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(113:6) and will care for the poor and needy (113:7, 8; 107:41). If wicked men think they can oppress with impunity, that only shows how foolish men can be. The 37th and 73rd psalms are devoted to the correction of any spirit that would misread the story of the supposed prosperity of evil in God's world. It is mushroom prosperity. We would have it corrected on the instant, but that cannot be the way of a world in which moral character is to be developed. Only, we are never to have the notion that immorality can go on uncorrected. The 7th and 10th psalms are based on some experience of the smash that has come to men who seemed too secure to be disturbed. They carry the same lesson as Browning's "Instans Tyrannus," a short poem in which he has told the scheming of an importunate tyrant to destroy a man who was not to his mind. The man himself was too insignificant to deserve such animosity, but the whim of the tyrant made him greater than he was. He was friendless, without place or position. At last the tyrant ran fires around him, laid mines under him and sent out his thunders over him, looking on "to enjoy the event."

"When sudden

how think ye, the end?

Did I say 'without friend?

Say rather, from marge to blue marge
The whole sky grew his targe

With the sun's self for visible boss,

While an Arm ran across

Which the earth heaved beneath like a breast

Where the wretch was safe prest!

Do you see? Just my vengeance complete,

The man sprang to his feet,

Stood erect, caught at God's skirts, and prayed!
-So, I was afraid!"

Is not that only a comment on Psalm 14:5, "There were they in great fear; for God is in the generation of the righteous"?

The favor claimed from God in the psalms is not arbitrary and on grounds of favoritism, but on the ground of righteousness. When men are condemned they are bad men, not personal enemies. They have oppressed the poor, they have ground down the distressed, they have robbed widows and orphans, they have sneered at the efforts of men to regain their feet after a fall, they have ridiculed religion and men

who have tried to be true to it, they have returned evil for good. In a word they are social offenders, and it does not occur to these writers that God can disregard that. On the other hand, the men approved are not favorites of fortune, but men who have tried to be true to God and man. In a word, they are social servants, and it does not occur to these writers that God can be indifferent to them and their fortunes. If religion is not to rectify such evils, if God is not to be supposed to care about them, then we will have to have a different idea of religion from that of the psalmists. It is for this reason that the lovingkindness of God is the peril of evil doers and the hope of the righteous (52).

III

Religion in the social order is intended to be a reassuring power. It is God who makes effort worth while. Unless he builds the house, they labor in vain that build it, and unless he keeps the city, the watchman wakes in vain (127:1). Admiral "Jack" Philip was not only a participant in our civil war and more prominently in the Spanish-American war in command of the Texas, but he was a sincere Christian. His Bible showed dates of his reading the entire Bible through twelve times and the New Testament thirty-four times. In his working copy of the Bible were these words written : "Send me anywhere-only go with me. Put any burden on me-only sustain me. Sever any tie, except that which binds service."

me to Thy heart and One Sunday Mrs. Julia Ward Howe had an experience which she records in her diary: "As we drove into town (to church) I had one of those momentary glimpses which in things spiritual are so precious. The idea became clear and present to my mind that God, an actual presence, takes note of our actions and intentions. I thought how helpful it would be to pass our lives in a sense of this divine supervision. The thought is one to which I have need to cling. I have at this moment mental troubles, obsessions of imagination, from which I pray to be delivered. While this idea of the divine presence was clear to me, I felt myself lifted above these things. May this lifting continue!" Tennyson's son tells that a week before the poet's death he "was

sitting with him and he talked long of the personality and the love of God-'that God whose eye considers the poor, who catereth even to the sparrow.' He said, 'I should infinitely rather feel myself the most miserable wretch on the face of the earth, with a God above, than the highest type of man standing alone.""

There is no calculating the value in social movements of a sense of divine interest in the movement itself. Paul was ready for the hardest field, because after all it was neither his planting nor Apollos' watering, but God who gave the increase (1 Cor. 3:6, 7). When a scoffer asked Morrison if he thought he could make any impression on China, he replied, “No, but I think God can." Schemes have their value, but power belongs to God (62: 11). He is the dwelling place of men who are trying to serve him (90: 1); a refuge and strength for them (46:1), even though the last earthly friend should forsake them (27:10); not merely a place where they may feel safe, but a source whence they may feel strong. No man needs strength to keep him out of the fight, seeking refuge for himself. If there is any promise of strength it must be because men are to get into the thick of things; only, in the thick of things they are to be wholly unafraid (3:6; 56:3, 11; 112:7). Such a state will be brought about by keeping clear our sense of God as over against men. One of the writers prays that nations may know themselves to be but men (9:20) and another calls on God to act so that "man who is of the earth may be terrible no more" (10:18).

Dr. Weir Mitchell once sent a nervous New York business man out to the plains just east of the Rocky Mountains to regain his perspective. He needed to get his horizon pushed farther back where it belonged, to see himself as no bigger than he actually was, to know how much of the world there is outside of a business house. After six months there he came back cured, steadied for work again. Religion is meant to do that kind of thing for us. Apply it to your own case. What is the effect of your own religion on your judgment of events and characters on your college campus or in your community life? Does it tend to make you ready to take part in movements for good because you know they will not fail? Do you incline to magnify small things beyond their real importance?

IV

Religion in the social order is intended to be an enlarging power. That is the meaning of that strange combination of ideas in the 18th psalm: "Thy gentleness hath made me great" (v. 35). Our story of the argument between the wind and the sun as to their power over the traveler carries the same truth. Juvenal said that the adage, "Know thyself," came down from heaven. Coleridge advises us rather to ignore ourselves and strive to know our God.

But it is not necessary to call ourselves sisters of the worm in order to realize that it is more important for us to know God than anything else. Dr. Deems used to put the three sayings together: Know thyself; The proper study of mankind is man; Acquaint now thyself with Him and be at peace; and to say that each of them has its value but that they rise in importance in this order. Jesus said it in the highest hour of his life (John 17:3): "and this is life eternal, that they may know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ." Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus, in his sermon on this text, compares the growth of a plant and its reaching up toward the sun, finding its life there, with the growth of our souls as they reach up to God. Christ is the sun-ray that comes down to the soul, bearing the very nature of God and making him knowable to finite men. Certainly no religion in history has attempted to mean so much in the social order as the religion of Christ.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT AND STUDY

In your observation of men who deny the existence of God or who count the matter wholly indifferent, are the reasons intellectual ones? What seems to you the probable explanation for such a position? What is the best way of meeting men of the sort?

Consider the attitude of the state toward religion. Is it well to consider the religious affiliations of a candidate for political office? Are laws relating to religion wise? How far ought laws regarding the Sabbath to go?

Religion being necessary for the social order, what should be the attitude of city or community settlements toward it? In cases where settlement leaders think religious influences cannot properly be used, how might their lack be made good?"

CHAPTER X

Sin and the Social Order

DAILY READINGS

Tenth Week, First Day

There is a vigorous sense of sin revealed in the psalms. Some of it is, of course, purely personal. The man cannot think of the wrongs of other people when his own seem so dark. But most of the sin dealt with in the psalms is social. It breaks the relations among men and damages not only the man who commits it, but other people who are caught in his group or even the whole social order. This section for today covers a wide circle of thought about the social aspects of sin.

But unto the wicked God saith,

What hast thou to do to declare my statutes,

And that thou hast taken my covenant in thy mouth?
Seeing that thou hatest instruction,

And castest my words behind thee.

When thou sawest a thief, thou consentedst with him,
And hast been partaker with adulterers.

Thou givest thy mouth to evil,

And thy tongue frameth deceit.

Thou sittest and speakest against thy brother;

Thou slanderest thine own mother's son.

These things hast thou done, and I kept silence;

Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thy

self:

But I will reprove thee, and set them in order before

thine eyes.

-Psalm 50: 16-21.

One primary sin is hypocrisy, talking in the terms of religion but refusing to live by its laws. That dulls one's keenness of

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