many an honest mind. This man who in his later years dipped his hands
in the blood of his foes and fell on one occasion into the grossest sin
with an attractive woman, this fellow a man after God's own heart!

He was not an angel. As we go up and down through history we find men
and not angels. We find men with mud on their boots, with blisters on
their hands, and with scars on their souls. George Washington owned
slaves. John Calvin burned Servetus at the stake. Peter the Apostle
denied his Lord three times in a single night--he denied with an oath.
If you are looking for moral perfection you will have to look somewhere
else than on this earth.

David was a man after God's own heart, not because he never did wrong,
but because when he fell down he got up again. He got up again faced
towards God and not away from Him, faced away from the evil which had
thrown him down and not towards a further advance in wrong-doing. "The
wise make of their moral failures ladders by which they climb towards
Heaven. The foolish make of their moral failures graves wherein they
bury all their highest hopes."

When Oscar Wilde was imprisoned in Reading gaol for his own wretched
wrongdoing he wrote that strangely human document, "De Profundis." It
was a message "out of the depths." In that book he used this striking
sentence which I have never forgotten since the first time I read it,
"The highest moment in a man's career may be the hour when he kneels in
the dust and beats upon his breast and tells all the sins of his life."

"God be merciful to me, a sinner." "Have mercy upon me, O God.
Against Thee have I sinned. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity and
cleanse me from my sin." This is all that any honest man can say in
the presence of his Maker, and when he does say it honestly he is on
his way to the divine favour.

David was a man of faith and of prayer; he was a man of deep, sweet
feeling and of spiritual longing. In all his better moments when he
was truly himself his heart hungered after righteousness and his soul
was athirst for the living God. A man of that moral mood and build is
much more after God's own heart, even though he may upon occasion be
betrayed by the fervour of his nature into wrong-doing, than is the
coldly correct man who has never felt enough of warm-hearted devotion
to anything to raise the spiritual temperature a single degree.

I do not know how many of these Psalms came from the lips or t