For he who wrote that psalm had an intense conviction of his own
personality. I, and me, are words for ever in his mouth: but not in self-
satisfied conceit; nor in self-tormenting superstition, crying
perpetually, Shall I be saved? shall I be lost? No. Faith in God
delivers him from either of these follies. He is forced to think of
self. Sad, persecuted, seemingly friendless, he is alone with self: yet
not alone. For at every moment he is referring himself to his true place
in the universe; to God; God's law, God's help. The burden of self--of
mingled responsibility and weakness--is to him past bearing. It would be
utterly past bearing, if he could not cast it down, at least at moments,
at the foot of the throne of God, and cry, I am Thine. Oh save me.

And if any should ask--as has been asked ere now--But is there not in
this tone of mind something undignified, something even abject? thus to
cry for help, instead of helping oneself? thus to depend on another
being, instead of bearing stoically with manly independence? I
answer--The Psalmist does bear stoically, just because he cries for help.
For the old Stoics cried for help; the earlier and truer-hearted of them,
at least. Some here, surely, have read Epictetus, the heathen whose
thought most exactly coincides with that of the Psalmist. If so, do they
not see what enabled him, the slave of Nero's minion, to assert himself,
and his own unconquerable personality; to defy circumstance; and to
preserve his own calm, his own honour, his own purity, amid a degradation
which might well have driven a good man to suicide? And was it not
this--The intensity of his faith in God? In God the helper, God the
guide?

If any man here have learnt, to his own loss, to undervalue the
experience of prophets, psalmists, apostles: then let him turn to
Epictetus the heathen; and learn from that heroic slave, that the true
dignity of man lies in true faith in God.

Nay more. It is a serious question, whether ungodliness--by which I
mean, as the Psalmist means, the assertion of self, independent of
God--whether ungodliness, I say, is ever dignified; whether, as has been
often said, Milton's still dignified Satan is not an impossible
character; whether Goethe's utterly undignified Mephistopheles is not the
true ideal of an utterly evil spirit. Ungodliness, as we see it
manifested in human beings, may be repulsive, as in the mere ruffian,
whose mouth is filled with cursing,