The heavens declare the glory of God,
    And the firmament sheweth His handywork.

At the seventh verse the Psalm abruptly passes to a eulogy of “The Law”—­the moral law shrined in the priestly Thorah: 

    The law of the Lord is an undefiled law,
    Converting the soul;
    The testimony of the Lord is sure,
    And giveth wisdom unto the simple.

Here we have, say our learned critics, two psalms welded into one, a song of nature and a song of the soul.  As though nature and man did not form one divine poem in two cantos!  As though the system of the world around us did not type the world within us!  As though it were not always the most instinctive action to pass from the sense of an Order in the starry heavens, and the awe thus awakened, to the sense of an Order in the soul of man, and the deeper awe thus roused!

We know that the Hindus and Egyptians made use, each, of one word to express the law of nature and the law of conscience.  The physical order interpreted the sense of a moral order.

   The Egyptian maat, derived like the Sanskrit rita, from merely
   sensuous impressions, became the name for moral order and
   righteousness.[61]

The Nineteenth Psalm is only the expression among the Hebrews of this wide-spread instinct; an instinct which learned critics may lack, but which the poet still inherits; as the Sphynx whispers to him of the double life of nature and of man, that yet are

    By one music enchanted,
    One Deity stirred.

4. The Bible leads us on to that sense of sin, in the presence of this “Law,” which no lower thought of law can quicken.

Violations of physiological law Nature stamps as folly.  Offences against social laws the State brands as crime.  Transgressions of Ideal and Eternal Law become sin.  It is not only foolish or disgraceful to break the moral law, it is wrong.  This is the sense of guilt in disobedience that is roused in each of us by the Bible, as by no other book; that has been quickened in Europe, historically, by these sacred Scriptures, as by no other writings.  The Bible has given to humanity a new and intense ethical perception of evil.

The strenuous moral earnestness of the Puritan and the Methodist is vitalized from these books.  The very type of saintship in Christendom is unique.  It is no mere ceremonial correctness for which the priestly Ezekiel pleads with tender pathos: 

   Repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions whereby ye
   have transgressed, and make you a clean heart and a new spirit; for why
   will ye die, O house of Israel?

It is this intense sense of the exceeding sinfulness of sin which oppressed the great-hearted Paul, and wrung from him the bitter cry: 

   O wretched man that I am!  Who shall deliver me from the body of this
   death.

How vividly this sense of sin expresses itself in the Fifty-first Psalm!  There is here a plaint infinitely deeper than the chagrin and remorse of the man who has committed an “indiscretion,” or become entangled in an “intrigue;” there is the cry of a soul that has betrayed its highest, holiest fidelities, and lies low in the dust before the Heavenly purity: