The Psalm makes no attempt to turn this tyrant whom it challenges; it invokes the mercy of God, not to change him, but to show how vain his boasts are, and to give heart to those whom he oppresses.  God’s mercy endureth for ever; but he must pass away.  The righteous shall see his end, and fear and laugh:  their satire will have religion in it.  But though the Psalm does not design this sinner’s conversion, its very challenge contains an indication of the means by which he and all selfish people who are like him may be changed to nobler lives.  In this respect it has a gospel for us all, which may be thus stated.

There are poor invalids who ought to get their health again by seeking the open air and sunshine, but who keep between their bed and their hearthrug, cowering over their fire with the blinds pulled down;—­to whom comes the wise doctor, pulls up the blinds, shows them that it is day outside, with the sun shining and the trees growing, and men walking about, and tells them that the health they are trying to get inside, and thereby only making themselves worse invalids, they will get out there.  This big man was such a moral invalid, seeking strength within his own riches and qualities.  And so doing he had developed the nasty indoor tempers, till it seemed pleasant and satisfactory to him to be spiteful, slanderous and false.  Meantime, outside the darkened windows of his selfishness, the mercy of God, in which other men gloried and grew strong, rose every day.  With one sweep the Psalmist tears the curtains down and lets in the sunshine. The leal love of God is every day.  There, in that commonplace daily light:  in that love which is as near you as the open air and as free as the sunshine, are the life and exultation which you seek so vainly within yourself.

It was in the sunshine that the Psalmist felt himself growing: 

  But I am like an olive-tree, green in God’s house. 
  I trust in the leal love of God for ever and aye.

This open-air figure suggests (though we have no confirmation of the fact) a tree growing in the high temple precincts, as trees to this day grow upon the Haram around the great mosque in Jerusalem, open to the sunshine and washed by the great rush of wind from the west.  The Old Testament as much as the New haunts the open air for its figures of religion—­a tree in full foliage, a tree planted by a river, a river brimming to its banks, the waves of a summer sea.  Now this is not only because there is nothing else that will reflect the freedom of God’s grace and the lavish joy it brings upon the world, but still more because the Bible feels the eternal truth, that to win this joy and freedom a man has got to go outside himself, outside his selfishness and other close tempers, outside his feelings and thoughts about himself, and receive the truths of religion as objective to him, taking the knowledge of God’s pardon and peace as freely as he takes the sunshine of heaven, the