With respect to this same element of personal trust, and real, heartfelt experience, contrast David also with any author whose name is given in Hindu literature.  He was full of humanity, large-hearted, loving, grateful, and though stained by sin, yet he was so penitent and humble and tender that he was said to be a man after God’s own heart.  He was a successful warrior and a great king, but he held all his honor and his power as a divine gift and for the Divine glory.  Compare the 119th Psalm with the Upanishads, or with any of the six schools of philosophy.  The one deals with moral precepts and spiritual aspirations, all the others with subtle theories of creation or problems of the universe.  The one is the outflowing of joyous experience found in obedience to God’s moral law, and only out of the heart could such a psalm have been written.  The law of God had become not a barrier or a hamper, but a delight.  Evidently David had found a religion which filled every avenue and met every want of his whole being.

Again, only the religion of Christ brings man into his proper relation of penitence and humility before God.  It is necessary to the very conception of reconciliation to a higher and purer being that wrong-doing shall be confessed.  All the leading faiths of the world have traditions of the fall of man from a higher and holier estate, and most of them—­notably Hinduism, Buddhism, ancient Druidism, and the Druse religion of Mount Lebanon—­declare that the fall was the result of pride and rebellion of spirit.  And of necessity the wrong, if it cannot be undone, must at least be confessed.  Self-justification is perpetuation.  The offender must lay aside his false estimate of self and admit the justice whose claims he has violated.  Even in the ordinary intercourse of men this principle is universally recognized.  There can be no reconciliation without either actual reparation or at least a frank acknowledgment.  Governmental pardon always implies repentance and promised reform, and between individuals a due concession to violated principle is deemed the dictate of the truest honor.  How can there be reconciliation to God, then, without repentance and humiliation?  Of what value can heathen asceticism and merit-making be while the heart is still barred and buttressed with self-righteousness?  The longer a man approaches the Holiness of Deity with the offerings of his own self-consequence the greater does the enormity of his offence become and the wider the breach which he attempts to close.

Even if he could render a perfect obedience and service for the future, he could never overtake the old unsettled score.  The prodigal cannot recover the squandered estate or wipe out the record of folly and sin, and if there be no resource of free remission on the one hand, and no deep and genuine repentance on the other, there can be no possible adjustment.  The universal judgment and conscience of men so decide.  Philosophers