A right to go wrong.  A right to make bad worse.  A right to break God’s laws, because we are too stupid or too hasty to find out what God’s laws are.  A right, as the wise man puts it, to draw bills on nature which she will not honour; but return them on a man’s hands with “No effects” written across them, leaving the man to pay after all, in misery and shame.  Truly said Solomon of old—­The foolishness of fools is folly.

But the Psalmist, because he was inspired by the Spirit of God, was of quite the opposite opinion.  So far from thinking that his trouble gave him a right to go wrong, he thought that his trouble laid on him a duty to go right, more right than he had ever gone before; and that going right was the only possible way of getting out of his troubles.

“Take from me,” he cries, “the way of lying, and cause Thou me to make much of Thy law.

“I have chosen the way of truth, and Thy judgments have I laid before me.

“Incline mine heart unto Thy testimonies, and not unto covetousness.

“Oh turn away mine eyes, lest they behold vanity, and quicken Thou me in Thy way.

“Thy word is my comfort in my trouble; for Thy word hath quickened me.

“The proud have had me exceedingly in derision, yet have I not shrunk from Thy law.

“For I remembered Thine everlasting judgments, O God, and received comfort.

“Thy statutes have been my songs, in the house of my pilgrimage.

“I have thought upon Thy name, O Lord, in the night-season, and have kept Thy law.”

This was the Psalmist’s plan for delivering himself out of trouble.  A very singular plan, which very few persons try, either now, or in any age.  And therefore it is, that so many persons are not delivered out of their troubles, but sink deeper and deeper into them, heaping new troubles on old ones, till they are crushed beneath the weight of their own sins.

What the special trouble was, in which the Psalmist found himself, we are not told.  But it is plain from his words, that it was just that very sort of trouble, in which the world is most ready to excuse a man for lying, cringing, plotting, and acting on the old devil’s maxim that “Cunning is the natural weapon of the weak.”  For the Psalmist was weak, oppressed and persecuted by the great and powerful.  But his method of defending himself against them was certainly not the way of the world.

Princes, he says, sat and spoke against him.  But; instead of fawning on them, excusing himself, entreating their mercy:  he was occupied in God’s statutes.

The proud had him exceedingly in derision—­as I am afraid too many worldly men, poor as well as rich, working men as well as idlers, would do now—­seeing him occupied in God’s statutes, when he might have been occupied in winning money, and place, and renown for himself.

But he did not shrink from God’s law.  If it was true, he could afford to be laughed at for obeying it.