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, and his feet swift to shed blood.  It may, again, be pitiable, as in those human butterflies, who live only to enjoy, or to minister to, what they call luxury and fashion.  And it may be again—­when it calmly and deliberately asserts itself to be a philosophy, and an explanation of man and of the universe, and gives itself magisterial airs, however courteously and kindly—­it may be then, I dare to think, a little ludicrous.