The second idea is refuge from punishment. The chief element of David's distress is a painful consciousness of guilt. It is conscience that wrings the wormwood for him into every cup of sorrow. It is remorse for past transgression that turns his tears into gall and makes his persecutions intolerable. Pure and innocent, he might defy his enemies, he might glory in tribulations. But he is forced to regard the wicked as God's sword for the punishment of his sins; and in all his pleadings we hear the voice of the penitent--sad confessions, bitter self-reproaches, touching appeals to the mercy of Heaven. "Lord, what wait I for? My hope is in thee. Deliver me from my transgressions; make me not a reproach of the foolish.... Remove thy stroke away from me; I am consumed by the blow of thy hand."[7] "Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink. Let not the water-flood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up. Hear me, O Lord! for thy loving-kindness is good. Turn unto me, according to the multitude of thy tender mercies; and hide not thy face from thy servant, for I am in trouble. Hear me speedily."[8] A good man, we all know, may be surprised by temptation, and so fall into grievous sin. Thus some of God's holiest servants have committed enormous crimes. Not the single or occasional act, however, constitutes character; but the habit of a man's life--his dominant impulse and prevailing tendency. To judge St. Peter, for example, by the one solitary instance of defection, were manifestly unfair; when his whole course, up to that moment, and ever afterward, was marked by uncompromising fidelity to the Master, with the most heroic daring and enduring in his service. Far more just were it to estimate the man by the tears which he wept when the reproving glance brought home the guilt to his conscience, and by his subsequent earnest endeavors to undo the evil he had done and honor the Saviour he had denied. Apply this principle to the royal penitent. Who ever more truly loved God, or more honestly sought to serve him? Was not holy obedience the tenor and tendency of his life? If he erred in numbering the people--if he took Uriah's wife to his bosom, and slew the husband to conceal the crime--it was under the power of peculiar temptation, which we, having never experienced, are quite incapable of estimating; and those deplorable deeds are the only recorded exceptions--the manifest violent contradictions--to a long life of singular piety, purity and uprightness. And now, made sensible of his sin, mark you how bitterly he grieves for it, and how earnestly he groans for its forgiveness:--