The singer has been educated by the husks of ritual to pass beyond these, and has learned that there is a better dwelling-place for Jehovah, and therefore for himself, than that pitched on Zion and frequented by impure and pure alike. Ver. 2 sums the qualifications of Jehovah's guest in one comprehensive demand, that he should walk uprightly, and then analyses that requirement into the two of righteous deeds and truthful speech. The verbs are in the participial form, which emphasises the notion of habitual action. The general answer is expanded in the three following verses, which each contain three clauses, and take up the two points of ver. 2 in inverted order, although perhaps not with absolute accuracy of arrangement. The participial construction is in them changed for finite verbs. Ver. 2 sketches the figure in outline, and the rest of the psalm adds clause on clause of description as if the man stood before the psalmist's vision. Habits are described as acts. The first outstanding characteristic of this ideal is that it deals entirely with duties to men, and the second is that it is almost wholly negative. Moral qualities of the most obvious kind, and such as can be tested in daily life and are cultivated by rigid abstinence from prevailing evils, and not any recondite and impalpable refinements of conduct, still less any peculiar emotions of souls raised high above the dusty levels of common life, are the qualifications for dwelling, a guarded guest, in that great pavilion. Such a stress laid on homely duties, which the universal conscience recognises, is characteristic of the ethics of the Old Testament as a whole and of the Psalter in particular, and is exemplified in the lives of its saints and heroes. They "come eating and drinking," sharing in domestic joys and civic duties; and however high their aspirations and vows may soar, they have always their feet firmly planted on the ground and, laying the smallest duties on themselves, "tread life's common road in cheerful godliness." The Christian answer to the psalmist's question goes deeper than his, but is fatally incomplete unless it include his and lay the same stress on duties to men which all acknowledge, as that does. Lofty emotions, raptures of communion, aspirations which bring their own fulfilment, and all the experiences of the devout soul, which are sometimes apt to be divorced from plain morality, need the ballast of the psalmist's homely answer to the great question. There is something in a religion of emotion not wholly favourable to the practice of ordinary duties; and many men, good after a fashion, seem to have their spiritual nature divided into water-tight and uncommunicating compartments, in one of which they keep their religion, and in the other their morality.