1 Preserve me, O God, for I take refuge in Thee 2 I have said to Jehovah, Thou art my Lord; Good for me there is none besides Thee. 3 As for the saints which are in the earth, They are the excellent, in whom is all my delight. 4 Their griefs are many who change [Jehovah] for another. I will not pour out their drink offerings of blood, And will not take their names on my lips. 5 Jehovah is my allotted portion and my cup; Thou art continually my lot. 6 The measuring lines have fallen for me in pleasant places, And my inheritance is fair to me. 7 I will bless Jehovah who has given me counsel; Yea, in the night seasons my reins instruct me. 8 I set Jehovah before me continually, Because He is at my right hand I shall not be moved. 9 Therefore my heart rejoices, and my glory exults; Yea, my flesh dwells in safety. 10 For Thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; Thou wilt not suffer Thy Beloved One to see the pit. 11 Thou wilt make me know the path of life; Before Thy face is fulness of joys; Pleasures are in Thy right hand for evermore. The progress of thought in this psalm is striking. The singer is first a bold confessor in the face of idolatry and apostasy (vv. 1-4). Then the inward sweetness of his faith fills his soul, as is ever the reward of brave avowal, and he buries himself, bee-like in the pure delights of communion with Jehovah (vv. 5-8). Finally, on the ground of such experience, he rises to the assurance that "its very sweetness yieldeth proof" that he and it are born for undying life (vv. 9-11). The conviction of immortality is then most vividly felt, when it results from the consciousness of a present full of God. The outpourings of a pure and wholesome mystic religion in the psalm are so entirely independent of the personality and environment of the singer that there is no need to encumber the study of it with questions of date. If we accept the opinion that the conception of resurrection was the result of intercourse with Persia, we shall have to give a post-exilic date to the psalm. But even if the general adoption of that belief was historically so motived, that does not forbid our believing that select souls, living in touch with God, rose to it long before. The peaks caught the glow while the valleys were filled with mists. The tone of the last section sounds liker that of a devout soul in the very act of grasping a wonderful new thought, which God was then and there revealing to him through his present experience, than of one who was simply repeating a theological truth become familiar to all.