Meditation on the sin which was ever before the psalmist, passes into renewed prayers for pardon, which partly reiterate those already offered in vv. 1, 2. The petition in ver. 7 for purging with hyssop alludes to sprinkling of lepers and unclean persons, and indicates both a consciousness of great impurity and a clear perception of the symbolic meaning of ritual cleansings. "Wash me" repeats a former petition; but now the psalmist can venture to dwell more on the thought of future purity than he could do then. The approaching answer begins to make its brightness visible through the gloom, and it seems possible to the suppliant that even his stained nature shall glisten like sunlit snow. Nor does that expectation exhaust his confidence. He hopes for "joy and gladness." His bones have been crushed--_i.e._, his whole self has been, as it were, ground to powder by the weight of God's hand; but restoration is possible. A penitent heart is not too bold when it asks for joy. There is no real well-founded gladness without the consciousness of Divine forgiveness. The psalmist closes his petitions for pardon (ver. 9) with asking God to "hide His face from his sins," so that they be, as it were, no more existent for Him, and, by a repetition of the initial petition in ver. 1, for the blotting out of "all mine iniquities." The second principal division begins with ver. 10, and is a prayer for purity, followed by vows of glad service. The prayer is contained in three verses (10-12), of which the first implores complete renewal of nature, the second beseeches that there may be no break between the suppliant and God, and the third asks for the joy and willingness to serve which would flow from the granting of the desires preceding. In each verse the second clause has "spirit" for its leading word, and the middle one of the three asks for "_Thy_ holy spirit." The petitions themselves, and the order in which they occur, are deeply significant, and deserve much more elucidation than can be given here. The same profound consciousness of inward corruption which spoke in the former part of the psalm shapes the prayer for renewal. Nothing less than a new creation will make this man's heart "clean." His past has taught him that. The word employed is always used of God's creative act; and the psalmist feels that nothing less than the power which brooded over the face of primeval chaos, and evolved thence an ordered world, can deal with the confused ruin within himself. What he felt that he must have is what prophets promised (Jer. xxiv. 7; Ezek. xxxvi. 26) and Christ has brought--a new creation, in which, while personality remains unaffected, and the components of character continue as before, a real new life is bestowed, which stamps new directions on affections, gives new aims, impulses, convictions, casts out inveterate evils, and gradually changes "all but the basis of the soul." A desire for pardon which does not unfold into such longing for