"'Wilt thou leave me thus,' I cried, 'Whelm'd beneath the rolling tide?' Ah! return and love me still; See me subject to Thy will; Frown with wrath, or smile with grace, Only let me see Thy face! Evil I have none to fear, All is good, if THOU art near. King, and Lord, whom I adore, Shall I see Thy face no more?" --_Madame Guyon._ "There is a persecution sharper than that of the axe. There is an iron that goes into the heart deeper than the knife. Cruel sneers, and sarcasms, and pitiless judgments, and cold-hearted calumnies--these are persecution." "My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God?"--_Verse 3._ IV. THE TAUNT. We are called, in this chapter, to contemplate a new experience--David in tears! These, his tears, brought sin to his remembrance. As, in looking through the powerful lens of a microscope, the apparently pellucid drop of water is found to be the swarming haunt of noxious things,--fierce animalculæ devouring one another; so the tears of the Exile formed a spiritual lens, enabling him to see into the depths of his own soul, and disclosing, with microscopic power, transgressions that had long been consigned to oblivion. Ten years of regal prosperity had elapsed since the prophet Nathan, the minister of retribution, stood before him, in his Cedar Palace, with heavy tidings regarding himself and his house. Time may have dimmed the impressions of that meeting. He may have vainly imagined, too, that it had modified the Divine displeasure. Now that his head was white with sixty winters, he may have thought that God would exempt him from further merited chastisement, and suffer him to go down to his grave in peace. But the day of reckoning, which the Divine patience had long deferred, had now come. He was called to see the first gleamings of that sword which the anointed prophet had told him would "never depart from his house." (2 Sam. xii. 10.) The voice of long averted judgment is at last heard amid the thickets and caves of Gilead,--"_These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself: but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes_." (Ps. l. 21.) Nature, in her august solitudes, echoed the verdict! The waters murmured it--the winds chanted it--the forest wailed it--the thunders rolled it--and the tears of the lonely Exile himself wept it,--"_Be sure your sin will find you out_!" As he sat by the willows of Jordan, with his crownless head and aching heart, he could say, in the words of an older Psalmist, "_We are consumed by Thine anger, and by Thy wrath are we troubled. Thou has set our iniquities before Thee, our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance._" (Ps. xc. 7, 8.)