That God may burst upon his faithless eye!
Is there no God?—The stars in myriads spread,
If he look up, the blasphemy deny;
While his own features, in the mirror read,
Reflect the image of Divinity.
Is there no God?—The streams that silver flows,
The air he breathes, the ground he treads, the trees,
The flowers, the grass, the sands, each wind that blows,
All speak of God; throughout, onne voice agres,
And, eloquent, his dread existence shows:
Blind to thyself, ah, see him, fool, in these!"
Giovanni Cotta.
Verse 1:—
"The owlet, Atheism,
Sailing on obscene wings across the noon,
Drops his blue-fringed lids, and shuts them close,
And, hooting at the glorious sun in heaven,
Cries out, 'Where is it'"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834.
Verse 1. "They are corrupt, they have done abominable
works." Sin pleaseth the flesh. Omne simile nutrit simile.
Corruption inherent is nourished by the accession of corrupt actions.
Judas's covetousness is sweetened with unjust gain. Joab is heartened
and hardened with blood. 1 Kings 2:5. Theft is fitted to and fatted
in the thievish heart with obvious booties. Pride is fed with the
officious compliments of observant grooms. Extortion battens in the
usurer's affections by the trolling in of his moneys. Sacrilege
thrives in the church-robber by the pleasing distinctions of those
sycophant priests, and helped with their not laborious profit. Nature
is led, is fed with sense. And when the citadel of the heart is once
won, the turret of the understanding will not long hold out. As the
suffumigations of the oppressed stomach surge up and cause the
headache, or as the thick spumy mists, which vapour up from the dark
and foggy earth, do often suffocate the brighter air, and to us more
than eclipse the sun, the black and corrupt affections, which ascend
out of the nether part of the soul, do no less darken and choke the
understanding. Neither can the fire of grace be kept alive at God's
altar (man's heart), when the clouds of lust shall rain down such
showers of impiety on it. Perit omne judicium, cum res transit ad
affectum. Farewell the perspicuity of judgment, when the matter
is put to the partiality of affection. Thomas Adams.
Verse 1. " They are corrupt, they have done abominable
things: there is none that doeth good." "Men," says Bernard,
"because they are corrupt in their minds, become
abominable in their doings: corrupt before God,
abominable before men. There are three sorts of men of which
none doeth good. There are those who neither understand nor seek God,
and they are the dead: there are others who understand him, but seek
him not, and they are the wicked. There are others that seek him but
understand him not, and they are the fools." "O God," cries a writer
of the middle ages, "how many are here at this day who, under the
name of Christianity, worship idols, and are abominable both to thee
and to men! For every man worships that which he most loves. The
proud man bows down before the idol of worldly power; the covetous
man before the idol of money; the adulterer before the idol of
beauty; and so of the rest." And of such, saith the apostle, "They
profess that they know God, but in works deny him, being
abominable and disobedient, and unto every good work
reprobate." Titus 1:16. "There is none that doeth good."
Notice how Paul avails himself of this testimony of the psalmist,
among those which he heaps together in the third chapter of the
epistle to the Romans, where he is proving concerning "both Jews and
Gentiles, that they are all under sin." Romans 3:9. John Mason
Neale, in loc.
Verse 1. The argument of my text is the atheist's divinity,
the brief of his belief couched all in one article, and that negative
too, clean contrary to the fashion of all creeds, "There is no
God." The article but one; but so many absurdities tied to the
train of it, and itself so irreligious, so prodigiously profane, that
he dares not speak it out, but saith it softly to himself, in secret,
"in his heart." So the text yields these three points; Who is
he? A "fool." What he saith, "no God." How he speaks
it, "in his heart." A fool, his bolt, and his draught. I will
speak of them severally. . . . . . . . There is a child in years, and
there is a child in manners, aetate et moribus, saith
Aristotle. So there is a fool; for fools and children both are called
nhpioi. There is a fool in wit, and there is a fool in life;
stultus in scientia, et stultus in conscientia, a witless and
a graceless fool. The latter is worthy of the title as the first;
both void of reason; not of the faculty but of the use. Yea, the
latter fool is indeed the more kindly of the twain; for the sot would
use his reason if he could; the sinner will not though he may. It is
not the natural, but the moral fool that David means, the wicked and
ungracious person, for so is the sense of the original term. . . . .
. . It is time we leave the person, and come unto the act. What hath
this fool done? Surely nothing; he hath only said. What hath
he said? Nay, nothing either; he hath only thought: for
to say in heart, is but to think. There are two sorts
of saying in the Scripture, one meant indeed so properly, the other
but in hope; one by word of mouth, the other by thought of heart. You
see the psalmist means here the second sort. The bolt the fool here
shoots is atheism: he makes no noise at the loss of it, as bowmen
use; he draws and delivers closely, and stilly, out of sight, and
without sound: he saith "God is not," but "in heart."
The heart hath a mouth; intus est os cordis, saith Augustine.
God, saith Cyprian, is cordis auditor, he hears the heart;
then belike it hath some speech. When God said to Moses, quare
clamas? why criest thou? we find no words he uttered: silens
auditor, saith Gregory, he is heard through saying nothing. There
is a silent speech (Psalm 4:4), "Commune with your own heart," saith
David, "and be still." Speech is not the heart's action, no more than
meditation is the mouth's. But sometimes the heart and mouth exchange
offices; lingua mea meditabitur, saith David. Psalm 35:28.
There is lingua meditans, a musing tongue; here is cor
loquens, a speaking heart. And to say the truth, the philosopher
saith well, it is the heart doth all things, mens videt, mens
audit, mens loquitur. It is the heart that speaks, the tongue is
but the instrument to give the sound. It is but the heart's echo to
repeat the words after it. Except when the tongue doth run before the
wit, the heart doth dictate to the mouth; it suggests what it shall
say. The heart is the soul's herald: look what she will have
proclaimed, the heart reads it, and the mouth cries it. The tongue
saith nought but what the heart saith first. Nay, in very deed, the
truest and kindest speech is the heart's. The tongue and lips are
Jesuits, they lease, and lie, and use equivocations: flattery, or
fear, or other by-respect, other wry respect adulterate their words.
But the heart speaks as it means, worth twenty mouths, if it could
speak audibly. Richard Clerke, D.D.,—1634 (one of the translators
of our English Bible).
Verses 1, 4. The Scripture gives this as a cause of the
notorious courses of wicked men, that "God is not in all their
thoughts." Psalm 10:4. They forget there is a God of vengeance and a
day of reckoning. "The fool" would needs enforce upon his
heart, that "there is no God," and what follows: "Corrupt
they are, there is none doth good: they eat up my people as
bread," etc. They make no more bones of devouring men and their
estates, than they make conscience of eating a piece of bread. What a
wretched condition hath sin brought man unto, that the great God who
"filleth heaven and earth" (Jeremiah 23:24) should yet have no place
in the heart which he hath especially made for himself! The sun is
not so clear as this truth, that God is, for all things in the world
are because God is. If he were not, nothing could be. It is from him
that wicked men have that strength they have to commit sin, therefore
sin proceeds from atheism, especially these plotting sins; for if God
were more thought on, he would take off the soul from sinful
contrivings, and fix it upon himself. Richard Sibbes.
Verse 2. To see if there were any that did understand. . .
. . seek God." None seek him aright, and as he ought to be
sought, nor can do while they live in sin: for men in seeking God
fail in many things: as, First, men seek him not for himself.
Secondly, they seek him not alone, but other things with him.
Thirdly, they seek other things before him, as worldlings do.
Fourthly, they seek him coldly or carelessly. Fifthly, they seek him
inconstantly; example of Judas and Demas. Sixthly, they seek him not
in his word, as heretics do. Seventhly, they seek him not in all his
word, as hypocrites do. Lastly, they seek him not seasonably and
timely, as profane, impenitent sinners do; have no care to depend
upon God's word, but follow their own lusts and fashions of this
world. Thomas Wilson, 1653.
Verses 2, 3. What was the issue of God's so looking upon men?
"They are all gone aside," that is, from him and his ways;
"They are altogether become filthy;" their practices are such
as make then stink; "There is none that doeth good, no, not
one;" of so many millions of men that are upon the earth, there
is not one doeth good. There were men of excellent parts then in the
world, men of soul, but not one of them did know God, or seek after
God: Paul therefore hath laid it down for a universal maxim, that the
animal, natural, or intellectual man, receives not the things of the
Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him, and so are rejected
by him. William Greenhill.
Verse 3. The ungodly are "vile" persons (Nahum 1:14). "I will
make thy grave; for thou art vile." Sin makes men base, it blots
their name, it taints their blood: "They are altogether become
filthy;" in the Hebrew it is, they are become stinking. Call
wicked men ever so bad, you cannot call them out of their name; they
are "swine" (Matthew 7:6); "vipers" (Matthew 3:7); "devils" (John
6:70). The wicked are the dross and refuse (Psalms 119:119); and
heaven is too pure to have any dross mingle with it. Thomas
Watson.
Verse 3. "Altogether become filthy." Thus the Roman
satirist describes his own age:
"Nothing is left, nothing, for future times
To add to the full catalogue of crimes;
The baffled sons must feel the same desires,
And act the same mad follies as their sires,
Vice has attained its zenith."
Juvenal, Sat. 1.
Verse 3. "There is none that doeth good, no, not one."
Origen maketh a question, how it could be said that there was none,
neither among the Jews nor Gentiles, that did any good; seeing there