Who can understand his errors?— While we praise and adore God for his mercies, it seems impossible to forget one great circumstance which affects both them and ourselves; I mean, how undeserved they are: It is a reflection which, like the pillar of the cloud that waited on the Israelites, casts light and beauty upon the mercies of God, and darkness and confusion of face upon ourselves. Can we help thinking, that, notwithstanding God has thus secured and hedged us about with a law which is perfect, with commandments that are pure, yet still our own weakness is perpetually betraying us into error; our folly or our wickedness driving us into sins more in number than either we can or, too often, care to remember? The royal Psalmist saw the justness of this reflection; and, while his heart glowed with the sense of God's unbounded mercies, he turned short upon himself with this complaint, Who can understand his errors? This complaint is followed by a fervent prayer to God for pardon and protection: From the prospect of the power and goodness of God, and our own weakness and misery, the soul
[through divine grace] easily melts into sorrow and devotion; lamenting what it feels, and deploring what it wants, from the hand which only is able to save and to redeem. Cleanse thou me from secret faults. He calls his faults secret, not with design to extenuate his crimes, or as if he thought the actions he had now in view of so doubtful a nature, that it was not easily to be judged whether they should be placed among the sinful or the indifferent circumstances of his life; and therefore, if they were faults, they were secret ones, such as stole from him without the consent and approbation of his mind; but secret he calls them, with respect to their number. So often had he offended, that his memory was too frail to keep an exact register of all his errors. But though they were secret to him, yet well he knew that God had placed them in the light of his countenance; and therefore, though he could neither number nor confess them, he begs that they might not be imputed to, or rise up in judgment against his soul. This sense is well expressed in our old translation: Who can tell how oft he offendeth? Oh cleanse thou me from my secret faults! Bishop Sherlock.