4. This is confirmed by the closeness of personal communion with God, wliich is the characteristic privilege of the devout soul in these poems, and the means by which that fellowship is to be restored, when it lias been lost or impaired. The joy is S]iiritual when the avenue of communion is open ; the sorrow is spiritual when that avenue is closed and darkened ; tlie means by which the soul may meet again with its God are spiritual also. The Israelite is a member of a community ill which sacrifice is a recognized institution ; he does not disparage it, but if he lias learned the lessons it has to teach, he knows that alone it is not sufficient. Tlie well-known expressions of the 40th, the 50th, the 51st psalms — ' Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it ' ; ' Would I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?' — do not stand alone. There is no inconsLstency between these psalms and ' I will go into thy house with burnt-otl'erings, I will oiler bullocks with goats,' in the 66th. The 51st psalm, as it now stands, contains a recognition of ceremonial sacrifices in vv.'"-^, and even if these are not by the same author as v.", ' the sacrifices of tJod are a broken spirit,' the same temple-congregation could chant •Kith alike without thought of contradiction. But 'he spiritual note is the deeper and the more char- acteristic The psalmist has learned in the school I
of the ])rophet rather than of the priest, his plea ia God's mercy, his hope for that sense of personal intercourse which can be enjoyed only when Divine forgiveness has removed the sense of personal sin. Tlie heaviness and pain before con- fession (32^- ■* 40") is as deep as his assurance of the readiness of God to forgive is complete and his joy when forgiven rapturous (40-' 103'""). The 130th is not the only ' Pauline ' psalm, and if its language and that of other psalms expresses the contrition of a community, it cau only be said that the mourners for sin of all ages, in the most spiritual religion the world has ever known, have found no language more appropriate to express their peni- tential sorrow and the rapturous joy of forgiveness than is to be found in the psalms.
5. Another characteristic of the ' lower level of morality ' which is said to mark the psalms is found in the particularism which belongs to many of them. The national confidence in J" has a reverse side which is not always admirable. The tone which the psalmists, like the prophets, adojit towards other nations than Israel, varies. Sometimes they are simply marked out for judgment and punishment (Ps 2. 9. 68). Sometimes, though more rarelj', they are represented as in some sense gathered in within the pale now occupied by Israel alone (Ps 22. 67. 87). Sometimes bitter resentment is expressed which sounds personal rather than national — the expression of tierce joy over the destruction of hated enemies, rather than the grave anticipation of righteous judgment upon evil. The Imprecatory psalms are better understood than they once were. Those who read into them a coarse vindictivenesa are now seen to be no less wide of the mark than those who in a mistaken zeal contended that all the utterances of godly men in an inspired Bible must be justifiable bj' the highest standard. But the solution of a moral ditficulty is not found in a timid compromise between extremes. The strong language of Ps 7. 35. 69. 109 and some others is not to be blamed as an exhibition of a personally revengeful spirit. The law condemns this as well as the gospel ; and in the psalm which contains the strongest language, the writer disclaims such culpable resentment (109^-'). The psalmist, as a member of a covenant - keeping community, was at liberty to identify himself with the friends of God and to count those who opposed him as God's enemies also (139'"- ^). Not always does he specifj- the ground of his anger and praj'ers for their destruction, as in Ps 83, ' Against thee do they make a covenant . . . O my God, make them like whirling dust, as stubble before the wind' ; but it is legitimate, in at least the majority of passa";es, to read in that thought w hen unexpressed. The psalmist wouUl be simidy unable to take the purely individualistic standpoint of modern times, which makes language such as we find in the 35th psalm for us unnatural and wrong.
It does not therefore follow that the spirit of the imprecatory psalms is justifiable by the standard of the NT. It may indeed be well to consider whether the OT saints, in the vigour and simplicity of their piety, did not cherish a righteous resentment against evil which the more facile and languid moral sense of later generations would have done well to preserve. 'O ye that love J", hate evil,' is an exhortation that belon<;s, not to one age, but to all time. But the point in question is the relation, not to evil deeds, but to evil men. And here it must be clearly recojpized that the moral level oi the old dispensation is necessarily lower than that of the new. The Christian does not stand in relation to the world as the Jew did to the nations around him. The blessings of the New (covenant are not material as were many of the blessings pro- mised under the Old; and the curses which are