This is best illustrated by the comparison of Amos ix. 1-3.

'He that fleeth of them shall not flee away;

And he that escapeth of them shall not be delivered.
Though they dig into hell, thence shall my hand take them;
Though they climb up to heaven, thence I will bring them down.
And though they hide themselves in the top of Carmel,

I will search and take them out thence;

And though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea,
Thence will I command the serpent, and he shall bite them.'

It is probable, that the 68th Psalm primarily refers to some victory achieved by God's people over their enemies, and that it was intended to be sung in the religious triumph with which the Ark of God was brought back to its usual seat. But if it was so, we must believe that such victory was celebrated under Divine inspiration in such a form, as to become symbolical of a far more glorious triumph afterwards to be achieved over spiritual enemies; and thus we are led to regard as parallel with that above quoted, passages such as the following, taken from Psalms in which the reference to the Christ stands out in yet more vivid colouring.

'Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron;

Thou shalt dash them in pieces as a potter's vessel.'—ii. 9.

The Lord at thy right hand,

Shall bruise kings in the day of His wrath:

He shall judge among the heathen; He shall fill [the places] with the dead bodies;

He shall bruise the heads [of men, cf. Ps. lxviii. 21] over [throughout] many countries.

Of the brook He [the Christ] shall drink on the way.

Therefore shall He lift up the head.''

Similar imagery is employed by Isaiah lxiii. and amplified with great depth of colouring. Our readers will remember how the holy prophet portrays the conqueror returning from His victories, red in His apparel, and His garments like him that treadeth in the winefat, and explaining His gory appearance by the exulting declaration:

6

'I have trodden the winepress alone;

And of the people there was none with me:

For I did tread them in mine anger,

And trample them in my fury;

And their blood was sprinkled upon my garments,
And I did stain all my raiment.'

1 These last words may be understood either according to the ancient exposition, of the sufferings of Christ on which were grounded His triumphs, or according to the modern view, as expressing the conqueror's unwearied pursuit of His enemies now in full flight, and not turning again until He had destroyed them.'Ps. cx. 5-7.

We may, therefore, leave the passage which we have cited from the 68th Psalm, as one in which the literal has been probably absorbed into the typical, and thus regard it as no longer expressing the feelings of the individual Psalmist, or of those of his time whose exponent he had become.

But there are other passages in which the amplification of the imagery appears to indicate something more than the excitement of poetical imagination, and to be fairly attributable to a vehemence of anger which requires a large satisfaction, and which accordingly finds complacency in accumulating circumstances of judicial visitation to degree which we cannot but often feel to be no less than appalling.

'Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth :

Break out the great teeth of the young lions, O Lord.

Let them melt away as waters which run continually:
When he bendeth [his bow to shoot] his arrows, let them [the
arrows] be as cut in pieces.

As a snail which melteth, let them pass away,

Like the untimely birth of a woman, which seeth not the sun. Before your pots' [addressed to the wicked]' can feel [the heat of] the thorns,

He [God] shall hurry them '[the thorns] 'away as with a whirlwind, alike the green and the burning.

The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance:

He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.'-lviii. 6—10.

We think the authority of the best critics will sustain us in our rendering of the 9th verse,-which, we believe, employs an incident which may often occur to hungry travellers in the desert, to express utter frustration and disappointment.

'Let their table become a snare to them: '

[while in their devotion to their sensual gratification they observe not the enemy coming upon them.]

'And for them when in secure ease let it become a trap.

Let their eyes be darkened that they see not;

And make their loins continually to shake [from weakness]:

Pour out Thine indignation upon them,

And let thy wrathful anger take hold of them.

Let their habitation be desolate;

And let none dwell in their tents.

For they persecute him whom Thou hast smitten;

And they talk to the grief of those whom Thou hast wounded.

Add iniquity unto their iniquity:

And let them not come into thy righteousness, [i.e. acceptance

with Thee, as in Ps. xxiv. 5.]

Let them be blotted out of the book of the living,

And not be written with the righteous.'-lxix. 22-28.

'Set Thou a wicked man over him:

And let Satan stand at his right hand [a vindictive adversary ever

at advantage over him].

When he shall be judged, [in any lawsuit,] let him be condemned:

And let his prayer [to Heaven] be turned into sin.
Let his days be few;

And let another take his office.

Let his children be fatherless,

And his wife a widow.

Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg.

Let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places [far away from their homes now desolated].

Let the extortioner catch all that he hath;

And let the stranger spoil his labour.

Let there be none to extend mercy unto him:

Neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children.

Let his posterity be cut off;

And in the generation following let their name be blotted out.

Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the Lord;
And let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.

Let them be before the Lord continually,

That He may cut off the memory of them from the earth.

As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him:

As he delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him.

As he clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment,
So let it come into his bowels like water,

And like oil into his bones.

Let it be unto him as the garment which covereth him,
And for a girdle wherewith he is girded continually.

Let this be the reward of mine adversaries from the Lord,

And of them that speak evil against my soul.'-cix, 6-20.

'O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, [or, thou
destroyer];

Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee

As thou hast served us.

Happy shall he be, that taketh

And dasheth thy little ones against the stones.'—cxxxvii. 8, 9.

These are fearful passages; no right-minded person can ever read them without profound impressions of awe. And this feeling does not respect merely the terribleness of the punishment which is denounced; but much more the state of mind in which they exhibit the holy Psalmist himself. It is, in part, that sentiment of awe, which we experience when witnessing the expression of strong concentrated indignation, coming from an energetic mind which we have otherwise reason to approve as good. This last ingredient of thought, of course, enters here in a vastly greater proportion, through our sense of the Divine inspiration which belongs to the Psalms as a part of Holy Scripture. must we not add, that there, perhaps, mingles also sometimes, in the mind of the Christian reader, a contrary element ;—a certain feeling of misgiving, whether the posture of mind thus manifested by the Psalmist is indeed right: a misgiving which is more frequently quashed as in itself unlawful and wrong, than confronted with such a fair and thoughtful investigation as would satisfy us that there is no just cause for its being entertained. It is, cer

But

tainly, in many cases both wise and right, thus to put down doubts within us with the strong hand of a resolute faith. For we know, that in a Divine revelation, there must be many things which we cannot understand; many things, which we cannot measure with any moral rule we are able to apply, so as to satisfy ourselves of their perfect rectitude by our own judgment of their character. Such cases are to be expected. They form a part of our probation; for when we have reason on the whole to be satisfied with the justness of our conviction, it is neither reasonable nor virtuous to suffer misgivings to clog either our practical conduct or the inward obedience of the spirit. In such cases, the rule of the Apostle Paul has its proper application: with the shield of faith we are to quench all the fiery darts of the Wicked, when otherwise we should only succumb beneath their assault.

But we apprehend, that without appealing from such doubts to our general conviction that whatever is inspired from Heaven must be right whether we can see it to be so or not, a fair consideration of the case before us will of itself suffice to prove, that there is no just cause for such misgiving, and that by those holy men of God who wrote these parts of sacred Scripture, the language which we have cited was, under their circumstances, properly and naturally employed; whilst also it may be shown, that for us, under our own present circumstances as disciples of Christ, such language would be unbecoming, and thus in a certain sense reprehensible and wrong.

We assume, as we have a right to do, that the cause of the holy Psalmists was the cause of righteousness; that the charges of unfaithfulness, deceit, and wrongful oppression, and likewise of impiety, which they allege against their enemies, are alleged justly; that these accusations were not the mere ventings of private resentment, seeking to malign an adversary and to render him odious, but that those on whom the Divine judgments are invoked were bad men, and the avowed enemies of religion. Indeed this last point, their irreligiousness and impiety, is frequently insisted upon. And when we remember how divided the minds of the Israelitish people were, between the worship of the One True God and that of idols, we can readily perceive, that the Jehovists (we trust that we forget not the reverence due to God's Holy Name in making use of a word which appears very aptly to describe the position which the worshippers of the LORD their God then held to others of their countrymen, and which was in many respects analogous to that afterwards held, amid the same people, by the first professors of our faith, giving rise to the distinctive appellation of Christians-) would very often be the object of obloquy and injurious treatment on this very account, and that the counsel of the poor' was often

shamed,' as we find it expressly stated, simply because Jehovah was his refuge.' (Ps. xiv. 6). We may feel confident, also, in assuming, that the worshippers of Jehovah would be the principal maintainers, not merely of the formal laws given to Israel through Moses, but also of virtue and goodness in general.

We take for granted, then, that the cause of the Psalmists was the cause of right and of true religion, and that their adversaries were, both in morals and religion, wicked persons, chargeable with crimes against men, and with deserting the worship of Jehovah for that of other gods; whilst they treated His servants with contumely and various kinds of persecution. It follows, that their character and doings were the proper objects, not merely of disapproval, but of indignation,-of the highest passion of displeasure and abhorrence of which our nature is susceptible. For let us consider the peculiar position which the servants of the true God then occupied. The small nation of which they formed a part, was now the only battle-field of absolute good and evil, piety and irreligion in the world. There was concentrated the whole cause of godliness and virtue. All around, lay the gross, thick darkness of heathenism with its manifold forms of hideous depravity, hemming in that little Goshen, and indeed continually invading it with irruptions of idolatry and vice,-continually threatening to extinguish the very last remains of light left amongst mankind. Alone, amidst a whole world of wickedness, the servants of God, the sole depositaries of His Holiness and Truth, must often have felt the solemn interest which belonged to their position with a singular intensity of emotion; and when wicked and impious men assailed them with the arts of wickedness and impiety, and by violence, treachery, and fraud sought to circumvent them and cut them off, besides that anger with which our nature always rises up to confront the approach of harm and danger, the very principle of goodness within them would itself array them in the terrors of an energetic indignation, and would prompt them to battle against the powers of evil with a zeal and earnestness proportioned to the vast interests which were at stake upon the issue. In our times of comparative peace, and when the cause of religion is diffused in its advocacy so far and wide over the world, it is difficult for us to estimate the zealous and even wrathful energy which the occasion in those times of concentrated strife and danger not only warranted, but even required. Christians in the ages of heathen persecution could better understand this; though even their position was far from being parallel, and though, as we shall presently see, there were in their hearts feelings and views antagonistic to this sentiment of righteous anger of which we speak, which could not but greatly qualify its nature and allay its force.