subdued to Israel or converted to God, the Law and religion of Jehovah will triumph, and Nature herself be transfigured. Now this expectation and picture of "the perfect Israel of God" was never absent from the mind and heart of the religious Israelite, and any factor in the present that pointed to it he at once idealised, projecting forward brilliant spiritual hopes and anticipations, prophetic ideals. The ideal Messianic King or Messianic Israel became a centre around which the present ideals, whether of glory or of holiness or even of suffering, could be gathered. Here an actual "anointed" King, there a holy" priest" or a righteous suffering saint, or a victory over enemies, or even smiling Nature, speaks to the psalmist of the perfect time coming, and he idealises it. In this broader sense, psalm upon psalm is truly Messianic as descriptive of the glorious "age to come," and Jewish readers would at once recognise it as such. Thus bit by bit, here a little and there a little, and from different originals, were drawn the lines of that perfect Figure, only realised in our Lord. In Him, the Sun of Righteousness, all their scattered rays are absorbed in the full light of the One bright beam, and the shadows disappear.

"1" Psalms.-This opens a keenly-controverted question with a direct bearing on the Imprecatory psalms of next section. In the "I" psalms, Does the "I" stand (a) for the individual speaker, or (b) for Israel, the Church and Servant of God, personified?

Of course, all scholars alike agree that in occasional psalms it is undoubtedly the psalmist himself who speaks. As in our Church Hymn-books, so in the Jewish, some hymns were originally personal and for private edification, like Newman's "Lead, kindly light." But many scholars reduce this "individual speaker" element to the barest limits, and (even in Ps. li.) insist that "I" and "me" almost invariably stand for "we" and "us" throughout the Psalter. Their plea is a strong one. They maintain,

and rightly, that, throughout, the Old Testament personifies Israel (e.g. "The Suffering Servant"), and they insist that it is so in the Psalter, the "I" standing for Israel = the Jewish Church the true people

of God, personified.

Equally able scholars deny this. They grant that it may be true to some degree, but not nearly to the extent claimed. Their plea is of this nature: It is true that, before the Exile, Israel is constantly personified, and for an obvious reason. Religion then was national, not a personal matter between God and the individual soul; hence the individual sense of right and wrong, of sin and guilt, was not so deeply felt. The community was all in all, the corporate sense very strong, while individual personality was largely merged in the national life. No doubt, even after Jeremiah's and Ezekiel's insistence on personal religion, there was not an immediate recoil to individualism pure and simple. The national instinct was alive and the corporate sense was still there (e.g. II. Isaiah's "Suffering Servant "), and rightly encouraged. But post-exilic Hebrew literature proves that, after the Return, individualism grew by leaps and bounds. And such a psalm as li., and most of the "I" psalms, would lose more than half their meaning and force if resolved into a mere expression of national penitence or hope, corporate prayer or praise. The personal note is too pronounced to be thus easily eliminated. Indeed, it is precisely this personal note which gives the Psalter its firm hold on every human heart.

This is a strong plea, and doubly strong when we bear in mind a point already noted. Although the whole Psalter, as it stands, was edited for Temple (and synagogue) service, there is little doubt that many of its hymns were originally the expression of individual experience, afterwards toned down and adapted to congregational use. If the second alternative be not the true solution, then all we can say is

that Hebrew psalmists had an exceptional geniuswhich died with them-for so wording national hymns as to voice exactly the inmost feelings of each individual heart, all the world over, for all time.

Imprecatory Psalms.-This is where the "I" question mainly comes in. In such psalms as lviii., lxix., cix., cxxxvii., we have Hymns of Hate which cast a black shadow on the lovely picture of the Psalter. These passionate outbursts of resentment against domestic or foreign foes may perhaps not be so shocking, if the "I" is Israel the down-trodden and persecuted community, and not the individual speaker, though our conscience to-day rightly condemns them in either case.1

Various pleas have been urged in justification of these psalms, e.g.: (1) They are but the expression of the Church's righteous wrath against the powers of evil hurting God's cause through the persons of His servants on earth; or (2) such resentment is only natural on the lips of a people long oppressed, enslaved, and maltreated, and would find its ready echo in Christian Belgium to-day; or (3) a Christ who called His calumniators "a generation of vipers,"

1 Pss. cxxxvii. and cix. are generally condemned by all. But many advocate the public singing of the rest, quoting Ps. xcvii. 10: "O ye that love the Lord, see that ye hate the thing that is evil," alleging that the clearer our realisation of the beauty of holiness, the sharper our recoil from, and condemnation of, all that is base and evil. Forgive personal enemies, they say, but express vigorously in word and deed your antipathy to "enemies of Society in the aggregate," even as Christ assailed Scribes and Pharisees who opposed His regeneration of mankind, and assailed them in terms of the strongest invective. These advocates see in e.g. Ps. lviii. : "Break their teeth, O God, in their mouths, Smite the jawbones of the lions, O Lord," and "the righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his footsteps in the blood of the ungodly," and see rightly, nothing but a poetical picture, sketched with a few bold strokes, of the defeat in battle of a criminal nation which has violated every law of God and of civilised humanity, and man's joy that justice has been done; just as we rejoiced when we had broken the teeth of the German eagle by sending their boats to the bottom or killing their thousands in battle. The Bible, they urge, is no pacifist book, neither should we erase from it passages which paint God's righteous vengeance in terrible colours, just to avoid shocking the susceptibilities of the weak. I have felt in honour bound to put their case as strongly as possible. But (1) Do these men realise Jewish vindictiveness of old under bitter wrongs? (cf. p. 22 sup.). (2) Does Christianity endorse their verdict? (3) Does natural man's vindictive spirit want prompting, and in God's House?

IMPRECATORY PSALMS

265

and consigned them to the "damnation of hell" (St. Mt. xxiii. 33), would prefer the righteous resentment of these strong Jews to the maudlin softness so common to-day in the presence of evil.

All said and done, the one excuse for such Hebrew Hymns of Hate, which are as wide apart as the poles from Christ's Spirit and Golden Rule of St. Mt. v. 38 sqq., is that such resentment is the ready voice of the natural man's heart under strong provocation, and recent experience proves that it is not for us to cast the first stone. Moreover, as we saw in Ch. II., the Psalms are the impassioned utterances of a Hebrew people full of the fire of passion, the strong love and hate, the pride and scorn of their Arab ancestors. If Hebrew depth of feeling and heart of fire vents itself in half a dozen Hymns of Hate, it also gives us an Amos, Isaiah, and the world's Great Lyric. Once more, 400 B.C. is not 1920 A.D.

CHAPTER XVII

(III.) "HOLY WRITINGS": JOB, ECCLESIASTES, PROVERBS

Јов

JOB is the profoundest creation of Hebrew religious thought, one of the great dramatic poems of the world's literature. Its theme is that sphinx-riddle : "If God is, and is good; why does evil prosper and goodness suffer?"

Even in Job's day (probably about 500-400 B.C.), as Psalms and Prov. show, traditional orthodoxy had its facile answer to this insoluble problem: "Virtue is ever rewarded and badness punished measure for measure in this life by a just God. Each man fares exactly as his character and deeds deserve. An apparently good man's woes are proof positive of a goodness only skin-deep "—e.g. Ps. xxxvii. 25 sqq.

Yet here is Job, a typically good man at heart, as God Himself1 and even Satan own (i. 8 sqq.), suddenly grievously afflicted. Therefore, on the current view of Providence, he is a great sinner. His three friends firmly uphold this orthodox view and lay some great sin at his door. This Job stoutly denies: "I am innocent; I have ever feared God and eschewed evil," is the clear and unwavering verdict of his conscience, and, as we have seen, endorsed of God. The whole plot of the book hinges on the clear understanding that, not only is Job's outer life morally correct as all the world can see, but that, as Job and

1 One of the finest strokes of the poet's art is his placing in the reader's hands from the very first this master-key to the whole position, so that the reader knows what God and Satan and Job alone know, and the three friends of Job do not know.