giving to be offered by the Church to God. But this general sense of the fitness of using the Psalms as a part of our service, is very often vague and indistinct; and when we come to repeat them, we are often at a loss to know what we mean by them;-how far, that is, we make them our own, and repeat them as our own words and thoughts; or how far we read them merely as the work of another man, which may be here and there instructive, or even applicable to ourselves; but which, in many parts, we do but listen to or repeat with our mouths, without at all identifying ourselves with the circumstances or feelings of their writers.

I would wish, then, to state in the first place what appears to be the right view of this question, before I say any thing of that particular Psalm from which the words of the text are taken.

Now, first of all, it is clear that if we look upon the Psalms merely as upon so many ancient writings, the works of writers whose names and, in many cases, whose very age is unknown to us, we should then regard them as altogether expressing the feelings of other men. We might learn from them, in part, where they express any general truths, we might admire their imagery or their devotion, but we could not adopt them as our own language; and many feelings contained in them would be such as to awaken in us no sympathy.

And if we are told upon this view of them that the Psalms are inspired, and are to be regarded as the word of God, I do not think that this tends much to clear our notions, or makes us find them more universally edifying than we did before. For the notion of inspiration with many people, so far as they have any distinct notions about it at all, is, that God makes the human author of an inspired composition, so far as that composition is concerned, to be perfect even as He is himself perfect; that the sentiments which he expresses must be those of perfect goodness and wisdom; and that as God is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, so in writings inspired by God the question of the date or circumstances of the human writer is of no importance, because he is but the organ of a wisdom and a goodness to which earthly time and circumstances must of course be altogether indifferent.

Following up this notion, men conclude farther, not unreasonably, that the language of God being all perfect, must be such as they not only may but ought to labour to make sincerely their own; and that what the Psalmists have said was right and good for them to say, and must be no less right and good in us; for it is not properly the language of the Psalmist, but of the Holy Ghost. We find now one or more Psalms, parts of the 69th, for example, and the 109th, which contain

the strongest denunciations and prayers for all manner of evil to come upon the heads of the Psalmists' enemies. This, we say, is inspired language, and therefore it must be right and good. But Christ has told us especially to love our enemies, and to pray not against, but for those who despitefully use us and persecute us. And lest we should say that this is the rule for our private enemies, but that we may curse heartily and hate the enemies of God and God's Church, we find that our Lord did pray for those who crucified Himself, and who in so doing were surely as much acting the part of God's enemies as we could ever dare to say was the case with any man or men in the world. Therefore the perplexity about certain parts of the Psalms has been great and general. Some have tried to get out of the difficulty by a different interpretation of the sacred text, the constant resource of the unwise and ignorant, and which is as constantly a foolish evasion of the point which presses them and no fair explanation. For instance, some tell us that the expressions, which in our version are rendered as wishes, are in the Hebrew expressed in the future tense; and that they are not to be rendered as wishes, but as prophecies. And others, again, would have it that all the denunciations of evil in the 109th Psalm are not the wishes of the Psalmist against his enemies, but their wishes against him, which

he repeats at length to show their bitterness against him. Others, again, of a different sort of temper, whose minds being naturally unable to distinguish truth and falsehood, have no sort of difficulty in adopting a whole set of things together, true and false, bad and good alike, are very angry with all such scruples, and delight in repeating the curses with all possible earnestness, applying them to those whom they call God's enemies now, and who at any rate are opposed to themselves. And at this moment persons of such a spirit hurt no one but their own souls: their wishes of evil, however vehemently uttered, are powerless against others, and only involve themselves in sin. But there have been times, and may well be again, when men not only wished and prayed for evil against their enemies, but took the sword also to execute what they prayed for; so that the Scripture was actually wrested by them to their own destruction; and the Psalms of Christ's Church, in which she has in every age delighted to find the fittest expression for her own feelings of penitence and of supplication, of joy and gratitude, of holiness and love, have been profaned into language such as Antichrist might delight in, have been made a cloak for hatred and bitterness, an excuse for injustice, oppression, and murder.

Now any person, who has followed me thus far,

will easily perceive that this wickedness is the strict consequence of false notions with respect to inspiration; which false notions being allowed to be true, the fanatical consequence is drawn from them correctly. Wherefore others again, seeing that the consequence is detestable, and observing also from what source it has sprung, proceed to attack it in its very root, and deny either openly, or by implication, the inspiration of the Psalms altogether. They are the writings of good men, it is allowed, but of men good according to the standard of their own time, which standard falls far short of Christian perfection. And therefore, it is said, although we find much in the Psalms in which we can sympathize, there is also much in which we cannot; and in particular, the wishes of evil in the 69th and 109th Psalms, and in others like them, were excusable enough in the men of old time, whose rule it was to love their neighbour, and hate their enemy, but could not be repeated by us now without great sin.

Now this opinion takes a view of the Old Testament, which, it must be confessed, is not the view of it entertained by our Lord and His Apostles. For, not to press St. Paul's famous declaration to Timothy about the Scriptures of the Old Testament, because some, though as I think erroneously, have given to the passage a different interpretation, yet whenever the Old Testament is referred