toward the whole human race? One has been used to seeing it now for
centuries, good people all over the world hanging their harps on willow
trees, or snuggling down together by the cold sluggish stream of their
lives, and gossiping about how the world has abused them, when they
would be far better occupied, nine out of ten of them--in doing
something that would make it stop. There was a poet and soldier some
thousands of years ago who put more real religion (and put it too, into
his imprecatory psalms), than has been put, I believe, into all the
sweet whinings and the spiritual droopings of the world in three
thousand years. I do not deny that I would quarrel, as a matter of form,
with the lack of urbanity, with a certain ill-nature in the imprecatory
Psalms; but with the spirit in them, with the motive and mighty desire,
with the necessity in the man's heart that was poured into them, I have
the profoundest sympathy.

David had a manly, downright belief. His belief was that if sin is
allowed to get to the top in this world of ours, it is our fault. David
felt that it was partly his--and being a king--very much his, and as he
was trying to do something about it, he naturally wanted the world to
help.

What he really meant--what lay in the background of his petition--the
real spirit that made him speak out in that naive bold way before the
Lord, and before everybody--that made him ask the great God in heaven
all looking so white and so indifferent, to come right down please and
jump on the necks of the wicked, was a vivid, live vision of his own for
his own use that he was going to make the world more decent. He was
spirited about it. If God did not, He would, and naturally when he came
to expressing how he felt in prayer, he wanted God to stand by him. To
put it in good plain soldier-like Hebrew, He wanted God to jump on the
necks of his enemies.

Speaking strictly for ourselves, in our more modern spirit of course, we
would want to modulate this, we admit that we would not ask God to do a
little thing like jumping on the necks of the wicked--just for us--nor
would we care to break away from the other things we are doing and
attend to it ourselves, nor would we even favour their necks being
jumped on by others, but while we do not agree with David's particular
request, we do profoundly agree with the way he felt when he made it. We
would not make our flank movement on the wicked in quite the same way
and according