to our more modern and more scientific manner of thought,
we would want to do something more practical with the wicked, but we
would want to do something with them and we would want to do it now.

As we look at it, it ought not to be necessary to jump on the necks of
the wicked to make them good, that is, to make them understand what they
would wish they had done in twenty years. We live in a more reasoning
and precise age and what more particularly concerns us in the wicked is
not their necks, but their heads and their hearts. It seems to us that
they are not using them very much and that the moment they do and we can
get them to, they will be good. Possibly it was a mere matter of
language, a concession to the then state of the language--David's
wanting their necks to be jumped on so that he could get their attention
at first and make them stop and think and understand. More subtle ways
of expressing things to the wicked have been thought of to-day than of
jumping on their necks, but the principle David had in mind has not
changed, the principle of being loyal to the human race, the principle
of standing up for people and insisting that they were really meant to
be better than they were or than they thought they could be--a kind of
holy patriotism David had for this world. The main fact about David
seems to be that he believed he belonged to a great human race.
Incidentally he believed he belonged to a human race that was really
quite bright, bright enough at least to make people sorry for doing
wrong in it--a human race that was getting so shrewd and so just and so
honest that it took stupider and stupider people every year to be
wicked, and when he found, judging from recent events in Judea, that
this for the time being was not so, he had a hateful feeling about it,
which it seems to some of us, vastly improved him and would improve many
of us. We do not claim that the imprecatory Psalms were David's best,
but they must have helped him immensely in writing the other ones.

* * * * *

We may be wrong. But it has come to be an important religious duty to
some of us, or rather religious joy, to hate the prosperity of the
wicked. We hate the prosperity of the wicked, not because it is their
prosperity and not ours, but because their prosperity constitutes a
sneer or slander on the world. We have no idea of wanting to go about
faithfully jumping upon the necks of the wicked. What we want i