one seeks to do his will, is insisted on again and again, as
the true method to please him, and to obtain his protection against
all dangers. There are few moods of the religious life that are not
represented in the Psalms: penitence, intellectual perplexity,
domestic sorrow, feebleness, loneliness, the approach of death, the
excitement of great events, the agony of persecution, quiet
contemplation of nature, each has its word. The imprecations of some
of the Psalms show a trait of the national character without which
the picture would be incomplete. It may be in part extenuated by the
consideration that in these Psalms it is the community that speaks,
and that the enemy of the good cause deserves less forbearance than
the private adversary. Whether the Psalms in general are to be
conceived as uttered by the community rather than as private
outpourings, is a question not yet decided. In either sense the
Psalms have been used and are still used as the hymn-book of
Christendom, as well as of the Jews; and it will always be a
wonderful feature in the religion of Israel, that so soon after the
truth of the one God was discovered by the prophets, it received a
form of expression which has proved fitted for the use of every
nation in the world.

The Jews after the exile are in possession of a new form of religious
association which belongs to a high stage of growth. The temple
worship is one in which the ordinary layman has no part, or only an
occasional part to play. The priest does everything in it; even the
singing of Psalms is done by choirs of priests. And the dweller in
the country might rarely be a witness of these great solemnities. But
we know that in the Maccabean period the country was covered with
synagogues: with buildings, that is to say, where the surrounding
population met on the Sabbath, and perhaps on other days as well, to
join in common prayer, and to hear lessons of Scripture and
exhortations. Some local religious meeting was necessary; an earnest
people could not do without it, and the local sacrifices were now of
the past. But the synagogue service marks a great advance in the
religious position of the Jews. They can now meet without any act or
sacrament which they have to do in common, to engage in purely
intellectual religious exercises. The same advance, as we shall see,
took place in Greece about the same time; what moral or religious
furtherance they wanted, the earnest there began to seek from t