all ages.

If we take the Bible as it stands (and we have no right to do
otherwise), these men were trying to kill David. He could not, and
upon a point of honour, would not kill them himself. But he
believed, and rightly, that God can punish the offender whom man
cannot touch, and that He will, and does punish them. And if he
calls on God to execute justice and judgment upon these men, he only
calls on God to do what God is doing continually on the face of the
whole earth. In fact, God does punish here, in this life. He does
not, as false preachers say, give over this life to impunity, and
this world to the devil, and only resume the reins of moral
government and the right of retribution when men die and go into the
next world. Here, in this life, he punishes sin; slowly, but
surely, God punishes. And if any of you doubt my words, you have
only to commit sin, and then see whether your sin will find you out.

The whole question turns on this, Are we to believe in a living God,
or are we not? If we are not, then David's words are of course
worse than nothing. If we are, I do not see why David was wrong in
calling on God to exercise that moral and providential government of
the world, which is the very note and definition of a living God.

But what right have we to use these words? My friends, if the
Church bids us use these words, she certainly does not bid us act
upon them. She keeps them, I believe most rightly, as a record of a
human experience, which happily seems to us special and extreme, of
which we, in a well-governed Christian land, know nothing, and shall
never know.

Special and extreme? Alas, alas! In too many countries, in too
many ages, it has been the common, the almost universal experience
of the many weak, enslaved, tortured, butchered at the wicked will
of the few strong.

There have been those in tens of thousands, there may be those again
who will have a right to cry to God, 'Of thy goodness slay mine
enemies, lest they slay, or worse than slay, both me and mine.'
There were thousands of English after the Norman Conquest; there
were thousands of Hindoos in Oude before its annexation; there are
thousands of negroes at this moment in their native land of Africa,
crushed and outraged by hereditary tyrants, who had and have a right
to appeal to God, as David appealed to him against the robber lords
of Palestine; a right to cry, 'Rid us, O God; if thou be a living
God, a God of justice