much a feeling against the delinquent, as a feeling in favour of the many who have suffered from his hand. There lies at the basis of what is felt, the elements of everything generous and noble-pity towards the weak, and care for the safety of the innocent. It is seen that forbearance towards men who do thus wickedly, must be injustice, cruelty, murder towards the unoffending. It is felt that society must be saved from the hands of such demons, and that the only way of so saving it is to destroy them. What less than this could be due to those mutineer fiends whose deeds will be associated through all history with the name of Delhi and Cawnpore? The whole resolves itself, not so much into the hate of one man, as into the love of many. It is in human nature to pronounce, that whosoever dares to rise up thus against humanity, should be crushed by humanity-that there must be something out of joint, something other than it should be, in any moral system, where this, as a rule, should not be. The feeling here, is not malignant, it is benevolent.

The

Often, indeed, the culprit himself comes to feel this. cases are not few in history in which the perpetration of some flagrantly wicked deed so haunts the perpetrator, as to forbid that he should attempt to escape from the terrible penalty he has merited. He has often been constrained, not merely to surrender himself into the hands of justice, but to implore that its stroke might not be with holden from him. Shallow witlings may make light of such moral phenomena, but grave men trace in them the finger of God.

Some of these imprecatory Psalms are, as we believe, Psalms of David. As such they may be regarded as being, not so much private, as public and judicial, in their character. Yes, and more-as being the utterances, not merely of David as an offended king, but of him as the representative of Jehovah, the Theocratic Sovereign of the Hebrews, the King of Kings. In this view, accordingly, the offences supposed are something more than offences against a private person, or against an earthly sovereign-they are such as take with them the double guilt of impiety and treason.

But, in all instances, the men who so wrote were at least inspired men. Now, it cannot be pretended that the evils accumulated on the heads of those who are the objects of these imprecations are other than do often await such offenders in the course of Divine Providence. The wicked do often thus treasure up unto themselves wrath against the day of wrath. And are we competent to say that inspired men may not have been prepared in some cases to see the sins of the sinning, and the retributions awaiting them, so clearly as to have been qualified and war

Imprecatory Passages in the New Testament.

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ranted to pronounce the doom of such men in anticipation of the
These Psalms bring no
coming judgment of the Almighty?
more upon the wicked than the Divine Providence brings upon
them. They give forth the burden of the Lord against such
men; that no more than that; and must we suppose it impos-
sible that an inspired mind may become so much one with the
Divine mind in these respects, as justly to pray that the Divine
Being would do what it would assuredly be righteous in him to
do, and what, in his time, he assuredly will do? In this view, the
argument against the imprecatory Psalms becomes an argument
against the moral government of God. It is not this or that
Hebrew scribe, but the Ruler of the universe, who is at fault.

Certainly, it is in our view a much easier and a much safer thing to accept the imprecatory Psalms under such lights, than to say with one breath, that all the moral and religious teaching in the Bible is inspired; and with the next, that those Psalm writers were so liable to err in their morality, and in their theology too, as to be in fact no authority at all, in comparison with If this our own inner sense of fitness in regard to such things. be not the great principle of Rationalism, we know not what that principle is.

But the grand plea in this matter is, that the Christian spirit is a forgiving spirit-that the language 'love your enemies' is characteristic of it, and so on. Now, it is not denied that lessons of this nature have a beautiful prominence in the New Testament. But lessons of another kind are there, and such as are in full accordance even with these imprecatory Psalms. Did Peter sin when he said to the man that would have purchased the gift of God with money, Thy money perish with thee?' Did Paul sin when he said, "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema maranatha?' or when he said, 'Though an 'angel from heaven preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed?' or when he said to an insolent priest who smote him, 'The Lord 'smite thee, thou whited wall? True, he withdrew the term when the priest proved to be the high-priest, but he therein affirmed the fitness of his feeling and of his words in other circumstances. Did the same apostle sin when he said, 'Alexander the coppersmith hath done me much evil; the Lord reward him according 'to his works? To say, for the purpose of turning aside such texts, that these are occasional utterances only, and that inspiration leaves room to individuality, and the like, what is this but in effect to say that it is well to accept the authority of the inspired writers when felt to be convenient, but no further? We certainly should not of ourselves have thought of looking to the

imprecatory Psalms as giving us language which should be regarded as that of the Messiah. But the New Testament shuts us up to this conclusion. We do not suppose it to be necessary that we should take the Psalms so cited as being Messianic in all their parts; but to us it is clear that some of the severest utterances found in them are said to be His utterances. And in the fact that those writings are cited in the New Testament as giving the language of Christ at all, we see enough to satisfy us that those portions of Holy Writ cannot have been the immoral composition which some men affirm them to have been-Messiah speaking in one verse, and some purely malignant passion, of which even heathen men should be ashamed, getting vent in the next! Upon reflection, there is not the slightest ground for wonder that our Lord should be made to speak as he does in these citations from the Psalms. We all remember the language in which he detects the sin, and foreshadows the doom of the Pharisees. In that doom we have his own judgment-that which He brings to pass, whether men pray him so to do or not. So in the woes which he pronounces on cities like Chorazin and Bethsaida. Those woes came, and came we must suppose according to his will. If the time came in which it was good for Him so to do, can we not suppose a time to have been in which inspired men might innocently have prayed him so to do? What was right as an object of his will, might assuredly be right as an object of prayer on the part of natures made to partake in a special degree of his mind. It was his voice which said, as he looked down on the guiltiest of cities, 'Thou shalt 'not see me, until thou shalt say, blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.' In other words, the judgment upon thee which will make thee a terror to all ages, shall come. Terrible as it is, it is only just; and I depart that it may enterthat I may send to thee, alas! not the Comforter, but the avenger! So, too, in the last day, it is from His lips that the words will proceed, 'Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.' What that future state is to which this language points, we can understand but imperfectly; but from the effects of evil in this world, we feel that we are forced upon dark inferences as to its consequences in the

next.

Now it is in vain for men who profess to believe in the Bible at all, to attempt to ignore these aspects of its teaching. The Christian revelation is not simply a revelation of mercy, it is also a revelation of justice. Its character of God discloses his compassion as a Father, but along with it his grandeur as a Moral Ruler. Whether to our liking or not, this revelation has its

False Ethics, how related to a False Theology.

321

heaven and its hell. It is designed for men who can believe, not only that there is a God, but that there is a devil. It depicts the evil of sin as a terrible reality. It teaches that there must be a real atonement made for sin, if there is to be pardon for the guilty. It teaches that a regenerating power must come from the Divine Nature itself to the nature of man, if the depraved are ever to become pure,

But the man must be little observant of what is existing about him who does not know that there is much in our modern philanthropy, as it is called, which is strongly at issue, not only with the retributive element in certain of the Psalms, and with the moral teaching of the Old Testament generally, but with the ethics which everywhere underlie the above scheme of doctrinedoctrine embracing the evangelical truth of the Christian Scriptures. The conclusion to which this feeling prompts is, in substance, that the case cannot be so bad as represented, and that the remedy demanded cannot have been of so serious a nature. This impression admitted, the next step is to make it appear that it is a just and safe impression.

The parties who come under the influence of such feeling, are some of them amiable and pious persons, whose mild and sensitive nature disposes them to turn away from suffering and terror in any form. Towards such temperaments it is easy to have compassion, and to judge charitably. But this plea of philanthropy is often obtruded upon us by persons of quite another description, and very commonly this class knows only too well how to make dupes of the former class. Parties who were never suspected of being much burdened with the milk of human kindness, who are known, on the contrary, as being among the best haters to be met with, may be found with much sickly talk of this sort upon their lips. Their own life is a ceaseless tissue of conceit, envy, uncharitableness, and evil speaking-nevertheless they are great philanthropists, inasmuch as they do not afflict bodies, they only aim to torture souls! Authority above their own does somehow or other force itself into play about these persons, and it is this fact which so deeply affects their bile. All war they account as unnecessary, unjust, cruel-as so much murder. All penal severity they describe as proceeding from prejudice, or from the mere love of inflicting it. The world, in fact, is a very well-disposed sort of world, if those who undertake to govern and amend it could only be induced to let it alone. Coercion is a barbarous and brute element; everything should be expected from persuasion.

Society in this country is saturated with such talk. Examine it, and you will find in it so much of Robert Owen redi

vivus, as to be little surprised at what often follows. Nothing is more natural than that minds thus prepossessed should be shocked by things they meet with in nearly every page of the Old Testament, and in large portions of the New. The human nature in which such people believe is not the human nature of the Bible, nor of the actual world. Hence the principles of civil government, and the doctrines of theology, which they are predisposed to expect in the Bible, are something very different from what they find there. Men possessed with this narrow and diseased feeling are largely committed against everything of special value in Divine Revelation. They have learnt to turn from any human government which makes itself a terror,' as from an abomination. How natural that they should turn from the Divine Government, which does the same thing on a much larger scale, as from a still greater abomination. Discourse concerning the paternal character of God, and his paternal administration of things, as much as you please. But discourse about moral law, about the necessity of sustaining its honour, of enforcing its sanctions, and of exacting satisfaction for offences against it, and you are accounted as entering the domain of mysteries-mysteries concerning which the less that is said in any positive way the better. Christ no doubt did, in some sense, die for our sins, but in what exact sense he so did is very difficult to determine. Divine influence in the human soul is no doubt a reality, but to what extent, and in what way, is very hard to comprehend. In fact, it is only weak men who dogmatize on such themes. Wise men show their wisdom by finding more intelligible and more practical topics with which to occupy their thoughts. It is in this manner, good reader, that evangelical truth, without being formally disavowed, is really ignored among us. The gospel, as preached by Paul, is passed by, and another-which is not another-is by degrees, and without noise, obtruded into its place. But the man who must quarrel with his Bible in this manner, because it will prophesy rough things to him as well as smooth, should bear in mind that the quarrel cannot rest there. For the same reasons it must be extended to providence and nature. In short, in this grave misconception as to the moral condition of our race, and in this morbid sentimentalism as regards the manner in which the case of humanity should be dealt with, the seeds of half the deisms and atheisms the world has known may be found. It is the old story, the internal light against the externalRationalism versus Revelation. Reason ceases to know its place, and, heedless of all external authority, whether of an external word or of an external universe, runs into all sorts of licence.

The philosophy of this brief paper may be placed within a small