Servus tuus sum ego:
Da mihi intellectum ut sciam testimonia tua.
Besides general principles, we are also to consider some of the general difficulties in the use of the Psalter as a Christian book. The Psalms are certainly not easy. Nothing as great as they are ever could be easy. None of the books of the Bible yield their secret except to labour and prayer, and the Psalms present special difficulties of their own. These are of various kinds and need various methods of approach. There is a difficulty inherent in the very origin and history of the Psalms. They are translated somewhat imperfectly from an ancient language, not akin to our own—a language which, if not difficult in itself, is rendered so by the comparative scantiness of its literature. The Psalms, humanly speaking, are the work of a race widely different from ourselves in habits and in modes of thought and expression. They contain allusions to events and circumstances imperfectly known or realised to-day. Most of our interpretation of these things is necessarily guess-work. The same Psalm may be ascribed with equal probability, by scholars of equal learning and reverence, to periods many centuries apart. Was the sufferer of Ps. xxii. David or Jeremiah, or is it altogether an ideal portrait? Was the coming of the heathen into God's inheritance of Ps. lxxix. that of the Babylonians in the sixth century B.C. or of the soldiers of Antiochus in the second? Who was the "king's daughter" in Ps. xlv. and who "the daughter of Tyre"? Is the Temple of the Psalms ever the first Temple, or is it always the second? Such problems still wait an answer. Again, there are difficulties inherent in Hebrew thought. It is intensely concrete and personal, in contrast with our more usual abstractions and generalities. The Psalmists speak habitually of "the wicked" and "the ungodly," where we should more naturally speak of the qualities rather than the persons. They ignore, as a rule, immediate or secondary causes, and ascribe everything in nature or human affairs to the direct action or intervention of God. Thus a thunder-storm is described:
There went a smoke out in His presence:
And a consuming fire out of His mouth,
so that coals were kindled at it.
(xviii. 8.)
And thus a national calamity:
Thou hast shewed Thy people heavy things:
Thou hast given us a drink of deadly wine.
(lx. 3.)
Such ways of describing God's work in Nature or His providence are partly, of course, due to the fact (often overlooked by the half-educated) that the Psalms are poetry and not prose. For the same reason inanimate objects are personified: "the earth trembled at the look of Him," "the mountains skipped like lambs"; the mythical "Leviathan" appears both as a title of Egypt (lxxiv. 15) and as an actual monster of the deep (civ. 26). God Himself, again, is spoken of in language that might seem more appropriate to man. He is "provoked," and "tempted." He awakes "like a giant refreshed with wine." He is called upon, not to sleep nor to forget, to avenge, to "bow the heavens and come down."
Nor do the Psalms in their literal meaning rise always above the current and imperfect religious conceptions of their time. The moral difficulties involved in this will be considered a little later, but it may be interesting to point out here some examples which bear on the progressiveness of revelation in the Old Testament by which heathen ideas became, under God's guidance, "stepping-stones to higher things." The Psalms seem sometimes to speak as if "the gods of the heathen" really existed and were in some way rivals of the God of Israel, universal and supreme though He is acknowledged to be. They are spoken of as "devils" as well as idols. They are called upon to "worship Him" (cf. cvi. 36, xcvii. 7, 9, cxxxviii. i).
Again, the Psalmists' horizon is, for the most part, limited to this present life, which is regarded as if it were the chief, almost the only, scene in which moral retribution would be worked out. And occasionally there appears the primitive Hebrew idea of the after-world as the vague and gloomy Sheol, like the shadowy Hades of Homer, where the dead "go down into silence," where, instead of purpose and progress, there is but a dawnless twilight, the land "without any order" of Job (xlix., lxxxviii., cxv. 17).
And yet the more one studies and uses the Psalms in the light of other Scriptures and the Church's interpretation, the more it is found that these partial, at first sight erroneous, conceptions have still their practical value for Christians. There is nothing in them that is positively false, and they suggest, on the other hand, aspects of truth which we tend to forget. Thus in the instances given above, by "the gods of the heathen" the Christian may well be reminded of the continued existence and influence in the heathen world of the powers of evil, of the malignant warfare that is still being waged by "principalities and powers" against light and truth. The ancient conception of the shadowy abode of the dead has also its value. Even the Lord Himself could speak of the night coming "when no man can work" (John ix. 4), and such Psalms as the 49th and the 115th may serve to remind us that this life is a time of work and probation in a sense that the life after death is not, that the grave cannot reverse the line that has been followed here nor put praises in the mouth of those who have never praised God "secretly or in the congregation" in this world. And again, the "present-worldliness" of the Psalter may well point the duty of Christians in respect of what they see and know around them here. Many are content, while repeating pious phrases about heaven, to ignore the fact that this present human life is the great sphere of Christian activity, and that whether the Church is able to regenerate human society here or not, it is her business to try to do it, as fellow-workers with Him—