The depth and passion of the struggle against sin is shown in the fifty-first Psalm. "Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving-kindness; according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies, blot out my transgressions." "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned." "Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow." "Make me to hear joy and gladness." "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me." "Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise."
This passion against sin—this cry for inward purity—is the root of the religion of Jesus, the blessedness of the pure in heart; the warfare of Paul, the spirit against the flesh.
In other psalms, again, is a poignant cry for help and deliverance. It is the expostulation of the soul with Fate, the cry to a Power who should be a friend, but hides his face. There, is a pathetic sense of man's frailty and mortality. "Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears, for I am a stranger with thee and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and be no more."
Praise for God's greatness and awe for his eternity are joined with the sad sense of man's mortality. "Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? Shall the dead arise and praise thee? Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?"
Very often again the burden is the cry of the weak against the oppressor. Man, wronged by his fellow, cries to God, and can imagine no deliverance save by the ruin of his enemies. The cursing is tremendous. "O daughter of Babylon, happy shall he be that taketh thy little ones and dasheth them against the stones!" At this point is the widest ethical difference between "them of old time" and our own religion. In them, abhorrence of sin was not yet distinguished from hatred of the sinner, and the foes of the Psalmist or his nation were always identified with the foes of God. To hate thine enemy seemed as righteous as to love thy friend.
In a sense we may say the Psalms are a cry to which Jesus is the answer: "Lord, save me, and destroy my enemies!" "Love your enemies, and in loving you are saved."
In the book of Psalms there blends and alternates with the old theory of reward and punishment a later idea,—that goodness carries its own blessing with it,—that better than oil and wine, flocks and herds, health and friends, is the peace of well-doing, the joy of gratitude, yes, even the passionate contrition in which the soul revolts from its own sin and finds again the sweetness of the upward effort and a response to that effort like heaven's own smile. Not, goodness brings blessings, but goodness is blessed; not, the wicked shall perish, but wickedness is perdition; this is the deep undertone of the best of the Psalms.
Among these hymns are some which are filled with a noble delight in the works of nature,—a fresh, glad pleasure in the whole spectacle of creation, from sun and stars, sea and mountains, to the goats among the hills, and the conies of the rock. There is frank satisfaction in the bread which strengtheneth man's heart and the wine that makes him glad. And all this free human joy in the activities and splendors of nature never so much as approaches the perilous slope towards sensuality. It is everywhere sublimated by the all-pervading recognition of a holy and beneficent God.
What may be said of the Psalms generally is this: they express the most vivid and various play of human emotions,—sorrow, wrath, repentance, joy, dread, hope,—always exercised as in the presence of an Almighty being, holy, righteous, and the friend of righteous men. In this is their abiding power,—this close reflection of the fluctuations in every sensitive heart under the play of life's experiences,—encompassed with an atmosphere of noble seriousness, and outreaching toward a higher Power.
In the story of the Jewish mind, the book of Job stands by itself. It is not so much a stage in the progressive development of a faith, as a powerful and unanswered challenge to the current assertions of that faith. The characteristic idea of Judaism was that God rules the world in the interest of the good man. Not so, says Job, the facts are against it. Hear the complaint of a good man to whom life has brought trouble and sorrow, without remedy and without hope! So stood first the bold arraignment, the earliest voice of truly religious skepticism. Job is skeptical, not from any want of goodness,—he has been strenuously good; even now in all his darkness, "my righteousness I hold fast and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live." His goodness is of no narrow sort; justice, protection of the oppressed, help to the suffering, these have been his delight; from wantonness of sense he has kept himself pure; not even against wrong-doers and enemies has his hate gone out; he has not "rejoiced at the destruction of them that hated me, or lifted up myself when evil found him; neither have I suffered my mouth to sin by wishing a curse to his soul." Yet, after a life of this sort, he finds himself bereft, impoverished, tormented. Where is the righteousness of God? He turns to his friends for sympathy. "Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me." His friends for reply justify God by blaming Job. Doubtless you deserve it all: you must have done all manner of wrong, and been a hypocrite to boot! That is all the comfort they give him. Dreary and desolate he stands, no good in the present, no hope in the future. "I cry unto thee, and thou dost not hear me: I stand up, and thou regardest me not. Thou art become cruel to me; with thy strong hand thou opposest thyself against me. I know that thou wilt bring me to death, and to the house appointed for all living."