Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg; let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labor.
Let there be none to extend mercy unto him; neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children.
Let his posterity be cut off: and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.
But do thou for me, O God the Lord, for Thy name's sake; because Thy mercy is good, deliver Thou me. * * I will greatly praise the Lord with my mouth.
Think of a God wicked and malicious enough to inspire this prayer. Think of one infamous enough to answer it.
Had this inspired psalm been found in some temple erected for the worship of snakes, or in the possession of some cannibal king, written with blood upon the dried skins of babes, there would have been a perfect harmony between its surroundings and its sentiments.
No wonder that the author of this inspired psalm coldly received Socrates and Penelope, and reserved his sweetest smiles for Catharine the Second.
Ninth. With having said that the battles in which the Israelites engaged, with the approval and command of Jehovah, surpassed in cruelty those of Julius Cæsar.
Was it Julius Cæsar who said, "And the Lord our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. And we took all his cities, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain"?