eclipsing here and there the ineffable brightness of him who showed us the Father in himself the Saviour and the Light of the world.

Let us not either mistake the real significance of the most fearful of the Imprecatory Psalms. The key to the 109th is found in the following words: "Because that he remembered not to show mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy man, that he might even slay the broken in heart. As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: as he delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him. As he clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment, so let it come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones. Let it be unto him as the garment which covereth him, and for a girdle wherewith he is girded continually." It is loathing of the soul which is unmerciful, which oppresses the afflicted, which delights in cursing rather than in blessing,-it is divine resentment against sin, holy wrath against the sinner, which is here outbreathed, and in its measure it is a true representation of the Divine reality in the mind of God and of God's children.

For the hater of hate is but the obverse of the lover of love, and, eliminating man from consideration, it is possible to believe in the righteousness of being cruel to the cruel. David believed in it, not eliminating man, but with special reference to man and man's innocent posterity. The Jews of his day believed in it. The Imprecatory Psalms were level with their plane of spiritual attainment and insight. They knew no Saviour and no Gospel making them a hideous contrast. They deemed themselves to be walking in the light of God when they loved their friends and hated their enemies, and were cruel to the cruel. But at last One came-the desire of many hearts, which had long since outgrown the measure of spiritual apprehension that David had attained to, and were wondering and waiting for the blessed Hope of Israel, internally vexed to deadly soul-sickness with the difficulty and inadequacy of that which had been revealed. He came, and not only answered expectation but completely surpassed it," I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you." Just otherwise than David prayed-pray ye! What then?

Does the new Teacher confound moral distinctions, dull the edge of conscience, and ask of us the impossible feat of loving our spiritual negatives? No; but he asks us to love him, and loving him we can view man as he does. For it is the love of him which brings us all upon one spiritual level, and compels Paul to say, "It is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief." And our guiltiest brother, who is most deformed and loathsome, and who has done us most despite, being seen to be no worse, no less worthy of the great salvation than ourselves, we count him not an enemy, but an alter ego, and we pray for him not as David prayed for his enemies, but as we in the mind of Christ are spontaneously moved to pray: "Have mercy upon him, my fellow sinner, my past self, my alter ego,-my self; have mercy upon him in me, upon me in him, upon us miserable sinners." For the salvation of any one of us is, ipso facto, a pledge of the salvability of us all.

And not only as the righteous judgment of God brings in all the world guilty before him do we by recognising and confessing this one

ness in guilt come into Christ's mind in respect of sinners, we also enter into sympathy with the difficulties, disadvantages, and untoward conditions of others, in proportion as we raise the standard of attainment for ourselves and are more merciless to our own shortcomings. God's infinite knowledge of the way in which the human soul is morally conditioned may well move him to infinite pity for its misfortunes as well as its faults, and it does so. This unites with his Fatherhood to suggest mercy and forgiveness, and the way thereto, even the sacrifice of himself. To him alone is known the number, the power, the subtlety of man's unseen spiritual foes. To him alone is known the reasons why one should grow up in such a situation as not to be more guilty in becoming a ferocious Turk participating in the massacre of Batak, than a deacon of a Christian church is guilty in selling goods within the shop not the same as the ticketed sample in the window. Christ is not only Judge but Advocate with God, and the power of his pleading is commensurate with his exact and infinite knowledge of the circumstances under which his clients incriminated themselves. Into this mind--not in its fulness-but supplementing our small instinctive conception, we enter with Christ. And when he says, "Love your enemies," we commence to be their advocate, in extenuating their faults and apologising to ourselves for them; perceiving how inferior were their advantages to ours, until instead of bleeding from our injuries, our hearts begin to bleed for the injurers, and we cry out, as dear disciples of Christ, who have learnt his mind and caught his spirit," Lord, bless and forgive them, for they know not what they do; and teach them thy way, O Lord, and bring them unto thy likeness."

Now had "David's greater Son," instead of speaking in this language, spoken as David himself in the Imprecatory Psalms, those who were living in a higher region than the Scriptures given to themselves led up to, would have shrunk back into themselves with bitter disappointment. But the very insufficiency of the old revelation had prepared many hearts in many generations to pray for and expect the new. For it is in the nature of each Word from heaven to beget dissatisfaction with itself as being at once" both a veil and a revelation," and when fed upon leading to a hunger which other manna yet to fall alone can satisfy. Hence, when the higher word was spoken for which so many yearned,— it turned indeed multitudes away, but also drew multitudes of divinely dissatisfied souls after it, in delighted liberty and bondage.

But what saith the commentators all this time? It is the fashion of those who set up to be commentators to begin by disparaging commentators, by which they do their best to discredit themselves. The devout thought of learned and life-long students of the Scriptures must everywhere and always be sought for as diffracted rays of inspiration from God himself, while at the same time there is always liberty to differ even from conclusions most generally accepted, for God has not confined his truth to any particular channels, but as many as seek to learn of him he teaches in different measure, and differently also in different ages of the world.

Bishop Horne converted all the imprecations of the Psalms into predictions merely, by converting an optative mood into the future tense. The Psalms, so read, make the wishes of David become the

intentions of God, and stretch out their fulfilment beyond this life into the next.

Bishop Horsley attempted nothing of this kind, but translated sheol everywhere as hell, thus lending his sanction to the errors of the Authorised Version.

The profound spiritual insight and beautiful perception of Delitzsch, appears to us to approach nearest to a correct appreciation of the true place and value of the imprecatory Psalms in the scheme of revelation; but the readers of the RAINBOW will perceive how much the "old theology" has to do with his laboured and unsatisfactory explanations.

"But as to the so-called imprecatory Psalms," he says, "in the position occupied by the Christian and by the church towards the enemies of Christ, the desire for their removal is certainly outweighed by the desire for their conversion: but assuming that they will not be converted, and that they will not anticipate their punishment by penitence, the transition from a feeling of love to a feeling of wrath is warranted in the New Testament (e.g., Gal. v. 12); and assuming their absolute satanic hardness of heart, the Christian even may not shrink from praying for their final overthrow, &c.; and every wish that judgment may descend upon those who oppose the coming of the Kingdom of God is cherished even in the Psalms on the assumption of their lasting impenitence. (Vide vii. 13; sq. cix. 17.) When however, as in Psalm lxix. and cix., the imprecations go into particulars and extend to the descendants of the unfortunate one and even on to eternity, the only justification of them is, that they flow from the prophetic spirit, and for the Christian they admit of no other adoption, except as, reiterating them, he gives the glory to the justice of God, and commends himself the more earnestly to his favour."*

And again :

"Psalms viii., xxxv., lxix., cix., form a fearful gradation. In Psalm cix., the old expositors count as many as thirty anathemas-paroxysms of a desire for revenge? (1 Sam. xxv. 10, sq.: but 1 Sam. xxv. 32, sq., a gentler stirring up of his conscience sufficient to dissuade him from it.) How much more natural (also Kurtz) that the preponderance of that magnanimity peculiar to him should have maintained its ascendancy in the moments of the highest religious consecration in which he composed his Psalms! . . . the duty of love towards one's enemies, however, is so little alien to the Old Testament (Exod. xxiii. 4, sq.; Lev. xix. 18; Prov. xx. 22; xxiv. 17; xxv. 21, 22; Job xxxi. 29, sq.), that the very words of the Old Testament are made use of in the New to indicate this law. And from Psa. vii. (Saul) we have seen that David was conscious of having fulfilled this duty. All the imprecatory words in these Psalms come therefore from the pure spring of unself-seeking zeal for the honour of God.

"That this zeal appears in this instance as zeal for his own person and character arises from the fact that, standing in antagonism to Saul whom God had rejected, to his mind the cause of God, the continuance of the church, and the future of Israel, coincide with his own destiny. The fire of his anger is kindled at this focus (so to speak) of the view

* Vol. i., pp. 74, 75. (Clark.)

which he has of his own position in the course of the history of redemption. It is therefore a holy fire, but the spirit of the New Testament, as Jesus himself declares in Luke ix. 55, is in this respect nevertheless a relatively different spirit from that of the Old. That act of divine love, redemption, out of the open fountain of which there flowed forth the impulse of a love which embraces and conquers the world, was then as yet not completed; and a curtain then still hung before eternity, before heaven and hell, so that imprecations like lxix. 20, were not understood even by him who uttered them, in their infinite depth of meaning. Now that this curtain is drawn up the New Testament faith shrinks back from invoking upon any one a destruction that lasts: and love seeks, so long as a mere shadow of possibility exists, to secure everything human from the perdition of an unhappy future-a perdition the full meaning of which cannot be exhausted by human thought. In connection with this, however, there remains one important consideration. The curses which are contained in the Davidic Psalms of the time of Saul's persecution, are referred to in the New Testament as fulfilled in the enemies of Jesus Christ. (Acts i. 20; Rom. xi. 7, 10.) One expres

sion found in our Psalm, épionoár μe dwpɛár (cf. lxix. 5), is used by Jesus (John xv. 25) as fulfilled in himself; it appears as though the whole Psalm ought to be, or may be, taken typically as the words of Christ. But nowhere in the Gospels do we read an imprecation used by Jesus against his own and the enemies of the kingdom of God. David's imprecations are not suited to the lips of the Saviour, nor do the instances in which they are cited in the New Testament give them the impress of being his direct words: they are treated as being the language of prophecy by virtue of the Spirit, whose instrument David was, and whose work the Scriptures are. And it is only in this sense that the Christian adopts them in prayer. For after the pattern of his Lord, who, on the cross prayed, 'Father, forgive them,' he desires that even his bitterest enemies may not be eternally lost, but, though it be in articulo mortis, that they may come to their right mind. Even the anathemas of the apostles against Judaising false teachers and against Alexander the smith (Gal. i. 9; v. 12; 2 Sam. iv. 14), refer only to temporal removal and chastisement, not to eternal perdition. They mark the extreme boundary where, in extraordinary instances, the holy zeal of the New Testament comes into contact with the holy fervour of the Old Testament."

Perowne-the latest, and the most distinguished of the English commentators says of David's imprecations: "Such language is certainly very different from anything that we meet with in the New Testament; and yet if it is not legitimate, if we may not use it ourselves, then how can it be said to be given by inspiration of God?" He goes on to say that the mind of Arnold found refuge from the "real difficulty" in a non-natural interpretation, referring the language to the enemies of our soul's peace, but that "the gulf is too wide between the original sense and the attempted application." He clearly proves that Bishop Horne is wrong in making the imprecations predictions. "The verbs are optatives, not futures;" and in his note to the 35th Psalm he finds the explanation in the statement that the older dispensation was in every sense a sterner one than the new. The spirit of Elias, though not an evil spirit, was

not the spirit of Christ. (Luke ix. 55.) The Son of man came not to destroy men's lives but to save them. Again, the Old Testament saints longed to see the righteousness of God manifested. It could be manifested, they thought, only in the evident exaltation of the righteous and the evident destruction of the wicked here, &c. &c. The awful things. of the world to come were to a great extent hid from their eyes. Could they have seen them, then surely their prayer would have been, not "Let the angel of the Lord persecute them," ""Blot them out of thy book;" but rather, with him who hung on the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

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In reference to this note, in another place, he says, "Surely there is. nothing in such an explanation which in the smallest degree impugns the Divine authority of the earlier Scriptures. In how many respects have the harsher utterances of the legal economy been softened down by the mind that was in Christ Jesus.' How much of it is declared to be antiquated, even though it still stands for our instruction in the volume of the Bible. Our Lord does not condemn Elijah for his. righteous zeal,-He does forbid the manifestation of a like zeal on the part of his disciples. As in the Sermon on the Mount he substitutes the moral principle for the legal enactment, so here he substitutes the spirit of gentleness, meekness, endurance of wrongs, for the spirit of fiery though righteous indignation. The Old Testament is not contrary to the New, but it is inferior to it."

The valuable suggestions of "T. W," in that most excellent article on the "Servile Interpretation of Scripture" in the RAINBOW for November 1876, must be deferred for consideration till our next paper. * HENRY DEACON.

(To be continued.)

PARAPHRASED PROPHECIES.

III.-DANIEL'S VISION OF THE RAM AND HE-GOAT AND OTHER PRECURSORS OF THE "KING OF FIERCE COUNTENANCE."

WO

Daniel viii.

Two years after Daniel saw the vision of the four great beasts, it was given him to see this. He was in the palace at Shushan, which was in the province of Elam, and not far from the border of Babylonia. The place is north of the Persian Gulf, and near the border line separating the present kingdoms of Persia and Turkey in Asia.

And Daniel said:-I was by the river of Ulai, and saw a vision. And I heard a man's voice over the river which called and said, "Gabriel, make this man to understand the vision." So Gabriel came near where I stood and said, "Understand, O son of man, that the vision is for the time of the end. Behold I will make thee know what shall be in the last end of the indignation; for the end shall be at the appointed time."

And this was the vision:

I saw before the river a ram which had horns; and the horns were