has abused them, when they would be far better occupied, nine out of ten of them—­in doing something that would make it stop.  There was a poet and soldier some thousands of years ago who put more real religion (and put it too, into his imprecatory psalms), than has been put, I believe, into all the sweet whinings and the spiritual droopings of the world in three thousand years.  I do not deny that I would quarrel, as a matter of form, with the lack of urbanity, with a certain ill-nature in the imprecatory Psalms; but with the spirit in them, with the motive and mighty desire, with the necessity in the man’s heart that was poured into them, I have the profoundest sympathy.

David had a manly, downright belief.  His belief was that if sin is allowed to get to the top in this world of ours, it is our fault.  David felt that it was partly his—­and being a king—­very much his, and as he was trying to do something about it, he naturally wanted the world to help.

What he really meant—­what lay in the background of his petition—­the real spirit that made him speak out in that naive bold way before the Lord, and before everybody—­that made him ask the great God in heaven all looking so white and so indifferent, to come right down please and jump on the necks of the wicked, was a vivid, live vision of his own for his own use that he was going to make the world more decent.  He was spirited about it.  If God did not, He would, and naturally when he came to expressing how he felt in prayer, he wanted God to stand by him.  To put it in good plain soldier-like Hebrew, He wanted God to jump on the necks of his enemies.

Speaking strictly for ourselves, in our more modern spirit of course, we would want to modulate this, we admit that we would not ask God to do a little thing like jumping on the necks of the wicked—­just for us—­nor would we care to break away from the other things we are doing and attend to it ourselves, nor would we even favour their necks being jumped on by others, but while we do not agree with David’s particular request, we do profoundly agree with the way he felt when he made it.  We would not make our flank movement on the wicked in quite the same way and according to our more modern and more scientific manner of thought, we would want to do something more practical with the wicked, but we would want to do something with them and we would want to do it now.

As we look at it, it ought not to be necessary to jump on the necks of the wicked to make them good, that is, to make them understand what they would wish they had done in twenty years.  We live in a more reasoning and precise age and what more particularly concerns us in the wicked is not their necks, but their heads and their hearts.  It seems to us that they are not using them very much and that the moment they do and we can get them to, they will be good.  Possibly it was a mere matter of language, a concession to the then state of the language—­David’s