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'FOR THY SAKE'

Thou makest us to turn back from the enemy:
And they which hate us plunder at their will.
Thou hast made us like sheep for meat;

And hast scattered us among the nations.
Thou sellest thy people for nought,

And makest no gain by their price.

Thou makest us a reproach to our neighbours,

A scorn and a derision to them that are round about us. Thou makest us a byword among the heathen,

A shaking of the head among the people.

My confusion is continually before me,

And the shame of my face hath covered me,
For the voice of him that reproacheth and blasphemeth ;
By reason of the
enemy and avenger.

All this is come upon us; yet have we not forgotten thee,
Neither have we been false to thy covenant.

Our heart is not turned back,

Neither have our steps declined from thy way;

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That thou shouldest have crushed us in the place of jackals, And covered us with the shadow of death.

If we had forgotten the name of our God,

Or stretched out our hands to a strange god;

Would not God search this out?

For he knoweth the secrets of the heart.

Nay, but for thy sake are we killed all the day long;
We are counted as sheep for the slaughter.

Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord?

Arise, cast us not off for ever.

Wherefore hidest thou thy face,

And forgettest our affliction and our oppression? For our soul is bowed down to the dust:

Our body cleaveth unto the earth.

Arise for our help,

And redeem us for thy lovingkindness' sake.

The beginning of the third stanza seems to show, as Professor Wellhausen says, that 'hitherto the fight with the heathen has been successful, but now the Israelite army (which all through the Psalm is the speaker, and rightly regards itself as the representative of the people) has suffered a severe defeat which has placed everything in danger.'

'For thy sake are we killed all the day long.' So spake the Maccabean warriors. And even now, after more than 2,000 years have elapsed, many millions of Jews can still say, 'For thy sake are we persecuted, for thy sake do we suffer all the day long.' As for us in English-speaking lands, where liberty and enlightenment prevail, should we not strive to change the verb and to say, 'For thy sake, for thy cause do we live our lives?'

" MISERERE MEI, DEUS'

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CHAPTER III

THE FIFTY-FIRST PSALM

§ 1. A whole chapter for a single Psalm.-Some thirty-eight Psalms constituted the last chapter. The present chapter is to be occupied by but one. Nor is that single Psalm of any considerable length. It has only seventeen (or perhaps nineteen) verses. But I place it in a chapter by itself, both because it is very great and noble, as well as because it is not easy to classify it with any of the other categories into which I have roughly divided these selections from the Psalter. It has affinities with several Psalms of the group just ended, as well as with several other Psalms which are to follow it, but yet it stands out sufficiently from them all to justify its possessing a special and separate chapter for itself.

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The Psalm for which I make this lofty claim is the fifty-first. It has already been quoted in Part I, where I ventured to call it perhaps the noblest penitential hymn in all the world.' Professor Cheyne says of it that there is no passage in the Hebrew Bible at once more inspiring and inspired.' Mr. Mason says,

'None of the other Psalms have had half the effect upon men's minds that this one has exercised. It has a library of its own. The more one meditates upon it, the richer it seems, and that unendingly, is most folks' comment.'

The Psalm has occupied, as is only natural, a high place of honour in the Synagogue and in the Church.

The opening words are well known both in the Greek and the Latin versions. In the Greek Eleêson me, ho theos, 'Pity me, O God,' produced Kurie eleison, Lord, have pity,' a famous liturgical formula. We often read of Roman Catholic priests chanting the miserere without perhaps at once calling to mind that it is the fifty-first Psalm: Miserere mei, Deus.

In the Christian Church seven Psalms out of the whole are specially known as the penitential Psalms. Of these, four have already passed before us (vi, xxxviii, cii and cxliii), while two others (xxxii and cxxx) have still to come. The seventh is our present Psalm. But though there are points of connexion between it and the remaining six, there are also points of difference. Its separate place can still be justified. For the four penitential Psalms which we have already heard, as well as Psalm cxxx, are petitions for help from surrounding trouble, while Psalm xxxii is prevailingly didactic. But in Psalm li the affliction seems wholly inward; the deliverance which the petitioner seeks from God is a deliverance from sin and its bondage, a deliverance which may indeed have its outward issues, but which in the first instance is sought for its own sake. Outward circumstance has little to do with the Psalmist's prayer. And that is why the Psalm is so broad and human, coming home to us alike in prosperity and in sorrow. We only need to be human to appreciate it. Woe to us indeed if that passionate cry does not appeal to us, if we cannot make it our own.

§ 2. Who is the speaker?-But I pass now to a closer consideration of the Psalm as a whole. Can we use it as the voice of our own hearts, as our own best prayer, without reading into it something more than its writer intended? Did he mean by it just what we mean by it? Or have we to apply, enlarge or modify his words and meaning for our own spiritual edification? It is a delicate and difficult question. It is delicate because we have to preserve a happy mean. In their aversion from reading modern ideas into the original, or in their rigid application of a particular theory, some commentators, as it seems to me, rob the Psalm of much of its depth and significance. They will not let it mean as much as to my mind it was meant to mean. They will not let it be as spiritual as to my mind it was meant to be. And it is a difficult question because it is, after all, an impossible task to realize and reproduce with accuracy the complicated religious feelings of a man who lived more than two thousand years ago. Things to us clearly separate and separable may in his mind have been always united together, and feelings, which to us seem only causable in one way, may to him have been caused in quite another.

The main point to settle is as so often before, Who is the speaker? Is he an individual, who refers only to his own sins and to his own sinful nature, or is he in some sense or other the representative of his people or community?

At the first blush, if ever a Psalm were the outpouring of an

WHO IS THE SPEAKER?

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individual soul, referring only to the individual's own feelings and sorrows, it would seem to be this one. And secondly, if the collective or national interpretation impairs the spiritual value of any Psalm, it would seem to impair the value of this one. 'Create

in me a clean heart': to us such a prayer is intensely personal; it is offered up alone to the Alone': surely then the original writer did the same. Surely he was only thinking of himself! And if he was not thinking only of himself, how utterly different (we are tempted to add, how exceedingly inferior) his meaning must have been to our own!

When the Psalm was incorporated into a collection of Davidic hymns, it was not difficult to discover the particular incident in David's career to which it ought to be ascribed. It must have been written after the great sin of David's life-the murder of Uriah. Hence the editor affixed the heading, 'A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had taken Bathsheba.' But that the author lived many centuries after David is as certain as that several passages of the Psalm are inapplicable to the supposed situation, and could not have been written by the Judaean king. The heading need not further concern us, except in so far as to ask, Was the editor right in his individualizing interpretation?

And the answer must be: No, he was not. Nevertheless it can, I think, be shown that even though the individualizing interpretation be wrong, the Psalm still retains its religious and spiritual value.

We have seen that the Psalter as it grew and expanded became the hymn-book of the Second Temple, and that the Psalmists, so far as we can discover, did not write as isolated individuals, but as Israelites, as members of the community whose joys and sorrows, whose wishes and aspirations, were theirs. It is these communal joys, sorrows and aspirations to which they gave expression in the Psalms. But they did not write them for the community without feeling their contents themselves. Because they felt, they wrote. They did not merely write for others to feel. Yet in many and many a Psalm where the pronouns are 'I' and 'me,' we have observed that though, or rather just because, the writers' words are the true outcome of their own experience, they speak as representatives of Israel, in whose true relationship to God the individual author found the type and pattern of his own. For the individual's religious life was not lived apart from Israel as a whole. He was not only a man, but also an Israelite, and his relationship to God was not the general relation of man to Deity, but that of an Israelite to Jehovah, who, though God of the whole universe,

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