alities. The Psalmists speak habitually of "the wicked" and "the
ungodly," where we should more naturally speak of the qualities rather
than the persons. They ignore, as a rule, immediate or secondary
causes, and ascribe everything in nature or human affairs to the direct
action or intervention of God. Thus a thunder-storm is described:

There went a smoke out in His presence:
And a consuming fire out of His mouth,
so that coals were kindled at it.
(xviii. 8.)

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And thus a national calamity:

Thou hast shewed Thy people heavy things:
Thou hast given us a drink of deadly wine.
(lx. 3.)

Such ways of describing God's work in Nature or His providence are
partly, of course, due to the fact (often overlooked by the
half-educated) that the Psalms are poetry and not prose. For the same
reason inanimate objects are personified: "the earth trembled at the
look of Him," "the mountains skipped like lambs"; the mythical
"Leviathan" appears both as a title of Egypt (lxxiv. 15) and as an
actual monster of the deep (civ. 26). God Himself, again, is spoken of
in language that might seem more appropriate to man. He is "provoked,"
and "tempted." He awakes "like a giant refreshed with wine." He is
called upon, not to sleep nor to forget, to avenge, to "bow the heavens
and come down."

Nor do the Psalms in their literal meaning rise always above the
current and imperfect religious conceptions of their time. The moral
difficulties involved in this will be considered a little later, but it
may be interesting to point out here some examples which bear on {25}
the progressiveness of revelation in the Old Testament by which heathen
ideas became, under God's guidance, "stepping-stones to higher things."
The Psalms seem sometimes to speak as if "the gods of the heathen"
really existed and were in some way rivals of the God of Israel,
universal and supreme though He is acknowledged to be. They are spoken
of as "devils" as well as idols. They are called upon to "worship Him"
(_cf._ cvi. 36, xcvii. 7, 9, cxxxviii. i).

Again, the Psalmists' horizon is, for the most part, limited to this
present life, which is regarded as if it were the chief, almost the
only, scene in which moral retribution would be worked out. And
occasionally there appears the primitive Hebrew idea of the after-world
as the vague and gloomy Sheol, like the shadowy Hades of Homer, where
the dead "go down into silenc