declarations of God's wrath upon the impenitent sinner
which have already been alluded to in a previous lecture. Viewed as
the utterances of the Son of Man such Psalms are more rightly to be
called _judicial_ than denunciatory. It is He to Whom all judgment has
been committed by the Father, He Whose coming into the world was
inevitably "for judgment," Who seems here to be delivering {66}
sentence. He is taking up and confirming the fragmentary utterances of
older days, in which the human conscience, imperfectly perhaps, and not
without some mixture of personal feeling, yet on the whole rightly, had
cried out against falsehood and wrong, and appealed to the wrath of
God. The words of such a Psalm even as the 109th might have been used
by Him Who twice scourged the buyers and sellers out of the Temple, and
Who denounced in words that burn like fire through the centuries the
cruelty and hypocrisy of scribes and Pharisees; Who Himself in mercy
warned us of the outer darkness and the unquenched flame.

But the Psalms not only illustrate the Passion of Christ in its mercy
and judgment; they also supply words befitting His Resurrection and
Triumph. It may be true that there is no clear or continuous line of
prophecy in the Old Testament concerning the life after death. But it
is at least equally true that the belief is there, grasped in moments
of intuition by the saints of Israel, disappearing for a time like a
buried river, but coming ever and anon again to the surface. So in the
Psalms there are certainly evidences of the undying hope of the
faithful that truth and justice must one day {67} visibly triumph, and
that man, in proportion as he is true to these things and therefore
true to God, Whose nature they are, and true to himself, as made in
God's image--man must also be immortal. He will not go down into
silence; an endless future opens before him, as yet unfathomed and
unknown, but certain. So in the Psalms which the Christian instinct,
illuminated by the Spirit of Pentecost, seized upon in its first words
of witness (Acts ii. 25-8) as prophetic of Christ, we have the
assurance:

I have set God always before me:
For He is on my right hand, therefore I shall not fall.
Wherefore my heart was glad, and my glory rejoiced:
My flesh also shall rest in hope.
For why? Thou shalt not leave my soul in hell:[2]
Neither shalt Thou suffer Thy Holy[3] One to see corruption.
(Ps. xvi. 9-11.)

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