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To me this has always been the imprecatory psalms excepted by far the noblest feature in Christian worship as worship; for, coming down as it does from the Jewish Church through the whole history of the Christian Church, and being practised by all the great bodies of Jews and Christians, it had, and still has, to me a great significance, both religious and historic.
We do not claim that the imprecatory Psalms were David's best, but they must have helped him immensely in writing the other ones. We may be wrong. But it has come to be an important religious duty to some of us, or rather religious joy, to hate the prosperity of the wicked.
May it not well be that the imprecatory Psalms, otherwise so difficult to understand, in the virulence of their desires for vengeance, etc., are prophetic of these days of persecution and tribulation? As well, too, must be many of the Prayers of the Psalms, etc. Ps. xxv. 2. Ps. lxxiv. Ps. cxl. Ps. lxxix. Isaiah xxxv. 3, 4. Isaiah li. 12-15. Micah vii. 8, 9. Luke xviii. 7, 8.
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.
And how numerous are the prayers which reflection and an awakened moral sense rule out of court: prayers which ask God to do for us by special intervention what we ought to do for ourselves by our own effort and industry; prayer for success in dealings and enterprises which in themselves are ethically unjustifiable, and to which the only answer could be, "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself"; prayers which carry the spirit of egoism, of competition, of bargaining even into our relations with the Most High; prayers of an imprecatory character such as meet and shock us in some of the psalms.
But it is a remarkable fact that even in these terrible denunciations of the Jews Luther moves on Bible ground, as any one can see that will examine his exposition of an imprecatory psalm, like Psalm 109 and 59. If these words of God mean anything and admit of any application to an apostate and hardened race, the Jews are that race, and a teacher of the Bible has the duty to point out this fact.
My poor father did not speak because he could not; his arms dropped; and such was the torrent of attack, with its free play of thunder and lightning in the form of oaths, epithets, short and sharp comparisons, bitter home thrusts and most vehement imprecatory denunciations, that our protesting voices quailed. Janet plucked at my aunt Dorothy's dress to bear her away.
Every order is received with imprecatory mutterings, such as "What an idiotic idea! What folly! to be as rich as Croesus and find amusement in poverty! To come and live in a little hole with common people and refuse to visit duchesses in their castles! People must not be surprised if I don't obey orders that I don't understand." She is stubborn and refractory.
His adversary's weapon had glanced harmless along the blank surface of his polished buckler; and the victory so far was with him. The expression of the Rowski's face, as, bareheaded, he glared on his enemy with fierce bloodshot eyeballs, was one worthy of a demon. The imprecatory expressions which he made use of can never be copied by a feminine pen.
"If you'd only try to love her a little, after all, my husband! He would know it; He might save her for it." Amos Ryck choked, coughed, and said it was time for prayers. He took down the old Bible in which his child's baby-fingers used to trace their first lessons after his own, and read, not of her who loved much and was forgiven, but one of the imprecatory Psalms. When Mrs.
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