Further evidence in the same direction, namely, that the tendency of the religion of Torah was not towards spiritual decline, is afforded by the book of Psalms. That evidence would be more cogent than it is, if it were possible to fix with certainty the date of every Psalm. That cannot be done; but the fact remains that the collection of the Psalms, and the use of that collection as a lyrical expression of devotion, belong to the time after, and not before, the age of Ezra. It is often said that the book of Psalms is the hymn-book of the second Temple; and I do not challenge the general correctness of that statement. But some, at all events, of the Psalms seem to be less adapted to the Temple service than to that of the Synagogue. I mean that those utterances of intensely personal devotion which make the Psalms so wonderful a treasure of spiritual experience, are much more in keeping with the simple worship of the Synagogue than with the stately and official celebrations of the Temple. It might indeed be said that some of the Psalms are too personal even for the congregational worship of the Synagogue, if we did not know, from common usage, that hymns of that character are constantly sung in Christian worship. There is hardly any one of the Psalms which could not have been quite well sung in the Synagogue; while there are many which have no obvious fitness for the service of the Temple. But, in any case, it was not until after Ezra had made Torah the dominant factor in Judaism that the book of Psalms was collected and arranged, and in part composed, as we have it now. It contains hymns of an older date, in some cases perhaps a much older date. And it is possible that some smaller collections had been made in times before Ezra. But there are several Psalms which quite clearly owe their origin to the idea of Torah as the supreme revelation, besides others which bear witness to the influence of that idea; while the collection of the whole is best explained as due to the need, first brought to the Jewish consciousness by the Synagogue, of some means of giving united expression to the thoughts and feelings of a worshipping multitude. Of course it is not here implied that the collection or production of the book of Psalms took place immediately after the time of Ezra. The collection may have only been completed as late as the first century B.C. But the point is that the whole was collected, and much of it composed, under the influence of the religious ideas associated with Ezra and the Torah. And it should be observed that the later be the date assigned to the composition of some of the Psalms, and the final collection of the whole of them, the stronger is the evidence that the religion of Torah was not the unspiritual formalism that it is often supposed to have been.