Very often again the burden is the cry of the weak against the oppressor. Man, wronged by his fellow, cries to God, and can imagine no deliverance save by the ruin of his enemies. The cursing is tremendous. "O daughter of Babylon, happy shall he be that taketh thy little ones and dasheth them against the stones!" At this point is the widest ethical difference between "them of old time" and our own religion. In them, abhorrence of sin was not yet distinguished from hatred of the sinner, and the foes of the Psalmist or his nation were always identified with the foes of God. To hate thine enemy seemed as righteous as to love thy friend. In a sense we may say the Psalms are a cry to which Jesus is the answer: "Lord, save me, and destroy my enemies!" "Love your enemies, and in loving you are saved." In the book of Psalms there blends and alternates with the old theory of reward and punishment a later idea,--that goodness carries its own blessing with it,--that better than oil and wine, flocks and herds, health and friends, is the peace of well-doing, the joy of gratitude, yes, even the passionate contrition in which the soul revolts from its own sin and finds again the sweetness of the upward effort and a response to that effort like heaven's own smile. Not, goodness brings blessings, but goodness _is_ blessed; not, the wicked shall perish, but wickedness _is_ perdition; this is the deep undertone of the best of the Psalms. Among these hymns are some which are filled with a noble delight in the works of nature,--a fresh, glad pleasure in the whole spectacle of creation, from sun and stars, sea and mountains, to the goats among the hills, and the conies of the rock. There is frank satisfaction in the bread which strengtheneth man's heart and the wine that makes him glad. And all this free human joy in the activities and splendors of nature never so much as approaches the perilous slope towards sensuality. It is everywhere sublimated by the all-pervading recognition of a holy and beneficent God. What may be said of the Psalms generally is this: they express the most vivid and various play of human emotions,--sorrow, wrath, repentance, joy, dread, hope,--always exercised as in the presence of an Almighty being, holy, righteous, and the friend of righteous men. In this is their abiding power,--this close reflection of the fluctuations in every sensitive heart under the play of life's experiences,--encompassed with an atmosphere of noble seriousness, and outreaching toward a higher Power.