Blessed shall he be that taketh thy children: And throweth them against the stones. (cxxxvii.) For what are Babylon and her children but the powers of falsehood, oppression, and cruelty? and blessed still and ever is he who is afire with indignation against such things, who scorns {39} any easy compromise with them, who burns to deal a blow at them for Jerusalem's sake! And there is still another justification for the continued use of these Psalms, which will be understood by those who have begun to be disciples in the Church's school. The Psalms are not merely the response to revelation, they are part of that revelation themselves. The Church uses them not as mere human utterances, but as the inspired words which God Himself has given her, and which the Lord Jesus consecrated by His own personal use of them. God cannot contradict Himself. The Gospel may expand the Law, or do away with its letter in order to bring out the underlying spirit, but it cannot abrogate it. If there were a real discrepancy between the imprecatory Psalms and the New Testament, it would be scarcely conceivable that the first word of Scripture quoted in the first history of the Church would be that sentence already alluded to: Let his habitation be made desolate: And let no man dwell therein. The severities of the Psalms are matched by the severities of the Gospels. There is no real difference between our Lord's sentence on the scribes and Pharisees, "Behold, your house is {40} left unto you desolate," and the sentence which the Holy Spirit puts into our mouth against the hypocrite and the traitor, "Let his children be fatherless: and his wife a widow" (cix. 8). God is still "a God of judgment" and a "consuming fire," and there is a "wrath of the Lamb" revealed, even though He is "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world." God has, as it were, put upon our lips, in these Psalms, His own great condemnation of sin, and made us our own judges. We recite, remembering that it is His word, and not our own, the denunciation of the sensual and the covetous, the traitor and the liar, the persecutor, the slanderer, and the hypocrite. From this point of view the recitation of such Psalms as the 69th or the 109th should be an exercise of personal humility, of godly fear for ourselves and others, and might well bring to our mind often that other great challenge of the Spirit: Why dost thou preach My laws, and takest My covenant in thy mouth? Whereas thou hatest to be reformed: And hast cast My words behind thee. (Ps. l. 16, 17.) {41} These are considerations which surely ought to be well weighed before we seek to make the Psalter a book of "smooth things" only, or eliminate any part of its witness. There are no short or easy methods applicable to its deeper difficulties. Like all the ultimate problems of faith, they fade away only before the uncreated Light of the Spirit of God, when He visits the heart.