In view of these unfulfilled ideals of the Church, the Psalter provides us in such Psalms as the 78th, the 79th, or the 106th with confession of sin and failure under the figure of Hebrew history. The recitation of these may well remind us not merely of personal faults but of our own share in the shortcomings of the Church of God: We have sinned with our fathers: We have done amiss and dealt wickedly. For the Church as well as ourselves we are taught to pray, "Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts." The sorrows and desolations of Zion are never represented in the Psalms as being _merely_ the effect of heathen malice, {86} though they are so largely that, but as calls to look back upon history, and also to look within, to consider what unfaithfulness there may have been and is, what "starting aside like a broken bow" in our fathers and in ourselves. From this point of view the penitential Psalms"[2] might profitably be used not merely as the expression of personal penitence, but as an act of reparation, an offering to God of our sorrow for the worldliness and imperfections of His Church; as an incentive also to effort, that we may do our part to remove the "reproach of the heathen," to restore the Church from within, to seek her unity and peace. There is, however, another side to the problem of the Church's failures. Israel and Jerusalem are constantly described in the Psalms as being the marks for the malignity and opposition of external enemies. Indeed, a persistent note of the Church, Jewish as well as Christian, is the hatred which she awakens in the powers of this world. The object of suspicion and attack from Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon in early days, Jerusalem fares no better after the humiliation of the Captivity. The attempts to {87} rebuild the Temple and restore the city arouse the bitterest hostility from the surrounding peoples, a hostility not merely political, but traceable to a deeper cause. The attempts of Antiochus Epiphanes in the second century B.C. to break down Jewish separation and to destroy Jewish worship are marked by the same spirit, working in a more arrogant and brutal manner. Our Lord Himself promises no smoother or more popular course for His faithful ones. "Ye shall be hated of all men." S. Paul recognises the same antagonism running throughout the history of the elect: "As then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now" (Gal. iv. 29).