"I know the psalms whereof we speak were meant, As were their fellow psalms, each, not to breathe The individual feeling of one soul Whether himself the writer or whoso Might take it for his own, but to be used By the great congregation joining voice In symphony or in antiphony Of choral worship, with stringed instruments Adding their help, and instruments of wind: So, most unmeet it were if private grudge Of any whomsoever, high or low, Should mix its base alloy with the fine gold Of prayer and praise stored in our holy psalms For pure oblation from all holy hearts To Him, the Ever-living Holy God. The wicked and the enemy therein Accurséd so from good to every bane And ill here and hereafter following them And hunting down their issue to the end Of endless generations of their like-- These, I can understand, were public foes, Not private, adversary heathen tribes That hated us because they hated God Who chose us for His own peculiar race, And swayed us weapon in His dread right hand To execute His judgment on His foes, His foes, not ours, or only ours as His-- 'Them that hate Thee do not I hate, O God?' The righteous execration bursting forth, An outcry irrepressible of zeal, Through all the cycle of those fearful psalms, Not from a heart of virulence toward men, But from a love, consuming self, for God. Such, I can understand, the purport was Wherein Himself, the Holy Ghost of God, Inspired those psalms and willed them to be sung. But, O my master, tell me, did not yet Some too importunate spirit not thus pure, Of outright sheer malevolence some trace, Escape of private malice uncontrolled, Hatred toward man that was not love for God, On his part who was chosen God's oracle To such high end and hard, enter the strain He chanted, here or there, to jar the tune And of his music make a dissonance?"