It is in the Psalms that personal religion receives its clearest exposition in the Old Testament, and this spirit owes much to the personal experience of Jeremiah. There has been an endeavour to find the speaking subject of the Psalms not in the individual but in the nation. There are national Psalms, but many others cannot be successfully interpreted save as the expressions of personal devotion. National religion could never reach these heights; it is bound down to the average level, it is always open to unethical movements and ideas. The personal element is not to be confused with the individualistic; the personal is wider than the individual; it realises the things that lie at the base of all human life, and when it is most personal it speaks the most universal language. It is in the deep sense of sin and the assurance of forgiveness that the Psalms are the classics for all who know the secrets they utter; and the sense of sin can never be felt save under the searching light of God's very presence. To be deeply conscious of sin is the first step towards any high revelation of God, and of this the fifty-first Psalm is the most perfect expression; there we see the sense of inward sin, opening up the possibility of a separation between the self and that higher self, the holy spirit, and bringing about the severest mental pain and anguish. Naturally, the Psalms hardly rise to the Christian ground of forgiveness, but the thirty-second Psalm vibrates with the joy that the Christian knows and, when mere figures of speech are discounted, it springs from the same reason: the acknowledgment of one's sin and the consciousness of its forgiveness in the newly realised communion with God. In dealing with the problem of the providential order of the world, the Psalms hardly reflect any higher conceptions than those found elsewhere in the Old Testament, if they even rise as high as the conception of the Second Isaiah. The idea that goodness is rewarded by long life and prosperity, and that wickedness is always marked by outward disaster is the root idea; and the fact that this is not confirmed by observation is the cause of the complaint of many a Psalm. This problem receives no conscious solution throughout the book. The revelation given through the worship of the sanctuary only shows that the prosperity of the wicked is temporary (Ps. xxxvii., lxxiii.); but how often even this must seem to be untrue, for in many cases there are no bands in their death. Nothing higher is reached than pride in one's integrity and the assurance that somehow and somewhere retribution is sure. There is no conception of the principle of vicarious suffering, and the values set upon righteousness and prosperity never attain to those words of Jesus: "Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness sake."