of any other God; no wonder that they in whose hearts a coarse or a subtle self-worship has dried the springs of pity and love can scoff at the very idea of a compassionate God; no wonder that a soul, shaken to its depths by the contemplation of this bewildering medley of heartlessness and misery, should be tempted to doubt whether there is indeed a Judge of all the earth, who doeth right. * * * * * There is no truth, no honour in their dealings with one another; falsehood is the dominant note of their social existence: _They are all adulterers, a throng of traitors!_ The charge of adultery is no metaphor (chap. v. 7, 8). Where the sense of religious sanctions is weakened or wanting, the marriage tie is no longer respected; and that which perhaps lust began, is ended by lust, and man and woman are faithless to each other, because they are faithless to God. _And they bend their tongue, their bow, falsely._[34] The tongue is as a bow of which words are the arrows. Evildoers "stretch their arrow, the bitter word, to shoot in ambush at the blameless man" (Ps. lxiv. 4; cf. Ps. xi. 2). The metaphor is common in the language of poetry; we have an instance in Longfellow's "I shot an arrow into the air," and Homer's familiar ἔπεα πτερόεντα, "winged words," is a kindred expression. (Others render, _and they bend their tongue as their bow of falsehood_, as though the term _sheqer, mendacium_, were an epithet qualifying the term for "bow." I have taken it adverbially, a use justified by Pss. xxxviii. 20, lxix. 5, cxix. 78, 86.) In colloquial English a man who exaggerates a story is said to "draw the long bow." Their tongue is a bow with which they shoot lies at their neighbours, _and it is not by truth_--faithfulness, honour, integrity--_that they wax mighty in the land_; their riches and power are the fruit of craft and fraud and overreaching. As was said in a former discourse, "their houses are full of deceit, therefore they become great, and amass wealth" (v. 27). _By truth_, or more literally _unto truth, according to the rule or standard of truth_ (cf. Isa. xxxii. 1, "according to right;" Gen. i. 11, "according to its kind"). With the idea of the verb, we may compare Ps. cxii. 2: "Mighty in the land shall his seed become" (cf. also Gen. vii. 18, 19). The passage chap. v. 2, 3, is essentially similar to the present, and is the only one besides where we find the term "by truth" (לאמונה _le'emunah_). The idiom seems certain, and the parallel passages, especially v. 27, appear to establish the translation above given; otherwise one might be tempted to render: _they stretch their tongue, their bow, for lying_ (לשקר, v. 2), _and it is not for truth that they are strong in the land_. "Noblesse oblige" is no maxim of theirs; they use their rank and riches for unworthy ends.