his indignation anew, and he flames out with petitions which seem to forget the former ones for lingering destruction: "End them in wrath, end them." The contradiction may be apparent only, and this passionate cry may presuppose the fulfilment of the former. The psalmist will then desire two dreadful things--first, protracted suffering, and then a crushing blow to end it. His ultimate desire in both is the same. He would have the evil-doers spared long enough to be monuments of God's punitive justice; he would have them ended, that the crash of their fall may reverberate afar and proclaim that God rules in Jacob. "Unto the ends of the earth" may be connected either with "rules" or with "know." In the former construction the thought will be, that from His throne in Israel God exercises dominion universally; in the latter, that the echo of the judgment on these evil-doers will reach distant lands. The latter meaning is favoured by the accents, and is, on the whole, to be preferred. But what a strange sense of his own significance for the manifestation of God's power to the world this singer must have had, if he could suppose that the events of his life were thus of universal importance! One does not wonder that the advocates of the personification theory find strong confirmation of it in such utterances; and, indeed, the only other explanation of them is that the psalmist held, and knew himself to hold, a conspicuous place in the evolution of the Divine purpose, so that in his life, as in a small mirror, there were reflected great matters. If such anticipations were more than wild dreams, the cherisher of them must either have been speaking in the person of the nation, or he must have known himself to be God's instrument for extending His name through the world. No single person so adequately meets the requirements of such words as David.