Ewald, Delitzsch, and others take all the verses of this group as spoken by the followers of the ungodly; and, unquestionably, that view avoids the difficulty of allotting the parts to different unnamed interlocutors. But it raises difficulties of another kind--as, for instance, those of supposing that these adulators should roundly call their patrons wicked, and that an apostate should profess that he has cleansed his heart. The same objections do not hold against the view that these four verses are the utterance, not of the wicked rich man or his coterie of admirers, but of the wider number whose faith has been shaken. There is nothing in the verses which would be unnatural on such lips. Ver. 11 would then be a question anxiously raised by faith that was beginning to reel; ver. 12 would be a statement of the anomalous fact which staggered it; and vv. 13, 14, the complaint of the afflicted godly. The psalmist's repudiation of a share in such incipient scepticism would begin with ver. 15. There is much in favour of this view of the speakers, but against it is the psalmist's acknowledgment, in ver. 2, that his own confidence in God's moral government had been shaken, of which there is no further trace in the psalm, unless vv. 13, 14, express the conclusion which he had been tempted to draw, and which, as he proceeds to say, he had fought down. If these two verses are ascribed to him, ver. 12 is best regarded as a summary of the whole preceding part, and only ver. 11 as the utterance either of the prosperous sinner and his adherents (in which case it is a question which means denial), or as that of troubled faith (in which case it is a question that would fain be an affirmation, but has been forced unwillingly to regard the very pillars of the universe as trembling).