There are, however, other and more conclusive criteria than references to historical events or persons. The religious situation in the Jewish community reflected in very many of the psalms is that of the Persian and Greek period, not that of the days of the kingdom. The strife of parties or of classes, on one side the righteous, the pious, the poor, for whom the psalmists speak, on the other, the wicked, the ungodly, the rich and the great; here those whose delight is in the law of God (religion), there those who contemn it and pursue evil ways regardless of its precepts and prohibitions, is a new condition, not in the behaviour of the wicked, but in the self-consciousness of the pious, who feel themselves a distinct class and are evidently crystallizing into a party or a sect. The religious conceptions and the conception of religion are drawn chiefly from Jeremiah and the Deuteronomists, and from Isaiah 40 ff., but on the subjective side of religion, piety, the best of the psalms represent a more advanced stage than the prophets of the seventh and sixth centuries. The hopes of the future of God's people and of the world run with the prophets of the Persian period and the contemporary anonymous and editorial additions to the older prophetic books. That the long rehearsals of the ancient history like Pss. 78, 105, 106, or eulogies of the law such as Ps. 119, or litanies of the fashion of Ps. 136, belong to a stage in the history of the liturgy such as rouses the enthusiasm of the Chronicler is also apparent. The evidence of language tends the same way. Fine hymns were written even at a late time; but on a large part of the psalms the decadence has set its mark. Such is the impression the Psalter makes as a whole, and it indicates that not only is the existing collection late, but that most of the hymns in it were comparatively modern when they were brought together. This is what would be expected in a hymn book, which for devotional even more than for liturgical use, needs to express and nurture the type of piety prevalent in its own time and circle. Protestant hymn books fifty years ago, outside the Anglican communion, had hardly any hymns in them more than a couple of hundred years old, except versified translations of the psalms, modernized and Christianized in the operation. It would be going much beyond the evidence to say there were no psalms in the Psalter that were composed in the days of the kingdom; there may be a considerable number. But the proof that any particular psalm came from that period is difficult and seldom very convincing. This is true even of the psalms which speak of the king; for, aside from the impossibility of deciding in some instances whether a reigning king is meant or the king of the good time coming (Messiah), a foreign king may sometimes be in mind (Ps. 45 is so interpreted by many), or an Asmonæan king.