not being addressed, like others, to God or to the Psalmist's own soul,
but to the wicked man himself. It is, at first at least, neither a prayer
nor a meditation, but a challenge and an arraignment of character.

Some may be disposed to cavil at its bitterness, and to say that for
Christians it is too full of threats and vengeance. Perhaps it is; nay,
certainly it is. But there are two noble feelings in it, and two vivid
pictures of character. The Psalm is inspired by a brave contempt for
wickedness in high places, and by a most devout trust in the love of God.
And in expressing these two noble tempers, the poet analyses two
characters. He analyses the character which is ruled from within by the
love of Self, and he gives his own experience of a character inspired from
without by faith--by faith in the mercy of the Living God.

We Christians too hastily dismiss from our own uses the so-called Cursing
Psalms. It is unfortunate that the translators have so often tempted us to
this by exaggerating the violence of the Hebrew at the expense of its
insight, its discrimination, and its sometimes delicate satire. If only we
had a version that produced the exact colours of the original, and if we
ourselves had the quick conscience and the honest wit to carry over the
ideas into terms suitable to our own day--in which the selfishness of the
human heart is the same old thing it ever was, though it uses milder and
more subtle means,--then we should feel the touch of a power not merely of
dramatic interest but of moral conviction, where we have been too much
accustomed to think that we were hearing only ancient rant. So treated,
Psalms like the fifth, the tenth, the fourteenth, and the fifty-second,
which we so often pass over, offended by their violence, become quick and
powerful, the very word of God to our own times and hearts.

Let us take a more literal version of the Psalm before us: