itish history they could possibly have originated. Of providential punishments the Psalter itself speaks often enough. Prophets, apocalyptic prophets, flourished well into the Christian era; and oracles in some form, the lot, signs and omens, have never ceased to find believers. The inexplicable thing to my mind is, that such a point should be raised by such critics.

Upon the whole, I must conclude that the evidence adduced is insufficient to warrant the opinion that David and his age knew Jahveh only as a tribal deity. I do not doubt that Jahveh was conceived to stand in relation to Israel as Chemosh stood to Moab, and Dagon to the Philistines. But there is nothing to show that he was held to differ from them only or chiefly in power, as one king is stronger than another, — no conclusive evidence even that other gods were regarded as really existing. I admit that the historical documents that treat of David and his time furnish no clear, positive proof that the Jahvism of that period was, strictly speaking, pure monotheism.1 But might not the same, mutatis mutandis, be said of many of the Psalms? Take, for instance, Psalm iii.; read Chemosh instead of Jahveh, and ask what of theistic grounds it affords for saying that it cannot have been composed by King Mesha? But if, so far as this criterion is concerned, Mesha might be its author, why not David?

I turn to the statement of the critics that David's ethical principles and character do not rise above his time, and are incompatible with the ethics of the Psalms. He is allowed to have had many admirable and lofty qualities. The nobility of his conduct toward Saul is cheerfully admitted. His friendship for Jonathan was ideally beautiful and constant. His chivalrous regard for his comrades in arms, according to Reuss (sect. 159), "moves even the uninterested heart." But they are accompanied by others of dreadful darkness. He is culpably weak in the treatment of crimes committed by his sons, or by others whom he fears to touch. Of his ingratitude and thirst for revenge a repulsive exhibition is given when on his death-bed he charges Solomon to destroy Joab, his most faithful servant, and Shimei, whom he had pardoned. But is it quite certain that this charge is rightly formulated? The parental weakness, though a vice, has its root in a virtue. And may it not be that the advice to Solomon concerning Joab and Shimei sprang from no lower motive than solicitude for the state and the new king? We know too little of the situation to decide confidently; but of David, I think, we know too much to make it seem probable that he was actuated by the mean spirit of revenge. Joab was a miracle of constancy and loyalty; but he was also a prodigy of arbitrariness and self-will, whom a hand so strong as David's could not control. His loyalty bears all the marks of attachment to a brilliant warrior-king of unequaled prowess and fame, without a trace of interest in the high calling of Israel, for the realization of which alone that king waged his wars. What was to be expected of that restless and apparently still vigorous spirit, in the peaceful reign for which the time was ripe? As for Shimei, let him pass. David's real error was in not punishing him more promptly.

To proceed. By the side of his chivalrous friendship, says Reuss (sect. 159), there stood "his wild lust after women, that did not hesitate 1 I ignore 2 Sam. vii. 22, because it is critically suspected by Kuenen, Onderzoek, p. 273, and therefore, as against him, not available.

to stride with bloody feet over honor and right." This is dreadfully true as to form; and yet the deeds were not those of an habitual, premeditating voluptuary. There have been Christian kings, with philosophically higher and more spiritual ideas of God than the people of the Old Testament ever reached, who sinned more deeply and more frequently. Nor should we forget that, if the prompt rebuke of Nathan the prophet gives a fair index to the best sentiment and feeling of the nation, David's sincere and ready repentance shows that he himself honors the same high standard. While I agree with those who hold that Psalm li. probably originated in the exile, I see no reason in David's moral character why he could not have written it.

Further according to Kuenen, treason and deceit are not considered unallowable. This is said of David's time, to be sure; but it is supported by references in which he himself figures, and which are designed to exhibit him as the "child of his time" (O., p. 268, n. 4). As applied to David, I admit the deceit, with qualifications, but decline the treason. There is no treason in his nature, and none appears in his career.1 Treason can be predicated only of acts by which one deliberately turns the confidence reposed in him into a means of inflicting injury. The nearest approach to it in David's life is his treatment of Uriah through his wife. But there was no deliberation in that outburst of passion. It was the unreflecting act of a man maddened by sensual desire. That does not take away its sinfulness; but it does take it out of the category of treason. As for deceit, he used it on various occasions, but always in the character of the Nothlüge. As a defense in war, its practice is and always has been so universal that truth would now be the best means of deceiving an enemy. And as a means of warding off danger from one's self or others, the Nothlüge has been used from the time of Abraham to that of St. Peter in Scripture, and by all mankind out of Scripture, even by English-speaking peoples, although their dictionaries have no proper word for it. If hymns and sacred songs could be written by none but persons who never said one thing while they thought another, the size and number of hymn-books would be small.

Finally, wars were carried on with inhuman cruelty. So they were. The wholesale massacres of the conquered Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites, aggravated in the instance of the Ammonites by the methods employed, fill us with horror. The same must be said of the total extermination of the clans against which David's earlier freebooting expeditions were directed, in order to deceive Achish as to the identity of the sufferers from those raids (1 Sam. xxvii. 8 ff.) To say that like atrocities were also practiced by other tribes, would merely be to admit what the critics assert, - that in this respect David was not better than his age. But does it therefore follow that he did not and could not have composed any of the Psalms? I need not appeal to the records of Christian nations. The cruelties of the Inquisition, the barbarities of the Spanish conquerors of South America, the butcheries of St. Bartholo mew's night, the Black Hole of Calcutta, and the horrors of the slavetrade and slave-ship, were they not permitted, if not actually perpetrated or approved, by men who, whatever other qualities they might lack for writing psalms, were not without high and pure conceptions of God 1 To infer from his relations with Achish, King of Gath, that he must have been ready, when occasion came, to act against his own people, or turn upon his Philistine suzerain, would be an entirely gratuitous proceeding.

and spiritual religion? But, not to dwell on that, is the Psalter, taken as a whole, entirely free from the spirit of what to us would be rude cruelty? Is there not a flavor of the soldier's camp in Psalm ii. 9:

"Thou shalt break them with a mace of iron;

Thou shalt shiver them like a potter's vessel."

Or in Psalm iii. 8: :

“Arise Jahveh, save me, my God!

For thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek-bone,
The teeth of the ungodly hast thou broken."

And in Psalm lxviii. 22-24:

"Surely Elohim will shatter the head of his enemies,

The long-haired crown of the head of him who goes on in his sins.

The Lord said, I will bring them back from Bashan,

I will bring them back from the ocean-gulfs,

That thou mayest wash thy foot in blood,

That the tongue of thy dogs may have its portion from the enemies."

Psalm cxxxvii. 8, 9:

"O daughter of Babylon, thou doomed one,

Happy he that pays thee back

For what thou hast wrought on us.
Happy he that takes and dashes

Thy children against the rocks."

Historical science, if it is to reach truth, cannot guard too carefully against idealizing David; but it should be equally watchful against idealizing the compositions of psalmists concerning whose lives we know nothing. And I am strongly persuaded that no historical criterion could be more unreliable and misleading than the psychological one which would determine what a person's religious conceptions and emotions and his ethical principles can or cannot be, from what he does under stress of great emergencies. Our thoughts of God and right, our emotions of adoration, praise, and wonder, are freer, and can therefore rise higher, than our actions, which are traversed and coerced by innumerable opposing forces. Many of the bulls and bears of the exchange are by no means the ruthless egoists they appear to be on a "Black Friday." If this be true of ordinary men, oppressed by little more than ordinary dangers, how much more of a great heroic king, in whose heart the best life of a nation came to a focus, in a time of terrible battle-crises on which the fate of his people depended?

The last point of the critical summary may be briefly met. It asserts that we have no reason to suppose that David the poet produced chiefly religious lyrics. Thus stated, no great importance attaches to it. Whether he composed more secular or more sacred poems is a matter of indifference. What we would know is whether he wrote psalms. That he wrote secular poems is not questioned. Elegies of his on Saul and Jonathan, and on Abner, have been preserved; and from the allusion in Amos vi. 5 it may be inferred that he was also considered a master of joyous, convivial song. Nor is this anything improbable in itself. But concerning his activity as sacred poet, no statements are made in the historical books, except that in 2 Samuel, chaps. xxii. and xxiii., there are two psalms expressly ascribed to him. The question of

their genuineness is far too difficult to be now gone into. Although a cause defended by Ewald, Hitzig, and Dillmann cannot be considered so hopeless as Kuenen thinks, I must dispense with the testimony of these chapters. This leaves nothing but general grounds on which to build.

First, then, it is antecedently probable that a poet of such great gifts, and of such warm enthusiasm for Jahveh and his service, as David is allowed to have been, would consecrate his powers in part to religious compositions. Indeed, when we reflect on the intimate connection of ancient public and social life with religion and religious observances, this probability almost rises into certainty.

Secondly, it scarcely admits of a doubt that in the so-called Schools of the Prophets, established by Samuel, sacred song was cultivated. Now, we know from 1 Samuel xix. 18 ff. that David visited Samuel at the school in Ramah, and tarried some time. Such a contact with enthusiastic young men could not leave him uninfluenced. Is it too much to surmise that, if he had not previously composed psalms, he must on that occasion have received a strong impulse to attempt it? Nor can it be regarded as unlikely that long-continued, intimate association with the prophets Nathan and Gad acted as a steady stimulus in the same direc

tion.

Finally, how can it be explained that in after times David's name became almost a synonym for psalmist? Such a repute cannot spring out of nothing. Tradition extends and embellishes, but it always starts from fact. Moses having been a great organizer and legislator, posterity could ascribe to him much that originated by imperceptible accretions and transformations during the course of centuries; but it could never have invented the story of his life, or ascribed to him all the legislation of the Pentateuch, without large and vigorous germs of true history. So the great celebrity of David as a psalmist must have had a basis of fact. It could scarcely have grown out of his secular songs. Nor can it reasonably be supposed to have sprung out of designed or accidental errors in ascribing to him psalms whose real authors were unknown. That might be done after his fame as psalmist was established, but not before. When the memory of David and his age was still fresh in the popular mind and Eastern memories are tenacious it was impossible to credit him with psalm-writing which he had never done. And though the lapse of time gradually destroyed the life of memory as such, and changed it into its more pliable successor, tradition, it made the difficulty of introducing a baseless fabrication constantly greater.

The character of the age of David, or any other in Israelitish history, must of course be determined in the first instance by means of the direct evidence at command. But if the evidence be scanty, or susceptible of more than one interpretation, that interpretation of it is certainly to be preferred which tends to give to each age its duly graded and chronologically proportioned place in the history as a whole. Now, it seems to me that the more recent historiography of Israelitish history, and especially of the age of David, labors under one great difficulty induced by neglect of this rule. It must assume, as I have already intimated, a greatly accelerated rate of religious progress in the short period that separates David from the great prophets. And the acceleration falls in a time concerning which the historical books of Kings tell us nothing

that can give a clue towards its explanation. It is not a time of steady religious direction by good kings, strongly imbued with the spirit of Jahvism. The good alternate with bad and indifferent. And yet the development towards pure monotheism must be going on as it never did under David and Solomon. And notwithstanding this marvelous onward movement, the prophets are prone to look back with regretful eyes to the past of David's time, or with longing to the future when a greater than David, but of his house and spirit, shall bring in the perfect day. Have we no ground here for suspecting that the Davidic age is placed much too low in the scale of progress, that the labors of Samuel are greatly underestimated, and that the darkness of the period of the Judges is much overdrawn? P. H. Steenstra.

EPISCOPAL THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL,
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

SOCIAL ECONOMICS.

THE OUTLINE OF AN ELECTIVE COURSE OF STUDY IN THREE

PARTS.

PART III. PAUPERISM.

TOPIC III. THE CHRISTIAN CHARITY AND THE CHARITIES OF THE CHURCH.

1. CHRISTIAN CHARITY.

Christian charity was not originally a method, a scheme, a system; it was simply one of the natural expressions of Christianity. It was Christianity acting appropriately in the presence of poverty and suffering. Charity, in the sense of almsgiving, was not a chief end of Christianity; it was only an incident in its progress. The term which expressed its simpler and larger purpose is "redemption," meaning by it the regeneration of the individual and the renovation of society. Keeping this fact in mind, it is seen why the beginnings of Christianity were not precisely what might have been expected in the exercise of a technical charity. Charity was not the chief agency relied upon for the spread of Christianity. It did not introduce itself through an effort in behalf of the "submerged tenth" of Rome. It did not attack the problem of pauperism any more than that of slavery. Its immediate and constant appeal to the world was a religious appeal.

Neither did Christianity manifest or develop at once any overpowering sense of suffering. The contrast in this respect between Christianity and Buddhism is very striking. The doctrine of Buddha was comprised in the “four sacred truths" of suffering, of the origin of suffering, of the removal of suffering, of the way of the removal of suffering.

See Pfleiderer, "Philosophy of History," vol. iii., pp. 67, 68. Christianity did not grow morbid in the presence of suffering, or passive in the contemplation of it. Where Buddhism was pessimistic, Christianity was optimistic; and for two reasons. Christ identified suffering with sacrifice. Instead of renunciation, consecration. And the Christian conception of immortality gave relief to the thought of the suffering