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: 

  Why glory in evil, big man? 
  The leal love of God is all day long. 
  Thy tongue planneth mischiefs,
  Like a razor sharp-whetted, thou worker of fraud. 
  Thou lovest evil more than good,
  Lying than speaking the truth. 
  Thou lovest all words of voracity,
    Tongue of deceit. 
  God also shall tear thee down, once for all,

  Cut thee out, and pluck thee from the
    tent,
  And uproot thee from off the land
      of the living. 
  That the righteous may see and fear,
  And at him they shall laugh.

    ’Lo! the fellow who sets not God
      for his stronghold,
      But trusts in the mass of his
      wealth,
      Is strong in his mischief.’

  But I like an olive-tree, green in God’s
    house,
  I have trusted in God’s leal love for
    ever and aye. 
  I will praise Thee for ever, that Thou
    hast done [this],
  And I will wait on Thy name—­for
    ’tis good—­
  In face of Thy saints.

The character who is challenged is easily made out, and we may recognize how natural he is and how near to ourselves.

In the first verse he is called by a name expressing unusual strength or influence—­a mighty man, a hero.  The term may be used ironically, like our ‘big fellow’, ‘big man.’  But, whether this is irony or not, the man’s bigness had material solidity.  He was rooted in the land of the living, he had abundance of riches. Riches are no sin in themselves, as the exaggerated language of some people of the present day would lead us to imagine.  Rich men are not always sent to hell, nor poor men always to heaven.  As St. Augustine remarks with his usual cleverness:  ’It was not his poverty but his piety which sent Lazarus in the parable to heaven, and when he got there, he found a rich man’s bosom to rest