wanting their necks to be jumped on so that he could get their attention at first and make them stop and think and understand.  More subtle ways of expressing things to the wicked have been thought of to-day than of jumping on their necks, but the principle David had in mind has not changed, the principle of being loyal to the human race, the principle of standing up for people and insisting that they were really meant to be better than they were or than they thought they could be—­a kind of holy patriotism David had for this world.  The main fact about David seems to be that he believed he belonged to a great human race.  Incidentally he believed he belonged to a human race that was really quite bright, bright enough at least to make people sorry for doing wrong in it—­a human race that was getting so shrewd and so just and so honest that it took stupider and stupider people every year to be wicked, and when he found, judging from recent events in Judea, that this for the time being was not so, he had a hateful feeling about it, which it seems to some of us, vastly improved him and would improve many of us.  We do not claim that the imprecatory Psalms were David’s best, but they must have helped him immensely in writing the other ones.

* * * * *

We may be wrong.  But it has come to be an important religious duty to some of us, or rather religious joy, to hate the prosperity of the wicked.  We hate the prosperity of the wicked, not because it is their prosperity and not ours, but because their prosperity constitutes a sneer or slander on the world.  We have no idea of wanting to go about faithfully jumping upon the necks of the wicked.  What we want is to feel that we are in a world where the good people are happy and are making goodness reasonable, successful, profitable and practical in it.  We want an earth with crowds on it who see things as they are, and who guess so well on what they want (i.e., who are good) that other people who do not know what they want and are not good, will be lonesome.

We have made up our minds to live in a world not where the wicked will feel that their necks are going to be jumped on (which is really a rather interesting and prominent feeling on the whole), but a world where the wicked will be made to feel that nobody notices their necks, that they are not worth being jumped on, a world where nobody will have time to go out back and jump on them, a world where the wicked will not be able to think of anything important to do, and where the wicked things that are left to do will be so small and so stupid that nobody will notice.  They will be ignored like boys with catcalls in the street.  When we can make people who do wrong feel unimportant enough, there is going to be some chance for the good.

If we could find some sweet, proper, gentle, Christian-looking way of conveying to these people for a few swift, keen minutes how little difference it makes when they and people like them do wrong, they would steal over in a body and do right.