Evening Post. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1933. "DEFINITELY UN-CHRISTIAN"

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 103, 28 October 1933, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1933. "DEFINITELY UN-CHRISTIAN"

The principle of the journalistic commonplace that the breaking of any of the Ten Commandments may be news hut that the keeping of them is not was strangely illustrated on Tuesday. A part of the Bible received an almost unique advertisement throughout the British Empire on that day, but i,t was the part which the new Dean of Durham had excluded from the Psalms for the previous day as repugnant to the spirit of Christianity. Verses 5 to 19 of Psalm 109 arc omitted from the service at Durham Cathedral. Dean Alingtou declared that he hoped that they would not, again be heard there. Despite his admiration for the Psalms iie had never understood why it was necessary to sing those definitely un-Christian verses. In the step that he has taken Dean Alington has no need to fear the'inhibition of his Bishop or the insur- ( rection of his flock or even the anathemas of the "Daily Mail," that faithful guardian of ancient piety, which after the General Election of 1923 strove to make the flesh of Christian England creep with the terrible possibility that the appointment of heir Bishops might fall into the hands of a Labour Government!-The nation which was not panic-stricken then is not going to be scared now, nor is the attempt worth a single headline. In excluding these "definitely un-Christian verses" from congregational use the Dean of Durham has the support of the common sense and the Christian sentiment of the country behind him. He has. merely exercised, a discretion which, if Parliament had not interfered on grounds entirely irrelevant to this issue, Ms Church would have placed in the hands of every one of its mm: isters six years ago. Psalm 109 bears in our Bibles the title of "A Psalm of David." It was styled by the Fathers "Psalmus Iscarioticus," the Psalm of Judas Iscariot, owing to the application that is made of a part of one of its verses by St. Peter in Acts I, 20. In Peake's Commentary the Rev. W. E. Addis gives it the title of "A Psalm of •Cursing," and his choice seems to be the best. The attribution of the Psalm to David is abandoned by modern scholarship in favour of a post-exilic date. The dominating effect of St. Peter's reference, which went no further than the citation from verse 8 of the words "And his bishopric [office] let another take" is also abandoned. The far-reach-ing effects of the old interpretation are indicated by its application to the following verse: — Let Ms children, be fatherless, And his wife a widow. "Some have inferred from this verse," says Dr. Whitton Davies in the "Century Bible," "that Judas had a wife and children!" and he regards the note of admiration as a sufficient reply. But other interpreters went a good deal further, for they were able to infer from the same verse that the children of Judas had reached the years of discretion before his death. A widely current view, based on this passage-, say Neale and Littledalo in their note on tho verse, is that the money which Judas stole from the "bag, and the sum he received in payment of his treason, were, intended for the support of Ms wife and children, who were consenting parties to the means he employed, and were therefore involved in his guilt .and punishment. These curiosities of an obsolete exegesis have a permanent interest and value as indicating the shifts to which the Christian conscience has been put in its efforts to escape the consequences of that terrible doctrine jof the old dispensation which regarded the sins of the fathers as visited upon the children unto the third and the fourth generation. It is the curses upon the child, qujte consistent with the ancient scheme of thought, that are most repugnant features of these imprecatory Psalms to the modern mind. Psalm 109 proceeds: Let his children be vagabonds, and beg: And let them seek their bread out of their desolate places. Still more revolting, though not essentially more cruel, is that concluding verse of Psalm 137: Happy shall he lie that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. The strange ideal of "happiness," the hideous detail and the contrast with the pathos and the beauty of its opening, "By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept," combine to make this imprecation strike even deeper than Psalm 109 with what Neale and Littledale call "that terrible series of maledictions unparalleled in Holy Writ"—a series in which no less tfutn thirty separate anathemas have been counted. h is satisfactory to know that in the Revised Prayer Book submitted to Parliament with the measure of 1927 all the imprecations in .the Psalter were enclosed within brackets to indicate that they might be omitted at the discretion of the minister. But to draw a hard and fast line between the ancient and the modern worlds in their altitudes to this problem would'be misleading, ft is indeed hard to realise that in the generation following the publication of the Authorised Version the ethics of the ancient Jews in their conflicts

with Babylon as represented in "the bitterest verse in history" were held to be applicable on the authority of this very verse to the religious feuds of England by one of the leading divines of the day. And though, as a fierce Presbyterian, Stephen Marshall was an uncompromising assistant of the Church of Rome, it was actually in the conflict of Protestant with Protestant that he considered the tactics approved in Psalm 137 should be literally adopted. The passage that follows is taken from the "Historians' History," vol. xx, p. 29, where neither the date nor the occasion is mentioned. What soldier's heart, said Marshall, is not appalled at the thought of piercing little children in a conquered city or of holding them up by the legs and dashing their heads against the wall. But if this work is done to avengo God's clmrch upon Bab} rlon, happy is he that taketh the little ones and dasheth them against the stones. And in the mouth of Stephen Marshall God's Church meant the Presbyterians, while heathen Babylon was represented by the Church of England! But the spirit of Thomas Fuller was, to borrow a phrase of Bacon's, "in a better tune." Fuller, who was a churchman and a Royalist, wrote his "Good Thoughts in Bad Times" at Exeter in 1645, and it was printed there. One of the "Scripture observations" included in this book is as follows: * Lord, when in my daily service I read David's Psalms, give mo to alter the accent of my soul according to1 their several subjects. In such psalms, wherein ho eonfesseth his sins, oil requesteth Thy pardon, or praiscth for former, or prayeth for future favours — in all these- give me to raise my soul to as high a pitch as may be. But when I come to such psalms wherein he cjirseth his enemies, O there let mo bring my soul down to a lower note. For those words were made only to fit David's mouth. I have the like breath, but not the same spirit to pronounce them. Nor let mo flatter myself, that it is lawful for me, with David, to curse thine enemies, lest my deceitful heart entitle all mine enemies to bo thine, and so what was religion in David, prove malice in me, whilst I act revenge Tinder the pretence of piety. There would be less need, to bracket or to omit any passages in the Psalter if everybody could approach them in the spirit of Thomas Fuller.