Chapter IV: Part II: Difficulties (2)

So again, in that profoundly spiritual Psalm, the 73rd, the writer turns from the puzzles of the moral order and the misgivings of his own heart, and seeks refuge in the abiding fact of his personal fellowship with God. He finds _there_ the assurance not only that the wicked will pass away "like a dream when one awaketh," but that the righteous is undying:

My flesh and my heart faileth:
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.

Such Psalms as these find their full meaning only in the light of Easter. The Resurrection of Christ was no mere portent or isolated miracle; it was strictly in line with all that man had risen up to in his highest spiritual intuitions in the past. It is true, in a much fuller sense than that of accomplishing a mere prediction, that Christ "rose again, according to the Scriptures."

This essential immortality of the righteous, through his union with God, is implied throughout {69} the Easter Psalms, especially in the 118th (part of "the Egyptian Hallel"), words which must have been recited by the Lord and His Apostles at the Passover Supper, in the very imminence of the Passion.

The voice of joy and health is in the dwellings of the righteous: ...
I shall not die, but live:
And declare the works of the Lord.

Ascension Day completes the triumph of man raised to immortality through his union with God in Christ. It inaugurates the accomplishment of man's ideal, in the eternal mediatorial reign of Christ as the Head of the human race. The appointed Psalms are again most suggestive. The 8th sings triumphantly of the supremacy of man over all the works of God, man crowned "with glory and worship." The 15th and the 24th describe the moral perfections which are the condition of this exaltation:

Lord, who shall dwell in Thy tabernacle:
Or who shall rest upon Thy holy hill?
Even he that leadeth an uncorrupt life:
And doeth the thing which is right, and speaketh the truth
from his heart.
* * * * *

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Whoso doeth these things:
Shall never fall.
(xv.)

The 21st and the 108th look back to the promises to David and to the typical character of his wars and victories. They shew that these events were part and parcel of the Divine warfare; they were a foretaste of the triumph of God Himself. They suggest that the Ascension of Christ, while it gathers into itself all the moral victories of the past, is the beginning of a new order. It brings in a Catholic empire of truth and righteousness, which, in spite of puzzles and warfare and contradictions, parallel to those which vexed the heart of the prophets of old, is now absolutely certain in its hope:

Who will lead me into the strong city:
And who will bring me into Edom?
Hast not Thou forsaken us, O God:
And wilt not Thou, O God, go forth with our hosts?
O help us against the enemy:
For vain is the help of man.
Through God we shall do great acts:
And it is He that shall tread down our enemies.
(cviii.)

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Thus, to him who, by God's mercy, has learned the Catholic Faith, the Psalms are full of Christ from end to end. He reads Christ in them, not by a pious imagination, but as the legitimate and only perfect key to their meaning and their use by the Church. In the Psalms he worships Christ as God:

Thy seat, O God, endureth for ever.
(xlv. 7.)

In the Psalms he worships with Christ as the Son of Man, with Him Who alone could say rightly:

My soul hath kept Thy testimonies:
And loved them exceedingly.
(cxix. 167.)

The human sorrows and struggles which cry out in the Psalter have been taken into the sacred heart of Him Who is the Word of the Father, and the King and Priest and Prophet of humanity, in Whom is fulfilled the saying:

He sent His Word, and healed them:
And they were saved from their destruction.
(cvii. 20.)

This Catholic secret of the Psalter, writ large as it is over the history of the Church's worship, {72} is yet something that eludes mere human research, and is a stumbling-block to human learning and scholarship. It can only be taught by that "hidden wisdom" of which S. Paul has told us (1 Cor. ii.), the wisdom given often to the weak of this world, the wisdom of the Spirit Who dwells in the Church, and makes her "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim. iii. 15).

[1] _Discourses to Mixed Congregations_, xvi.

[2] _i.e._ Sheol, Hades, the grave or place of departed souls.

[3] _i.e._ godly or pious, a characteristic word of the Psalmists, implying not only consecration but active devotion to God.

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LECTURE III

THE CHURCH IN THE PSALTER

Gloriosa dicta sunt de te:
Civitas Dei.

It has already been pointed out that the personal element in the Psalms, vivid and even passionate as it appears, if they are read as mere lyrics, has been transformed by the Church's use of them as her hymns of worship. The "I" of the Psalter has become the voice of the worshipping community.

The Jews themselves recited the personal Psalms in a national sense. Even such an intensely personal confession of sin as the 51st Psalm becomes through the last two verses (possibly added by a later pen) the confession of national penitence and the voice of national hope:

O be favourable and gracious unto Sion:
Build Thou the walls of Jerusalem.

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But besides such liturgical adaptations, whether of letter or spirit, many of the later Psalms, especially those which clearly belong to the period of the second Temple, were written intentionally for the nation as a whole. "We" predominates, instead of the earlier "I." In these Psalms the nation reviews her past history, or cries out against her present oppressors, or looks onward to liberty and enlargement in the future.

But the nation which thus finds her voice in the Psalms is of a different spirit from the kingdoms of this world. Her patriotism is of a higher order. She is conscious of a Divine vocation, separating her from the nations of the heathen:

Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt:
Thou hast cast out the heathen, and planted it.
(lxxx. 8.)

What time as they went from one nation to another:
From one kingdom to another people;
He suffered no man to do them wrong:
But reproved even kings for their sakes;
Touch not Mine Anointed:
And do My prophets no harm.
(cv. 13-15-)

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She has a treasure committed to her keeping, which others have not:

He sheweth His word unto Jacob:
His statutes and ordinances unto Israel.
He hath not dealt so with any nation:
Neither have the heathen knowledge of His laws.
(cxlvii. 19-20.)

She has a hope that burns within her, which to the world would be foolishness:

The Lord hath chosen Sion to be a habitation for Himself:
He hath longed for her.
This shall be my rest for ever:
Here will I dwell, for I have a delight therein.
(cxxxii. 14, 15.)

In other words, the community which speaks in the Psalter is more than a nation; she is a theocracy, a Church. Her characteristic names are prophetic; they suggest supernatural dealings and a heavenly calling. She is "Israel," heiress of him who "persevered with God" and won the blessing; she is the "seed of Abraham," in which it was promised that "all the nations of {76} the earth should be blessed"; she is "Sion," the "stronghold," "Jerusalem," name of ideals, "vision" or "possession" or "foundation"--"of peace"! It is as this sacred congregation, this _ecclesia_, that the nation rejoices in the Psalms in her calling and illumination, sorrows over her failures, prays in her warfare, waits for her glory.

It is not surprising that the Catholic Church recognised here her own portrait, or that the outlines sketched in the Psalter have been filled with light and colour and detail during the Christian centuries. The Catholic Church instinctively felt herself to be the true successor of the Israel of the Psalms. The ancient titles were retained, but in a fuller meaning. To S. Paul the Church is the "Israel of God" (Gal. vi. 16) in contrast to the "Israel after the flesh." The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells his Christian readers that they are "come unto Mount Sion" (xii. 22). S. Peter applies to the Church the old titles given to Israel in the Law, "an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation" (1 Peter ii. 9). S. John in the Apocalypse sees the new Jerusalem, having not only the names of "the twelve apostles of the Lamb" on her jewelled foundations, but the names of the "twelve tribes of the children of Israel" on {77} her gates of pearl (Rev. xxi. 12, 14). Old things had passed away, the sacred people of God remained, but no longer confined to the narrow boundaries of Palestine, nor to the dispersed descendants of Abraham: her children were "princes in all lands," all who were "of faith" were counted her seed. The Church knew herself to be the Israel of the future, custodian of a greater treasure, called to a grander work.

The Psalter indeed demands this higher interpretation. Just as the portrait of the Righteous One would have been an unfulfilled ideal had not Christ made it His own, so the glowing descriptions of Israel would have been but pious dreamings had not the Catholic Church risen up out of the fallen tabernacle of David. As the songs of the Temple falter and die away, the new spirit of praise clothes itself in the ancient forms. "From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs, Glory to the Righteous" (Is. xxiv. 16). The very words of the Psalter become transfigured like the garments of the Lord on the holy mount.

Nor is this passing away of the glory of old Israel into the greater glories of the Catholic Israel of God without some foreshadowing in the Psalter itself. In the 22nd, the great {78} Psalm of the Passion, the Sufferer passes from the dogs and lions and the mocking faces that surround him to contemplate the far-off fruit of his anguish. He seems to see "a great congregation," in the midst of which he himself hereafter will praise God Who has heard his prayer. Mysteriously it seems to rise, this "seed," this "people that shall be born," out of the very hopelessness and desolation of the Cross. "All the ends of the earth" are united in it, "all the kindred of the nations" worship there. The rich and the poor alike have their place in this kingdom of the future. And the special characteristic of this new creation of God will be the sharing in a sacrificial feast, the Sufferer's thanksgiving, his Eucharist in which he "pays his vows." Here "the meek shall eat and be satisfied," here eating and worshipping are strangely intermingled--a prophecy unread and unfulfilled until the Church learnt the secret "in the same night that He was betrayed."

"Therefore we, before Him bending,
This great Sacrament revere;
Types and shadows have their ending,
For the newer Rite is here."

This ecclesiastical aspect of the Psalter is {79} of very high importance. There is perhaps no part of the Christian faith which is more difficult for "the natural man" than "the Holy Catholic Church." An erroneous or imperfect idea of the Church seems to pass muster, among Christians even, so much more readily than error in other matters of faith. All through Christian history the true idea of the Church has been obscured, now by imperialism, with its misleading traditions of the Roman Empire; now by nationalism, as if the Church were only the religious aspect of a civil community; or again by individualism, as if she were no more than a collection of separate units. Erastianism and Puritanism in turn have led men astray. The warning against such things is written largely enough in the history of ancient Israel. The Jews of our Lord's time, while insisting keenly, even bitterly, on their separation from the Gentiles, were for the most part forgetful of what that separation really involved. Their ambition to be separate from the nations of the earth only meant for them a worldly and selfish exclusiveness. In earlier days the clamour for a king, the thirst for alliances with Egypt and Assyria and Babylon, had displayed in the opposite manner much the same spirit. Religious privileges, that Divine calling which {80} had made them a nation, were to be used as a means to worldly advancement and security. In the Psalter there stands out a truer conception of the Church as the spiritual commonwealth, a kingdom of God in the world, but not of this world's spirit, organised for higher ends than self-protection or self-development, aiming not at conquest but at the conversion and good of mankind, glorying not in privilege but in vocation, not in self but in the law of God. And this is the pattern for all time. The Christian Church may find in the Psalter her own just self-expression in a fuller manner than ever ancient Israel did or could. Indeed, we may trace indelibly stamped on the Psalter the true lineaments of the ideal Church.

First in the Psalter there is the note of _comprehensiveness_. The heathen, the nations, so often denounced or prayed against in the Psalms, are, after all, not so much those who are outside the boundaries of Israel as those who are alien from her spirit. They are communities, societies, untouched by grace, governed by passion and worldly ambitions rather than by conscience or the Divine law. And side by side with threats and foreboding of their utter destruction in the day of God there are glimpses here and there of the possibility of {81} their conversion, and even of their becoming one family with Israel. The great Psalm of Whitsunday, the 68th, passes from the thought of God wounding the head of His enemies, of His warriors dipping their feet in the blood of the vanquished, to the hope of the princes coming out of Egypt, and Ethiopia making haste to stretch out her hands unto God. So, again, the 47th Psalm looks forward to the essential sovereignty of God over all the earth being recognised even by this world's rulers:

The princes of the people are joined unto the people
of the God of Abraham.[1]

And lest it should be thought that such hopes referred only to an empire of external rule, like that of Solomon's, we have the startling predictions of Ps. lxxxvii. Here the people of Rahab (Egypt) and Babylon, the Philistines, the Tyrians, the Ethiopians, all types of the obstinate and idolatrous heathen world, are pictured as forsaking their natural lineage and descent to be born again in Zion, enrolling themselves there as citizens of the Lord's {82} glorious foundation upon the holy mountains, finding there their joy and the fount of their inspiration.

The Lord shall count, when He writeth up the peoples:
This one was born _there_.
They that sing as well as they that dance shall say,
All my fountains are in Thee. (R.V.)

Surely this is one of the most remarkable foreshadowings in the Old Testament of the catholicity of the Church, and of that new birth of Baptism by which men of every race and tongue are grafted into the one body, "where there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman: but Christ is all, and in all" (Col. iii. 11). In this and in many other Psalms (_cf._ lxvii., xcviii., c.) we confess the essentially _missionary_ vocation of the Church; that she calls to all mankind, not to the Western nations only, nor to the progressive and civilised only. Hers is the one faith for all men, her citizenship unlimited by any barriers of race or temperament.

If the catholicity of the Church is so clearly sketched in the Psalter, no less clear is {83} her _social_ ideal. The poor, the oppressed, those who have no helper, are equally called to share in Israel's hope and her gifts. God Himself is her pattern, Who--

Taketh up the simple out of the dust:
And lifteth the poor out of the mire;
That He may set him with the princes:
Even with the princes of His people.
(cxiii.)

The Messianic King will count the blood of the poor and needy equally precious with that of the rich and great (lxxii.). The Sufferer of the Passion Psalm (xxii.) looks forward, as we have seen, to the result of his triumph, in not only calling the "fat ones of the earth" to eat and worship at his table, but in finding there an equal place for--

Even him that cannot keep his soul alive.
(xxii. 30, R.V.)

These are lessons which we have as yet gone but a little way in learning. Yet the Psalter, as we recite it day by day, puts in our own mouth the condemnation of exclusiveness and pride and of deafness to the complaint of the poor; it makes us confess at least the Catholic {84} ideal of unity, of universal justice, of the imperishable value of the individual life, of the transformation of human society in the light of the Divine sovereignty of Christ.

The two lines of the Church's activity just alluded to, missionary and social, so prominent in the Psalms, are calling to-day so loudly for self-humiliation and new effort, that they may profitably be dwelt on a little further. The Psalmist's prophecy of the kings of Arabia and Saba bringing gifts (lxxii.) is still largely unfulfilled. The East is still almost untouched. Asia has not yet brought her characteristic gift to Christ. She is still under the dominion of imperfect religions--Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam. And yet India is our possession; Japan is our pupil. "The way of the kings of the East" is already "prepared" (Rev. xvi. 12), but where is the adequate response from English Christianity? "Who is blind but My servant, or deaf as My messenger that I send?"

And turning homewards, what are we to say of these grotesque and monstrous contrasts between wealth and poverty, luxury and squalor in England to-day, where rich and poor alike are baptized? What of the immoralities of commerce, of the bad work of the labourer as well as the swindling of the capitalist? Does {85} not the spirit of the Psalter cut across it all like the keen breath of the mountain wind? Yet Englishmen are spending time and energy in ritual debates and persecutions, and educational and social strife. Worse still, the rich and intellectual, for some prejudice or political motive, are eager to deny the poor the beauties of worship or the definiteness of the Catholic Faith.

Surely Thou hast seen it:
For Thou beholdest ungodliness and wrong.
(x. 15.)

In view of these unfulfilled ideals of the Church, the Psalter provides us in such Psalms as the 78th, the 79th, or the 106th with confession of sin and failure under the figure of Hebrew history. The recitation of these may well remind us not merely of personal faults but of our own share in the shortcomings of the Church of God:

We have sinned with our fathers:
We have done amiss and dealt wickedly.

For the Church as well as ourselves we are taught to pray, "Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts." The sorrows and desolations of Zion are never represented in the Psalms as being _merely_ the effect of heathen malice, {86} though they are so largely that, but as calls to look back upon history, and also to look within, to consider what unfaithfulness there may have been and is, what "starting aside like a broken bow" in our fathers and in ourselves.

From this point of view the penitential Psalms"[2] might profitably be used not merely as the expression of personal penitence, but as an act of reparation, an offering to God of our sorrow for the worldliness and imperfections of His Church; as an incentive also to effort, that we may do our part to remove the "reproach of the heathen," to restore the Church from within, to seek her unity and peace.

There is, however, another side to the problem of the Church's failures. Israel and Jerusalem are constantly described in the Psalms as being the marks for the malignity and opposition of external enemies. Indeed, a persistent note of the Church, Jewish as well as Christian, is the hatred which she awakens in the powers of this world. The object of suspicion and attack from Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon in early days, Jerusalem fares no better after the humiliation of the Captivity. The attempts to {87} rebuild the Temple and restore the city arouse the bitterest hostility from the surrounding peoples, a hostility not merely political, but traceable to a deeper cause. The attempts of Antiochus Epiphanes in the second century B.C. to break down Jewish separation and to destroy Jewish worship are marked by the same spirit, working in a more arrogant and brutal manner. Our Lord Himself promises no smoother or more popular course for His faithful ones. "Ye shall be hated of all men." S. Paul recognises the same antagonism running throughout the history of the elect: "As then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now" (Gal. iv. 29).

The Psalter will not allow us to shut our eyes to this malignant and persecuting attitude of the world. The enemies of the Righteous find a place in almost every Psalm. The malice of human nature at its worst seems to be marshalled against Him, in slander and ingratitude and treachery. But there is also the opposition of the heathen as a whole against Israel. The vicissitudes of her history are typical; they illustrate a permanent principle which is found working from age to age. It was not less active nor less brutal in the first three Christian centuries {88} than it was in the days of Antiochus. To-day, though its attack is less outwardly cruel, the spirit which prompts it is just as deeply seated, and more malignant perhaps in proportion as it is veiled. The Church has not merely to contend with the hatred of those who have chosen and loved evil, and find the righteous a standing reproach. There is gathered against her also the world's steady resentment of spiritual authority; the world's antipathy against all that refuses to come to terms, or water down its witness to suit changing fashions of men's thought. It is the same spirit which in earlier days called the Christians "the enemies of the human race," and in these later times directs its sneers and opposition against the Creeds, the Sacraments, the priesthood--"the spirit of Antichrist."

The 44th Psalm, perhaps belonging to the time of the great Maccabaean struggle, makes its pathetic appeal to God amidst the scorn and blasphemy of the heathen, and, what is worse, the bitterness of apparent failure and defeat which seem to justify the heathen.

My confusion is daily before me:
The shame of my face hath covered me:

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For the voice of the slanderer and blasphemer:
For the enemy and avenger.

Faith indeed does not fail the Psalmist: he clings to God; he still recognises the hand of God throughout these sufferings; he prefers to attribute them to God rather than to man:

_Thou_ makest us to turn our backs upon our enemies: ...
_Thou_ lettest us be eaten up like sheep: ...
_Thou_ sellest Thy people for nought:
And takest no money for them.

Nevertheless, it is all a puzzle, a bewildering maze in which faith seems walking blindfold, like the Lord Himself when the malice of the high-priest's servants bandaged His eyes and smote Him in derision and bade Him prophesy! The light of God's presence seems to have gone out of the world:

Wherefore hidest Thou Thy face:
And forgettest our misery and trouble.

Very similar is the 74th Psalm, with its same high consciousness of faithfulness to God, the same agonising sense of contradiction in the enemies of God being suffered to break down {90} the carved work of the sanctuary, the same feeling of helplessness and lack of guidance. The adversaries' banners are manifest enough, _their_ tokens are clear; but with the faithful it is otherwise:

We see not our tokens, there is not one prophet more.

O God, how long! ... Remember! ... Arise! ... Forget not!

Probably of the same period is the 79th, written apparently in the very hour of the heathen triumph, when the Temple is defiled, Jerusalem "an heap of stones," the blood of the righteous flowing on every side like water. And there is still the characteristic turning away from self and personal humiliation to the thought of the dishonour done to God Himself. For to the faithful the honour of God is dearer than their own liberty or life.

Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of Thy Name:
O deliver us, and be merciful unto our sins, for Thy Name's sake.

The 83rd belongs perhaps to an earlier age. It seems to recall the great confederacy of the nations against Jehoshaphat (2 Chron. xx.). The Psalmist cries out to God against the {91} gathering hordes who have no interest in common, except their mutual hatred of Israel and Israel's God. It is a sorry catalogue: Edomites, Ishmaelites, Moabites, Hagarens; Gebal, Ammon, and Amalek; Philistines, Tyrians, Assyrians:

"All the warring hosts of error
Sworn against her, move as one."

But the hot indignation which prays that this rabble of malice and mischief may be swept like the stubble before the whirlwind, consumed like the dry grass before the mountain fires, is yet tempered with a higher thought. Defeat may lead to conversion and to a better mind:

Make their faces ashamed, O Lord:
That they may seek Thy Name.

Once again, the 102nd Psalm breathes out the pathetic appeal of the exile, or the lonely, friendless watcher over the desolations of the holy city. His heart is "smitten down and withered like grass"; he has "eaten ashes as it were bread, and mingled his drink with weeping." But his fasting and tears are not for himself; there is the eternal background of hope; God is unchanging; future generations {92} will know again the happiness of worship and service--his sorrow is for Zion:

Thy servants think upon her stones:
And it pitieth them to see her in the dust.

Do not experiences and prayers like these come home to Christians with a curious sense of familiarity? Is not this tragedy of faith repeated in every age? In every Christian generation it has been "given" to the Beast to war against the saints and overcome them (Rev. xiii. 7). His undying malice has too often been seconded by the impotence, the lack of unity, the fear of truth and its consequences, which have marred the Christian defence.

We find eloquent illustrations of this unceasing, heart-sickening warfare in such moments of history as that in the fourth century, when "the whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian";[3] in the seventh and eighth, when the armies of Islam swept away the divided and bickering Churches of the East and that Church of North Africa, once so glorious, where holiness had not kept pace with zeal; in the fifteenth, {93} when Constantinople fell, and the great cathedral of S. Sophia passed into the hands of the Turks, and this very day, where once Christian worship was offered, and Christian emblems high on its walls still make their silent protest,

"Moslem prayers profane
At morn and eve come sounding;"

in the sixteenth, when the fair abbeys of England were despoiled and suffered to fall into ruin, through covetousness and irreligion masquerading under the garb of piety; in the seventeenth, when the voice of the Church's worship was stifled, and the faithful were interrupted in their very Christmas Communion by the levelled muskets of the Cromwellian troopers[4]; in our own day, when liberality can tolerate everything except the Catholic Faith? Verily these Hebrew Psalms are a Christian possession for ever. They speak to us and speak for us in accents of undying truth, and every year that passes verifies their witness and points more sharply their appeal.

But not only does the Psalter tell of the Church and her ideals, of her warfare and her failures, it insists with equal conviction on her _stability_. God's great promise to the line of {94} David carried with it the preservation of David's city. The attacks of the heathen seemed to have reached their climax when Sennacherib's army had taken all the fortified cities of Judaea, and Jerusalem was left isolated and helpless (2 Kings xix.). Yet when human hope was gone, the prophet's word rang out with the certainty of faith. "I will defend this city to save it, for Mine own sake, and for My servant David's sake." The sequel was one of the most startling catastrophes in history. The Assyrian hosts were destroyed in a single night, and Assyrian invasions ceased. Again, in a later generation, when the promise seemed at last to have failed, and the Temple had fallen, the city was burnt and her king and citizens in captivity, the prophets never waver in their vision of a future restoration when sin has been repented and national guilt expiated. Zerubbabel and Joshua, Ezra and Nehemiah, Judas Maccabaeus and his descendants, restore and maintain Temple and city to last till "the fulness of the time," when the true meaning of the Davidic promises was revealed.

The sense of this supernatural continuance has left its mark on the Psalms. The rout of the Assyrian armies is commemorated in one at least, the 76th:

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The proud are robbed, they have slept their sleep:
And all the men whose hands were mighty have found nothing.
At Thy rebuke, O God of Jacob:
Both the chariot and horse are fallen.

The secret of victory preludes the Psalm. Jerusalem is the seat of God's special presence:

At Salem is His tabernacle:
And His dwelling in Sion.

The 46th may also refer to the same event. The flood of heathen invasion is breaking itself in vain against the walls of the city of God:

God is in the midst of her, therefore shall she not be removed:
God shall help her, and that right early.

The great historical Psalm, the 78th, speaks at its close of the hill of Sion and the Temple "built there on high" as coeval with the earth itself; its foundation is "like the ground which He hath made continually."[5] And the later {96} Psalms seem even to unite Sion and Jerusalem and the sacred nation with the very eternity of God Himself:

This shall be My rest for ever.
* * * * *
The Lord thy God, O Sion, shall be King for evermore.
* * * * *
Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem:
Praise thy God, O Sion.
For He hath made fast the bars of thy gates:
And hath blessed thy children within thee.
(cxxxii. 15, cxlvi. 10, cxlvii. 12, 13.)

The end of earthly Jerusalem, when it came, was no less significant than her long continuance. The double destruction of the city by the Roman armies (A.D. 70 and A.D. 135) was consummated by the strangeness of the failure of Julian the Apostate to rebuild and re-establish the Temple; flames burst out from the foundations and the workmen fled in terror.[6] But long before this the Christian Church had recognised that in her world-wide citizenship and her worship, confined no longer {97} (as the Lord had foretold) either to Jerusalem or a mountain in Samaria, she had inherited in fuller measure these promises of continuance. Had it not been said, when the great Apostle made his confession of Christ's Divinity, "Upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it"? And in this consciousness the Catholic Church rightly appropriated to herself the songs of Sion's confidence. Just as early Christian art set above the altars the figure of the living Christ enthroned as the Eternal King of the universe, so the Church has always known in her darkest moments that her continuance is as certain as her Master's throne; and that as He remains the same, though the heavens and the earth decay, and are changed as a garment, the promise of the 102nd Psalm is hers for ever:

The children of Thy servants shall continue:
And their seed snail stand fast in Thy sight.

Once again, the Psalmists feel that as Israel, the Church, is in a sense partaker in God's own eternity, so she is, even on earth, a shadow of His essential beauty, she appeals with His attractiveness to the soul of man. Hence the {98} Christian finds in the Psalter words in which he may express his joy in his calling in the Church, his love and delight in his heavenly citizenship; words which may also remind him that, in spite of all the failures and littlenesses of the visible Church, it is through her that he is in touch with the ideal and the invisible.

Thus in no mere partisan or ecclesiastical spirit we are invited in the Psalms to express our love of the Catholic Church. On Whit Sunday, the Church's birthday, we take up the ancient strain of affection:

The hill of Sion is a fair place, and the joy of the whole earth.

We gaze with awe upon her jewelled foundations and her jasper walls; we wander with delight in her spacious golden streets:

Walk about Sion, and go round about her:
And tell the towers thereof.
Mark well her bulwarks, set up her houses:[7]
That ye may tell them that come after.
For this God is our God for ever and ever:
He shall be our guide unto death.
(xlviii.)

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In another Psalm, the 122nd, one of the pilgrim-psalms recited of old as the faithful drew near to Jerusalem, we contemplate with joy and self-forgetfulness the ideal unity of the Church as the true centre of the earth, and as "the seat of judgment" to which all this world's shams and shadows must come sooner or later for their reformation or their sentence:

O pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
They shall prosper that love thee.
Peace be within thy walls:
And plenteousness within thy palaces.
For my brethren and companions' sakes:
I will wish thee prosperity.
Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God:
I will seek to do thee good.

It is an aspiration that should find an echo in the heart of every faithful son of the Church, especially in such "a day of trouble and of rebuke and blasphemy" as our own.

Thus while we recognise in the Psalter the expression, put into our lips by the Holy Spirit, of our own personal struggles and joys and sorrows in the spiritual life, while we remember with awe and gratitude that the {100} Eternal Son of God Himself here speaks and prays and suffers as one of us, we shall find here also the voice of our corporate consciousness, our life and worship as citizens even on earth of that "Jerusalem which is above, which is the mother of us all."

And so as we conclude every Psalm in the Church's service with the _Gloria_, with that confession of our faith which prophets and kings would fain have known and knew not, let us lift up our hearts and give glory to the Father, Who has revealed to us His Name; glory to the Son, Who has vouchsafed in all things to be made like unto us His brethren; glory to the Holy Ghost, Whose word and power in the Church is undying, Who is still bringing forth from the ancient treasury old things which are ever new.

Gloria Patri, et Filio:
Et Spiritui Sancto.
Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper:
Et in saecula saeculorum.
Amen.

[1] The princes of the people are gathered together,
To be the people of the God of Abraham.
(R.V.)

[2] vi., xxxii., xxxviii., li., cii., cxxx., cxliii.

[3] "Ingemuit totus orbis et se Arianum esse miratus est" (S. Jerome).

[4] Evelyn's Diary: Dec. 25, 1657.

[5] The earth which He hath established for ever (R.V.).

[6] Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_, c. xxiii.

[7] "Consider her palaces" (R.V.).

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NOTES

A. The extent to which the Psalms were used liturgically by the Jews in Temple and Synagogue is not at all fully known. The following list of uses is interesting in itself, but probably does not by any means cover the whole field. And it seems certain, from the free and natural way in which the Psalms are referred to in the New Testament, that, even if a comparatively small number were used in the public services, the Psalter must have been very familiar indeed to the pious Jew of our Lord's time and have formed practically his book of private devotion.

DAILY IN THE TEMPLE (AND PROBABLY ELSEWHERE):

_First day_. Ps. xxiv. The earth is the Lord's, etc.

_Second day_. Ps. xlviii. Great is the Lord.

_Third day_. Ps. lxxxii. God standeth in the congregation.

_Fourth day_. Ps. xciv. O Lord God, to Whom vengeance belongeth.

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_Fifth day_. Ps. lxxxi. Sing we merrily unto God our strength.

_Sixth day_. Ps. xciii. The Lord is King.

_Sabbath day_. Ps. xcii. It is a good thing to give thanks.

THE PASSOVER, AND ON OTHER GREAT FESTIVALS. The Hallel, probably Pss. cxiii.-cxviii.

FEAST OF TABERNACLES:

_First day_. Ps. cv. O give thanks.

_Second day_. Ps. xxix. Bring unto the Lord.

_Third day_. Ps. l. 16. But unto the ungodly said God.

_Fourth day_. Ps. xciv. 16. Who will rise up with me.

_Fifth day_. Ps. xciv. 8. Take heed, ye unwise.

_Sixth day_. Ps. lxxxi. 6. I eased his shoulder. Pss. cxx.-cxxxiv. Songs of Degrees.

_Seventh day_. Ps. lxxxii. 5. They will not be learned.

NEW MOON OF SEVENTH OR SABBATICAL MONTH. Ps. lxxxi. Sing we merrily.

DEDICATION. The Hallel, as at the Passover.

PRESENTATION OF FIRST-FRUITS. Ps. cxxii. I was glad. Ps. xxx. I will magnify Thee, O Lord.

B. The allusions to the singing of Psalms in the New Testament shew that it was from the first a recognised Christian devotion, both in public and private (Acts xvi. 25; 1 Cor. xiv. 26; Eph. v. 19; {103} James v. 13). This is borne out by the evidence of the Christian Fathers (see, for example, S. Athanasius' _Epistle to Marcellinus_; S. Aug. _Confess._ ix. 8; S. Jerome, Ep. xlvi.). But it was no doubt the rise of the monastic life in Egypt and its subsequent spread over the whole Church in the fourth and fifth centuries that led by its disciplined devotion to the systematic arrangement of the Psalter for daily services and to its continuous recitation. Many of the early monks, indeed, recited the whole Psalter daily; but the Western use, settled traditionally by S. Gregory the Great, aimed at a weekly recitation, and this system in theory dominated the Breviary services all through the Middle Ages.

The normal arrangement of the Psalter in the daily offices was, roughly speaking, as follows:

At _Mattins_, Ps. i.-cix., divided into nine "Nocturns," three of which were said on Sunday, and one on each of the following week-days, beginning each day with the 95th, the Invitatory Psalm.

At _Lauds_, Pss. lxiii., lxvii., cxlviii.-cl., with certain other varying Psalms.

At _Prime_, always Ps. liv. and the first four portions of the 119th, and one varying Psalm.

At _Terce_, the next six portions of the 119th.

At _Sext_, the next six portions of the 119th.

At _None_, the last six portions of the 119th.

At _Vespers_, Pss. cx.-cxlvii., divided into seven portions, omitting the 119th.

At _Compline_, iv., xxxi. 1-6, xci., cxxxiv.

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Thus the bulk of the Psalms were said at the two offices which corresponded most closely to our Morning and Evening Prayer; some few were said daily, the 51st was said at every one of the offices, and the others were said weekly.

But in practice a festival arrangement of the Psalms, in which a much smaller number, and chiefly of the shorter Psalms, were recited, was largely substituted for the normal or ferial use, thus justifying the criticism of our Reformers, "Now of late time a few of them have been daily said and the rest utterly omitted."

The following special uses are also interesting:

THE OFFICE OF THE DEAD:

_Vespers_ (the "Placebo"): cxvi., cxx., cxxi., cxxx., cxxxviii.

_Mattins_ (the "Dirge"): v., vi., vii.; xxiii., xxv., xxvii., xl., xli., xlii.

_Lauds_: li., lxv., lxiii., cxlviii.-cl., cxlv.

PREPARATION FOR MASS: lxxxiv., lxxxv., lxxxvi., cxvi. 10., cxxx., xliii.

THANKSGIVING AFTER MASS: cl.

C. Antiphons were originally verses sung as a refrain between each verse of the Psalms, one side of the choir taking the former and the other the latter. The refrain varied at different seasons and festivals. An example of this early and more elaborate use survived in the Breviary in the treatment of the Venite as an Invitatory Psalm. But gradually, for the sake of brevity, this method {105} was abandoned, and the normal use of antiphons in the Breviary was simply after (or on festivals before and after) each Psalm or set of Psalms. The advantage of the antiphon lay in the fact that it shewed at once with what particular intention the Psalm was sung, as the same Psalm naturally might be sung on many different occasions and with reference to a different season or festival. But the very complex nature of the antiphons or "anthems" led the English Reformers to abandon them altogether; "many times," as they said, "there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out." The only traces of antiphons left in the Prayer Book are: (1) "O Sapientia," in the Kalendar on December 16, the first words of the first of the "Greater Antiphons" to the Magnificat, which began on that day and continued till Christmas Eve, each commencing with some striking Old Testament title of the Messiah; (2) in the Litany, the repetition of the words, "O Lord, arise," etc., shews that this is the antiphon to the Psalm "O God, we have heard" (perhaps originally the whole of Ps. xliv., but now one verse only); (3) the words "O Saviour of the world," etc., in the Office for the Visitation of the Sick. The last is the best example: the antiphon connects the recitation of Ps. lxxi. with the Passion of our Lord; the _intention_ of the Psalm is thus shewn to be the association of our sufferings in sickness with {106} the Cross of Christ (_cf._ the second exhortation in the same office).

D. Helps to the study of the Psalter.

_Literal Meaning_:

Kirkpatrick, in the _Cambridge Bible_ (3 vols.). The Introduction is extremely useful, and an excellent list of the literature bearing on the Psalter is also given.

Perowne, _The Book of Psalms_.

Cheyne, _The Book of Psalms_.

Barry, _Teacher's Prayer Book_.

_Mystical and Spiritual Meaning_:

Neale and Littledale, _Commentary on the Psalms_ (4 vols.). This has a very valuable Introduction on the Psalms as used in the offices of the Church, and a dissertation (in vol. i.) on the mystical and literal interpretation of the Psalms.

Walpole, _The People's Psalter_.

_General_:

Prothero, _The Psalms in Human Life_.

Marson, _The Psalms at Work_.

Church, _The Sacred Poetry of Early Religions_, in _The Gifts of Civilisation_. _The Discipline of the Christian Character_, iii.

Robertson Smith, _The Old Testament in the Jewish Church_, lect. vii.

Orr, _The Problem of the Old Testament_, c. xii.

Alexander (Archbishop), _The Witness of the Psalms to Christ_.

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