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 ]L I B R ^ R Y 
 
 T h e b 1 e^g i e a 1 Seminary, 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 Cos 
 
 BS 1430 .C4 1876 
 Chambers, Talbot W. 1819- 
 Shel 1896. 
 
 noo Th^ Psalter 
 
THE VEDDER LECTURES. 1876. 
 
 THE PSALTER 
 
 A WITNESS 
 
 DIVINE ORIGIN OF THE BIBIE. 
 
 BY 
 V 
 TALBOT W. CHAMBERS, D.D., 
 
 ONE OF THE PASTORS OF THE COLLEGIATE DUICU CHURCH OF NEW YORK. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY. 
 
 900 liROADWAY, COR. 20th ST, 
 1876. 
 
Copyright, 1876, by 
 Anson D. F. Randolph & Company. 
 
 ROBERT RUTTER, 
 
 BINDER, 
 84 BEEKMAN SHEET, N. 1. 
 
 EDWARD 0. JENKINS, 
 
 PRINTER AND STEREOTYPER, 
 
 JO NOHIM WILLIAM ST., N. r. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 This volume consists of a course of lectures de- 
 livered before the Theological Seminary and Rut- 
 gers College, New Brunswick, N. J., in the months 
 of April and May last. The General Synod of the 
 Reformed Dutch Church having seen fit to appoint 
 the author to be Lecturer, on the Vedder Founda- 
 tion, at a time when he was out of the country, and 
 had neither expressed nor felt any wish on the sub- 
 ject, he felt constrained to accept the position, not- 
 withstanding the fact that the pecuniary support of 
 the Foundation had totally failed. The general sub- 
 ject of the lectui-eship is stated by the founder to be, 
 " The present aspects of Modern Infidelity, in- 
 cluding its cause and cure." The best " cure " of 
 Infidelity is the study of the sacred volume which 
 it rejects. With a view to promote this, the author 
 selected a theme in the line of his recent studies, 
 and treated it to the best of his ability. He is not 
 aware that the argument here set forth has ever been 
 handled in any separate volume. If, as thus pre- 
 sented, it shall satisfy any wavering minds, or if 
 it shall prompt abler writers to a fuller and more 
 convincing discussion of its varied aspects, he 
 will be abundantly content. 
 
 New York, September, 1876. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 Introductory : The Nature of the Psalter. . . i 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 The Doctrine of God in the Psalter 37 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 The Doctrine of Man in the Psalter 73 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 The Messiah and the Future Life 113 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 The Ethics of the Psalter 149 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. THE NATURE AND CHARACTER- 
 ISTICS OF THE PSALTER. 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 FORMS OF MODERN INFIDELITY — AGREE IN REJECTING 
 THE SCRIPTURES— NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE METHODS OF 
 DEFENCE — LATTER PREFERRED — THE PROPOSITION STATED 
 — THE PSALTER CHOSEN BECAUSE IT BELONGS TO THE OLD 
 TESTAMENT — BECAUSE SPONTANEOUS — BECAUSE SPIRIT- 
 UAL — NATURE OF THE BOOK — ITS CONTENTS — AUTHORS — 
 DATES — CLASSIFICATION — THE FIVE BOOKS — MOURNFUL 
 — JOYFUL — DIDACTIC — GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS — I . 
 POETICAL — PECULIARITIES OF FORM — 2. LYRICAL — 3. PAL- 
 ESTINIAN — 4. TRUE — 104TH PSALM — i8TH PSALM — THE 
 ARGUMENT a fortiori. 
 
 THE forms of modern infidelity differ widely 
 among" themselves, sometimes assailing 
 single characteristic features of revealed truth ; 
 at others laying the axe at the rootof all super- 
 natural religion. The hottest controversy of 
 the last half century had respect to the person 
 of our Lord. The answers to His own weighty 
 and searching question, "What think ye of 
 Christ ? " have declared that He was an inten- 
 tional deceiver, or a victim of His own self-de- 
 
2 THE PSALTER. 
 
 ception and enthusiasm, or an invention of His 
 disciples and biographers, or a final result of 
 mythical traditions gradually taking shape in an 
 unintelligent age — all these being simply so 
 many different ways of rejecting His own state- 
 ment that He is the Son of the living God, and 
 the Saviour of the world. Another form of the 
 prevalent skepticism of our day is found in what 
 the apostle once spoke of as '' the oppositions of 
 science falsely so called." This is not content 
 with attacking some one great truth or fact as- 
 serted in our holy religion, such as the fall of 
 man, the unity of the race, the occurrence of 
 the deluge, or the resurrection of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ, but cuts away the ground from 
 under supernaturalism by insisting upon an ab- 
 solute and unvarying uniformity in the sequences 
 of nature from the very beginning. This theory 
 of the unchangeableness of natural laws rules 
 out revelation entirely, and remands us back to 
 our own discoveries in the search for moral and 
 religious truth. 
 
 Both these forms of error — the denial of the 
 Lord Jesus, and the denial of the possibility of 
 divine intervention in the processes of nature — 
 agree in rejecting the Scripture as unworthy of 
 trust because it states what is not true. Hence 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 3 
 
 the pivot of the whole argument Hes in the 
 question, Is there a revelation come from 
 God? or in other words, Is the Bible such a 
 revelation ? For however loosely men may 
 talk of the different Scriptures of the ancient 
 races as alike in character and authority, no se- 
 rious person will undertake to set up any other 
 professedly holy or divine book in competition 
 with the lively oracles of God. The Vedas of 
 the Brahmans, the Tripitaka of the Buddhists, 
 the Avestan of the Parsis, the Koran of the 
 Mohammedans claim to be divine, and are so 
 regarded by their respective followers. But 
 w^ho now thinks of admittino- the claim? These 
 writings are all truly remarkable. They con- 
 tain many striking thoughts, brilliant pictures, 
 and glorious visions. Detached statements are 
 found here and there which challenge universal 
 admiration. But they lack not only in part, but 
 altogether, the distinctive evidence of a revela- 
 tion. They offer no specifications of time and 
 place and circumstances to which the ordinary 
 historical tests can be applied. Their warmest 
 advocates claim for them no external evidences 
 whatever. And when subjectively considered, 
 these writings as a whole are found to be pecul- 
 iarly local and national, not even pretending to 
 
THE PSALTER. 
 
 that universality of meaning and application 
 which must belonof to a communication bv God 
 
 to man. 
 
 If anywhere on earth there is an authen- 
 tic message from heaven, it must be in the Old 
 Testament and the New. The argument to 
 show that it is there may be conducted in two 
 ways. One, the negative, takes up in detail 
 the various objections which have been urged, 
 and shows their unsoundness. This method 
 has been pursued from the beginning in every 
 age of the Church, indeed so extensively as to 
 have given its name to the whole department 
 of Christian evidences, which is now commonly 
 known as Apologetics. The successful prosecu- 
 tion of this work demands time and space 
 largely, l^ake, for example, the difficulties based 
 on the discoveries of physical science. Much 
 patience and learning are required to follow 
 scientists through their elaborate investigation 
 and argumentation, and carefully discriminate 
 fact from theory, separating what is proved 
 from what is inferred or conjectured. And 
 when this is successfully done, there is often 
 needed a special training in the hearer or reader 
 to fit him to see the point of the objection or 
 the force of the reply. And, besides, when 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 5 
 
 one class of difficulties has been removed, all 
 the others resting upon different grounds still 
 remain to be taken up in turn and disproved. 
 
 The other method, therefore, the positive, 
 that which considers and sets forth the Q-i'ounds 
 upon which our faith in the Bible as th.e Word 
 of God rests, is both more complete and more 
 satisfactory. It is true that the lines of argu- 
 ment are many, for it could not be otherwise in 
 a book which is so large and varied in its con- 
 tents, its history, and its relations to men. But 
 each line of argument, if satisfactorily main- 
 tained, is not only good for itself, but concludes 
 in favor of the whole. For example, if the 
 miraculous attestations are made out to be what 
 they profess, and God has actually set His seal 
 to the written word, then the Bible is true, and 
 all the other evidences, such as those drawn 
 from the fulfilment of prophecy, from the sub- 
 stance of the Bible, from its purity and har- 
 mony, its truth to human nature, its benign in- 
 fluence upon the individual, the family, and the 
 State, the rapid propagation of its faith, and 
 the like, are also true, and give the argument 
 cumulative force. And so with any one of 
 these compared with the rest. Truth is the 
 same always and everywhere. A revelation 
 
6 THE PSALTER. 
 
 which is true historically must be also true on 
 all other g-rounds, theoretical or practical. Mil- 
 ton, in his Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, 
 mentions the Egyptian fable that " Typhon with 
 his conspirators took the virgin Truth, hewed 
 her lovely form into a thousand pieces and scat- 
 tered them to the four winds," from which time 
 her sad friends have gone up and down in care- 
 ful search, "gathering up limb by limb still as 
 they could find them." But the dissevered 
 pieces must needs make one whole, and each as 
 it turned up was a pledge of the existence of 
 the rest. And so each successful arofument for 
 the supreme truth interlocks with all the others 
 and carries them along with it. As Hooker 
 says, " Truth, of what kind soever, is by no kind 
 of truth gainsaid." 
 
 If a choice is to be made among the various 
 methods of sustaining the faith, I quite agree 
 with the sentiment expressed in the previous 
 course of lectures on this foundation by Dr. 
 Tayler Lewis: "The Bible itself must be 
 brought out as the best defence against infidel- 
 ity — the Bible itself, not only as the great 
 standing miracle of history, but as containing un- 
 earthly ideas for which no philosophy, no theory 
 of development can ever account Other 
 
IN TROD UC TOR V. 7 
 
 defences are indeed important, but without this 
 they are shorn of the great strength which can 
 alone make them available to the pulling down 
 of stroRcdiolds, and the overthrow of the truth's 
 unwearied foes." A further reason for taking- 
 this course is found in the fact that the most in- 
 teresting branch of Apologetics to ordinary 
 readers, and especially to devout Christians, is 
 that which treats of the Scripture's own claims 
 for what it is, in and of itself This is a port- 
 able manual of the evidences always at hand, 
 and always available for an answer to them that 
 ask a reason of the hope that is in us. But the 
 whole Bible, or even one Testament, is far too 
 larofe for a course of lectures like this. I have 
 chosen, therefore, to take up a single book, one 
 that is complete in itself, and yet stands in vital 
 relation to all the rest, viz.: the Psalms. The 
 proposition is that these Psalms as a whole, 
 when viewed as to their subjects, aims, spirit, 
 and teaching, especially in comparison with the 
 corresponding literature of all other forms of 
 reliirion, can be accounted for on no other ofround 
 than a divine origin. 
 
 This theme is selected because, first, it be- 
 longs to the Old Testament, w^hich is always 
 more sharply assailed than the New, and which, 
 
8 ■ ■ THE PSAL TER. 
 
 as the introductory portion of a gradual revela- 
 tion, for that very reason stands the more open 
 to hostile criticism. Hence it follows that if 
 a constituent part of that which is professedly 
 an incomplete and preparatory disclosure of the 
 divine will can be substantiated on independent 
 grounds, much more may that which belongs to 
 the full and final statement of God's Word. 
 The timidity of some Christian writers on this 
 point is unaccountable. They seem to speak 
 of the Hebrew Scriptures as if they were a bur- 
 den to carry. How much nobler and truer is 
 the language of the accomplished and genial 
 critic, Herder, in the preface to his Geist der 
 Ebrdische Poesie : "The basis of theology is 
 the Bible, and that of the New Testament is 
 the Old. It is impossible to understand the 
 former aright without a previous understanding 
 of the latter ; for Christianity proceeded from 
 Judaism, and the genius of the language is in 
 both books the same. And this eenius of the 
 language we can nowhere study better — that is, 
 with more truth, comprehensiveness, and satis- 
 faction — than in its poetry, and, indeed, as far as 
 possible, in its most ancient poetry. It pro- 
 duces a false impression and misleads the young 
 theologian to commend to him the New Testa- 
 
INTRODUCTORY. g 
 
 ment to the exclusion of the Old. Without 
 this that can never be understood in a satis- 
 factory manner. In the Old Testament we 
 find as an aid to this a rich interchange of his- 
 tory, of figurative representation, of characters, 
 and of scenery ; and we see in it the many-col- 
 ored dawn, the beautiful going forth of the sun 
 in his milder radiance. In the New Testament 
 it stands in the highest heavens and in merid- 
 ian splendor, and every one knows which period 
 of the day to the natural eye imparts most life 
 and strencrth."* 
 
 The spontaneous character of the Psalms 
 gives a further reason for selecting them. They 
 are thus sharply defined and discriminated from 
 the most of the other writings with which they 
 are connected. Every reader at once recog- 
 nizes the difference between a chapter of moral 
 or ceremonial precepts, or a historical narrative 
 or a logical argument, and the outburst of pas- 
 sion or sentiment which gives character to a 
 poetical utterance, especially when it takes the 
 form of a lyric. In the latter there is a buoy- 
 ancy of life, a freshness of feeling not seen 
 elsewhere. The singer has his tongue unloosed 
 
 ♦Marsh's Translation, I., 22. 
 1* 
 
lO 
 
 THE r SALTER. 
 
 from every bond, and under some overmaster- 
 ing impulse pours out what he sees and feels. 
 He pursues no course of consecutive reasoning, 
 draws no nice distinctions, elaborates no specu- 
 lative theme, but simply utters, in such phrase 
 as the place and the time suggest, that which 
 deeply stirs his own heart. Consequently all 
 is free, unstudied, natural. Even where the 
 conceptions are most sublime, or the images 
 most striking, or the words most felicitous, art 
 lingers behind nature, and we feel ourselves in 
 the presence of a soul moved to its depths. If, 
 now, it can be shown that in such passionate 
 utterances as these which arouse and express 
 
 All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
 Whatever slirs this mortal frame, 
 
 that even amid the highest flights of imagina- 
 tion, and a very whirlwind of contending feelings, 
 there is yet an element truly divine that domi- 
 nates the whole and separates it by an impassa- 
 ble gulf from all other poetry, ancient or modern, 
 the conclusion holds good not only for the 
 Psalter, but for the entire volume of which it is 
 an integral part. 
 
 Another attractive feature of the Psalms for 
 the present purpose is their spiritual character. 
 
nVTKOD UCTOR Y. 1 1 
 
 They are wonderful not only for their antiquity, 
 their variety, their simplicity, their frequent sub- 
 limity, pathos, tenderness, and fire, but also for 
 a peculiar development of thought and feeling. 
 They acquaint us with the interior life of the 
 Old Testament saints ; they disclose to us their 
 feelings in the most sacred and hallowed mo- 
 ments of their lives ; they give us a deep insight 
 into the more hidden wonders of a holy religion, 
 showing how our common humanity is affected 
 under the experimental application of a true and 
 self-consistent theology. Other parts of the 
 Old Testament furnish the didactic statements 
 of religious truth, its precepts or its promises, or 
 its illustration in history or biography ; but in 
 the Psalter we come close to the beatine heart 
 of the believer ; we see the actings of the whole 
 moral nature in the presence of vivid, spiritual 
 realities ; we trace the working of faith, and 
 hope, and gratitude, or of shame, and fear, and 
 penitence ; we follow the entire course of spir- 
 itual vicissitudes in the dealings of the individual 
 soul with its Maker and Portion ; in short, there 
 is a perfect mirror of the devout man's inward 
 life. Hence it is that so often the Psalms and 
 the New Testament arc bound up in the same 
 volume, and lie on the table or the pillow of 
 
12 THE PSALTER. 
 
 many an humble Christian for whom the poetic 
 power, the lyric fire, the graceful allusions, and 
 the vivid imagery have little or no charm, but 
 who sees in the picture of soul conflicts, of lowly 
 abasement, of penitential confession, of rapt 
 adoration, of clinging faith and sacred joy, the 
 very stimulus and comfort his own situation 
 requires. Doctrine and duty are translated 
 before his eyes into experience, and the tran- 
 script goes straight to his heart. Utterances 
 made thousands of years ago in the Cave of 
 Adullam or in the courts of the temple, are as 
 fresh and life-like to his apprehension as if they 
 originated but yesterday in his own land. If 
 this be the fact — and how can it for an instant 
 be doubted ? — in dealing with the Psalter we 
 are not at work upon the outposts, but in the 
 citadel of Revelation, at close quarters with the 
 very secret of its strength. Its acknowledged 
 excellence in this respect, its fidelity to the in- 
 tuitive instincts of enlightened souls, unmarred 
 by the excesses of superstition or enthusiasm, 
 require us to seek its origin higher than on the 
 plane of this earth. 
 
 What, then, is the Psalter? In the form in 
 which it stands in our Bibles — a form which can 
 
IN TROD UC TOR V. 1 3 
 
 be conclusively traced back to the middle of the 
 third century before Christ — it is a collection of 
 one hundred and fifty lyrics, marked by very 
 great differences among themselves, yet on the 
 other hand united by certain features which they 
 have in common. The differences are patent 
 on even a superficial inspection. For example, 
 in the matter of length they vary from one of 
 two sentences (cxvii.) to one of a hundred and 
 seventy-six (cxix.) ; and between these two 
 extremes there is a constant diversity, denoting 
 the absence of any prescribed pattern. The 
 authors, too, are various. Although the book 
 is commonly called the Psalms of David, yet he 
 is the recognized author of only seventy-three, 
 a little less than one-half of the whole. Still 
 the title is justly given, since he was probably 
 the composer of others, and the entire book 
 evidently took its characteristic features and 
 tone from him. More than fifty psalms are 
 anonymous, while twelve are assigned to Asaph, 
 eleven to the sons of Korah, two to Solomon, 
 one to Ethan, and one to Moses, the man of 
 God. The oldest known division of the collec- 
 tion is into Five Books, terminating respectively 
 with Pss. xli., Ixxii., Ixxxix., cvi., and cl. These 
 books are separated and distinguished from 
 
14 
 
 THE r SALTER. 
 
 each other by the doxologies with which they 
 severally conclude, by the greater or less use of 
 one or other of the divine names, and by a 
 general progress from doctrine and experience 
 in the First, through historical and didactic 
 utterances in the Second and Third, to a domi- 
 nant tone of praise and triumph in the Fourth 
 and Fifth. This ancient division suo-orests what 
 on other grounds seems a rational hypothesis, 
 that the collection as we have it is one that was 
 gradually made through a long course of time — 
 each book markinof a new accretion to the 
 original stock. For this reason it is not sur- 
 prising to find the composition of some lyrics 
 separated by a considerable interval from that 
 of others. The oldest is the one (xc.) ascribed 
 to Moses — an ascription which, although often 
 and severely attacked, can yet be successfully 
 vindicated. Others are by common consent 
 attributed to the period of the Exile or the 
 Restoration. Some writers have assigned cer- 
 tain Psalms to the Maccabees — a view in which 
 Calvin so far shared as to consider that Pss. xliv., 
 Ix., Ixxiv., and Ixxix. were composed during the 
 persecuting reign of Antiochus Epiphanes. But 
 it is not necessary to defend at length the 
 traditional view on this point, since even so 
 
IN TROD UC TOR V. 1 5 
 
 independent a thinker as Ewald, whose scholar- 
 ship and insight no one disputes, scouts the 
 Maccabean authorship as destitute of any ra- 
 tional grounds. Taking, then, the age of Mal- 
 achi as the time when the collection was com- 
 pleted, we have a body of literature whose 
 beginning is separated from its end by a thou- 
 sand years — a space more than half as long 
 again as that between Homer and Anacreon, 
 or between Chaucer and Tennyson. 
 
 But great as is the diversity of authorship 
 and date, equally great is that of tone and spirit. 
 All are by no means pitched in the same key. 
 Avoiding minute details, I may specify three 
 general divisions as indicating the variety of 
 feeling and utterance. One is the Pathetic, or 
 Mournful. A tradition as old as Origen gives 
 to seven (vi., xxxii., xxxvi., li., cii., cxxx., cxliii.) 
 the title of Penitential Psalms, but these are far 
 from exhausting the list of such as may fairly 
 be thus described. Indeed it is remarkable 
 how amply the literature of sorrow is repre- 
 sented in this book. No sufferer of any period, 
 whether from age or infirmity,\or bereavement, 
 or desertion, or treachery, or persecution, or 
 exile, or any form of spiritual perplexity or 
 darkness, fails to find an appropriate expres- 
 
1 6 THE PSALTER. 
 
 sion of his feelings. So vivid are these utter- 
 ances of the soul that no one can mistake them 
 for flights of fancy. They are, they must be, 
 the records of a real experience. In strong 
 contrast with the " hearse-like airs," as Bacon 
 calls them, are the Songs of Praise and Joy. 
 The themes here are very various ; a recent 
 deliverance from danger, a victory over national 
 foes, the downfall of a persecuting tyrant, the 
 glory of God expressed in His works, the same 
 glory shining out in providential interpositions, 
 the perfections of the Most High, and especially 
 the displays of His loving-kindness. Here, 
 again, is a fitting vehicle for the expression 
 of similar feelings in all ages and countries. 
 Thanksgiving and praise on whatever ground 
 have a pattern in these old Hebrew lyrics, 
 which leaves nothing to be desired. But what 
 is truly remarkable, a feature which occurs no- 
 where else that I know, sometimes both styles 
 are united in the same composition. The writer 
 begins in the deepest distress, a wail de proficn- 
 dis, but gradually, sometimes suddenly, passes 
 into a strain exactly opposite ; and the groans 
 and complaints of the first part are drowned in 
 the triumphant hallelujahs of the second (vi., 
 xiii., xxxi., etc.) But besides these impassioned 
 
IN TROD UCTOR Y. 1 7 
 
 Utterances, there is a class of didactic or even 
 gnomic compositions which are scarcely less in- 
 teresting or useful. These for the most part 
 set forth the character of the good man and the 
 bad, and the consequent happiness or misery 
 of their respective conditions, or the varied ex- 
 cellencies of the divine law, or the vanity of 
 human pursuits, or the duties of particular 
 classes of men. Modern precision has objected 
 to some of these as unsuited for lyrical pur- 
 poses, but they were certainly sung or cantil- 
 lated in the ancient Church, and the majority of 
 the Christian Church in all ages, has found its 
 account in cherishing didactic compositions as 
 an integral part of the service of song in the 
 house of the Lord. 
 
 But while the Psalms have the differences 
 which have been mentioned, and bear such 
 strong marks of individuality, there are several 
 features which belong to them in common, and 
 give to them a unity of character, which quite 
 forbids the thought that they are scattered and 
 random utterances accidentally or capriciously 
 gathered into a book. 
 
 First, they are poetical, all of them. Of 
 course not in the sense in which we apply that 
 
1 8 THE PSALTER. 
 
 term to the verse of the ancient classics, or to 
 that of any modern literature. The Hebrews 
 knew nothing of rhythm or rhyme. A fearful 
 amount of ingenuity and research has been 
 wasted in vain endeavors to find some regular 
 measures corresponding to the metres of the 
 western nations. Nor does there seem any 
 reason to suppose that the result would be dif- 
 ferent, did we know (as confessedly we do 
 not) the exact method of the ancient pronunci- 
 ation of the language. Metres have not been 
 discovered because they did not exist. Did they 
 exist, we may be sure that the penetration 
 which has unlocked the secrets of Hieroglyph- 
 ic, Cypriote, and Cuneiform inscriptions would 
 long since have shown the fact to the satisfac- 
 tion of all. As the case stands, there is no 
 more measured verse in the Hebrew Psalter 
 than there is in the authorized version of the 
 same. And we may well rejoice that it is so. 
 Were it otherwise, how greatly would the diffi- 
 culties of translation into other tongues be mul- 
 tiplied ! It is hard enough to convey the sense 
 of one language justly and gracefully into an- 
 other, but the task is far sorer when form as 
 well as substance has to be reproduced. Any 
 eood Greek scholar can qrive the full and exact 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 19 
 
 meaning- of a ringing chorus of yEschylus or 
 Sophocles, but not all combined can reproduce 
 in English the music of the harmonious num- 
 bers employed by the original poet. Our lit- 
 erature abounds in imitations, but they are im- 
 itations, and as much like the original as a wax 
 flower is to what it represents — as much, but no 
 more. There may be the perfection of mechan- 
 ism, but there is no life. On the contrary, the 
 poetical form of the Psalms can be perfect- 
 ly well represented in almost an)^ language. 
 There is a versified structure, but the versifica- 
 tion does not depend upon sounds or words or 
 accents, but upon things. Instead of being ver- 
 bal, it is real. The relation between the success- 
 ive lines of a Hebrew poem does not lie in the 
 harmony of the words, but in the harmony of 
 the ideas. Every poetical utterance of every 
 kind, long or short, literal or figurative, ani- 
 mated or calm, is made up of a series of bal- 
 anced sentences or propositions, each of which 
 corresponds in some way to the rest. This 
 feature, called Parallelism by Lowth, who, 
 though he by no means was its discoverer, yet 
 was its most skilful and successful expounder, 
 is the key to the entire structure. One clause 
 leads us always to expect another, which shall 
 
20 THE r SALTER. 
 
 cither repeat the sentiment of the first, or set 
 forth its opposite, or give a variation of the 
 theme. The ParalleHsms have been classified 
 and named by various writers, but minutiae on 
 this point are of no value. The one essential 
 thing is that the poetical form lies in the rela- 
 tion of the clauses or sentences, and necessarily 
 carries with it the thought. Hence the truth of 
 the remark so often made as to its unchange- 
 able character in all versions, however rudely 
 made. As Bishop Jebb says, " Hebrew poetry 
 is universal poetry, the poetry of all languages 
 and of all peoples ; the collocation of words is 
 primarily directed so as to secure the best pos- 
 sible announcement and discrimination of the 
 sense. Let, then, only a translator be literal, and 
 so far as the genius of the language will permit, 
 let him observe the original order of the words, 
 and he will infallibly put the reader in possession 
 of all, or nearly all, that the Hebrew text can 
 give to the best Hebrew scholar of the present 
 day." Of course there are linguistic peculiarities 
 which can not be reproduced in a modern tongue 
 — such as the use of archaic terms, the introduc- 
 tion of peculiar grammatical forms and termina- 
 tions, and, at times, the employment of words, 
 which suggest at once to a vernacular reader 
 
]XTROD UCTOR Y. 2 I 
 
 what could not be conveyed to another except 
 by a tedious periphrasis — as, for example, in 
 Isaiah Ix. i, we read, " The glory of the Lord 
 is risen upon thee." The version is faithful, 
 yet it does not convey to the English reader 
 what the original does to the Hebrew, viz., 
 that this glory would rise upon Zion with the 
 same majesty and beauty with which the sun 
 rises over the earth. But apart from these ex- 
 ceptions, every literal version of Hebrew poetry 
 in any tongue, gives to the reader a full and 
 faithful impression of its beauty, sublimity, and 
 force, whereas a bald prosaic rendering of the 
 Iliad or of the Divina Commedia, would make 
 one wonder where the far-famed glory of the 
 original had gone. 
 
 (2). But the Psalms are not only Poetical, 
 but also, as has been said, belong to that species 
 of poetry which is called Lyrical. The Hebrews 
 had no epic and no drama. The argument of 
 Ewald {Die Dichter des A. B., I. 69, seq.) to 
 show the existence of a theatre in the days of 
 David and Solomon, is a conspicuous failure, 
 which not even his profound insight and vast 
 learning could avoid. To call Job a tragedy and 
 Canticles a comedy, simply shocks common 
 sense. But the dramatic element, so far as con- 
 
22 THE PSALTER. 
 
 ccrns representation of character, and dialogue, 
 and refrain, and chorus, is not wanting even in the 
 shorter utterances of the Hebrew muse, because 
 they are for the most part pure lyrics, unques- 
 tionably the oldest form of poetry and the fruit- 
 ful germ of all others. It is as Ewald says, 
 " The daughter of the moment, of swiftly rising, 
 powerful feelings, of deep, stirring, and fiery 
 emotions of the soul by which the poet is alto- 
 gether carried away." It is a direct outpouring 
 of the heart, the result of an impulse springing 
 from the very foundations of our nature, to 
 express in words what powerfully stirs within. 
 But these words must in form correspond with 
 that which they express, and hence they take 
 the peculiar shape which we call poetic. The 
 singer sings, in the first instance at least, to 
 satisfy this inward pressure, and has no thought 
 or aim beyond his immediate subject. Hence 
 while his words take form, it is always form of 
 the simplest kind, parallel utterances, strophes, 
 refrains, occasional assonances, and the like, 
 never rhymes or measured syllables. The de- 
 velopment of the thought is varied by striking 
 images of all kinds, by numerous personifica- 
 tions of inanimate nature, by the introduction 
 of changing scenes and persons, unexpected 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 23 
 
 applications, sharp transitions, and the boldest 
 anthropomorphic representations of God and 
 divine things. Yet all bears the unmistakable 
 stamp of freshness and originality. Song never 
 deals with the abstract, but with the concrete. 
 It is personal and emotional. It starts from the 
 feelings, and it speaks to the feelings. It is 
 therefore intensely human. That element not 
 only lies upon the surface, but pervades warp 
 and woof of the whole. Hence always the 
 lyrics of a people or a period are the truest 
 expression of its character. When Lord Ma- 
 caulay was seeking the materials for his incom- 
 parable history, he made diligent search for 
 every popular ballad, for every dingy half-sheet, 
 as that which gave the very form and spirit of 
 the time. And he was right. Other forms of 
 utterance may be borrowed or imitated, but 
 song wells up from the heart, and indicates 
 unerringly what it is that stirs the interior 
 recesses of the soul. A genuine singer sings 
 not because he wants to sing, but because he 
 must. The passion swelling within demands 
 expression and will not be denied. 
 
 (3). Accordingly the Psalter is eminently 
 Hebraistic, or rather Palestinian, bearing in all 
 its parts the evidence of its origin. None of its 
 
24 THE PSALTER. 
 
 characteristic features came from without. Even 
 cultivated Egypt, where the seed of Abraham 
 accompHshed the slow transition from a family 
 to a nation, exerted no influence here. Learned 
 men have often tried to deduce the Mosaic 
 ritual and cultus from Egyptian memories and 
 traditions, but so far as I know, only one (De 
 Ronge, Revile Contemporaiiie, 1856,) has ever 
 dreamed of tracing Hebrew poetry to the land 
 of the Pharaohs. The very thought is absurd. 
 How could that rainless reo-ion with its one 
 river and its one monotonous plain from the 
 cataracts to the sea, suggest the boundless and 
 varied stock of images and expressions which 
 are found in the Psalms ? These in their com- 
 bination could come alone from such a land as 
 Palestine, with its hills and dales ; its fountains, 
 wells, and brooks ; its lakes and seas ; its deep 
 gorges ; its lofty precipices ; its snows and hail, 
 and ice, and storm, and whirlwind ; its orchards 
 and vines, and pastures, and grain fields, and 
 gardens ; its fragrant and gorgeous wild flowers ; 
 its dense forests, where birds sing among the 
 branches, and wild beasts crouch in their dens ; 
 its continual outlook upon the great sea on one 
 hand, and the great desert on the other. The 
 Holy Land is as distinctly marked by its natural 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 25 
 
 peculiarities as it is by its history and traditions. 
 Its physical geography is unlike that of any 
 other country on the face of the globe. No 
 where is there such a furrow on the earth's 
 surface as that made by the Jordan in its rapid 
 and tortuous course from the roots of Hermon 
 to the beautiful, yet awful gulf of Siddin. The 
 summit of Lebanon is a little short of the limit 
 of perpetual snow, while the Dead Sea is 1,300 
 feet below the ocean level ; and therefore be- 
 tween these limits are found the temperatures 
 of all zones and their productions ; the palm and 
 the sugar cane, and the cotton, and the fig, along 
 with the apple, the wheat, the barley, and the 
 grape. As Isaac Taylor says in a remarkable 
 chapter of his Spirit of the Hebrew Poetry 
 (London Ed., p. 72), " Palestine in the age of its 
 wealth was a samplar of the world ; it was a 
 museum country — many lands in one ; the tread 
 of the camel in two or three hours, may now 
 give the traveller a recollection of his own — 
 come whence he may, from any country between 
 
 the torrid zone and our northern latitudes 
 
 Thus it was that the Hebrew poet found always 
 near at hand those materials of his art which 
 the poets of other lands had to seek for in dis- 
 tant travel. Imagery, gay or grave, was around 
 
26 THE PSALTER. 
 
 him everywhere, and these materials included 
 contrasts the most extreme." 
 
 Yet while the tone and coloring are thus lo- 
 cal, while the range of allusion and the wide 
 diversity of natural symbols point unerringly to 
 a Palestinian origin, the moulding and charac- 
 teristic features come from the poet himself 
 His imagery bears the color and flavor of the 
 soil, but he handles it for his own purposes. 
 He possesses and is not possessed by his mate- 
 rials. Matter is constantly subordinated to 
 spirit, and nature to God. 
 
 (4). Once more, the Psalter is absolutely trtce. 
 This needs to be emphasized, because there are 
 those who think that its poetical character is 
 inconsistent with trustworthiness. A maxim in 
 universal use treats truth and poetry as if they 
 were irreconcilable opposites. And Goethe 
 wrote an autobiography which he entitled " Po- 
 etry and Truth : from my own Life," in which 
 the contrast is very evident. The proportions 
 of reality and romance are like those of " the 
 half pennyworth of bread and the intolerable 
 deal of sack," in Falstaff's bills. Real incidents 
 are poetically treated, i. e., in such a way as to 
 give a very different impression from that which 
 an actual spectator of them would receive. It 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 27 
 
 is quite otherwise with tlie Psahiis. In them 
 we have an exempHfication of the statement 
 that poetry is essential truth alHed with feeling-, 
 with imagination, with appropriate and vigorous 
 expression. It is truth not argued, inferred, or 
 proved, but truth seen and felt — truth filling' the 
 soul and then pouring itself forth as a fountain 
 bursts out of the earth. It is concerned, not 
 with the accidental and temporary, but with the 
 necessary and eternal, with the essence of things 
 rather than details. Hence the profound Aris- 
 totle, himself anything but a poet, affirmed 
 {De Poet, ix.) " that poetry is a more philosoph- 
 ical and a more serious thing than history 
 itself." For history treats of ra /ca^'sKacrroi', what 
 is individual, and may or may not be repeated, 
 but poetry of ra KaO'oXov, what is universal, true 
 in all places and for all time. Hence the poet, 
 according to his name, is the maker. He does 
 not copy, but creates. His work is the ideal em- 
 bodied in and shininof throuQ-h the real. It 
 gains at first hand, and as if by inspiration, what 
 other writers and speakers reach by slow and 
 tentative processes. 
 
 In consequence of the subjective nature of 
 lyric poetry, and the intense mental action it ini'^ 
 plies, there is, one can not deny, a tendency to 
 
28 THE PSALTER. 
 
 excess, to extravagance in thought and utterance. 
 Yet those who are confessedly the greatest of 
 epic poets — Homer, Dante, Milton — are marked 
 by their truth and simplicity, by a calm repose, 
 a sustained grandeur, resulting from conscious 
 power. The same result is reached in the 
 Psalter, but in another way. The flame of 
 emotion glows through and through its utter- 
 ances, transfiguring and ennobling everything, 
 but it is always true to nature when nature is 
 truest to virtue and to wisdom. The singer's ob- 
 ject is not to win admiration by the splendor of 
 genius, not to charm a listening multitude by 
 tricks of invention or graces of song, but to 
 please and honor the God of truth by articulat- 
 ing what He himself inspired, or by giving 
 form and shape to the most real and living ex- 
 periences of the human soul. Hence the ab- 
 sence of all that is unsuitable in theme or treat- 
 ment. No erotic songs, no poeans to a national 
 hero, no brilliant ideals of humanity, no meretri- 
 cious ornament, nothing to dazzle, bewilder, or 
 delude, nothing unreal or sophisticated, but 
 everything stamped all the way through with 
 the tokens of absolute truth. Take, for exam- 
 ple, the One Hundred and F'ourth Psalm, a divine 
 ode of creation, a lyrical poem in which, as 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 29 
 
 Humboldt says, "we are astonished to find in 
 such hmited compass, the whole univ^erse — the 
 heavens and the earth sketched with a few bold 
 touches. The contrast of the labor of man 
 with the animal life of nature, and the image of 
 omnipresent, invisible Power renewing the earth 
 at will or sweeping it of its inhabitants, is a 
 grand and solemn poetical creation." The sa- 
 cred songster follows the first chapter of Gene- 
 sis. What Moses represents in narrative prose, 
 the psalmist sets forth in a series of living pic- 
 tures, which, for depth of color, brightness, 
 tenderness, beauty, and grace, have never been 
 surpassed. It is a continuous series of vivid 
 images — Jehovah clothed with light as a gar- 
 ment, making the clouds His chariot, and moving 
 upon the wings of the wind ; the wild ass 
 quenching his thirst at streams which God pro- 
 vides ; the birds singing among the branches ; 
 the wild QToats findino- a home in inaccessible 
 crags ; the young lions seeking from God their 
 prey ; the sea with the same fulness of life — 
 its depths peopled with monsters, and its sur- 
 face studded with sails ; and then, in fine con- 
 trast with this animal activity of lower creatures, 
 the even tenor and calm dignity of man's daily 
 life of labor. Yet with all this exuberant energy 
 
20 THE PSALTER. 
 
 and fertile play of the imag-ination, there is not 
 a single false note, not a solitary departure from 
 the purest and highest truth. On the contrary, 
 even the early record in Genesis, so remarkable 
 as to have attracted the praise of the heathen 
 Longinus, does not set forth so strikingly the 
 infinite greatness, the order, the life of the uni- 
 verse, and its absolute dependence upon God. 
 The same thing is vividly illustrated in an- 
 other and very different psalm, the Eighteenth. 
 This is a grateful retrospect by David of his 
 peculiar career down to the time when he sat 
 upon the throne of all Israel, and saw his ene- 
 mies on all sides subdued. He begins with a 
 series of lively figures denoting what God had 
 been to him during his pilgrimage — his rock (of 
 strength), his fortress, his deliverer, his rock 
 (of refuge), his shield, his horn of salvation, his 
 high tower. Then after setting forth the des- 
 perate extremities in which he had fallen, he 
 describes his deliverance. But how ? Not by 
 a minute recital of his conflict with the lion and 
 the bear, or with Goliath, his escape from the 
 spear of Saul or the bows of the Philistines, his 
 refuofe at Adullam or Enofedi, the defeat of the 
 men of Keilah, or the means by which the hot 
 pursuit of the fugitive was again and again 
 
IN TROD UCTOR V. 
 
 31 
 
 checked just at the point of success. No ; he 
 masses all together, as if performed at one time 
 and by one act, and pictures the whole as a 
 magnilicent Theophany. God comes to the 
 rescue as He came of old to Sinai, and all nature 
 is moved at His coming. The earth quakes and 
 even mountains reel. Amid vaporous clouds 
 the blaze of liorhtninof is seen. Then the 
 heavens seem to sink toward the earth, and 
 amid the increasing gloom, behold, Jehovah 
 riding upon the Cherubim, flying upon the 
 wings of the wind. Darkness is His pavilion 
 round about Him, but the brightness of His pres- 
 ence dissipates the gathering clouds and the 
 full fury of the storm bursts forth. Thunder 
 and lightning, hailstones and coals of fire, 
 scatter all foes, and lay bare the depths of the 
 sea and the very foundations of the world. The 
 consequence is the swift and certain deliverance 
 of David. Now not a word of this is to be 
 taken literally. The whole is a grand poetic 
 picture, transferring to an individual experience 
 the memorable display at the giving of the law. 
 At no time did David see, except in imagination, 
 the burning coals, the flying Cherub, the bared 
 sea-bottom. Yet he has truly expressed the 
 fact in relation to the marvellous Providence 
 
32 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 which watched over his course from the sheep- 
 fold to the throne. The actual care of God for 
 His servant was as real and great, and effective 
 as it could have been, had He came down in 
 person to manifest it. The lofty lyric is there- 
 fore true. It is not mere poetic license or 
 fancy's exaggeration, but the vivid lyric expres- 
 sion of what occurred, not once only, nor twice, 
 but over and over during a lifetime. 
 
 Now it is just this truth of the Psalter which 
 is the foundation of the argument I have under- 
 taken to present. That argument is strictly a 
 fo7'tiori. Leaving out of view the prose of 
 Scripture, its history, its dogma, its ethics, its 
 prophecy, whatever belongs to the discursive 
 faculty, and treating only of one of those por- 
 tions in which imagination and feeling predom- 
 inate, the aim is to show that here where 
 exaggeration and error might most of all be 
 looked for, where tongue and pen run riot, 
 where it is common to excuse aberrations from 
 propriety on the ground that the poet must 
 needs have license, just here there is no need 
 for any abatement or qualification whatever. 
 Wide as is the range of the Hebrew harp, 
 varied as are its tones, intense as is its action, and 
 spontaneous as is its movement, yet throughout 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 33 
 
 it never teaches, nor suggests, nor implies what 
 is wronof in doctrine or in morals. In the Hve- 
 Hest play of the imagination, in the most soar- 
 ing flight of dithyrambic fervor, there is a some- 
 thing which keeps the singer from ever trans- 
 gressing the bounds of reason and truth. Not 
 that the Hebrew poets move in fetters or reel 
 off their strains from a machine. They are the 
 freest of all writers. The whole form and 
 color of their utterances proceed from their 
 personal character and circumstances, and ex- 
 press the direct action of a human soul moved 
 from within and not from without. Yet when 
 subjected to a rigid scrutiny, these lyric out- 
 bursts are found to have a correctness and a 
 purity, the like of which has never been seen 
 anywhere else since the world began. The 
 argument is that if this be the fact, then only a 
 supernatural, a divine influence can account for 
 it. And if the songs of sacred Scripture be 
 doctrinally and morally correct, much more 
 must be its prosaic utterances. 
 2* 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD IN THE PSALTER. 
 
LECTURE IL 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 
 
 IMPORTANCE OF THIS POINT — THE PSALTER TEACHES THAT 
 GOD IS ONE — DISTINCT FROM THE WORLD — OF INFINITE 
 PERFECTION — HOLY — CONTRAST OF THE GRECIAN HYMNS 
 — OF THE VEDAS — OF THE AVESTAN — NOT A QUESTION OF 
 RACE— CONCLUSION. 
 
 THE history of the Christian Church is a his- 
 tory of the development of Christian doc- 
 trine. Of development in the natural sense, and 
 not in the non-natural sense in which the word 
 was employed by Dr. Newman in his attempt to 
 justify on this ground all the novelties of modern 
 and mediaeval Popery. The whole mind and 
 will of God for human salvation was, as we be- 
 lieve and are sure, recorded in the Scripture, 
 and as such admits of neither diminution nor 
 increase. But the full meaning and explication 
 of particular doctrines was not understood and 
 formulated until, in course of time, reflection, ex- 
 perience, and especially the sharp attacks of er- 
 rorists, enabled the Church to draw the line ac- 
 curately between the truth and that which falsely 
 
 (37) 
 
38 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 assumed to take its place. Thus was formed 
 what is justly called the historical faith of the 
 Church. Now it is notable that the first article 
 of the common faith which was thus put under 
 fire, and subjected to keen and unsparing criti- 
 cism, was the doctrine of God. The Ebionite, 
 Gnostic, Manichsean, Arian, ApoUinarian, Sabel- 
 lian, and Tritheistic heresies, all bear witness to 
 the severity of the conflict. Nor is it at all won- 
 derful that strife should begin just here. The 
 object of worship is the first point in all re- 
 ligion. This decides everything else, in the 
 sense that if a man be wrong here, he will be 
 so throughout. If he believe the Deity to 
 be impersonal, or identified with the world, or 
 more than one, or without providence, or lim- 
 ited, or partial, or immoral, all his other beliefs 
 will be modified accordingly. The stream can 
 not rise higher than its fountain, nor can the 
 worshipper be better than the Being whom he 
 worships. 
 
 I propose in this lecture to consider what is 
 plainly taught or necessarily implied in the 
 Psalms respecting the being, character, and per- 
 fections of God, and then to compare it with the 
 views given in other sacred anthologies, and 
 from the comparison draw such inferences as 
 
THE DOCTRIXE OF GOD. 
 
 39 
 
 are fairly deducible. This course is the more 
 interesting and suggestive, because it does not 
 compare creed with creed, or law with law ; 
 does not take up abstract formularies, carefully 
 prepared and guarded, but deals with the actual 
 workings of the religious principle, and shows 
 how men, under the deepest excitements of 
 feeling, conceived and represented Him whom 
 they call God ; so that we learn not only what 
 they professed, but what they actually believed, 
 what really entered into and moulded life and 
 character, 
 
 (i). The Psalter knows of only one God. A 
 great variety of names is applied to Him, but it 
 is always one and the same Being that is meant. 
 Some of these names are plural in form, and 
 seem to suggest a plurality of persons in one 
 substance — a suggestion which is further con- 
 firmed by the language of the Second Psalm 
 and the One Hundred and Tenth ; but however 
 that may be, or whatever explanation of these 
 peculiarities may be adopted, none can ques- 
 tion that the unity of the Divine Essence is 
 maintained throughout the entire book. Men- 
 tion is indeed made of other gods, but never in 
 the way of recognizing them as having a real 
 existence, but as subsisting only in the vain 
 
.Q THE PSALTER. 
 
 imaginations of their worshippers. Instead of 
 being considered as actual rivals, they are call- 
 ed false gods, idol gods, no gods. It is true 
 we find no such formal and stately assertions of 
 the divine unity as are given by Moses : " The 
 Lord our God is one Lord " (Deuteronomy vi. 
 4) ; or Hezekiah, " Thou art the God, even thou 
 alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth " (2 
 Kings xix. 15) ; or Isaiah, " I am the Lord, and 
 there is no God besides me" (xlv. 6) ; but it is a 
 stronger testimony when we find all the utter- 
 ances of deep emotion, whether glad or sor- 
 rowful, implying, as if unconsciously, or as if it 
 were a matter about which no dispute could 
 exist, that the object of worship is One. No 
 hint is given either of Dualism or Polytheism, 
 although the writers were just as much tempted 
 as any of their neighbors on the East or the 
 West to fall back on these plausible, biit super- 
 ficial, methods of escaping from the difficulties 
 met in understanding the moral government of 
 the world. But while the Hebrew Lyrics main- 
 tain thus clearly One God, they also represent 
 Him throughout as — 
 
 (2). Distinct from the world. Pantheism is 
 the oldest and at the same time the youngest 
 of religious errors. Its origin is sought among 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 4 1 
 
 the most ancient traditions of the race, and yet 
 to-day it is professed by not a few, even 
 under the broad blaze of the Christian Revela- 
 tion. There appears to be something strangely 
 attractive in the conception of one eternal sub- 
 stance of which all that appears from age to 
 age is only a temporary modification. Men do 
 not like either the name or the fact of being 
 atheists, and they take refuge from the disa- 
 greeable necessity in a scheme of thought which 
 identifies God and the universe ; and yet there 
 is no one but knows that to make everything 
 God, and to say that there is no God, practically 
 amounts to the same thing. All that is useful 
 in Theism is equally done away in both cases. 
 Yet ancient and widespread and enticing as 
 this error is, there is not the least trace of it in 
 the Psalms. They have much to say of God 
 and much to say of His works, but the two are 
 never represented as necessary and constituent 
 parts of one whole. On the contrary, they are 
 sharply distinguished. God, the personal God, 
 is Maker and Ruler, while men and things are 
 the product of His creative hand. " He spake, 
 and it was done ; He commanded, and it stood 
 fast " (xxxiii. 9). There are several of what 
 might be called Psalms of Nature, in which there 
 
42 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 is a detailed description of natural objects ; but 
 never is there even a trace of pantheistic thought 
 or expression. Sun and moon, and the stars of 
 light, dragons and all deeps, mountains and all 
 hills, fruitful trees and all cedars, beasts and all 
 cattle, creeping things and flying fowl — in short, 
 the heavens and the earth, and whatever they 
 contain, all, all are creatures of the divine power. 
 "Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did He in 
 heaven, and in earth, in the seas, and all depths " 
 (cxxxv. 6). The sacred writers are familiar 
 with all the grand or beautiful aspects of the 
 external world which in every age have been 
 the poet's storehouse of images and of senti- 
 ment ; but we never find anything like the quasi- 
 independence of nature which is disagreeably 
 prominent in modern poets, such as Words- 
 worth and Bryant. One of the most admired 
 productions of the former is the well-known 
 Tintern Abbey. Who does not remember the 
 fine passage beginning, — 
 
 For I have learned 
 To look on nature, not as in the hour 
 Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes 
 The still sad music of humanity, 
 Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power 
 To chasten and subdue. 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 
 
 43 
 
 The poet describes with wonderful strength 
 and beauty the influence of external nature upon 
 the human heart, showing-, as does the whole 
 piece, his imaginative force, his spiritual insight, 
 and his power of vivid characterization. " His 
 thoughts are fresh and have the dew on them." 
 Yet at the close he outrages all propriety in 
 saying that he is 
 
 Well pleased to recognize 
 In nature, and the language of the sense. 
 The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
 The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
 Of all my moral being. 
 
 For this is simply to make nature take the 
 place of God to the soul. The poet confounds 
 the soft sensations produced by the beauties of 
 the world of sense, with the moral emotions 
 which the thought of the good God working in 
 them produces. It is every way desirable to 
 " see into the life of things," and to be able to 
 obtain even from the meanest flower that blows 
 "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," 
 but it is not at all necessary to call or consider 
 all the emotions awakened by nature, piety. 
 This is a perilous confusion of things that differ. 
 Robertson of Brighton vindicates this passage 
 
44 
 
 THE F SALTER. 
 
 from the charge of Pantheism by referring- to 
 other poems of the author tending in a directly 
 opposite direction, which, of course, are to be 
 taken into account in estimating his position. 
 But in the Psalter there is no need of balancing 
 one portion against another. The Hebrew 
 singers looked upon the earth's fair variety of 
 things with as much kindling imagination and 
 reflective insight as any poet of ancient India or 
 modern England ; but never for an instant, or 
 under any circumstances, did they use language 
 which could suggest that they identified the 
 world and its Maker, but just the contrary. For 
 example, in the magnificent storm described in 
 Ps. xxix, which, as Delitzsch says, begins with 
 a gloria i7t excelsis, and ends in 2, pax in terris ; 
 every feature — the gathering fury of the ele- 
 ments, the peal of thunder, the flash of the 
 lightning, the crashing cedars, and the quaking 
 mountains — is ascribed directly to the Lord who 
 sits as King forever, and who, controlling the 
 wildest uproar of earth, gives to His people both 
 strength and peace. 
 
 The works of the American writer referred 
 to contain an exquisite poem, entitled Thana- 
 topsis, written at the age of eighteen, and per- 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 
 
 45 
 
 haps unsurpassed by anything- produced in the 
 long course of the author's after years. It be- 
 gins,— 
 
 To Him who in the love of nature holds 
 Communion with her visible forms, she speaks 
 A various language ; 
 
 and it proceeds to interpret that language under 
 varying circumstances, especially in reference to 
 the end of life. Yet even the name of God 
 does not once occur. The author was, we 
 know, as he still is, a Christian, yet his verse 
 might have been written by a firm believer in 
 Spinoza or Hegel. I am not finding fault with 
 the poem. Its perfect rhythm, its unity, its sus- 
 tained thought, its felicities of allusion and ex- 
 pression disarm criticism. And it must be ad- 
 mitted that in other efforts of Mr. Bryant's 
 muse, such as the noble Forest Hymn, the the- 
 istic recognition is as distinct as any one could 
 desire. But the characteristic of the Psalter is 
 that there are no exceptions to its tone. It 
 holds firmly to the everlasting distinction be- 
 tween the universe and its Creator. All nature 
 IS but the expression of God's glory, and it al- 
 ways points to something above and beyond 
 itself Nor is there a line inconsistent with the 
 lofty utterance at the close of Psalm cii., — 
 
46 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 Of old hast Thou laid the foundation of the earth. 
 
 And the heavens are the work of Thy hands ; 
 
 They shall perish, but Thou remainest, 
 
 Yea, all of them shall wax old as a garment, 
 
 As a vesture shalt Thou change them, and they shall 
 
 be changed ; 
 But Thou art the same. 
 And Thy years shall have no end. 
 
 (3). The God of the Psalter is not only God 
 alone, and distinct from the world, but possess- 
 ed of infinite attributes. These are sometimes 
 formally stated, at others quietly assumed as 
 the basis of prayer, praise, or devout medita- 
 tion. We, of course, are familiar with the con- 
 ception of God as the infinite Spirit in whom all 
 excellence inheres. But the glory of the Psalm- 
 ists is that, writing when and where they did, 
 they made no mistakes upon the subject. 
 Neither tradition, nor philosophy, nor concep- 
 tions borrowed from their neighbors, ever led 
 them to any unworthy representations of the 
 object of worship. Take, for example, the first 
 attribute of Deity which suggests itself to man, 
 that of Power. If God be distinct from the 
 world, then either He made the world, or, what 
 seems to be the natural outcome of the Devel- 
 opment Theory when pushed to its legitimate 
 results, the world made God. The Psalmists 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 47 
 
 have no hesitation here. To them God is 
 Ti"'b3!;, the most High, and i^p, the Ahnighty. To 
 Him none on earth, none in heaven are to be 
 compared. Strong is His hand, high is His 
 right hand. The heavens are His, the earth 
 also is His ; as for the world and the fulness 
 thereof, He has founded them (Ixxxix.) He sits 
 serene upon the flood, yea. He sits as King for- 
 ever. The power of men, of all creatures, is 
 necessarily limited. We must use means to ac- 
 complish our ends, and patiently contrive expe- 
 dients to make nature subservient to our pur- 
 poses. But God wills, and it is done. He ac- 
 complishes without effort whatever seems good 
 to Him. As the Thirty-third Psalm says, 
 " By the word of the Lord were the heavens 
 made ; and all the host of them by the breath 
 of His mouth." The idea of creation as wrouo-ht 
 
 o 
 
 either by necessity or by law never seems to 
 have occurred to the Hebrew singers. All 
 that is seen is due to One Supreme Personal 
 Will. " Our God is in the heavens ; He hath 
 done whatsoever He pleased " (cxv. 3). 
 
 So also of God's Eternity. There is no at- 
 tempt at a philosophical explanation of timeless 
 existence, but a simple distinct assertion that 
 the Lord is exalted above all the limitations of 
 
48 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 time. This indeed is implied in the peculiar, 
 revealed, covenant name, Jehovah — I am. 
 
 The sublime thought of self-existence in- 
 volves the similar thought of eternity. But the 
 Psalter affirms the truth in direct words : 
 
 Before the mountains were brought forth, 
 
 Or ever Thou gavest birth to the earth and the world. 
 
 Even from everlasting to everlasting Thou art God, 
 
 A thousand years in Thy sight 
 
 Are but as yesterday when it passeth. 
 
 And as a watch in the night. — (xc). 
 
 He, therefore, is without beginning of days 
 or end of years. He is. He always has been, 
 He always will be. With Him there is no dis- 
 tinction between the past, the present, and the 
 future. "A thousand years are in Thy sight 
 as yesterday when it is passed." With Him 
 duration is an eternal now. But this thouQfht 
 is uttered not as a mere sentiment, but in liv- 
 ing contrast with man's brief, shifting, troubled 
 years, and as an ever-enduring support un- 
 der the consciousness of human sin and frailty. 
 For which reason the lofty and plaintive Psalm 
 I have quoted is read to-day at a Christian 
 funeral with the same propriety and force as 
 when three thousand years ago men first turned 
 in their sorrow to the Eternal God as a Refucre. 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD 
 
 49 
 
 In like manner are we taught respecting 
 God's immensity. He is infinite in relation to 
 space just as He is in relation to time. He is 
 equally present with all His creatures, at all 
 times and in all places. No explanation of the 
 truth is given or attempted, but the fact is set 
 forth with wonderful power and beauty. 
 
 Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit? 
 
 Or whifher shall I flee from Thy presence? 
 
 If I ascend into heaven. Thou art there:; 
 
 If I make my "bed in hell, behold Thou art there. 
 
 If 1 take the wings of the morning, 
 
 And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; 
 
 Even there shall Thy hand lead me, 
 
 And Thy right hand shall hold me. — (cxxxix). 
 
 It is true, Calvin says that this passage is 
 wrongly applied to prove the infinite nature of 
 God, for the writer is not concerned with meta- 
 physical conceptions, but with the practical 
 truth, that by no change of place or circum- 
 stance can man escape from the eye of God. 
 Undoubtedly the immediate aim is what the great 
 Reformer states, but in reachlRg this the Psalm- 
 ist does assert the divine omnipresence, not 
 theoretically, but as an actual fact. And the 
 way in which he does it shows only the more 
 vividly that he does not hold it as a mere ab- 
 3 
 
50 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 stract dogma, but as a vital truth, powerfully 
 influencing one's heart and life. As God acts 
 everywhere, so is He present everywhere. 
 Spiritual, without form, and therefore invisible. 
 He is present with every blade of grass, every 
 fish of the sea or bird of the air, with every 
 thought of man's heart, with every angel, fallen 
 or elect, with every star in the firmament, with 
 all the works of His hands throughout illimita- 
 ble space. And as with His presence, so with 
 His knowledge. It is without bounds. Here 
 again we find none of the speculations with 
 which theologians and scholars have wearied 
 themselves in all ages, but simple unambiguous 
 statements, which convey the truth distinctly to 
 the mind of the most unlettered. Indeed, so 
 far from attempting to explain the truth, the 
 writers confess their inability to comprehend it. 
 As we see in the opening of the fine Psalm 
 already quoted. 
 
 O Lord, Thou hast searched me and known me. 
 
 Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising ; 
 
 Thou understandest my thought afar off. 
 
 Thou compassest my path and my lying down, 
 
 And art acquainted with all my ways. 
 
 For there is not a word in my tongue. 
 
 But lo, O Lord, Thou knowest it altogether. 
 
 Is it any wonder that after this statement of 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 
 
 51 
 
 God's exhaustive knowledge, the Psalmist 
 should add, "Such knowledge is too wonderful 
 for me ; it is high, I cannot attain unto it." 
 How can the finite overtake the infinite ? Still 
 we can take in and feel the preciousness of the 
 truth that our God is one whose knowledge ex- 
 tends to all the past and all the future, and so 
 can be neither increased nor diminished ; to 
 whom the darkness and the light are alike ; who 
 knows our thouohts even better than we do 
 ourselves, and who is, therefore, absolutely per- 
 fect. 
 
 (4). But while the book is thus full and clear 
 upon the natural attributes of the Most High, 
 it is not less, but rather more, distinct and express 
 upon His Moral Perfections. The sum of these 
 is set forth in one word, the frequency and em- 
 phasis of which in the Psalms separates them 
 widely from any other so-called Sacred Anthol- 
 ogy which the world contains. This is Holi- 
 ness, which is set forth as the peculiar and dif- 
 ferentiating characteristic of Jehovah. 
 
 Thou art holy, 
 
 O Thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel. — (xxii. 3). 
 
 Unto Thee will I sing with the harp, 
 
 O Thou Holy One of Israel ! — (Ixxi. 22). 
 
 Exalt the Lord our God, 
 
52 THE PSALTER. 
 
 And worship at His holy hill, 
 
 For He is Holy. — (xcix. 9). 
 
 Holy and reverend is His name. — (cxi. 9). 
 
 This term denotes entire freedom from moral 
 evil of any and every kind. It is not an excel- 
 lence in any particular direction, but absolute 
 completeness, and as such it is ascribed to God 
 in the most exclusive terms. Evil can not dwell 
 with Him, the foolish shall not stand in His 
 sight. The utterance of Bildad (Jobxxv. 5) on 
 this subject is as true as it is poetical, " Behold 
 even to the moon, and it shineth not ; yea, the 
 stars are not pure in His sight." All creatures, 
 even the best, the angels who stand nearest the 
 throne, are mutable in their own nature and 
 limitted in their capacities. Holiness in them 
 is but an accident or a quality, but in God it is 
 the very substance of His nature. He is as 
 necessarily holy as He is necessarily God. 
 
 This is the fair implication from the language 
 of the sacred poets. And when we look into 
 the peculiar forms in which this essential glory 
 of the divine nature is manifested, the same 
 perfection is to be seen. The Psalmists do not 
 ascribe to God infinite purity in gross, and then 
 take it away in detail. Their teaching is one 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 53 
 
 and the same throughout. Take, c. g., the 
 primary conception which we have of the Su- 
 preme Ruler, viz., that He is just. The doc- 
 trine is that in all His dealings with His rational 
 creatures He is righteous. His laws are holy 
 and just and good, and these laws are faithfully 
 administered. There is no partiality nor fickle- 
 ness. God renders to every man according to 
 his works — never condemning the innocent, 
 never clearing the guilty. Now, while it is true 
 that this view must be entertained by any ra- 
 tional theist — for an unjust Supreme God is an 
 unthinkable idea — yet as we all know by obser 
 vation, if not by experience, there are many 
 thinofs in this world which seem to militate 
 against the equity of the governor of the world. 
 The prosperity of wicked men, and the afflic- 
 tions of the righteous, apparently, at least, pre- 
 sent a constant impeachment of the divine jus- 
 tice. This mournful contrast has always existed 
 as it does now ; and it was distinctly recognized 
 by the Psalmists. Nay, they present it not un- 
 frequently with the greatest vividness, and often 
 in the way of earnest complaint. It is the bur- 
 den of many a prayer, the source of many a 
 painful perplexity. God's providence seems to 
 run counter to His repeated promises, and the 
 
54 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 pious sufferer is tempted to say, "Verily, in 
 vain have I cleansed my heart, and washed my 
 hands in innocency." But never for one mo- 
 ment is the rectitude of Jehovah questioned. 
 In the darkest hour, when flesh and heart fail, 
 the soul still holds firmly that the Judge of all 
 the earth must do riofht. Clouds and darkness 
 may be around Him, but righteousness and judg- 
 ment are the habitation of His throne (xcvii. 2). 
 Nor is the divine righteousness a mere name, 
 but a reality. Jehovah is the God to whom 
 vengeance belongeth. He is angry with the 
 wicked every day. A fire goeth before Him 
 and burnetii up His enemies round about 
 (xcvii.) He teareth in pieces, and there is none 
 to deliver (1. 22). No combinations succeed 
 against Him ; " He that sitteth in the heavens 
 shall laugh." Nor do any outward professions 
 of rectitude avail ; " Unto the wicked He saith, 
 What hast thou to do to declare my statutes, 
 or that thou shouldst take my covenant in thy 
 mouth ? " And yet side by side with these 
 assertions of God's strict punitive righteous- 
 ness are the most ample and express statements 
 of His erace. 
 
 t> 
 
 How excellent is Thy loving-kindness, O Lord ! — (xxxvi. 7). 
 The Lord is good, His mercy is everlasting — (c. 3). 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 55 
 
 The Lord is merciful and gracious, 
 
 Slow to anger and plenteous in kindness. 
 
 He will not always chide, 
 
 Neither keep His anger forever. 
 
 For as the heaven is high above the earth. 
 
 So great is His mercy toward them that fear Him. 
 
 — (ciii. 8, 9, II). 
 
 Every reader is familiar with these amiable 
 and winning" representations of God. They 
 run through and through the book. And they 
 concur with the sterner utterances before cited 
 to round out one absolutely complete concep- 
 tion — a God, holy yet gracious, just yet merci- 
 ful. Neither attribute is sacrificed to the other. 
 No one-sidedness is to be seen. In the same 
 collection we have a psalm like the Fiftieth, de- 
 scribing in sublime strains Jehovah's universal 
 judgment, and another, like the One Hundred 
 and Thirty-sixth, where the refrain of every 
 verse is, ''His mercy endureth forever." The 
 precise theoretical reconciliation of these per- 
 fections could not, of course, be known to the 
 ancient saints as it is to us who live since the 
 Incarnation of the Son of God ; but the pecul- 
 iarity of the case is that, without the flood of 
 light shed by the Gospel, these sacred poets, 
 writing at such different times and places, yet 
 held the balance so even, and set forth an idea 
 
56 
 
 THE PSALTER' 
 
 of God as men's ruler and judge so well-poised 
 and adequate, that even the New Testament 
 does not alter the lines. The best thoughts of 
 the best Christians toward God are still fully 
 and justly expressed in the words of the old 
 Psalmists — and that not coldly nor dogmatically, 
 but with the energy and fire with which the 
 soul is stirred when it comes to a hand to hand 
 grapple with the great problems of human life 
 and human destiny. 
 
 Such, then, is the theology of the Psalter. 
 No mysticism, no vagueness, no confusion, but 
 the clear conception of one infinite and eternal 
 Being ; a personal Spirit, who, instead of being 
 of the world or identified with it, is its Maker 
 and Ruler ; who has all conceivable perfections ; 
 who does according to His own will, at all times 
 and in all places ; but who although thus exalted 
 makes Himself known to His creatures, directs 
 their service, accepts their praises, hears their 
 prayers, counts their tears, soothes their sor- 
 rows, forgives their sins, quickens their souls, 
 and is their refuge, counsellor, friend and father. 
 And all this, not drawn into a creed, nor 
 arranged in logical formulas, but wrought into 
 the experience and expressed in the words of 
 men under the deepest excitements of feeling. 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 
 
 57 
 
 How came they to give utterance to such a 
 noble and consistent conception of God ? Their 
 case stands alone in all the records of ancient 
 times. Other races and nations indeed had 
 their sacred poems, their hymns to the gods, 
 their expression in lyrical form of religious and 
 devotional feeling, but nothing comparable to the 
 strains of David, or Heman, or Asaph. Take 
 the ancient Greeks. We have a small collec- 
 tion of Hymns to the Gods, popularly known as 
 the Minor Homeric Poems, and once supposed 
 to be the work of Homer, but now known to 
 be of a different authorship. The first remark 
 to be made of them is that they are polytheistic. 
 All are addressed to different orods and eod- 
 desses, and although they are exquisite produc- 
 tions of the muse, abounding in tenderness, or 
 grace, or humor, and expressed with all the 
 curious felicity of phrase natural to the best 
 poets of Hellas, they have no claim whatever 
 to consideration as utterances of serious devo- 
 tion. Instead of offering devout w^orship to one 
 supreme and infinitely exalted, yet gracious 
 Being, they celebrate the power, the wisdom, 
 the adventures, the amours, the pranks of 
 Apollo, or Mercury, or Venus, or Ceres, or 
 Mars, or Bacchus. . The hymn to Aphrodite or 
 
58 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 Venus recounts at leno^th her liaison with An- 
 chises, and although an English editor speaks 
 of its instinctive propriety of manner and words, 
 yet I am quite sure it could not be read before 
 any such audience as I now address, much less 
 a promiscuous assembly. So the hymn to Mer- 
 cury is simply a diverting recital of the exploits 
 of this little born rogue among the dwellers of 
 Olympus — how he stole the oxen of the sun, and 
 what enormous lies he told to Apollo and to= Ju- 
 piter when charged with his offence. The 
 nearest resemblance to it in modern literature, 
 that I know of, is Moliere's Comedy, entitled 
 Lcs Foiirbcries de Scapin. And although the 
 hymns to the Delian and the Pythian Apollo 
 do not shock morality so grossly, yet with all 
 their poetic fire and beauty, they display a 
 coarseness of thought and feeling, and an ex- 
 ercise of low earth-born tempers in the immor- 
 tals, wholly incompatible with the reverence 
 which we instinctively feel to be due to any 
 object of worship. Poetic inspiration is found 
 abundantly in these Homeric hymns, but of any 
 real divine theopneusty there is not a trace. 
 The same thing is true of the Theogony of 
 Hesiod, and the hymns of Callimachus. The 
 whole atmosphere of these poems is as differ- 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. go 
 
 ent from that of the Psalter, as jest is from 
 earnest. There is abundance of poetic feehng, 
 of fine imagination, of dehcate allusion, and be- 
 witching- description, but not a solitary ex- 
 pression of humilicy, faith, or spiritual aspiration. 
 All is of the earth, earthy. 
 
 But let us try the comparison with the pro- 
 ductions of the Hindu muse. Within the 
 present century the treasures of the ancient 
 Sanscrit literature have been exhumed from 
 their long grave, and by translation and com- 
 mentary been made known to English readers. 
 It seems to be satisfactorily made out that a 
 considerable portion of the Rig-Veda — very 
 much the most important and valuable of all 
 the Vedas — must date back to a period between 
 one thousand and fifteen hundred years before 
 Christ, and therefore expresses the earliest 
 thought of the Aryan races upon religious 
 topics. This Veda contains both poetry and 
 prose. The former, the earlier portion, consists 
 of ten books, in which there are more than a 
 thousand separate hymns, all of which are claim- 
 ed by the Brahmanic authorities to be the result 
 of divine inspiration — the work of the Deity 
 alone, down to the very last line. The whole 
 of these poems has not yet beep, translated, and 
 
6o THE rSAL TER. 
 
 perhaps never will be ; and much of them, Max 
 Miiller says, " Will and must remain to us a 
 dead letter" {^C hips from a German Workshop, 
 I., 75), " owing to the difficulty of introducing- 
 ourselves into the circle of thouQfht and feelinof 
 in which these writers so far back, and in such 
 different circumstances habitually moved." Did 
 it not occur to this scholar to ask why we do 
 not have the same difficulty of entering into the 
 Psalmist's circle of thought and feeling? Yet 
 enough has been put into English to enable us 
 justly to estimate the ethical or theological value 
 of the whole. The same writer, a critic neither 
 incompetent nor severe, says, " Large numbers 
 of the Vedic hymns are childish in the extreme ; 
 tedious, low, common-place. The gods are 
 constantly invoked to protect their worshippers, 
 to grant them food, large flocks, large families, 
 and a long life ; for all which benefits they 
 are to be rewarded by the praises and sacri- 
 fices offered day after day, or at certain sea- 
 sons of the year. But hidden in this rubbish 
 are precious stones," {Chips, I., 26). Now it 
 is undeniable that Monotheism is not the 
 doctrine of the Vedas. In numberless cases 
 the hymns are addressed to individual deities, 
 whose names suggest almost irresistibly their 
 
7 HE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 6 1 
 
 origin from the objects or forces of nature — 
 e. g., the sun, the earth, the dawn, the storms, 
 the waters, the fire, etc. However beautiful, 
 lofty, or impressive these addresses may at 
 times be, however true it is that the poet, when 
 writing-, considered the god he addressed as 
 supreme and absolute, losing all the others 
 from sight ; yet the gathering of these different 
 hymns into the same collection produced all the 
 effects of the ordinary polytheism of other lands 
 in degrading the idea of God, and paving the 
 way for the monstrous excesses of idolatry. 
 And if, on some occasions, the Hindu poets 
 rose to the conception of a Supreme mind, 
 transcending all other minds, it was yet identi- 
 fied with nature; so that the whole collection 
 oscillates perpetually between Polytheism and 
 Pantheism. It is true, that sometimes there 
 are ascriptions of praise which remind one of 
 Biblical utterances ; as when it is said of Va- 
 runa, "Where two persons sit together, he is 
 the third." "The two seas (sky and ocean) 
 are Varuna's loins ; he is also contained in this 
 drop of water." " He counts the twinklings of 
 the eyes of men." " As a player throws the 
 dice, he settles all things." "May all thy fatal 
 nooses catch the man who tells the lie, may 
 
62 THE PSALTER. 
 
 they pass by him who tells the truth." {Chips, 
 I., 41). There is, too, the recognition of the 
 power and will of the gods to pardon sin : " Va- 
 runa is merciful even to him who has commit- 
 ted sin," (p. 40). But for the purpose of com- 
 parison^ the Veda is to be estimated as a whole. 
 To take selected passages, and from them to 
 infer the character and bearing of the rest, is to 
 fall into the same error as the late Mr. Deutch, 
 who eathered out of the Talmud a number of its 
 most striking things, and left the impression 
 upon his readers, that these fairly represented 
 the immense body of matter contained in a 
 number of folio volumes — the most gigantic ac- 
 cumulation of fable, filth, and trash the world 
 has ever seen. 
 
 The same remark is to be made concerning 
 the hymns taken from the Zend-Avesta, the 
 sacred book of a religion justly said to be, of all 
 ethnic faiths, the most admirable for the depth 
 of its philosophy, the spirituality of its views and 
 doctrines, and the purity of its morality. The 
 Zendic Canon is made up of several separate 
 portions differing in age, origin, and character. 
 Hymns of praise are contained -in all these, but 
 the most interesting portion is found in the so- 
 called Gathas, five collections of religious lyrics, 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 63 
 
 each collection written in a different metre. 
 The doctrine they hold respecting God is un- 
 doubtedly sublime and elevating. There is no 
 worship of nature, no bowing to images, no 
 identification of God with the world ; but on the 
 contrary, a distinct recognition of one self-exist- 
 ent and eternal Being who is the Creator of all 
 things. " I invoke," says the Yacma, " Ahura 
 Masda, brilliant, resplendent, greatest and best. 
 All-perfect, all-powerful, all-pure, source of true 
 knowledge, of real happiness ; Him who created 
 us. Him who sustains us, wisest of all intelli- 
 gences." But while this lofty monotheism in 
 form was maintained, while Ahura Masda was 
 held to be the creator and ruler of the universe, 
 and the author of all good ; yet, it was also 
 held that there were other sorts of beings who 
 formed a body of malevolent and harmful pow- 
 ers, and from whom came all the wickedness, 
 impurity, and unhappiness in the world. This 
 was the beginning of what afterwards became a 
 fully-developed Dualism, both philosophical and 
 theological. And thus I account for a coldness 
 and vagueness which marks the highest utter- 
 ances of the Zoroastrian singers. We find bright 
 thoughts, happy sayings, fine descriptions, but 
 nothing like the affectionate, tender, loving con- 
 
64 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 fidence which breathes through the Hebrew 
 lyrics. The assurance of the Psalmists that 
 Jehovah was absolutely supreme over all worlds, 
 and that He shared His dominion in no degree, 
 and in no form, with any other beings, was so 
 complete and thorough, that all their reverence 
 and all their hope was toward Him. They, there- 
 fore, adopt a tone which, even in the highest 
 flights of imagination, or in the widest reach of 
 poetic license, never loses its sense of complete 
 and all-absorbinof devotion to the Beino- of 
 whom or to whom they sing. While they fear- 
 ed Him as they feared no one else, they loved 
 Him as they loved no one else. It is especially 
 remarkable how they familiarized the thought 
 of God without ever in the least deeradinof 
 Him in their apprehensions. Some modern 
 Christians, whose sincerity it would be a breach 
 of charity to question, are in the habit of speak- 
 ing of, and to, their Maker in a tone which is 
 very offensive not merely to a cultivated taste, 
 but to a truly devout soul. It lacks reverence, 
 modesty, delicacy. It forgets the distance be- 
 tween heaven and earth, and treats the Infinite 
 One as if He were a product of clay like 
 themselves. . No approach to such an error is 
 found in the Psalter. Its writers bring down 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 65 
 
 the Deity quite within the sphere of human 
 affections, but never impair His majesty. In 
 their most exulting moments they are always 
 reverent, and the object of their hope, and trust, 
 and joy, however tenderly and affectionately 
 addressed, is still to them God — the God whose 
 greatness is unsearchable, and whose under- 
 standing is infinite. 
 
 The question, then, arises, How came these 
 Hebrews to get and retain the conception of one 
 supreme, personal God, infinitely great, yet in- 
 finitely condescending ? The answer given by 
 Mons. Renan, who, however we may repudiate 
 his philosophy, is anything but contemptible as 
 a scholar, is that the whole question is one of 
 race. The Semitic family, he says, had the 
 monotheistic instinct, and this accounts for their 
 constant faith in one God alone. But such a 
 theory is every way untenable. For, in the 
 first place, as a matter of fact polytheism is 
 found among the majority of the Semitic races. 
 It prevailed in the Arabian tribes, in Philistia 
 and Phoenicia, and in Syria and Mesopotamia. 
 Among these, the sun, the moon, the planets, 
 and all the host of heaven, as well as other 
 forces of nature, were deified and worshipped. 
 It is only in one branch of the race that we find 
 
66 THE PSALTER. 
 
 Monotheism maintained. Besides, the answer 
 itself needs explanation. The instinct of the 
 irrational animals we understand as the working 
 of the nature given to them, but how can men 
 have an instinct unless implanted by their Crea- 
 tor ? Moreover, an instinct is invariable. How 
 came this instinct, if such it were, to be so often 
 utterly denied and extirpated, and that, not for a 
 short period, but for generations and ages ? 
 But the whole theory is baseless. Its consider- 
 ation only brings out more broadly the point 
 aimed at in this lecture. All over the ancient 
 world was Polytheism or Dualism. The 
 Aryan races and the Semitic races alike fell 
 into the monstrous error. It pervades all their 
 literature, whether in hieroglyph, or cuneiform, 
 or ordinary script, and was set forth in pictures 
 and images. But there is one exception, only 
 one, i. e., the Hebrews. And here it is found 
 only in their literature. As for the people them- 
 selves, they displayed a constant tendency to go 
 after other gods — not for the most part exchang- 
 ing Jehovah for a heathen deity, which they did 
 only in the days of Ahab and Jezebel, but 
 taking this deity into partnership wath Jehovah. 
 This disposition runs through all their history 
 from the days of Jacob down to the Captivity in 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 6/ 
 
 Babylon. That history has justly been said " to 
 be made up of an almost uninterrupted series of 
 relapses into polytheism." And yet this fact 
 left no stamp upon their poetry. The sacred 
 singers never for an instant give way to the 
 error, or even assert the truth in a wavering or 
 uncertain manner. In the height of joy, one 
 God is praised ; in the depth of gloom, one God 
 is supplicated. Other gods are mentioned only 
 to be disparaged or denied. Nature is fre- 
 quently and grandly described, but always as 
 the creature of God. The events of the past 
 are often recounted, but never as results of des- 
 tiny or caprices of fortune, but as the manifested 
 will of One whose throne is in the heavens, and 
 whose kingdom ruleth over all. Whence came 
 this remarkable peculiarity subsisting through a 
 thousand years ? Surely not from the efforts of 
 the Jews themselves, their grasp of intellect or 
 stretch of speculation. Of all the ancient nations 
 they were the least endowed with the philo- 
 sophic spirit. Neither their language nor their 
 character fitted them for the minute inquiries 
 and subtle distinctions which abounded among 
 the flower of the Aryan races. And yet they 
 held fast with an unyielding grasp a truth which 
 eluded the laborious culture of Athens and 
 
68 THE PSALTER. 
 
 Alexandria. But in fact they never pretended 
 that their idea of the one supreme God was a 
 discovery of their own. " He made known 
 His ways unto Moses, His acts unto the chil- 
 dren of Israel." The historical Psalms go back 
 to Abraham (cv. 6) as the head of the race, and 
 refer all the distinctions of the people to the reve- 
 lation made to him and his successors. This, I 
 say, is their account of the origin of their knowl- 
 edge of God, and it is the only account which 
 fully meets the requirements of the case. God 
 Himself seofreeated this race from the children 
 of men, and made them the depositories of His 
 truth, confirming and upholding the original 
 disclosure by continual subsequent communica- 
 tions, from time to time, and thus guarding 
 against the corruptions to which all human in- 
 stitutions are liable. Only in this way can we 
 explain the marvellous purity, and beauty, and 
 consistency of the doctrine of God set forth in 
 the old Hebrew Psalms. Beyond all question 
 these Psalms are human, but equally beyond 
 question are they Divine. The brightest gem 
 in the whole range of addresses to the Gods, 
 found in Greek literature, is the Hymn of the 
 Stoic Cleanthes, addressed to Jupiter, which 
 does really contain some fine thoughts and 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 
 
 69 
 
 sounding phrases. But the entire hymn is a 
 splendid illusion. " Stoic dogma empties Stoic 
 hymnology of half its sublimity and more than 
 half its devoutness." The Father in heaven 
 whom Cleanthes praises, and to whom he prays, 
 is not a personal Being, all-righteous and all- 
 holy, whose loving care may be aptly symbolized 
 by the tenderness of an earthly parent, but is 
 only another name for nature, for necessity, for 
 fate, for the universe. The stately words which 
 the writer uses are employed only in a forced 
 and unnatural sense. But the Psalmists always 
 mean just what they say, or if there is any dif- 
 ference, it is because words can not express the 
 fulness and vigor of their thought. In no case 
 do they use language transcending their own 
 feelings and conceptions. And there are scores 
 of these sacred songs as much superior to Cle- 
 anthes' Hymn as this is to the Minor Homeric 
 Poems. How is it that the singers of an obscure 
 and despised nation, whom the classic races 
 stigmatized as barbarous, and who, in the arts 
 of life, in all the mental and social habits which 
 lead to depth and breadth of thought, or to the 
 sense and creation ot beauty, zvere barbarous in 
 the comparison, yet produced the only concep- 
 tion of God which, by the general consent of 
 
70 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 the wise and good, is pronounced to be just, 
 and true, and satisfying? The people were mer- 
 ciless and bloody ; they were constantly prone 
 to the coarsest irreligion and profligacy, yet 
 their sacred singers express thoughts about God 
 which have been welcomed and adopted by the 
 gentlest, the most refined, and the most saintly 
 spirits whom the world has ever seen. How is 
 this to be accounted for ? No answer can be 
 given which does not affirm a divine guidance 
 which controlled thought, and tongue, and pen. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF MAN IN THE PSALTER. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 
 
 man's origin and place in nature — EIGHTH PSALM — 
 HIS MORAL CORRUPTION — THIS UNKNOWN TO OTHER 
 SINGERS — THE REASON OF THE FACT — THE PSALTER 
 PRAISES GOD AND NOT MAN — NO MYTHICAL IDEALS OF 
 HUMANITY — NO PESSIMISM — LOFTY FAITH IN GOD AND 
 ATTACHMENT TO HIM — NO CLANNISHNESS — HOPE FOR THE 
 WORLD — THIS NOW A COMMON PLACE, NOT SO THEN — 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 IN the last lecture the subject was the teach- 
 ing of the Psalter respecting God, His nature 
 and attributes, and His relations to men. This 
 point naturally came first, because it is first — be- 
 ing the pivot upon which all other truths turn. 
 But next to the question of God, comes that of 
 man. How is he regarded as to his position in 
 the world — his origin, his character, his duty, and 
 his destiny. This constitutes the other factor 
 in any scheme of religious thought, and is 
 worthy of the most attentive consideration. 
 What, then, is the doctrine of the Psalms on 
 this point? Is it like that of other religious 
 systems ? Does it start on the same plane 
 
 4 (73) 
 
74 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 and arrive at the same end ? or does it differ 
 widely, and if so, how shall we account for the 
 difference ? 
 
 The first inquiry respects man's origin and 
 his place in creation. The general doctrine of 
 antiquity on this subject was that man is a spon- 
 taneous production of the earth, since almost 
 all philosophers held that matter was eternal, 
 on the ground ex nihilo nihil Jit — the idea of 
 creation seeming to them unphilosophical and 
 incredible. The earth was assumed to be preg- 
 nant with the germs of all living organisms, 
 which were quickened into life under favorable 
 circumstances. Hence the great boast of the 
 Athenians was that they were not derived from 
 any other existing race, but avTOKOoveg, sprung 
 from the soil. It is true, we have what seems a 
 contrary doctrine in the statement quoted by 
 Paul in his address on Mars' Hill at Athens, 
 Tov yap Kol ytvog eofitv, whether we suppose this 
 fine utterance taken from Aratus of Cilicia, 
 (270 B.C.) or from the famous hymn of Clean- 
 thes, the Stoic. But these were mere 
 sporadic utterances, and besides were rather 
 used to show that God was like to man than 
 that man was like to God. The former view 
 being the prolific parent of idolatry in its 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF' MAN. 
 
 75 
 
 grossest forms, while the latter, as handled by 
 the great Apostle, furnishes the most emphatic 
 protest against such a degrading habit. 
 
 In the Psalms, on the contrary, the position 
 long before taken in Genesis — that man was 
 made, and that he was made in the image of 
 God — is everywhere assumed, and sometimes 
 explicitly formulated and poetically developed. 
 As in the looth Psalm, "Know ye that the 
 Lord He is God : it is He that hath made us 
 and not we ourselves : we are His people and 
 the sheep of His pasture." Still more vividly 
 is this set forth in the 8th Psalm, where David 
 gives feeling expression to the insignificance of 
 man in the presence of the vastness, the splen- 
 dor, the mysterious depth and the boundless 
 glory of the heavens, as seen at night. — 
 
 When I see Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, 
 The moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained ; 
 What is man, that Thou art mindful of him, 
 And the son of man, that Thou visitest him ? 
 
 As Dr. Whewell says, " The vault of the 
 sky arched at a vast and unknown distance over 
 our heads ; the stars apparently infinite in num- 
 ber, each keeping its appointed course and 
 place, and seeming to belong to a wide system 
 
yd ' 'THE PSALTER. 
 
 which has no relation to the earth ; while man is 
 but one among many millions of the earth's in- 
 habitants, all this makes the contemplative spec- 
 tator feel how exceeding small a portion of the 
 universe he is ; how little he must be in the 
 eyes of an Intelligence which can embrace the 
 whole." And it may well be doubted whether 
 the brilliant discoveries of modern astronomy 
 cause the view of the nightly heavens to make 
 any deeper impression upon a modern spectator 
 than it did upon the sweet singer of Israel ages 
 ago. Even we can hardly say with more emo- 
 tion than David, What is man in the sight of 
 Him who made those heavens, and in them 
 planted those glittering orbs ? But no sooner 
 does the poet give utterance to the thought of 
 man's insignificance on this side of the subject, 
 than he turns to set forth on the other, his won- 
 drous greatness — in nature almost divine, 
 crowned and sceptered as a king, wielding a 
 dominion over air and earth, and seas — all 
 things put under his feet. The first theme of 
 the lyric is the manifested excellence of the 
 Creator, so conspicuously displayed in all the 
 earth, and in the heavens above the earth, as to 
 attract the admiration of children, and even 
 sucklings. But the second is the dignity of 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN.', yy 
 
 man, made by the favor of God to be the head 
 of creation, animate and inanimate. Little as 
 he is in one sense, in another he is inexpressi- 
 bly great — nothing less than a sovereign ruler 
 like his Maker and Lord. Thus was anticipated 
 in the old Hebrew song, the fine thought of 
 Pascal — " Man is but a reed, the weakest in 
 nature, but he is a thinking reed. It is not 
 necessary that the entire universe arm itself to 
 crush him. A breath of air, a drop of water, 
 suffices to kill him. But were the universe to 
 crush him, man would be still more noble than 
 that which kills him, because he knows that he 
 dies ; and the universe knows nothing of the 
 advantage it has over him." 
 
 But while the Psalms wholly ignore all theo- 
 ries of man as an emanation or a development, 
 and set him on the pinnacle of the earth as a 
 creature bearing the lineament of the divine 
 handiwork ; yet on the other hand they are far 
 from affirming that his moral character is in 
 accordance with his origin and his place in 
 nature. Nay, they declare just the reverse. 
 In the Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle sets 
 forth his grand indictment against the race — 
 that Jews and Gentiles are all alike under sin 
 — and then rivets his conclusion by citations 
 
78 THE PSAL TER. 
 
 from Scripture — " it is written," giving a cento 
 of six different passages. Four of these are 
 from the Psalter. It will suffice to quote the 
 rnost striking of them — the opening of the 14th 
 Psalm, which is also the same as that of the 
 53d — a case of repetition or retractatio, which 
 is well justified by the importance of the theme, 
 and the indisposition of men to receive it. 
 
 The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. 
 
 They are corrupt, they have done abominable works. 
 
 There is none that doeth good. 
 
 The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, 
 
 To see if there be any that understand. 
 
 That seek after God. 
 
 They are all gone aside, they are together become filthy, 
 
 There is none that doeth good, no, not one. 
 
 The Psalmist, doubtless, had an historical 
 occasion for this utterance, although we can not 
 determine what it was. But rising above any 
 particular circumstances, he surveys the whole 
 race and brands it with a fatal apostasy. Even 
 the eye of the Omniscient, looking down from 
 the height of heaven, fails to discern a single 
 sinless person. Well says Ewald, " It would 
 scarcely be possible for a great truth to be 
 sketched in fewer or more striking outlines." 
 Yet the subject is not always treated in this 
 objective way. Generally, it comes out, as we 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 
 
 79 
 
 should expect in lyrics, as a matter of experi- 
 ence. There is no reference in all the Psalter 
 to the origin of evil, or to our connection with 
 the head of the race. But the deep doctrine of 
 depravity, as hereditary, inborn, and all-pervad- 
 ing, is distinctly set forth. In Psalm Iviii. 3, 
 David traces the corruption of his times back 
 to original sin, to an evil germ infecting the 
 nature even from birth. ** The wicked are es- 
 tranged from the womb : they go astray as 
 soon as they be born, speaking lies." Still 
 more affectingly is the same assertion made by 
 him in regard to himself in Psalm li. 5, when 
 bewailing the great transgression of his life. 
 Not content with acknowledging his actual 
 misdeeds, he goes back to the fountain from 
 which they sprang — a corrupt nature. " Behold, 
 I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my 
 mother conceive me." This is not said in ex- 
 tenuation of his conduct, but in aggravation of 
 it — not as casting blame upon his mother — the 
 shocking hypothesis which some writers have 
 allowed themselves to frame — but as affirming 
 that the poison of sin, instead of being restric-ed 
 to particular wrong acts, however many or 
 gross, went down to the roots of his beings and 
 affected the whole life and character. Not that 
 
8o THE PSAL TER. 
 
 this took away guilt as if sin were an involun- 
 tary thing, for man's responsibility is constantly 
 assumed — being given in this very Psalm as 
 clearly as it is in every human consciousness. 
 Need I recite other touching utterances, — 
 
 If thou, Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, 
 O Lord, who should stand ? — (cxxx.) 
 
 Or again, — 
 
 Enter not into judginent with thy ser\^ant, 
 
 For in thy sight shall no man living be justified. — (cxiiii.) 
 
 All, all need His pardoning mercy, and this not 
 only for known, but unknown sins. " Who can 
 discern His errors ? Cleanse Thou me from 
 secret faults." These sayings are not due to 
 poetic license or rhetorical exaggeration, but 
 are the true utterances of a deep and real feel- 
 ing. And as such they stand alone in litera- 
 ture. Nowhere in the sacred anthology of 
 Rome, Greece, Assyria, Persia, Hindustan, or 
 China, do we find any equivalent to it. Not 
 that these peoples were ignorant of the fact of 
 human depravity and of its extent. How could 
 they be ? What they saw within and around 
 them, and all the records of the past, compelled 
 them to feel and acknowledge that human 
 nature was in a sad, disjointed condition. Phi- 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 8 1 
 
 losophers could find no explanation of the uni- 
 versal fact save in the idea of a general rooted 
 depravity of the race. And many a poet has, 
 like Ovid, deplored the inward conflict between 
 inclination and conscience — the clear percep- 
 tion of what is right, and yet the determined 
 following of what is wrong. But all these ut- 
 terances were more matters of speculation than 
 of emotion. They were not so held by men as 
 to shape their religious convictions, or to gov- 
 ern their worship or their lives. The nearest 
 approach I have seen to the Scripture utter- 
 ance is in some of the Hindu hymns, of which 
 the following is a specimen : 
 
 " I am sin, I commit sin, my nature is sinful, and I am conceived 
 
 in sin. 
 Save me, O thou lotus-eyed, O Hari, who removest all sin." 
 
 These words have a very orthodox sound, 
 and, being the daily prayer of the Brahmans, 
 while performing their religious ablutions, 
 have often been quoted to them by Chris- 
 tian missionaries as asserting the great truth 
 which renders the sacrifice of the Cross 
 so needful and so precious. But neither did 
 the ancient authors of this prayer, nor do those 
 who incessantly repeat it now, mean by its 
 words what it seems to us to say. Their phi- 
 
82 THE PSAL TER. 
 
 losophy attributes all the pain, the unsatisfied 
 desire, the gloom and misery of human life, to 
 the connection of soul with nature. The spirit 
 is in bondage to matter, and the only prospect 
 of emancipation lies in an enormous series of 
 successive transmigrations until at last it passes 
 into the Supreme source — that is, God. It is 
 easy to see that in this view the most complete 
 and exhaustive confessions of sinfulness have a 
 very different meaning from that which the 
 same words express when used by believers in 
 the Bible. The moral corruption which the 
 Hindu bewails is not the consequence of his own 
 act, or that of his legal representative, but of 
 dispositions originating in the first construction 
 of the body from the subtle elements of nature. 
 It is, of course, impossible that the sense of re- 
 sponsibility should be keen, or the reproaches 
 of conscience severe. Nor is it surprising that 
 men should come to believe that the sin which 
 owes its being to the body is removed by mere 
 bodily or external observances. A chief feature 
 of the every-day worship of all Brahmans is to 
 bathe in one of the sacred rivers, and while in 
 the act, to repeat the prayer above cited. Their 
 worship and their lives show that they have no 
 proper conception of inbred corruption as this 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 83 
 
 is felt by Christians. Their confessions, so mor- 
 tifying in terms, are made without either shame 
 or sorrow — indeed for the most part repeated 
 merely as a matter of form. As Dean Church re- 
 marks, {Early Sacred Poeiry, p. 30), "Though 
 in these ancient hymns sin is confessed and its 
 consequences deprecated, though they praise 
 the righteous and denounce the deceitful and 
 the wicked, there is but little to show what was 
 the sin, and what constituted the righteousness. 
 Of that moral conviction, that moral enthusiasm 
 for goodness and justice, that moral hatred of 
 wrong and evil, that zeal for righteousness, 
 that anguish of penitence which has elsewhere 
 marked religious poetry, there is singularly lit- 
 tle trace." 
 
 It may, then, be fairly affirmed that the ethnic 
 faiths scarcely understood the strict idea of sin 
 as an offence against God. They had no ink- 
 ling of that view of the Divine Holiness which 
 pervades the Scriptures, and which was con- 
 tinually and strongly represented in a tangible 
 shape to Israel, alike by the minute and painful 
 symbolism of the ceremonial institute ; by the 
 stern and unbending enactments of the moral 
 law ; and by the actual and repeated judgments 
 God sent both upon them and upon their 
 
84 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 heathen neighbors in upholding the Law. Even 
 in the master-pieces of Greek Tragedy, the 
 Nemesis is not so much the result of the delib- 
 erate purpose of a supreme divine person as 
 the acting of a blind unconscious Fate to which 
 gods and men are alike subject. There is a 
 plenty of pathos, of terror, of wrong-doing, and 
 of ultimate suffering, but never once the spirit- 
 ual conception of sin as a disease of the moral 
 nature needing both pardon and renovation in 
 order to free the conscience from its load. And 
 why? How comes it that the varied and cul- 
 tivated races with an ancestral faith, with an 
 elaborate cultus, and with a very striking men- 
 tal development, never, save in very rare in- 
 stances, looked deep enough into their own 
 hearts to see what was there, while these He- 
 brew singers had such a vivid conception of the 
 truth, and expressed it with such feeling and 
 power, and never set forth any statements of 
 an opposite kind? It is no answer to ascribe 
 this effect to the moral earnestness of the He- 
 brew race. For first, the other races had as 
 much earnestness, only they showed it in a dif- 
 ferent way. When did any people fall into 
 such a paroxysm of dismay, terror, and wrath, 
 as the Athenians at the mutilation of the Her- 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 85 
 
 mse ; or as the Egyptians, when Cambyses mock- 
 ed at their sacred customs ? What people 
 could be more earnest in their religion than 
 those Syrian tribes who made their children 
 pass through the fire to Moloch ? But, sec- 
 ondly, if they did not have it, it remains to be 
 explained how the Hebrews alone came to be 
 in possession of it. The only possible solution 
 is, I submit, to be found in the direct and spe- 
 cific divine revelation which they enjoyed, and 
 which, by furnishing the pure and lofty stan- 
 dard of duty, enabled men to ascertain exactly 
 their deviations from it. 
 
 This view of human nature gave rise to 
 another peculiarity by which the Hebrew Lyrics 
 are distinguished, viz. : that their praise is 
 always of God or of God's works, and never of 
 man. The earlier history of the race abounds 
 with men of remarkable character : the innocent 
 Abel ; the unworldly Enoch ; the faithful Noah ; 
 the mysterious Melchizedek ; Abraham, the 
 friend of God ; the contemplative Isaac ; Jacob, 
 the wrestler and prince ; Joseph with his diversi- 
 fied and romantic history ; Moses, the law-giver, 
 with his wondrous career from the bulrushes of 
 the Nile to the lonely summits of Nebo ; Aaron, 
 the head of the oldest priesthood in the world ; 
 
86 THE PSAL TER. 
 
 Joshua, the great captain ; Jephthah and Gideon, 
 the mighty men of valor ; and Samuel, last of the 
 judges and first of the prophets. These names 
 were rooted in the hearts and the memories of 
 their countrymen, and all regarded them with a 
 glow of national pride. 
 
 Why do not these appear in the song- 
 book of the nation ? Why do we not find some 
 encomiastic, or triumphal, or elegiac odes in 
 honor of these distinguished men ? Why in all 
 the Psalter is there nothing in this respect even 
 approaching the sublime odes in which Pindar 
 immortalized the victors at the great games of 
 Greece ? That the fact is as I have stated, is 
 indisputable. There is not a psalm of praise in 
 the entire collection which has for its chief, or 
 even its subordinate, subject, the exploits of any 
 man or set of men. The spirit of the whole is 
 faithfully expressed by the opening words of the 
 115th Psalm, "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto 
 us, but unto Thy name give glory, for Thy mercy, 
 for Thy truth." It may, perhaps, be said that 
 all poems of this kind were recorded in the book 
 of Jasher, or of the Upright, which is mentioned 
 in Joshua x. 13, and 2 Samuel i. 18, and of 
 which nothing is certainly known, although for 
 ages its precise nature has been a theme of 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 
 
 87 
 
 laborious disputation. To me the opinion of 
 Lowth appears most probable — that it was a 
 collection of national songs, celebrating either 
 the civil or the military exploits of the great 
 men of the past. But admitting this to be the 
 fact in the case, the question at issue is pushed 
 only a step farther back. For supposing these 
 two collections to be growing up side by side, 
 how came it to pass that the secular never even 
 by chance invaded the sacred, but the line of 
 demarkation was kept distinct from beginning 
 to end ? And why was it that the one perished 
 so entirely that we know not of its existence at 
 all, except by two slight references in the canoni- 
 cal Scriptures, while the other was at once taken 
 into the canon, and has so remained for aees 
 an integral part of the Hebrew Scriptures ? 
 Certainly this is not the ordinary course of 
 events. Pride of ancestry and pride of race are 
 universal features of human nature. We find 
 them in all modern, in all ancient literatures — in 
 the lyrics of Greece and Rome, in the hymns of 
 the Veda, in the GAthas of the Avestan, in the 
 cuneiform inscriptions of Chaldea and Assyria. 
 If, then, the book of Jasher was what it is com- 
 monly supposed to be, it only makes the case 
 stronger. The Hebrews did not omit to pre- 
 
88 THE PSALTER. 
 
 serve songs in praise of illustrious men, because 
 they had none of that class ; but on the con- 
 trary, having them and enough of them to make 
 a " book," they yet refused to mingle them with 
 the songs of Zion, and kept their sacred anthol- 
 ogy pure from even the least taint of hero wor- 
 ship, or saint worship. This is clearly estab- 
 lished by one signal case. On the death of Saul 
 and Jonathan, David composed one of the most 
 exquisite elegies of any age or land. It is re- 
 corded in the second book of Samuel (i. 17-27) 
 as part of the annals of the time, and as useful 
 in many directions. But it was not put into the 
 Psalter, it was not inscribed " To the chief musi- 
 cian." Neither its author, nor its subject, nor 
 its occasion, nor its inherent beauties of thought 
 and expression, could gain for it admission into 
 that collection whose title is Thehillijn — Praises, 
 the Praises of God. Nor may it be said that 
 there were not in Jewish history events or 
 scenes sufficiently striking to be embalmed in 
 poetic numbers. The record proves the con- 
 trary abundantly. The material existed, but 
 some unseen force hindered the singers from 
 using it in any such way as would turn men's 
 thoughts from their Maker's honor to the glori- 
 fication of mere men, as may be seen by com- 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF MAiV. 89 
 
 paring the treatment of a celebrated modern 
 feat of arms with that of a similar one of old. 
 The brilliant exploit of the British cavalry at 
 Balaklava has been worthily perpetuated in 
 Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade, and 
 multitudes who otherwise might never have 
 heard of the brave deed, will know it well from 
 the poet's striking lyric. But the three captains 
 who broke through the^garrison at the well of 
 Bethlehem did quite as glorious an enterprise 
 in snatching at the risk of life a cup of water for 
 David, and their self-sacrifice was even sur- 
 passed by the generous devotion of their leader, 
 but not the remotest allusion to it occurs in the 
 Psalter. 
 
 Still further, not only is there no attempt at 
 the glorification of real personages in the na- 
 tional history, but no appearance of an effort 
 after an ideal of humanity, a mystic conception 
 of what is greatest and best according to earthly 
 standards. Among every cultivated people it 
 has been a favorite object of men of genius to 
 give expression to some faultless model of the 
 race, to paint a perfect picture of godlike virtue, 
 wisdom, courage, self-control, and endurance, 
 and to hold this up for imitation and admiration. 
 In all such poems it is required that they be 
 
go 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 true to human nature generically, but not in de- 
 tail. They borrow indeed from actual history, but 
 they add and omit, and expand and diversify, 
 until they have finally created their ideal char- 
 acter. But however skilfully drawn, whatever 
 excellence the work has in tone, style, and struc- 
 ture, it is only a romance. It may have the 
 highest possible verisimilitude, but still no ob- 
 jective truth. " No such embodiment of the 
 Ideal has ever broken in upon the vulgar real- 
 ities of human existence. There have been 
 good men, and brave men, and wise men, often ; 
 but there have been no living sculptures after 
 the fashion of Phidias, no heroes after the 
 manner of Homer and Virgil." Nothing of this 
 kind appears in the Psalter. It is as free from 
 any imaginary or mythical heroes as from any 
 that are historical. Its whole atmosphere is 
 that of literal truth — reciting of men, even the 
 best of men, their shame as well as their glory, 
 their sins, and falls, and infirmities as well as 
 their faith, and heroism, and devotion. The 
 only apparent exception to this uniformity is the 
 reference to one described sometimes as a king, 
 at others as a prophet, who is indeed set forth 
 as invested with every possible excellence. 
 But this is not a real exception. For although 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. gi 
 
 a certain school of Rationalists have endeavored 
 to account for these passages, and others in the 
 rest of the Old Testament, as representing an 
 ideal Christ, an earth-born conception of men 
 dissatisfied with what they saw around them, 
 and therefore striving to give a concrete picture 
 of what they hoped would be developed in the 
 progress of society, the attempt has signally 
 failed. The theory is totally inadequate to an- 
 swer its purpose, as might be easily shown were 
 there time. And the old view remains impreg- 
 nably established — that this lyric hero, so far 
 from being of human invention, is of divine sug- 
 gestion. He is the great hope of Israel, a real 
 personage who in the fulness of time should 
 appear to bridge the chasm between heaven 
 and earth by a wondrous Incarnation. Upon 
 the glories of this Being the sacred singers ex- 
 haust all their stores. But the bright portraiture 
 they give of Him only displays the more clearly 
 their absolute restraint from any degree or form 
 of panegyric upon a mere man. 
 
 But while the Psalms are free from all secular, 
 eulogistic songs in praise of individuals, and 
 while they freely speak of the whole race as in 
 a lost and sinful condition, they are far from any 
 pessimistic extravagance. There is none of the 
 
92 THE PSALTER. 
 
 hopelessness of heathenism or mere nature. 
 Men have gone astray, but they may be re- 
 covered. They are burdened with guilt, but 
 that burden may be shifted. They are banished 
 from God, yet they may be brought back to His 
 fellowship. For along with the clearest state- 
 ments of human sin, we have similar statements 
 of the divine mercy. "The Lord is merciful 
 and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in 
 kindness. He will not always chide, neither 
 keep His anger forever." In consequence of 
 this, penitents have hope. And it is these re- 
 peated, express, and emphatic affirmations of 
 the divine compassion which distinguish th^ 
 Psalms from the Vedas and the Avestan. What 
 in the latter is set forth vaguely, rarely, and 
 hesitatingly, in the former is triumphantly as- 
 sumed and made the basis of prayer and assur- 
 ance. A conspicuous instance is seen in the 
 103d Psalm : 
 
 He hath not dealt with us after our sins. 
 
 Nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. 
 
 For as the heaven is high above the earth, 
 
 So great is His mercy toward them that fear Him. 
 
 As far as the east is from the west. 
 
 So far hath He removed our transgressions from us. 
 
 Like as a father pitieth his children, 
 
 So the Lord pitieth them that fear Him. 
 
 For He knoweth our frame ; 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 
 
 93 
 
 He remembereth that we are dust. 
 For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone. 
 And the place thereof shall know it no more ; 
 But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlast- 
 ing upon them that fear Him, 
 And His righteousness unto children's children. 
 
 In consequence of such utterances as these, 
 the singers of old, without having the full- 
 orbed doctrine of atonement as it lies in the 
 New Testament, were able to apprehend God 
 as gracious and forgiving, and yet to feel His 
 grace, not as a license to sin, but as a fresh bond 
 to duty. As one of them said, "There is for- 
 giveness with Thee that Thou mayest be fear- 
 ed." The forgiveness takes away the estrange- 
 ment wrought by sin, and the soul comes back 
 to its old place as a child of God and a sharer in 
 His image. It loves Him, it serves Him, it 
 enjoys Him. His statutes are more precious 
 than gold, sweeter than the honey-comb. It 
 meditates therein by day and by night. Its 
 cry is, " Because thou hast been my help, there- 
 fore in the shadow of Thy wings will I rejoice." 
 " How precious also are Thy thoughts unto me, 
 
 God ? How great is the sum of them ! If 
 
 1 should count them, they are more in number 
 than the sand ; when I awake, I am still with 
 Thee." 
 
94 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 Now, this is a phase of experience to which 
 all ancient literature has nothing that even ap- 
 proaches an analogy. It may be said of some 
 of the hymns of the Veda that their waiters 
 Avere seekers after God, but they were not find- 
 ers. The highest idea they formed of what 
 God could bestow was earthly, temporal bless- 
 ings — life, health, riches, success. Whereas, 
 in the Psalms we have a conception of the true 
 blessedness of the human soul, not surpassed 
 even in the New Testament. They seem to 
 have anticipated the fine saying of Augustine — 
 "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart 
 hath no rest until it rest in Thee." See in the 
 1 6th Psalm — " The Lord is the portion of my 
 inheritance and my cup." Not what He gives or 
 promises, but Himself He is more and better 
 than all His gifts. Just as the eye was formed 
 for light, and the ear for sound, and the intellect 
 for truth — and these organs can find pleasure 
 only in their respective objects — so the soul 
 was formed by God for Himself, and can never 
 know real and abiding enjoyment except in 
 Him. This undertone runs all through the 
 Psalter, but sometimes comes to the surface in 
 a very striking way. " There be many that 
 say, who will shew us any good ? " (iv. 6). 
 
THE DOCTRIh'E OF MAN. 95 
 
 Yes, for centuries after David, this was the 
 burden of every philosophical inquiry, and 
 marny, many have been the answers ; yet, none 
 has superseded His own simple and all- 
 sufficient utterance — " Lord, lift Thou up the 
 light of Thy countenance upon us." 
 
 So, again, in the very remarkable Psalm of 
 Asaph, in which the saint finds his faith stag- 
 gered at seeing the prosperity of the wicked. 
 Their eyes stand out with fatness, and they 
 have more than heart could wish. It seems, 
 therefore, as if all the pains of God's people 
 have been thrown away. In vain have they 
 washed their hands in innocency. But going 
 into the Sanctuary, he sees their latter end, 
 how they are brought to desolation as in a mo- 
 ment, and all their prosperity vanishes like a 
 dream. And thus the apparent mystery of 
 Providence is explained. But there is more 
 than this. The holy singer reaches a far 
 higher point. Even supposing that there were 
 no such deadly retribution as he has been in- 
 formed of, there is no need for him to envy the 
 felicities of the wicked. The objects which 
 they seek, and prize, and enjoy, are not what 
 the believer needs. He has far more and 
 better. 
 
96 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 Whom have I in heaven but Thee ? 
 
 And upon earth I desire none besides Thee. -wa,-»-n 
 
 My flesh and my heart faileth ; 
 
 But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. 
 
 As Ewald says — ** Though all else in heaven 
 and earth should fail, the one true everlasting- 
 Friend abides." Has devout thought in any 
 age ever soared to a loftier eminence ? Asaph 
 does not fall into the Pantheistic abyss of the 
 east, nor into the mystical absorption of the 
 west ; but maintaining distinctly the Divine Per- 
 sonality and his own, yet finds in the friendly 
 union of the two, the reliance of a finite soul 
 upon an infinite God — all that his heart can 
 wish or his mind conceive. The book which 
 contains that thought came from God. 
 
 But was this high privilege confined only to 
 the race to which belonged the men who set it 
 forth ? Such a question has often been an- 
 swered in the affirmative. There are many 
 who speak disparagingly of the Old Testament, 
 on the ground of its restricted views and mo- 
 rose spirit, charging it with what they call a 
 " narrow particularism," meaning by that a 
 scornful antipathy toward the rest of mankind. 
 Now, it is certainly true that the Psalms recog- 
 nize and celebrate with grateful praise the pre- 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 
 
 97 
 
 eminence which God o-ave to Israel over other 
 nations. How could they omit to confess what 
 they owed to Him who had chosen them to be 
 His covenant people, who had given them the 
 revelation of His will, and manifested His gra- 
 cious presence in the Sanctuary ? Hence, we 
 read often such utterances as, — 
 
 In Judah is God known, 
 
 His name is great in Israel. — (Ixxvi. 2). 
 
 He made known His ways to Moses, 
 
 His acts unto the children of Israel. — (ciii. 7). 
 
 He declared to Jacob His word. 
 
 His statutes and judgments to Israel. 
 
 He hath not dealt so with any nation ; 
 
 And His judgments, they know them not. — (cxlvii. 19, 20). 
 
 Yet, it is observable that these statements 
 are never made with any appearance of self- 
 complacency, as if God's favors to them were 
 bestowed as the reward of their own merit, but 
 rather as incitements to thankfulness and praise 
 and holy living. And so far from cherishing a 
 narrow, clannish spirit, they are constantly on 
 the outlook for the time when the blessings 
 they enjoy shall become the common posses- 
 sion of the race. Indeed, the spirit of the 
 Psalms is but an expansion of what is given in 
 the call of Abraham. He was segregated from 
 
 5 
 
98 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 his kindred, and made the recipient of a special 
 revelation. But why ? The very words of the 
 promise indicate the world-wide scope of the ar- 
 rangement — " In thy seed shall all the families 
 of the earth be blessed." So the sacred sing- 
 ers believed, and so they sang. The contrast 
 between them, and all other singers on this 
 point, has often been remarked. In every lite- 
 rature we find the tradition of a golden age. 
 Men see so much of confusion and darkness 
 in the moral order of the world in their own 
 day, that the heart turns longingly to the con- 
 ception of a nobler and better state of things 
 in which truth and right shall prevail, and jus- 
 tice accomplish its perfect work. But inva- 
 riably the ethnic religions placed the blessed 
 period of rest and peace in the past, when the 
 human race was young. Here only did they 
 find any basis for their visions, for when they 
 undertook to forecast the future, it always 
 seemed as if the world were waxing worse and 
 worse. Not only so. They had no idea of 
 the solidarity of the race. That is a concep- 
 tion due only to the Scriptures. The first ap- 
 proach to it was made in the time of Alexander 
 the Great, who, by his vast conquests in Asia, 
 and his endeavors to unify his empire by as- 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. gg 
 
 similating Europeans and Asiatics, gave to 
 thoughtful men the notion of a universal history. 
 It is no wonder, therefore, that the heathen 
 contemporaries of our Psalmists never looked 
 forward to a universal reign of righteousness 
 — never solaced the troubles of the present 
 by glancing into the future. The whole con- 
 ception lay outside of their sphere of thought. 
 So much the more wonderful is it that the 
 singers of a small secluded people, shut off 
 from all others by the great sea on one 
 hand, and the trackless desert on the other, 
 and still more separated by an elaborate ritual 
 which penetrated all points of character and 
 usage, should yet lift themselves bodily out of 
 these restrictions and widen their sympathies 
 to take in all the children of men everywhere. 
 That they did so, is beyond question. The 
 connections in which they gave utterance to 
 this expectation of the universal prevalence of 
 truth and righteousness are manifold and vari- 
 ous. Sometimes it is in the flush of some orreat 
 victory, the experience of which suggests the 
 thought of a far more glorious manifestation of 
 Jehovah's victorious energy. For example, in 
 Psalm xlvii., usually thought to have originated 
 
lOO THE PSALTER. 
 
 in Jehoshaphat's triumph over Amnion and 
 Edom, the poet begins,- — - 
 
 O clap your hands, all ye peoples ; 
 
 Shout unto God with the voice of triumph, 
 
 thus summoning the whole gentile world to 
 join in the praise. Then, after reciting God's 
 doings, he concludes with predicting an assem- 
 bly of the nations to do homage as vassals of 
 their one Liege-lord and King : 
 
 The princes of the peoples are gathered together, 
 
 A people of the God of Abraham, 
 
 For unto God belong the shields of the earth. 
 
 So again in the remarkable 68th Psalm, 
 after recounting God's blessings in the wilder- 
 ness, under the judges, and at the foundation 
 of the monarchy, David sees in these only the 
 foreshadowings of a mightier and far more ex- 
 tensive conquest : 
 
 Because of thy temple at Jerusalem 
 Kings shall bring presents unto thee. 
 
 Princes shall come out of Egypt, 
 
 Ethiopia shall eagerly stretch out her hands unto God : 
 
 Kingdoms of the earth, sing unto God : 
 
 Sing praises unto the Lord. 
 
 Ascribe ye strength unto God, 
 Over Israel is His majesty, 
 And His strength in the cloilds. 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. \q\ 
 
 This does not mean simply a subjugation of 
 the heathen world for Israel's glory, but a sub- 
 jection which should justly excite the joyful 
 praises of all thus brought into the fellowship 
 of truth. The same prospect is still more dis- 
 tinctly set forth in the 87th Psalm, occasion- 
 ed by Hezekiah's victory over Sennacherib. 
 After an outburst celebrating the glory of Zion 
 as the city of God, the poet proceeds to de- 
 scribe her brilliant prospects, introducing God 
 as enumerating among His willing people those 
 who had always been fierce enemies of His 
 cause. 
 
 I will mention Rahab and Babylon as them that know me. 
 Lo, Philistia and Tyre with Ethiopia. 
 (Of each of these it shall be said), 
 This one was born there (/. ^., in Zion). 
 
 Not individuals merely, but whole peoples are 
 to be subjects of regenerating grace. And 
 when Jehovah makes out the muster-roll of His 
 nations, each of these shall find a place in the 
 registry. Well may such an issue be commem- 
 orated by a triumphal procession, headed by 
 the singers and the players, saying, "All my 
 springs are in thee." 
 
 Another class of Psalms looking to the unl- 
 versal diffusion of the truth, is found in the little 
 
I02 THE PSAL TER. 
 
 fasciculus, comprising xciii.-c, which seem in- 
 tended in times of darkness and doubt to raise 
 the thoughts of the people up to the Lord as 
 King, who will one day come forth to show His 
 boundless power and authority. The floods 
 lift up their voice, but far above the crash of 
 their foaming billows is the Lord on high (xciii.) 
 
 He is a great God and a great King above all Gods. — (xcv.) 
 
 Give unto the Lord, ye families of nations. 
 
 Give unto the Lord glory and strength. 
 
 Let the sea roar and the fulness thereof ; 
 
 The world and they that dwell therein. 
 
 Let the floods clap their hands, 
 
 Let the hills be joyful together 
 
 Before the Lord : for He cometh to judge the earth : 
 
 With righteousness shall He judge the world 
 
 And the peoples with equity. 
 
 Sea and land, rivers and mountains, are all 
 summoned to praise in concert God's assump- 
 tion of His universal sovereignty. Then the 
 series concludes in Psalm lOO, with an invitation 
 to the entire race to draw near, — 
 
 Shout unto the Lord, all the earth. 
 Serve the Lord with gladness, 
 Come before Him with singing. 
 Know that the Lord He is God, 
 It is He that made us. 
 And not we ourselves. 
 
 Here are no local restrictions, no national 
 exclusiveness, but a summons to every kindred 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 
 
 103 
 
 and tribe, on the ground that Jehovah is the 
 one common Creator and Father of all. 
 
 The same largeness of view is found in two 
 other Psalms, very different in their origin and 
 tone, the I02d and 67th. The former, justly 
 entitled a prayer of the afflicted, begins with 
 the description of a sad and bitter lot, but sud- 
 denly the writer rises above his sorrows with 
 the thought that God sits as King forever. 
 This divine majesty will one day be manifested 
 on Zion's behalf, and that so signally that na- 
 tions shall fear the name of Jehovah, and all 
 kings of the earth His glory. Not only that, 
 but peoples and kingdoms shall be gathered 
 together to unite with Israel in recounting Je- 
 hovah's praise, and doing His will. In the 
 latter Psalm all this comes out so striking- 
 ly, that it has been called the Mission Hymn 
 of the Hebrew Church. It is apparently 
 a harvest song in which the devout singer 
 takes occasion, from the recent experiences of 
 God's goodness in sending a fruitful season, to 
 entreat and to anticipate the extension of the 
 divine bounties to all the nations of the earth. 
 
 God be merciful to us and bless us, 
 And make His face to shine upon us. 
 
I04 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 Why ? Mark the large and generous words 
 which immediately follow : 
 
 That Thy way may be known upon the earth, 
 Thy saving health among all nations. 
 Let the peoples praise Thee, O God, 
 Let all the peoples praise Thee. 
 
 God even our own God, shall bless us. 
 
 God shall bless us. 
 
 And all the ends of the earth shall fear Him. 
 
 Visions like these of universal peace and joy 
 have now become the common property of 
 man. They are a most agreeable relief against 
 the tangled mazes and constant jars of ordi- 
 nary life, and the wide separations and con- 
 trasts of peoples and nations. And the poet 
 laureate of England, has well voiced the sen- 
 timents of our age in his anticipations of the 
 period when 
 
 The war drum throbs no longer and the batlle-flagsare furled 
 In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. 
 
 And in his loud call, — 
 
 Forward, forward, let us range. 
 
 Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of 
 
 change : 
 Through the shadow of the globe, we sweep into the younger 
 
 day. 
 
 Such an anticipation as this is so familiar ac 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 
 
 105 
 
 to have become one of the commonplaces of 
 human thought. All men look forward to that 
 
 One far-off divine event, 
 To which the whole creation moves. 
 
 But it was another matter three thousand 
 years ago. Then neither the reasonings of 
 philosophers, nor the plans of statesmen, nor 
 the dreams of poets took in so wide a range. 
 They knew of kingdoms, and tribes, and races ; 
 but of the human race as a whole, as bound to- 
 gether by a common origin, a common nature, 
 and a common destiny — of this they had not 
 the remotest conception. It was left for a 
 band of singers in small, obscure, despised Pal- 
 estine to anticipate a reign of righteousness, 
 which should unite all the children of men 
 under one sceptre. And they set it forth not 
 merely as a possible or desirable event, but as 
 one certain to occur ; and they did this not 
 simply in some favored moment of prophetic 
 inspiration, but again and again — not only in 
 one particular connection, but in a great variety 
 of relations. The fact seems to have entered 
 into the habitual current of their devout medi- 
 tations, and they declare it in tones of the most 
 absolute conviction and certainty. And when 
 men now undertake to describe "the g^ood time 
 
1 06 THE PSAL TER. 
 
 coming," they can find no better materials for 
 their purpose than those fiirnished by the old 
 Hebrew poets. The question recurs — What 
 was it that lifted these men so greatly above 
 all their contemporaries, and gave them such 
 prescience of the far-distant future ? How did 
 their thoughts come to take this direction, when 
 there was nothing in their situation or sur- 
 roundings to suggest it ? The only possible 
 answer is found in the statement that they sang 
 under a divine impulse. It is vain to remind us 
 that the poet is a seer — that a sublime and 
 fiery genius enables its possessor to see what 
 escapes the notice of ordinary men. No genius 
 was equal to a task like this. The Hebrews 
 had in their immediate neighborhood a crowd 
 of minor kingdoms, all idolatrous, debased, and 
 sensual. On the south lay Egypt with its mas- 
 sive temples, its stately ritual, its profound 
 symbolism, and as bent upon its idols as it 
 was in the days of Abraham. On the east 
 were the great military empires upon the Ti- 
 gris and Euphrates, which indeed changed 
 from time to time as a new tribe or family 
 came in the ascendant, but never showed any 
 amelioration in faith or in morals. What up- 
 lifting of mere human faculties could enable a 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 107 
 
 Jew to foresee that all this imperial magnifi- 
 cence would pass entirely away, and its elabo- 
 rate and gorgeous idolatries utterly disappear, 
 and that not only the people of these proud 
 and ancient kingdoms, but all others, should be- 
 come willing servants of the One True God ? 
 The question answers itself 
 
 The same thing may be said of the teaching 
 as to the individual man — How came these sing- 
 ers of a comparatively unlettered race, widely 
 separated from the intellectual life of the rest 
 of mankind, and without the stimulus of great 
 schools and philosophies, to describe so accu- 
 rately man's glory and his shame ? Without 
 elation they set forth his origin as the creature 
 of God, the child of God, and little less than 
 divine, superior to all else that the earth con- 
 tains, and finding his truest honor and bless- 
 edness in communion with his infinite Maker. 
 On the other hand, in their tremendous im- 
 peachment of human nature as fallen, we see not 
 a trace of satire or cynicism. They say harder 
 things than are found in Juvenal or Horace, or 
 any of their imitators, but there is nothing that 
 looks like misanthropy. Their intense earnest- 
 ness is blended and balanced with a tenderness 
 and compassion which forbid every malign emo- 
 
I08 T^R PSALTER. 
 
 tion. With the fall they see the possibility of 
 restoration, and for this all needful provision is 
 made in the disclosure of Jehovah's wonderful 
 condescension and loving-kindness. 
 
 This, then, is the trinity of truths respecting 
 the race which are taught by the Psalter, with a 
 precision, variety, fulness, and force, not sur- 
 passed even by the New Testament. First, 
 man's original position as a son of God by 
 creation, stamped with his Maker's image, and 
 endowed with His dominion over the animal 
 world, but himself governed only by reason and 
 conscience. Secondly, his subsequent fall from 
 that high estate, so as to become the prey of 
 sin and guilt, feeding on ashes, out of harmony 
 with his God and with himself, a blind Samson 
 groping amid the ruins of his original home, 
 and pursued by the spectres of remorse and 
 fear. Thirdly, the prodigal coming back from 
 his long wandering, acknowledging with shame 
 and blinding tears his sinful errors, caught up 
 in a father's arms, restored to his old place in 
 that father's heart, then through his fellowship 
 with heaven, renewing his fellowship with 
 earth, and seeing in all the countless tribes of 
 the world his fellow-subjects of the Supreme 
 Will, and his destined fellow-partakers in the 
 
J HE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 
 
 109 
 
 riches of the Divine Mercy. These truths no 
 other set of men even thought out, much less 
 made them their own by such a Hving experi- 
 ence that they were uttered in poetry and song 
 with pathos, with fiery energy, with subHme 
 glory, with more than earthly beauty. Not 
 one discordant note is heard in the whole col- 
 lection. The reason, the only reason is that 
 along with the poetic inspiration in these sweet 
 singers of Israel, there was the afflatus of the 
 Divine Spirit, and the Psalter came from God. 
 
i 
 
 V 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF A MESSIAH PECULIAR TO THE OLD TESTA- 
 MENT — HOW IT IS STATED IN THE PSALTER — THE SECOND 
 PSALM— THE FORTY-FIFTH — THE SEVENTY-SECOND — THE 
 ONE HUNDRED AND TENTH — THE TWENTY-SECOND — THE 
 CHARACTER THUS DESCRIBED — UNLIKE THE HINDU AVA- 
 TARA — THE PERSIAN SOSIOSH — NOT OF SUBJECTIVE ORIGIN 
 — DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE — OF LITTLE VALUE /^r se — 
 KNOWN TO THE PSALMISTS — NOT DWELT UPON — HOW ITS 
 PLACE WAS SUPPLIED — THE ARGUMENT SUMMED UP. 
 
 THE fallen condition of man is not only a 
 doctrine of Scripture, but a fact of universal 
 experience and observation. All the religions 
 of the heathen world bear witness to this fact, 
 and to their own incompetency to deal with it. 
 They could devise no effectual relief. Mankind 
 yearned for that which it could not find, which 
 in itself it did not possess. Neither mythology 
 nor philosophy could give any assurance of re- 
 demption. Men cried aloud to heaven, but they 
 
 (113) 
 
114 
 
 THE PSAL TER. 
 
 received no answer. The attempts even of the 
 wisest and best, whether among Aryan or 
 Semitic races, are not unfitly represented in the 
 words of a Hving poet, — 
 
 An infant crying in the night ; 
 An infant crying for the light ; 
 And with no language but a cry. 
 
 It may be said, therefore, with truth, that the doc- 
 trine of the Messiah, at least in any clearly de- 
 veloped form, is peculiar to the Old Testament. 
 There are indeed scattered through the Pagan 
 mythologies obscure allusions to a future de- 
 liverer, but nowhere is there anything to show 
 that this conception held the place which it oc- 
 cupied among the Hebrews, lying as it did at 
 the very basis of their national existence, and 
 giving shape and color to all their institutions. 
 The first promise was uttered at the gates of 
 Paradise ; it was renewed to Noah, the second 
 father of the race ; it was the reason of the call 
 of Abraham from Chaldea to Canaan ; it was 
 perpetuated in his family ; it underlay the insti- 
 tution of the priestly and prophetic orders in the 
 Mosaic Cultus ; and finally it blossomed out in 
 the monarchy established in the line of David. 
 That is, by the time of this eminent man, the 
 
THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 115 
 
 history of the chosen people had been so 
 developed, its ecclesiastical and political consti- 
 tution had become so fixed, and the cycle of its 
 fortunes had been so diversified, that abundant 
 material was furnished for expanding and illus- 
 trating- the Messianic Conception in every ap- 
 propriate way. Accordingly, in the great era 
 of lyric poetry which began with David, we 
 should naturally expect to find this lofty national 
 hope set forth. And so it is. There are no 
 songs in praise of the national heroes, a nega- 
 tive fact still more markedly exhibited in the 
 hymn of Moses at the Red Sea, and that of De- 
 borah upon the overthrow of Sisera. In neither 
 is there any lauding of the human instruments 
 of the triumph, but the entire glory is given to 
 Israel's God. So the Psalter contains not a 
 single paean in honor of any one illustrious per- 
 sonage of earthly origin, from Abel and Enoch 
 down to David and his mighty men. 
 
 But it does contain a number of Psalms which 
 celebrate in a peculiar and otherwise unexampled 
 method the sufferings and the glories of one ex- 
 traordinary personage. And they do this in 
 such a way as to make it apparent that they are 
 a fair expression of the national thought. They 
 present to us predictions of the great future de- 
 
Il6 THE PSALTER. 
 
 liverer, not abstractly nor historically, not as 
 belonging entirely to remote ages, but as a 
 living hope in the present and as developed out 
 of the existing experience of God's people. 
 The hopes and fears, the trials and triumphs, 
 the temptations and confessions and prayers and 
 praises of believers, flowering into song and ut- 
 tering themselves in that poetic form which al- 
 ways seems most appropriate to deep emotion 
 — it would indeed be strange, if these lyrics 
 contained no reference to that which always was 
 the ground-idea of the nation's existence. Nor 
 is it wonderful that there are Psalms in which at 
 first it is difficult to determine to what extent 
 and according to what law they are pervaded by 
 the Messianic element. The prophets, priests, 
 and kings of the Old Testament were adumbra- 
 tions of One who should comprehend in His own 
 person all these offices. The nation itself was 
 indissolubly connected with its future head, and 
 on that account shared and anticipated his for- 
 tunes. Hence there are so many instances in 
 which language is used respecting the type 
 which belongs only to the antitype, and others 
 in which the singer almost insensibly passes 
 from utterances appropriate only to himself or 
 the people he represents, to utterances which 
 
THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 117 
 
 necessarily suggest the thought of some one 
 spotless, if not divine, with whom the people 
 stand in intimate and mysterious union. But in 
 all cases the drapery of the Psalms is native and 
 national. There are no exotics in the garden 
 of the Hebrew muse. The imagery is taken 
 from the circumstances of the time and place ; 
 and the poet expresses himself according to his 
 training and experience. Hence the seemingly 
 fragmentary character of the Messianic Psalms. 
 No one of them gives a view of Messiah's whole 
 person or work or character, but each one takes 
 that portion or feature which needed at the time 
 to be set forth, leaving it for future ages or the 
 progress of events to adjust these separate 
 statements into one harmonious and self-con- 
 sistent portraiture. To quarrel with this ar- 
 rangement is to quarrel with the entire system 
 of lyric poetry, or with its use as a mode of 
 Divine revelation. 
 
 What, now, is the Messiah of the Psalms ? I 
 propose to answer this question by citing in 
 succession some of the lyrics, which by imme- 
 morial tradition, and by the almost concurrent 
 voice of scholars of our own day, are admitted 
 to refer chiefly, if not exclusively, to Christ. 
 Let me begin with the Second, the most finish- 
 
Il8 TUB. PSALTER. 
 
 ed and striking poem in the entire collection. 
 Indeed I know of none in any language that 
 surpasses it in regularity of structure and depth 
 of poetic feeling. It consists of four strophes 
 of equal length, each containing a distinct por- 
 tion of the theme. In the first the poet hears 
 the tramp of gathering armies, and as the tumult- 
 uous host draws near, sees whole nations in 
 revolt and recognizes the presumptuous words 
 of their leaders. And so he breaks out in a 
 question of wonder and horror, " Why do na- 
 tions rage, and peoples imagine a vain thing ? 
 Kings of the earth have set themselves, and 
 princes have taken counsel against Jehovah and 
 His anointed, saying, Let us break their bonds 
 asunder, and cast their cords from us." Then 
 all at once, in the second strophe, he lifts his 
 eye far away from this tempest of confusion, 
 and sees Jehovah seated upon His everlasting 
 throne, mocking at the fatuity of His adversaries, 
 and calmly announcing, to their terror and con- 
 fusion, that He had set His king upon His holy 
 hill. Then in the third strophe, by a sudden and 
 most dramatic change of speakers, the anointed 
 king comes in, affirming, on the authority of 
 Jehovah, his own Divine Sonship, the grant to 
 him of a strictly universal dominion, and of 
 
THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 119 
 
 power to exercise that dominion, whether in 
 wrath or in mercy. Lastly, in the fourth strophe, 
 the poet summons kings and judges to desist 
 from their hopeless enterprise, and kissing the 
 Son to experience the blessedness of all who 
 take refuge in Him. It seems to be plain that 
 the person here described could not possibly be 
 David or any of his line. The boundaries of 
 the promised land had been definitely fixed by 
 the Divine Word, and were never exceeded in 
 fact ; but here is a covenant that Jehovah's 
 anointed Son should have and exercise an un- 
 limited dominion, on the ground of which 
 earthly rulers indiscriminately are advised to 
 yield Him implicit obedience. 
 
 In the Forty-fifth Psalm, this mighty ruler re- 
 appears. He is girded with a sword. He rides 
 forth prosperously. His arrows are sharp, and 
 peoples fall under Him. But the poet celebrates 
 with emphasis the moral groundwork of this 
 dominion. The Conqueror is beautiful beyond all 
 human standard or comparison, i. e., invested 
 with every moral and spiritual attraction. Grace 
 is poured into His lips. He loves righteousness 
 and hates iniquity. For this reason God 
 anoints Him and blesses Him forever. Nay, He 
 is even addressed as divine — " Thy throne, O 
 
1 20 THE PSAL TER. 
 
 God, is forever and ever." But this King has a 
 bride richly dressed in gold inwoven garments, 
 who, loaded with gifts and followed by virgins, 
 enters with music and song into the palace, 
 where the dynasty thus established is to have 
 perpetual succession and endless fame. Here 
 is a plain reference to the familiar figure used all 
 through the sacred Scriptures, by which the 
 relation between God and His people, and so 
 between Christ and His Church, is represented 
 as a conjugal tie. To consider the Psalm as a 
 glowing epithalamium upon the marriage of a 
 mere earthly monarch, is simply absurd. No king 
 of the Hebrew, or of any other race, ever found- 
 ed his title to his throne simply upon his moral 
 qualities, his love of truth, meekness and right- 
 eousness. Yet this is preeminently the case 
 here. Because the King is so upright, God 
 bestows upon Him an eternal blessing, and na- 
 tions give Him thanks forever. 
 
 The same point is somewhat differently elab 
 orated in the Seventy-second Psalm. Here is 
 described by Solomon a superhuman King whose 
 empire far transcends his own. It reaches 
 from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends 
 of the earth, i. e., from each frontier of the 
 promised land to the remotest regions of the 
 
THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 12 1 
 
 known world in the opposite quarter : from the 
 Mediterranean to the ocean that washes the 
 shores of Eastern Asia, and from the Euphrates 
 to the utmost west. Before its ruler, all who 
 are most inaccessible to the arms of Israel, 
 hasten to tender their voluntary submission. 
 The wild sons of the desert, the merchants of 
 Tarshish, the islanders of the Mediterranean, 
 the Arab chiefs, the wealthy Ethiopians, are 
 foremost in proffering- their homage and fealty. 
 But this is not enough. All kings are to fall 
 down before Him — all nations are to do Him 
 service. His empire is to be coextensive with 
 the world, and is to last while the moon endures. 
 He Himself maybe out of sight, but His Name 
 will endure forever — that name will propagate 
 itself as long as the sun shines, and men shall 
 be blessed in Him to the end of time. Yet this 
 kingdom is spiritual ; it confers peace upon the 
 world only by righteousness. Its Head has 
 profound sympathy with the poor and the help- 
 less. He hears the cry of every human heart ; 
 He brings relief to every human sufferer. So 
 that His appearance is like the rain upon the 
 mown grass, like showers that water the earth. 
 He is formidable only to oppressors, whom He 
 breaks in pieces ; but the needy, the afflicted, 
 
122 THE PSALTER. 
 
 and the friendless, are the objects of His pecul- 
 iar care. And it is upon this fact, upon the 
 equity and grace of the King-, that the univer- 
 sality and perpetuity of His kingdom are 
 founded. 
 
 Yet again, we meet with this lofty personage 
 in the One Hundred and Tenth Psalm. Here 
 He is introduced at once, as sitting on the right 
 hand of Jehovah, as the partner of His dignity 
 and power. Exalted thus. He has enemies, but 
 they are doomed to a remediless overthrow. 
 Nations and kings and the wide earth shall feel 
 the resistless rod of His strength. When He 
 musters His host, His people willingly offer 
 themselves for the service, clad not in earthly 
 armor, but in the beauties of holiness. And 
 they come in countless multitude and never-end- 
 ing succession, like dewdrops from the womb of 
 the morning. But their ruler is Priest as well 
 as King ; — not Levitical, nor Aaronic, but of 
 that older order, which in the person of the 
 mysterious Melchizedek had been honored even 
 by the Father of the faithful. According to this 
 lofty type, the Messiah has neither beginning of 
 days nor end of life, but sits forever a priest 
 upon His throne. And He is Priest-king mani- 
 festly in order that some work of expiation 
 
THE MESSIAH AND A EUTURE LIFE. 123 
 
 may be accomplished by which His people shall 
 become prepared to offer themselves willingly 
 to His service, and thus be worthy of sharing in 
 His universal conquests. In this double capaci- 
 ty, uniting the two functions, regal and sacerdo- 
 tal, which to the Jewish mind always stood 
 separate and distinct, the consecrated Monarch 
 sets forth against His foes. When wearied in 
 the pursuit, like Gideon's warriors He refreshes 
 Himself with water from the brook, and marches 
 on, conquering and to conquer. 
 
 But the image of the Priest suggesting as it 
 does the thought of sacrifice, reminds us of 
 another order of ideas respecting the Messiah 
 which might naturally be expected to occur in 
 the Psalms. Accordingly from these bright 
 and glowing pictures of regal majesty and 
 power and victory, I turn back toward the be- 
 ginning of the collection, where we find quite a 
 new conception of the entire subject. It is in the 
 Twenty-second Psalm, the song upon Aijeleth 
 vShahar, the hind of the morning, a title in which 
 it is with some probability supposed that the 
 hind\% a poetical figure for persecuted innocence, 
 and the morning (literally, dawn) for deliverance 
 after long distress. The lyric concludes with a 
 graphic picture of the same universal prevalence 
 
124 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 of truth and right already presented, but comes 
 to it in a very different way. The clash of arms 
 is not heard once, nor the blare of trumpets. 
 The opening words are the cry of a sufferer 
 pleading for help. Apparently abandoned by 
 heaven and earth, He is in the last extremity. 
 Furious enemies assail Him on every side, while 
 He Himself is wasted away, His body reduced to 
 a skeleton, His hands and His feet pierced ; and 
 as He is thus hovering on the brink of death, 
 His foes feast their eyes on the spectacle and 
 cast lots over His raiment. But just here His 
 loud cry for help passes into a confident antici- 
 pation of deliverance. The consequences of 
 this deliverance will be universal and everlast- 
 ing. The rescued sufferer will thank and praise 
 God among all the seed of Israel, so that their 
 heart shall live forever. Not only so, but He 
 will perform His vows by suitable offerings and 
 sacrifices, and to the joyful eucharistic table 
 thus spread shall come not only His brethren, 
 but all kindreds of the nations from one end of 
 the earth to the other. The rich and the poor alike 
 shall gather to the festive assembly. Nor shall 
 the celebration cease with the contemporary 
 race, but go down from age to age to genera- 
 tions yet unbo]rn. For the Kingdom is the 
 
THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 125 
 
 Lord's, and He is Governor among the na- 
 tions. 
 
 Such is the substance of five Messianic 
 Psalms. There is a score or more besides, the 
 recital of which would add to the liveliness and 
 the fulness of the delineation, but there is not 
 time to cite them. For the same reason I have 
 not entered upon nice questions of exegesis, nor 
 attempted to explain or defend the principles 
 upon which the utterance of these far-reaching 
 predictions is reconciled with the character and 
 condition of their respective authors. Nor is 
 it any part of the plan to found an argument 
 upon the fulfilment of prophecy as shown by the 
 correspondence between many of the detailed 
 expressions of the Psalter, and the recorded life 
 and death and resurrection of our blessed Lord. 
 This is an interesting and fruitful theme, but it 
 does not belong here. All that concerns the 
 present argument is simply the existence of 
 these remarkable poems in a popular lyric 
 collection of the Hebrew people, largely and 
 constantly used in their social and public wor- 
 ship. I have analyzed their contents and briefly 
 stated their general meaning, as it is ascertained 
 by the fixed laws of language. Nor does this 
 statement rest simply upon the authority of the 
 
126 THE PSALTER. 
 
 New Testament. Had that book never been 
 written, these Psalms would necessarily have 
 the same meaning- as has been attributed to 
 them. The question, then, recurs, how are we 
 to account for such a peculiar phenomenon in 
 literature ? We are dealing, not with prose, but 
 with poetry ; not with a stately epic, but with 
 verses intended to be sung. We are brought 
 into contact with the throbbing heart of a people 
 giving free utterance to all its hopes and fears, 
 its recollections and its anticipations, in its 
 relations to God. Here is a distinct class 
 of sacred odes, which, leaving aside both 
 the past and the present, distinctly points 
 to the future, and declares the coming of 
 One who is to introduce the reign of universal 
 truth and peace. While He is invested with 
 irresistible might, and wields an iron sceptre, 
 yet He is Himself personally an example of rec- 
 titude and truth and grace, and the whole force 
 of His administration turns in this direction. 
 He overthrows the proud and the wicked, but 
 is a shelter to all the humble poor. He starts 
 from the holy hill of Zion ; He is a product of 
 the Jewish race ; He is to sit upon David's 
 throne; but His blessings — not simply His au- 
 thority, but the benefits He confers — are to be 
 
THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 127 
 
 felt to the end of the earth. He is, too, not only 
 a king, but a priest, and in some undefined way 
 His sufferings are connected with His triumph ; 
 so that the former are the cause of the latter. 
 Of course, in our day, we understand the ex- 
 act nature of this connection, for we have the 
 words of Him who expounded the things writ- 
 ten of Him in the Law of Moses, and in the 
 Prophets, and in the Psalms (Luke xxiv. 44), 
 and who said to the two disciples on the way 
 to Emmaus — " Ought not Christ to have suf- 
 fered these things, and to enter into His 
 glory ? " (xxiv. 26). The contemporaries of 
 David had no such illumination, but they had 
 the record, from which they could scarcely fail 
 to infer that moral causes lay at the foundation 
 of the Messianic Empire, and that humiliation 
 must precede exaltation. Whence, then, did 
 this conception originate ? It was not an im- 
 portation from any other race or faith, for no 
 other had it. The last hundred years have 
 thrown a flood of light upon all the literature 
 and traditions of the ancient nations of East- 
 ern and Central Asia. Neither Egyptians, nor 
 Brahmans, nor Buddhists, nor Confucianists, nor 
 Parsees, nor Accads, nor Chaldeans, ever form- 
 ed a conception of a future deliverer approach- 
 
128 THE PSALTER. 
 
 ing the Hebrew notion, in distinctness, in pu- 
 rity, in tenderness, in universality. Their views 
 were distorted by mythological legends or ab- 
 surd fancies. Compare the Hindu Avatara as 
 given in the Sanscrit Scriptures. Vishna is rep- 
 resented as coming into the world in ten, 
 some say twenty-four, successive transforma- 
 tions, for the purpose of redressing wrong and 
 preserving the creation. These consist of a 
 series of hideous physical generations in the 
 shape of a fish, a tortoise, a boar, a lion, a 
 dwarf, etc., in all of which metamorphoses there 
 is a boundless store of legendary words and 
 deeds, but all of them destitute of any spiritual 
 meaning or moral purpose. What resemblance 
 is there between these grotesque and often im- 
 moral developments, and the picture of a wise, 
 and just, and benignant, and glorious king, 
 formidable only to the wicked, and at last gath- 
 ering high and low, rich and poor, under one 
 peaceful sceptre ? There is, indeed, some re- 
 semblance in the Sosiosh of the Avestan — the 
 expected deliverer of the Perso-Aryan race, 
 who, when evil had reached its final stage, was 
 to appear, and by a process of resurrection and 
 judgment, destroy at last all the wicked, purge 
 out the dross from created nature, and gather 
 
THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 129 
 
 the whole race of man on a new-born earth to 
 sing the glory of Ormazd and the Amshas- 
 pands. But this part of the Zendic Scriptures 
 belongs, if not to post-Christian, certainly to a 
 very late period in the development of Zoroas- 
 ter's doctrine, and therefore is generally and 
 justly supposed to have been a reproduction of 
 views borrowed from the Jews, whose writings 
 we know were widely disseminated all through 
 the East after the first overthrow of Babylon. 
 Where, then, did the Jews get the brilliant con- 
 ception of a Messiah, so inwrought into the lit- 
 erature and the life of the people, that it rang 
 constantly in the choruses of the temple, and 
 was the sheet-anchor of the nation in every 
 time of trial — the pivot of their firmest hopes, 
 and the key to all their Scriptures ? Modern 
 writers make its origin human and subjective. 
 They say it was the joint product of the misfor- 
 tunes of the times and the theocratic consti- 
 tution — the experience of a felt want in this and 
 other instances exciting the imagination to fill 
 up the blank out of its own resources. But 
 how can this theory, however ingeniously 
 wrought out, explain the Psalms we have been 
 considering ? These are all of the Davidic or 
 Solomonic period, when the nation was united 
 6* 
 
I30 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 under one head, in a state of great prosperity, 
 and with boundaries equalHng the widest range 
 ever mentioned in the original grant of Canaan. 
 What subjective considerations could have led 
 writers in that age, when even the idea of a 
 universal history was unknown, to conceive of 
 a monarch who, by divine appointment, should 
 go forth from Zion and rule literally all the 
 earth, who should do this in the strictest exer- 
 cise of righteousness, and should introduce a 
 peaceful state of general prosperity, and yet 
 combining priestly with kingly functions, should 
 in some way suffer the extremest sorrow as the 
 prelude of His signal and eternal triumph ? No 
 known laws of human nature will account for 
 such a result, and no similar case can be fur- 
 nished from all the records of human expe- 
 rience. It follows, therefore, that these Psalms 
 were divinely suggested. 
 
 From the Messiah I pass to the doctrine of 
 a Future Life in the Psalms. The absence 
 of full and explicit reference to this subject has 
 not unfrequendy been a source of perplexity, 
 even to believers. If the Psalter is the one 
 divinely appointed Liturgy of the Church in all 
 ages ; if its fervent ritual of devotion was intend- 
 
THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 131 
 
 ed to revolve within the circle of every-day pains, 
 fears, and solaces of our earthly pilgrimage, and 
 furnish the fittest material for prayer, praise, 
 trust, and hope, why is there so little reference 
 to the final outcome of our present life, to the 
 better world beyond the grave ? In answer to 
 this question it may be observed : 
 
 (i). That the doctrine of Immortality {per se) 
 is far from deserving the emphasis which has 
 been placed upon it. It is very true that the ab- 
 sence of the belief is a serious reproach. One 
 can hardly sufficiently reprobate the crude mate- 
 rialism which at the present day, and often under 
 the pretence of relying upon the results of sci- 
 entific investigation, coolly dismisses all thought 
 of a life to come as a mere dream, pleasing in- 
 deed, and affordinof an ac^reeable excitement to 
 the imagination, but utterly destitute of any 
 rational basis. Far better is the stout assertion 
 of Max Miiller, that " the stJie qua non of all real 
 religion, is a belief in immortality and in per- 
 sonal immortality, without which religion is like 
 an arch resting upon one pillar — like a bridge 
 ending in an abyss." Whoso holds that man, 
 when the breath leaves the body, perishes like 
 the beasts, is in great danger of coming to act 
 upon the beastly-maxim, " Let us eat and drink, 
 
132 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 for to-morrow we die." But it does not follow 
 from this, that all who are persuaded that there 
 is a future life are necessarily possessors of 
 a pure, or elevated, or satisfying- theology. 
 There are numerous examples to the contrary, 
 alike among nations of the highest refinement 
 and amonof tribes of wanderings savag-es. In 
 ancient Egypt we have the best developed con- 
 ception of man's immortality which any of the 
 heathen attained — one that mcluded the ethical 
 ideas of judgment and retribution. Yet this 
 did not save its holders from the grossest forms 
 of polytheism. For they worshipped even brute 
 animals — a custom which provoked the scorn 
 not only of Christians, but of the heathen. The 
 words of Clement of Alexandria are familiar ; 
 speaking of a visitor's disappointment when 
 passing through the long and stately propylons 
 and halls of a magnificent temple gleaming with 
 jewels and gold, till he reached at last the most 
 holy recess, a veil was drawn aside and reveal- 
 ed the god, in the shape of a bull, or a cat, or 
 a crocodile, or a serpent! Plutarch before 
 him reprobated this animal-worship as a fit 
 subject of laughter and ridicule. Among the 
 Fijians of the South Sea, the belief of immor- 
 tality led to the most revolting bloodshed ; for 
 
THE MESSIAH AXD A FUTURE LIFE 
 
 133 
 
 arguing that man's state after death will be 
 precisely that in which he was when he died, 
 they destroyed their parents, and sometimes 
 themselves, while in full health and strength, in 
 the hope of thus escaping here and hereafter 
 the evils of age and decrepitude. And Living- 
 stone mentions numerous tribes of Central Africa 
 who, when a chief dies, slaughter a number of 
 his slaves to be his companions in the other 
 world. So the wild tribes of North America 
 all held firmly that there was a future life, but 
 almost the only result was to intensify the 
 gloom and terror which belong to all natural 
 religions. It is clear, then, that there is no 
 religious character and no ethical importance 
 in this much-lauded tenet. All depends upon 
 the other doctrines with which it is associated. 
 (2). That it was known and held by the 
 authors of the Psalms is very evident. Their 
 fathers must have learned it during their long 
 stay in Egypt, where it was represented in paint- 
 ing, in architecture, and in literature. Besides, 
 they must have inferred it from man's original 
 creation in the image of God ; from the trans- 
 lation of Enoch, and from Jehovah's persistent 
 application to Himself of the title^ — the God of 
 Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of 
 
134 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 Jacob, long after those patriarchs had ceased to 
 Hv^e on the earth. Nay, the very superstitions 
 of the people bear witness on this point. We 
 find that from the time of Moses there was con- 
 stantly a class of persons who professed to be 
 mediums of communication between this world 
 and the other. They were called NecromaJicers, 
 or Seekers to the dead — (Deut. xviii. ii, Isaiah 
 viii. 19). See the case of Saul and the witch 
 of Endor. It does not make any difference 
 whether we call this practice a delusion or an 
 imposture. In either case, its prevalence and 
 long continuance show that the popular Jewish 
 mind was deeply pervaded by a conviction that 
 the soul existed after this life. But since the 
 vulofar held this truth without livinof reference 
 to God, they only made it a miserable super- 
 stition. But besides, there are utterances in the 
 Psalms themselves which imply the conviction 
 that there is a life beyond the present. In the 
 Sixteenth, the sacred poet, looking death full 
 in the face, said : 
 
 Thou wilt not abandon my soul to the unseen world, 
 Nor suffer Thy holy one to see the pit. 
 Thou wilt show me the path of life, 
 Fulness of joy in Thv presence, 
 Pleasures at Thy right hand forevermore. 
 
THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 135 
 
 So again in the Seventeenth, contrasting 
 himself with men of the world who have their 
 portion in this life, who are sated with children 
 to whom they bequeath their wealth, the poet 
 says : 
 
 As for me, in righteousness I shall behold Thy face, 
 I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness ; 
 
 — a jubilant hope which never could have been 
 bounded by the grave. A similar contrast is 
 found in the Forty-ninth Psalm, where the 
 singer describes the vanity of men, even in their 
 best estate. Although rich, and honored, and 
 wise, they have no permanence. They perish 
 like cattle ; they are laid in the grave ; Death 
 is their shepherd ; their beauty and their glory 
 are gone. But he adds, " God shall redeem 
 my soul from the power of the grave, for He 
 shall take me." He who knows and loves God, 
 has the life of God, and can never utterly perish. 
 That bond must survive even the shock of 
 death. To the same effect, and partly in the 
 same words, is the utterance of Asaph in the 
 Seventy-third Psalm. In this striking lyric, the 
 writer, after solving the painful mystery of pros- 
 perous ungodliness, declares that as for himself, 
 he is ever held by God's hand, and therefore 
 
136 
 
 THE PSALTER, 
 
 has unshaken confidence. " Thou wilt guide 
 me with Thy counsel, and afterward receive me 
 to glory. My flesh and my heart faileth, but 
 God is the strength of my heart and my portion 
 forever." Now it is true that there are other 
 utterances differing very widely from these, 
 such as the following : 
 
 In death there is no remembrance of Thee, 
 
 In the grave who shall give Thee thanks ? — (vi. 5). 
 
 What profit is there in my blood when I go down to the pit ? 
 Shall the dust praise Thee ? Shall it declare Thy truth ?— (xxx. 9). 
 
 Wilt Thou show wonders unto the dead ? 
 
 Shall the shades below arise and give Thee thanks ? 
 
 Shall Thy loving-kindness be told in the grave ? 
 
 Or thy faithfulness in destruction? — (Ixxxviii. 10, 11). 
 
 These sorrowful forebodings were uttered un- 
 der a sense of desertion. Their authors felt 
 themselves going down to death under a cloud, 
 and considered their situation a token of the 
 Divine displeasure. Their hopeless gloom arose 
 not from the mere cessation of life, but from its 
 cessation under the frown of the Almighty. If 
 He were alienated from them, what hope had 
 they here or hereafter? Hence these wailings 
 of seeming despair 1 
 
 (3). Still it is very evident that there is a sharp 
 contrast between the teachings of the Old Tes- 
 
'I HE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 137 
 
 tament and those of the New on the subject of 
 immortality. In the latter there is a fulness, and 
 confidence, and glow, and splendor which leave 
 nothing to be desired. In the former the state- 
 ments are scanty, infrequent, and sometimes 
 apparently at least ambiguous. And it is very 
 certain that in the Psalter, which represents in the 
 best way the practical side of dogma, there is no 
 such reference to the truth as we should expect. 
 Why is this ? Why do these devout singers 
 say so much less of the future life than their 
 heathen contemporaries ? Why is there not 
 even an allusion to the process of judgment 
 upon every disembodied spirit in the Hall of 
 Osiris, which their forefathers must have seen or 
 heard of during their long stay in the Nile 
 valley ? In short, why is there the possession 
 of the truth, and yet so little use of it ? The 
 answer to these questions furnishes the argu- 
 ment I offer in the case. The reticence of the 
 Psalmists was divinely ordered. The dispensa- 
 tion to which they belonged was an inchoate 
 one. It was to bridge over the interval between 
 the fall of man and. the fulness of time for the 
 appearance of the great Revcaler of God. For 
 that Revealer was to make the full disclosure of 
 God's purposes of love and mercy toward His 
 
1 3 S THE PSA L TER. 
 
 people. By His coming He " abolished death 
 and brought life and immortality to light." This 
 was not simply the truth that death is not the 
 end of man. That was known, or at least 
 believed, the world over and among all races. 
 But the New Testament sets forth life and im- 
 mortality in the highest sense — comprehending 
 the resurrection of the body in a new and 
 glorious form ; its reunion with the soul ; perfect 
 freedom from all the stain and power of sin ; the 
 vision of God, and the endless and ever-increas- 
 ing enjoyment of His favor. Now these things 
 could not be fairly conceived and satisfactorily 
 applied until the actual manifestation of the Son 
 of God. In His life, and death, and rising again 
 from the dead, and His ascension on high, there 
 was furnished the proper historical basis for an 
 intelligent and satisfying faith on these points. 
 And it was proper that for Him whom God 
 sent last of all, it should be reserved fully to 
 lift the veil of the future and disclose what the 
 Lord has prepared for them that love Him. 
 Hence the sparing references to these themes 
 in the Psalms. The reserve was not accidental, 
 but designed ; not the result of ignorance, but 
 of knowledee. Had the Psalmists been left to 
 themselves they would have done like the rest of 
 
THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 139 
 
 mankind — joked about Charon and his boat, or 
 constructed an elaborate "Ritual of the Dead," 
 like the Egyptians, or adopted some form of the 
 Hindu transmigration of souls, or anticipated the 
 sensual paradise of Moslems, the warrior ban- 
 quets of Scandinavians, or the happy hunting- 
 grounds of our own Aborigines. But they did 
 nothing of the kind. Their references to the 
 subject are always connected with the idea of 
 God. If of a hopeful character, they anticipate 
 being in happy union with Him ; if of a despond- 
 ing purport, the great sorrow is that the chorus 
 of His praise must cease. Everything revolves 
 around the one central thought of the Supreme, 
 holy, and ever-blessed God, as the abiding and 
 all-sufficient source of their happiness. 
 
 Here, then, lies the peculiar, and, on natural 
 principles, inexplicable position of the Psalmists. 
 Having the living roots of the doctrine in their 
 earlier literature, and meeting with varied forms 
 of it among the heathen with whom they came 
 in contact, they yet habitually and carefully re- 
 frained from any prolonged or minute references 
 to it. The fruitfulness and attractiveness of the 
 theme is apparent in all literature ; not only in 
 that of the ethnic religions, but also and eminently 
 in that of Christendom, from the splendid imagery 
 
140 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 of the Apocalypse, down through the hymnol- 
 ogy of all ages and lands, even to our own date. 
 Upon scarce any theme does the Christian poet 
 rise on loftier wing, or take a wider sweep of 
 imaginative conception, than when expatiating 
 upon the future glories of the believer. But 
 the old Psalmists stay their hands. They de- 
 light to dwell on the Divine perfections or the 
 glory of the Divine government. They are 
 never weary of setting forth the trust and confi- 
 dence and peace and joy that are found in 
 fellowship with the unseen Jehovah. This is 
 represented in the largest variety of phrase: — 
 the shadow of a great [rock in a weary land, 
 manna in the wilderness, gushing streams in the 
 desert, the dawn of morning to a weary night- 
 watcher, a shelter from the storm, a portion 
 sweeter than honey, more desirable than gold. 
 But as soon as they approach the life to come, 
 they give but a glance within the veil, and then 
 retreat to dwell upon the present spiritual 
 relations of the creature and his Creator. For 
 here was all that was needed. If the Almighty 
 reveals Himself in condescension and love to 
 His people as their God — their dwelling place, 
 the rock of their streno-th — this involves an end- 
 less relation, for surely the living God would 
 
THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 141 
 
 not expend His riches of love upon perishing 
 creatures of clay whose houses are crushed 
 before the moth. We see and feel this as a 
 matter of course. And to us a mere naked im- 
 mortality, such as is found among the lowest 
 tribes of men, bears no comparison in dignity 
 and value to the idea of a present happy life 
 with God. But the marvel is, that the Hebrew 
 singers understood this so distinctly, and were 
 controlled by it so entirely in their most impas- 
 sioned utterances. 
 
 The case, then, stands thus : On the one side 
 we find the doctrine of the soul's immortality 
 holding a fixed and prominent place among the 
 articles of popular belief the world over, in an- 
 cient times as well as modern. This position 
 has been indeed at times attacked, but never 
 successfully. The evidence adduced from the 
 old Sanscrit texts, or the graven or painted 
 walls of Thebes or Philae, or the cuneiform in- 
 scriptions of Nineveh or Persepolis, or the litera- 
 ture of Greece and Rome, or the consensus of 
 modern travelers, is altogether too abundant 
 and clear to be resisted. The belief was so 
 widespread, if not universal, as to compel us to 
 attribute it to the common instincts of man's nat- 
 ure. As Coleridge says, " Its fibres are to be 
 
142 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 traced to the tap-root of humanity." But the 
 beHef was always expressed in gross and in- 
 adequate forms, and associated with outlandish 
 views, as if to show that our fallen nature, left 
 to itself, could not frame any rational view of the 
 mode of existence in the world to come, or of 
 the character of its retributions. Hence men 
 devised the fables of Elysium and Tartarus, the 
 Metempsychosis from one fleshly form into an- 
 other, the absorption into the divine unity, and 
 the like. Hence, too, the folly of the Necro- 
 mancy of our own day, the self-styled Spiritual- 
 ism which for a generation has been rampant in 
 this country. This crude imposture boasts 
 much of its clear disclosure of a future life, and 
 indeed has converted some materialists. But 
 wherein has there been any gain to human 
 knowledge or happiness or character ? The 
 history of the movement has only added another 
 to the many illustrations already on record, of 
 the moral impotence of the doctrine of immor- 
 tality held in and for itself to elevate or purify. 
 " The power of an endless life " (Hebrew vii. 
 1 6) is something transcendent and ineffable; 
 but if it be separated from its kindred thought 
 of the eternal God as the moral governor of the 
 world and the satisfying portion of the soul, it 
 
THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 143 
 
 at once degenerates into grotesque or monstrous 
 or puerile conceptions, or else resolves itself in- 
 to a mere prolongation of the present state of 
 things without essential change, and therefore 
 destitute of any restraining or uplifting influence. 
 The mere continuance of being after death is 
 rather a metaphysical dogma than a religious 
 truth, and may coexist with the crudest and 
 most unspiritual notions. The Esquimaux, the 
 Papuan, the wildest savages in the forests of 
 Central Africa, have no doubt that the spirits of 
 their departed ancestors survive, but in no de- 
 gree does this conviction raise them in the scale 
 of thinking beings. 
 
 On the other side, we find the doctrine among 
 the Hebrews held indeed, and occasionally illus- 
 trated in a remarkable manner, but still not 
 thrust forward or made prominent, and yet all 
 its essential ends gained in the fullest manner. 
 The Hebrew poets talk of man's mortality in. a 
 strain of effectiveness and pathos nowhere sur 
 passed. They represent the frailty, the vanity, 
 the emptiness of human pursuits and expecta- 
 tions, with a keenness which no satirist of 
 Greece or Rome has exceeded. And yet their 
 doctrine of man's kinship with God, of his filial 
 relation, of his capacities of holiness, of his 
 
144 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 faith in the unseen, of the superiority of spiritual 
 things to temporal, of the certain overthrow of 
 the transgressor and the equally certain recom- 
 pense of the righteous, of the forgiveness of sin 
 upon repentance and confession, and of the bless- 
 edness of the new life thus secured — this doc- 
 trine, I say, quite restored the scale, and put man 
 in his social and religious relations in a position 
 which no other ancient nation even approached. 
 It is pertinent, then, again to ask. What occa- 
 sioned this remarkable difference ? How comes 
 it to pass that in one nation — and that not dis- 
 tinguished by a philosophical spirit, nor by a 
 gift for speculative inquiries — we find inwrought 
 not only in its formal creed and national history, 
 but also in its pious meditations and lyric songs, 
 a marked and seemingly studied reticence upon 
 the life beyond the grave, united with an intense- 
 ly pure and spiritual conception of all divine 
 things ? The only answer is, that they were 
 divinely guided. This superintendence on the 
 one hand kept them from the vain and foolish 
 imaginations which deluded all their contempo- 
 raries, and on the other refused to grant that 
 decree of illumination which would have been 
 inconsistent wiUi the design and character of 
 the inchoate system to which they belonged. 
 
THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 H5 
 
 In conclusion, let me suggest the contrasted 
 relations of the two themes we have been con- 
 sidering. Both refer to the Future, and yet how 
 differently treated ! Of the coming Messiah 
 there is abundant mention — His person, His 
 offices. His suffering. His kingdom, His glory, 
 His moral excellence, His world-wide influence, 
 His imperishable name. The picture is so com- 
 plete, so vivid, so striking, that it requires a 
 vigorous imagination to find any tolerable 
 analogies to it in the literatures of other ancient 
 nations. Yet in regard to Immortality, the con- 
 trast is the other way. Here the Hebrew sing- 
 ers are reticent and obscure. Occasionally a 
 rift for a moment parts the clouds, and one 
 catches a glimpse of the pleasures forevermore ; 
 but in an instant the curtain is drawn again, and 
 it is the present relations of the soul to God 
 that occupy all the attention. The ethnic re- 
 ligions, on the contrary, all habitually point for- 
 ward to what follows this life, making indeed 
 sad work of it. For just as the old map-makers 
 filled the unexplored regions of Central Africa 
 with figures of unicorns and elephants and all 
 sorts of mythical wild beasts, so these peopled 
 the unknown beyond with monstrous imagina- 
 7 
 
146 THE PSALTER. 
 
 tions which terrified, but could not attract. Now 
 it is on this departure from the beaten track of 
 all the world that the argument bases itself 
 Why, in that outlook upon the future which all 
 thoughtful men must take — and the more when 
 the soul is roused by deep experiences — why do 
 the Hebrew poets say so little of one theme on 
 which others are profuse and animated, and yet 
 linger long and lovingly on the theme upon 
 which these others have little or nothing to say? 
 The reason can not be found in race or soil or 
 climate or national character or institutions or 
 surroundings. The only sufficient and intelli- 
 gible cause is given in the fact that the sacred 
 sino-ers of Palestine were under the control of a 
 superior Power, which without impairing their 
 freedom, yet guided their choice of themes, and 
 the way in which they treated those themes. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 
 
 A FAIR TEST — NEGATIVE EXCELLENCE — PURITY OF THE MOR- 
 ALITY — FREEDOM FROM ASCETICISM, FORMALISM, HYPOC- 
 RISY — LOWLY, YET JOYFUL AND FREE — NOT SELF-RIGHT- 
 EOUS — THE IMPRECATIONS VINDICATED — LORD MACAULAY 
 AND DR. DUFF — HISTORY OF THE PSALTER — TESTIMONIES 
 TO ITS WORTH — CONCLUSION. 
 
 ^^ TD Y their fruits ye shall know them," is a 
 X-^ maxim of universal and absolute truth. 
 It holds good in morals, in political economy, in 
 statesmanship, just as much as in all natural 
 processes. Good fruit the world over indi- 
 cates a good tree, and evil fruit an evil tree ; 
 and so in all other relations. Plans and theo- 
 ries and projects may be apparently rational 
 and judicious, but if on trial the results are bad, 
 men almost instinctively reason back from effects 
 to causes, and. insist that the underlying prin- 
 ciples must be unsound. But in no department 
 
 (149) 
 
I50 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 of human thought and action is this so manifest 
 as in all that pertains to religion. If a book, 
 or a doctrine, or a practice, can be shown to 
 lead to immorality, that fact at once puts an 
 end to dispute or doubt. In the nature of 
 things, i. e., in the constitution of human so- 
 ciety under the control of one supreme and in- 
 finite Being, truth must be in order to good- 
 ness, sound principles must lead to virtuous 
 living. 
 
 From the beginning this doctrine has been 
 used in Christian Apologetics. Indeed, Gibbon, 
 in his well-known enumeration of the secondary 
 causes of the rapid propagation of the Gospel 
 in the first centuries of our era, expressly men- 
 tions the pure morals of the followers of the 
 new faith as a powerful and widespread influ- 
 ence in its favor, as it certainly was — and the 
 more so, as this fact was shown to be the result 
 of the holy precept and example of the founder 
 of the system. But many, while admitting 
 this claim, have tried to break its force by dis- 
 paraging the elder Scriptures. They compli- 
 ment the New Testament at the expense of the 
 Old. No judicious defender of the faith will ac- 
 cept such compliments. Not only the nature of 
 the case, but the painful results of experience 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 151 
 
 during the last century, show that both Testa- 
 ments constitute integral and constituent parts 
 of one book, nor can they be separated without 
 violence and harm. The Hebrew Scriptures 
 are to the Greek what the foundation is to a 
 house ; and to cut them off is to leave Chris- 
 tianity like an exquisitely-shaped and propor- 
 tioned pyramid floating in the air. He who 
 surrenders Moses and the Prophets must, in 
 logical consistency, surrender Christ and the 
 Apostles in like manner. Of course the two 
 portions of the book are not identical — if they 
 were, why should there be two ? They have 
 differences, but these differences spring out of 
 the fact that the revelation is a gradual one, of 
 which the earlier portions point to the later, 
 while the later presuppose the earlier. There 
 will, therefore, naturally be in the concluding 
 part a fulness and maturity not to be expected 
 in what goes before. Yet, substantially the 
 doctrinal and moral teaching will be the same. 
 
 Is this the fact? To answer this question 
 out of the Psalter is the aim of the present Lec- 
 ture. Here one has the advantage of seeing 
 the matter in the fairest light. For lyric poems 
 are expressions of experience — songs of the 
 heart. They contain views of truth and duty, 
 
152 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 not arranged and tabulated as in a code or 
 treatise, but actually felt and uttered under the 
 varying- circumstances of outward providence 
 or inward struggles. The singer looks out 
 upon God, or the external world, or his fellows, 
 or inwardly upon his own past or present ; and 
 then his soul is stirred within him, his heart 
 boils over, and he bursts into song. Such ut- 
 terances must be sincere. They are wrung 
 out of a great pressure from within, and they 
 bear the stamp of their origin. They register 
 the moral status of the poet with unfailing 
 accuracy. In looking at this status, the first 
 impression concerns its negative character. 
 One finds a total absence of the coarseness, 
 frivolity, or downright immorality so offensively 
 prominent in the hymns to the gods preserved 
 in some other religions. The whole atmos- 
 phere is one of seriousness and purity. There 
 are no tales of mischievous adventure, of cun- 
 ning tricks, or of sensual indulgences as in 
 the Homeric Hymns ; nor is there any iden- 
 tifying of God and Nature as one and the 
 same, whether in the attractive or the terri- 
 ble manifestations of physical phenomena, nor 
 a habitual supplication for mere outward gifts, 
 such as health, children, fertile pastures, boun- 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 153 
 
 teous harvests, victory over foes, which con- 
 stitute the staple of the prayers in the Rig-- Veda. 
 One will look in vain through the entire Psal- 
 ter for any compromise of morality, any deifica- 
 tion of natural powers, any representation or 
 suggestion of true happiness as possible or de- 
 sirable apart from the knowledge and service 
 of a holy God. It is an entirely safe book to 
 put into the hands of the young, the inexpe- 
 rienced, or the ignorant. They can learn noth- 
 ing which they will need to unlearn, nothing to 
 weaken the moral forces of the soul, or give an 
 unhealthy direction to the imagination. 
 
 But to say this is to say little in comparison 
 with the truth. The Psalter not only does not 
 impair the principles of morals, but in every 
 way confirms and establishes them. It makes 
 for righteousness throughout. The key-note 
 is given in the first Psalm, often considered a 
 sort of preface to the whole. The theme is the 
 Happy Man. Who is he ? Where is he to be 
 found? How is he to be described? Is he 
 known or made by the possession of wealth, or 
 place, or learning, or power, or any other form 
 of worldly good ? Nay. He is the one who 
 walks not in the way of the ungodly, nor stands 
 7* 
 
IS4 
 
 THE PSALTER, 
 
 in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the 
 scornful ; but his dehght is in the law of the 
 Lord, and in that law he meditates day and 
 night. Such a man is like a tree planted be- 
 side living streams whose fruit does not fail, 
 neither does its leaf wither ; whereas a wicked 
 man is like the dry and worthless chaff which 
 the wind drives away. 
 
 Here is suo-aested what is one of the most 
 marked and discriminating features of the He- 
 brew Ethics, viz., that they are deeply rooted 
 in religion. In all false religions, ancient and 
 modern, and in some corrupt forms of Christi- 
 anity, the two things are widely separated. A 
 man may be moral without being religious, and 
 vice versa. Religion is a set of tenets and 
 ritual practices which may be carefully observed 
 and yet leave the outward secular life wholly 
 unaffected. Morality, oh the other hand, is the 
 discharge of social duties without respect to 
 divine authority, or the sanctions of Providence. 
 The Psalter knows nothing of this most mis- 
 chievous divorce between integrity of life and 
 the eternal, spiritual truth upon which all up- 
 rightness must rest. It uniformly represents 
 God as governor and ruler — the source, the 
 standard, and the efficacious cause of all moral 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS, 
 
 155 
 
 good. Justice, temperance, truth, meekness, 
 and love have Indeed intrinsic value ; but they 
 press upon the heart and conscience of these 
 singers, because they are part of the express 
 will of God. The servant of Jehovah, as such, 
 must have and exercise these qualities. See 
 this finely set forth in a Psalm (xv.) usually 
 thought to have been composed on occasion of 
 the removal of the Ark to Zion : 
 
 Lord, who shall abide in Thy tabernacle ? 
 Who shall dwell in Thy holy hill ? 
 
 The answer is not. He that is circumcised, 
 that comes to the great yearly festivals, that 
 shuns unclean food, or anything of the kind, but 
 
 He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness. 
 
 And speaketh truth in his heart: 
 
 Who backbiteth not with his tongue, 
 
 Nor doeth evil to his neighbor, 
 
 Nor taketh up a reproach against his friend ; 
 
 In whose eyes a vile person is contemned, 
 
 But he honoreth them that fear the Lord ; 
 
 Who sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not. 
 
 He that doeth these things shall never be moved. 
 
 Is there anywhere a brighter picture of stain- 
 less honor, of lofty integrity ? — yet the whole 
 inseparably linked with the presence and favor 
 of God as its oricrin and sanction. 
 
156 
 
 THE r SALTER. 
 
 Yet with this elevated standard of ethical 
 principle there is nothing- overstrained or exag- 
 gerated. There is not the least tinge of ascet- 
 icism ; no punishing of the body for the sins of 
 the soul ; no denial of the sweet charities of 
 domestic life ; no rejection of civil or political re- 
 lations as inherently sinful or unbecoming ; no 
 praise of celibacy, or solitude, or any other 
 form of voluntary renunciation of what is in it- 
 self innocent — nothing whatever in common 
 with self-torturing Brahmans, or Jewish Essenes, 
 or scornful Stoics, or even Christian stylites or 
 anchorets. On the contrary, there are domes- 
 tic, household, social, and patriotic Psalms. 
 These compare brotherly affection to the dews 
 of Hermon, or the fragrant oil of the sanctu- 
 ary ; God's continual providence to favors sent 
 in sleep ; children at one time to the olive plants 
 around the table^ at another to arrows which 
 fill the quiver of a hero ; while the daughters are 
 corner-pillars polished after the similitude of a 
 palace. 
 
 The Psalmists praise God as the Father of 
 the fatherless, the Judge of the widow, who sets 
 the solitary in families, and makes the barren 
 woman the joyful mother of children. They 
 exult in Jerusalem as the city of God, the 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 
 
 157 
 
 mountain of His holiness, the place where His 
 honor dwelleth, and invoke peace within her 
 walls and prosperity within her palaces. And 
 of Mount Zion they declare that it is beautiful 
 for situation, the joy of the whole earth, a place 
 more excellent and glorious than all the moun- 
 tains of prey ; God Himself establishes it for- 
 ever. The whole tone here is peaceful, domes- 
 tic, and national in the best sense. The moral- 
 ity is not that of slaves, or of hermits, or of 
 philosophers, or of devotees, but of men, wom- 
 en, and children, engaged in all the usual re- 
 lations of human life, but elevating and trans- 
 figuring these by a constant sense of their com- 
 mon obligation as children of the heavenly 
 King, as subjects of a holy and beneficent law. 
 The purity of the Hebrew ethics is the more 
 remarkable when one considers the minute and 
 complicated ritual of worship in which all the 
 authors of the Psalms were trained. The whole 
 round of sacred persons and places and times 
 was prescribed according to the pattern shown to 
 Moses on the mount. The custom of sacrifices 
 or offerings, bloody or unbloody, found in all 
 the ancient nations, was here developed with 
 amazing fulness. Every day the morning and 
 the evening sacrifice was kindled. On the week- 
 
1 5 8 1^^^!^ PSA L TER. 
 
 ly, monthly, yearly festivals, besides innumerable 
 occasions of a private or personal nature, the 
 blood of bulls and goats ran, the smoke of incense 
 ascended, the steam of burning flesh filled the 
 courts of the tabernacle. The cultus was 
 stately and imposing in the highest degree. 
 Nothing, therefore, was more natural than for 
 the worshippers to fall into what in modern 
 times is called the opus operatum theory, and 
 to attribute an intrinsic and inherent efficacy to 
 the gorgeous ceremonial in which they were 
 habitually engaged. This was a common error 
 among the heathen. They supposed, or at 
 least are represented by the poets as suppos- 
 ing, that hecatombs of victims and costly liba- 
 tions brought their divinities under obligation to 
 them, so that it would be ungrateful and wrong 
 not to show favor to such earnest and self-sac- 
 rificing worshippers. Nor is there any reason 
 to doubt that a similar degrading notion at 
 times obtained among the Hebrews. But it 
 never found expression among the Psalmists. 
 Again and again do they repudiate it, especially 
 in the great judicial process described in the 
 Fiftieth Psalm. Here Jehovah, revealing Him- 
 self in fire and tempest as at Sinai, summons the 
 people before Him, and in lofty irony reproves 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 159 
 
 the stupidity which would deem mere outward 
 oblations any gratification to Him. 
 
 I will not reprove thee for thy sacrifices. 
 
 Or for thy burnt-offerings continually before Me. 
 
 I will take no bullock out of thy house, 
 
 Nor he-goats from thy folds. 
 
 For every beast of the forest is Mine, 
 
 And the cattle upon a thousand hills. 
 
 I know all the fowls of the mountains, 
 
 And whatever moveth in the fields is with Me. 
 
 If I were hungry I would not tell thee. 
 
 For the world is Mine, and the fulness thereof. 
 
 Will I eat the flesh of bulls, 
 
 Or drink the blood of goats ? 
 
 Do I need such things, or is it possible for Me 
 to use them ? Yet it is to be observed that in 
 avoiding one error the writer does not run into 
 the opposite. Because sacrifices have no in- 
 trinsic merit and can not feed the Deity, it does 
 not follow that they are useless. On the con- 
 trary, they were both needed and commanded. 
 Hence soon after the vigorous expostulation 
 just recited, follows the precept — 
 
 Sacrifice to God thanksgiving, 
 
 And so pay thy vows to the Most High. 
 
 The animal victims were still to be offered, but 
 as symbolical expressions of penitence, faith, 
 and devout affection. Presented in this way 
 
1 60 ^^^ ^-S". / L TER. 
 
 they fulfilled their function, and the believer 
 would find his worship accepted and blessed. 
 
 In the latter part of the same Psalm we have 
 a similar testimony against another error com- 
 mon among the professors of every faith. This 
 is hypocrisy, the substitution of words for 
 deeds, the homage which vice pays to virtue. 
 
 Unto the wicked God saith, 
 
 What hast thou to do to declare My statutes 
 
 And take My covenant into thy mouth ? 
 
 "Whereas thou hatest instruction, 
 
 And hast cast My words behind thee. 
 
 And then He proceeds to specify violations of 
 three of the commandments, concluding with 
 the solemn Avords, — 
 
 These things hast thou done 
 
 And I kept silence ; 
 
 Thou thoughtest I was just like thyself. 
 
 I will reprove thee, 
 
 And array (thy sins) before thine eyes. 
 
 The uniform doctrine of the Psalter is that 
 God requires truth in the inward parts. Men 
 may forget His character and attempt to im- 
 pose upon Him by sounding professions, but 
 the effort is vain. The mask will be stripped 
 off from every hypocrite, and all secret iniquities 
 be brought to light. They who would walk so 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. i6l 
 
 as to please God must have clean hands and a 
 pure heart. Otherwise they only flatter them- 
 selves in their own eyes until their iniquity is 
 found to be hateful. 
 
 It is often supposed that the law was re- 
 garded by the Old Testament believers as a 
 yoke of bondage which they submitted to as a 
 disagreeable necessity, slavishly fearing its pun- 
 ishment and selfishly looking forward to its re- 
 ward. The holy singers teach us better things. 
 They indeed were deeply conscious of their 
 feebleness and dependence. Hear the cry of 
 the 19th Psalm : 
 
 Who can discern his errors ? 
 
 Clear Thou me from hidden faults. 
 
 Keep back Thy servant also from presumptuous sins ; 
 
 Let them not have dominion over me. 
 
 Then shall I be perfect. 
 
 And I shall be clean from much transgression. 
 
 To the same effect is the long alphabetical 1 19th 
 Psalm, which a recent German critic charges 
 with monotony and poverty of thought, but in 
 so doing only shows his own poverty of spirit- 
 ual apprehension. In every age this singular 
 lyric has been a chosen portion of Scripture to 
 the spiritually-minded. Never wearied by its 
 repetitions, or its apparent redundancies, they 
 
1 62 , THE PSALTER. . 
 
 have found in each verse a new stimulus to 
 pious meditation or fresh nutriment of devout 
 feeling. The Psalm is a continued series of 
 aphorisms expressing in every variety of phrase, 
 on one hand the excellence of the divine law, 
 and on the other the difficulty and yet the 
 blessedness of conforming to it. Hence it is 
 full of devout and earnest breathings after Je- 
 hovah's grace and help. 
 
 Oh that my ways were directed to keep Thy statutes. 
 
 My soul cleaveth to the dust ; 
 
 Quicken Thou me according to Thy word. 
 
 Hold Thou me up, and I shall be safe. 
 
 Order my footsteps in Thy word, 
 
 And let not any iniquity have dominion over me. 
 
 The deep insight of these holy men into the 
 radical corruption of human nature made them 
 thoroughly sensible of the fact that good 
 thoughts and good works have their source 
 only in God. Yet while all this is true ; while 
 they, like the Apostle, found a law that when 
 they would do good, evil was present with them, 
 they also could and did say with the same Apos- 
 tle, " I delight in the law of God after the in- 
 ward man." Indeed we have an almost identi- 
 cal utterance in the 40th Psalm : 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 163 
 
 To do Thy will, O my God, I delight, 
 Yea, Thy law is within my heart. 
 
 That law to them was a badge, not of slavery, 
 but of liberty. It gave light to the mind, it 
 quickened the soul, it rejoiced the heart. The 
 statutes of the Lord were more to be desired 
 than gold, yea, than much fine gold, sweeter 
 also than honey and the droppings of the comb. 
 
 Oh, how I love Thy law ! 
 
 It is my meditation all the day. 
 
 Seven times a day do I praise Thee, 
 Because of Thy righteous judgments. 
 
 It is not necessary to affirm that these utter- 
 ances express the feelings of all the people, or 
 even the habitual state of those from whose lips 
 they fell. It is enough if they are regarded as 
 the product of some favored hours of devotion, 
 for even then they stand as the norm of godly 
 character, the standard which every one is to set 
 before him. And they show what a moral ele- 
 vation was reached by obscure singers in an 
 obscure country, far, far away from the aesthetic 
 completeness of Greece, yet kindling a fire of 
 love to God and holy things at which every 
 succeeding generation has been glad to light 
 its torch. 
 
164 THE PSALTER. 
 
 But there are two objections to the ethical 
 correctness of the Psalter which -require notice. 
 One of these rests upon the assertion not un- 
 frequently made by the Psalmist of his integ- 
 rity. I will quote one case as strong- as any, 
 that which is found in Psalm xviii. 20-24 : 
 
 The Lord rewarded me according to my righteouness ; 
 
 According to the cleanness of my hands hath He recompensed 
 me. 
 
 For I have kept the ways of the Lord, 
 
 And have not wickedly departed from my God. 
 
 I was also upright before Him, 
 
 And kept myself from my iniquity. 
 
 Therefore the Lord recompensed me according to my righteous- 
 ness, 
 
 According to the cleanness of my hands in His sight. 
 
 Such utterances are charged as breathing the 
 very spirit of self-righteousness and irreligious 
 pride, and as, therefore, wholly unworthy of 
 sincere and candid persons, much more of the 
 devout and God-fearing. But this is a great 
 mistake. In all these passages the worshipper 
 is not laying claim to a perfect holiness, for one 
 and all agree in the petition (cxliii. 2), — 
 
 Enter not into judgment with Thy servant. 
 For in Thy sight no man living is righteous. 
 
 The consciousness of human guilt lay too deep 
 for that. The explanation of the claim to right- 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 165 
 
 eousness is not found (as Hengstenberg holds) 
 in the fact of an upright moral striving, a sin- 
 cere bent of mind earnestly reaching after the 
 fulfilment of the divine law, in view of which 
 God may be expected to pardon many weak- 
 nesses. How such a view is to be reconciled 
 with the doctrine of gratuitous justification I can 
 not conceive. Far better is the ground that 
 the Psalmist is speaking of the case as it stood 
 between him and his enemies, and in that view 
 meant his words to be taken in their literal 
 sense. Consider, e.g., his conflict with Saul. 
 In this the right was all on one side. Toward 
 the king, David's whole course was absolutely 
 faultless. Hunted for his life, and persecuted 
 in every possible way, he refused to retaliate 
 even when it was in his power. He could, 
 therefore, justly claim as against such opposers 
 absolute rectitude. Such a protestation is quite 
 consistent with a deep sense of sin before God. 
 Thus Paul asserted that in his flesh there dwelt 
 no good thing, and spoke of himself as the 
 chief of sinners ; yet when occasion required, he 
 resolutely asserted his integrity, and made a 
 long detail of his services and his sufferings (2 
 Corinthians xi. 21-31). And God is not dis- 
 pleased with even a heat of jealousy in His 
 
1 66 THE PSALTER. 
 
 people when insisting upon their sincerity. And 
 such declarations are useful to remind us of the 
 necessity of being able, in the quarrel of the 
 world with the Lord's people, evermore to in- 
 sist that as to the things in which they assail 
 us we are not assailable. It is not simply by 
 passing feelings and vain imaginations that 
 God's children are separated from others, but 
 by a consistent outward life. 
 
 Another and far more formidable objection 
 to the ethical excellence of the Psalms is based 
 on the fearful imprecations which some of them 
 contain. Among the most striking are the fol- 
 lowing : 
 
 Let them be confounded that seek after my soul ; 
 
 Let them be turned back and brought to confusion that devise my 
 
 hurt, 
 Let them be as chaff before the wind, 
 And let the angel of the Lord drive them. 
 Let their way be dark and slippery, 
 And let the angel of the Lord persecute them. — (xxxv. 4, 5, 6.) 
 
 Pour out Thy indignation upon them, 
 
 And let Thy wrathful anger take hold on them. 
 
 Add iniquity unto their iniquity, 
 
 And let them not come into Thy righteousness. — (Ixix. 24, 27.) 
 
 Set Thou a wicked man over him, 
 And let Satan stand at his right hand. 
 When he is judged, let him be condemned ; 
 And let his prayer become sin. 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS, ^ 167 
 
 Let his children be fatherless, 
 
 And his wife a widow. — (cix. 6, 7, 9.) 
 
 O, daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed ; 
 
 Happy shall he be that rendereth unto Thee 
 
 The deed which thou hast done to us. 
 
 Happy shall he be that taketh 
 
 And dasheth thy little ones against the rock. — (cxxxvii. 8, 9.) 
 
 Such terrible maledictions have often been a 
 grief and perplexity to the Christian, and an 
 occasion for cavil and scoffing to the sceptical. 
 And although one can not go so far as to say 
 with Mr. Froude, " Those who accept the 109th 
 Psalm as the Word of God are far on their 
 way toward auto-da-fes and massacres of St. 
 Bartholomew," or to agree with Dean Stanley, 
 who describes their spirit as " savage " {yeivish 
 Church, II., 170) ; yet it must be confessed that 
 at first at least there seems to be a sharp contrast 
 to the mild and benignant tones of the New Tes- 
 tament. This has led some with Bishops Home 
 and Horsley to try to overcome the difficulty 
 by rendering the verbs in the future tense, and 
 so converting the imprecations into predictions. 
 But I believe that this is now considered by all 
 respectable scholars a mere evasion, and one 
 that does violence to the settled laws of the 
 Hebrew language. Besides, it leaves unex- 
 plained a numerous class of passages to which 
 
l68 . ^^^ P SALTER. 
 
 even its advocates admit that it does not apply. 
 A similar evasion is that suggested by Arnold 
 of Rugby, that the language of these Psalms 
 may be, and is to be, applied by the modern 
 reader to the enemies of his soul's peace. 
 But even were this possible, still it would not 
 explain these fearful words as pronounced by 
 the original utterers. Not a few, therefore, have 
 taken the ground that the language is indefensi- 
 ble ; that it sprang from the presence of wicked 
 passion in the hearts of God's ancient servants, 
 who could not rise above the level of the dis- 
 pensation in which they lived ; and that we 
 ought not to be surprised at their occasional 
 lapses into human infirmity. This view is re- 
 garded by Dr. Hesse (Bampton Lecture, 1872) 
 as that which is least objectionable. Even 
 Tholuck seems to admit that at times there 
 mingled with the holy fire of the Psalmists the 
 unholy fire of personal irritation. This is 
 wholly inadmissible. These Psalms were not 
 random individual utterances, for which the 
 Bible is no more responsible than it is for the 
 speeches in the Book of Job, but they were 
 from the first destined for use in the sanctuary. 
 God, therefore, must be considered as suggest- 
 ing and approving the prayers which His Church 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 
 
 169 
 
 was to offer in the perpetual service of song. 
 The human authors doubtless expressed their 
 own feelings, but they also expressed what the 
 community of God's people ought to feel, and 
 did feel. On any other view it would be diffi- 
 cult, if not impossible, to maintain the inspira- 
 tion and authority of the Psalter. 
 
 The gist of the matter lies in the question, 
 Do these Psalms contain the malignant expres- 
 sion of ill-will to personal enemies as such, or 
 are they rather the utterance of God's punitive 
 wrath against His obstinate foes ? Surely it is 
 not difficult to maintain the latter. The as- 
 sumption that the Old Testament cherished a 
 vindictive spirit and tolerated resentment for 
 private injuries, is wholly unfounded. In the 
 Pentateuch itself we read, " If thou meet thine 
 enemy's ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt 
 surely bring it back to him" (Exodus xxiii. 4). 
 " Thou shalt not avenge nor bear any grudge 
 against the children of the people, but shall 
 love thy neighbor as thyself " (Leviticus xix. 
 18). So in Job, " If I rejoice in the destruc- 
 tion of him that hated me, or lifted up myself 
 when evil found him ; neither have I suffered 
 my mouth to sin by wishing a curse upon his 
 
I/O 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 soul " (xxxi. 29, 30). The prescription of the 
 law (Exodus xxi. 23), " Life for hfe, eye for 
 eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand," etc., has 
 been ignorantly quoted as if it laid down the 
 rule for individuals in redressing- their own 
 wrongs, whereas it simply states the penalty 
 which the magistrates are to exact from a wrong- 
 doer. Indeed, so far from the Old Testament 
 being at war with the New on this point, we 
 find the Apostle, in dissuading his Roman 
 brethren from taking matters into their own 
 hands, going back to the book of Deuterono- 
 my and quoting its words as a rule, " Dearly 
 beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give 
 place unto wrath ; for it is written, * Vengeance 
 is Mine, I will repay,' saith the Lord." And 
 that these inculcations were not fruitless is 
 shown by many examples, and especially that 
 of David. He was a man of intense force of 
 will, and of very strong passions, yet he often 
 exhibited great meekness and forbearance even 
 in trying circumstances. His conduct toward 
 Saul from first to last indicated a spirit anything 
 but malignant and revengeful ; and the same is 
 true of his deportment under Shimei's bitter re- 
 proaches. Nor can his dying charge to Solomon, 
 respecting Joab and Shimei, be said, if all the 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 
 
 171 
 
 circumstances are considered, to be a case of 
 hate projecting itself beyond the grave, but 
 rather of wisdom securing at a future time that 
 satisfaction of justice which could not be at- 
 tained in the present. This statement is sus- 
 tained by his own words. In Psalm 7th, 4, 5, 
 he invokes wrath upon his head if he has re- 
 warded evil to one that was at peace with him, 
 and affirms on the contrary that he had deliv- 
 ered the man that was without cause his enemy. 
 So in the very Psalm which contains some sore 
 imprecations, the 35th, we find that David refers 
 to personal foes in a very different manner, — 
 
 They rewarded me evil for good, 
 
 My soul was bereaved. 
 
 But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth ; 
 
 I afflicted my soul with fasting. 
 
 And my prayer returned into my own bosom. 
 
 I behaved myself as if it had been my friend, my brother ; 
 
 I bowed down heavily as one that mourneth for a mother. 
 
 It seems to be evident, then, that when David 
 poured out his awful maledictions, it was not from 
 a mean and base desire to see his personal ene- 
 mies laid low. So far as he, himself, was con- 
 cerned, he could afford to forofive and forofet. 
 But his enemies were also enemies of the Lord, 
 and he could rightfully desire and rejoice in 
 
1/2 
 
 THE PSAL TER. 
 
 their destruction when that dread result was 
 necessary to vindicate God's justice, and demon- 
 strate the reahty and power of His government. 
 Thus, in Psahii 58th, the singer, after denounc- 
 ing unjust and oppressive rulers, and supplicat- 
 ing their rapid and hopeless overthrow, con- 
 cludes : 
 
 The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance, 
 He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. 
 So that men shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous. 
 Verily there is a God that judgeth in the earth. 
 
 It is God's honor that is chiefly concerned, 
 and not the personal feelings of any of His serv- 
 ants. There is, therefore, no more individual 
 resentment in these utterances than there is in 
 the tremendous imprecation of Paul, which, 
 though so simple in its words, contains a full 
 equivalent to all the long and varied wishes for 
 vengeance contained in all the imprecatory 
 Psalms put together. " If any man love not 
 our Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema, 
 Maranatha." Surely in this fearful expression 
 the Apostle was gratifying no private grudge, 
 but only exhibiting his intense and perfect sym- 
 pathy with the merit and the claims of our ador- 
 able Redeemer. 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 173 
 
 But admitting this, why were these awful 
 curses put into the Liturgy of the Church, 
 and so stereotyped for all coming generations ? 
 For eood reason. It is true the rule of our 
 conduct is to bless and curse not, to pray for 
 them that despitefully use us ; and no part of 
 our Lord's example is more binding upon us 
 than His rebuke to James and John for wishing 
 to call down fire from heaven upon the churlish 
 Samaritans, and His own prayer for His mur- 
 derers upon the cross. But there is danger 
 lest this meekness and forbearance should be 
 misapplied so as to check or lessen that living 
 conviction of the evil of sin, and of the cer- 
 tainty of God's retributive righteousness, which 
 is essential to true Christian character. The 
 Apostle tells us that the civil magistrate is " a 
 revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth 
 evil " — not simply to preserve order and to de- 
 ter by example others from wrong-doing, but 
 in the name of God, whose representative and 
 minister he is, to redress the wrongs of out- 
 raged justice. This is seen whenever some 
 foul crime has been committed. Meek and 
 gentle souls who scarcely know what malice is 
 by experience, and who would be quite ready to 
 feed and clothe a personal enemy, will feel a 
 
174 THE PSALTER. 
 
 righteous indignation, and long and pray that 
 the criminal may be detected and receive the 
 just reward of his crimes. Now it is just the 
 same sympathy, not with human government, 
 but the divine, that is expressed in the impre- 
 catory Psalms. The kingdom of God comes 
 not only by showing mercy to the penitent, but 
 by executing judgment upon the impenitent. 
 Was it not so at the deluge, at the deliverance 
 from Egypt, at the destruction of Jerusalem ? 
 We need to have the consuming zeal for God 
 which animated the old Hebrew singers, and 
 then their solemn utterances will take their right- 
 ful place as just and true. They will seem as 
 natural and proper as the opening words of 
 Milton's fine sonnet on the Vaudois, — 
 
 Avenge, O Lord ! thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 
 Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold. 
 
 The truth is, these Psalms denounce no more 
 against the wicked than what God actually 
 brings upon them. They simply utter the bur- 
 den of the Lord concerning His obdurate foes. 
 Is it impossible that a godly mind may become 
 so much at one with the divine mind in these 
 respects, as justly to pray that the Divine Being 
 would do what it would be certainly righteous 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 175 
 
 in Him to do, and what in His time He assuredly 
 will do ? In fact, the argument against these 
 imprecations is really an argument against all 
 retributions, and therefore against the moral 
 government of God, against that throne with 
 whose stability the welfare of the universe is 
 identified. Forbearance toward the desperately 
 wicked is injustice and cruelty to the unoffend- 
 ing, and the feeling which demands justice, in- 
 stead of being malignant, is really benevolent. 
 As long as men are at ease, reposing amid 
 the comforts of an established Christian society, 
 and breathing an atmosphere of contentment, 
 peace, and moral order, they fail to hear or un- 
 derstand the outcry of God's suffering children, 
 and have little sympathy with a righteous indig- 
 nation at wrong-doing. But let storm and tem- 
 pest come, let diabolical iniquity be wrought, 
 let not only law and justice, but humanity and 
 nature be trodden under foot, and at once there 
 is a startling recoil of the soul. Even the meek 
 and patient fall back upon these inspired utter- 
 ances, and cry out with fervor : 
 
 O Lord God ! to whom vengeance belongeth ; 
 
 O God, to whom vengeance belongeth, show Thyself. 
 
 Lift up Thyself, Thou Judge of the earth. 
 
 Render a reward to the proud. 
 
lyS THE PSALTER. 
 
 Lord, how long shall the wicked, 
 
 How long shall the \vicked triumph ? — (xciv. 1-3). 
 
 An irrepressible instinct of liuman nature 
 planted by the author of that nature unites with 
 the sentiments nourished by the revelation of 
 God's essential and unalterable righteousness in 
 His word to make men long and pray that the 
 doers of evil may be rooted out of the earth. 
 
 A signal illustration of this truth is found in 
 what took place at the time of the East Indian 
 mutiny in 1857, when the news of the fearful 
 atrocities perpetrated not only upon men in 
 arms, but upon women and children, reached 
 Europe and America. The first feeling was one 
 of unspeakable horror ; then went up from both 
 sides of the Atlantic a terrible cry for revenge. 
 Persons who had no tie of blood or affection or 
 interest with the sufferers, felt the emotion just 
 as much as the nearest relatives. A prominent 
 American author. Dr. O. W. Holmes, wrote 
 the suggestion that England should take down 
 the map of India, and correct it thus: Delhi, 
 deie, and declared that the civilized world would 
 say, Amen. Lord Macaulay {Life, II., 367-9) 
 said, " It is painful to be so revengeful as I feel 
 myself I, who can not bear to see a beast or a 
 bird in pain, could look on without winking 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 
 
 \77 
 
 while Nana Sahib underwent all the tortures of 
 Ravaillac." Again, "Till this year I did not 
 know what real vindictive hatred meant. With 
 what horror I used to read in Livy how Fulvius 
 put to death the whole Capuan Senate in the 
 Second Punic War ! And with what equanimity 
 I could hear that the whole garrison of Delhi 
 and all the rabble of the bazaar had been treat- 
 ed in the same way! Is this wrong? Is not 
 the severity which springs from a great sensi- 
 bility to human suffering, a better thing than 
 the lenity which springs from indifference to 
 human suffering ? " Still more marked was the 
 utterance of the great man who stands at the 
 head of living missionaries of the cross. Dr. 
 Alexander Duff, of Scotland. He said, " I 
 could never fully understand how the so-called 
 imprecatory Psalms could be consistent with the 
 teachings of the New Testament, until the Se- 
 poy rebellion broke out with such terrific fury, 
 and foes sprung up filling the land with violence, 
 shaking the foundations of society and of gov- 
 ernment ; threatening towns and cities with pil- 
 lage, fire, and sword ; murdering the innocent 
 and defenceless ; persecuting unoffending Chris- 
 tians with especial malignity; making unresist- 
 
178 THE PSALTER. 
 
 inof missionaries a sacrifice to brutal lust and 
 deadly torture, and thus rolling back the tide 
 of Christian civilization, that iniquity might come 
 in again like a flood, and heathenism with all its 
 horrors and idolatry once more set up its seats 
 in the land — not until then could it be properly 
 realized — felt — that there are times in the out- 
 breaking of human passion and human enmity 
 when the pleadings of mercy are vain, and jus- 
 tice, naked, pitiless justice, must draw the sword 
 in a war of righteous self-defence." 
 
 On this view of the case, the Psalms in ques- 
 tion are not to be apologized for, nor explained 
 away, nor renounced, but to be justified and 
 commended as an integral part of the word of 
 God, as fulfilling an important and necessary 
 function, as suc^orestinof in a most strikino- and 
 appropriate way that sympathy with God's gov- 
 ernment, and that jealousy for God's honor which 
 are the strongest moral powers of the soul. 
 They teach us the fundamental difference be- 
 tween the popular notion of goodness as identi- 
 cal with careless, good-natured indulgence, and 
 the Scriptural doctrine of holiness. God, we 
 are told, hates sin, and He directs us to abhor 
 that which is evil ; which indeed seems a logical 
 necessity. For a good man must love that 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 
 
 179 
 
 which is good ; and how can he love the good 
 without hating its opposite ? Hence the two 
 are united in one of the prophetic statements 
 of the moral ground of our Lord's exaltation : 
 "Thou hast loved righteousness and hated in- 
 iquity." The truest test of religious character 
 is found in the degree of our sympathy with 
 God in His aversion as well as in His compla- 
 cency. Indeed, a deep sense of moral evil is 
 essential to a true or saving- knowledge of 
 God. Hence the value of those portions of 
 holy writ which stimulate and intensify this con- 
 viction. The intelligent reader of these Psalms 
 will never fall a prey to the dreamy sentimental- 
 ism which enfeebles so much of the piety of our 
 times, or to the rationalistic subtleties which 
 convert sin into a misfortune, or'an accident, or 
 a means of good. He will never exalt mercy at 
 the expense of righteousness, and so turn it into 
 feebleness and incapacity. On the contrary, 
 with a healthy moral sense, and in the spirit of 
 power, of love, and of a sound mind, he will be 
 able to adopt the words which close the 139th 
 Psalm, the crown of the collection, the noble 
 lyric which has attracted the praise of all lands 
 and all scholars : 
 
I So THE PSALTER. 
 
 Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee ? 
 • And am not I g^rieved with those that rise up against Thee ? 
 I hate them with perfect hatred. 
 I count them mine enemies. 
 Search me, O God, and know my heart ; 
 Try me and know my thoughts ; 
 And see if there be any wicked way in me, 
 And lead me in the way everlasting. 
 
 To conclude : I have now gone over the lead- 
 ing points of the argument, and stated the 
 teaching of the Psalms upon the nature of God 
 and of man — the two great factors in any scheme 
 of religious thought ; upon the contrasted topics 
 of the Messiah and of immortality — one remark- 
 able for the fulness of its treatment, the other 
 for its scantiness and obscurity ; and finally, 
 upon the essential features of ethics and wor- 
 ship. In all these respects it has been shown 
 that there is in the Psalter a purity, a correct- 
 ness, and a spiritual elevation which stamp it as 
 wholly unique among all the literature of its 
 own or any preceding age. And this fact, taken 
 in connection with the character of the book, as 
 not only poetical, but lyrical, and with the cir- 
 cumstances of the region, people^ and period in 
 which the collection originated, compel the be- 
 lief that the sweet singers of Israel sang not 
 only under poetic, but divine inspiration, and 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. i8l 
 
 that their work is part of an authentic and bind- 
 ing: revelation from the Hvincr God. This con- 
 elusion is greatly strengthened by the subse- 
 quent history of the Psalter. For twenty-five 
 centuries its varied contents have maintained a 
 continuous historic life, unbroken by neglect or 
 oblivion — and that, too, among the most widely 
 differing races and countries. They never could 
 be buried under the rubbish of an obsolete 
 literature like the Vedas and the Avestan, nor 
 hid away in the impenetrable darkness of an 
 unknown language like the cuneiform inscrip- 
 tions. Their very nature gave them an inex- 
 haustible vitality. The ecclesiastical common- 
 wealth, in which they were produced, passed 
 through as many dangers and disasters from 
 without and from within as any of its contem- 
 poraries, and at last went down in a tremendous 
 catastrophe. But the Psalms survived, and 
 ever since have been flourishine in immortal 
 youth. The reason is, that they are true. Quite 
 beyond their excellence as poetry, their beauty 
 or finish, or pathos, or lyric fire, they are the 
 living, breathing record of an experience which 
 enters into that which is most characteristic, 
 permanent, and universal in Man, his moral in- 
 stincts and his spiritual relations to his Maker. 
 
1 82 THE PSALTER. 
 
 "The deeps of our humanity remain unruffled 
 by the storms of ages which change the sur- 
 face," It is these deeps to which the Psalms 
 relate. Local and national as they are, they do 
 not treat life after the fashion of any one age 
 or race, but life in its essential and unchangeable 
 elements, and that so thoroughly that every 
 possible state of feeHng is represented, and 
 every condition of humanity provided for. As 
 Hooker says, " Let there be any grief or dis- 
 ease incident to the soul of man, any wound or 
 sickness, named, for which there is not in this 
 treasure-house a present comfortable remedy at 
 all times to be found." Each of these divine 
 lyrics is beyond question the true expression of 
 an individual human heart pouring itself out 
 before God, according to its situation at the time ; 
 but all observation shows that the writers ex- 
 pressed the joys and sorrows, the struggles and 
 the victories, the fears and the aspirations, not 
 of one man, but of all. Hence the unanimity 
 with which they have been accepted in every 
 age as the inspired directory for worship, both 
 public and private — not simply recognized in 
 form as such, but actually used for every con- 
 ceivable utterance of prayer and praise. The 
 language of Dean Church is not more express- 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 183 
 
 ive than it is true, when, comparing the remains 
 of early heathen reHgions with the Psahns, he 
 says, " They are hke the appearance of the 
 ilhiminated, but dead surface of the moon, with 
 its burnt-out and extinct volcanoes, contrasted 
 with the abounding light and splendor of the 
 unexhausted sun, still, age after age, the source 
 of life and warmth, and joy to the world, still 
 waking up new energies and developing new 
 wonders." How many in the long track of the 
 ages have had their devotion kindled, their hearts 
 comforted, their affections moulded by this 
 blessed book ! To the Jews, alike at the vic- 
 tories under such kings as Jehoshaphat and 
 Hezekiah, or in the bitterness of exile, or in the 
 nascent hopes of the Restoration, the Psalter 
 was the recognized vehicle of thanks or suppli- 
 cation. The Maccabees, in their little-known 
 but most wondrous struggle, drew their inspira- 
 tion from the same source. A Psalm brightened 
 the gloom at the last supper of our Lord. And 
 He himself when on the cross expressed His 
 fearful isolation in the words of one Psalm, and 
 in those of another gave up his spirit unto God. 
 When Paul and Silas lay in the prison at Phil- 
 ippi, with feet fast in the stocks, they astonished 
 the other prisoners with the songs of Zion. 
 
1 84 
 
 THE PSALTER. 
 
 These examples were followed by the early- 
 Church. " Go where you will," says Jerome, 
 " the ploughman at his plough sings his joyful 
 Hallelujahs, the busy mower regales himself 
 with his Psalms, and the vine-dresser is singing 
 one of the songs of David. These are the 
 solace of the shepherd in his solitude and of the 
 husbandman in his toil." According to Euse- 
 bius, the martyrs in the Thebaid employed their 
 latest breath in uttering these divine compo- 
 sitions, just as was done centuries afterward by 
 John Huss and Jerome of Prague, when burning 
 at the stake.* So the army of Gustavus Adol- 
 phus, and the Protestants at Courtras, and the 
 Ironsides of Cromwell, and the Covenanters of 
 
 *-In 1663, the town of Kingston, N. Y., was attacked by the 
 Indians, who buined all the houses and carried off a number of 
 prisoners. These were taken far into the wilderness near the 
 Shawangnnk river, where preparations were made to torture 
 them to death. The women of the party, to support their 
 drooping spirits, began to sing the songs of Zion. The music 
 attracted the attention of their captors and delayed their pro- 
 ceedings, discovering which, the singers raised Dathenus's ver- 
 sion of the 137th Psalm, and poured out its melancholy strains 
 in sight of the spot where the faggots were piled for their torture. 
 Just then deliverance came, the Indians fled, and the songs of 
 mourning were changed to songs of joy — the 137th into the 126th, 
 and the wood intended to consume living bodies was burned to 
 take away the chills of night. — Edmund Eliini:^c in Collections of 
 Ulster County Historical Society. (Kingston, i860). 
 
THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 185 
 
 Scotland, entered into conflict chanting Psalms, 
 Avith voices which rose far above the din of 
 battle. 
 
 And still in our own day, these old Hebrew 
 lyrics continue to fulfil their high office as a 
 manual of public and private devotion, a stim- 
 ulus and a comfort amid all the varied ex- 
 periences of human life. As good Bishop Home 
 says in a passage of exquisite beauty : " They 
 suit mankind in all situations ; grateful as the 
 manna which descended from above and con- 
 formed itself to every human palate. The 
 fairest productions of human wit, after a few 
 perusals, like gathered flowers, wither in our 
 hands and lose their fragrancy ; but these un- 
 fading plants of paradise become, as we are ac- 
 customed to them, still more and more beauti- 
 ful ; their bloom appears to be daily heighten- 
 ed ; fresh odors are emitted, and new sweets ex- 
 tracted from them. He who hath once tasted 
 their excellencies, will desire to taste them yet 
 again ; and he w^ho tastes them oftenest will 
 relish them best." In singular agreement with 
 these statements of the devout English prelate 
 are the utterances of the great German critic, 
 Herder: "Not merely as regards the contents, 
 but also as regards the form, has this use of the 
 
1 86 . THE PSALTER. 
 
 Psalter been a benefit to the spirit and heart of 
 men. As in no lyric poet of Greece or Rome, 
 do we find so much teaching, consolation, and 
 instruction together, so has there scarcely been 
 anywhere so rich a variation of tone in every 
 kind of song as here. For two thousand years 
 have these old Psalms been again and again 
 translated and imitated in a variety of ways, and 
 still so rich, so comprehensive is their man- 
 ner that they are capable of many a new appli- 
 cation. They are flowers which vary according 
 to each season and each soil, and ever abide in 
 the freshness of youth. Precisely because this 
 book contains the simplest lyric tones for the 
 expression of the most manifold feelings, is it a 
 hymn-book for all times." The words of both 
 these eminent men are as true now as when 
 first printed more than a century ago. The 
 Psalms to-day are read by a million times more 
 persons than any other poems in the world, and 
 yet their flavor is not exhausted. Greeks and 
 Orientals, Romanists and Protestants, Prelatists 
 and Puritans, Lutherans and Reformed, men of 
 all shades of doctrine and polity, and of all de- 
 grees of culture and progress ; the profound 
 theologian and the humble believer, the ripe 
 Christian and the young convert, the man of 
 
^^:. 
 
 THE ETHICS OF 7 HE PSALMS. 187 
 
 elegant taste and the freedman who can just 
 spell out the words, alike refresh themselves at 
 these living springs. The mightiest productions 
 of human genius, the Iliad, the Divina Com- 
 media, the dramas of Shakespeare, are to not a 
 few sealed books, but there never yet was in 
 any age, a single devout soul which did not find 
 in these old Psalms the very best expression of 
 its own best experiences. Even Mr. Francis 
 Newman, after abandoning the Gospel for the 
 Absolute Religion, has to go back to David's 
 lyre to find fitting words to express the inward 
 yearning of the human heart toward God. 
 Having quoted Psalm xlii. i, — 
 
 As the hart panteth after the water-brooks. 
 So panteth my soul after thee, O God ! 
 My soul is athirst for God, 
 Yea, even for the living God, — 
 
 he adds : " Then the soul understands and 
 knows that God is her God, dwelling with her 
 more closely than any creature can ; yea, 
 neither stars nor sea, nor smiling nature hold 
 God so intimately as the bosom of the soul. 
 All nature is ransacked by the Psalmists for 
 metaphors to express this single thought, God 
 is for my soul, and my soul is for God. Father, 
 
I 88 THE PSALTER. 
 
 Brother, Friend, King, Master, Shepherd, Guide, 
 are common titles. God is their Tower, their 
 Glory, their Rock, their Shield, their Sun, their 
 Star, their Joy, their Portion, their Trust, their 
 Life." 
 
 Surely a book thus profound and tender, thus 
 suited to all lands and ages, thus attested by 
 scores of generations, dear to lowly Christians, 
 and yet compelling the suffrage of unbelievers, 
 always tried and yet never found wanting, as 
 eagerly and usefully read to-day in Oregon or 
 Oceanica as it was in the hill country of Judah 
 before the Trojan war ; such a book must have 
 a higher than human origin. 
 
PASSAGES OF SCRIPTURE QUOTED 
 
 OR 
 
 REFERRED TO. 
 
 Exodus, xxi. 23 
 
 . 170 
 
 Psalm 
 
 " xxiii. 4 . . 
 
 . 169 
 
 " 
 
 Leviticus, xix. 18 . . 
 
 . 169 
 
 " 
 
 Deuteronomy, vi. 4 
 
 . 40 
 
 " 
 
 " xviii. I 
 
 . 134 
 
 " 
 
 xxxii. 3 
 
 5 • 170 
 
 " 
 
 Joshua, x. 13 . . . 
 
 . 86 
 
 " 
 
 2 Samuel, i. 18 . . . 
 
 86, 88 
 
 " 
 
 2 Kings, xix. 15 . . 
 
 . 40 
 
 " 
 
 Job, xxv. 5 . . . . 
 
 • 52 
 
 " 
 
 " xxxi. 29, 30 
 
 . 170 
 
 " 
 
 Psalm i 
 
 • 153 
 
 " 
 
 " ii 
 
 39. 117 
 
 " 
 
 " iv. 6 . . . 
 
 • 94 
 
 " 
 
 vi. . . . 15 
 
 , 16, 136 
 
 '• 
 
 " vii. 4, 5 . . 
 
 . 171 
 
 " 
 
 " viii. . . . 
 
 75 
 
 " 
 
 ^' xiii. . . . 
 
 . 16 
 
 " 
 
 " xiv. . . . 
 
 . 78 
 
 " 
 
 " XV, . . . 
 
 . 155 
 
 " 
 
 ^' xvi. . . . 
 
 . 94. 134 
 
 " 
 
 xvii. . . . 
 
 • 135 
 
 " 
 
 " xviii. . . . 
 
 . 30, 164 
 
 " 
 
 " xix. 12, 13 . 
 
 . 161 
 
 " 
 
 " xxii. . . . 
 
 • 54 
 
 '< 
 
 ^' xxix. . . . 
 
 • 44 
 
 
 " xxx. 9 . . 
 
 . . 136 
 
 „ 
 
 " xxxi. . . . 
 
 . . 16 
 
 " 
 
 xxxii. . . 
 
 
 
 • 15 
 
 xxxiii. 6 . 
 
 
 
 • 47 
 
 " 9 • 
 
 
 
 41 
 
 XXXV. 4-6 
 
 
 
 . 166 
 
 12-14 
 
 
 
 171 
 
 xxxvi. . . 
 
 
 
 15 
 
 xl. 8 . . 
 
 
 
 163 
 
 xliv. . . 
 
 
 
 14 
 
 xlv. . . . 
 
 
 
 119 
 
 xlvii. . . . 
 
 
 
 99 
 
 xlix. . . . 
 
 
 
 135 
 
 1. . . . 
 
 5^ 
 
 .55. 158 
 
 li. 5 . . 
 
 
 15.79 
 
 liii. 1-3 . . 
 
 
 . 78 
 
 Iviii. 3 . . 
 
 
 
 79 
 
 " 10, 1 1 
 
 
 
 172 
 
 Ix. . . . 
 
 
 
 14 
 
 Ixvii. . . 
 
 
 
 103 
 
 Ixviii. . . 
 
 
 
 100 
 
 Ixix. 24-27 
 
 
 
 166 
 
 Ixxi. 22 . 
 
 
 
 51 
 
 Ixxii. . . 
 
 
 
 120 
 
 Ixxiii. 24 
 
 
 
 136 
 
 25, 26 
 
 
 
 96 
 
 Ixxiv. 
 
 
 
 14 
 
 Ixxvi. 2 . 
 
 
 
 97 
 
 Ixxix. 
 
 
 
 14 
 
 Ixxxvii. . 
 
 
 
 101 
 
 (189) 
 
 
 
 
190 
 
 PASSAGES OF SCRIP TURE. 
 
 Psalm Ixxxviii. 10, 
 " Ixxxix. 
 
 xc. 
 " xciii. . 
 " xciv . 
 „ xcv. . 
 " xcvii. . 
 " c. 3 . 
 " " 5 . 
 
 " " 1-3 
 " cii. 
 
 " 25-27 
 " ciii. 7 . . 
 
 " 8, 9, II 
 " " 10-17 
 " civ. 
 " cv. 
 " cix. 
 " ex. 
 " cxi. 9 . 
 " cxv. I 
 
 " " 3 
 " cxix. 
 " cxxvi . 
 
 • 136 
 
 • 47 
 14,48 
 
 . 120 
 
 • 175 
 . 102 
 
 • 54 
 
 • 54 
 . 75 
 . 102 
 
 15. 103 
 
 . 46 
 
 • 97 
 . 92 
 
 • 55 
 28-30 
 
 . 167 
 39, 122 
 
 • 52 
 . 86 
 
 • 47 
 161-163 
 
 Psalm cxxx. . , 
 
 " 2 < 
 
 " cxxxv. 6 
 
 " cxxxvi. , 
 
 " cxxxvii. , 
 
 " 8,9 
 cxxxix. 1-4 
 6 . 
 7-10 
 17,18 
 " 21-24 
 cxliii. 
 
 " cxlvii. 19, 20 
 Isaiah, viii. 19 . 
 " xlv. 6 . 
 " Ix. I . . 
 Matthew, vii. 20 
 Acts, xvii. 28 . 
 Romans, iii. 10 
 " vii. 22 
 " xii. 19 
 2 Corinthians, xi. 21-31 
 
 15, 80 
 180 
 
 42 
 
 55 
 
 184 
 
 167 
 
 50 
 
 51 
 
 49 
 
 93 
 
 179 
 
 15 
 80, 164 
 
 97 
 
 134 
 
 40 
 
 21 
 
 149 
 
 74 
 
 78 
 
 162 
 
 170 
 
 165 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Apologetics, 4, 1 50. 
 Aratus, quotation from, 74. 
 Arnold of Rugby on the Imprecations, 168. 
 Asaph, his noble Ps., 95, 135. 
 Asceticism absent from the Psalter, 156. 
 
 Athenians, their claim to be autochthons, 74 ; Moral earnest- 
 ness, 84. 
 Augustine's famous saying, 94. 
 Avatara, the Hindu, 128. 
 Avestan, 3, 62, 87, 92, 128, 181. 
 
 Bacon, calls some Pss. " hearse-like," 16. 
 Books of the Pss., The Five, 13, 14. 
 Bryant's Thanatopsis, ignores God, 44. 
 
 Callimachus, his hymns, 58. 
 
 Calvin, on Maccabean Pss., 14 ; on the 139th, 49. 
 
 Church, Dean, on ancient hymns, 83, 182. 
 
 Cleanthes, Hymn of, 68, 74. 
 
 Clement of Alexandria on Egj^ptian Idolatry, 132. 
 
 Coleridge on Love, 10; on Immortality, 141. 
 
 David, retrospect of life, 30-32 ; Confession of Sin, 79 ; Conflict 
 
 with Saul, 165 ; not vindictive, 170. 
 Delitzsch on the 29th Ps., 44. 
 Deutch, E., on the Talmud, 62. 
 Didactic Pss., 17, 153, 161. 
 
 (191) 
 
192 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 East India Mutiny, 176. 
 
 Eg^-pt, not the source of Hebrew Poetry, 24 ; its idolatrj^ 106 ; 
 
 Doctrine of Immortality, 133, 139, 137. 
 Eltinge, Edmund, quoted, 184. 
 Eternity of God, 47. 
 Ethics of the Psalter, not overstrained, 156 ; pure, 157 ; spiritual, 
 
 160 ; joyful, 161. 
 Eusebius on the Martyrs of the Thebaid, 184. 
 Ewald, on Maccabean Pss. 15 ; on Hebrew drama, 21 ; on lyric 
 
 poetry, 22 ; on the 53d Ps., 78 ; on the 73d, 96. 
 
 Fijians, their view of Immortality, 132. 
 
 Forgiveness of injuries taught in the Old Testament, 169. 
 
 Froude on Ps. cix., 167. 
 
 Gibbon, on pure morals of the early Church, 150. 
 
 Goethe referred to, 26. 
 
 Golden Age, put in the past by heathen, 98 ; in the future by the 
 
 Psalmists, 99, 105. 
 Greek Tragedy, its Nemesis, 84. 
 
 Happy Man, The, 153. 
 
 Herder, on the Old Testament, 8 ; on the Pss., 185. 
 
 Hesiod, his Theogony, 58. 
 
 Hesse, Dr. H., on the Imprecations, 168. 
 
 Hindus's Confession of Sin, 81-83. 
 
 Holmes, Dr. O. W., quoted, 176. 
 
 Holiness of God, 51, 83. 
 
 Homeric Hymns, 57, 152, 
 
 Home, Bp., on the Imprecations, 167 ; on the Pss., 185. 
 
 Horsley. Bp., on the Imprecations, 167. 
 
 Human heroes, not found in the Psalter, 88, 115. 
 
 Humboldt on the 104th Ps., 29. 
 
 Ideal Messiah denied, 91. 
 Immensity of God asserted, 49. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 193 
 
 Immortality of the Soul, not per se important, 131 ; known to 
 the Jews, 133 ; not emphasized, 137 ; a universal tradition or 
 belief, 141. 
 
 Imprecations in the Pss., 166. 
 
 Jasher, Book of, its nature, 86-88, 
 Jebb, Bp., quoted, 20. 
 Jerome, on use of the Pss., 184. 
 Justice of God asserted, 53. 
 
 Lewis, Prof. Tayler, on the Bible as best defence against error, 6. 
 Livingstone on Central African beliefs, 133. 
 Lowth on Parallelism, 19. 
 Lyrics, Nature of, 9, 10, 152. 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, his search for ballads, 23 ; on the India 
 
 Mutiny, 176, 177. 
 Man, not the subject of lyric praise, 28, 86, 115, 
 Messiah, triumphant, 117 ; suffering, 123; not found elsewhere 
 
 in equal purity, 128. 
 Milton, quotation from Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, 6 ; from 
 
 his Sonnet on the Vaudois, 174. 
 Moliere, 58. 
 Monotheism, characteristic of the Pss., 66 ; not a question ot 
 
 race, 65. 
 Morals of the Psalter, pure, 152; rooted in religion, 154, 
 
 gracious, 156. 
 Moses, author of the 90th Ps., 13, 14. 
 Muller, Max, on Vedic Hymns, 60 ; on Immortality, 131. 
 
 Necromancers, among the Jews, 134 ; modern, 142. 
 Nemesis of Greek Tragedy, 84. 
 Newman, Dr. J. H., referred to, 34. 
 Newman, Prof. Francis, quoted, 187. 
 
194 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Old Testament, foundation of the New, 8, 151 ; not vindic- 
 tive, 169. 
 Omnipresence of God, 49. 
 Omniscience of God, 50. 
 Orig-in of Man, 74. 
 Ovid, 81. 
 
 Palestine, its physical peculiarities, 25. 
 
 Pantheism known to the Psalter, 40. 
 
 Parallelisms in Hebrew Poetry, 19. 
 
 Pascal on man's dignity, T"] . 
 
 Pessimism, not found in the Psalter, 91, 
 
 Penitential Pss., 15. 
 
 Poetry of the Psalter, real, 17-21 ; lyrical, 21-23 ; Palestinian, 
 
 24-26 ; true, 27. 
 Pindar, contrast with the Psalter, 86. 
 
 Renan on Monotheism, 65. 
 
 Robertson of Brighton, his vindication of Wordsworth, 43. 
 
 Self-righteousness not justly chargeable to the Psalter, 164. 
 
 Soul, its yearning for God, 94, 187. 
 
 Sosiosh, the Persian, 128. 
 
 Spirituality of the Psalter, 11. 
 
 Spontaneity of the Pss., 9. 
 
 Stanley, Dean, on the Imprecations, 167. 
 
 Talmud, 62. 
 
 Taylor, Isaac, on Palestine, 25 ; on mythical heroes, 90. 
 
 Tennyson quoted, Charge, etc., 89 ; Locksley Hall, 104 ; In 
 
 Memoriam, 105, 104. 
 Theology of the Psalter, 39, etc. 
 Tholuck on the Imprecations, 168. 
 Truth of all poetry, 27 ; of the Pss., 28-32. 
 
INDEX. IQ5 
 
 Unity of God, 39, 66-68. 
 
 Varuna's greatness, 61, 62. 
 
 Vedas, Age of, 59; Character, 60; fine sayings of, 61 ; confes- 
 sion of sin, 81 ; vagueness, 92 ; earthly, 94. 
 
 Whewell on the 8th Ps., 75. 
 
 Wordsworth, his pantheistic tendencies, 43. 
 
 Zendic HjTnns, elevated, 62 ; Dualistic, 63 ; their Sosiosh post 
 Biblical, 129. 
 

 
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