_THE GOSPEL PSALMS._
Unlike modern church builders, St. Luke sets his chancel by the porch.
No sooner have we passed through the vestibule of his Gospel than we
find ourselves within a circle of harmonies. On the one side are
Zacharias and Simeon, the one chanting his _Benedictus_, and the other
his _Nunc Dimittis_. Facing them, as if in antiphon, are Elisabeth and
Mary, the one singing her _Beatitude_, and the other her _Magnificat_;
while overhead, in the frescoed and star-lighted sky, are vast
multitudes of the heavenly host enriching the Advent music with their
_Glorias_. What means this grand irruption of song? and why is St. Luke,
the Gentile Evangelist, the only one who repeats to us these Hebrew
psalms? At first it would seem as if their natural place would be as a
prelude to St. Matthew's Gospel, which is the Gospel of the Hebrews. But
strangely enough, St. Matthew passes them by in silence, just as he
omits the two angelic visions. St. Matthew is evidently intent on one
thing. Beginning a New Testament, as he is, he seems especially anxious
that there shall be no rent or even seam between the Old and the New;
and so, in his first pages, after giving us the genealogy, running the
line of descent up to Abraham, he laces up the threads of his narrative
with the broken-off threads of the old prophecies, so that the written
Word may be a vestment of the Incarnate Word, which shall be "without
seam, woven from the top throughout." And so really the Advent hymns
would not have suited St. Matthew's purpose. Their ring would not have
been in accord with the tone of his story; and had we found them in his
first chapters, we should instinctively have felt that they were out of
place, as if we saw a rose blossoming on a widespread oak.
St. Luke, however, is portraying the Son of man. Coming to redeem
humanity, he shows how He was first born into that humanity, making His
advent in a purely human fashion. And so the two conceptions form a fit
beginning for his Gospel; while over the Divine Birth and Childhood he
lingers reverently and long, paying it however, only the homage Heaven
had paid it before. Then, too, was there not a touch of poetry about our
Evangelist? Tradition has been almost unanimous in saying that he was a
painter; and certainly in the grouping of his figures, and his careful
play upon the lights and shadows, we can discover traces of his artistic
skill, in word-painting at any rate. His was evidently a soul attuned to
harmonies, quick to discern any accordant or discordant strains. Nor
must we forget that St. Luke's mind is open to certain occult
influences, whose presence we may indeed detect, but whose power we are
not able to gauge. As we have already seen, it was the manifold
narratives of anonymous writers that first moved him to take up the pen
of the historian; and to those narratives we doubtless owe something of
the peculiar cast and colouring of St. Luke's story. It is with the
Nativity that tradition would be most likely to take liberties. The
facts of the Advent, strange enough in themselves, would at the hands
of rumour undergo a process of developing, like the magnified and
somewhat grotesque shadows of himself the traveller casts on Alpine
mists. It was doubtless owing to these enlargements and distortions of
tradition that St. Luke was led to speak of the Advent so fully, going
into the minutiæ of detail, and inserting, as is probable, from the
Hebrew tone of these first two chapters, the account as given orally, or
written, by some members of the Holy Family.
It must be admitted that to some inquiring and honest minds these Advent
psalms have been a difficulty, an enigma, if not a stumbling-block. As
the bells that summon to worship half-deafen the ear of the worshipper
on a too near approach, or they become merely a confused and unmeaning
noise if he climbs up into the belfry and watches the swing of their
brazen lips, so this burst of music in our third Gospel has been too
loud for certain sensitive ears. It has shaken somewhat the foundations
of their faith. They think it gives an unreality, a certain mythical
flavour, to the story, that these four pious people, who have always led
a quiet, prosaic kind of life, should now suddenly break out into
impromptu songs, and when these are ended lapse again into complete
silence, like the century plant, which throws out a solitary blossom in
the course of a hundred years. And so they come to regard these Hebrew
psalms as an interpolation, an afterthought, thrown into the story for
effect. But let us not forget that we are dealing now with Eastern mind,
which is naturally vivacious, imaginative, and highly poetical. Even our
colder tongue, in this glacial period of nineteenth-century
civilization, is full of poetry. The language of common every-day
life--to those who have ears to hear--is full of tropes, metaphors, and
parables. Take up the commonest words of daily speech, and put them to
your ear, and they will sing like shells from the sea. There are whole
poems in them--epics, idylls, of every sort; and let our colder speech
get among the sweet influences of religion, and like the iceberg adrift
in the Gulf Stream, it loses its rigidity and frigidity at once, melting
in liquid, rhythmic measures, throwing itself away in hymns and
_jubilates_. The fact is, the world is full of music. As the Sage of
Chelsea said, "See deep enough, and you see musically, the heart of
Nature being everywhere music if you can only reach it." And it is so.
You can touch nothing but there are harmonies slumbering within it, or
itself is a stray note of some grander song. Dead wood from the forest,
dead ore from the mine, dead tusks of the beast--these are the "base
things" that strike our music; and only put a mind within them, and a
living soul with a living touch before them, and you have songs and
anthems without number.
But to Eastern minds poetry was a sort of native language. Its
inspiration was in the air. Their ordinary speech was ornate and
efflorescent, throwing itself out in simile and hyperbole. It only
needed some small excitement, and they fell naturally into the couplet
form of utterance. Even to-day the children swing under the
mulberry-trees to songs and choruses; hucksters extol their wares in
measured verse; and the Bethany fruit-girl sings in the market, "O lady,
take of our fruit, without money and without price: it is yours; take
all that you will"! And so it need not surprise us, much less trouble
us, that Simeon and Elisabeth, Zacharias and Mary, should each speak in
measured cadences. Their speech blossomed with flowers of rhetoric, just
as naturally as their hills were ablaze with daisies and anemones.
Besides, they were now under the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
We read, "Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost;" and again,
Zacharias was "filled with the Holy Ghost;" Simeon "came in the Spirit
into the Temple;" while Mary now seemed to live in one conscious,
constant inspiration. It is said that "a poet is born, not made;" and if
he be not thus "free-born" no "great sum," either of gold or toil, will
ever pass him up within the favoured circle. And the same is true of the
poet's creations. Sacred hymns are not the product of the unaided
intellect. They do not come at the bidding of any human will. They are
inspirations. There is the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit in their
conception. The human mind, heart, and lips are but the instrument, a
kind of Æolian lyre, played upon by the Higher Breath, which comes and
goes--how, the singer himself can never tell; for
"In the song
The singer has been lost."
It was when "filled with the Spirit" that Bezaleel put into his gold and
silver the thoughts of God; it was when the Spirit of God came upon him
that Balaam took up his parable, putting into stately numbers Israel's
forward march and endless victories. And so the sacred psalm is the
highest type of inspiration; it is a voice from no earthly Parnassus,
but from the Mount of God itself--the nearest approach to the celestial
harmonies, the harmonies of that city whose very walls are poetry, and
whose gates are praise.
And so, after all, it was but fitting and perfectly natural that the
Gospel that Heaven had been so long time preparing should break upon
the world amid the harmonies of music. Instead of apologizing for its
presence, as if it were but an interlude improvised for the occasion, we
should have noted and mourned its absence, as when one mourns for "the
sound of a voice that is still." When the ark of God was brought up from
Baale Judah it was encircled with one wide wreath of music, a travelling
orchestra of harps and psalteries, castanets and cymbals; and as now
that Ark of all the promises is borne across from the Old to the New
Dispensation, as the promise becomes a fulfilment, and the hope a
realization, shall there not be the voice of song and gladness? Our
sense of the fitness of things expects it; Heaven's law of the harmonies
demands it; and had there not been this burst of praise and song, we
should have listened for the very stones to cry out, rebuking the
strange silence. But the voice was not silent. The singers were there,
in their places; and they sang, not because they would, but because they
must. A heavenly pressure, a sweet constraint, was upon them. If Wealth
lays down her tribute of gold, with frankincense and myrrh, Poetry
weaves for the Holy Child her beautiful songs, and crowns Him with her
fadeless amaranth; and so around the earthly cradle of the Lord, as
around His heavenly throne, we have angelic songs, and "the voices of
harpers, harping with their harps."
Turning now to the four Gospel-psalmists--not, however, to analyze, but
to listen to their song--we meet first with Elisabeth. This aged
daughter of Aaron, and wife of Zacharias, as we have seen, resided
somewhere in the hill-country of Judæa, in their quiet, childless home.
Righteous, blameless, and devout, religion to her was no mere form; it
was her life. The Temple services, with which she was closely
associated, were to her no cold clatter of dead rites; they were
realities, full of life and full of music, as her heart had caught their
deeper meaning. But the Temple, while it attracted her thoughts and
hopes, did not enclose them; its songs and services were to her but so
many needles, swinging round on their marble pivot, and pointing beyond
to the Living God, the God who dwelt not in temples made with hands, but
who, then as now, inhabits the purified temple of the heart. Long past
the time when motherly hopes were possible, the fretting had subsided,
and her spirit had become, first acquiescent, then quiescent. But these
hopes had been miraculously rekindled, as she slowly read the vision of
the Temple from the writing-table of her dumb husband. The shadow of her
dial had gone backward; and instead of its being evening, with gathering
shadows and ever-lessening light, she found herself back in the glow of
the morning, her whole life lifted to a higher level. She was to be the
mother, if not of the Christ, yet of His forerunner. And so the Christ
was near at hand, this was certain, and she had the secret prophecy and
promise of His advent. And Elisabeth finds herself exalted--borne up, as
it were, into Paradise, among visions and such swells of hosannas that
she cannot utter them; they are too sweet and too deep for her shallow
words. Was it not this, the storm of inward commotion, that drove her to
hide herself for the five months? Heaven has come so near to her, such
thoughts and visions fill her mind, that she cannot bear the intrusions
and jars of earthly speech; and Elisabeth passes into a voluntary
seclusion and silence, keeping strange company with the dumb and deaf
Zacharias.
At length the silence is broken by the unexpected appearance of her
Nazareth relative. Mary, fresh from her hasty journey, "entered into the
house of Zacharias and saluted Elisabeth." It is a singular expression,
and evidently denotes that the visit of the Virgin was altogether
unlooked for. There is no going out to meet the expected guest, as was
common in Eastern hospitalities; there was even no welcome by the gate;
but like an apparition, Mary passes within, and salutes the surprised
Elisabeth, who returns the salutation, not, however, in any of the
prescribed forms, but in a benediction of measured verse:--
"Blessed art thou among women,
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb!
And whence is this to me,
That the mother of my Lord should come unto me?
For, behold, when the voice of thy salutation came into mine ears
The babe leaped in my womb for joy.
And blessed is she that believed,
For there shall be a fulfilment of the things which have been spoken
to her from the Lord."
The whole canticle--and it is Hebrew poetry, as its parallelisms and
strophes plainly show--is one apostrophe to the Virgin. Striking the
key-note in its "Blessed art thou," the "thou" moves on, distinct and
clear, amid all variations, to the end, reaching its climax in its
central phrase, "The mother of my Lord." As one hails the morning star,
not so much for its own light as for its promise of the greater light,
the dayspring that is behind it, so Elisabeth salutes the morning star
of the new dawn, at the same time paying homage to the Sun, whose near
approach the star heralds. And why is Mary so blessed among women? Why
should Elisabeth, forgetting the dignity of years, bow so deferentially
before her youthful relative, crowning her with a song? Who has
informed her of the later revelation at Nazareth? It is not necessary to
suppose that Elisabeth, in her seclusion, had received any corroborative
vision, or even that she had been supernaturally enlightened. Had she
not the message the angel delivered to Zacharias? and was not that
enough? Her son was to be the Christ's forerunner, going, as the angel
said, before the face of "the Lord." Three times had the angel
designated the Coming One as "the Lord," and this was the word she had
carried with her into her seclusion. What it meant she did not fully
understand; but she knew this, that it was He of whom Moses and the
prophets had written, the Shiloh, the Wonderful; and as she put together
the detached Scriptures, adding, doubtless, some guesses of her own, the
Christ grew as a conception of her mind and the desire of her heart into
such colossal proportions that even her own offspring was dwarfed in
comparison, and the thoughts of her own maternity became, in the rush of
greater thoughts, only as the stray eddies of the stream. That such was
the drift of her thoughts during the five quiet months is evident; for
now, taught of the Holy Ghost that her kinswoman is to be the mother of
the expected One, she greets the unborn Christ with her lesser
_Benedictus_. Like the old painters, she puts her aureole of song around
the mother's head, but it is easy to see that the mother's honours are
but the far-off reflections from the Child. Is Mary blessed among women?
it is not because of any wealth of native grace, but because of the
fruit of her womb. Does Elisabeth throw herself right back in the shade,
asking almost abjectly, "Whence is this to me?" it is because, like the
centurion, she feels herself unworthy that even the unborn "Lord" should
come under her roof. And so, while this song is really an ode to the
Virgin, it is virtually Elisabeth's salute of the Christ who is to be, a
salute in which her own offspring takes part, for she speaks of his
"leaping" in her womb, as if he were a participant in her joy,
interpreting its movements as a sort of "Hail, Master!" The canticle
thus becomes invested with a higher significance. Its words say much,
but suggest more. It carries our thought out from the seen to the
unseen, from the mother to the Holy Child, and Elisabeth's song thus
becomes the earliest "Hosannah to the Son of David," the first prelude
to the unceasing anthems that are to follow.
It will be observed that in the last line the song drops out of the
first and the second personals into the third. It is no longer the
frequent "thy," "thou," "my," but "she:" "Happy is she that believed."
Why is this change? Why does she not end as she began--"Happy art thou
who hast believed"? Simply because she is no longer speaking of Mary
alone. She puts herself as well within this beatitude, and at the same
time states a general law, how faith ripens into a harvest of
blessedness. The last line thus becomes the "Amen" of the song. It
reaches up among the eternal "Verilies," and sets them ringing. It
speaks of the Divine faithfulness, out of which and within which human
faith grows as an acorn within its cup. And who could have better right
to sing of the blessedness of faith, and to introduce this New Testament
grace--not unknown in the Old Testament, but unnamed--as she who was
herself such an exemplification of her theme? How calmly her own heart
reposed on the Divine word! How before her far-seeing and foreseeing
vision valleys were exalted, mountains and hills made low, that the way
of the Lord might appear! Elisabeth sees the unseen Christ, lays before
Him the tribute of her song, the treasures of her affection and
devotion; even before the Magi had saluted the Child-King, Elisabeth's
heart had gone out to meet Him with her hosannas, and her lips had
greeted Him "My Lord." Elisabeth is thus the first singer of the New
Dispensation; and though her song is more a bud of poetry than the ripe,
blossomed flower, enfolding rather than unfolding its hidden beauties,
it pours out a fragrance sweeter than spikenard on the feet of the
Coming One, while it throws around Him the purple of new royalties.
Turning now to the song of Mary, our _Magnificat_, we come to poetry of
a higher order. Elisabeth's introit was evidently spoken under intense
feeling; it was the music of the storm; for "she lifted up her voice
with a loud cry." Mary's song, on the other hand, is calm, the hymn of
the "quiet resting-place." There is no unnatural excitement now, no
inward perturbation, half mental and half physical. Mary was perfectly
self-possessed, as if the spell of some Divine "peace" were upon her
soul; and as Elisabeth's "loud cry" ceased, Mary "said"--so it
reads--her response. But if the voice was lower, the thought was higher,
more majestic in its sweep. Elisabeth's song was on the lower heights.
"The mother of my Lord," this was its starting-place, and the centre
around which its circles were described; and though its wings beat now
and again against the infinities, it does not attempt to explore them,
but returns timidly to its nest. But Elisabeth's loftiest reach is
Mary's starting-point; her song begins where the song of Elisabeth ends.
Striking her key-note in the first line, "The Lord," this is her one
thought, the Alpha and Omega of her psalm. We call it the _Magnificat_;
it is a _Te Deum_, full of suggested doxologies. Beginning with the
personal, as she is almost compelled to do by the intense personality of
Elizabeth's song, Mary hastes to gather up the eulogies bestowed upon
herself, and to bear them forward to Him who merits all praise, as He is
the Source of all blessing. Her soul "magnifies the Lord," not that she,
by any weak words of hers, can add to His greatness, which is infinite,
but even she may give the Lord a wider place within her thoughts and
heart; and whoever is silent, her song shall make "the voice of His
praise to be heard." Her spirit "hath rejoiced in God her Saviour," and
why? Has He not looked down on her low estate, and done great things for
her? "The bondmaid of the Lord," as she a second time calls herself,
glorying in her bonds, such is her promotion and exaltation that all
generations shall call her blessed. Then, with a beautiful effacement of
self, which henceforth is not even to be a mote playing in the sunshine,
she sings of Jehovah--His holiness, His might, His mercy, His
faithfulness.
Mary's song, both in its tone and language, belongs to the Old
Dispensation. Thoroughly Hebraic, and all inlaid with Old Testament
quotations, it is the swan-song of Hebraism. There is not a single
phrase, perhaps not a single word, that bears a distinctive Christian
stamp; for the "Saviour" of the first strophe is the "Saviour" of the
Old Testament, and not of the New, with a national rather than an
evangelical meaning. The heart of the singer is turned to the past
rather than to the future. Indeed, with the solitary exception, how all
generations shall call her blessed, there is no passing glimpse into the
future. Instead of speaking of the Expected One, and blessing "the
fruit of her womb," her song does not even mention Him. She tells how
the Lord hath done great things for her, but what those "great things"
are she does not say; she might, as far as her own song tells us, be
simply a later Miriam, singing of some family or personal deliverance, a
salvation which was one of a thousand. A true daughter of Israel, she
dwells among her own people, and her very broadest vision sees in her
offspring no world-wide blessing, only a Deliverer for Israel, His
servant. Does she speak of mercy? it is not that wider mercy that like a
sea laves every shore, bearing on its still bosom a redeemed humanity;
it is the narrower mercy "toward Abraham and his seed for ever." Mary
recognizes the unity of the Godhead, but she does not recognize the
unity, the brotherhood of man. Her thought goes back to "our fathers,"
but there it halts; the shrunken sinew of Hebrew thought could not cross
the prior centuries, to find the world's common father in Paradise. But
in saying this we do not depreciate Mary's song. It is, and ever will
be, the _Magnificat_, great in its theme, and great in its conception.
Following the flight of Hannah's song, and making use of its wings at
times, it soars far above, and sweeps far beyond its original. Not even
David sings of Jehovah in more exalted strains. The holiness of God, the
might supreme above all powers, the faithfulness that cannot forget, and
that never fails to fulfil, the Divine choice and exaltation of the
lowly--these four chief chords of the Hebrew Psalter Mary strikes with a
touch that is sweet as it is clear.
Mary sang of God; she did not sing of the Christ. Indeed, how could she?
The Christ to be was part of her own life, part of herself; how could
she sing His praise without an appearance of egotism and
self-gratulation? There are times when silence is more eloquent than
speech; and Mary's silence about the Christ was but the silence of the
winged cherubim, as they bend over the ark, beholding and feeling a
mystery they can neither know nor tell. It was the hush inspired by a
near and glorious presence. And so the _Magnificat_, while it tells us
nothing of the Christ, swings our thoughts around towards Him, sets us
listening for His advent; and Mary's silence is but the setting for the
Incarnate WORD.
The song of Zacharias follows that of Mary, not only in the order of
time, but also in its sequence of thought. It forms a natural postlude
to the _Magnificat_, while both are but different parts of one song,
this earliest "Messiah." It is something remarkable that our first three
Christian hymns should have their birth in the same nameless city of
Judah, in the same house, and probably in the same chamber; for the
room, which now is filled with the priest's relatives, and where
Zacharias breaks the long silence with his prophetic _Benedictus_, is
doubtless the same room where Elisabeth chanted her greeting, and Mary
sang her _Magnificat_. The song of Mary circled about the throne of
Jehovah, nor could she leave that throne, even to tell the great things
the Lord had done for her. Zacharias, coming down from his mount of
vision and of silence, gives us a wider outlook into the Divine purpose.
He sings of the "salvation" of the Lord; and salvation, as it is the
key-note of the heavenly song, is the key-note of the _Benedictus_. Does
he bless the Lord, the God of Israel? it is because He has "visited" (or
looked upon) "His people, and wrought redemption for" them; it is
because He has provided an abundant salvation, or a "horn of salvation,"
as he calls it. Has God remembered His covenant, "the oath He sware
unto Abraham"? has He "shown mercy towards their fathers"? that mercy
and faithfulness are seen in this wonderful salvation--a salvation "from
their enemies," and "from the hand of all that hate" them. Is his child
to be "the prophet of the Most High," going "before the face of the
Lord," and making "ready His ways"? it is that he may "give knowledge
of" this "salvation," in "the remission of sins." Then the psalm ends,
falling back on its key-note; for who are they who "sit in darkness and
the shadow of death," but a people lost? And who is the Day-spring who
visits them from on high, who shines upon their darkness, turning it
into day, and guiding their lost feet into the way of peace, but the
Redeemer, the Saviour, whose name is "Wonderful"? And so the
_Benedictus_, while retaining the form and the very language of the Old,
breathes the spirit of the New Dispensation. It is a fragrant breeze,
blowing off from the shores of a new, and now near world, a world
already seen and possessed by Zacharias in the anticipations of faith.
The Saviour whose advent the inspired priest proclaims is no mere
national deliverer, driving back those eagles of Rome, and rebuilding
the throne of his father David. He might be all that--for even prophetic
vision had not sweep of the whole horizon; it only saw the little
segment of the circle that was Divinely illumined--but to Zacharias He
was more, a great deal more. He was a Redeemer as well as Deliverer; and
a "redemption"--for it was a Temple word--meant a price laid down,
something given. The salvation of which Zacharias speaks is not simply a
deliverance from our political enemies, and from the hand of all that
hate us. It was a salvation higher, broader, deeper than that, a
"salvation" that reached to the profound depths of the human soul, and
that sounded its jubilee there, in the remission of sin and deliverance
from sin. Sin was the enemy to be vanquished and destroyed, and the
shadow of death was but the shadow of sin. And Zacharias sings of this
great redemption that leads to salvation, while the salvation leads into
the Divine peace, to "holiness and righteousness," and a service that is
"without fear."
The ark of Israel was borne by four of the sons of Kohath; and here this
ark of song and prophecy is borne of four sweet singers, the sexes
dividing the honours equally. We have listened to the songs of three,
and have seen how they follow each other in a regular, rhythmic
succession, the thought moving forward and outward in ever-widening
circles. Where is the fourth? and what is the burden of his song? It is
heard within the precincts of the Temple, as the parents bring the Child
Jesus, to introduce Him to the visible sanctities of religion, and to
consecrate Him to the Lord. It is the _Nunc Dimittis_ of the aged
Simeon. He too sings of "salvation," "Thy salvation" as he calls it. It
is the "consolation of Israel" he has looked for so ardently and so
long, and which the Holy Ghost had assured him he should behold before
his promotion to the higher temple. But the vision of Simeon was wider
than that of Zacharias, as that in turn was wider and clearer than the
vision of Mary. Zacharias saw the spiritual nature of this near
salvation, and he described it in words singularly deep and accurate;
but its breadth he did not seem to realize. The theocracy was the
atmosphere in which he lived and moved; and even his vision was
theocratic, and so somewhat narrow. His _Benedictus_ was for the "God
of Israel," and the "redemption" he sang was "for His people." The "horn
of salvation" is "for us;" and all through his psalm these first
personal pronouns are frequent and emphatic, as if he would still
insulate this favoured people, and give them a monopoly even of
"redemption." The aged Simeon, however, stands on a higher Pisgah. His
is the nearer and the clearer vision. Standing as he does in the Court
of the Gentiles, and holding in his arms the Infant Christ, "the Lord's
Christ," he sees in Him a Saviour for humanity, "the Lamb of God, who
taketh away the sin of the world." Still, as ever, "the glory of God's
people Israel," but likewise "a light for the unveiling of the
Gentiles." Like the sentry who keeps watch through the night till the
sunrise, Simeon has been watching and longing for the Day-spring from on
high, reading from the stars of promise the wearing of the night, and
with the music of fond hopes "keeping his heart awake till dawn of
morn." Now at length the consummation, which is the consolation, comes.
Simeon sees in the Child Jesus the world's hope and Light, a salvation
"prepared before the face of all people." And seeing this, he sees all
he desires. Earth can give no brighter vision, no deeper joy, and all
his request is--
"Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart, O Lord,
According to Thy word, in peace;
For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation."
And so the four psalms of the Gospels form in reality but one song, the
notes rising higher and still higher, until they reach the very pinnacle
of the new temple--God's purpose and plan of redemption; that temple
whose altar is a cross, and whose Victim is "the Lamb slain from the
foundation of the world;" that temple where courts and dividing-lines
all disappear; where the Holiest of all lies open to a redeemed
humanity, and Jews and Gentiles, bond and free, old and young, are alike
"kings and priests unto God." And so the Gospel psalms throw back, as it
were, in a thousand echoes, the _Glorias_ of the Advent angels, as they
sing--
"Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace."
And what is this but earth's prelude or rehearsal for the heavenly song,
as all nations, and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues, falling down
before the Lamb in the midst of the throne, sing, "Salvation unto our
God, which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the LAMB"?