Haereditate acquisivi testimonia tua in aeternum:
Quia exsultatio cordis mei sunt.
The Christian use of the Psalter is as old as Christianity itself. The
new-born Catholic Church, returning from her earliest conflict with the
kingdoms of this world, found the most natural expression of her faith
and her need in the words of the 2nd Psalm:
Why did the Gentiles rage,
And the peoples imagine vain things?
The kings of the earth set themselves in array,
And the rulers were gathered together,
Against the Lord, and against His Anointed.
(Acts iv. 25, 26, R.V.)
{2}
Before this, on the very birthday of the Church, the chief of the
Apostles had appealed to the witness of "David," for the Resurrection
and Triumph of the Holy One (Pss. xvi., cx. in Acts ii. 25-8, 34, 35).
And even earlier, during the ten days of waiting, the great Psalms of
righteous wrath (thought so impossible by many to-day) had supplied the
prophecy of the fall of Judas:
Let his habitation be made desolate,
And let no man dwell therein;
and the justification of the election of Matthias:
His office let another take.
(Pss. lxix. and cix. in Acts i. 20.)
So harmoniously did the praise-book of the Jewish Church pass into the
service of Christ; so clearly did the first believers recognise that
the Spirit of Christ was the same Who had spoken by "David." This
immediate appropriation of the Psalter as a book of Christian witness
is remarkable evidence to the felt unity and continuity of the two
Covenants. No book of the Old Testament, with the exception of Isaiah,
is so frequently quoted in the New as the book of Psalms.
But still more remarkable is the influence of the Psalter on Christian
_worship_. The Church {3} exists in the world not only as the
teaching, but also as the worshipping community. As the ages pass she
ceases not to bear the witness of her praise and thanksgiving to the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. From the beginning she showed a
tendency to do this in ordered and liturgical forms. The Apostolic
Church continued steadfast in "the prayers" (Acts ii. 42, R.V.). The
expression implies not merely a daily gathering for worship, but the
offering of that worship in a fixed and orderly manner, suggested, no
doubt, by the existing Jewish services. Whatever may have been the
actual form of "the prayers" in the first age of the Church, or
whatever stages they may have passed through, there can be no doubt
that they are the germ of all the rich later developments of the
liturgy of the Church, such as are represented in the Middle Ages by
the Missal and the Breviary, and to-day by our own Book of Common
Prayer.
The regular services of the Church fall naturally into two classes.
The Eucharist, the service of the Altar, took the place of the
sacrificial worship of the Temple. The Divine Office, the service of
the Choir, may have been suggested by the services of the Synagogue.
But if so, there is one most significant difference. {4} The Christian
Church made a much fuller public use of the Psalms than the Synagogue
ever seems to have done.[1] The Psalms in the Jewish Church seem to
have been adjuncts or embellishments of the service, rather than its
central feature. The Divine Office of the Christian Church practically
is the Psalter. The readings from other parts of Scripture, so
prominent in the Synagogue service, fall now into a secondary place.
The recitation of the Psalms, which appears from very early times as
the characteristic Christian devotion, became the very centre and core
of the sevenfold daily Choir Office of the mediaeval Church. The whole
Psalter in theory was said through once a week, mainly at Mattins (the
midnight office), while selected Psalms formed the chief part of the
subsequent services of the day.[2] The English Reformers, however
hastily and trenchantly they may have cut down and simplified these
services of the Breviary, showed the true Catholic instinct in this at
least, that they provided as the leading feature of Morning and Evening
Prayer an unbroken and systematic recitation of the Psalms. In this
respect their claim was justified that they had provided an {5} order
"much agreeable to the mind and purpose of the old Fathers."[3] It was
a return from mediaeval complications to a more primitive ideal.
What, then, was this book of praise and worship which the Catholic
Church found ready to hand, and made unhesitatingly her own, and which
has set the standard and provided the chief material for her continual
voice in the ear of God? The Psalter, as we know it now, had been for
some time before Christ the recognised praise-book of Israel. Its
Hebrew name is simple and significant--_Tehillim_, "praises." Its
historical origins and growth are still indeed wrapt in obscurity, and
to discuss them would be alien from our present purpose. Suffice it to
say that there seems no conclusive reason for discrediting the
universal Jewish and Christian tradition that the Psalter begins at
least with David. Some of the earlier and more personal psalms are
naturally felt to reflect his character and youthful struggles. Nor is
it unreasonable to believe that the later historical books are
substantially correct in making him the founder {6} of the Temple choir
(1 Chron. xv.; Ezra iii. 10). Doubtless the majority of the Psalms
belong to a later age, and their collection is due to the scrupulous
care and reverence of the period of Jewish history which begins with
Ezra. The singers of the Temple after, perhaps even before, the
Captivity formed various collections of sacred lyrics, which passed
under characteristic names, some being entitled "Psalms of David"
(though not of necessity all his work); others bearing the names of
ancient leaders of the Temple choir, like Asaph, or of the guilds of
singers, like "the sons of Korah." Another collection with a distinct
individuality would be the "songs of degrees" or "ascents"
(cxx.-cxxxii.), the pilgrim-songs of the faithful Israelites as they
journeyed from their homes to keep the annual feasts at Jerusalem. At
some unknown time these different collections, or selections from them,
must have been brought together into one. Many scholars consider that
the compilation cannot have been complete before the age of the
Maccabees, as more than one Psalm is thought to refer to the agonies of
faithful Israel during that great national crisis (e.g. Pss. xliv.,
lxxiv., lxxix., lxxx.). But it must have been substantially complete
by the time that the Septuagint translation was made (in the second
century {7} B.C.); and so ancient then were the titles of the Psalms in
the Hebrew that these Alexandrine scholars seem to have been frequently
puzzled by them.
This collection of 150 Psalms, whenever precisely it may have been
made, was divided into five books, each ending with an outburst of
praise to the God of Israel.[4] The key to this somewhat artificial
arrangement is no doubt to be found in the desire to make the Psalter
correspond with the Pentateuch. "Moses," says a Rabbinical commentator
(Midrash _Tillim_), "gave five-fifths of the Law, and correspondingly
David gave the book of _Tehillim_, in which are five books." Of this
Dr. Cheyne says, "The remark is a suggestive one: it seems to mean
this--that the praise-book is the answer of the worshipping community
to the demands made by its Lord in the Law, the reflexion of the
external standard of faith and obedience in the utterance of the
believing heart." This criticism is so illuminating that it may well
suggest the first great principle in our own Christian use of the
Psalter.
I. The Psalter is the inspired answer of praise which human faith is
privileged to make to {8} God's revelation. It is the "new song" put
in the mouth of humanity by its Creator. "Thou preparest their heart,
and Thine ear hearkeneth thereto" (Ps. x. 19).
This is surely a very great thought. The Old Testament is the record
of God's gradual unveiling of Himself to His elect, whom for the
world's sake He had chosen out of the world. The revelation was not
indeed to them alone. God had spoken in many ways, more than even the
Church yet recognises, to the heathen world. Yet to Israel God gave
that highest privilege of receiving and keeping the true knowledge of
Himself, of His unity, His universality, His moral being, His holiness,
His love, and of the demand which this knowledge makes on human
conscience. The unknown author of 2 Esdras, looking back on history
after the great blow had fallen on Jerusalem, has expressed this in
vivid and pathetic language: "Of all the flowers of the world Thou hast
chosen Thee one lily: and of all the depths of the sea Thou hast filled
Thee one river: and of all builded cities Thou hast hallowed Sion unto
Thyself: ... and among all the multitudes of peoples Thou hast gotten
Thee one people: and unto this people, whom Thou lovedst, Thou gavest a
law that is approved of all" (2 Esd. v. 24-7). In the Psalter God {9}
has provided, as it were, for His people the words of praise in which
their thankful hearts may express their love and loyalty to what He has
revealed.
This feature, the glad response to revelation, is stamped upon the
Psalter from end to end. Thus the 1st Psalm describes the secret of
human blessedness:
His delight is in the law of the Lord:
And in His law will he exercise himself day and night.
The 9th Psalm is an outburst of thanksgiving to "the Name" of God, Who
is revealed as the moral Governor of the world. The 19th couples the
self-revelation of God in nature, God Whose glory the heavens declare,
with the revelation given in the Law, which is, as it were, the sun in
the moral world restoring the soul and enlightening the eyes. The 25th
reads like a comment from man's heart on the great proclamation of
God's Name given to Moses in the "cleft of the rock"--"The Lord, the
Lord, a God full of compassion, and gracious, slow to anger, and
plenteous in mercy and truth" (Ex. xxxiii. 19, xxxiv. 5-7). So the
Psalmist prays, as it were, in answer:
{10}
Call to remembrance, O Lord, Thy tender mercies:
And Thy loving-kindnesses, which have been ever of old.
O remember not the sins and offences of my youth:
But according to Thy mercy think Thou upon me, O Lord,
for Thy goodness.
The 40th offers the response of a converted will to what is found and
recognised in the Law:
In the roll of the book it is written of me:
I delight to do Thy will, O my God.
(R.V.)
The 78th recounts the long history of rebellious Israel as in itself
part of the "testimony" of God. The mingled record of deliverance and
failure, of judgment and hope, is in itself "a parable," a "dark saying
of old," which faith can read and make answer to. The 131st expresses
the very fundamental spirit of faith, the essential temper and attitude
of the Church, the spirit of humility, of intellectual submission, of
obedience, which is the same under the Gospel Dispensation as under the
Old Covenant.
{11}
Lord, I am not high-minded:
I have no proud looks.
I do not exercise myself in great matters:
Which are too high for me.
But the most remarkable illustration of this characteristic attitude of
the believer is the 119th Psalm. It is like a piece of music, every
verse a subtle and harmonious variation on one dominant theme. It is
the voice of the converted soul, learning the one lesson which man must
learn in this world's school, if he is to attain his true
being--learning to be ever turning away from self, from one's own
doubts, troubles, persecutions, sufferings, to rest on what God has
revealed in His statutes, His judgments, His testimonies, His laws.
Nor is it without a subtle propriety that this Psalm is arranged as an
acrostic under the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. These
letters are, as it were, the rudiments out of which man is enabled to
exercise his characteristic gift of articulate speech; and in the
acrostic Psalms they are visibly consecrated to His service Who made
the mouth of man. And each part of the 119th Psalm consists of eight
verses, a significant Hebrew number, the symbol of the {12}
Resurrection and the restoration of all things in that eighth day, the
octave of eternity, which is yet to come, and will complete the work of
the seven days of the first creation.
This Psalm, which expresses the unchanging spirit of true religion, was
most naturally appropriated by Christian devotion to form the services
for the working part of each day, beginning at Prime, when "man goeth
forth to his work and his labour" with that benediction which comes on
labour done with a pure motive in God's Name:
Blessed are those that are undefiled in the way:
And walk in the law of the Lord,
and ending at None, the hour of the death of the Lord, when day visibly
declines, with the confession that the worker, as he looks back, must
always make:
I have gone astray like a sheep that is lost:
O seek Thy servant, for I do not forget Thy commandments.
It was like a stream of water, crossing unexpectedly a dusty
way--_mirabilia testimonia tua_! In psalm and antiphon, inexhaustibly
fresh, the soul seemed to be taking refuge, at that undevout {13} hour,
from the sordid languor and the mean business of men's lives, in
contemplation of the unfaltering vigour of the Divine righteousness,
which had still those who sought it, not only watchful in the night,
but alert in the drowsy afternoon.[5]
We can scarcely exaggerate the value, in our own time especially, of
this use, not only of the 119th Psalm, but of the whole Psalter, as the
response of the Church and the human soul to the revealed word of God.
These times of Christ have indeed filled and enriched the early
conception of "the Name" of God. We have learned to see in the Trinity
the justification of belief in the Divine Unity; we have learned more
of the Fatherhood of God in the face of His only Son; we have learned
that the Cross is the key to human suffering; we have learned the
Catholic nature of the Divine sovereignty: nevertheless the foundation
teaching of the Psalmists as to the relation of the creature to his
Creator remains unchanged. We still find in the Psalter a guide for
our uncertain footsteps in our journey back to God. Is not the answer
to every problem of faith, even such mysteries as the existence and
continuance of evil, or the calamities that fall on the just, {14}
still to be found as the author of the 73rd Psalm found it, in
returning and rest upon the God Who has made _Himself_ known to
suffering man?
My flesh and my heart faileth:
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.
The prevailing thought of the 119th Psalm, that God's revelation is
fixed and permanent and the law of human life, marks the great
separation between the world and the Church. Such a belief is
abhorrent and distasteful always to the natural mind, while it is
familiar to and welcomed by the Catholic Church, as it was by the
Jewish. The Church's witness to the world is of a revelation from
above: she has _received_ it; she may not alter it without apostasy.
Her mission in the world is not to be the mirror of each succeeding
phase of human thought, nor merely the consecration of human
aspirations, but rather to speak with a supernatural authority, to tell
men what God is and what is His will, "whether they will hear, or
whether they will forbear." And the Church can only deliver her
message aright, in the face of the frowns of the princes of this world,
so long as worship gladdens and confirms her {15} witness, so long as
she herself finds her joy in contemplating her treasure and returning
thanks for it to the Giver.
As the devout Israelite found in the Psalter the natural expression of
an intelligent devotion to the God Who had revealed Himself in Law and
Prophets, so the Christian Church, with no break of continuity, found
the Psalter still adequate to express her joy in her fuller knowledge.
For that fuller knowledge was strictly in line with the old. The faith
of Israel had not been changed, but carried forward, developed,
illuminated. In the Law the Gospel lay hid, and the Christian Church
felt in the old words of devotion no outworn or alien accents, but
living utterances of the Spirit of Life, which renewed their youth with
hers. So from the beginning she found strength and comfort in her
warfare for the truth, in the praises of Israel. From the beginning
she based her ordered worship on the services of Temple and Synagogue.
The choirs of the Catholic Church find their most lasting and
characteristic voice not in hymn or anthem, but in--
"The chorus intoned
As the Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned."
{16}
II. A second great principle of the Christian use of the Psalter will
be found in its humanism. The Psalms are profoundly human. They
sympathise with the soul of man in all his varied efforts after God.
They find a voice for him in his battles for truth and right, in his
moments of defeat as well as his victories, in his doubts no less than
his certainties. They put words into his mouth as he contemplates the
variety, the beauty, and the law of nature, or the injustice, the
obstinacy, the treachery of men. The Psalms make his bed in his
sickness; they strengthen him in the inward agonies of faith; they go
with him to the gates of death, and farther still, even to God's "holy
hill and His dwelling"; they point him to the eternal morning, when he
will wake up and be satisfied with God's likeness (_cf._ Pss. civ., x.,
xli., lxxvii., lxxxviii., xliii., xvii.).
We have all no doubt felt something of this abiding sympathy of the
Psalter. Dean Church expressed it very remarkably in a letter written
by him shortly before his death:
The thought of what is to take the place of things here is with me all
day long, but it is with a strange mixture of reality and unreality,
and I wish it did me all the good it might. Books are not
satisfactory--at least, I have always found it {17} so. It seems to me
that there is nothing equal to letting the Psalms fall on one's ears,
till at last a verse starts into meaning, which it is sure to do in the
end (_Life and Letters_, p. 409, ed. 1897).
The Psalter has in this way endeared itself to many generations of
struggling and dying men, and appealed even to many who were alien from
its spirit. It has interwoven itself with striking scenes and moments
of history, as when Hildebrand chanted "He that dwelleth in heaven
shall laugh them to scorn" (ii.) before the encircling hosts of emperor
and anti-pope; or when S. Athanasius, on that night of fear when the
imperial soldiers had blockaded the doors of the church, and the fate
of the faith of Nicaea seemed to hang in the balance, bade the deacon
intone that Psalm which tells of God smiting great kings, "for His
mercy endureth for ever" (cxxxvi.); or when Henry V. turned his face to
the wall and died, confessing that his ideal was unfulfilled, and that
God, and not he, must "build the walls of Jerusalem" (li.).
This humanism of the Psalter makes it pre-eminently a Christian
possession, for Christianity is human through and through. It is the
religion of "the soul which is by nature Christian." It redeems and
consecrates, as no other religion could ever dare to do, all the
fulness of man's being. {18} And why? Here we touch the innermost
secret of the Psalter. It is the book of the Incarnation. "The Word
was made flesh, and dwelt among us." God Himself has taken to Himself
a human soul and spirit as well as a human body. And the Incarnate
Word found on earth the voice of His communing with the Father, as the
faithful of His own adopted nation did, in the words of the Psalms.
These words rise naturally to His lips in the supreme agony on the
Cross; they must have provided His prayers and thanksgivings, we may
reverently imagine, not only in the public services which He attended,
but in His home at Nazareth, and in His lonely vigils of prayer. He
gathered together in Himself all the human experiences of the past
which are reflected in the Psalter. Hence the Psalter is also the
characteristic voice of His Church, that Church which was founded by
Him, and is united to Him, and is the assembly of the first-born of
humanity calling Him "Lord" and Mary "Mother."
The consideration of these great truths will be reserved for subsequent
lectures; but it would be impossible to speak of general principles in
our Christian use of the Psalter without pointing out on the very
threshold its indissoluble connection, historically and doctrinally,
with the {19} "Author and Finisher of our faith," and with His Church
"the household of faith."
III. Once again, the Psalter is appropriate for Christian use because
it is the book of Hope. The world estranged from God is without hope.
The heathen looked back to a golden age; Virgil stands almost alone in
his dream of its possible return.[6] The Israel of God is the
fellowship of the future. It feels itself in harmony with an
increasing purpose of God. The great revelation to Moses of the Name
of God, "I will be that I will be" (Ex. iii. 14, R.V. marg.), left its
mark on all subsequent history. So the Old Testament writers, under
every imaginable difficulty and persecution and reverse, among the
treacheries of friends, as well as the attacks of a hostile heathen
world, are ever straining forward to a coming of God and a Kingdom of
God. Like the spirits in Virgil's vision:
Stabant orantes primi transmittere cursum,
Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.[7]
{20}
The Psalms throughout delight in this attitude. The most casual reader
is struck by the constancy with which an outlook of hope and joy
succeeds to the sorrow and stress of the opening verses of Psalm after
Psalm. Even the darkest have their gleams of promise. And so the
Christian Church, having learned what the hope of Israel meant, found
the Psalms come naturally to her lips. She could sing with fuller
meaning of the rising up again of the righteous (xli.), of the
deliverances from the stormy waters and from the wandering out of the
way in the wilderness (cvii.), of the bringing up of the sufferer "from
the deep of the earth again" (lxxi.). The Psalter was and is to the
Christian not merely the reflection of his characteristic sorrows and
trials, but the book of the Resurrection, of the restitution of all
things, of the doing away of the imperfect and the coming of the
perfect.
Thou shalt shew me the path of life; in Thy presence
is the fulness of joy:
And at Thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.
(xvi. 12.)
Thus the Psalter is ours, for it is the new song of gratitude to Him
Who has given us the {21} Catholic Faith; it is ours because it is the
book of Him Who has redeemed us by making Himself one with us, and
"taking the manhood into God"; it is ours because it has not merely the
human consecration of ages of Christian use, but it is the channel
which the Holy Spirit, Who dwells in the Church, seems deliberately to
have chosen in which to make His ineffable intercession for the sons of
God who wait for their adoption, "the redemption of the body" (Rom.
viii. 19-27). Appreciation of the Psalter grows with the devout use of
it. The obligation to recite it month by month in the daily office is
one of the best gifts the Church has given to her priests; and both
priest and laity alike will find increasingly that the Psalms need no
apology. They are the noblest and most comprehensive form of public
worship; they are the most truly satisfying book of private devotion.
[1] Note A, p. 101.
[2] Note B, p. 102.
[3] "Concerning the Service of the Church," the original Preface to the
Prayer Book.
[4] xli. 13, lxxii. 18-19, lxxxix. 50, cvi. 46, cl.
[5] Walter Pater, _Gaston de Latour_.
[6] Virgil, _eclogue_ iv.
[7] Virgil, _Aeneid_, vi. 313, 314 (_cf._ Heb. xi. 13):
Praying, they stood with hands of love outspread,
If but that farther shore each might be first to tread.
{22}