Servus tuus sum ego:
Da mihi intellectum ut sciam testimonia tua.
Besides general principles, we are also to consider some of the general
difficulties in the use of the Psalter as a Christian book. The Psalms
are certainly not easy. Nothing as great as they are ever could be
easy. None of the books of the Bible yield their secret except to
labour and prayer, and the Psalms present special difficulties of their
own. These are of various kinds and need various methods of approach.
There is a difficulty inherent in the very origin and history of the
Psalms. They are translated somewhat imperfectly from an ancient
language, not akin to our own--a language which, if not difficult in
itself, is rendered so by the comparative scantiness of its literature.
The Psalms, humanly speaking, are the work of a race widely different
from ourselves in habits and in modes of thought and expression. They
contain allusions to events and circumstances imperfectly known or
realised to-day. Most of our interpretation of these things is
necessarily guess-work. The same Psalm may be ascribed {23} with equal
probability, by scholars of equal learning and reverence, to periods
many centuries apart. Was the sufferer of Ps. xxii. David or Jeremiah,
or is it altogether an ideal portrait? Was the coming of the heathen
into God's inheritance of Ps. lxxix. that of the Babylonians in the
sixth century B.C. or of the soldiers of Antiochus in the second? Who
was the "king's daughter" in Ps. xlv. and who "the daughter of Tyre"?
Is the Temple of the Psalms ever the first Temple, or is it always the
second? Such problems still wait an answer. Again, there are
difficulties inherent in Hebrew thought. It is intensely concrete and
personal, in contrast with our more usual abstractions and
generalities. The Psalmists speak habitually of "the wicked" and "the
ungodly," where we should more naturally speak of the qualities rather
than the persons. They ignore, as a rule, immediate or secondary
causes, and ascribe everything in nature or human affairs to the direct
action or intervention of God. Thus a thunder-storm is described:
There went a smoke out in His presence:
And a consuming fire out of His mouth,
so that coals were kindled at it.
(xviii. 8.)
{24}
And thus a national calamity:
Thou hast shewed Thy people heavy things:
Thou hast given us a drink of deadly wine.
(lx. 3.)
Such ways of describing God's work in Nature or His providence are
partly, of course, due to the fact (often overlooked by the
half-educated) that the Psalms are poetry and not prose. For the same
reason inanimate objects are personified: "the earth trembled at the
look of Him," "the mountains skipped like lambs"; the mythical
"Leviathan" appears both as a title of Egypt (lxxiv. 15) and as an
actual monster of the deep (civ. 26). God Himself, again, is spoken of
in language that might seem more appropriate to man. He is "provoked,"
and "tempted." He awakes "like a giant refreshed with wine." He is
called upon, not to sleep nor to forget, to avenge, to "bow the heavens
and come down."
Nor do the Psalms in their literal meaning rise always above the
current and imperfect religious conceptions of their time. The moral
difficulties involved in this will be considered a little later, but it
may be interesting to point out here some examples which bear on {25}
the progressiveness of revelation in the Old Testament by which heathen
ideas became, under God's guidance, "stepping-stones to higher things."
The Psalms seem sometimes to speak as if "the gods of the heathen"
really existed and were in some way rivals of the God of Israel,
universal and supreme though He is acknowledged to be. They are spoken
of as "devils" as well as idols. They are called upon to "worship Him"
(_cf._ cvi. 36, xcvii. 7, 9, cxxxviii. i).
Again, the Psalmists' horizon is, for the most part, limited to this
present life, which is regarded as if it were the chief, almost the
only, scene in which moral retribution would be worked out. And
occasionally there appears the primitive Hebrew idea of the after-world
as the vague and gloomy Sheol, like the shadowy Hades of Homer, where
the dead "go down into silence," where, instead of purpose and
progress, there is but a dawnless twilight, the land "without any
order" of Job (xlix., lxxxviii., cxv. 17).
And yet the more one studies and uses the Psalms in the light of other
Scriptures and the Church's interpretation, the more it is found that
these partial, at first sight erroneous, conceptions have still their
practical value for Christians. There is nothing in them that is {26}
positively false, and they suggest, on the other hand, aspects of truth
which we tend to forget. Thus in the instances given above, by "the
gods of the heathen" the Christian may well be reminded of the
continued existence and influence in the heathen world of the powers of
evil, of the malignant warfare that is still being waged by
"principalities and powers" against light and truth. The ancient
conception of the shadowy abode of the dead has also its value. Even
the Lord Himself could speak of the night coming "when no man can work"
(John ix. 4), and such Psalms as the 49th and the 115th may serve to
remind us that this life is a time of work and probation in a sense
that the life after death is not, that the grave cannot reverse the
line that has been followed here nor put praises in the mouth of those
who have never praised God "secretly or in the congregation" in this
world. And again, the "present-worldliness" of the Psalter may well
point the duty of Christians in respect of what they see and know
around them here. Many are content, while repeating pious phrases
about heaven, to ignore the fact that this present human life is the
great sphere of Christian activity, and that whether the Church is able
to regenerate human society here or {27} not, it is her business to try
to do it, as fellow-workers with Him--
Who helpeth them to right that suffer wrong:
Who feedeth the hungry.
(cxlvi. 6.)
Have we not a remarkable witness to the continuity of the Holy Spirit's
teaching, and to the fact that not "one jot or one tittle" of the law
is to remain unfulfilled, in the way that these apparent imperfections
and limitations of the Psalter fall into their place in connection with
the later revelation?
Another obvious difficulty of the Psalter lies in the frequent
obscurity of connection between verse and verse, in the rapid
transitions, in the uncertainty as to the sequence of thought, or the
meaning of the Psalm as a whole. This difficulty, as it bears upon the
liturgical use of the Psalms, has been increased by the abolition of
the _antiphons_, which in the pre-Reformation offices certainly helped
at times to suggest a leading thought, or to guide the worshipper as to
the Church's intention in the recitation of this or that Psalm. (Note
C, p. 104.) Sometimes indeed, the connection between the verses of a
Psalm is really very slight, more a matter {28} of suggestion or
association than of logic. Such is the case in "proverbial" Psalms,
like the 33rd, 34th, and 37th, or the 119th. But in others it is well
worth the effort to gain a continuous view of the Psalm as a whole. A
simple commentary will give this, or even sometimes the R.V. alone, or
the headings in the A.V., such as the very suggestive one prefixed to
the 110th: "1 The kingdom, 4 the priesthood, 5 the conquest, 7 and the
passion of Christ." (Note D, p. 106.)
There are also difficulties caused by a real obscurity in the Hebrew,
or by mistranslations. Here, again, a comparison with the R.V. is of
great value. The meaning of the 87th springs to light at once when we
read "This one was born there," instead of the mysterious "Lo, there
was he born," etc. The Psalm refers not to the birth of the Messiah,
but to the new birth of individuals out of the heathen races who thus
become citizens of Sion. "So let indignation vex him, even as a thing
that is raw" (lviii. 8), becomes certainly more intelligible as "He
shall take them away with a whirlwind, the green and the burning alike"
(a metaphor from a traveller's fire of brushwood, blown away by a
sudden wind); and even if "the beasts of the people" remains still
obscure in Ps. lxviii. in the revised {29} translation, its "why hop ye
so, ye high hills?" is more significant when it is read--
Why look ye askance, ye high mountains:
At the mountain which God hath desired for His abode?
Sometimes the alteration of a single word makes the difference between
obscurity and sense, as in xlix. 5, where "the wickedness of my heels"
becomes intelligible as "iniquity at my heels"; or in Ps. xlii., where
"Therefore will I remember thee concerning the land of Judah and the
little hill of Hermon" is made clear at once by the substitution of
"from" for "concerning." The verse is the cry of the exile, who, far
away in northern Palestine, among the sources of the Jordan, yearns for
the Temple and its services, which he is no longer able to visit.
Doubtless the reasons which prevented the older version of the Psalms
being changed in the Prayer Book in the seventeenth century, when other
passages of Scripture were revised, still hold good. Neither A.V. nor
R.V. are so well adapted for music, nor have they endeared themselves
to the worshipper by daily use. Those who have time and opportunity
may {30} discover for themselves more exact meanings or clear up
difficulties by private study. But even those who have not may find
that there are better uses of the Psalter than a merely intellectual
grasp of its meaning. Possibly an occasional obscurity may even have a
humbling or awe-inspiring effect on the mind. The strange version of
the Vulgate of Ps. lxxi. 14, though incorrect, is not without its point:
Quoniam non cognovi litteraturam,
introibo in potentias Domini.[1]
Learning by itself can never lift the soul on the wings of devotion and
worship. The unlearned, Christ's "little ones," have in every age
found a voice that spoke to them in the liturgy of the Catholic Church,
even though its accents were inarticulate, and its message music rather
than words. Such considerations may prevent us distressing ourselves
because something, perhaps much, in the Church's book of praise is
unintelligible and must remain so.
Two practical suggestions may be offered here to those who find
themselves hindered in devotion by the difficulties of the Psalter, by
its rapid transitions, or its constantly varying tone. The leading
purpose of the Psalter in {31} the Church's use is expressed in its
Hebrew title, _Tehillim_, "praises." "We shall do well," says Dr.
Cheyne, "to accustom ourselves to the intelligent use of this title,
and to look out in every psalm for an element of praise." It is good
to allow this thought to dominate our mind while the Psalms are being
read or sung in the Church's service. For this and for that our
fathers in the Faith thanked God; for what He had revealed, or promised
or done. And He is the same, He changes not. Ever and anon as the
service proceeds, a verse will suggest some ground of thanksgiving for
ourselves or for the Church we love. We need to keep our minds, like
our bodies, in the attitude of praise and aspiration, like that exiled
lover of his nation who wrote Ps. cvi.:
Remember me, O Lord, according to the favour that Thou
bearest unto Thy people:
O visit me with Thy salvation;
That I may see the felicity of Thy chosen:
And rejoice in the gladness of Thy people,
And give thanks with Thine inheritance.
(cvi. 4, 5.)
{32}
Not only the attitude of praise should be cultivated, but also that of
sympathy. This will be especially fruitful as we take upon our lips
these constantly recurring expressions of penitence, struggle, and
sorrow. These are certain to be at times unreal to us, unless we can
remember that we recite them not merely for ourselves, but as part of
the Church's intercession for the world, in which it is our privilege
to take part. Others are suffering under the burden of sin and grief,
others are overwhelmed with sorrow, racked with pain, harried by the
slanderer and the persecutor. It is such as these that we remember
before God, as fellow-members of the one body. And will not such a
remembrance, such sympathy, bring us very near to our blessed Lord's
own use of the Psalter in His days on earth, Who "Himself took our
infirmities and bore our sicknesses"?
Yet beyond all these difficulties of language, history, and modes of
thought, whether they yield to study or not, there are outstanding
_moral_ difficulties of the Psalter. Some of the Psalms appear to be
inconsistent with the spirit of the Gospel, or even with the moral
sense of mankind, educated as it has been for so long in the
Gospel-school. This objection seems at first {33} sight a more serious
difficulty than any of the others; but before it can be satisfactorily
dealt with, another and more fundamental question must be faced. What
is the attitude, as a whole, of the objector to the revealed word of
God? There are those to whom the Psalms seem to speak altogether in an
alien tongue, who find the recitation of them in the Church's service
"tedious" (a reason alleged recently as one of those which keep people
from attending church), to whom the 119th Psalm appears to be
"mechanical and monotonous," whose very expression in church proclaims
them "bored." Such feelings may be only the result of ignorance, or
lack of effort, or inherited misconceptions. Or the reason may lie
deeper. The worship of the Catholic Church can only be understood by
those who are of the mind of the Church, who have learned to place
themselves in the believer's attitude towards God and His revelation.
However much the word "conversion" may have been abused, and turned
into a mere catchword or shibboleth, it is unquestionable that the
Christian religion demands a fundamental change of mind and attitude, a
change which does not come by education only, nor by any natural
process. There is a hidden wisdom in the Church which to the natural
man is {34} "foolishness" (1 Cor. ii. 14); it can only be learned by
those who humbly set themselves to be taught by the Spirit. This
change, come it suddenly or very slowly, must have its effect upon the
whole man, his intellect, as well as his heart and will. "There is
nothing hid from the heat thereof." Especially will it rule our
attitude towards Holy Scripture. Without such a change neither
historical nor grammatical explanations can make the Scripture sweet or
even intelligible. Not least will our comprehension of the Psalter be
influenced by it. How impossible is it really to say, "Lord, what love
have I unto Thy law," if one has never realised that there is a law of
God, supreme and absolute, to be read in the Scriptures and in the
witness of the Church; and that only in obedience to this law can man
find his true self and "walk at liberty." It is vain to seek to be
critics before we are disciples. And the Psalter is clearly meant for
the initiated, not for him who merely follows the crowd. The Divine
Office, which the Psalter fills and dominates, is the means whereby the
instructed faithful express their unchanging delight in, and loyalty
to, what they have received freely from God. It is not the Church's
message to the unconverted world, nor the voice of man's natural
desires and sympathies, {35} undisciplined by grace. The Catholic
temper, the mind of the Church, is an absolute first principle in the
right use of the Church's book of praise, and the key to its chief
difficulties.
Bearing this in mind, let us endeavour to face, in conclusion, this
moral difficulty of some parts of the Psalter--a difficulty which
undoubtedly causes pain and uncertainty to some who are really devout,
and which has led many to ask for a revised or expurgated Psalter for
the public services. First, there is what appears to be the
self-righteousness of the Psalter. Side by side with the most perfect
expressions of humility and penitence, there are found protestations of
innocence and purity which, if they were merely personal, we should
rightly hesitate to make our own. But the "I" of the Psalter is not
merely personal; it is the collective voice of the Church, and of the
Church in her ideal aspect, such as we confess her in the Creed--"one,
holy, Catholic." It is the voice of the great company of the holy
souls from the beginning of the world, on earth and beyond the veil.
It is with these that we recite our psalms, with these that we humbly
associate ourselves, it is their righteousness that we seek to make our
own, for it is the righteousness of Christ.
And if the "I" of the Psalter is the {36} self-expression of the
Communion of Saints, still more is it the voice of the King of Saints,
the immaculate Lamb, in whose Name we offer our worship.
But there is still the problem of the Psalms of Imprecation. What can
we say of their apparent fierceness and vindictiveness, their
reflection of the stormy passions and bitter warfare of a primitive
age? There is much indeed that can be rightly urged, here, as in the
other Old Testament writings, from the point of view of the difference
between Hebrew modes of expression and our own, and from the
progressive character of revelation, much that may help to remove
prejudice and clear away apparent inconsistencies. But the larger view
of the Psalter as the book primarily of the Church is of still greater
importance. The imprecations of the Psalms, though expressed in so
vividly personal a manner, are no more personal than the protestations
of innocency. They express rather that age-long passion for
righteousness, that burning belief in a moral Judge of the world Who
must do right, which have always been the Church's saving salt among
the corruptions and indifference of the world. It is this spirit that
inspires them, rather than the thirst for {37} vengeance or the
vindication of self. They express the Church's belief that there is a
world-conflict ever proceeding between the cause of God, the cause of
truth and right, and the passions of men urged on by the powers of evil.
For lo, Thine enemies make a murmuring:
And they that hate Thee have lift up their head.
They have imagined craftily against Thy people:
And taken counsel against Thy secret ones.
(lxxxiii. 2, 3.)
Lay hand upon the shield and buckler:
And stand up to help me.
Bring forth the spear and stop the way
against them that persecute me:
Say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.
(xxxv. 2, 3.)
This sense of an irreconcilable conflict between the malignity of evil
and the will of God, between the carnal mind and that reflection of
God's will which He has implanted in the human conscience, is much to
seek in our own day. We are too much inclined to minimise the reality
of sin, and to imagine that it is {38} disappearing before civilisation
and the growth of gentler ways and sentiments. The Psalmists knew
better--they knew that the battle was to the death, and that God alone
can win His own victory; and they express, sternly and roughly perhaps,
but with the utmost sincerity, their undying faith that He will; that
the overthrow of malice and falsehood and treachery must one day be
manifested,
God shall suddenly shoot at them with a swift arrow,
and that the part we each have played in the battle will be the true
measure of our worth.
All they that are true of heart shall be glad.
(lxiv.)
In this sense we may even repeat the dreadful conclusion of the
Babylonian exiles' Psalm:
Blessed shall he be that taketh thy children:
And throweth them against the stones.
(cxxxvii.)
For what are Babylon and her children but the powers of falsehood,
oppression, and cruelty? and blessed still and ever is he who is afire
with indignation against such things, who scorns {39} any easy
compromise with them, who burns to deal a blow at them for Jerusalem's
sake!
And there is still another justification for the continued use of these
Psalms, which will be understood by those who have begun to be
disciples in the Church's school. The Psalms are not merely the
response to revelation, they are part of that revelation themselves.
The Church uses them not as mere human utterances, but as the inspired
words which God Himself has given her, and which the Lord Jesus
consecrated by His own personal use of them. God cannot contradict
Himself. The Gospel may expand the Law, or do away with its letter in
order to bring out the underlying spirit, but it cannot abrogate it.
If there were a real discrepancy between the imprecatory Psalms and the
New Testament, it would be scarcely conceivable that the first word of
Scripture quoted in the first history of the Church would be that
sentence already alluded to:
Let his habitation be made desolate:
And let no man dwell therein.
The severities of the Psalms are matched by the severities of the
Gospels. There is no real difference between our Lord's sentence on
the scribes and Pharisees, "Behold, your house is {40} left unto you
desolate," and the sentence which the Holy Spirit puts into our mouth
against the hypocrite and the traitor, "Let his children be fatherless:
and his wife a widow" (cix. 8). God is still "a God of judgment" and a
"consuming fire," and there is a "wrath of the Lamb" revealed, even
though He is "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world."
God has, as it were, put upon our lips, in these Psalms, His own great
condemnation of sin, and made us our own judges. We recite,
remembering that it is His word, and not our own, the denunciation of
the sensual and the covetous, the traitor and the liar, the persecutor,
the slanderer, and the hypocrite. From this point of view the
recitation of such Psalms as the 69th or the 109th should be an
exercise of personal humility, of godly fear for ourselves and others,
and might well bring to our mind often that other great challenge of
the Spirit:
Why dost thou preach My laws, and takest My covenant in thy mouth?
Whereas thou hatest to be reformed:
And hast cast My words behind thee.
(Ps. l. 16, 17.)
{41}
These are considerations which surely ought to be well weighed before
we seek to make the Psalter a book of "smooth things" only, or
eliminate any part of its witness. There are no short or easy methods
applicable to its deeper difficulties. Like all the ultimate problems
of faith, they fade away only before the uncreated Light of the Spirit
of God, when He visits the heart.
I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear:
But now mine eye seeth _Thee_.
(Job xlii. 5.)
[1] "Inasmuch as I know not man's learning, I will enter into the
mighty works of the Lord."
{43}
LECTURE II
CHRIST IN THE PSALTER
Paravi lucernam Christo meo.
Jewish and Christian tradition alike connect the Psalter with the great
name of David. Whether David himself wrote any of the Psalms or not is
a question that may continue to agitate the minds of scholars. But
there can be no question that the permanency of the throne of David and
the Divine promises on which it rested are leading thoughts in the
Psalter. The starting-point must be sought earlier in the Old
Testament, in the great oracle communicated by Nathan to David (2 Sam.
vii., referred to directly in Ps. lxxxix. 20, etc.), "Thy throne shall
be established for ever." In this was recognised from the first
something more than a mere promise of the long continuance of the crown
in the family of the son of Jesse. It carried with it some special
sanction and {44} blessing over and above the ordinary Divine authority
of heaven-anointed kings. The words "I will be his Father, and he
shall be My son" seemed to imply a peculiar and unique relationship
between God Himself, the true King of Israel, and His earthly
representative. The comment ascribed to David himself is significant:
"Is this the manner of _man_, O Lord God?" No mere human sovereignty,
however glorious or firmly settled, would satisfy such a prophecy as
this.
The thoughts of the pious in Israel must have dwelt often and deeply in
after-time upon this promise and its connection with the Divine calling
of the sacred nation and her mission in the world. It is remarkable
how persistently this thought of the permanence and supernatural
character of the Davidic sovereignty recurs in the prophetic
writings--even when the crown had passed to an unworthy head, or seemed
to have been plucked off for ever. Jeremiah, when the clouds are
gathering thickly round the doomed city, foretells that the covenant of
David will be as lasting as that of "the day and the night in their
season," and that the seed of David will be unnumbered "as the host of
heaven and the sand of the sea" (Jer. xxxiii.). Ezekiel from his
far-off exile {45} by the waters of Babylon, while he proclaims the
Divine sentence against the degenerate son of David--"Remove the mitre,
and take off the crown: this shall be no more: ... I will overturn,
overturn, overturn it, ... until He come Whose right it is"--predicts
the time when Judah and Ephraim shall be one, and "David My servant
shall be their prince for ever" (Ezek. xxi. 26, 27, xxxvii. 15-28).
Haggai, in the days of the Return, continues the promise to the
uncrowned prince, Zerubbabel--"I have chosen thee, saith the Lord of
hosts" (Hag. ii. 23).
It is not to be wondered at that in the Psalter, the inspired response
of worshipping Israel to the revelation of God, we should find Psalms
that rejoice in this indestructible and royal hope, Psalms that look
beyond present failures and imminent perils to a perfect fulfilment of
what God had spoken "sometime in visions to His saints." Thus the 2nd
Psalm tells triumphantly of the Divine "law" or "decree" concerning
David's son, and sees in it the assurance of a world-wide empire, the
discomfiture of the raging of the nations and the gathering of the
kings of the earth:
Thou art My son, this day have I begotten thee.
{46}
Desire of Me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance:
And the utmost parts of the earth for thy possession.
The 18th describes the Almighty riding on His chariot of whirlwind and
storm, coming down from heaven itself in His condescension, to pluck
His anointed out of "many waters," "to deliver him from the strivings
of the people, and to make him the head of the heathen." The 45th
tells, with "the pen of a ready writer," of this everlasting sceptre
and throne, founded on truth and righteousness, of a king to whom
Divine titles are given, "anointed with the oil of gladness above his
fellows," and sees in the marriage of this king with a foreign princess
the earnest of a kingdom over all the earth. The 72nd describes not
only the prosperity, but the moral greatness of this empire stretching
from sea to sea, "from the river to the ends of the earth." Not like
the giant empires of the East, founded on aggression and cruelty, with
no motive but the monstrous pride of their founders and rulers, the
Davidic king is to be the champion of the poor, the needy, and the
helpless:
He shall deliver their souls from falsehood and wrong:
{47}
And dear shall their blood be in his sight.
The 89th, while it tells how God has found David His servant and
anointed him with holy oil, and made him "His first-born, higher than
the kings of the earth," is bold to face in those later days the
agonising problem of the apparent failure of all this lofty promise:
But Thou hast abhorred and forsaken Thine anointed:
And art displeased at him.
Thou hast broken the covenant of Thy servant,
And cast his crown to the ground.
"Lord, how long? ... Lord, where are Thy old loving-kindnesses? ...
Remember, Lord!"
The 132nd, also apparently a Psalm of a later age, though ascribed to
David, dwells with joy on David's love of the sanctuary of God, pleads
for the fulfilment of the promise, asks that the lamp may not be put
out, nor the face of God's anointed "turned away" in confusion.
Rightly are such Psalms as these called "Messianic." We feel that even
those who {48} originally wrote them looked for more than "transitory
promises." They were learning to look for the redemption of Israel and
of the world itself through Israel and her kings. They were bold to
believe, even when the crown was gone and the purple faded, and Israel
was no longer a sovereign state, that the ancient word of God to David
could never be exhausted. So when at last the great message of the
Archangel came to the virgin of the house of David, it was felt by
those who had read aright the history of their nation that here was no
mere fanciful resuscitation of a dead past, but the vindication of
God's undying purpose: "He shall be great, and shall be called the Son
of the Most High: and the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of
His father David: and He shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever;
and of His kingdom there shall be no end" (Luke i. 32, 33).
It was therefore strictly legitimate, and in line with all the history
of revelation, that the Christian Church should adopt these Messianic
Psalms as her own thanksgiving for the mysteries of the Incarnation.
Thus on Christmas Day she welcomes the Nativity in some of the Psalms
already alluded to--in that which tells of the reconciliation of
mankind with one {49} another and with God under the figure of the
marriage between the anointed King and the king's daughter "all
glorious within" (xlv.); in that which pleads the great promises to him
who so loved God's presence that he would not "suffer his eyes to sleep
nor his eyelids to slumber" until he had found a permanent
resting-place for that presence among men (cxxxii.); or in that, again,
which in the strength of faith can gaze even on the casting down of the
throne and the breaking of the covenant, resting still on God's
faithfulness among "the rebukes of many people" (lxxxix.).
But there are other Psalms which, if they cannot strictly be called
Messianic, yet bear their witness to another aspect of the same great
hope of Israel. In the voice of prayer, or joyful confidence, they
look forward to some _coming_ of God to earth, some visible
manifestation of His righteousness and His world-wide purpose:
For He cometh, for He cometh to judge the earth:
And with righteousness to judge the world,
and the people with His truth
(xcvi. 13),
{50}
or--
Bow Thy heavens, O Lord, and come down:
Touch the mountains, and they shall smoke.
(cxliv. 5.)
In the 85th, one of the Psalms appointed for Christmas Day, this advent
of God is spoken of in words which are re-echoed in the prologue to S.
John's Gospel (i. 14) as a dwelling or "tabernacling" of God's glory,
not in the darkness of a Holy of Holies (as the later Jews imagined the
Shekinah), but as a new and permanent fact in the moral order of the
world:
For His salvation is nigh them that fear Him:
That glory may dwell in our land.
Mercy and truth are met together:
Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.
Truth shall flourish out of the earth:
And righteousness hath looked down from heaven.
In such prophetic visions as these, as well as in the Psalms that speak
of the glories of the Messianic King, the Christian conscience has {51}
rightly recognised definite predictions of the coming of Christ, of Him
Who was both "the effulgence of God's glory" (Heb. i. 3) and also, by
His human birth, the Son of David and King of Israel, and Who
manifested the holiness of God in human flesh and blood. He Himself,
when He came, selected from the Psalms one striking phrase, in which
both ideas, the Divine glory and the human calling, are combined. For
He quotes, as a witness to Himself and as a corrective of imperfect
views, the 110th Psalm (again a proper Psalm for Christmas Day), where
the Messianic King is spoken of both as Ruler and Victor and Priest of
humanity, and as standing also in a unique relationship to God, which
exalts Him far above any mere earthly connection with David:
The Lord said unto my Lord:
Sit thou on My right hand--
If David then calleth him Lord, how is he his son?
(Matt. xxii. 45.)
But besides all these prophecies, which look onward to the great
outcome of Israel's history, there is another and wider sense, as the
Christian Fathers apprehended, in which the whole Psalter is the book
of the {52} Incarnation and speaks of Christ. "David," says S. Jerome,
"on his harp and ten-stringed lute, sings throughout of Christ, and
brings Him up from the dead." However fanciful and over-subtle the
early Christian commentators may seem to us in their working out of
this idea, they had grasped a profound truth. When we once recognise
that Christ, knowing Who He was and why He came into the world (_cf._
John xiii. 1), must in the Jewish services or in private prayers have
recited the Psalms with a perfect intention, and found in them the true
expression of Himself, with regard both to the eternal Father and to
His brethren, we are compelled to admit the possibility of each verse
of the Psalms having some bearing on the Incarnation. It is a
conclusion which might at first sight seem extravagant; but it forces
itself upon us as we realise the true humanity of the Saviour. He is
"the Son of Man"; He took of the substance of His Virgin-mother the
fulness of human nature; He has a human body, a human soul, a human
spirit; He is "the second Adam," the great Head of our race, Who, in
the striking phrase of S. Irenaeus, has "summed up" (_recapitulavit_)
all humanity and all the long history of man. "For verily, not of
angels doth He take hold, but He taketh hold of the {53} seed of
Abraham" (Heb. ii. 16). He has gathered into Himself all truly human
experience, the hopes of humanity, and its sufferings; its infinite
pathos, its capacity of sorrow and of joy, its progress towards God,
and its final apprehension and vision of God.
This is the key to the most constant feature of the Psalter, the
portrait of the Righteous Sufferer. Whether we regard it as the
personification of the holy nation or the self-expression of human
conscience in its moral witness and its conflicts, it is an ideal that
is only fulfilled in the Just One, Jesus Christ. He appeared in the
world as the pattern Man, in Whom the Divine image is perfected and
Whose moral nature corresponds with that holiness which is God's
essential character. He appeared, too, as the perfect realisation of
the filial spirit, that spirit of sonship which is the true attitude of
the creature towards the Creator. Therefore it is in Christ Himself
that the witness of the Psalms to righteousness, their expression of
man's effort towards his ideal, is taken up, illuminated, made perfect.
Therefore it is that a New Testament writer is found applying directly
and without question to Christ not only the descriptions of the
self-revealing God of the Old Testament, "Thou, Lord, in the beginning
hast {54} laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the
works of Thy hands" (Heb. i. 10, from Ps. cii.), and the portrait of
the Messianic King, "The sceptre of uprightness is the sceptre of Thy
kingdom" (_ib._, from Ps. xlv.), but also the description of _man_ in
his ideal excellence and supremacy:
Thou madest him a little lower than the angels;
Thou crownedst him with glory and honour,
And didst set him over the works of Thy hands
(Heb. ii., from Ps. viii.),
and that word in which some unknown psalmist and prophet had
consecrated the free obedience of his will to God, as a higher offering
than the sacrifices of the Law:
Wherefore when He cometh into the world, He saith,
Sacrifice and offering Thou wouldest not,
But a body didst Thou prepare for Me;
In whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin
Thou hadst no pleasure:
Then said I, Lo, I am come
{55}
(In the roll of the book it is written of Me)
To do Thy will, O God."
(Heb. x., from Ps. xl.)
This line of interpretation may be followed out with great spiritual
profit in the varied aspects of the Psalms. The thanksgivings of the
Psalter are in the same spirit as those recorded by the Evangelists
from our Lord's own lips, as when He thanked the Father for the
revelation made to babes rather than to the wise and understanding
(Matt. xi. 25), or at the grave of Lazarus gave thanks that His prayer
was heard (John xi. 41). The prayers of the Psalter might well be
those in which the Incarnate Son communed with the Father. For He
fought our human battle with the human weapons of faith and prayer.
The great description given by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews
of Christ as "the Author and Finisher of our faith" (Heb. xii. 2),
implies One Who inaugurated our effort of faith by Himself first taking
part in it, and Himself perfectly accomplished it by bearing to the
very final and utmost strain our human temptations. Hence we may hear
the voice of Christ Himself in those pathetic outcries of the Psalter;
in its appeal of faith as the Righteous One wrestles with doubt and
{56} depression or faces the contradiction of sinners; in its stedfast
hold on God even when sin is triumphing, and a world created good seems
given over into the hand of the wicked. All these utterances have a
new meaning, a fuller efficacy, when we recognise in them the words of
the "Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief." There is nothing
either fantastic or presumptuous in this reading of the Gospel in the
Psalter. Did not He Himself vouchsafe to shew us something of this
human struggle of faith in the words spoken on the eve of His Passion,
when He confessed that His soul was troubled, and He would fain have
said, "Father, save Me from this hour" (John xii. 27)? Did He not lift
the veil even further in admitting us to the dark sanctuary of
Gethsemane, in suffering us to hear even His utterances from the Cross?
The fourth Word from the Cross, so often misunderstood, is the opening
of the 22nd Psalm. This cry at the climax of the Passion is really the
voice of faith, faith triumphing over desolation of spirit, faith
holding on by the unseen, amidst the falling away and the vanishing for
the time of every consolation. It is not _merely_ "Why didst Thou
forsake Me?" but it is "My God, My God," the fundamental confession of
a personal faith in a personal God, seeing Him {57} Who is invisible,
waiting for Him Who hides His face, believing, even though His truth
and justice seem blotted out of the world, that God is, and that He is
still "enthroned upon the praises of Israel" (v. 3). And this faith
finds its last utterance of peace and thanksgiving and renewed
consciousness of union with the Father in the seventh Word, again from
the Psalter, "Into Thy hands I commend My spirit" (Ps. xxxi. 6).
One of the most fruitful lines of Christian meditation will be found in
this Christological aspect of the Psalms. It throws a wonderful light
on the inner life of our Lord, and gives the Psalter a value which no
merely literary study could give.
The five Psalms appointed by our Church for Good Friday are a rich
storehouse of the secrets of the Passion. The 22nd and the 69th bear
upon it very directly, and present many points of similarity. In each
the sufferings of the Righteous are described minutely and
pathetically, in each these sufferings lead on to triumph and to the
assurance of their world-wide efficacy:
All the ends of the earth shall remember themselves,
and be turned unto the Lord:
{58}
And all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before Him.
(xxii. 27.)
For God will save Sion, and build the cities of Judah:
That men may dwell there and have it in possession.
The posterity also of His servants shall inherit it:
And they that love His Name shall dwell therein.
(lxix. 36, 37.)
Each, again, in its picture of undeserved suffering, brings out the
true nature and the malignity of _sin_. In the 22nd sin is portrayed
in its cruelty and its irrational character, as if men led by it were
but wild beasts, "wild oxen," "bulls of Bashan," "dogs," and "lions."
In the 69th we see its ingratitude, and its pitiless and causeless
malice, and the fact that, whatever its immediate object, it is really
directed against God Himself:
For Thy sake I have suffered reproach.
* * * * *
The reproaches of them that reproached Thee are fallen upon me.
Both these Psalms, again, contain what we {59} must confess to be
definite predictions of details of the Passion. The 22nd tells of the
very words and gestures which the chief priests and Pharisees in their
blindness made use of to insult the Crucified:
All they that see me laugh me to scorn:
They shoot out their lips, and shake their heads, saying,
He trusted in God, that He would deliver him:
Let Him deliver him now, if He will have him.
(_Cf._ Matt, xxvii. 39-43.)
Another startling prediction is that of the piercing of the hands and
the feet. No such punishment was used by the Jews, or endured, as far
as we know, by any of the martyrs of the Old Testament. All the four
Evangelists, again, note the literal fulfilment of xxii. 18:
They part my garments among them:
And cast lots upon my vesture.
Indeed, this 22nd Psalm along with Isaiah liii. stands forth beyond all
the other writings of the Old Testament as a witness which is proof
against all attempts to explain it away, to the {60} truth that "the
Spirit of Christ" was in the prophets "testifying beforehand of the
sufferings of Christ "(1 Peter i. 11).
The 69th (like the 40th) may have been originally suggested by the
persecution of the prophet Jeremiah, when he was thrown into the miry
cistern (Jer. xxxviii.); but it contains an anticipation of Calvary,
whose fulfilment is described by all the Evangelists, in the wine
mingled with myrrh, and the vinegar and gall offered in mockery before
the Crucifixion:
They gave me gall to eat:
And when I was thirsty they gave me vinegar to drink.
S. John, the nearest to the Cross and to the heart of the Crucified,
tells us moreover that this verse was consciously appropriated by
Christ Himself, when, "knowing that all things are now finished, that
the Scripture might be accomplished, He saith, I thirst" (John xix. 28).
Each of the other proper Psalms for Good Friday bears its witness to
the suffering Christ. The 88th, at first sight one of the most
difficult in the Psalter, a Psalm whose darkness seems scarcely
illuminated by any ray of hope, is clearly chosen to illustrate
Christ's desolation on the Cross, the Three Hours of darkness, His {61}
Burial and His descent into Hades. The Sufferer is absolutely alone,
lover and friend are in darkness; He is fighting the battle with that
last enemy of mankind, the King of Terrors, yet overcoming the
sharpness of death by faith and patient endurance; He is looking on to
the dawn of Easter:
Unto Thee have I cried, O Lord:
And early shall my prayer come unto Thee;
or--
In the morning shall my prayer come before Thee (R.V.).
May not even those strange words "from My youth up Thy terrors have I
suffered with a troubled mind" have been on the lips and in the thought
of the "Man of Sorrows" as the Cross cast its shadow over Him, perhaps
from His earliest years? "For not even our Lord Jesus Christ Himself,"
says _The Imitation_ in one of those chapters which sweeten the tears
of the world, "was ever one hour without the anguish of His Passion as
long as He lived" (_Imit._ ii. 12).
Both the 40th and the 54th suggest that inner secret of the Atonement
which the writer of the {62} Epistle to the Hebrews has fixed upon as
giving Christ's Passion its universal efficacy:
An offering of a free heart will I give Thee.
(liv. 6.)
I come--that I should fulfil Thy will, O my God.
(xl. 9, 10.)
"By which will we have been sanctified, through the offering of the
body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Heb. x. 10). For the Passion is
the supreme oblation of the freewill of man, the re-direction into the
right attitude of that high faculty by which man had sinned and fallen
originally, the consecration of it to its true end, voluntary obedience
to God. "Not My will, but Thine be done"; that Christ as man should
bring the human will perfectly into conformity with the will of God is
what "in the volume of the book"--_i.e._ in the writings of all the
line of prophets--was written of Him; for this "the body was prepared"
for Him in the pure flesh of the Virgin-mother; for this His "ears were
opened," that as child and youth and man He might perfectly hear and
obey the word of the Father.
But the 15th verse of the 40th Psalm suggests {63} an obvious
difficulty in the application of the Psalms as a whole to Christ
personally:
My sins have taken such hold upon me that I am not
able to look up:
Yea, they are more in number than the hairs of my head,
and my heart hath failed me.
How can we ascribe these words, or any of the confessions of sin in the
Psalter, to the sinless Lamb of God? Are not these at least all our
own? And yet He Himself must on earth have repeated them. In their
original meaning they referred either to personal or national guilt.
In either sense the recitation of them, at first sight, would seem to
be alien and external to His pure conscience. But do they not take a
deeper and more solemn tone when we consider them in the light of the
prophet's great description of the Atoning Sufferer, "The Lord hath
laid on Him the iniquity of us all" (Is. liii. 6), or of S. Paul's
statement, "Him Who knew no sin, He made to be sin on our behalf" (2
Cor. v. 21)? Such words as these contain more than the mere bearing of
the punishment of sin; they imply some inward connection between the
Sufferer and the sin. Indeed, rightly understood, they help to {64}
remove the difficulty that many have felt as to the apparent injustice
or unreality of a vicarious Atonement. Christ was not merely a Victim
suffering for human sin; He was man's Creator taking that sin upon
Himself. Thus these expressions of penitence in the Psalter may be
regarded as the voice of the sympathetic love of the Sin-bearer, the
love which stands by the sinner's side, and feels with him so
intimately that it makes its own what is not its own but utterly alien
and hateful, makes it its own that it may burn it up in the flame of
love. So in these Psalms we may hear the Son of Man confessing and
making reparation for all the age-long sin of man; speaking of it as if
it were His own sin, so closely has He made Himself one with us in our
extremest need.
Cardinal Newman, in one of the most eloquent of his sermons, "The
Mental Sufferings of our Lord in His Passion," has developed this
thought in language whose daring is only justified by its devotion. It
is a description of Christ kneeling alone in Gethsemane:
His very memory is laden with every sin which has been committed since
the Fall, in all regions of the earth, with the pride of the old
giants, and the lusts of the five cities, and the obduracy of Egypt,
and the ambition of Babel, and the {65} unthankfulness and scorn of
Israel. Of the living and the dead and of the as yet unborn, of the
lost and of the saved, of Thy people and of strangers, of sinners and
of saints, all sins are there.... It is the long history of a world,
and God alone can bear the load of it.... They are upon Him, they are
all but His own. He cries to His Father as if He were the criminal,
not the victim. His agony takes the form of guilt and compunction. He
is doing penance, He is making confession, He is exercising contrition
with a reality and a virtue infinitely greater than that of all saints
and penitents together; for He is the one Victim for us all, the sole
satisfaction, the real penitent, all but the real sinner.[1]
Connected closely with these confessions of sin, these outcries of
suffering and expiation, with the _Miserere_ and the _De Profundis_,
are those solemn declarations of God's wrath upon the impenitent sinner
which have already been alluded to in a previous lecture. Viewed as
the utterances of the Son of Man such Psalms are more rightly to be
called _judicial_ than denunciatory. It is He to Whom all judgment has
been committed by the Father, He Whose coming into the world was
inevitably "for judgment," Who seems here to be delivering {66}
sentence. He is taking up and confirming the fragmentary utterances of
older days, in which the human conscience, imperfectly perhaps, and not
without some mixture of personal feeling, yet on the whole rightly, had
cried out against falsehood and wrong, and appealed to the wrath of
God. The words of such a Psalm even as the 109th might have been used
by Him Who twice scourged the buyers and sellers out of the Temple, and
Who denounced in words that burn like fire through the centuries the
cruelty and hypocrisy of scribes and Pharisees; Who Himself in mercy
warned us of the outer darkness and the unquenched flame.
But the Psalms not only illustrate the Passion of Christ in its mercy
and judgment; they also supply words befitting His Resurrection and
Triumph. It may be true that there is no clear or continuous line of
prophecy in the Old Testament concerning the life after death. But it
is at least equally true that the belief is there, grasped in moments
of intuition by the saints of Israel, disappearing for a time like a
buried river, but coming ever and anon again to the surface. So in the
Psalms there are certainly evidences of the undying hope of the
faithful that truth and justice must one day {67} visibly triumph, and
that man, in proportion as he is true to these things and therefore
true to God, Whose nature they are, and true to himself, as made in
God's image--man must also be immortal. He will not go down into
silence; an endless future opens before him, as yet unfathomed and
unknown, but certain. So in the Psalms which the Christian instinct,
illuminated by the Spirit of Pentecost, seized upon in its first words
of witness (Acts ii. 25-8) as prophetic of Christ, we have the
assurance:
I have set God always before me:
For He is on my right hand, therefore I shall not fall.
Wherefore my heart was glad, and my glory rejoiced:
My flesh also shall rest in hope.
For why? Thou shalt not leave my soul in hell:[2]
Neither shalt Thou suffer Thy Holy[3] One to see corruption.
(Ps. xvi. 9-11.)
{68}
And again:
As for me, I will behold Thy presence in righteousness:
And when I awake up after Thy likeness, I shall be satisfied with it.
(Ps. xvii. 16.)
So again, in that profoundly spiritual Psalm, the 73rd, the writer
turns from the puzzles of the moral order and the misgivings of his own
heart, and seeks refuge in the abiding fact of his personal fellowship
with God. He finds _there_ the assurance not only that the wicked will
pass away "like a dream when one awaketh," but that the righteous is
undying:
My flesh and my heart faileth:
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.
Such Psalms as these find their full meaning only in the light of
Easter. The Resurrection of Christ was no mere portent or isolated
miracle; it was strictly in line with all that man had risen up to in
his highest spiritual intuitions in the past. It is true, in a much
fuller sense than that of accomplishing a mere prediction, that Christ
"rose again, according to the Scriptures."
This essential immortality of the righteous, through his union with
God, is implied throughout {69} the Easter Psalms, especially in the
118th (part of "the Egyptian Hallel"), words which must have been
recited by the Lord and His Apostles at the Passover Supper, in the
very imminence of the Passion.
The voice of joy and health is in the dwellings of the righteous: ...
I shall not die, but live:
And declare the works of the Lord.
Ascension Day completes the triumph of man raised to immortality
through his union with God in Christ. It inaugurates the
accomplishment of man's ideal, in the eternal mediatorial reign of
Christ as the Head of the human race. The appointed Psalms are again
most suggestive. The 8th sings triumphantly of the supremacy of man
over all the works of God, man crowned "with glory and worship." The
15th and the 24th describe the moral perfections which are the
condition of this exaltation:
Lord, who shall dwell in Thy tabernacle:
Or who shall rest upon Thy holy hill?
Even he that leadeth an uncorrupt life:
And doeth the thing which is right, and speaketh the truth
from his heart.
* * * * *
{70}
Whoso doeth these things:
Shall never fall.
(xv.)
The 21st and the 108th look back to the promises to David and to the
typical character of his wars and victories. They shew that these
events were part and parcel of the Divine warfare; they were a
foretaste of the triumph of God Himself. They suggest that the
Ascension of Christ, while it gathers into itself all the moral
victories of the past, is the beginning of a new order. It brings in a
Catholic empire of truth and righteousness, which, in spite of puzzles
and warfare and contradictions, parallel to those which vexed the heart
of the prophets of old, is now absolutely certain in its hope:
Who will lead me into the strong city:
And who will bring me into Edom?
Hast not Thou forsaken us, O God:
And wilt not Thou, O God, go forth with our hosts?
O help us against the enemy:
For vain is the help of man.
Through God we shall do great acts:
And it is He that shall tread down our enemies.
(cviii.)
{71}
Thus, to him who, by God's mercy, has learned the Catholic Faith, the
Psalms are full of Christ from end to end. He reads Christ in them,
not by a pious imagination, but as the legitimate and only perfect key
to their meaning and their use by the Church. In the Psalms he
worships Christ as God:
Thy seat, O God, endureth for ever.
(xlv. 7.)
In the Psalms he worships with Christ as the Son of Man, with Him Who
alone could say rightly:
My soul hath kept Thy testimonies:
And loved them exceedingly.
(cxix. 167.)
The human sorrows and struggles which cry out in the Psalter have been
taken into the sacred heart of Him Who is the Word of the Father, and
the King and Priest and Prophet of humanity, in Whom is fulfilled the
saying:
He sent His Word, and healed them:
And they were saved from their destruction.
(cvii. 20.)
This Catholic secret of the Psalter, writ large as it is over the
history of the Church's worship, {72} is yet something that eludes mere
human research, and is a stumbling-block to human learning and
scholarship. It can only be taught by that "hidden wisdom" of which S.
Paul has told us (1 Cor. ii.), the wisdom given often to the weak of
this world, the wisdom of the Spirit Who dwells in the Church, and
makes her "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim. iii. 15).
[1] _Discourses to Mixed Congregations_, xvi.
[2] _i.e._ Sheol, Hades, the grave or place of departed souls.
[3] _i.e._ godly or pious, a characteristic word of the Psalmists,
implying not only consecration but active devotion to God.
{73}
LECTURE III
THE CHURCH IN THE PSALTER
Gloriosa dicta sunt de te:
Civitas Dei.
It has already been pointed out that the personal element in the
Psalms, vivid and even passionate as it appears, if they are read as
mere lyrics, has been transformed by the Church's use of them as her
hymns of worship. The "I" of the Psalter has become the voice of the
worshipping community.
The Jews themselves recited the personal Psalms in a national sense.
Even such an intensely personal confession of sin as the 51st Psalm
becomes through the last two verses (possibly added by a later pen) the
confession of national penitence and the voice of national hope:
O be favourable and gracious unto Sion:
Build Thou the walls of Jerusalem.
{74}
But besides such liturgical adaptations, whether of letter or spirit,
many of the later Psalms, especially those which clearly belong to the
period of the second Temple, were written intentionally for the nation
as a whole. "We" predominates, instead of the earlier "I." In these
Psalms the nation reviews her past history, or cries out against her
present oppressors, or looks onward to liberty and enlargement in the
future.
But the nation which thus finds her voice in the Psalms is of a
different spirit from the kingdoms of this world. Her patriotism is of
a higher order. She is conscious of a Divine vocation, separating her
from the nations of the heathen:
Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt:
Thou hast cast out the heathen, and planted it.
(lxxx. 8.)
What time as they went from one nation to another:
From one kingdom to another people;
He suffered no man to do them wrong:
But reproved even kings for their sakes;
Touch not Mine Anointed:
And do My prophets no harm.
(cv. 13-15-)
{75}
She has a treasure committed to her keeping, which others have not:
He sheweth His word unto Jacob:
His statutes and ordinances unto Israel.
He hath not dealt so with any nation:
Neither have the heathen knowledge of His laws.
(cxlvii. 19-20.)
She has a hope that burns within her, which to the world would be
foolishness:
The Lord hath chosen Sion to be a habitation for Himself:
He hath longed for her.
This shall be my rest for ever:
Here will I dwell, for I have a delight therein.
(cxxxii. 14, 15.)
In other words, the community which speaks in the Psalter is more than
a nation; she is a theocracy, a Church. Her characteristic names are
prophetic; they suggest supernatural dealings and a heavenly calling.
She is "Israel," heiress of him who "persevered with God" and won the
blessing; she is the "seed of Abraham," in which it was promised that
"all the nations of {76} the earth should be blessed"; she is "Sion,"
the "stronghold," "Jerusalem," name of ideals, "vision" or "possession"
or "foundation"--"of peace"! It is as this sacred congregation, this
_ecclesia_, that the nation rejoices in the Psalms in her calling and
illumination, sorrows over her failures, prays in her warfare, waits
for her glory.
It is not surprising that the Catholic Church recognised here her own
portrait, or that the outlines sketched in the Psalter have been filled
with light and colour and detail during the Christian centuries. The
Catholic Church instinctively felt herself to be the true successor of
the Israel of the Psalms. The ancient titles were retained, but in a
fuller meaning. To S. Paul the Church is the "Israel of God" (Gal. vi.
16) in contrast to the "Israel after the flesh." The author of the
Epistle to the Hebrews tells his Christian readers that they are "come
unto Mount Sion" (xii. 22). S. Peter applies to the Church the old
titles given to Israel in the Law, "an elect race, a royal priesthood,
a holy nation" (1 Peter ii. 9). S. John in the Apocalypse sees the new
Jerusalem, having not only the names of "the twelve apostles of the
Lamb" on her jewelled foundations, but the names of the "twelve tribes
of the children of Israel" on {77} her gates of pearl (Rev. xxi. 12,
14). Old things had passed away, the sacred people of God remained,
but no longer confined to the narrow boundaries of Palestine, nor to
the dispersed descendants of Abraham: her children were "princes in all
lands," all who were "of faith" were counted her seed. The Church knew
herself to be the Israel of the future, custodian of a greater
treasure, called to a grander work.
The Psalter indeed demands this higher interpretation. Just as the
portrait of the Righteous One would have been an unfulfilled ideal had
not Christ made it His own, so the glowing descriptions of Israel would
have been but pious dreamings had not the Catholic Church risen up out
of the fallen tabernacle of David. As the songs of the Temple falter
and die away, the new spirit of praise clothes itself in the ancient
forms. "From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs,
Glory to the Righteous" (Is. xxiv. 16). The very words of the Psalter
become transfigured like the garments of the Lord on the holy mount.
Nor is this passing away of the glory of old Israel into the greater
glories of the Catholic Israel of God without some foreshadowing in the
Psalter itself. In the 22nd, the great {78} Psalm of the Passion, the
Sufferer passes from the dogs and lions and the mocking faces that
surround him to contemplate the far-off fruit of his anguish. He seems
to see "a great congregation," in the midst of which he himself
hereafter will praise God Who has heard his prayer. Mysteriously it
seems to rise, this "seed," this "people that shall be born," out of
the very hopelessness and desolation of the Cross. "All the ends of
the earth" are united in it, "all the kindred of the nations" worship
there. The rich and the poor alike have their place in this kingdom of
the future. And the special characteristic of this new creation of God
will be the sharing in a sacrificial feast, the Sufferer's
thanksgiving, his Eucharist in which he "pays his vows." Here "the
meek shall eat and be satisfied," here eating and worshipping are
strangely intermingled--a prophecy unread and unfulfilled until the
Church learnt the secret "in the same night that He was betrayed."
"Therefore we, before Him bending,
This great Sacrament revere;
Types and shadows have their ending,
For the newer Rite is here."
This ecclesiastical aspect of the Psalter is {79} of very high
importance. There is perhaps no part of the Christian faith which is
more difficult for "the natural man" than "the Holy Catholic Church."
An erroneous or imperfect idea of the Church seems to pass muster,
among Christians even, so much more readily than error in other matters
of faith. All through Christian history the true idea of the Church
has been obscured, now by imperialism, with its misleading traditions
of the Roman Empire; now by nationalism, as if the Church were only the
religious aspect of a civil community; or again by individualism, as if
she were no more than a collection of separate units. Erastianism and
Puritanism in turn have led men astray. The warning against such
things is written largely enough in the history of ancient Israel. The
Jews of our Lord's time, while insisting keenly, even bitterly, on
their separation from the Gentiles, were for the most part forgetful of
what that separation really involved. Their ambition to be separate
from the nations of the earth only meant for them a worldly and selfish
exclusiveness. In earlier days the clamour for a king, the thirst for
alliances with Egypt and Assyria and Babylon, had displayed in the
opposite manner much the same spirit. Religious privileges, that
Divine calling which {80} had made them a nation, were to be used as a
means to worldly advancement and security. In the Psalter there stands
out a truer conception of the Church as the spiritual commonwealth, a
kingdom of God in the world, but not of this world's spirit, organised
for higher ends than self-protection or self-development, aiming not at
conquest but at the conversion and good of mankind, glorying not in
privilege but in vocation, not in self but in the law of God. And this
is the pattern for all time. The Christian Church may find in the
Psalter her own just self-expression in a fuller manner than ever
ancient Israel did or could. Indeed, we may trace indelibly stamped on
the Psalter the true lineaments of the ideal Church.
First in the Psalter there is the note of _comprehensiveness_. The
heathen, the nations, so often denounced or prayed against in the
Psalms, are, after all, not so much those who are outside the
boundaries of Israel as those who are alien from her spirit. They are
communities, societies, untouched by grace, governed by passion and
worldly ambitions rather than by conscience or the Divine law. And
side by side with threats and foreboding of their utter destruction in
the day of God there are glimpses here and there of the possibility of
{81} their conversion, and even of their becoming one family with
Israel. The great Psalm of Whitsunday, the 68th, passes from the
thought of God wounding the head of His enemies, of His warriors
dipping their feet in the blood of the vanquished, to the hope of the
princes coming out of Egypt, and Ethiopia making haste to stretch out
her hands unto God. So, again, the 47th Psalm looks forward to the
essential sovereignty of God over all the earth being recognised even
by this world's rulers:
The princes of the people are joined unto the people
of the God of Abraham.[1]
And lest it should be thought that such hopes referred only to an
empire of external rule, like that of Solomon's, we have the startling
predictions of Ps. lxxxvii. Here the people of Rahab (Egypt) and
Babylon, the Philistines, the Tyrians, the Ethiopians, all types of the
obstinate and idolatrous heathen world, are pictured as forsaking their
natural lineage and descent to be born again in Zion, enrolling
themselves there as citizens of the Lord's {82} glorious foundation
upon the holy mountains, finding there their joy and the fount of their
inspiration.
The Lord shall count, when He writeth up the peoples:
This one was born _there_.
They that sing as well as they that dance shall say,
All my fountains are in Thee. (R.V.)
Surely this is one of the most remarkable foreshadowings in the Old
Testament of the catholicity of the Church, and of that new birth of
Baptism by which men of every race and tongue are grafted into the one
body, "where there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and
uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman: but Christ is
all, and in all" (Col. iii. 11). In this and in many other Psalms
(_cf._ lxvii., xcviii., c.) we confess the essentially _missionary_
vocation of the Church; that she calls to all mankind, not to the
Western nations only, nor to the progressive and civilised only. Hers
is the one faith for all men, her citizenship unlimited by any barriers
of race or temperament.
If the catholicity of the Church is so clearly sketched in the Psalter,
no less clear is {83} her _social_ ideal. The poor, the oppressed,
those who have no helper, are equally called to share in Israel's hope
and her gifts. God Himself is her pattern, Who--
Taketh up the simple out of the dust:
And lifteth the poor out of the mire;
That He may set him with the princes:
Even with the princes of His people.
(cxiii.)
The Messianic King will count the blood of the poor and needy equally
precious with that of the rich and great (lxxii.). The Sufferer of the
Passion Psalm (xxii.) looks forward, as we have seen, to the result of
his triumph, in not only calling the "fat ones of the earth" to eat and
worship at his table, but in finding there an equal place for--
Even him that cannot keep his soul alive.
(xxii. 30, R.V.)
These are lessons which we have as yet gone but a little way in
learning. Yet the Psalter, as we recite it day by day, puts in our own
mouth the condemnation of exclusiveness and pride and of deafness to
the complaint of the poor; it makes us confess at least the Catholic
{84} ideal of unity, of universal justice, of the imperishable value of
the individual life, of the transformation of human society in the
light of the Divine sovereignty of Christ.
The two lines of the Church's activity just alluded to, missionary and
social, so prominent in the Psalms, are calling to-day so loudly for
self-humiliation and new effort, that they may profitably be dwelt on a
little further. The Psalmist's prophecy of the kings of Arabia and
Saba bringing gifts (lxxii.) is still largely unfulfilled. The East is
still almost untouched. Asia has not yet brought her characteristic
gift to Christ. She is still under the dominion of imperfect
religions--Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam. And yet India is our possession;
Japan is our pupil. "The way of the kings of the East" is already
"prepared" (Rev. xvi. 12), but where is the adequate response from
English Christianity? "Who is blind but My servant, or deaf as My
messenger that I send?"
And turning homewards, what are we to say of these grotesque and
monstrous contrasts between wealth and poverty, luxury and squalor in
England to-day, where rich and poor alike are baptized? What of the
immoralities of commerce, of the bad work of the labourer as well as
the swindling of the capitalist? Does {85} not the spirit of the
Psalter cut across it all like the keen breath of the mountain wind?
Yet Englishmen are spending time and energy in ritual debates and
persecutions, and educational and social strife. Worse still, the rich
and intellectual, for some prejudice or political motive, are eager to
deny the poor the beauties of worship or the definiteness of the
Catholic Faith.
Surely Thou hast seen it:
For Thou beholdest ungodliness and wrong.
(x. 15.)
In view of these unfulfilled ideals of the Church, the Psalter provides
us in such Psalms as the 78th, the 79th, or the 106th with confession
of sin and failure under the figure of Hebrew history. The recitation
of these may well remind us not merely of personal faults but of our
own share in the shortcomings of the Church of God:
We have sinned with our fathers:
We have done amiss and dealt wickedly.
For the Church as well as ourselves we are taught to pray, "Turn us
again, O Lord God of hosts." The sorrows and desolations of Zion are
never represented in the Psalms as being _merely_ the effect of heathen
malice, {86} though they are so largely that, but as calls to look back
upon history, and also to look within, to consider what unfaithfulness
there may have been and is, what "starting aside like a broken bow" in
our fathers and in ourselves.
From this point of view the penitential Psalms"[2] might profitably be
used not merely as the expression of personal penitence, but as an act
of reparation, an offering to God of our sorrow for the worldliness and
imperfections of His Church; as an incentive also to effort, that we
may do our part to remove the "reproach of the heathen," to restore the
Church from within, to seek her unity and peace.
There is, however, another side to the problem of the Church's
failures. Israel and Jerusalem are constantly described in the Psalms
as being the marks for the malignity and opposition of external
enemies. Indeed, a persistent note of the Church, Jewish as well as
Christian, is the hatred which she awakens in the powers of this world.
The object of suspicion and attack from Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon in
early days, Jerusalem fares no better after the humiliation of the
Captivity. The attempts to {87} rebuild the Temple and restore the
city arouse the bitterest hostility from the surrounding peoples, a
hostility not merely political, but traceable to a deeper cause. The
attempts of Antiochus Epiphanes in the second century B.C. to break
down Jewish separation and to destroy Jewish worship are marked by the
same spirit, working in a more arrogant and brutal manner. Our Lord
Himself promises no smoother or more popular course for His faithful
ones. "Ye shall be hated of all men." S. Paul recognises the same
antagonism running throughout the history of the elect: "As then he
that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the
Spirit, even so it is now" (Gal. iv. 29).
The Psalter will not allow us to shut our eyes to this malignant and
persecuting attitude of the world. The enemies of the Righteous find a
place in almost every Psalm. The malice of human nature at its worst
seems to be marshalled against Him, in slander and ingratitude and
treachery. But there is also the opposition of the heathen as a whole
against Israel. The vicissitudes of her history are typical; they
illustrate a permanent principle which is found working from age to
age. It was not less active nor less brutal in the first three
Christian centuries {88} than it was in the days of Antiochus. To-day,
though its attack is less outwardly cruel, the spirit which prompts it
is just as deeply seated, and more malignant perhaps in proportion as
it is veiled. The Church has not merely to contend with the hatred of
those who have chosen and loved evil, and find the righteous a standing
reproach. There is gathered against her also the world's steady
resentment of spiritual authority; the world's antipathy against all
that refuses to come to terms, or water down its witness to suit
changing fashions of men's thought. It is the same spirit which in
earlier days called the Christians "the enemies of the human race," and
in these later times directs its sneers and opposition against the
Creeds, the Sacraments, the priesthood--"the spirit of Antichrist."
The 44th Psalm, perhaps belonging to the time of the great Maccabaean
struggle, makes its pathetic appeal to God amidst the scorn and
blasphemy of the heathen, and, what is worse, the bitterness of
apparent failure and defeat which seem to justify the heathen.
My confusion is daily before me:
The shame of my face hath covered me:
{89}
For the voice of the slanderer and blasphemer:
For the enemy and avenger.
Faith indeed does not fail the Psalmist: he clings to God; he still
recognises the hand of God throughout these sufferings; he prefers to
attribute them to God rather than to man:
_Thou_ makest us to turn our backs upon our enemies: ...
_Thou_ lettest us be eaten up like sheep: ...
_Thou_ sellest Thy people for nought:
And takest no money for them.
Nevertheless, it is all a puzzle, a bewildering maze in which faith
seems walking blindfold, like the Lord Himself when the malice of the
high-priest's servants bandaged His eyes and smote Him in derision and
bade Him prophesy! The light of God's presence seems to have gone out
of the world:
Wherefore hidest Thou Thy face:
And forgettest our misery and trouble.
Very similar is the 74th Psalm, with its same high consciousness of
faithfulness to God, the same agonising sense of contradiction in the
enemies of God being suffered to break down {90} the carved work of the
sanctuary, the same feeling of helplessness and lack of guidance. The
adversaries' banners are manifest enough, _their_ tokens are clear; but
with the faithful it is otherwise:
We see not our tokens, there is not one prophet more.
O God, how long! ... Remember! ... Arise! ... Forget not!
Probably of the same period is the 79th, written apparently in the very
hour of the heathen triumph, when the Temple is defiled, Jerusalem "an
heap of stones," the blood of the righteous flowing on every side like
water. And there is still the characteristic turning away from self
and personal humiliation to the thought of the dishonour done to God
Himself. For to the faithful the honour of God is dearer than their
own liberty or life.
Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of Thy Name:
O deliver us, and be merciful unto our sins, for Thy Name's sake.
The 83rd belongs perhaps to an earlier age. It seems to recall the
great confederacy of the nations against Jehoshaphat (2 Chron. xx.).
The Psalmist cries out to God against the {91} gathering hordes who
have no interest in common, except their mutual hatred of Israel and
Israel's God. It is a sorry catalogue: Edomites, Ishmaelites,
Moabites, Hagarens; Gebal, Ammon, and Amalek; Philistines, Tyrians,
Assyrians:
"All the warring hosts of error
Sworn against her, move as one."
But the hot indignation which prays that this rabble of malice and
mischief may be swept like the stubble before the whirlwind, consumed
like the dry grass before the mountain fires, is yet tempered with a
higher thought. Defeat may lead to conversion and to a better mind:
Make their faces ashamed, O Lord:
That they may seek Thy Name.
Once again, the 102nd Psalm breathes out the pathetic appeal of the
exile, or the lonely, friendless watcher over the desolations of the
holy city. His heart is "smitten down and withered like grass"; he has
"eaten ashes as it were bread, and mingled his drink with weeping."
But his fasting and tears are not for himself; there is the eternal
background of hope; God is unchanging; future generations {92} will
know again the happiness of worship and service--his sorrow is for Zion:
Thy servants think upon her stones:
And it pitieth them to see her in the dust.
Do not experiences and prayers like these come home to Christians with
a curious sense of familiarity? Is not this tragedy of faith repeated
in every age? In every Christian generation it has been "given" to the
Beast to war against the saints and overcome them (Rev. xiii. 7). His
undying malice has too often been seconded by the impotence, the lack
of unity, the fear of truth and its consequences, which have marred the
Christian defence.
We find eloquent illustrations of this unceasing, heart-sickening
warfare in such moments of history as that in the fourth century, when
"the whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian";[3] in the
seventh and eighth, when the armies of Islam swept away the divided and
bickering Churches of the East and that Church of North Africa, once so
glorious, where holiness had not kept pace with zeal; in the fifteenth,
{93} when Constantinople fell, and the great cathedral of S. Sophia
passed into the hands of the Turks, and this very day, where once
Christian worship was offered, and Christian emblems high on its walls
still make their silent protest,
"Moslem prayers profane
At morn and eve come sounding;"
in the sixteenth, when the fair abbeys of England were despoiled and
suffered to fall into ruin, through covetousness and irreligion
masquerading under the garb of piety; in the seventeenth, when the
voice of the Church's worship was stifled, and the faithful were
interrupted in their very Christmas Communion by the levelled muskets
of the Cromwellian troopers[4]; in our own day, when liberality can
tolerate everything except the Catholic Faith? Verily these Hebrew
Psalms are a Christian possession for ever. They speak to us and speak
for us in accents of undying truth, and every year that passes verifies
their witness and points more sharply their appeal.
But not only does the Psalter tell of the Church and her ideals, of her
warfare and her failures, it insists with equal conviction on her
_stability_. God's great promise to the line of {94} David carried
with it the preservation of David's city. The attacks of the heathen
seemed to have reached their climax when Sennacherib's army had taken
all the fortified cities of Judaea, and Jerusalem was left isolated and
helpless (2 Kings xix.). Yet when human hope was gone, the prophet's
word rang out with the certainty of faith. "I will defend this city to
save it, for Mine own sake, and for My servant David's sake." The
sequel was one of the most startling catastrophes in history. The
Assyrian hosts were destroyed in a single night, and Assyrian invasions
ceased. Again, in a later generation, when the promise seemed at last
to have failed, and the Temple had fallen, the city was burnt and her
king and citizens in captivity, the prophets never waver in their
vision of a future restoration when sin has been repented and national
guilt expiated. Zerubbabel and Joshua, Ezra and Nehemiah, Judas
Maccabaeus and his descendants, restore and maintain Temple and city to
last till "the fulness of the time," when the true meaning of the
Davidic promises was revealed.
The sense of this supernatural continuance has left its mark on the
Psalms. The rout of the Assyrian armies is commemorated in one at
least, the 76th:
{95}
The proud are robbed, they have slept their sleep:
And all the men whose hands were mighty have found nothing.
At Thy rebuke, O God of Jacob:
Both the chariot and horse are fallen.
The secret of victory preludes the Psalm. Jerusalem is the seat of
God's special presence:
At Salem is His tabernacle:
And His dwelling in Sion.
The 46th may also refer to the same event. The flood of heathen
invasion is breaking itself in vain against the walls of the city of
God:
God is in the midst of her, therefore shall she not be removed:
God shall help her, and that right early.
The great historical Psalm, the 78th, speaks at its close of the hill
of Sion and the Temple "built there on high" as coeval with the earth
itself; its foundation is "like the ground which He hath made
continually."[5] And the later {96} Psalms seem even to unite Sion and
Jerusalem and the sacred nation with the very eternity of God Himself:
This shall be My rest for ever.
* * * * *
The Lord thy God, O Sion, shall be King for evermore.
* * * * *
Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem:
Praise thy God, O Sion.
For He hath made fast the bars of thy gates:
And hath blessed thy children within thee.
(cxxxii. 15, cxlvi. 10, cxlvii. 12, 13.)
The end of earthly Jerusalem, when it came, was no less significant
than her long continuance. The double destruction of the city by the
Roman armies (A.D. 70 and A.D. 135) was consummated by the strangeness
of the failure of Julian the Apostate to rebuild and re-establish the
Temple; flames burst out from the foundations and the workmen fled in
terror.[6] But long before this the Christian Church had recognised
that in her world-wide citizenship and her worship, confined no longer
{97} (as the Lord had foretold) either to Jerusalem or a mountain in
Samaria, she had inherited in fuller measure these promises of
continuance. Had it not been said, when the great Apostle made his
confession of Christ's Divinity, "Upon this rock I will build My
Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it"? And in
this consciousness the Catholic Church rightly appropriated to herself
the songs of Sion's confidence. Just as early Christian art set above
the altars the figure of the living Christ enthroned as the Eternal
King of the universe, so the Church has always known in her darkest
moments that her continuance is as certain as her Master's throne; and
that as He remains the same, though the heavens and the earth decay,
and are changed as a garment, the promise of the 102nd Psalm is hers
for ever:
The children of Thy servants shall continue:
And their seed snail stand fast in Thy sight.
Once again, the Psalmists feel that as Israel, the Church, is in a
sense partaker in God's own eternity, so she is, even on earth, a
shadow of His essential beauty, she appeals with His attractiveness to
the soul of man. Hence the {98} Christian finds in the Psalter words
in which he may express his joy in his calling in the Church, his love
and delight in his heavenly citizenship; words which may also remind
him that, in spite of all the failures and littlenesses of the visible
Church, it is through her that he is in touch with the ideal and the
invisible.
Thus in no mere partisan or ecclesiastical spirit we are invited in the
Psalms to express our love of the Catholic Church. On Whit Sunday, the
Church's birthday, we take up the ancient strain of affection:
The hill of Sion is a fair place, and the joy of the whole earth.
We gaze with awe upon her jewelled foundations and her jasper walls; we
wander with delight in her spacious golden streets: