The Christian Use of the Psalter. Whitham Arthur Richard
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."
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 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 Nicæa 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. 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 "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 ripæ ulterioris amore.7
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.
Thus the Psalter is ours, for it is the new song of gratitude to Him Who has given us the 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.
PART II. DIFFICULTIES
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 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
Virgil,
Virgil,
Praying, they stood with hands of love outspread,
If but that farther shore each might be first to tread.