things together, true and false, bad and good alike, are very angry with all such scruples, and delight in repeating the curses with all possible earnestness, applying them to those whom they call God's enemies now, and who at any rate are opposed to themselves. And at this moment persons of such a spirit hurt no one but their own souls: their wishes of evil, however vehemently uttered, are powerless against others, and only involve themselves in sin. But there have been times, and may well be again, when men not only wished and prayed for evil against their enemies, but took the sword also to execute what they prayed for; so that the Scripture was actually wrested by them to their own destruction; and the Psalms of Christ's Church, in which she has in every age delighted to find the fittest expression for her own feelings of penitence and of supplication, of joy and gratitude, of holiness and love, have been profaned into language such as Antichrist might delight in, have been made a cloak for hatred and bitterness, an excuse for injustice, oppression, and murder.

Now any person who has followed me thus far, will easily perceive that this wickedness is the strict consequence of false notions with respect to inspiration; which false notions being allowed to be true, the fanatical consequence is drawn from them correctly. Wherefore others again, seeing that the consequence is detestable, and observing also from

what source it has sprung, proceed to attack it in its very root, and deny either openly, or by implication, the inspiration of the Psalms altogether. They are the writings of good men, it is allowed, but of men good according to the standard of their own time, which standard falls far short of Christian perfection. And therefore, it is said, although we find much in the Psalms in which we can sympathize, there is also much in which we cannot; and in particular, the wishes of evil in the 69th and 109th Psalms, and in others like them, were excusable enough in the men of old time, whose rule it was to love their neighbour, and hate their enemy, but could not be repeated by us now without great sin.

Now this opinion takes a view of the Old Testament, which, it must be confessed, is not the view of it entertained by our Lord and His Apostles. For, not to press St. Paul's famous declaration to Timothy about the Scriptures of the Old Testament, because some, though as I think erroneously, have given to the passage a different interpretation, yet whenever the Old Testament is referred to by our Lord or his Apostles, it is clearly spoken of as invested with the highest authority, as being even, as we commonly call it," the word of God." Nay, it has so happened, or rather, I should say, it has been so ordered, that some of the very most startling passages of the very 69th and 109th Psalms themselves, are referred to by our Lord's Apostles as

more than human compositions. The words, "Let their habitation be void, and no man to dwell in their tents," are quoted by St. Peter from the 69th Psalm; and those, "Let another take his office," are quoted by him from the 109th Psalm, and both are called by him, "the Scripture which the Holy Ghost spake by the mouth of David."

The authority of our Lord and His Apostles justifies then the practice of the Church in regarding the Psalms as inspired, and in adopting them as such to be the language of her own devotions. But the notion of inspiration is in itself often conceived very erroneously. For inspiration does not raise a man above his own time, nor make him, even in respect to that which he utters when inspired, perfect in goodness and wisdom: but it so overrules his language that it shall contain a meaning more than his own mind was conscious of, and thus gives to it a character of divinity, and a power of perpetual application; while the man who uttered it partakes of this full meaning in infinitely different degrees, but in no case, it may be said, does he partake of it perfectly; for to One alone was the Spirit given without measure. The rest of us, even though inspired prophets, have it not granted them to look through all time, nor to understand the full accomplishment of their own words, according to the depth and height of God's wisdom.

Christ's Church takes the Psalms then as her own

language, or as the language of her Lord; not as that of David, nor of any other of the ancient Psalmists, except in part; that is, there are passages in which their meaning is not her meaning; for she has been enabled to see more of the true mind of the Spirit than the very prophet who uttered it. For those very Psalms, the 69th and 109th, to which we have referred so often,-St. Peter shows us in what sense the Church takes them, when he names Judas Iscariot as the subject of their denunciations of evil. If Judas could be amongst the enemies spoken of by the Psalmist, then it follows that He whose enemies are denounced is Christ our Lord; and in that sense His church uses it. But who are His enemies, and as being His, ours? Who are they against whom we may and ought to feel an enmity so strong? Who are they for whose utter destruction we may breathe the most earnest prayers with no breach of charity? Surely His enemies and ours, till the judgment day shall come, are sin and the author of sin, and they only. Evil men no doubt there are in abundance; men whose designs we must oppose, whose example we must shun, whose society we may and ought to avoid, but so long as they are those for whom Christ has died, they are not yet declared finally to be His enemies, nor therefore may they be ours. But sin is our enemy now, and so is he who is the author of sin, called by eminence the Great Enemy.

Hate these

with an intense hatred, it will not damp but increase your charity. Hate all evil, most of all the evil in your own souls; pray to God in the warmest language to extirpate and destroy it utterly; such prayers are pure and holy; they become the Church of Christ to utter; no evil passion can creep into our bosoms along with the hatred of our own sin.

But if there are Psalms in which the meaning of the Church rises far beyond the meaning of the human Psalmist, yet how much more delightful is it to dwell on those where his meaning and ours are all but the same; where he ministered not to us only but to himself; where the communion of God's people before and after the coming of Christ has nothing to interfere with it; they and we are one with each other in Christ their Lord and ours. And of such a sort is that Psalm from which the text is taken, and in which the Church has expressed this day her abiding confidence in God's protection and love both for life and death. For although in one point the Psalmist was checked as it were on the very edge of the full Christian revelation; which seems to have been a part of God's dispensation, that the first open revealing of life eternal should be made by Him who purchased it for us by His own blood; yet surely in the words, "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death," &c., there is a hope of which we may say, that it entereth