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Thus the twilight of the world's morning brightens into noon, and the echoes of many an ancient confession swell on into a living volume of sound, like a cry of prayer and praise from a multitude which no man can number. In the sight of * ''Lord, have mercy upon us, and write all these iky Umm in our hearts, we beseech Thee/' is the prayer with which the Church of England concludes her read- ing of the Mosaic commandments, and which may justify her retention of them as an instrument of admonition (though not as the highest law) in the spiritual service of the Eucharist. Compare Luther On the Galatians, and Whately On St Pavl, and Palmer, who treats the Decalogue as a lesson, in his Oriffines Liturgicae, t Read GalaUans iii. 19, ao, 15. 486 Q08F£L OF CHRIST FREEDOM. God the witnesses are not dead who are gone before us; and He by whom they live, renews perpetually their life in us. Cannot you now understand, how we separate the temporary from the eternal, when we read the experiences of the Church of old, yet stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us Jreef Clearly we are not concerned to justify the personal frail- ties of men recorded in our sacred books. If in their lives we see principles exemplified for good and evil, it does not follow that we have always examples for imitation. Often we may even have warnings, and most commonly, food for thought, or instances of the world's course. Nor again are we bound to adopt all their associations with persons or places ; but if they loved their kindred or country, we may love ours ; and if they thought theirs especially favoured of God, we may trust that a like favour embraces ours, and those of other men. We can take what is general, and waive what is special ; that is, we may find many of the principles involved to be eternally true, yet the applications of them to bear shifting in every age and country. But as the application to persons, rather than the general truth, admits of change, so may it even of error. A man may feel truly that justice ought to be done ; yet he may think wrongly that he shall win his cause : for perhaps his cause is not just Or he may have a true foreboding that oppressors will be over- thrown, and the lot of the oppressed made tolerable by patience or deliverance ; yet he may be often mistaken as to the time and nature of the deliverance, and the persons by whom it may be wrought. Perhaps, after looking in vain for a particular thing, he may sink his own desire in a wider design of the Almighty, and so find his prayer fail, yet have it answered in peace of mind, or a gift higher than he expected. But the inspiration of God applies to the great principles which we apprehend by the conscience and reason, or to the feelings which are conscious of a spiritual law and a divine love encompassing us, rather than to our anger or fear, or to what we desire for ourselves. Thus, if king David curses Ahitophel who betrayed, or Shimei who ESSENCE. ACCIDENT. APPLICABILITY. 487 railed at him, we need not desire his imprecations to be fulfilled, still less apply them to any enemy of our own. For we can see how the kindred of Ahitophel to Uriah the Hittite gave him just cause of grievance, and the kindred of Shimei to Saul made it natural for him to rejoice in David's overthrow ; and so in our own cases, our faults, or the clash of our interests, may have rendered enmity to us natural. But yet whenever treachery or insult to fallen greatness recur in the world, we discern them to be hateful. Nor need we doubt that, in so far as any one par- takes of any sin, he merits a consequence of it, which may be called a malediction. But above all, when our Divine Deliverer, Jesus, goes beyond the sons of men in innocence and in suffering, we cannot indeed say that any ancient imprecations are prophe- cies of those who betrayed or slew Him ; for we read that He uttered no such accents, since He rather said. Father, forgive them; but we can imderstand how the affectionate reverence of the Church would take up every description of suffering inno- cence and triumphant guilt of old, and apply it with accession of meaning to her Lord betrayed and crucified, and to those who wrought His death, or rejoiced at it. Such is the method by which I believe the ancient prophecies become applicable to Christ; and as He transcends all who went before Him, in good- ness, in fall, in triumph, and in the unfading nature of His de- liverance of the mind from evil, so things written strongly of human sufferers and deliverers come out eminently true of Him. 488 THE FIBST PSALM. CHAPTER Xin. PART II. "As you wish it we may illustrate this briefly by the Book of Psalms. It is called more properly the Booh cf Praises ^ or of those songs which through a number of generations were brought forth for the service of the temple. It is therefore the Liturgy, or the Book of Common Prayer, of the Hebrew priest- hood. The first Psalm, as the book is now arranged, may not be nearly the oldest ; but it is a convenient Preface, expressing the general blessings of the righteous, and the falling of the imgodly. There is nothing here the Church cannot adopt ; ex- cept that she turns our minds more to blessings of the soul ; and if she still observes worldly virtues have their reward, she does not hold this as her special promise. If by * the leaf which does not wither, and the ripening of whatever firuit the tree by the waterside bears,' any one chooses to understand the * un- fading garland' of St Paul, and the good deeds which come of Christian faith, such an interpretation will suit the changed point of view from which the Church now looks on body and soul ; but yet if we so apply tlie words, we can hardly say the old Hebrew so meant them. But tliere has been a growth of the inner mind of men, which makes them often speak a new language, and often apply the old in a new meaning. Yet often the more homely and literal view has a perpetual truth of its own. " In the second song we have a clear expression of some time of trouble, when nations and kings made war against Jerusalem. The singer then boldly identifies the cause of his country with that of the Lord whom she honoured. Her anointed king be- comes to him anointed as it were by the Eternal King ; and he bids those who, like Edomites or Hagarens, would shake off the yoke of his sovereign, beware, lest they be shattered like the potter's vessel. He even declares it for a fixed decree, that SECOND AND EIGHTH PSALMS. 489 the king of Sion shall be as a son, or a fixed favourite of heaven. He bids the surrounding nations therefore honour the Son; or, as it is better rendered, to worship purdy^ lest Jehovah be angry, and so they perish before Him. Now, if you remember what I said about the temporal kingdom of the Jews, and the spiritual one which Christ establishes, you will understand why the Jews are clearly right in applying this song literally to some king of old, and in extending its application to whatever deliverer they may hope for at any time. Yet you will also see why we, thinking a kingdom of thought better than one of the sword, and the binding of nations in peace under the throne of God far better than any Jewish triumph in Palestine, can only take up this song by transferring it from the realm of the body to that of the mind, and making its temporal accents vocal with a better meaning, which Christ, and not David, has taught us. " In the eighth song, which the maidens of Israel chanted as they trod out the grapes, we have the goodness of God celebrated as putting all lower creatures under the feet of man. We dare not say, for it is not true, that the phrase * Son of man,' which the Hebrews used for any mortal, is here spoken predictively of Jesus. But yet, if we consider, how the likeness of God in man was blurred by sin, and how he lost his rightfcd superiority to the beasts that perish by letting his sight of G^d and dbnse- quently his hope of everlasting life become faint, we can under- stand how Jesus, coming forth as the true likeness of God, and restoring in us that likeness by delivering us from evil, may be especially the Son of man. We do not therefore blame the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, whether he were Paul, or Apollos, or some one else, for taking up these words, and apply- ing them to Christ, as one under whose feet all things should most properly be put.