The Psalms And The Prophets

( Originally Published 1913 )

"Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus."—PHIL. ii. 5.

"Teach me to do the thing that pleaseth Thee, for Thou art my God ; let Thy loving Spirit lead me forth into the land of righteousness."—Ps. cxliii. To.

THE foundations of the religious character, which was to be perfected in the " mind of Christ," were laid in faith in God, and in the recognition of the supremacy of the moral law. Through ages and generations the Bible sets before us the slow growth, the unfolding and ripening of this character, till after long preparation and many steps, and still with many shortcomings, it became such that when Jesus Christ came it was able to welcome Him, to recognise, however dimly, His hidden glory, to follow Him, and, from strength to strength and from grace to grace, to rise to something of His likeness. In Abraham we have seen the eyes of the soul opened to believe in God, to understand its own relation to Him. In the dispensation of Moses we have seen the discipline of the law, the acknowledgment of the paramount place of eternal moral truth. We go on from the religious character, as shown in the Patriarchs, and under Moses, to the religious character, in a more advanced and developed form, exhibited in the Psalms and the Prophets. A great step has been made ; for we are in the full burst of religious affections in the Psalms, of religious thought and reason in the Prophets. We see the religious character alive in every organ in the Psalms ; we see it speaking, teaching, soberly judging, earnestly warning in. the Prophets. Compared with what has been shown us so far, it is something new. It is a form in which we now trace not only actions and rules, not only the great rudimentary elements of faith and obedience and reliance on God, but feelings, desires, motives, reasonings. It is no longer a view from the outside. In the Psalms we see the soul in the secret of its workings, in the variety and play of its many-sided and subtly-compounded nature—loving, hoping, fearing, despairing, exulting, repenting, aspiring—the soul, conscious of the greatness and sweetness of its relations to Almighty God, and penetrated by them to the very quick ; longing, thirsting, gasping, after the glimpses that visit it, of His goodness and beauty—awestruck before the unsearchableness of His judgment, silent before the certainty of His righteousness—opening, like a flower to the sun, in the presence of His light, of the immensity of His loving-kindness. And not only the affections, but the faculties and functions of the reason, awaken and expand. In the Prophets, the mind and thought of man receive and reflect the truth and the purposes of God. More and more illuminated by Him, the soul looks with new eyes on the world, its disorders, its greatness, its future. " It considers the days of old and the years that are past;" it has caught the deep interest of human history, and sees in it the mystery of His Providence and government. In His name it passes judgment, it blesses, it condemns. With His promise, and under His leading, it dares, amid the darkness of sin and the present and visible power of evil, to go forward and see visions of a kingdom of righteousness. It recognises the sure signs which warrant its great hopes. It ventures to foretell the conquest of the untamed Gentile world for God. And thus, to the discipline of outward precept and outward polity has been added the inner discipline of the awakened heart and intellect, quick to understand the Father's will, and to interpret its signs. " I will inform thee," is the promise, "and teach thee in the way wherein thou shalt go: I will guide thee with Mine eye."

This is the fact which meets us in the Bible. And surely there is nothing more wonderful in the religious history of our race than the interval between the Book of Judges and the Book of Psalms. In Judges we have the picture of a society lost in rebellion and apostasy, of a coarse and stiff-necked people, whom the law had not curbed even to an outward obedience, whom no deliverances could bring to a better mind. It closes in shame and desolation and blood, which Saul's troubled and disastrous kingdom could not repair. That is the history ; and then we come to the Book of Psalms, not yet, of course, in its earliest portions, all that it was to be, but still, even in its earliest portions, marked with that special character which gained for the whole collection the name of the Psalms of David. In the Book of Psalms the religious affections are full grown : it was the highest expression of them which the world was to see. The profoundest religious thinkers have met there what they feel after. The highest saint cannot soar higher to the eternal throne of justice and love. And where were the foundations of this laid ? Where did they come from ? Songs of triumph, like those of Miriam and Deborah, prophecies like those of Balaam, lyrical retrospects like the "Song of Moses," thanksgivings like Hannah's, or laments like David's over Saul and Jonathan, even the mysterious Book of Job, we can understand at that time. But in the Psalms the soul turns inward on itself, and their great feature is that they are the expression of a large spiritual experience. They come straight from "the heart within the heart," and the secret depths of the spirit. Where, in those rough, cruel days, did they come from, those piercing, lightning-like gleams of strange spiritual truth, those magnificent outlooks over the kingdom of God, those raptures at His presence and His glory, those wonderful disclosures of self-knowledge, those pure outpourings of the love of God ? Surely here is something more than the mere working of the mind of man. Surely they tell of higher guiding, prepared for all time ; surely, as we believe, they hear "the word behind them saying, This is the way, walk ye in it," they repeat the whispers of the Spirit of God, they reflect the very light of the Eternal Wisdom. In that wild time there must have been men sheltered and hidden amid the tumult round them, humble and faithful and true, to whom the Holy Ghost could open by degrees the " wondrous things of His law," whom He taught and whose mouths He opened to teach their brethren by their own experience, and to do each their part in the great preparation. For "So is the kingdom of God : as if a man should cast seed into the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how, for the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself ; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." So has grown among mortal and sinful men, amid long delays and many disappointments, but with sure and wonderful advances, the "mind of Christ."

How do the Psalms exhibit the development of the religious character, from its simpler to its more complete form ? Out of a wide subject, let us take two points.

They bring before us in all its fulness and richness the devotional element of the religious character. They are the first great teachers and patterns of prayer, and they show this side of the religious character, not as hitherto in outline, but in varied and finished detail, in all its compass and living and spontaneous force. They disclose a religious character, as now, for instance, the Litany of our Prayer-book discloses a whole range of religious character. The Patriarchs and Moses, in the ancient days, "communed with God" ; but what thoughts, what desires, passed through the soul of the " Friend of God," abroad under the stars of heaven, of Isaac meditating in the field at eventide, of Moses amid the storms and the revelations of Sinai and the desert, we are not told, we are too far off to guess. And there is but scanty record of actual prayer in the Mosaic ritual of sacrifice and offering. But here we have before us what devotion is and what are the emotions and affections that feed it, and what is its natural language. Doubtless, what seems to us a sudden burst of the spirit of prayer was in reality the gradual growth of the long training of the Holy Ghost ; but so it is ; the Book of Psalms comes on us after the disappointing history of Israel, in a way which recalls the prophet's words—" The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf be unstopped ; then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert." Yes, in that "dreary waste of years," when the seed of Abraham seems sinking into a mere kingdom of this world, the waters of prayer and praise break forth, and "streams in the desert" The tongue is loosed to give utterance out of the abundance of the heart, to every mood, every contrasted feeling of the changeful human mind. From all the hidden depths, from all the strange and secret consciousness of the awakened and enlightened soul, spring up unexpected and vivid words, in which generation after generation has found the counterpart of its own convictions and hopes and joys, its own fears and distresses and perplexities and doubts, its own confidence and its own sorrow, its own brightest and darkest hours.

This immense variety of mood and subject and occasion, with which the reverence and hope of worship are always combined, is a further point in the work of the Book of Psalms. It is a vast step in the revealing of man to man. We know how much we owe of the knowledge of ourselves to the great dramatists, to the great lyrical poets, to the great novelists. Such in the unfolding to man of all that is really and most deeply involved in the religious character, is the place of the Book of Psalms. It shows what, indeed, God is to the soul in all its many needs. The soul cannot be alone without God : the centre of attraction to all His creatures, the " Fountain and Loadstone of all love," 1 high above the highest, yet humbling Himself to behold the things in heaven and earth ; mindful of the least, and feeding the young ravens when they cry unto Him, and opening His hand " to fill all things living with plenteousness ;" in the "excellence of His mercy" shadowing beneath His wings the children of men—" They shall be satisfied with the plenteousness of Thy house ; Thou shalt give them drink of Thy pleasures as out of the river; for with Thee is the well of life, and great lyrical poets, to the great novelists. Such in the unfolding to man of all that is really and most deeply involved in the religious character, is the place of the Book of Psalms. It shows what, indeed, God is to the soul in all its many needs. The soul cannot be alone without God : the centre of attraction to all His creatures, the " Fountain and Loadstone of all love," 1 high above the highest, yet humbling Himself to behold the things in heaven and earth ; mindful of the least, and feeding the young ravens when they cry unto Him, and opening His hand " to fill all things living with plenteousness ;" in the "excellence of His mercy" shadowing beneath His wings the children of men—" They shall be satisfied with the plenteousness of Thy house ; Thou shalt give them drink of Thy pleasures as out of the river; for with Thee is the well of life, and in Thy light shall we see light." That is the God Whom the soul owns as its Hope, and Refuge, and Guide, and Shepherd—" When my father and mother forsake me, the Lord taketh me up;" the "God of my life," the "God of my strength, the help of my countenance, and my God 1" No other can so draw to Him the soul of man; and for Him, the "living God," the soul thirsts and longs:—" Like as the hart desireth the water brooks, so longcth my soul after Thee, O God. O how amiable are Thy tabernacles, Thou Lord of Hosts. O God, Thou art my God, early will I seek Thee. My soul thirsteth for Thee, my flesh also longeth after Thee in a barren and dry land where no water is. Thus have I looked for Thee in holiness, that I might behold Thy power and glory ; for Thy loving-kindness is better than the life itself." What a revelation to man of his deepest yearnings. But even this might have misled him, if there had not been joined with it, in all its certainty, the profound and immovable belief in God's righteousness : " The Lord is righteous in all His ways, and holy in all His works:" "Thou art the God That hath no pleasure in wickedness : neither shall any evil dwell with Thee:" " If I incline unto wickedness in my heart the Lord will not hear me." This is the faith which dominates the whole Psalter ; the soul recognising God's righteousness, as for Him and for itself the great reality of human life, which gives meaning and substance to its shadowy nothingness. It is sobered and solemnised as it looks abroad on the world, sees that righteousness set at nought by the pride and blindness of man, sees the insolence of the cruel and the oppression of the poor and needy, sees all the shadows of human power and human life passing away, yet is able to " tarry the Lord's leisure," can say to itself, " Fret not thyself because of the ungodly," knows that God is listening—" Thou hast heard the desire of the poor, Thou preparest their heart, and Thine ear hearkeneth thereto :" can see, through the mists and delusions of the present, the coming of the God of judgment :—" Thou art of more honour and might than the hills of the robbers. The proud are robbed, they have slept their sleep ; and all the men whose hands were mighty have found nothing. Yea, even as a dream when one awaketh ; so shalt Thou make their image to vanish out of the city." And with this has come in the soul itself the stirring and enlightening of conscience. In the Psalms we see how it has learned to look into itself, how it has learned the need of the inward watch, the inward struggle, the inward self-disclosure—" Examine me, O Lord, and prove me ; try out my reins and my heart:" "Commune with your own heart, and in your chamber, and be still "—how it has seen the awful vision of its own sin, how it has discovered how deeply it needs mercy and forgiveness and healing, and the spirit from God to help it in the right path which, with all its sins, it longs to tread—" Who can tell how oft he offendeth; O cleanse Thou me from secret faults;" " My sins are more in number than the hairs of my head ; " " Have mercy upon me according to Thy great goodness ; make me a clean heart ; take not Thy Holy Spirit from me ;" " The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit ; a broken and contrite heart Thou wilt not despise." Here we first hear these familiar words—words so familiar to countless generations since : and what a profound and original lesson, what a step is here made in the contact of the human mind with the realities of its state. But if the Psalms have taught us the language of penitence, if they even give a merciful sanction to the bursts of fear or desolation which the weakness of human nature cannot always restrain, if they can recognise as dread passages in human experience the " palpable oppressions of despair," what ever equalled, before the days of Pentecost, the freedom, the joy of their worship ? Who could have imagined such varied, such abounding exultation at the glories, the bounty, the loving-kindness, the hopes of God ? When does it ever seem to tire and flag—the rush, the sweep of that flood of gladness, that in spite of all interruptions of distress and fear, pours through the Book of Psalms, filling our earthly days with glory and hope, and making us feel that, short and few as they are, vain and incomplete as they seem, that can be no poor and worthless a life which man passes under the " shadow of the wings of God;" sheltered and guided by Him Whose "righteousness is like the strong mountains, and His judgment like the great deep," " Who rewardeth every man according to his work." " Whom have I in heaven but Thee ? and there is none upon earth that I desire in comparison of Thee. My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever."

In the Psalms we see the growing up in the religious character of these high gifts of the Spirit of God—devotion, worship, self-knowledge. In the vast and diversified domain of Prophecy we see other elements of that character gradually appearing, and under God's guiding and the lessons of enlarging experience shaping themselves distinctly and permanently. In the prophecies the religious reason has been awakened ; the faculties which observe and compare and consider and judge, which find problems to solve and difficulties to explain, the thought which recognises great ideas, and is fired by great principles, begin to occupy themselves with the doings and prospects of men, with the rise and fall of the kingdoms of this world, with the fortunes and hopes of the kingdom of God. The prophets predict ; but even still more, they teach. They draw out and elucidate, and apply the meaning of that moral law which the ancient Church always carried in its bosom. They interpret as they were taught by Him Who inspired them, those wonderful promises of which Israel was so tenacious, and so little imagined the issue. In the prophets we have the first beginnings of what has never failed since, religious teaching ; religion, studied, meditated, reflected on, thought out into principle and inference, explicitly brought to bear on conscience and duty, on the hopes and welfare of society. The great and characteristic ideas of the Psalms reappear in the prophets ; but in the Psalms they come in devotion addressed to God ; the prophets turn them upon men, expand and develop them in instruction, encouragement, warning, rebuke.

Take, for instance, the development of moral ideas in Ezekiel. He is emphatically the prophet of the moral significance of the Law and of personal responsibility. He is full of the subject in its definite shape. The crimes and transgressions of his people are moral crimes. The tremendous disasters of Israel are the direct result of gross rebellion against the moral law. The burden of his teaching is that the history of nations, whether in Tyre, or Egypt, or Jerusalem, is no chance accident ; that their ruin is the natural and inevitable consequence of their disloyalty to righteousness and truth. He takes up and expands ideas which only show themselves, as it were, in passing, in the Psalms. The Psalms give warning against the tricks of conscience—" If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me:" "With the clean thou shalt be clean, and with the froward thou wilt show thyself froward." Its self-deceits are lighted up as with a lightning flash, in that terrible Fiftieth Psalm—"But unto the ungodly said God, Why dost thou preach My laws, and takest My covenant in thy mouth?" "Thou thoughtest wickedly that I am even such a one as thyself." But Ezekiel expands this into an explicit and definite statement, into a doctrine, a generalised rule of the Divine government. The elders of Israel, who came and sat before him, are answered—" Therefore speak unto them, and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God ; every man of the house of Israel that setteth up his idols in his heart, and putteth the stumbling-block of his iniquity before his face, and cometh to the prophet to inquire of him—I the Lord will answer him according to the multitude of his idols." So, again, in the Psalms no one can doubt what is implied in the words, " Thou rewardest every man ac-cording to his work." No one can doubt the assurance shown of God's acceptance of repentance. But in Ezekiel the two great doctrines of individual responsibility and of the possibility and efficacy of repentance are expounded at length, and in definite cases and distinct circumstances. "What mean ye that ye use this proverb concerning the land of Israel, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge ?" "Behold all souls are Mine : as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is Mine—the soul that sinneth it shall die." "As for the wickedness of the wicked he shall not fall thereby in the day that he turneth from his wickedness ; neither shall the righteous be able to live for his righteousness in the day that he sinneth." Definitely and consciously, these great beliefs have taken their permanent place in the character of the religious man. His conscience felt them before. He now knows them by thought and reason.

Again, in Isaiah, we see the work finished of moulding the religious character, moulding man into the true and conscious servant of the All Holy, as far as it could be accomplished under the old dispensation. In Isaiah we are so occupied with the greatness and splendour of the message that we some-times forget, as we do not in Jeremiah and Daniel, what is shown us of the man. I pass by all critical questions about the book ; if there are two parts in it, the spirit and moral portraiture are identical in both. It is full, as no other book of the Old Testament is, of the magnificence of our human hopes, and of the strange and inconceivable ways in which they were to be secured and fulfilled ; and it is unrolled before us, like the march of some profound and overpowering musical composition, full of all changeful and unexpected movements, strains of sadness and awe interwoven with thrilling joy and piercing tenderness, appeals the most pathetic with bursts of wrath and terror, but all resulting in a whole of incomparable grandeur. But we may also see in it the mirror of the mind of him who was charged with this wonderful disclosure of the counsels and purposes of God. We may see the character, mature and many-sided, of the servant of God, trained by the experience and the traditions of many generations of like-minded men, to the perfect freedom of willing service, to the strength and largeness of heart of an intelligent obedience. His soul is one with his awful Master; he has comprehended something of the greatness and the meaning of Him Whose is the world, and before Whom the seraphim veil their faces; the coal from the altar has touched his lips, and his whole being is aflame with zeal, with sympathy, for the greatest of causes, the cause of the Lord of righteousness and truth. All affections which spring from such whole-hearted loyalty, from such boundless trust, are there: confidence in the hopes of Israel, in the hopes of mankind, dauntless facing of all that evil can do to make the cost of victory dear by suffering ; the wrath of the pure-minded, scorn of human pride, tenderness and compassion going forth to take hold of the humble and meek—" Comfort ye, comfort ye, My people, saith your God." In this awful volume, in which thought and imagination were allowed to master "The vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be," in which he has embodied all that most concerns mankind for the present and the future, and in which the tremendous severity of judgment mingles so strangely with a gracious and inexpressible sweetness which even still takes us by surprise,—through all these public and divinely inspired utterances we may trace, with a fulness and richness and depth unequalled in the Old Testament, the personal lineaments of one who not only by faith and self-discipline, but by thought and knowledge, had become fitted to be a saint of the company of that Redeemer, Whose Person, Whose coming, Whose life of suffering and glory he was given to foretell, and in Whose perfection man was to be made perfect.

So has the wisdom and goodness of God prepared the way to build up among His creatures a special character, the character of true and deep religion. It was so of old, it is so still. The Psalms are to many of us our daily companions. Week after week and month after month they are the universal language of worship in the whole Christian Church; and if anything is certain in the world it is that they will still be found the language of worship when He comes again. The Prophets still teach, inspire, rebuke us. Nothing in the whole range of poetry, nothing in Greek or Italian art, equals to English minds and feelings the wondrous beauty of those passages of Isaiah, which take soul and ear with their inexplicable charm of thought and melody, which surprise us in hours of joy and trouble and hope with new and unthought of force of meaning, which haunt our memories with their undying music. And through all this long and varied schooling —varied in degree and in method, which we trace from Abraham to the prophets, there is one thing common to all its stages, one thing always growing in depth and strength and purity—the passion for righteousness, the hatred of iniquity. O Christian souls, on whom the ends of the world are come, who inherit the experience, the treasures, the memories of a thousand generations, shall that great passion fade and grow dim out of our lives ? Shall it burn less brightly and purely in us, possess us more feebly and more doubtfully, now that we have seen the true image of God restored to man and in man, and perfect righteousness fulfilled in Him Who has come to take away the sin of the world, and by the power of His Spirit to make all things new?