of joy; at His right hand there are pleasures for evermore. Keen as every Hebrew is to live long (for as yet he hardly suspects the possibility of a blissful life beyond the grave), he can, nevertheless, affirm that the divine love is better than life. As a father pities his children, so God pities those that fear Him. 'Whom have I in heaven but Thee?' one singer exclaims in ecstasy; 'and there is nought upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My heart and my flesh may fail; yet God is for ever my rock and my portion.' Truly does Kittel say: 'Here are thoughts of a religious purity and power, before which one stands in silent admiration. It is the greatest achievement which, on this field, has ever entered into a human heart; not surpassed, only attained, and referred to Christ, by Paul in utterances such as Romans viii, 28, seq.' And we may agree with Dr Kirkpatrick when he says, in his admirable commentary, that if, as seems on the whole more probable, we are not to interpret the words, Thou wilt afterwards receive me to glory,' as referring to a happy life after death, the Psalmist's faith 'is even grander.' 'He rises victorious over the world of sense and appearance in the inward certainty of the reality of his communion with God, and the absolute conviction that this is the highest good and the truest happiness of which man is capable. Such a knowledge is eternal life; and the possibility of it is in itself a pledge that the communion thus begun cannot suddenly be interrupted by death, but must be carried on to an even fuller perfection.'* It is true that this profound religious individualism of the Psalter is brought about by the special relation of Israel to his divine Lord. But to say this is not to deny the reality and depth of this individualism; it merely explains its historic genesis. Each Israelite becomes for himself a little Israel. God is not only the God of the nation, but to each member of it He is the adored Ruler Personality of God, as has the Psalter.' (The Rev. W. T. Davison, in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, vol. iv, p. 157.) Yet Psalm lxxiii, like xvi, is, as Prof. Kent rightly says, 'an important forerunner of the belief in individual immortality that is for the first time definitely asserted in Daniel xii.' (The Songs, Hymns and Prayers of the Old Testament,' by C. F. Kent, 1914.) and Friend, the trusted and beloved Source of comfort, of happiness, and of strength. That the God of the prophets became all this to the psalmists is an evidence of their comparatively late date. And yet the psalms which bear the strongest evidence of this spiritual influence must be placed-whether we regard their language, their place in the collection, or other characteristics-rather among the earlier than the later pieces. Consequently the Psalter, as a whole, must be taken to belong to a still more recent epoch. 6 The same conclusion is arrived at, or confirmed, by the attitude of the Psalms towards the prophetic teaching of the relation of the outward to the inward in true religion and in the service of God. The prophetic doctrine on this matter is laid down with complete definiteness by Amos, the earliest of the band, with his vigorous, 'I hate, I despise your feast days; I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. . . but let justice run down as waters and righteousness as a perpetual stream,' right down to Joel with his curt, Rend your hearts and not your garments.' Hosea enunciates the teaching very plainly: I delight in loving-kindness and not in sacrifice.' To Amos, Hosea and Isaiah, to Jeremiah too, who spoke and wrote before sacrifices and offerings had become universally recognised as both Mosaic and Divine, there was no difficulty in doctrine of this kind. Outward religion, which they depreciated and despised, consisted of all the ritual and ceremonial of the 'high places' and of the temple; inward and true religion consisted of justice, compassion, loving-kindness. It is highly remarkable that in psalms which were probably not written till during the exile or after the return from Babylon, and were certainly only edited and collected under the domination of the Law, some reflexions of this genuine prophetic teaching should occur, and have been allowed to remain. The truth is that the teachers of the Law had absorbed enough of the prophetic teaching both to appreciate it, and to admit, even themselves, its measure of truth. They too taught that, at any rate, the sacrifices of the wicked are an abomination unto the Lord. The writers of the 40th, 50th and 51st psalms go yet further. In their depreciation of the outward-of sacrifices and burnt offerings-they rise to the highest prophetic level. 'Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it; Thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.' But the more interesting point is to follow. The Law came and made a compromise. Though God enjoined justice and mercy and love, He also enjoined sacrifices. And the Temple was no longer the seat of half-heathenous, half-idolatrous practices; it was the recognised official centre of a strictly monotheistic faith. Its servants and ministrants were many of them devout and pure-minded worshippers of God. Moreover, to many a layman the public worship of the Temple, and individual worship in the Temple, far from preventing the growth of spiritual religion, helped it. Instead of deflecting people from finding God, it aided them to find Him. Of this change and growth we find evidence in many psalms, which thereby, in all probability, show themselves to belong to the post-exilic period. There was, doubtless, a certain danger in this method of finding the Supreme; but, for the time being, it led to noble results. Though men knew well enough that in no coarse, material sense did God dwell' within the Temple, yet it was believed that His divine presence could be felt there, that it even existed there, in some special and peculiar degree. We may admit that this belief had its limitations and its perils, but just so has some people's conception of a church or chapel as the house of God to-day. Nevertheless, the Temple to the ancient Jew, like a church to some modern Christians, did cause a pure communion with the Divine, and was thus far, and to that extent, an agent in the production of spiritual religion. When the Psalmist, who thirsted after the living God, was cut off from God's house, his thirst could not be assuaged. To another, a day in Thy courts was better than a thousand elsewhere.' The poet who declared that the divine loving-kindness was better than life had risen to this rapture when 'seeing' the divine glory in the sanctuary. He who sang that the Lord was his light and his salvation; whom should he fear? that the Lord was the strength of his life; of whom should he be afraid? asked only one thing of Him; that he might dwell in the Lord's house all the days of his life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to meditate in His Temple. Nor were these psalmists above the use of sacrifices; song, praise, prayer, and sacrifice, all might fitly be employed in the adoration of God. While recognising the dangers to which this passion for the Temple might give rise, may we not, nevertheless, detect in these psalms a certain progress beyond the prophets-an advance not merely in time, but in religious development? In the interests of inward and spiritual religion the prophets denounced the outward; in the interests of inward and spiritual religion the psalmists used the outward. Average man cannot get on without the outward; is it not better, then, that he should be taught how to use it? And another curious, mystical feature about the place of the outward in the religion of certain psalmists is that the outward and inward tend to coalesce; or, rather, the outward tends to become a symbol. The visible Temple becomes a metaphor for that greater, diviner house which is not made by human hands, and cannot be seen by human eyes. 'How precious is Thy loving-kindness, O God; the children of men take refuge under the shadow of Thy wings. They satiate themselves with the fatness of Thy house; Thou givest them to drink of the river of Thy pleasures.' The shadow, the wings, the river, are clearly all symbolical or metaphorical. Are not the fatness and the house nearly, or quite, symbolical too? If the table and the oil in the famous 23rd psalm are obviously metaphorical, is the Lord's house in the very next verse to be interpreted with absolute, material literality? The Temple hardly became the vehicle for spiritual religion before the acceptance and the reign of the complete or priestly Law. And, whether we like it or no, the larger portion of the Psalter is, in a certain, not fantastical sense, the product of this Law. Accepted by many critics, the fact is variously interpreted. Some regard it as an indication that it took some time before the Law crushed out all spiritual religion, as it did in the 'Pharisaic' age. Others, like Duhm, regard it as a sort of reason why there must after all be much less spiritual religion in the Psalms than is commonly imagined; and they proceed to interpret the book accordingly. A third view, which has not much chance We mentioned very cursorily the views of the prophets But the great feature, for the psalmists, of the goal C |