human progress leads them to speak of Jesus Christ as one whose intentions were good, yet who has done infinite mischief to the world. The imperfections and inconsistencies of religious men, the disastrous mistakes into which the Church has now and then been betrayed by the folly and shortsightedness of her own children, the divisions of Christendom-all these have no doubt fatally wounded nascent faith, and retarded the advance of the divine kingdom: they have produced either the impatience which betrays or the despair which abandons the cause of God. And And yet when we endeavour to explain to ourselves that overwhelming and heart-piercing fact of the general aversion from religion which is so common in the present as in every age we shall, I think, find that ultimately it is due to a fundamental mistake as to the true meaning of religion. The experience of saints recorded in Scripture shows that religion is, and from the first ever has been, the life of friendship with God; nothing can be clearer than this conception as it is marked for us in each stage in Israel's history 2. A friendship between God and the soul of man-this is religion. So the Old Testament tells us of Enoch, who walked with God; of Noah, to whom God revealed His secret purpose of judgment; of Abraham, who was called the friend of God; of Jacob, the object of divine pity, protection and favour throughout the days, few and evil, of his pilgrimage; of Moses, with whom the Lord spake face to face as a man speaketh with his friend; of Samuel, dedicated to the service of Jehovah from his childhood; of David, the recipient of awful and momentous, yet most tender, promises. The prophets too-they are friends of God; they repre

1 The remark is quoted, apparently with approval, by Darmesteter in a review of Renan's Histoire du peuple d'Israël (see Les Prophètes d'Israël, p. 204). 2 There is great truth in a striking remark of M. Renan: 'Le peuple juif est à la fois le peuple le plus religieux et celui qui a eu la religion la plus simple (L'Ecclésiaste, p. 28).

3 Wisd. vii. 27.

sent in their own persons the ideal calling of every individual Israelite: that life of holy intimacy, of upward-looking faith, of unreserved self-surrender which was really involved in the vocation of God's chosen from the first.

But it is chiefly in the psalmists that we find typical representatives of religion-of the life of love. The element that is local, national, temporary in the Psalter is comparatively insignificant. 'What gives the Psalms, even more than the Prophets, their value as classical devotional writings for all times and peoples, is just the withdrawal and partly the total absence of the national theocratic point of view. Cares about the fates of peoples and the future ideals of universal history lay far from the Psalm-poet of the Persian and Greek age; to him the place of the secular state was taken by the religious community. The Psalms describe the converse of the human soul with Godthe human soul in its solitariness, its frailty, its aspirations, its yearnings for ideal truth, light, peace, love, and joy. They bear witness, as no human literature has ever done, to the elemental fact of life, that

'God alone can satisfy whom God alone created.'

For to the psalmists God is all in all: the refuge in any trouble, the rock which stands unshaken amid the storms of human life, the supreme solace in loneliness, the living object of the soul's thirst, its richest and most precious portion and possession, the object of its tenderest, most passionate and yet most restful self-surrender, trust, and love. This is the blessedness of the true Israelite's religion: his portion is God, the living God, more close, more dear, more faithful than father or mother, bringing refreshment as the true fountain of life, and gladness as the source of all beauty and light. In the Psalms it is

love which breathes, love which awakes and sings like a bird in spring. The whole passion of the human heart pours itself forth in that endless variety of phrase in which it strives to realize what God is to the soul. The psalmists look at all things with the eye of love at the past history of Israel, the vicissitudes of the soul's life, the troubles of the righteous, the ordinances of temple worship, the requirements of the Law, the solitariness of exile, the mysteries of pain and death. And here we touch on what is most fundamental in human life: the soul's capacity for loving God above all things, and resting in Him as a refuge and home. It is surely for this reason that the Church of God places the Psalter in the hands of her children: she would train them to think the thoughts, to utter the language, to experience the affections of love. There can be no more eloquent testimony as to the true meaning and power of religion; there can be no higher expression of its essential spirit than is contained in the Psalms. Religion-the relationship of love-is here described, is here describing itself, as the supreme satisfaction of man's deepest and most personal needs; and the essential inter-dependence of ethics and religion is implied in the soul's discovery that the highest good is God, and that communion with Him is the only blessedness.

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Now the peculiar contribution of the Psalter to the religious life seems to lie in its uniform recognition of the truth of divine providence-of the personal care of God for the soul-that mystery which (as was once said by Dr. Newman in this place) might well 'make us laugh with perplexity and amazement.' O God, thou art my God: here is the keynote of the book. The confession marks a wonderful advance in the story of human faith. A devout Israelite did indeed recognize the hand of God in nature and in history. He watched with reverence and awe the operation of an invincible and righteous will in the universe. He acknowledged its supremacy: Whatsoever Jehovah

A a

pleased, that did he in heaven, and in earth, in the sea, and in all deep places. It was He who bringeth forth the clouds from the ends of the world; He who smote the firstborn of Egypt, both of man and beast1. Jewish faith intuitively perceived that all things were so guided and controlled as to serve the purposes and promote the ends of a moral kingdom. The conception of miracle was unclouded by any speculative difficulty, for to the Jew the idea of the fixity of natural laws was entirely subordinate to the sense of a righteous will bearing all things onward in a divinely predetermined course. The self-revelation of God-this was what gave to history its significance, to human life its dignity, to nature its mysteriousness. But it needed a certain development of subjective religion to prepare the way for the belief which is reflected in the Psalter-the belief in God not merely as the awful ruler of the universe, but as the precious possession of the soul. It is indeed, if we think of it, a new spiritual discovery that underlies the habitual language of the Psalms. That the Creator cares for the single soul, that He answers prayer, that His ear is open to the cry of spiritual desolation or need, that He can dispose and overrule the hearts of men as it pleases Him, that He watches and protects the individual life, shields it from peril and provides for its natural necessities, that His care extends even to the beasts of the forest or of the field, and to the birds of the air-this belief was new. In modern times it is that which seems most to be threatened by the immensities opened to us by science. Yet once realized it is the very foundation-truth of religion. He that cometh to God, says an apostolic writer, must believe that he is; and he surely who prays and longs to love God, must believe that He hears, and cares for

1 Ps. cxxxv. 6 foll.

2 It is noticeable that the later Psalms are full of the thought of God's immediate presence and handiwork in the ordinary processes and incidents of nature.

3 Heb. xi. 6.

the soul. The Psalms testify to the fact that the Jew equally with the Christian, so far as each is true to his faith, lives in the sense of divine providence 1. It is a belief which must in any case follow from any vivid realization by man of God's personality, and of his own. The restoration in our time of the lost sense of a Father's providence, which watches and tends and guides the individual soul, depends upon the measure in which the Christian Church can bring home to men the truth of the divine personality, and by its active ministries can re-awaken the consciousness of a love which works behind the veil, though obscured by the unlovely struggles, the harsh competitions, the agonies, disasters, degradations, and failures incidental to the march of civilization.

It is unnecessary to enlarge on this point; but it is worth while to notice that the general teaching of the Psalms on this subject pervades other books of the Hagiographa. In a sense the Psalter gives a character to the entire division of the Hebrew Scriptures in which it occupies the foremost place. Its importance corresponds to its apparently accidental position, and to the fact that the entire collection of Hagiographa seems to be occasionally quoted by the title of The Psalms 2. All the books may be said to be connected by the common conception of religion as not merely a covenant relationship between God and the chosen people, but as a personal possession and stay of the individual soul. The dramatic Song of Solomon, in its primary acceptation, may be regarded as a divine consecration of human love. Incidentally, in so far as it makes for purity in the relation of the sexes, it serves to emphasize an element in the religion of Jehovah which sharply distinguished it from the natureworship of Canaan. But the usage of the New Testament and the traditional practice of interpreters

1 Consider Ps. xxxiii. 13-15. See generally Weill, Le Judaïsme, ses dogmes et sa mission, troisième partie, chh. 1, 2.

Luke xxiv. 44.