A. R. Whitham

“ It is the voice of the converted soul, learning the one lesson which man must learn in this world's school, if he is to attain his true being—learning to be ever turning away from self, from one's own doubts, troubles, persecutions, sufferings, to rest on what God has revealed in His statutes, His judgments, His testimonies, His laws. Nor is it without a subtle propriety that this Psalm is arranged as an acrostic under the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. ”

“ We have learned to see in the Trinity the justification of belief in the Divine Unity; we have learned more of the Fatherhood of God in the face of His only Son; we have learned that the Cross is the key to human suffering; we have learned the Catholic nature of the Divine sovereignty: nevertheless the foundation teaching of the Psalmists as to the relation of the creature to his Creator remains unchanged. We still find in the Psalter a guide for our uncertain footsteps in our journey back to God. ”

“ The words "I will be his Father, and he shall be My son" seemed to imply a peculiar and unique relationship between God Himself, the true King of Israel, and His earthly representative. The comment ascribed to David himself is significant: "Is this the manner of man, O Lord God?" No mere human sovereignty, however glorious or firmly settled, would satisfy such a prophecy as this.
The thoughts of the pious in Israel must have dwelt often and deeply in after-time upon this promise and its connection with the Divine calling of the sacred nation and her mission in the world. ”

“ Christ was not merely a Victim suffering for human sin; He was man's Creator taking that sin upon Himself. Thus these expressions of penitence in the Psalter may be regarded as the voice of the sympathetic love of the Sin-bearer, the love which stands by the sinner's side, and feels with him so intimately that it makes its own what is not its own but utterly alien and hateful, makes it its own that it may burn it up in the flame of love. So in these Psalms we may hear the Son of Man confessing and making reparation for all the age-long sin of man ”

“ Learning by itself can never lift the soul on the wings of devotion and worship. The unlearned, Christ's "little ones," have in every age found a voice that spoke to them in the liturgy of the Catholic Church, even though its accents were inarticulate, and its message music rather than words. Such considerations may prevent us distressing ourselves because something, perhaps much, in the Church's book of praise is unintelligible and must remain so. ”

“ He has gathered into Himself all truly human experience, the hopes of humanity, and its sufferings; its infinite pathos, its capacity of sorrow and of joy, its progress towards God, and its final apprehension and vision of God.
This is the key to the most constant feature of the Psalter, the portrait of the Righteous Sufferer. Whether we regard it as the personification of the holy nation or the self-expression of human conscience in its moral witness and its conflicts, it is an ideal that is only fulfilled in the Just One, Jesus Christ. ”

“ Just as the portrait of the Righteous One would have been an unfulfilled ideal had not Christ made it His own, so the glowing descriptions of Israel would have been but pious dreamings had not the Catholic Church risen up out of the fallen tabernacle of David. As the songs of the Temple falter and die away, the new spirit of praise clothes itself in the ancient forms. "From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs, Glory to the Righteous" (Is. xxiv. 16) . The very words of the Psalter become transfigured like the garments of the Lord on the holy mount. ”

“ Indeed, we may trace indelibly stamped on the Psalter the true lineaments of the ideal Church.
First in the Psalter there is the note of comprehensiveness. The heathen, the nations, so often denounced or prayed against in the Psalms, are, after all, not so much those who are outside the boundaries of Israel as those who are alien from her spirit. They are communities, societies, untouched by grace, governed by passion and worldly ambitions rather than by conscience or the Divine law. ”

“ The Psalmists knew better—they knew that the battle was to the death, and that God alone can win His own victory; and they express, sternly and roughly perhaps, but with the utmost sincerity, their undying faith that He will; that the overthrow of malice and falsehood and treachery must one day be manifested,
God shall suddenly shoot at them with a swift arrow,
and that the part we each have played in the battle will be the true measure of our worth. ”

“ This humanism of the Psalter makes it pre-eminently a Christian possession, for Christianity is human through and through. It is the religion of "the soul which is by nature Christian." It redeems and consecrates, as no other religion could ever dare to do, all the fulness of man's being. {18} And why? Here we touch the innermost secret of the Psalter. It is the book of the Incarnation. "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." God Himself has taken to Himself a human soul and spirit as well as a human body. ”

“ But the larger view of the Psalter as the book primarily of the Church is of still greater importance. The imprecations of the Psalms, though expressed in so vividly personal a manner, are no more personal than the protestations of innocency. They express rather that age-long passion for righteousness, that burning belief in a moral Judge of the world Who must do right, which have always been the Church's saving salt among the corruptions and indifference of the world. It is this spirit that inspires them, rather than the thirst for {37} vengeance or the vindication of self. ”

“ In psalm and antiphon, inexhaustibly fresh, the soul seemed to be taking refuge, at that undevout {13} hour, from the sordid languor and the mean business of men's lives, in contemplation of the unfaltering vigour of the Divine righteousness, which had still those who sought it, not only watchful in the night, but alert in the drowsy afternoon. [5]
We can scarcely exaggerate the value, in our own time especially, of this use, not only of the 119th Psalm, but of the whole Psalter, as the response of the Church and the human soul to the revealed word of God. ”

“ The 131st expresses the very fundamental spirit of faith, the essential temper and attitude of the Church, the spirit of humility, of intellectual submission, of obedience, which is the same under the Gospel Dispensation as under the Old Covenant.
{11}
Lord, I am not high-minded:
I have no proud looks.
I do not exercise myself in great matters:
Which are too high for me.
But the most remarkable illustration of this characteristic attitude of the believer is the 119th Psalm. It is like a piece of music, every verse a subtle and harmonious variation on one dominant theme. ”

“ Not only the attitude of praise should be cultivated, but also that of sympathy. This will be especially fruitful as we take upon our lips these constantly recurring expressions of penitence, struggle, and sorrow. These are certain to be at times unreal to us, unless we can remember that we recite them not merely for ourselves, but as part of the Church's intercession for the world, in which it is our privilege to take part. Others are suffering under the burden of sin and grief, others are overwhelmed with sorrow, racked with pain, harried by the slanderer and the persecutor. ”

“ Especially will it rule our attitude towards Holy Scripture. Without such a change neither historical nor grammatical explanations can make the Scripture sweet or even intelligible. Not least will our comprehension of the Psalter be influenced by it. How impossible is it really to say, "Lord, what love have I unto Thy law," if one has never realised that there is a law of God, supreme and absolute, to be read in the Scriptures and in the witness of the Church; and that only in obedience to this law can man find his true self and "walk at liberty." ”

“ Once again, the Psalmists feel that as Israel, the Church, is in a sense partaker in God's own eternity, so she is, even on earth, a shadow of His essential beauty, she appeals with His attractiveness to the soul of man. Hence the {98} Christian finds in the Psalter words in which he may express his joy in his calling in the Church, his love and delight in his heavenly citizenship; words which may also remind him that, in spite of all the failures and littlenesses of the visible Church, it is through her that he is in touch with the ideal and the invisible. ”

“ The Psalms are not merely the response to revelation, they are part of that revelation themselves. The Church uses them not as mere human utterances, but as the inspired words which God Himself has given her, and which the Lord Jesus consecrated by His own personal use of them. God cannot contradict Himself. ”

“ The warning against such things is written largely enough in the history of ancient Israel. The Jews of our Lord's time, while insisting keenly, even bitterly, on their separation from the Gentiles, were for the most part forgetful of what that separation really involved. Their ambition to be separate from the nations of the earth only meant for them a worldly and selfish exclusiveness. In earlier days the clamour for a king, the thirst for alliances with Egypt and Assyria and Babylon, had displayed in the opposite manner much the same spirit. ”

“ The most casual reader is struck by the constancy with which an outlook of hope and joy succeeds to the sorrow and stress of the opening verses of Psalm after Psalm. Even the darkest have their gleams of promise. And so the Christian Church, having learned what the hope of Israel meant, found the Psalms come naturally to her lips. ”

“ Cheyne says, "The remark is a suggestive one: it seems to mean this—that the praise-book is the answer of the worshipping community to the demands made by its Lord in the Law, the reflexion of the external standard of faith and obedience in the utterance of the believing heart." This criticism is so illuminating that it may well suggest the first great principle in our own Christian use of the Psalter.
I. The Psalter is the inspired answer of praise which human faith is privileged to make to {8} God's revelation. It is the "new song" put in the mouth of humanity by its Creator. ”

“ Appreciation of the Psalter grows with the devout use of it. The obligation to recite it month by month in the daily office is one of the best gifts the Church has given to her priests; and both priest and laity alike will find increasingly that the Psalms need no apology. They are the noblest and most comprehensive form of public worship; they are the most truly satisfying book of private devotion. ”

“ The worship of the Catholic Church can only be understood by those who are of the mind of the Church, who have learned to place themselves in the believer's attitude towards God and His revelation.
However much the word "conversion" may have been abused, and turned into a mere catchword or shibboleth, it is unquestionable that the Christian religion demands a fundamental change of mind and attitude, a change which does not come by education only, nor by any natural process. There is a hidden wisdom in the Church which to the natural man is {34} "foolishness" (1 Cor. ii. 14) ”

“ Israel and Jerusalem are constantly described in the Psalms as being the marks for the malignity and opposition of external enemies. Indeed, a persistent note of the Church, Jewish as well as Christian, is the hatred which she awakens in the powers of this world. The object of suspicion and attack from Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon in early days, Jerusalem fares no better after the humiliation of the Captivity. ”

“ The rich and the poor alike have their place in this kingdom of the future. And the special characteristic of this new creation of God will be the sharing in a sacrificial feast, the Sufferer's thanksgiving, his Eucharist in which he "pays his vows." Here "the meek shall eat and be satisfied," here eating and worshipping are strangely intermingled—a prophecy unread and unfulfilled until the Church learnt the secret "in the same night that He was betrayed." ”

“ Her mission in the world is not to be the mirror of each succeeding phase of human thought, nor merely the consecration of human aspirations, but rather to speak with a supernatural authority, to tell men what God is and what is His will, "whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear." ”

“ He appeared in the world as the pattern Man, in Whom the Divine image is perfected and Whose moral nature corresponds with that holiness which is God's essential character. He appeared, too, as the perfect realisation of the filial spirit, that spirit of sonship which is the true attitude of the creature towards the Creator. Therefore it is in Christ Himself that the witness of the Psalms to righteousness, their expression of man's effort towards his ideal, is taken up, illuminated, made perfect. ”

“ PSALM vi. Domine, ne in furore
Ash Wednesday, morning (Prayer Book)
The prayer of the human soul suffering the temporal punishments, bodily and mental, of sin. Christ Himself endured these sufferings to the utmost, not for Himself, but for His people, and in this sense it, with the other penitential Psalms, may be called a Psalm of the Incarnation.
PSALM vii. Domine, Deus meus
The declaration of the Innocency of Christ against the persecution and treachery of His enemies; His appeal to the Father's justice. ”