Psalter

“ 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. ”

“ And this was interpreted to mean that those who passed their lives in mortifying the body and praising God by singing the psalter, in living in this world as strangers from all society and as pilgrims to a better world, were a peculiar people and entitled to call themselves the people of God. ”

“ Does {85} not the spirit of the Psalter cut across it all like the keen breath of the mountain wind? Yet Englishmen are spending time and energy in ritual debates and persecutions, and educational and social strife. Worse still, the rich and intellectual, for some prejudice or political motive, are eager to deny the poor the beauties of worship or the definiteness of the Catholic Faith. ”

“ Two practical suggestions may be offered here to those who find themselves hindered in devotion by the difficulties of the Psalter, by its rapid transitions, or its constantly varying tone. The leading purpose of the Psalter in {31} the Church's use is expressed in its Hebrew title, Tehillim, "praises." "We shall do well," says Dr. Cheyne, "to accustom ourselves to the intelligent use of this title, and to look out in every psalm for an element of praise." It is good to allow this thought to dominate our mind while the Psalms are being read or sung in the Church's service. ”

“ In view of these unfulfilled ideals of the Church, the Psalter provides us in such Psalms as the 78th, the 79th, or the 106th with confession of sin and failure under the figure of Hebrew history. The recitation of these may well remind us not merely of personal faults but of our own share in the shortcomings of the Church of God:
We have sinned with our fathers:
We have done amiss and dealt wickedly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is thought to have been translated in one of the shires just south of the Humber. [6] This Psalter, like the former specimen, employs a instead of the Southern ea, even as we ourselves do.
There are many other respects in which the Psalter differs from Southern English of the Ninth Century; the chief is that the first Person Singular of the verb ends, like the Latin, in o or u: as sitto, I sit; ondredu, I fear. The second Person ends in s, not st; as neosas, thou visitest. It is, therefore, less corrupt than King Alfred's form. ”

“ 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 Psalter will not allow us to shut our eyes to this malignant and persecuting attitude of the world. The enemies of the Righteous find a place in almost every Psalm. The malice of human nature at its worst seems to be marshalled against Him, in slander and ingratitude and treachery. But there is also the opposition of the heathen as a whole against Israel. ”

“ In his ragged youth, when acting as assistant to a drunken church singer he gained at least one thing. That was a familiarity with the Psalter and the Hebrew prophets. The deep religious fire of the Hebrew seems fused with his own irrepressible native genius to form a spirit that could not be subdued. ”

“ It was a time of genuine community singing.
153 VII. THE SCOTCH VERSION
In 1556, John Knox issued his Anglo-Genevan Psalter, based on the 1551 edition of Sternhold and Hopkins, with some alterations and additions. It naturally was greatly influenced by Calvin’s Genevan Psalter. The Anglo-Genevan Psalter is significant chiefly because of its influence on the Scotch Psalter. Through that, it is the source of some psalms and tunes still in use—notably, “All people that on earth do dwell” and “Old Hundredth” to which the Long Meter Doxology is sung. ”

“ The recent researches of [1] Bovet, [2] Douen, and others into the history of the Genevan Psalter have cleared up almost all difficulties, and shown that it was in that work that the tune first appeared. A brief sketch of the history of the Genevan Psalter will be given in a supplemental notice of Louis Bourgeois. [3] For the present it is enough to say that the 'Old Hundredth' was the melody adapted to Beza's version of the 134th Psalm included in the first instalment of psalms, 34 in number, added by him to the Genevan Psalter in 1551. ”

“ The wood was held by two persons on opposite sides of the psalter, and the accused having been placed before them, one of them said thrice to the other: "He has the thing" (i.e., the stolen article) . The other thrice answered: "He has it not." Thereupon the priest declared: "This He will deign to make manifest unto us, by Whose judgment are ruled things terrestrial and things celestial. Thou art just, O Lord, and righteous are Thy judgments. Turn away the evils of Thy enemies, and destroy them with Thy truth." ”

“ Nor is this passing away of the glory of old Israel into the greater glories of the Catholic Israel of God without some foreshadowing in the Psalter itself. In the 22nd, the great {78} Psalm of the Passion, the Sufferer passes from the dogs and lions and the mocking faces that surround him to contemplate the far-off fruit of his anguish. He seems to see "a great congregation," in the midst of which he himself hereafter will praise God Who has heard his prayer. Mysteriously it seems to rise, this "seed," this "people that shall be born," out of the very hopelessness and desolation of the Cross. ”

“ Among the Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa has attempted to show that the Psalter in its five books leads upward as by five steps to moral perfection, ἀεὶ πρὸς τὸ ὑψηλότερον τὴν ψυχὴν ὑπερτιθεὶς, ὡς ἂν ἐπὶ τὸ ἀκρότατον ἐφίκηται τῶν ἀγαθῶν; [14] and down to the most recent times attempts have been made to trace in the five books a gradation of principal thoughts, which influence and run through the whole collection. [15]
We fear that in this direction, investigation has set before itself an unattainable end. Nevertheless, as we shall see, the collection bears the impress of one ordering mind. ”

“ To the late 9th or early 10th century a work may be assigned which is in so far an advance upon preceding efforts as to be a real translation, not a mere gloss corresponding word for word with the Latin original. This is the famous Paris Psalter, [2] a rendering of the first fifty Psalms (Vulg. i.–l. 10) , contained in the unique MS. lat. ”

“ It has always produced so powerful an effect, even where it is only preached as the experience of others, that he who has come in contact with it can never forget it; it accompanies him as a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night; he who imagines that he has long shaken it off, sees it rising up suddenly before him again.”—Harnack's History of Dogma, v. 74 (Eng. trans., London, 1898) . 145. The Wolfenbüttel Library contains the Psalter (Vulgate) used by Luther in lecturing on the Psalms. ”

“ On these two collections the first edition of the Genevan Psalter was based, and was published at Geneva in 1542. It contains the thirty psalms of Marot with his Pater and Credo (a different one from that in the Strasburg edition of 1539 which is in prose) , the five psalms of Calvin, and his Song of Simeon and Decalogue. Of the tunes, seventeen (1, 2, 3, 15, 25, 36, 46, 91, 103, 104, 114, 130, 137, 138, 143, the Song of Simeon and the Paternoster) are taken from the preceding Psalters, but all except three (36, 103, and 137) are more or less modified ”

“ This was mainly carried out by the adoption of a rule that all antiphons and responses should be in the exact words of Scripture, which, of course, cut out the whole class of appeals to created beings. The services were at the same time simplified and shortened, and the use of the whole Psalter every week (which had become a mere theory in the Roman Breviary, owing to its frequent supersession by saints’ day services) was made a reality. These reformed French Breviaries—e.g. ”

“ Still, when we read the ‘Provincial Letters’ or the ‘Pensées,’ we feel ourselves in communion with a living writer who knew how to light up with an immortal touch both the follies of ecclesiasticism and the struggles of a solitary spirit after truth. The tenderness of a genuine insight mingles with all the sublimity p. 205and severe reserve of the thought, and so we get close to a true soul, distant as Pascal himself in some respects remains to us. ”

“ The drama of Parsifal teaches its own great lessons of life. Yet one or two suggestions of interpretation may not be amiss, for it is confessedly one of the most mystical of modern dramas. It may perchance be considered as representing the strife between paganism and Christianity in the early centuries of the Church,—the powers of magic and the hot passions of the human heart contending against the advancing power of Christian truth and the victorious might of Purity as portrayed in the guileless hero. ”

“ For who can be safe after a calumny of this nature? For shame, fathers! to publish in Paris such a scandalous book, with the name of your Father Meynier on its front, and under this infamous title, “Port-Royal and Geneva in concert against the most holy Sacrament of the Altar,” in which you accuse of this apostasy, not only Monsieur the abbé of St. Cyran, and M. Arnauld, but also Mother Agnes, his sister, and all the nuns of that monastery, alleging that “their faith, in regard to the eucharist, is as suspicious as that of M. Arnauld,” whom you maintain to be “a downright Calvinist.” ”

“ This event is spoken of by Pascal’s biographers as his “first conversion,” and it appears to have been attended not only with a zealous consecration of his own powers to the service of religion, but moreover, as often happens in the case of youthful enthusiasm, with a warm determination against all who seemed to him to be acting at variance with the true faith. “Although,” as his sister says, “he had made no special study of scholastic p. 20theology, he was not ignorant of the judgments of the Church against the heresies invented by human subtlety. ”

“ I prevailed on him, however, after much entreaty, to accompany me, and asked for one of my New Thomists. He was delighted to see me again. “How now! my dear father,” I began, “it seems it is not enough that all men have a proximate power, with which they can never act with effect; they must have besides this a sufficient grace, with which they can act as little. Is not that the doctrine of your school?” “It is,” said the worthy monk; “and I was upholding it this very morning in the Sorbonne. ”

“ That he should [79] have sought relief from his singular wretchedness, in that sombre company, is like the second stroke of tragedy upon him. At moments Pascal becomes almost a sectarian, and seems to pass out of the genial broad heaven of the Catholic Church. He had lent himself in those last years to a kind of pieties which do not make a winning picture, which always have about them, even when they show themselves in men physically strong, something of the small compass of the sick-chamber. ”

“ Then Parsifal drew near, and slowly spake:
"Only one weapon serves to kill that pain.
The one that struck can staunch thy wound again!"
And with the sacred Spear he touched the King.
And lo! a miracle of healing power!—
The wound was staunched and a deep thrill of love
Changed agony to rapture all divine.
And Parsifal spake on: "Thou art forgiven.
Body and soul are cleansed by God's free grace
Thy life for evermore shall happy be
Within the service of the Holy Grail. ”

“ Pascal loved her more than any other creature in the world; but he betrayed no grief when he heard of her death. "God grant us grace to die like her," he exclaimed; and reproved his sister for the affliction she displayed. It was this question of the signature of the formula that caused his temporary dissension with the recluses of Port Royal. They {Pg 207} wished the nuns to temporise, and to sign the formula, with a reservation; but Pascal saw that the jesuits would not submit to be thus balked, and that they were bent on the destruction of their enemies. ”

“ Paschal, who were poor lay Franciscans, and unacquainted with human sciences, but learned in the science of the saints. But the wonder is, that, though worldlings themselves are fully persuaded of this truth, and constantly extol the merit of those who retire from the world to live only to God, still they act as if they believed it not. ”

“ But, not to dwell longer on these objections, the Provincials are liable to another charge, seldomer advanced, and not so easily answered; which is, that the loose casuistical morality denounced by Pascal was not confined to the Jesuits, nor to any one of the orders of the Romish Church, much less, as Voltaire says, to “a few Spanish and Flemish Jesuits,” but was common to all the divines of that Church, and was, in fact, the native offspring and inevitable growth of the practices of confession and absolution. ”