Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my 14 heart be acceptable in Thy sight,

Jehovah, my rock and my redeemer !

15

prayers of later Psalmists for strength; 48. liv. 1-3; § 41. cxli. 4; they felt that it was only by escaping this temptation they could avoid great transgression; and that unconscious breaches of the law were more pardonable than a conscious leaning towards the ways of the heathen. This fear of falling away into heathenish ways increased still more, when the newly built Jerusalem was actually under the dominion of the heathen, § 92. cxxv. 3.

Ver. 15. Jehovah-redeemer. This address to Jehovah is taken from § 12. xviii. 2; a fact, which suggests the idea that the later Psalmist found that psalm in the same series with the Davidic psalm, to which he appended the conclusion contained in vv. 7—15.

$9. PSALM VIII.

THE PRAISE OF JEHOVAH IN THE CREATION OF MAN.

'HE great spiritual truth contained in the 1first page of Scripture,

THE

that God made man in his own image, flashes forth in this Psalm in true lyric grandeur, a ray of light across the dark mystery of creation. This truth has been worthily expressed in some of the noblest poems in our language, in which the proof of our heavenly origin is sought in the unsoiled purity of our infancy, in its simplicity and obedience, in the consciousness that its life is bounded by love, in its unruffled serenity and the fulness of its joy. But it is here that we find the first and grandest expression of this truth,—the outcome of that Hebrew inspiration, which in an age of darkness seized upon the sublimest spiritual truths and revealed them to mankind. We learn here what is nature and what is law; what is degeneracy and breach of law; and that God has ordained for Himself in the unconscious praise of their Creator from the mouths of babes and sucklings a stronghold against the noisy clamour of apostate men, who rebel against the divine order and lay upon God the blame of their own aberration from His order.

To David, whose shepherd life on the lofty hill-sides of Judah had brought him into constant communion with God in His creation, there

1 Gen. i. 26, 27.

2 By H. Vaughan in the Retreat and by Wordsworth. See note on ver. 2.

was nothing unnatural in the transition from the thought of man's divine origin to the contemplation of God's other works. He could think without shrinking of the contrast between his own weakness and the glories of a starlit night, between himself, the poor shepherd, 'the atom amidst the infinity of nature' and the multitudinous brilliance of the firmament. Nay more, the sense of God's omnipotence, which was nurtured by this life in the wilderness, seemed only to enhance the sense of human dignity', which was so striking a part of David's character.

The solitude of David's early life brought him face to face with God in two distinct ways. He realised God's omnipotence in creation with the imagination of a poet: he realised no less fully in the depths of his consciousness the living connection of man with God. This living connection with God is the source of human dignity; hence David, though a sense of the physical impotence of man was daily forced upon him by the stupendous phenomena which environed him, yet felt in the presence of God within his own soul a source of spiritual power which raised him above all material creation and affiliated him to the Divine.

I. Testimony of infancy to the glory of God.

Jehovah, our Lord!

how excellent is Thy name in all the earth,

Thou, whose glory is high above the heavens !

Out of the mouth of very babes and sucklings

hast Thou ordained a stronghold for Thyself, because

of Thine enemies,

that thou mightest still the enemy and the revengeful man!

II. The physical weakness and spiritual dignity of man. When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained;

what is man that Thou art mindful of him,

and the son of man that Thou visitest him,

1 § 2. vii. 5; § 12. xviii. 43-48; § 20. 2 Sam. xxiii. 1, 17; § 14. iii. 3; § 15. iv. 2.

I

2

3

and madest him a little lower than God,

and crownedst him with glory and honour;

and madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands,

and didst put all things in subjection under his feet,

all sheep and oxen,

yea, even the wild beasts of the field,

the fowls of the air and the fishes of the sea,

and whatsoever walketh through the paths of the seas?

Jehovah, our Lord!

III.

how excellent is Thy name in all the earth!

Ver. 2. By H. Vaughan in the Retreat.

Happy those early days, when I

shined in my Angel-infancy!
before I understood this place
appointed for my second race,
or taught my soul to fancy aught
but a white, celestial thought;
when yet I had not walked above
a mile or two from my first Love,
and looking back, at that short space
could see a glimpse of His bright face;
when on some gilded cloud or flower
my gazing soul could dwell an hour,
and in these weaker glories spy
some shadows of eternity;

before I taught my tongue to wound

my conscience with a sinful sound,
or had the black art to dispense

a several sin to every sense,

but felt through all this fleshly dress
bright shoots of everlastingness.

O how I long to travel back

and tread again that ancient track!
that I might once more reach that plain
where first I left my glorious train;
from whence the enlightened spirit sees
that shady city of Palm-trees!
but ah! my soul with too much stay
is drunk, and staggers in the way:-

5

6

7

8

9

some men a forward motion love,
but I by backward steps would move;
and when this dust falls to the urn,

in that state I came, return.

And by Wordsworth, in his great Ode on intimations of Immortality from recollections of Early Childhood.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
the soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
hath had elsewhere its setting

and cometh from afar;

not in entire forgetfulness
and not in utter nakedness,

but trailing clouds of glory do we come
from God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
upon the growing boy,

but he beholds the light and whence it flows,
he sees it in his joy;

the youth who daily from the East

must travel, still is Nature's priest,
and by the vision splendid

is on his way attended;

at length the man perceives it die away
and fade into the light of common day.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
and even with something of a mother's mind
and no unworthy aim,

the homely nurse doth all she can
to make her foster-child, her inmate, Man,
forget the glories he hath known
and that imperial palace whence he came.
Behold the child among his new-born blisses
a six years darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies
fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
with light upon him from his father's eyes!
See at his feet some little plan or chart,
some fragment of his dream of human life,
shaped by himself with newly learned art;
a wedding or a festival,

a mourning or a funeral;

and this hath now his heart,
and unto this he frames his song:
then will he fit his tongue

to dialogues of business, love or strife;
but it will not be long

e'er this be thrown aside,

and with new joy and pride

the little actor cons another part;

filling from time to time his 'humorous stage'
with all the persons down to palsied Age,
that life brings with her in her equipage;
as if his whole vocation

were endless imitation.

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
thy soul's immensity;

thou best philosopher who yet dost keep
thy heritage, thou eye among the blind,
that deaf and silent read'st the eternal deep,
haunted for ever by the eternal Mind,-
Mighty prophet! Seer blest!

on whom those truths do rest
which we are toiling all our lives to find;
thou, over whom thy immortality
broods like the day, a master o'er a slave,
a presence which is not to be put by;
thou little child, yet glorious in the might
of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
the years to bring the inevitable yoke,

thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?

Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,
and custom lie upon thee with a weight

heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

§§ 10-12. PSALMS CX. LX. XVIII.

DAVID'S GREAT WARS AGAINST THE HEATHEN.

HESE Psalms shew the fruits which were produced in the hour of

THE

peril by the fearless faith which had been the distinguishing mark of David's rule. He had seen what Saul had not seen, that the secret of the nation's strength lay in the consciousness that they were the people of Jehovah. As long as 'every man did what was right in his own eyes,' the Divine election of the nation might be a tradition of the past or a possibility in the future, but it was in no true sense a reality in the present. It was an idea that might inspire a few hero-spirits: the call of Deborah and Barak might make Zebulun and Naphthali 'willingly offer themselves :' and the war-cry which identified the sword