THE PSALMS IN LIFE AND HISTORY.* THERE is no little
comfort, and we cannot but feel, some reassurance of long-cherished beliefs, when we turn from critical controversies about the date and authorship of the Psalms to such a book as this. Under a title which is perhaps a little awkward, but certainly expresses a good deal, Mr. Marson has put together a widely varied and highly interesting collection of examples, taken from Biography and History, of what may be called the practical use of the Psalms. Used from the earliest times for purposes of de- votion, public and private—the one Scriptural liturgy contains a couple of verses from the second Psalm—they have found their way to an extent that is difficult fully to appreciate, into the life of civilised man in all its more serious aspects. Nor is this fact without its bearing on the controversies mentioned above. If we have in the Psalms the utterances daring successive ages of the greatest men of this wonderful Hebrew nation, from David down to the Maccabees, the influence which they have had upon the human mind is intelligible. They are to the devotional side of human nature, what the poetry of Greece has been to its intellectual. But if they were the work of post-exilic literati, who simulated the inspiration and the sentiments of traditional heroes of the race, how is their history, so absolutely without parallel as it is, to be accounted for Who could these unknown poets have been, that they contrived to secure for their apocryphal productions this immortal glory of being the prayer-book of civilised mankind ? The simple fact that they are the only poems which have had any acceptance, not to speak of fame, in a translated form, is in itself a perpetual marvel.
No better instance of the width and variety of the associa- tions which attach themselves to the Psalms can be found than that already mentioned, the Second. "It has always been," writes Mr. Manion, " from the earliest days, a psalm of good heart in hard times." The Apostles used it when they would strengthen the spirit of the infant Church against their persecuting countrymen ; some of those persecutors may have used it themselves in later days, for it was sung by the Jews at the Siege of Jerusalem. It was a favourite hymn of the first Crusade, the most single-minded of those very mixed exhibitions of Christian zeal. Athanasius found in it "a trumpet-call against the enemies of the Faith." It was on the lips of Savonarola when Florence was in her greatest peril, and on those of Luther a generation later. The seventh verse, "Thou art my Son: this day have I begotten thee; " has been a " Catholic motto in the Arian, Socinian, and Deist Controversies," and with more authority than always belongs to the controversial employment of single texts, for it was so used by St. Paul in his discourse to the Jews of the Pisidian Antioch, and by him again, or by an eminently Pauline writer, in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Baxter used the last three verses, " Be wise now therefore, 0 ye Kings," as an appeal to the unconverted in an assize sermon at Worcester in 1654 ;
• The Psalms at Work. By Charles L. Maroon. London: Elliot Stock. 1893.
and a similar sense is attached to the ninth, " Thou shalt rule them with a rod of iron : thou shalt break them in pieces like a potter's vessel," in the Apocalypse. It is somewhat of a descent when we find Sir Thomas Browne, according to Mr. Marson, using v. 4, "He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh them to scorn," " against the vulgar error that our Lord never laughed."
We may, indeed, find something not unlike to this rich variety of use whenever we may chance to open the volume. The eleventh Psalm has associations as diverse as the Civil War in America, when President Lincoln quoted one of its verses in an anti-slavery manifesto :—" The righteous Lord loveth righteousness ; " and the Civil War in France which followed the victory of Poictiers. (Charles of Navarre's sermon to the Parisians was not " immediately after Poictiers," for Poictiers was fought on September 19th, 1356, whereas Charles did not come to Paris till 1357, Mr. Marson's own date.) We may add that the first verse is on the text of one of Adolphe Monod's most magnificent discourses, delivered after the Revolution of 1848.
Psalm xxii. has, of course, an association of unparalleled interest in the use of the first verse, "My God, my God, why halt thou forsaken me ?" by the dying Christ. That they have been repeated by sufferers without number in their darker hours is certain ; but there are few recorded instances. A biographer is commonly like a sun-dial, hems non numerat nisi serenas. Mr. Marson mentions one curious application of the words by Richard Lion-Heart, when he saw that his crusade had failed : " How unwilling should I be to forsake Thee in so forlorn and dreadful a position were I Thy Lord and advocate, as Thou art mine," a strangely perverse anticipation of the famous epitaph on David Elginbrod. The Psalm that follows, " The Lord is my Shepherd," is probably another where the very multiplicity of use defies any kind of enumeration or description. Mr. Mama connects it with the name of Edward Irving, who repeated it in Hebrew on his death-bed; of St. Francis, who chanted it when he went, single-handed, to convert the Saracens, and with Heine, who quoted the second verse in one of his last poems. He quotes also from Mr. Ruskin that it was " the first he learnt at his mother's knee." Probably, if Christendom could choose its " favourite " psalm, it would be this.
We have said enough, we hope, of Mr. Marson's book to interest our readers in it. His method is to give what he modestly calls "a few short notes on the use of the Psalms," and to add the " liturgical use " in the English Church (the Prayer-book of 1549, as well as that now authorised), of the Greek, and of the Latin Churches. The collection is meant, we read in the preface, "to set the reader gathering for him- self." One instance we may give that will be well known to many Oxford men,—the second foundation of Lincoln College by Archbishop Rotherham, who was stirred to the good work by a sermon preached by Dean Forest on Psalm lxxx., 14, "Behold and visit this Vine." The vines that grow to this day on the walls of the Lincoln quadrangles are a memorial of the Dean's happy application of the text.
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