n his face to the earth;" and also a reference
to an earlier triumph in Israel's history, celebrated with fierce
exultation in the wild chant whom rolls the words like a sweet morsel
under the tongue, as it tells of Sisera--

"Between her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay;
Between her feet he bowed, he fell;
Where he bowed, there he fell down dead."

Another autobiographical reference in the psalm has been disputed on
insufficient grounds:

"For my father and my mother forsake me,
And Jehovah takes me up." (Ver. 10.)

It is, at all events, a remarkable coincidence that the only mention of
his parents after the earliest chapters of his life falls in precisely
with this period of the history, and is such as might have suggested
these words. We read (1 Sam. xxii. 3, 4) that he once ventured all the
way from Adullam to Moab to beg an asylum from Saul's indiscriminate
fury for his father and mother, who were no doubt too old to share his
perils, as the rest of his family did. Having prepared a kindly welcome
for them, perhaps on the strength of the blood of Ruth the Moabitess in
Jesse's veins, he returned to Bethlehem, brought the old couple away,
and guarded them safely to their refuge. It is surely most natural to
suppose that the psalm is the lyrical echo of that event, and most
pathetic to conceive of the psalmist as thinking of the happy home at
Bethlehem now deserted, his brothers lurking with him among the rocks,
and his parents exiles in heathen lands. Tears fill his eyes, but he
lifts them to a Father that is never parted from him, and feels that he
is no more orphaned nor homeless.

The psalm is remarkable for the abrupt transition of feeling which
cleaves it into two parts; one (vers. 1-6) full of jubilant hope and
enthusiastic faith, the other (vers. 7-14) a lowly cry for help. There
is no need to suppose, with some critics, that we have here two
independent hymns bound together in error. He must have little knowledge
of the fluctuations of the devout life who is surprised to find so swift
a passage from confidence to conscious weakness. Whilst the usual order
in the psalms, as the usual order in good men's experience, is that
prayer for deliverance precedes praise and triumph, true communion with
God is bound to no mechanical order, and may begin with gazing on God,
and realizing the mysteries of beauty in His secret place, ere it drops
to earth. The lark sings as it descends from the "privacy of