he hearing of the ear they obey me.
The sons of the stranger feign obedience to me.

(45) The sons of the stranger fade away,
They come trembling from their hiding-places."

The rebellion which weakened his early reign is subdued, and beyond the
bounds of his own people his dominion spreads. Strange tribes submit to
the very sound of his name, and crouch before him in extorted and
pretended submission. The words are literally "lie unto me," descriptive
of the profuse professions of loyalty characteristic of conquered
orientals. Their power withers before him like a gathered flower before
a hot wind, and the fugitives creep trembling out of their holes where
they have hid themselves.

Again he recurs to the one thought which flows like a river of light
through all the psalm--that all his help is in God. The names which he
lovingly heaped together at the beginning are in part echoed in the
close. "The Lord liveth, and blessed is my rock, and the God of my
salvation is exalted." His deliverances have taught him to know a living
God, swift to hear, active to help, in whom he lives, who has magnified
His own name in that He has saved His servant. And as that blessed
conviction is the sum of all his experience, so one glad vow expresses
all his resolves, and thrills with the expectation which he had
cherished even in his lonely exile, that the music of his psalm would
one day echo through all the world. With lofty consciousness of his new
dignity, and with lowly sense that it is God's gift, he emphatically
names himself _His_ king, _His_ anointed, taking, as it were, his crown
from his brows and laying it on the altar. With prophetic eye he looks
onward, and sees the throne to which he had been led by a series of
miracles enduring for ever, and the mercy of God sustaining the dominion
of his house through all generations:--

(49) "Therefore will I give thanks to Thee among the nations, O
Jehovah,
And to Thy name will I strike the harp:

(50) Who maketh great the deliverances of His king
And executeth mercy for His anointed,
For David and his seed for evermore."

And what were his purposes for the future? Here is his answer, in a
psalm which has been with considerable appropriateness regarded as a
kind of manifesto of the principles which he intended should
characterize his reign (Psa. ci.): "I will walk within my house with a
perfect heart. I will set no wicked