work for it. Now for the first time can he
be set forth as the king of Israel; now the width of the promise which
at first had embraced the seed of the woman, and then had been narrowed
to the seed of Abraham, and thereafter probably to the tribe of Judah,
is still further defined as to be fulfilled in the line of the house of
David; now the personal Messiah Himself begins to be discerned through
the words which are to have a preparatory fulfilment, in itself
prophetic, in the collective Davidic monarchs whose very office is
itself also a prophecy.

Many echoes of this new message ring through the later psalms of the
king. His own dominion, his conquests, and his office, gradually became
to himself a solemn prophecy of a mysterious descendant who should be
really and fully all that he was in shadow and in part. As the
experience of the exile, so that of the victorious monarch supplied the
colours with which the spirit of prophecy in him painted "beforehand the
sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow." In both classes
of psalms we have two forms of the Messianic reference, the typical and
the purely prophetic. In the former the events of David's own biography
and the feelings of his own soul are so portrayed and expressed as to
suggest his greater Son. In the latter, the personality of the psalmist
retreats into the background, and is at most only the starting-point for
wails of sorrow or gleams of glory which far transcend anything in the
life of the singer. There are portions, for instance, of the xxii. and
lxix. psalms which no torturing can force into correspondence with any
of David's trials; and in like manner there are paeans of victory and
predictions of dominion which demand a grander interpretation than his
own royalty or his hopes for his house can yield. Of course, if prophecy
is impossible, there is no more to be said, but that in that case a
considerable part of the Old Testament, including many of David's
psalms, is unintelligible.

Perhaps the clearest instance of distinct prophecy of the victorious
dominion of the personal Messiah is the 110th psalm. In it we do see, no
doubt, the influence of the psalmist's own history, shaping the image
which rises before his soul. But the attributes of that king whom he
beholds are not his attributes, nor those of any son of his who wore the
crown in Israel. And whilst his own history gives the form, it is "the
Spirit of Christ that was in" him which gi