ed him out of the hand of all his enemies, and out
of the hand of Saul: And he said, The Lord is my rock, and my fortress
and my deliverer; the God of my rock; in him will I trust: he is my
shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge, my
saviour; thou savest me from violence."--2 SAM. xxii. 1-3.

This is the death song of David; the last words of the great man--warrior,
statesman, king, poet, prophet. A man of many joys and many sorrows,
many virtues, and many crimes; but through them all, every inch a man. A
man--heaped by God with every gift of body, and mind, and heart, and
especially with strong and deep intense feeling. Right or wrong, he is
never hard, never shallow, never light-minded. He is in earnest.
Whatever happens to him, for good or evil, goes to his heart, and fills
his whole soul, till it comes out again in song.

This it is which makes David the Psalmist. This it is which makes the
Psalter a text book still for every soldier or sailor, for all men who
have human hearts in them. This it is which will make his psalms live
for ever. Because they are full of humanity, of the spirit of man,
awakened and enlightened, and ennobled, by the Spirit of God.

Looking through these psalms of David, one is struck with astonishment at
their variety. At what is called the versatility of his mind, that is,
his ability to turn himself to every kind of subject, as it comes before
him, and to sing of it--as man has never sung since. And one is the more
astonished, when one remembers that many of the most beautiful of these
Psalms must have been written while David was still a very young man.
Though we have them, of course, only in a translation--though many of the
words and phrases in them are difficult, sometimes impossible to
understand, though they were written in a kind of verse which would give
our English ears no pleasure, and were set to a music so utterly
different from our own, that it would not sound like music to us. Yet,
with all these disadvantages, they are beautiful as they stand, they sink
into the ear, and into the heart, as what they are, the words of one
inspired by God, who found beauty in every sight which he beheld, in
every event which happened, even in every sorrow and every struggle in
his own soul, and could sing of each and all of them in words and
thoughts fresh from God, the fountain of all beauty and all truth.

But the peculiarity of David's psal