ms, after all, is from his intense
faith in God. God is in all his thoughts. God is near him, guiding him,
trying him, educating him, punishing him, sometimes he thinks for a
moment, deserting him. But even then his mind is still full of God. It
is God he wants, and the light of God's countenance, without which he
cannot live, and leaving him in misery, and shame, and darkness, and out
of the darkness he cries--My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? And,
therefore, everything which happens to him shapes itself not into mere
poetry, but into a prayer, or a hymn.

It is this which has made David for Christians now, as well as for Jews
of old, the great master and teacher of heart religion. In the early
church, in the middle ages, as now, Catholic alike and Protestant,
whosoever has feared God and sought after righteousness; whosoever has
known and sorrowed over the sinfulness and weakness of his own heart;
whosoever has believed that the Lord God was dealing with him as with a
son, educating him, chastening him, purifying him and teaching him, by
the chances and changes of his mortal life; whosoever, I say, has had any
real taste of vital experimental religion--to David's Psalms he has gone,
as to a treasure house, to find there his own feelings, his own doubts,
his own joys, his own thoughts of God and His providence--reflected as in
a glass; everything which he would say, said for him already, in words
which will never be equalled on earth.

There are psalms among them of bitter agony, cries as of a lost child,
like that 6th psalm--"Oh Lord, rebuke me not in Thine anger, neither
chasten me in Thy hot displeasure," &c. And yet ending like that, with a
sudden flash of faith, and hope, and joy, which is a peculiar mark of
David's character, faith in God triumphing over all the chances and
changes of mortal life. "The Lord hath heard the voice of my weeping.
The Lord will receive my prayer, all mine enemies shall be confounded and
sore vexed. They shall be turned back and put to shame."

There are psalms again which are prayers for guidance and teaching like
the 5th Psalm--"Lead me, O Lord, in thy righteousness because of mine
enemies: make thy way plain before my face."

There are psalms, again, of Natural Religion, such as the 8th and the
19th and the 29th, the words of a man who had watched and studied nature
by day and night, as he kept his sheep upon the mountains, and wandered
in the desert with his me