m swept away the divided and
bickering Churches of the East and that Church of North Africa, once so
glorious, where holiness had not kept pace with zeal; in the fifteenth,
{93} when Constantinople fell, and the great cathedral of S. Sophia
passed into the hands of the Turks, and this very day, where once
Christian worship was offered, and Christian emblems high on its walls
still make their silent protest,

"Moslem prayers profane
At morn and eve come sounding;"

in the sixteenth, when the fair abbeys of England were despoiled and
suffered to fall into ruin, through covetousness and irreligion
masquerading under the garb of piety; in the seventeenth, when the
voice of the Church's worship was stifled, and the faithful were
interrupted in their very Christmas Communion by the levelled muskets
of the Cromwellian troopers[4]; in our own day, when liberality can
tolerate everything except the Catholic Faith? Verily these Hebrew
Psalms are a Christian possession for ever. They speak to us and speak
for us in accents of undying truth, and every year that passes verifies
their witness and points more sharply their appeal.

But not only does the Psalter tell of the Church and her ideals, of her
warfare and her failures, it insists with equal conviction on her
_stability_. God's great promise to the line of {94} David carried
with it the preservation of David's city. The attacks of the heathen
seemed to have reached their climax when Sennacherib's army had taken
all the fortified cities of Judaea, and Jerusalem was left isolated and
helpless (2 Kings xix.). Yet when human hope was gone, the prophet's
word rang out with the certainty of faith. "I will defend this city to
save it, for Mine own sake, and for My servant David's sake." The
sequel was one of the most startling catastrophes in history. The
Assyrian hosts were destroyed in a single night, and Assyrian invasions
ceased. Again, in a later generation, when the promise seemed at last
to have failed, and the Temple had fallen, the city was burnt and her
king and citizens in captivity, the prophets never waver in their
vision of a future restoration when sin has been repented and national
guilt expiated. Zerubbabel and Joshua, Ezra and Nehemiah, Judas
Maccabaeus and his descendants, restore and maintain Temple and city to
last till "the fulness of the time," when the true meaning of the
Davidic promises was revealed.

The sense of this supernatural continu