as the Eternal
King of the universe, so the Church has always known in her darkest
moments that her continuance is as certain as her Master's throne; and
that as He remains the same, though the heavens and the earth decay,
and are changed as a garment, the promise of the 102nd Psalm is hers
for ever:

The children of Thy servants shall continue:
And their seed snail stand fast in Thy sight.

Once again, the Psalmists feel that as Israel, the Church, is in a
sense partaker in God's own eternity, so she is, even on earth, a
shadow of His essential beauty, she appeals with His attractiveness to
the soul of man. Hence the {98} Christian finds in the Psalter words
in which he may express his joy in his calling in the Church, his love
and delight in his heavenly citizenship; words which may also remind
him that, in spite of all the failures and littlenesses of the visible
Church, it is through her that he is in touch with the ideal and the
invisible.

Thus in no mere partisan or ecclesiastical spirit we are invited in the
Psalms to express our love of the Catholic Church. On Whit Sunday, the
Church's birthday, we take up the ancient strain of affection:

The hill of Sion is a fair place, and the joy of the whole earth.

We gaze with awe upon her jewelled foundations and her jasper walls; we
wander with delight in her spacious golden streets:

Walk about Sion, and go round about her:
And tell the towers thereof.
Mark well her bulwarks, set up her houses:[7]
That ye may tell them that come after.
For this God is our God for ever and ever:
He shall be our guide unto death.
(xlviii.)

{99}

In another Psalm, the 122nd, one of the pilgrim-psalms recited of old
as the faithful drew near to Jerusalem, we contemplate with joy and
self-forgetfulness the ideal unity of the Church as the true centre of
the earth, and as "the seat of judgment" to which all this world's
shams and shadows must come sooner or later for their reformation or
their sentence:

O pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
They shall prosper that love thee.
Peace be within thy walls:
And plenteousness within thy palaces.
For my brethren and companions' sakes:
I will wish thee prosperity.
Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God:
I will seek to do thee good.

It is an aspiration that should find an echo in the heart of every
faithful son of the Church, especially in such "a day of trouble and of
reb