ng hosts of emperor
and anti-pope; or when S. Athanasius, on that night of fear when the
imperial soldiers had blockaded the doors of the church, and the fate
of the faith of Nicaea seemed to hang in the balance, bade the deacon
intone that Psalm which tells of God smiting great kings, "for His
mercy endureth for ever" (cxxxvi.); or when Henry V. turned his face to
the wall and died, confessing that his ideal was unfulfilled, and that
God, and not he, must "build the walls of Jerusalem" (li.).

This humanism of the Psalter makes it pre-eminently a Christian
possession, for Christianity is human through and through. It is the
religion of "the soul which is by nature Christian." It redeems and
consecrates, as no other religion could ever dare to do, all the
fulness of man's being. {18} And why? Here we touch the innermost
secret of the Psalter. It is the book of the Incarnation. "The Word
was made flesh, and dwelt among us." God Himself has taken to Himself
a human soul and spirit as well as a human body. And the Incarnate
Word found on earth the voice of His communing with the Father, as the
faithful of His own adopted nation did, in the words of the Psalms.
These words rise naturally to His lips in the supreme agony on the
Cross; they must have provided His prayers and thanksgivings, we may
reverently imagine, not only in the public services which He attended,
but in His home at Nazareth, and in His lonely vigils of prayer. He
gathered together in Himself all the human experiences of the past
which are reflected in the Psalter. Hence the Psalter is also the
characteristic voice of His Church, that Church which was founded by
Him, and is united to Him, and is the assembly of the first-born of
humanity calling Him "Lord" and Mary "Mother."

The consideration of these great truths will be reserved for subsequent
lectures; but it would be impossible to speak of general principles in
our Christian use of the Psalter without pointing out on the very
threshold its indissoluble connection, historically and doctrinally,
with the {19} "Author and Finisher of our faith," and with His Church
"the household of faith."

III. Once again, the Psalter is appropriate for Christian use because
it is the book of Hope. The world estranged from God is without hope.
The heathen looked back to a golden age; Virgil stands almost alone in
his dream of its possible return.[6] The Israel of God is the
fellowship of the future. I