find increasingly that the Psalms need no
apology. They are the noblest and most comprehensive form of public
worship; they are the most truly satisfying book of private devotion.

[1] Note A, p. 101.

[2] Note B, p. 102.

[3] "Concerning the Service of the Church," the original Preface to the
Prayer Book.

[4] xli. 13, lxxii. 18-19, lxxxix. 50, cvi. 46, cl.

[5] Walter Pater, _Gaston de Latour_.

[6] Virgil, _eclogue_ iv.

[7] Virgil, _Aeneid_, vi. 313, 314 (_cf._ Heb. xi. 13):

Praying, they stood with hands of love outspread,
If but that farther shore each might be first to tread.

{22}

PART II. DIFFICULTIES

Servus tuus sum ego:
Da mihi intellectum ut sciam testimonia tua.

Besides general principles, we are also to consider some of the general
difficulties in the use of the Psalter as a Christian book. The Psalms
are certainly not easy. Nothing as great as they are ever could be
easy. None of the books of the Bible yield their secret except to
labour and prayer, and the Psalms present special difficulties of their
own. These are of various kinds and need various methods of approach.
There is a difficulty inherent in the very origin and history of the
Psalms. They are translated somewhat imperfectly from an ancient
language, not akin to our own--a language which, if not difficult in
itself, is rendered so by the comparative scantiness of its literature.
The Psalms, humanly speaking, are the work of a race widely different
from ourselves in habits and in modes of thought and expression. They
contain allusions to events and circumstances imperfectly known or
realised to-day. Most of our interpretation of these things is
necessarily guess-work. The same Psalm may be ascribed {23} with equal
probability, by scholars of equal learning and reverence, to periods
many centuries apart. Was the sufferer of Ps. xxii. David or Jeremiah,
or is it altogether an ideal portrait? Was the coming of the heathen
into God's inheritance of Ps. lxxix. that of the Babylonians in the
sixth century B.C. or of the soldiers of Antiochus in the second? Who
was the "king's daughter" in Ps. xlv. and who "the daughter of Tyre"?
Is the Temple of the Psalms ever the first Temple, or is it always the
second? Such problems still wait an answer. Again, there are
difficulties inherent in Hebrew thought. It is intensely concrete and
personal, in contrast with our more usual abstractions and
gener