6). The very words of the Psalter
become transfigured like the garments of the Lord on the holy mount.

Nor is this passing away of the glory of old Israel into the greater
glories of the Catholic Israel of God without some foreshadowing in the
Psalter itself. In the 22nd, the great {78} Psalm of the Passion, the
Sufferer passes from the dogs and lions and the mocking faces that
surround him to contemplate the far-off fruit of his anguish. He seems
to see "a great congregation," in the midst of which he himself
hereafter will praise God Who has heard his prayer. Mysteriously it
seems to rise, this "seed," this "people that shall be born," out of
the very hopelessness and desolation of the Cross. "All the ends of
the earth" are united in it, "all the kindred of the nations" worship
there. The rich and the poor alike have their place in this kingdom of
the future. And the special characteristic of this new creation of God
will be the sharing in a sacrificial feast, the Sufferer's
thanksgiving, his Eucharist in which he "pays his vows." Here "the
meek shall eat and be satisfied," here eating and worshipping are
strangely intermingled--a prophecy unread and unfulfilled until the
Church learnt the secret "in the same night that He was betrayed."

"Therefore we, before Him bending,
This great Sacrament revere;
Types and shadows have their ending,
For the newer Rite is here."

This ecclesiastical aspect of the Psalter is {79} of very high
importance. There is perhaps no part of the Christian faith which is
more difficult for "the natural man" than "the Holy Catholic Church."
An erroneous or imperfect idea of the Church seems to pass muster,
among Christians even, so much more readily than error in other matters
of faith. All through Christian history the true idea of the Church
has been obscured, now by imperialism, with its misleading traditions
of the Roman Empire; now by nationalism, as if the Church were only the
religious aspect of a civil community; or again by individualism, as if
she were no more than a collection of separate units. Erastianism and
Puritanism in turn have led men astray. The warning against such
things is written largely enough in the history of ancient Israel. The
Jews of our Lord's time, while insisting keenly, even bitterly, on
their separation from the Gentiles, were for the most part forgetful of
what that separation really involved. Their ambition to be separate
fr