om the nations of the earth only meant for them a worldly and selfish
exclusiveness. In earlier days the clamour for a king, the thirst for
alliances with Egypt and Assyria and Babylon, had displayed in the
opposite manner much the same spirit. Religious privileges, that
Divine calling which {80} had made them a nation, were to be used as a
means to worldly advancement and security. In the Psalter there stands
out a truer conception of the Church as the spiritual commonwealth, a
kingdom of God in the world, but not of this world's spirit, organised
for higher ends than self-protection or self-development, aiming not at
conquest but at the conversion and good of mankind, glorying not in
privilege but in vocation, not in self but in the law of God. And this
is the pattern for all time. The Christian Church may find in the
Psalter her own just self-expression in a fuller manner than ever
ancient Israel did or could. Indeed, we may trace indelibly stamped on
the Psalter the true lineaments of the ideal Church.

First in the Psalter there is the note of _comprehensiveness_. The
heathen, the nations, so often denounced or prayed against in the
Psalms, are, after all, not so much those who are outside the
boundaries of Israel as those who are alien from her spirit. They are
communities, societies, untouched by grace, governed by passion and
worldly ambitions rather than by conscience or the Divine law. And
side by side with threats and foreboding of their utter destruction in
the day of God there are glimpses here and there of the possibility of
{81} their conversion, and even of their becoming one family with
Israel. The great Psalm of Whitsunday, the 68th, passes from the
thought of God wounding the head of His enemies, of His warriors
dipping their feet in the blood of the vanquished, to the hope of the
princes coming out of Egypt, and Ethiopia making haste to stretch out
her hands unto God. So, again, the 47th Psalm looks forward to the
essential sovereignty of God over all the earth being recognised even
by this world's rulers:

The princes of the people are joined unto the people
of the God of Abraham.[1]

And lest it should be thought that such hopes referred only to an
empire of external rule, like that of Solomon's, we have the startling
predictions of Ps. lxxxvii. Here the people of Rahab (Egypt) and
Babylon, the Philistines, the Tyrians, the Ethiopians, all types of the
obstinate and idolatr