ous heathen world, are pictured as forsaking their
natural lineage and descent to be born again in Zion, enrolling
themselves there as citizens of the Lord's {82} glorious foundation
upon the holy mountains, finding there their joy and the fount of their
inspiration.

The Lord shall count, when He writeth up the peoples:
This one was born _there_.
They that sing as well as they that dance shall say,
All my fountains are in Thee. (R.V.)

Surely this is one of the most remarkable foreshadowings in the Old
Testament of the catholicity of the Church, and of that new birth of
Baptism by which men of every race and tongue are grafted into the one
body, "where there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and
uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman: but Christ is
all, and in all" (Col. iii. 11). In this and in many other Psalms
(_cf._ lxvii., xcviii., c.) we confess the essentially _missionary_
vocation of the Church; that she calls to all mankind, not to the
Western nations only, nor to the progressive and civilised only. Hers
is the one faith for all men, her citizenship unlimited by any barriers
of race or temperament.

If the catholicity of the Church is so clearly sketched in the Psalter,
no less clear is {83} her _social_ ideal. The poor, the oppressed,
those who have no helper, are equally called to share in Israel's hope
and her gifts. God Himself is her pattern, Who--

Taketh up the simple out of the dust:
And lifteth the poor out of the mire;
That He may set him with the princes:
Even with the princes of His people.
(cxiii.)

The Messianic King will count the blood of the poor and needy equally
precious with that of the rich and great (lxxii.). The Sufferer of the
Passion Psalm (xxii.) looks forward, as we have seen, to the result of
his triumph, in not only calling the "fat ones of the earth" to eat and
worship at his table, but in finding there an equal place for--

Even him that cannot keep his soul alive.
(xxii. 30, R.V.)

These are lessons which we have as yet gone but a little way in
learning. Yet the Psalter, as we recite it day by day, puts in our own
mouth the condemnation of exclusiveness and pride and of deafness to
the complaint of the poor; it makes us confess at least the Catholic
{84} ideal of unity, of universal justice, of the imperishable value of
the individual life, of the transformation of human society in the
light of the Divine