sovereignty of Christ.

The two lines of the Church's activity just alluded to, missionary and
social, so prominent in the Psalms, are calling to-day so loudly for
self-humiliation and new effort, that they may profitably be dwelt on a
little further. The Psalmist's prophecy of the kings of Arabia and
Saba bringing gifts (lxxii.) is still largely unfulfilled. The East is
still almost untouched. Asia has not yet brought her characteristic
gift to Christ. She is still under the dominion of imperfect
religions--Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam. And yet India is our possession;
Japan is our pupil. "The way of the kings of the East" is already
"prepared" (Rev. xvi. 12), but where is the adequate response from
English Christianity? "Who is blind but My servant, or deaf as My
messenger that I send?"

And turning homewards, what are we to say of these grotesque and
monstrous contrasts between wealth and poverty, luxury and squalor in
England to-day, where rich and poor alike are baptized? What of the
immoralities of commerce, of the bad work of the labourer as well as
the swindling of the capitalist? Does {85} not the spirit of the
Psalter cut across it all like the keen breath of the mountain wind?
Yet Englishmen are spending time and energy in ritual debates and
persecutions, and educational and social strife. Worse still, the rich
and intellectual, for some prejudice or political motive, are eager to
deny the poor the beauties of worship or the definiteness of the
Catholic Faith.

Surely Thou hast seen it:
For Thou beholdest ungodliness and wrong.
(x. 15.)

In view of these unfulfilled ideals of the Church, the Psalter provides
us in such Psalms as the 78th, the 79th, or the 106th with confession
of sin and failure under the figure of Hebrew history. The recitation
of these may well remind us not merely of personal faults but of our
own share in the shortcomings of the Church of God:

We have sinned with our fathers:
We have done amiss and dealt wickedly.

For the Church as well as ourselves we are taught to pray, "Turn us
again, O Lord God of hosts." The sorrows and desolations of Zion are
never represented in the Psalms as being _merely_ the effect of heathen
malice, {86} though they are so largely that, but as calls to look back
upon history, and also to look within, to consider what unfaithfulness
there may have been and is, what "starting aside like a broken bow" in
our fathers and in o