Almighty, and try and catch the sound of the words: 'Lord, thou hast been our refuge from one generation to another. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and world were made, thou art God from everlasting, and world without end. Thou turnest man to destruction; again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men."'

Psalm 91.

Theodore Beza relates that, in his younger years, he was one day in the church of Charenton, and heard the 91st Psalm expounded. It came home to him with power, and he was enabled to close with the 2nd verse: 'I will say of the Lord, he is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.' At his death he declared to his Christian friends that, in the after changes of his life, he found the promises one by one fulfilled. In the civil wars, then so fierce in France, he was kept in a composed spirit, and had most convincing deliverances from most imminent hazards. 'And now,' he said, 'I have no more to wait for but the fulfilling of these last words of the psalm, "I will show him my salvation," which with confidence I look for.'-Beza was born 1519, and died 1605. In early life he was light-minded and devoted to worldly pleasure, but, after the change he records, he became, next to Calvin, the most influential leader in the Reformed Church. His long life was

spent in preaching, writing and administration, with a diligence peculiar to that age. His translation of the New Testament into Latin came into universal use among Protestants; and the French Psalter, which had such an effect on the spirit of the Huguenots, Owes more than a half of its version to his poetic genius, the rest being the work of Clement Marot. The church of Charenton, associated with the memory of Beza, and many of the most eminent ministers of the French Reformation, was an immense structure in the suburbs of Paris, near the junction of the Seine and Marne, where liberty for Protestant worship was enjoyed. Few edifices ever gathered round them. memories of so many eloquent and devoted preachers and pious worshippers. At last, when the Edict of Nantes was revoked by Louis XIV., it was razed to the ground amid the tears and groans of the despairing Huguenots. A picture of the scene, struck off and circulated in numberless prints, with reference to Ps. lxxiv. ver. 7, served to keep alive their grief and love: They have cast fire into thy sanctuary; they have defiled by casting down the dwelling-place of thy name to the ground.' A century afterwards the rebound of the blow shattered the French monarch's throne.

Psalm 92

Is called by Dante (Purg. xxviii. 80), Il Salmo Delectasti, because, in the Vulgate, the 4th verse

begins with the word, 'Thou hast made me glad.' A beautiful female form, representing the higher life, is introduced as saying, 'She is so happy because she can sing like the psalm Delectasti, “Thou, Lord, hast made me glad through thy work."'

Ver. 12. Casaubon was one of the most learned men of his age, and truly devout. He was so humble and reticent, that some doubted his religious spirit; but there is an incident he records in his diary which reveals it, and which shows the hold the book of Psalms had on the hearts of Christians of that time. He and his wife, residing in Paris, wished to go to the Protestant Church of Charenton. There was only a frail old boat to take them up the Seine, but they ventured it rather than lose the service. 'On embarking,' he says, 'my wife, as her custom was, began to sing the Psalms. We had finished Ps. xci. and had reached Ps. xcii. ver. 12, when the boat sank. With difficulty we saved our lives, but the psalmbook, which had been a wedding gift to my wife twenty-two years before, was lost. We reached in time for the second service; and on looking into the book of a young man near me to see what was being sung, I found it was Ps. lxxxvi. 13, "for great is thy mercy towards me: and thou hast delivered my soul from the lowest grave." I thought immediately of the word of St. Ambrose, that "those who listen to, or read, the Psalms aright may find as if they had been indited expressly for themselves."

Psalm 94.

Vers. 9, 10. He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? he that formed the eye, shall he not see? he that teacheth man knowledge, shall not he know?' These verses made a strong impression on the mind of Sophia the Electress of Hanover, a woman of decided mental power, and were adopted with approbation by her friend the philosopher Leibnitz in his opposition to Atheism. The principle

on which he reasoned was, that as the stream cannot rise above its fountain, intelligence in man implies an intelligent source. Thought must come from thought. Descartes had already given expression to the same idea in his Meditations, III., 'Now it is manifest by the light of nature that there must be as much reality in the efficient cause as in the effect; for whence could the effect draw its reality but from the cause? And how could the cause communicate the power to it, if it had it not in itself? And from this it follows, not only that nothing can be produced from nothing, but also that what is more perfect cannot be a result of, and dependent on, what is less perfect.'

Psalm 95.

This psalm, the Venite exultemus Domino, O come, let us sing unto the Lord,' was the chant of the Templars, the Knights of the Red Cross, when during

the Crusades they entered into battle with the Saracens for the conquest of Jerusalem.

In a different pirit, the great missionary, Christian Schwartz, took the 6th verse, and put it over the entrance of his new church in Tranquebar: 'O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.' He called the church Bethlehem, as his predecessor, Ziegenbalg, had built one with the name Jerusalem, which was filled with native converts. More devoted labourers never entered the mission field. The death of Ziegenbalg, the first Protestant missionary to India, was one of rapture, departing at the age of thirty-six. His closing words were: 'Christ says, "Father, I will that where I am, there shall also my servant be." He then put his hand to his eyes, and exclaimed, 'How is it all so clear? It seems as if the sun were shining in my eyes.' He then asked that the hymn Jesus meine Zuversicht, 'Jesus my trust,' should be sung, and died while they sang it.

Psalm 96.

Julian, the nephew of Constantine, succeeded to the Empire A.D. 361, renounced Christianity, which had been established by his uncle, and devoted a brief but energetic reign of two years to the attempted restoration of paganism. He sought to put a new spirit of philosophy into the old forms, and, without return