prayer to the triumphant hymn of victory. To this we may add that it is without equal for the richness of its contents. It embraces nature and history, heaven and earth, the world around and the world within us, the experience of each and all from the darkest abyss of trial to the summit of celestial joy. It is unequalled in the depth of its secret soulexperience, and the power of expressing it—not the palpable and superficial, but the root-secrets of the inmost life, ideal and real, abstract and concrete, universal and individual—and so it possesses for the understanding of each reader and for the inquiry of the commentator a growing attraction towards something ever fresh and new. If it is the peculiarity of the classic that the oftener it is read the more beautiful and full of meaning it becomes, then are the psalms classic in the highest degree.'

Dr. John Eadie in his English Bible, after relating how the Gospels were rendered in early ages into our mother tongue, goes on to say: 'But the favourite portion of Scripture for translation in these times, as in all times, was the Psalms; and one can scarcely wonder at the preference. The melody of the Psalmist has many moods, but the song is ever the genuine outburst of his heart, and the reader is lured into living sympathy with it; nay, as it throbs underneath the page, he is brought into immediate fellowship. with the singer and not with his shadow. For the

singer himself, in his various changes, is embodied in his psalms, whether he sinks in deep contrition, or soars away in spiritual rapture; whether he extols mercy, or sinks into awe before judgment; or whether he lays his sword and sceptre at the foot of the throne in offer of suit and service, or in acknowledgment that the kingdom and the victory are alike from God. The Psalter is the poetry of spiritual life; its beauty, power, and freshness never fail, for it does not consist of abstract impersonal effusions, or of subjective theological dogmas. Difference of age and country at once fades away. Therefore the Psalms have always been cherished companions, not simply because they are a body of divine truth, bearing on man's highest interests, but because they come home to human experiences, and tenderly touch them on so many points; because they are not only the true elements of public worship, but may also be murmured in earnest soliloquy as the spirit of confidence and joyousness lifts itself to God.'

METRICAL VERSIONS OF THE PSALMS.

IT is comparatively late, not indeed until about the period of the Reformation, that metrical versions of the Psalms appear. There is abundant evidence that psalms were used in the primitive Church, not only for private edification, but for common worship. Our Lord gave the example at the institution of the communion, Matt. xxvi. 30, when it is said that, at the close, he and his disciples sung an hymn. It was, no doubt, a psalm, part of cxv.-cxviii., with which the Jews were accustomed to terminate the celebration of the Passover. Other sacred songs, besides the Psalms, were employed by the primitive Church, of which some believe they find traces in Acts iv. 24, Eph. v. 14, 1 Tim. iii. 16, the Christian songs in the book of Revelation, and elsewhere. The hymns which, as Pliny tells us, in the beginning of the second century, the Christians met together to sing to Christ as to a God, must have been of this character; and they remain to us, both in Greek and Latin, from an early period. But still the chief material for praise was found in the Psalter. There were different

ways of employing it, reading, chanting, singing entire, or by responses, and in these the whole community of the faithful took part. As time went on, however, and as the New Testament view of the priesthood of all Christians was lost, the priests and officials shut the people out from active participation in the worship; and so it continued for dark centuries. The Psalms were still the spiritual nourishment of some in private, for the Council of Toulouse in 1229, which interdicted the Bible to the laity, left them the use of the Psalter; but their public share in it was for a long season withdrawn. When light grew, song grew with it; and as the sun is welcomed by the birds before his rays are above the horizon, so the faint fore-glimmerings of the Reformation were heralded by psalms and hymns among the people. The name Lollards was given to the witnesses for evangelical truth in the Low Countries, and in England and Scotland, from their habit of singing, and is connected with our word lull-to sing softly; they were the sweet singers. Song has been a feature of every new up-springing of truth, or marked deliverance at the hand of God. It showed itself at the birth of Christianity, the return from Babylon, the triumphs of the reign of David, the deliverance from Egyptian bondage, and it is repeated in every revival: 'She shall sing there as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt,' Hos. ii. 15. We know little of what these

N

Lollards sang, for most of the information we have about them comes from their enemies; but as we approach the Reformation, we have more precise knowledge of the sacred songs of those separated from the Romish Church.

Two things marked them:

they were in the mother tongue, and they took the form known as rhyme. The necessity for both of these had been slowly growing up. The only literary language of the West, for a long period, had been the Latin, and, as the mass of the people were ignorant of it, they were shut out from sources of knowledge ; but now national languages had grown up fit to carry all the stores of thought, and the people demanded entrance to spiritual provision in their mother tongue. And as the Bible now spoke to them in their own language, it behoved them to praise God in like manner. But songs in the mother tongue implied a different poetical measure from that which prevailed in the classic poetry of Greece and Rome. The old Latin hymn-writers began to feel very early that the Christian spirit needed something more free and natural than the fettered style of the Roman lyrists, and they gradually found their way to a simpler rhythm, which many believe to be the original form poetry takes among all nations. However this may be, when the people claimed their share in the worship of the Church, it was in song through the mother tongue, and song fashioned according to what we call rhyme. This at least as a rule; and one benefit of