-

the Unity of which our Lord spoke as the argument whereby to extort the world's belief that Christendom can scarcely show. But,' it will be said, 'Christians are one invisibly. They are bound by threads too fine to be seen by worldly eyes, by cords which are as light as air and as strong as adamant.' Thank God, there is a truth in this. But the unity of which Jesus speaks is visible. It is a unity which even the world can see. If we were as the Angels of God; if we were disembodied spirits; if we had the sight which, as some assert, can perceive the flame which runs along the magnetic threads that go from heart to heart; this invisible unity might be enough. But it was of material and concrete beings, who see through eyes of flesh, that our Lord asked that by the sight of the unity of believers they also might be brought to believe. And therefore an invisible unity is not enough.

III.

For us, the Psalter, with its grand anticipations, with its predelineations of the Church, speaks out against the notion that Christ was to become Incarnate merely to teach a doctrine or found a school of philosophy. The Christian Church is in the Psalter as really as Christ, the Body as really as the Head. Still there is one standing before us who looks up with eyes of loving admiration, and exclaims in (y'sudhatho), 'His foundation is in the holy mountains.' The City of God-that City of which we are all citizens in so far as we are Christians-is no airy sketch, no unsubstantial form. It is not a chain of Lecture Rooms or Sunday Schools-a democracy swayed

by rhetoricians. It is the 'grand Church,' the people of strength,' the city that is 'compacted together,'3 the 'city of strength,' the city of the Lord of Hosts, the city of our God.'5 That city is built up by its citizens. 'Ipsi sunt lapides, qui sunt cives; lapides enim vivi sunt.'6

Thus the Psalter has varied tones. Some prophesy of Christ Risen and Glorified. Soine, we have dared to affirm, are the voice of His agony or triumph. Some contain the germs of great dogmas. Some, as their name implies, are for thoughtful meditation. Some have words of fire for the praises of God. Some are cries of penitence. But there is one continuous strain, ever prophesying of the Church and of the relation of the individual soul to it, and through it to God-of grace, which is, indeed, intensely personal, but which is bestowed upon the individual as a member of a favoured city and a great organisation. There are certain images recurring again and again. We might well wonder at their meaning being hidden from the spiritual perceptions of good men, if we did not know what local influences are round the sectarian

1

7

2 δη ἐν ἐκκλησίᾳ πολλῇ, LXX; In ecclesia grandi,' S. Hieron.

life. There are times when the keenest eyes cannot see St. Paul's in the fog. These images tell us of a Community, attractive, popular, peaceful, universal. It is the old dispensation transformed and glorified. Its origin is pointed out by Sion and Jerusalem ;-its organisation and objectivity by the city of God; its splendour, sway, and union under Christ its Lord by the Kingdom. It is true that for every soul religion is a personal thing; that without conscience feeling a burden, and faith laying it on a Saviour, we can neither fitly sing the Psalter below nor chant the new song above. But do not let us say that nothing, after all, is lost by the Christian incivisme which drops out of sight this element in the Psalms. Every Article in the Creed neglected or denied, like every Article exaggerated, has its revenge. There are often for communities four degrees in the descent:-No dogmatic Christianity, no historical Church, no historical Christianity, no Christianity at all. If we lose nothing else, we lose the courage given by the sense of being members of a great host, with a glorious history and magnificent prospects. In 1859, after Magenta, a vast army marched through a country thickly covered with shrubs and small trees. As the soldiers plodded wearily on, none could see more than a few hundred comrades on the right or left. Then at last a vast open plain was reached; instead of marching, corps after corps, they were deployed across the plain simultaneously in line of battle. The setting sun gleamed upon miles of burnished arms and glittering standards; and the eye of every soldier flashed and his cheek flushed at the magnificence of the spectacle. They

were really as strong and as close before; but each fraction had a depressing sense of isolation. They now became aware of their strength. The next day was Solferino. Such courage is given to the soldier of Christ by the visible unity of the Church to which he belongs. And the Psalter is the music of that great host as it marches on to victory. Psalm after Psalm peals grandly out of the Kingdom, the City, the Bride-of Sion and Jerusalem. One string is mute or broken for those who do not bear within them the idea of the living Church. For such, as they read, or hear, or sing, one great thought fades into the shadows of the past; subsides into the dust of antiquarianism; falls back into the pigeon-holes of history; recedes from the Catholic, the Spiritual, and the Eternal, into the local, temporary, sectarian, and national. The accomplishment shrinks into the type, the reality into a distant memory. See,' cries St. Augustine, 'of what city he sayeth that very glorious things are spoken of it. The earthly Jerusalem is destroyed. It has endured the violence of its enemies; it is laid even with the ground; it is not what it was; it expressed the image of what it was to represent, and passed away like a shadow.'2 Psalm after Psalm (pre-eminently the 46th, the 48th, 87th, 122nd, 133rd) bears witness to the Church. As we hear, our hearts may pass onward from the historical Jerusalem, the Church Militant, to the city of the Living God; and upward to the Church Triumphant, to Jerusalem the Golden, to

Where beyond these voices there is Peace.

Duc d'Harcourt, Speech at Falaise, 1875.

2 Enarrat. in Ps. lxxxvii.

Ψαλμὸς . . . Ἐκκλησίας φωνή . . . οὗτος τὰς ἑορτὰς φαιδρύνει.

St. Basil, Homil. in Ps. i.

A TRAVELLER has observed that the great Cathedral of Damascus is still standing. But the Christian Church has been turned into a mosque. Over one magnificent portal remains legibly inscribed in Greek characters the thirteenth verse of the 145th Psalm, with the addition of one single word

Η βασιλεία σου, Χριστέ, βασιλεία πάντων τῶν αἰώνων.

There stands the clause, in letters unobliterated by time. or hostile hands; unheeded by the haughty ignorance of the Moslem; saddening, for the moment at least, every Christian who can read it as he passes by, 'Thy Kingdom, O Christ! is an everlasting Kingdom.'1

This inscription at least affords evidence how those who reared the Church interpreted and applied the 145th Psalm, and with it many other parts of the Psalter. It was for them an act of worship addressed to our Incarnate Lord. To one employed in the task which occupies us at present

Tristram, Holy Land, p. 618.