words of
eternal life.

It is worth noting from which portion of the Old Testament Jesus
fetched the word on which He stayed up His soul in this supreme moment.
The quotation is from the thirty-first Psalm. The other great word
uttered on the cross to which I have already alluded was also taken
from one of the Psalms--the twenty-second. This is undoubtedly the
most precious of all the books of the Old Testament. It is a book
penned as with the life-blood of its authors; it is the record of
humanity's profoundest sorrows and sublimest ecstasies; it is the most
perfect expression which has ever been given to experience; it has been
the _vade-mecum_ of all the saints; and to know and love it is one of
the best signs of spirituality.

Jesus knew where to go in the Bible for the language that suited Him;
for He had been a diligent student of it all His days. He heard it in
the home of His childhood; He listened to it in the synagogue; probably
He got the use of the synagogue rolls and hung over it in secret. He
knew it through and through. Therefore, when He became a preacher, His
language was saturated with it, and in controversy, by the apt use of
it, He could put to shame those who were its professional students.
But in His private life likewise He employed it in every exigency. He
fought with it the enemy in the wilderness and overcame him; and now,
in the supreme need of a dying hour, it stood Him in good stead. It is
to those who, like Jesus, have hidden God's Word in their hearts that
it is a present help in every time of need; and, if we wish to stay
ourselves upon it in dying, we ought to make it the man of our counsel
in living.

It is worth observing in what manner Jesus made this quotation from the
Psalter: He added something at the beginning and He omitted something
at the close. At the beginning He added, "Father." This is not in the
psalm. It could not have been. In the Old Testament the individual
had not begun yet to address God by this name, though God was called
the Father of the nation as a whole. The new consciousness of God
which Christ introduced into the world is embodied in this word, and,
by prefixing it to the citation, He gave the verse a new colouring. We
may, then, do this with the Old Testament: we may put New-Testament
meaning into it. Indeed, in connection with this very verse we have a
still more remarkable illustration of the same treatment. Stephen, the
first martyr of