chosen people?

ANSWER: In the affirmative to both parts.

On May 1, 1910, in an audience graciously granted to both Most Reverend
Consultors Secretaries His Holiness approved the foregoing answers and
ordered that they be published.

Rome, May 1, 1910.

PULCRANUS VIGOUROUX, P.S.S.

LAURENTIUS JANSSENS, O.S.B.

Consultors Secretaries.

The Psalms were always dear to the hearts of Christians. Our Lord died
with the words of a psalm on His sacred lips: "Into thy hands I commend
my spirit" (Psalm 30, v. 6). Millions of dying Christians have repeated
His great prayer. On the Church's very birthday, when St. Peter preached
the first Christian sermon, he had three texts and two of them were from
the Psalms (Acts II.). To an educated and rigid Pharisee like St. Paul
they were a treasure house of teaching. To the early Christians the
Psalms were a prayer book, for there was no Christian literature. It was
twenty-five years after the Ascension before the first books of the New
Testament were written. Hence St. Paul and St. James tell their fellow
Christians to use the Psalms in worship (Ephesians, v. 19; Colos. iii.
16; I. St. James 5-13). Some of the greatest of the early Christian
writers and saints, Origen, St. Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, St.
Ambrose, St. Chrysostom, Bede, and St. Augustine all studied the psalms
deeply and wrote learned commentaries on them. The works of later saints
abound in happy and beautiful quotations from these religious poems.
With them, too, as with those holy people of whom St. Chrysostom wrote,
"David is first, last and midst." For many years no priest was ordained
who could not recite the whole Psalter without the aid of a book, This
veneration of the inspired words deserves respect and imitation. The
learned Calmet (1672-1757) writing of the universal esteem and study of
the Psalms, said that then there existed more than a thousand
commentaries on them. Since then, the number has been doubled; so great
and universal is the reverence and esteem in which this book of
Scripture is held. To conclude this very long note on the Psalms I quote
the quaint words of a mediaeval poet. It shows how the saints of old
found their Master in the songs of His great ancestor:--

Rithmis et sensu verborum consociatum
Psalterium Jesu, sic est opus hoc vocitatum,
Qui legit intente, quocunque dolore prematur,
Sentiet inde bonum, dolor ejus et alleviatur;
Ergo pius legat hoc e