ance has left its mark on the
Psalms. The rout of the Assyrian armies is commemorated in one at
least, the 76th:

{95}

The proud are robbed, they have slept their sleep:
And all the men whose hands were mighty have found nothing.
At Thy rebuke, O God of Jacob:
Both the chariot and horse are fallen.

The secret of victory preludes the Psalm. Jerusalem is the seat of
God's special presence:

At Salem is His tabernacle:
And His dwelling in Sion.

The 46th may also refer to the same event. The flood of heathen
invasion is breaking itself in vain against the walls of the city of
God:

God is in the midst of her, therefore shall she not be removed:
God shall help her, and that right early.

The great historical Psalm, the 78th, speaks at its close of the hill
of Sion and the Temple "built there on high" as coeval with the earth
itself; its foundation is "like the ground which He hath made
continually."[5] And the later {96} Psalms seem even to unite Sion and
Jerusalem and the sacred nation with the very eternity of God Himself:

This shall be My rest for ever.
* * * * *
The Lord thy God, O Sion, shall be King for evermore.
* * * * *
Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem:
Praise thy God, O Sion.
For He hath made fast the bars of thy gates:
And hath blessed thy children within thee.
(cxxxii. 15, cxlvi. 10, cxlvii. 12, 13.)

The end of earthly Jerusalem, when it came, was no less significant
than her long continuance. The double destruction of the city by the
Roman armies (A.D. 70 and A.D. 135) was consummated by the strangeness
of the failure of Julian the Apostate to rebuild and re-establish the
Temple; flames burst out from the foundations and the workmen fled in
terror.[6] But long before this the Christian Church had recognised
that in her world-wide citizenship and her worship, confined no longer
{97} (as the Lord had foretold) either to Jerusalem or a mountain in
Samaria, she had inherited in fuller measure these promises of
continuance. Had it not been said, when the great Apostle made his
confession of Christ's Divinity, "Upon this rock I will build My
Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it"? And in
this consciousness the Catholic Church rightly appropriated to herself
the songs of Sion's confidence. Just as early Christian art set above
the altars the figure of the living Christ enthroned