ed. In the Law the Gospel lay hid, and the Christian Church
felt in the old words of devotion no outworn or alien accents, but
living utterances of the Spirit of Life, which renewed their youth with
hers. So from the beginning she found strength and comfort in her
warfare for the truth, in the praises of Israel. From the beginning
she based her ordered worship on the services of Temple and Synagogue.
The choirs of the Catholic Church find their most lasting and
characteristic voice not in hymn or anthem, but in--

"The chorus intoned
As the Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned."

{16}

II. A second great principle of the Christian use of the Psalter will
be found in its humanism. The Psalms are profoundly human. They
sympathise with the soul of man in all his varied efforts after God.
They find a voice for him in his battles for truth and right, in his
moments of defeat as well as his victories, in his doubts no less than
his certainties. They put words into his mouth as he contemplates the
variety, the beauty, and the law of nature, or the injustice, the
obstinacy, the treachery of men. The Psalms make his bed in his
sickness; they strengthen him in the inward agonies of faith; they go
with him to the gates of death, and farther still, even to God's "holy
hill and His dwelling"; they point him to the eternal morning, when he
will wake up and be satisfied with God's likeness (_cf._ Pss. civ., x.,
xli., lxxvii., lxxxviii., xliii., xvii.).

We have all no doubt felt something of this abiding sympathy of the
Psalter. Dean Church expressed it very remarkably in a letter written
by him shortly before his death:

The thought of what is to take the place of things here is with me all
day long, but it is with a strange mixture of reality and unreality,
and I wish it did me all the good it might. Books are not
satisfactory--at least, I have always found it {17} so. It seems to me
that there is nothing equal to letting the Psalms fall on one's ears,
till at last a verse starts into meaning, which it is sure to do in the
end (_Life and Letters_, p. 409, ed. 1897).

The Psalter has in this way endeared itself to many generations of
struggling and dying men, and appealed even to many who were alien from
its spirit. It has interwoven itself with striking scenes and moments
of history, as when Hildebrand chanted "He that dwelleth in heaven
shall laugh them to scorn" (ii.) before the encircli