t feels itself in harmony with an
increasing purpose of God. The great revelation to Moses of the Name
of God, "I will be that I will be" (Ex. iii. 14, R.V. marg.), left its
mark on all subsequent history. So the Old Testament writers, under
every imaginable difficulty and persecution and reverse, among the
treacheries of friends, as well as the attacks of a hostile heathen
world, are ever straining forward to a coming of God and a Kingdom of
God. Like the spirits in Virgil's vision:

Stabant orantes primi transmittere cursum,
Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.[7]

{20}

The Psalms throughout delight in this attitude. The most casual reader
is struck by the constancy with which an outlook of hope and joy
succeeds to the sorrow and stress of the opening verses of Psalm after
Psalm. Even the darkest have their gleams of promise. And so the
Christian Church, having learned what the hope of Israel meant, found
the Psalms come naturally to her lips. She could sing with fuller
meaning of the rising up again of the righteous (xli.), of the
deliverances from the stormy waters and from the wandering out of the
way in the wilderness (cvii.), of the bringing up of the sufferer "from
the deep of the earth again" (lxxi.). The Psalter was and is to the
Christian not merely the reflection of his characteristic sorrows and
trials, but the book of the Resurrection, of the restitution of all
things, of the doing away of the imperfect and the coming of the
perfect.

Thou shalt shew me the path of life; in Thy presence
is the fulness of joy:
And at Thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.
(xvi. 12.)

Thus the Psalter is ours, for it is the new song of gratitude to Him
Who has given us the {21} Catholic Faith; it is ours because it is the
book of Him Who has redeemed us by making Himself one with us, and
"taking the manhood into God"; it is ours because it has not merely the
human consecration of ages of Christian use, but it is the channel
which the Holy Spirit, Who dwells in the Church, seems deliberately to
have chosen in which to make His ineffable intercession for the sons of
God who wait for their adoption, "the redemption of the body" (Rom.
viii. 19-27). Appreciation of the Psalter grows with the devout use of
it. The obligation to recite it month by month in the daily office is
one of the best gifts the Church has given to her priests; and both
priest and laity alike will