h serious difficulties. They contain, at
least some of them, historic allusions of a character so marked and
circumstantial that it is hard to believe that the writer had not in
view his own personal situation. In some of them, moreover, the writer
makes confession to God of his sins. Psa. 40:12; 69:5.

They who apply these psalms exclusively to Christ assume that
these confessions of sin are made in a _vicarious_ way, the
Messiah assuming the character of a sinner because "the Lord
hath laid on him the iniquities of us all." Isa. 53:6. But the
form of these confessions forbids such an interpretation. When
the psalmist says: "Mine iniquities have taken hold upon me;" "O
God, thou knowest my foolishness, and my sins are not hid from
thee," we cannot understand such language of any thing else than
personal sinfulness. It is true that the Messiah bore our
iniquities, and that God "made him to be sin for us, who knew no
sin;" but the Saviour nowhere speaks or can speak of "mine
iniquities," "my foolishness," and "my sins."

(2.) According to another class of interpreters, the subject of these
psalms, particularly of those which describe the Messiah as a sufferer,
is an _ideal personage_, namely, the congregation of the righteous
considered not separately from Christ, but in Christ their head; or,
which amounts to the same thing, Christ considered, not in his simple
personality apart from the church, but Christ with his body the church.
The contents of these psalms are then applied, _according to their
nature_, to Christ alone, to believers alone who are his members, or to
Christ in the fullest sense and believers in a subordinate sense. Much
might be said in favor of this view; yet it labors under the difficulty
already indicated, that one cannot well read the psalms in question,
with their marked historic allusions, without the conviction that the
author had in view--not indirectly, but immediately--his own personal
situation.

(3.) There remains a third, and perhaps preferable view, which may be
called the _typical view_, maintained, as is well known, by Melanchthon,
Calvin, and many later expositors. This begins with the well-established
principle that David (in a less eminent degree his successors also on
the throne, so far as they were true to their office) was a
divinely-constituted type of the Messiah, not only in his office as the
earthly head of God's kingdom, but