There is the sea, so great and wide and broad,
Therein are things moving innumerable,
Living creatures, both small and great.

There go the ships,

There is Leviathan whom thou hast formed to play therein. These wait all upon thee,

That thou mayest give them their food in due season. Thou givest them-they gather;

Thou openest thine hand-they are filled with good; Thou hidest thy face-they are troubled,

Thou gatherest in their breath-they die,

And turn again to their dust.

Thou sendest forth thy breath, they are created,
And thou renewest the face of the earth.

May the glory of the Lord endure for ever;
May the Lord rejoice in his works!
Who looketh on the earth, and it trembleth,
Who toucheth the mountains, and they smoke!

I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live,

I will make melody to my God while I have my being.

May the sinners be consumed out of the earth,

And may the wicked be no more.

Bless thou the Lord, O my soul.

Parts of the Psalm should be compared with the account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis (Part I, p. 559).

In the second stanza the poet conceives the earth formed and fashioned, but still covered with primaeval waters. As the waters subsided, the mountains appeared above them, and the valleys seemed to sink. The line ('the mountains rose, the valleys sank') is parenthetical.

My friend Mr. Burkitt has suggested an ingenious emendation and correction in this passage of the Psalm which he has allowed me to mention here. He points out that, in accordance with the description in the first chapter of Genesis, a current notion of creation was that the earth was originally covered with waters (the primaeval 'deep'). These waters were partly driven by God into the ocean, and partly pent up above the firmament. Therefore the divine work of creation was not to cover the earth with the deep, but precisely the reverse. Hence, by a small emendation of one Hebrew word, Mr. Burkitt renders :

:

THE SINNER AND HIS FUTURE

He founded earth on its bases,

It shall not be shaken for ever and ever.
The deep as a garment covered it up,

The waters stood upon the mountains.
At thy rebuke they fled;

At the voice of thy thunder they hastened away;
They went up mountains, they went down valleys,
To whatever place thou hast founded for them.

635

The last distich would then mean that some of the waters rushed up from below, up and beyond the mountain-tops into the sky (the waters above the firmament'), while others were driven off into the sea.

'Cony' is an old word for rabbit. (It is the same word as the Latin Cuniculus, or the German Kaninchen.) But the animal meant in the Hebrew is not really a rabbit at all. It does not burrow, but lives in crannies or holes. It is allied to the rhinoceros, but is like a rabbit in size and appearance. The Latin name is Hierax Syriacus; it has been called in English the rock badger. Herbs' 'include all vegetable foods, which, as in the first chapter of Genesis, are regarded as the natural food of the human race. Corn, wine, and oil are the three great products of the soil of Palestine.' 'Service' means 'use.'

In the last stanza the poet remembers that there is one glaring disharmony in God's beautiful world: it is the sinner and his sin. The Psalmist has no philosophical theory or explanation of sin; he only realizes that it is a blot upon the earth. But the sinners whom he has in his mind are presumably the external foes of Israel, and the apostates or indifferentists within the pale. A touch of human anger mingles with his prayer. Contrast the Talmudic story quoted in Part I, p. 601. To the Psalmist the lovingkindness of the Lord is limited to those who keep his covenant, and we ourselves are far from believing that there is not a necessary difference between the good and the bad, whether in this life or in another. The supremest bliss can surely only be known unto the good, whether on earth or beyond the grave. But who is wholly good, and who is wholly bad, and is there not hope for the vilest and the worst? Had the 'good' been born of evil parents and grown up in vile environment, might they not have turned out 'bad' Not merely or mostly for those who do his commandments, or rather not for them in so far as they do his commandments (for who does them all or always ?), are God's lovingkindness and pity required. Nay, it is the sinner and the outcast who may claim them. The prayer, may the sinners be consumed,' is in contradiction to the statement: Who forgiveth all thine iniquities,' for assuredly we are sinners all. And the statement,

'Who forgiveth all thine iniquities,' is to be thus interpreted: at last he will purify thy soul.

'I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live.' Compare the striking close of the striking chapter of Epictetus on Providence (Arrian's Discourses of Epictetus, I. xvi): 'If I were a nightingale, Ì would do the work of a nightingale; if I were a swan, I would do like a swan. But now I am a rational creature, and I ought to praise God: this is my work; I do it, nor will I desert this post, so long as I am allowed to keep it; and I exhort you to join in this same song.'

§ 5. The sixty-fifth Psalm: Te decet hymnus.'-The following Psalm (lxv) has been placed in this group mainly because of its concluding stanzas. It might equally well have been placed among the Psalms of thanksgiving. But thanksgiving and praise run into each other. Professor Cheyne describes our Psalm as a song of praise, composed in the spring, when the "pastures" were already green, the "meadows clothed with flocks, and the "valleys" covered with swelling corn. Not long before, a great national deliverance (from one of the troubles that befell Judah, say, under Artaxerxes I, 465-425) had probably occurred, but this is not directly mentioned. The most prominent blessings in the mind of the Psalmist are the early and the latter rain.'

Praise is meet for thee, O God, in Zion:

And unto thee let the vow be performed. O thou that hearest prayer,

Unto thee may all flesh come.

Iniquities prevail against us:

Our transgressions thou wilt purge away. Happy is the man whom thou choosest,

And causest to approach unto thee, that he may dwell in thy courts:

That we may be satisfied with the goodness of thy house,
Even of thy holy temple.

By terrible things in righteousness dost thou answer us,
O God of our salvation;

Who art the confidence of all the ends of the earth,

And of the islands that are afar;

Who by his strength setteth fast the mountains,

Being girded with power;

Who stilleth the roaring of the seas,

The roaring of their waves, and the tumult of the peoples;

'O THOU THAT HEAREST PRAYER

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So that they who dwell in the uttermost parts are afraid at thy tokens:

Thou makest the risings of the morning and evening to rejoice.

Thou hast visited the earth, and watered it;

Thou hast greatly enriched it:

With the river of God, which is full of water,
Thou hast prepared them corn.

Thou hast watered the furrows thereof abundantly;
Thou crushest its clods;

Thou hast made it soft with showers;

Thou hast blessed the sprouting thereof.
Thou hast crowned the year of thy goodness;
And thy paths drop with fatness.

Yea, the pastures of the prairie do drop;
And the hills gird themselves with joy,
The meadows are clothed with flocks;
And the valleys are covered over with corn;
They shout for joy, they also sing.

The tenses are

'Iniquities prevail.' A very obscure verse. uncertain. If to translate by the present be right, does it mean: Of themselves and by their own weight, our iniquities would be too heavy for us to get rid of. It is thou, O God, who must cancel them, and remit the punishment which is their due. Or should we translate, 'had prevailed,' and 'thou purgest,' or 'hast purged'? And is the meaning then: Our iniquities caused our calamities, but thou hast delivered us of these, and this deliverance betokens the forgiveness of our sins?

"Thy courts.' 'By the "temple" and its "courts" the Psalmist means not merely the temple in Zion, but also that spiritual temple of which the Psalmist had conceived the idea while using to the full the means of grace provided for him in the visible sanctuary. On the other hand, by the "goodness" (i.e. the good things) of God's house, he cannot mean in any degree the meats of the sacrificial feasts; he refers to the blessings common to all the true Israel, as well those of the material as those of the spiritual order' (Cheyne).

'Who art the confidence.' 'The wonderful history of Israel (such is the faith of the Psalmist) has impressed, or is sure to impress, the nations outside first with fear, and then with confidence' (Cheyne).

'Setteth fast the mountains.' 'The God of nature and the God of history are one. There may be also a secondary symbolic reference, the mountains suggesting the colossal power, and the seas the restless character of the world-empires which so often troubled Israel' (Cheyne).

"The river of God.' A mythic survival. The rain was supposed to come from a heavenly ocean or river beyond the sky.

"The year of thy goodness.' 'The fruitful rain promises a rich harvest. Hence the year may already be called a year of God's goodness' (Baethgen).

On the

The Midrash on this Psalm has some pretty thoughts. verse, 'Unto thee may all flesh come,' it observes: A king of flesh and blood can listen to two or three persons at once but not to everybody, but the Holy One, even though all flesh prays at once, hearkens to the prayer of each. The ear of flesh and blood becomes satiated with hearing, and the eye becomes satiated with seeing, but the eye of the Holy One is never sated of seeing, nor is his ear sated of hearing.' And on the verse, 'By terrible things in righteousness dost thou answer us,' the Midrash has a quaint discussion on the difference between prayer and repentance. One Rabbi says: "The gates of prayer are sometimes open and sometimes shut, but the gates of repentance are always open. As the sea is never shut, but every one who wishes to bathe in it can bathe therein at any hour according to his will, so is it also with repentance. At all times when a man repents, the Holy One accepts his repentance, but for prayer there are fixed seasons and times.' But other Rabbis say: The gates of prayer are never shut likewise.'

§ 6. The thirty-sixth Psalm.-Perhaps the noblest and most spiritual praise of God in the whole Psalter is contained in a portion of Psalm xxxvi. The verses which now precede it, here omitted, may originally not have formed a part of the Psalm. Anyway, one is glad to have these five verses by themselves. I have also omitted the last three verses of the Psalm.

Thy lovingkindness, O Lord, is unto the heavens ;
And thy faithfulness reacheth unto the skies.
Thy righteousness is like the mountains of God;
Thy judgements are like the great deep:
Man and beast thou savest, O Lord.

How precious is thy lovingkindness, O God!

The children of men take refuge under the shadow of thy wings.