like our neighbours, nor by neglecting Church, nor by staying away from Holy Communion, nor by inattention to prayers, nor by thinking little about sins, that we can be saved. No: in the Church of Christ, clinging to Christ in faith, proving that faith by works of living love; constant in prayers, both private at home, and public in the Church; feeding on the blessed Body and Blood of Christ in the spiritual feast of Holy Communion-this, and this only, is the way pointed out to us in Holy Scripture, whereby we who have once been brought into the great net of God may at the last be, for His sake, acknowledged as His own.

May God give us His grace to lay it to our hearts in time! while it is yet day; for the night cometh when no man can work. Death cometh, when our trial will be May no false teaching, no feeling of foolish independence, no love of sin, keep any of us from giving ourselves up to Christ in body and soul in His Church.

over.

If it may be—and but for our own perverseness and love of evil it surely may be, yes, and it will be—may we, one and all, clinging to Christ in His Church in our lives, be found in Him at the last, clothed in His righteousness, accepted for His sake, received as His repentant, forgiven, faithful people to glory unspeakable in Heaven for ever and ever.

с

E will lay me down in Peace

PSALM iv.

8. I will lay me down in peace, and take my rest; for it is Thou, Lord, only that makest me dwell in safety.

HE Book of the Psalms of David has formed part of

THE

the

the worship of God almost, we may believe, from

very time of the building of the Temple at Jerusalem. The Jewish service of the Temple consisted chiefly of portions of it, as the prayers of the modern Jews are taken almost wholly from it. The Christians undoubtedly used it in public service in the times of the Apostles; and in the following ages it was repeated so often at Church, that the most unlearned Christians. could say great portions of it by heart to themselves while engaged in their ordinary work.

It is not surprising that the Jews should have prized it so highly, and used it so much: for David was their own great king, the pride of their nation; and their patriotism would naturally lead them even to magnify the

beauty and the value of so precious a store of hymns which he had bequeathed to them.

Perhaps it is somewhat surprising, at the first thought, that Christians have used it so much: for it is, of course, a Jewish book, and the actual truths of the Gospel are not, of course, they are not,-expressed in it in plain terms.

But the truth is, that it is a Divine Book, and plainly written,―not perhaps that David himself knew fully what he was doing,-but by the Holy Spirit who bade him write it for the Christian use and instruction of the Church of God in all ages.

It is a most wonderful book. Perhaps those people who know it only a little, who glance at it now and then only, and do not take the trouble to understand it, may not think so: they think it more or less beautiful, or ancient or curious, but they do not really know how very wonderful and divine it is.

One great feature of it is the way in which, without actually stating, as of course it could not, the actual facts or doctrines of the Gospel, in express terms, it yet indirectly, and as it were under a curtain, refers to them; so that to us, who know them well, it speaks almost as plainly as if it did actually state them in terms.

Take for example the twenty-second Psalm. Not

only did the Lord Himself, by uttering the first words of that Psalm as He hung upon the Cross, bind that Psalm to the subject of the Crucifixion,-but all through, the very words of it are so wonderfully express, that they sound more like a hymn by St. John, describing what he saw when he stood by the Cross, than one of David, predicting, by the Holy Spirit, a thousand years before, what would happen so long afterwards. "They pierced My hands and My feet. I may tell all My bones, they stand staring and looking upon Me. They parted My garments among them, and upon My vesture they did cast lots." How wonderful and how divine is all this! Written, sung, a thousand years before the Crucifixion, and yet describing with such exact minuteness the very things which took place at that time! What wonder, then, that Christians can read in that Divine Psalm, as in others, more than David knew, or the ancient Jews discovered in it, the very truths of the Gospel under a curtain, the very provision of Divine Psalms, prepared by the Holy Spirit of God for their use in every generation?

This is one great thing. But there is another too; namely, that the Psalms form the most wonderful expression of human feelings that was ever penned. Those who only know the Book of Psalms slightly do not understand this. But those who are wise enough to know

them well, to learn them by heart and use them, know well that there is no state of feeling, no condition in life for which that wonderful book does not furnish the most exact and well-fitted expressions that can be conceived or desired. With joy and thankfulness the Psalms, if I may so speak, run over; they are full of faith, and trust, and cheerful confidence in the mercy and goodness of God. Of penitential sorrow and distress for sins, of humble confession and repentance, they are so full, that, when you read them with that view they almost seem to contain nothing else. For peaceful times, for anxious times, for times of affliction and grief, for times when others round about us are in trouble, or are ill-treating or misunderstanding us, for reliance on God in the morning, or in the evening, awake or asleep, at midnight or at mid-day, in solitude or in society,—none know so well as those who use the Psalms, or some of them, by heart, what a store of heavenly expressions they furnish by which Christian hearts may pour themselves out to God in strains the most beautiful, and most exactly suitable to all their various states of feeling and condition. It has been very beautifully said of Holy Scripture in general, and it is I think more applicable to the Psalms than to any other book in it, that its eye follows us, like the eye of a picture, ever fixed upon us turn where we will.