not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thy Holy One to see corruption."

Now the man of God looks to the end of the race he has been patiently running, and beholds the goal at hand. He looks upon the recompense of reward which is awaiting him, the prize of his high calling in Christ Jesus. The last enemy that he has to overcome is death. The king of terrors is to be met face to face. He cannot avoid the combat if he would, and he would not if he could. How often, in the travail of his soul, hath he exclaimed, "Wo is me that I am constrained to dwell in Meshech, and to have my habitation amongst the tents of Kedar? O that I had the wings of a dove, for then would I flee away and be at rest!" How often hath he said, "In thy presence is fulness of joy, and at thy right hand are pleasures for evermore! As for me, I shall behold thy face in righteousness. When I awake, I shall be satisfied with thy likeness." And now that his conflicts are about to cease for ever, and his sorrows to have an end, he lifteth up his head, because the day of his redemption draweth nigh. In vision, his spirit, already winged to take its everlasting flight, discerneth the throne of God encircled by a thousand times ten thousand sons of light. In vision, he mingles with the glorious throng. He tunes his harp to the heavenly theme, and sings the song of Moses and the Lamb. Sprinkled with the blood of sprinkling, which speaketh better things than the blood of Abel, he ascends in spirit "to the Mount Zion, the city of the living God, making one of the innumerable company of angels, and general assembly and church of the first-born, whose names are written in heaven. Ah! how doth it grieve his soul to wake once again out of the trance of bliss, to open his eyes once again upon the dull, cold, blank realities of life. The syren world hath no longer charms for him. He hath proved the falseness of her beauty: he hath seen the glory that excelleth, and hath no eye to look upon fictitious brightness. He hath seen the King in his beauty, and the land that is afar off how shall he endure to soil his feet again with the base mould of the degenerate earth, to breathe any longer the polluted atmosphere of a world poisoned with sin, and full of the voices of sorrow! In this tabernacle he groans, being burdened. And when the grisly king shakes against him his terrible dart, he openeth his bosom to receive the stroke of grace, saying the while, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory And looking up to heaven, he takes his departure, saying, "Into thy hand I commend my spirit; for thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth!"

It has been our purpose to show, by the above sketch and commentary of Christian life, that the multiplied experiences of the soul, the various states of mind through which the regenerate children of the second Adam pass, from their first entrance upon the life of faith, to the period when that life is swallowed up in light, are all exemplified in the Book of Psalms. So that the believer cannot be in any condition, whether of joy or sorrow, but he will find in this book most appropriate forms of utterance, ready prepared for the expression of his feelings, of whatever kind. We have only brought to light a portion of these feelings. tracing their genuine and expressive utterance, as it were with the Psalmist's pen. But it would not be difficult to show, that in the Psalms, the expressions of spiritual feeling are infinitely varied, and correspond to every emotion, and to every aspiration of the soul, quickened to the life of faith and holiness, yet groaning still under the partial bondage of a fleshly na

ture, exposed to the assaults of innumerable enemies, and compassed upon every side with temptation and infirmity. So that this Book is to be regarded as a spiritual world, with which the new-born spirit may converse, and acquire the knowledge and use of its faculties, as well as the knowledge and use of those objects which are revealed therein. And hence it hath a charm it can never loose, being associated with the simple and true affections of the spirit, and with the joy and satisfaction which attend the revelation of any new faculty within us. And this charm must grow with our growth, and strengthen with our strength; for according as we increase in spiritual strength, we are able to make more of those feelings our own; and the more we become acquainted with dialectic methods, the more we discern their difficulty and uncertainty, and desire to return to the simple impressions made upon the soul by the words of the Holy Spirit. And we reckon also that the more we advance in divine life, the simpler our discourse will become, and the more delivered from the forms of human-learning, into the forms of the Spirit's teaching, until in the end, if by reason of extreme age or languor, we can say no more, we will say, as is reported of the Apostle John, "Little children, love one another;" and when speech is denied us to utter anything, we will occupy our spiritual musings with some simple forms of divine truth, as the learned Baxter is reported to have said upon his death-bed, that he had been meditating all night long upon the great wisdom of the Lord's prayer and the ten commandments. So that we very much question if these Psalms, which have the charm of having unloosed to us the secrets of our own spiritual selves, may not, like a true and faithful friend, continue to add to their first loveliness and value unto the end. For, as was said in the beginning, and hath been amply illustrated, the part of our being which they take hold upon, is not our opinions or our reasonings, or any of our peculiarities, but those universal feelings of the spiritual man, which being constant in all, we have denominated spiritual instincts; in the abiding of which is the abiding of spiritual life, and upon the experiences of which all spiritual knowledge is built up.

While executing this sketch of spiritual experience, in order to exhibit the proper character and true value of the Book of Psalms, several ques tions arose to our mind besides those we touched in passing, from the consideration of which we withheld ourselves till we should have completed the main purpose of our essay, but which cannot be omitted without leaving it, in a good measure hypothetical, and to which therefore we now address ourselves.

The first is, how far we are justified in applying to Christian life in general those feelings and expressions of feeling, which, in the first instance, pertained to individuals, and in general to one individual-David, the son of Jesse. To this we answer, that spiritual men are the only proper judges of that which is appropriate to the expression of their feelings, who, from the beginning of the church in the days of Moses, even until now, have gathered up, and preserved, and appropriated these morsels of divine instruction, as they fell from the lips of the men who spake them; and that not in the Jewish church, but in the Christian church, and these not in latter days, but in primitive days, and the days of the Fathers, to an extent and depth of spirituality unknown in our times. The universal church of Christ hath therefore given its witness, that these Psalms are not made for one age, but for all ages; not for one place, but for all places; not for one soul, but for all souls; time, place,

and person, being only so far present in them, as to associate them with that generation to which they were first given, not to dissociate them from any other generation of spiritual children, which, in after ages, was to be born to the same Spirit by the seed of the word, which liveth and abideth for ever.

The temptations of David's soul, and its experiences under them, are as much the property of every saint, and of every age of the church, as are the discourses, remonstrances, parables, and instructions of our Lord, to his untoward generation-as are the arguments, and demonstrations, and Epistles of Paul to the early churches which he planted or watered. They are all equally personal, (for the Son of God himself was a person) and the personal runneth like a thread of humanity through the heavenly hues of their discourse. They are all equally secular, and the conditions of the age are the frame-work upon which the tissue of the web is woven. Which presence of the personal, and intermixture of the temporary, instead of taking from the force and power of the revelations, do only apply them with the more force and power to the personality of every other saint and the peculiarity of every other age. For, had the revelations not breathed of the man who spoke them, and told of the condition of the age to which they were given, the former would have been an automaton, and the latter a looker upon the wonders which the automaton spoke; neither the one nor the other feeling any interest or concern in the marvellous display of divine art. But God wished both prophet and people to take heed, and to stand in awe of fearful issues, if they heeded not; therefore, he moulded man to his purpose, and cast him into the condi tions which suited his ends, and still he was a man, acted on by course of nature, and manifest to the people as a fellow-man, through whom, indeed, they heard soul-stirring truths uttered with ear-piercing words, and, when need was, sustained by attention-riveting works; but still suit ed to their case, and thrust in their way, and spoken to their feelings, and pressed on their consciences, and riveted there by the most mighty sanctions of life and death, present and eternal. But they are not the less spoken to us. No, not the less, on that account, spoken to us. Yet, that we might have no shadow of excuse, nor shield of self-delusion, the Lord appointed a race of prophets, or ministers, to abide until his coming, who should be gifted of his Spirit, to apply the universal and unchangeable, in all his revelation, to the condition of every time, place, and individual; and so far from abandoning the peculiarity of the revelation, to use that no less than the other, wherever it will accommodate itself to the case in hand, and to bring it home with tenfold force, by the application of the parable, "Thou, even thou thyself, art the very man,"-this, even this, is the very season-this, even this in which we live, is the very condition, to which this revelation was given.

We do admire how this automaton-inspiration can stand a thought, when it is the very RULE of heaven's communications, that in every word of God there should be a humanity, as well as a divinity present. And as THE WORD which was in the beginning took not voice, nor intelligence, but flesh, human flesh, and the fulness of the Godhead was manifested bodily; so, when that same Word came unto the Fathers by the prophets, and discovered a part of his fulness, it was through their flesh or their humanity, that is, through their present conditions of spirit, and mind, and body, and outward estate, that he discovered himself to the flesh or the humanity of the people, that is, their present conditions of

spirit, and body, and outward estate. Whence, if it be said that Moses was Christ under the veil, and if Paul says of himself, that not he but Christ lived in him, then it may be said, that David was the humiliation and the exaltation of the church under the veil.

Now, as the apostle, in writing to the Hebrews concerning the priesthood of Christ, calls upon them to consider Melchizedek, his solitary majesty, and singular condition, and remarkable honour; so call we upon the church to consider David, the son of Jesse, his unexampled accumulation of gifts, his wonderful variety of conditions, his spiritual riches and his spiritual desolation, and the multifarious contingencies of his life; with his faculty, his unrivalled faculty of expressing the emotions of his soul, under all the days of brightness and days of darkness which passed over his head. For thereby shall the church understand how this the lawgiver of her devotion was prepared by God for the work which he accom-plished, and how it hath happened that one man should have brought forth that vast variety of experience, in which every soul rejoiceth to find itself reflected. For Moses was not more prepared by all the wisdom and learning of Egypt, for becoming a fit vehicle to carry from God unto the people an institution of law, than David was prepared, by the experiences of his life between the sheepcot and the throne, for becoming a fit vehicle to carry from God unto his church, an institution of spiritual experience, and devotional feeling.

And we the more gladly enter upon the education and gifts of this saint, the great revealer of the moods of the renewed soul, that we may shame or silence the Rabshekas who rail upon this great type of Messiah's humiliation and exaltation, the man after God's own heart. We call upon the church, and all reasonable men, to consider this man David, how well furnished he was by nature, and educated by providence, for the great honour to which the Christian Church hath preferred him.

There never was a specimen of manhood, so rich and ennobled as David, -the son of Jesse, whom other saints haply may have equalled in single features of his character, but such a combination of manly, heroic qualities, such a flush of generous godlike excellencies, hath never yet been seen embodied in a single man. His Psalms, to speak as a man, do place him in the highest rank of lyrical poets, as they set him above all the inspired writers of the Old Testament,-equalling in sublimity the flights of Isaiah himself, and revealing the cloudy mystery of Ezekiel; but in love of country, and gloryings in its heavenly patronage, surpassing them all. And where are there such expressions of the varied conditions into which human nature is cast by the accidents of Providence, such delineations of deep affliction, and inconsolable anguish, and anon such joy, such rapture, such revelry of emotion, in the worship of the living God! Such invocations to all nature, animate and inanimate, such summonings of the hidden powers of harmony, and of the breathing instruments of melody! Single hymns of this poet would have conferred immortality upon any mortal, and borne down his name as one of the most favoured of the sons of men.

But it is not the writings of the man, which strike us with such wonder, as the actions and events of his wonderful history. He was a hero without a peer, bold in battle, and generous in victory; by distress or by triumph, never overcome. Though hunted like a wild beast among the mountains, and forsaken like a pelican in the wilderness, by the country whose armies he had delivered from disgrace, and by the monarch whose

daughter he had won-whose son he had bound to him with cords of brotherly love, and whose own soul he was wont to charm with the sacredness of his minstrelsy-he never indulged malice or revenge against his unnatural enemies. Twice, at the peril of his life, he brought his. blood-hunter within his power, and twice he spared him, and would not be persuaded to injure a hair upon his head,-who, when he fell in his high places, was lamented over by David, with the bitterness of a son, and his death avenged upon the sacrilegious man who had lifted his sword against the Lord's anointed. In friendship and love, and also in domestic affection, he was not less notable than in heroical endowments, and in piety towards God he was most remarkable of all. He had to flee from his bed-chamber in the dead of night, his friendly meetings had to be concerted upon the perilous edge of captivity and death-his food he had to seek at the risk of sacrilege-for a refuge from death, to cast himself upon the people of Gath-to counterfeit idiocy, and become the laughingstock of his enemies. And who shall tell of his hidings in the cave of Adullam, and of his wanderings in the wilderness of Ziph; in the weariness of which he had to stand before his armed enemy with all his host, and by the generosity of his deeds, and the affectionate language which flowed. from his lips, to melt into childlike weeping the obdurate spirit of king Saul, which had the nerve to evoke the spirits of the dead!

King David was a man extreme in all his excellencies-a man of the highest strain, whether for counsel, for expression, or for action, in peace and in war, in exile and on the throne. That such a warm and ebullient spirit should have given way before the tide of its affections, we wonder not. We rather wonder that, tried by such extremes, his mighty spirit should not often have burst control, and enacted right forward the conqueror, the avenger, and the destroyer. But God, who anointed him from his childhood, had given him store of the best natural and inspired gifts, which preserved him from sinking under the long delay of his promised crown, and kept him from contracting any of the craft or cruelty of a hunted, persecuted man. And adversity did but bring out the splendour of his character, which might have slumbered like the fire in the flint, or the precious metal in the dull and earthy ore.

But to conceive aright of the gracefulness and strength of King David's character, we must draw him into comparison with men similarly conditioned, and then shall we see how vain the world is to cope with him. Conceive a man who had saved his country, and clothed himself with gracefulness and renown in the sight of all the people, by the chivalry of his deeds won for himself intermarriage with the royal line, and by unction of the Lord's prophet been set apart to the throne itself; such a one conceive driven with fury from house and hold, and, through tedious years, deserted of every stay but heaven, with no soothing sympathies of quiet life, harassed for ever between famine and the edge of the sword, and kept in savage holds and deserts and tell us, in the annals of men, of one so disappointed, so bereaved and straitened, maintaining not fortitude alone, but sweet composure and a heavenly frame of soul, inditing praise to no avenging deity, and couching songs in no revengeful mood, according with his outcast and unsocial life; but inditing praises to the God of mercy, and songs which soar into the third heavens of the soul: not, indeed, without the burst of sorrow, and the complaint of solitariness, and prophetic warnings to his blood-thirsty foes, but ever closing in sweet preludes of good to come, and desire of present contentment. Find us