general distribution of the contents is unmistakeable. A more doubtful question is, whether we see here an instance of a choral psalm ; that is to say, whether this ode was intended to be used in public worship, and if so, whether the parts of the different persons were intended to be distributed among the singers, so that for the general introduction the full chorus would be used ; for the single speaker, a solo voice ; for the human answer, some portion of the chorus; and for the closing divine response, the gathered majesty of the whole collective harmony. Without asserting that it was so, we may use the supposition as an auxiliary in representing the distribution of the various parts.

There is first, then, the general enunciation of the subject of the whole.

“He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under

the shadow of the Almighty.”—Verse 1. This is the text of the sei mon- the thought of which the rest is expansion and application. Or, to use an illustration from music, it is the theme at the beginning of the piece which runs through the whole. The verse is often quoted and read without any distinct perception of its force. “Dwelling in the secret place of the Most High,” is vaguely thought about as meaning precisely the same thing as “abiding under the shadow of the Almighty.” But there is much more than such a bald, senseless repetition in these grand words. Putting them in the briefest form, they say, “To dwell with God is to dwell safely.” “Communion with Him” is the equivalent of the first ; “ protection from him” is the equivalent of the second ; and the spirit of the whole is the conviction that the soul, which by constant, calm fellowship with God, carries always an atmosphere of holy thoughts, and lives like the boy-prophet in the shrine of the Holy, will never be touched by the pestilential vapours that float through other air, and will find the temple a fortress, the pavilion of its God an impregnable defence.

After this impersonal general introduction, we have the single voice and the answer twice introduced. The first is from verse 2–8, which we print here for convenience. SINGLE VOICE (2) “I will say of the Lord-He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in

Him will I trust.” ANSWERS (3) “Surely he shall deliver thee from the share of the fowler, and from

the noisome pestilence. (4) He shall cover thee with his feathers, and
under his wings shalt thou trust: His truth shall be thy shield and
buckler. (5) Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor fo;
the arrow that fleeth by day. (6) Nor for the pestilence that walket!
in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noon-day. (7) A
thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand ; bu
it shall not come migh thee. (8) Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold

and see the reward of the wicked.” Deliverance from temporal calamities is the burden of this part o the psalm, as deliverance from spiritual temptations is that of the next; the two thus forming one comprehensive whole, in which al

Four dangers are pictured and our one defence set forth. And what

a list of enemies they are! Snares and pestilenee, terrors and arrows, destruction and death. What a fearful contrast between the one feeble voice, rising in a tremulous trust towards God, and all this horde of evils! A man all alone, with no help in the whole wide earth but only God, hunted like Orestes by an army of furies; and finding asylum and sweet peace at the horns of the altar, the sole spot in all the world where their slings and arrows cannot reach him. This great promise of protection from misfortunes and sorrows is expanded in the verses above in a regular gradation of thoughts. There is first, (v. 3), the wide general promise, couched in the shape of assured deliverance from a plague. *This image may have been selected from that great storehouse for psalms and prophets, Israel's history in Egypt, as is the case with another verse of the Psalm (v. 10); some pestilence may have been the occasion of the composition; or it may simply be chosen as one of the extremest, and in those unscientific days and warm lands one of the most unmanageable, of earthly calamities. The snare of the fowler seems to be death (Eccles. ix. 12), or rather death is personified as the fowler, and his snare is the noisome pestilence. From the broad general promise we pass to a glorious description of the source of all security (v.4), the brooding providence of our Father in heaven, where we lie warm and sheltered. One thinks of the twofold image of the mother-bird, employed with so characteristic a difference in the Old and in the New Testament ; in the Old, the eagle mighty and terrible fluttering over her eaglets, tender to them, fierce to all beside ; in the New, the hen gathering her chickens under her wings : “He shall cover thee with his feathers.” The source of all our safety is God. But this is not all—the human condition of receiving this divine fostering care is that living personal trust in a living, loving, personal God, which the Bible means by faith, and which is at once the pre-requisite of our enjoying and the consequence of our having experienced it. So the verse goes on to say, “ Under his wings shalt thou trust." Nor is this all-the ground of that trust is laid in the true sayings of God revealed in his word, and in the unchanging faithfulness of God to his sayings manifested by his acts. So, once more, there is added as the foundation of our reliance, “His truth shall be thy shield and buckler.” God's faithfulness is the basis of our faith, God's truth the object of our trust. That trust is the human act by which the divine power is extended about us. They who trust under his wings, and only they, are those who are covered with his feathers. Surely, there is here in brief the summary of the whole gospel.

There follows an expanded description of the dangers still under the image of the plague. The protection is to be a universal one (5,6), to express which universality in a graphic form, it is pictured 23 availing equally for open and for secret dangers--all those evils that come out of the mysterious unknown, being represented by the terrors by night and the pestilence that walketh in darkness; and all those which borrow no portion of their fearfulness from their mystery, being shadowed in the arrow that flieth by day, the

B 2

destruction that wasteth at noontide. That fear of the unknown, that awe of simple darkness, is a testimony of man's finiteness and of his evil conscience, which says, “Somewhere in there among the shadows there may be lying couching, just on the spring, a power mightier than I, and not loving me.”• There are few who have not some haunting of a fear like that. These secret dangers are the most powerful over the imagination ; there is something awful in inexplicable calamity; and it is against these, which no human foresight is able to predict, and which come crashing down on us like a hand reaching out of the darkness and stabbing behind the back, that the protection of Him to whom the darkness and the light are both alike, is here promised us. Scarcely less terrible is the mischief that does its work upon us in the full day; which can be foreseen and calculated; which we know all about, but can do nothing to avert. That “ destruction wasting at noonday” is a true-poet touch, suggesting the contrast which all who have turned from a death-bed to close a shutter, and have seen as in a dream the mocking beauty of a cloudless sky, have felt between the grief of the heart and the wealth of joy in the natural world.

The protection is further described as distinguishing, v. 7, with a reminiscence of Egypt on the passover night; and the whole closes, v. 8, with the idea that the issue of all the exposure to and deliverance from worldly calamity is the recognition of their true nature-as a “reward to the wicked.” The maze of Providence will be no inextricable one to him who has made God his fortress, and has learned his protecting care. Trials and afflictions will not be mere arrows aimed by an unknown hand out of the darkness, nor will their causes be thought to be ascertained when the laws of them are known ; but the mysterious and the plain will be alike beheld as sent by him, and as sent in full accordance with his retributive righteousness. Sin has brought sorrow, and all the ills that flesh is heir to are seen by the purged eyesight of him who dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High as the rewards which wickedness compels the divine mercy to send. This calm conviction is indeed the blessed height and worthy climax to which all the discipline of God on ourselves is meant to conduct us, and so it fitly closes this portion of our psalm.

According to the most probable translation, the ninth verse contains in its first clause a brief exclamation from the single voice ; and the answer runs on from the centre of that verse to the end of the thirteenth. We append, as before, the translation :SINGLE VOICE

(9) For Thou, O Lord, art my refuge. ANSWER— (9) Thou hast made the Most High thy habitation. (10) There shall no

This is not the place to vindicate the separation of the ninth verse into two. The parallelism with the foriner portion, the change of persons in the clauses, the interruption in the progress of the whole which ensues from following our authorised version, and the plain construction of the original, are the reasons which have led such translators as the Septuagint in ancient, and Calvin, Hengstenberg and Stier in modern times, to render as we have done, though they do not all see the solo and choral answer which we recognise. The burden of this second portion is deliverance in temptation, triumph over sin. The need is sorer, the enemies graver, the cry for help shorter as in greater need, and the protection grander than in the former period. A perfect parallelism, however, exists between the two. Here, as there, we have first, v. 10, the general promise of protection—then the medium by which it is given, v. 11, 12-then a further darkening of the picture of the danger to enhance the glory of the deliverance.

The character of the danger comes out plainly in the office assigned to the angel ministers, “ to keep thee in all thy ways, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone;" which evidently points to the support given when “a stumbling-block or occasion to fall” is in the way, and that expression is, in accordance with the whole usage of Scripture, a synonyme for temptation. Then the medium of protection is here,—the angel world, the reality of whose ministrations this Sadducean time says and thinks little about. It cannot be eliminated from the Bible, however, which, both in its plain statement and in the life of him who was “The Man,” shows us that God blesses and guards us by their soft attendance. It is no dream that in all our dusty journeyings over life's desert, we may, like Jacob, lift up our eyes, and behold the air filled with the light of the armour of the Lord's host; or, like a greater and more tempted than Jacob, have them with us in all our temptations to strengthen, and after the devil has left us, to refresh and soothe. So at least our psalm says. And as it unveils for us the heavens to show us our defence in temptation, so it unveils hell to show us the source of it. The thirteenth verse describes the enemies as the lion and the adder, the young lion and the dragon. The correspondence with the angel defenders, and the fact that all these are recognised Scripture epithets for Satan, (serpent, Genesis ii. ; roaring lion, Peter ; that dragon, Revelation,) lead us to see in this verse the distinct attribution of temptation to him; and in its promise of triumph an exact parallel to, as well as a commentary on, Christ's saying, “I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing shall by any means hurt you," Luke x. 17—20. It may be intentional too, that the distinction between open and secret dangers is repeated here—the springing lion and the lurking adder, as typifying the various forms in which we are assailed by temptation. A grand picture this, of a man trusting in God; stormed upon by the buffetings of calamity, but kept from its pain; attacked by powers of darkness, but helped by brightharnessed angels; and trampling down by God's grace sorrows and temptations, because his heart is set on God !

But now the earthly voices cease, and God speaks, confirming and surpassing all that has been promised in his name. THE DIVINE VOICE(14) Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him :

I will set him on high, because he hath known my name. (15) He shall call upon me, and I will answer him : I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him. (16) With long life will

I satisfy him, and show him my salvation. We can but indicate what we would gladly have expounded here. There is a threefold act on the part of man specified as the condition of the Divine protection ; the setting of love upon God; the knowing of his name, not as a theoretical perception of the truth, but a personal acquaintanceship with his revealed character, which with deep truth is represented as second in order to love, as John says, “He that loveth knoweth God;" and, finally, the call for help to him, child of the two preceding, love and knowledge. Verse fifteen gives a threefold divine blessing :-presence in trouble (thus interpreting the previous promise of exemption from it, and showing us that not escape from the outward calamity, but escape from the inward pain of it, the evil in the evil, is the true meaning of it); extrication from trouble ; exaltation through trouble: and all closes with a verse which comes like a strain of peaceful music after discord, or the peaceful setting of a summer's sun at the end of a stormy day,“I will satisfy him with length of days”-not a promise of long life, but a promise that whatever the length be, it will be enough-a life here which in duration and in character will leave nothing to be desired, and after that a vision yonder of God's salvation, which vindicates by its grand result all the trials that led to it.

Sorrow and temptation are our foes! GOD IS OUR FRIEND! So on to a New Year with hopeful trust !

Southampton.

INDIVIDUAL POWER.

BY THE REV. C. H. SPURGEON. “Not by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord.”—Zech. iv. 6. The greatest works that have been done have been done by the ones. The hundreds do not often do much,--the companies never do; it is the units, just the single individuals, that after all are the power and the might. Take any parish in England where there is a well-regulated society for doing good-it is some young woman or some young man who is the very life of it. Take any church-there are multitudes in it, but it is some two or three that do the work. Look on the Reformation; there might be many reformers, but there was but one Luther; there might be many teachers, but there was but one Calvin. Look ye upon the preachers of the last age, the mighty preachers who stirred up the churches; there were many coadjutors with them, but, after all, it was not Whitfield's friends, nor Wesley's friends, but the men themselves that did it. Individual effort is, after all, the grand thing. A man