28. God.** The original for “God” gives force to this passage, Thou art my “El”—the Mighty One; therefore will I praise Thee; my “Eloah”—a varied form with substantially the same sense, “and I will extol Thee”—lift Thee high in glory and honor. C.

29. O give thanks unto the Lord; for He is good: for His mercy endureth forever. The Psalm concludes as it began, making a complete circle of joyful adoration. We can well suppose that the notes at the close of the loud hallelujah were more swift, more sweet, more loud than at the beginning. To the sound of trumpet and harp, Israel, the house of Aaron, and all that feared the Lord, forgetting their distinctions, joined in one common hymn, testifying again to their deep gratitude to the Lord’s goodness, and to the mercy which is unto eternity. What better close could there be to this right royal song? S.

VERSE 15. The Voice of Rejoicing and Salvation is in the Tents of the Righteous.

Add to all other sources of joy another, and the craving of the immortal nature is filled. It is the conviction, fastened in the soul by God’s unalterable promise, that the new life which is begun is a principle that can never be extinguished, that the new relations of adoption, childship with God, can never be sundered, that the new home can never be broken up, the inheritance never fail or be lessened by the enjoyment. And this, too, is God’s own assurance, upon which as completing all possible or conceivable sources of delight, He bids us, “Rejoice evermore!” Upon His covenant, well-ordered, sure, and everlasting, the believing soul rests expectant. He knows that all things shall work together for good here and forever, that all things of this and the coming life are His, by a pledge that cannot be broken. The good work begun in the soul will be completed. The new life once begotten by the Spirit, the life once hid with Christ in God will be perpetuated, with all its blessed fruits, by the same Divine power, so long as the life of the Godhead is perpetuated. So long as the Father endures shall the child endure, sharing all the joy of the Father’s home and heart. So long as the Son remains enthroned King shall His redeemed dwell in His presence, rejoice in His love, and share His throne. So long as holds the might of the Infinite new-creating Spirit, shall the spirits of the just He has made perfect be held in faultless being, with every energy of thought and will and affection full strung in holy activity. So long as the Godhead lives, reigns, acts, God’s children shall love and obey, God’s redeemed ones shall praise, God’s sanctified ones shall serve. So long, even to everlasting, shall God Himself dwell with them and in them as their exceeding glory and joy. Then rejoice evermore, ye who, through God’s grace and by His promise, hold in your hearts such sources of joy! Let the voice of joy and rejoicing be in the tabernacles of the righteous. Rejoice that to you there is no longer condemnation! Rejoice that you are the children of God, joint-heirs with Christ, to the inheritance that is incorruptible and unfading. Rejoice in your comfort and your toil. Rejoice even in tribulation, for the joy of the Lord is your strength. Might it brings to you to do or to bear. Heed, then, His bidding, who bids you, rejoice evermore. B.

1. BLESSED are they that are perfect [or, up-right] in the way, Who walk in the law of the LORD. 2 Blessed are they that keep his testimonies, That seek him with the whole heart.

3. Yea, they do no unrighteousness; They walk in his ways. 4 Thou hast commanded us thy precepts, That we should observe them diligently. 5 Oh that my ways were established To observe thy statutes! 6 Then shall I not be ashamed, When I have respect unto all thy commandments.

7. I will give thanks unto thee with uprightness of heart,

When I learn thy righteous judgments.

8. I will observe thy statutes:

O forsake me not utterly.

9. Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?

By taking heed thereto according to thy word.

10. With my whole heart have I sought thee:

O let me not wander from thy commandments.

THE one hundred and nineteenth Psalm is the appropriate sermon, after the Hallel, on the text which is its epitome (Psalm 1:1, 2), “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly; but his delight is in the law of the Lord.” Except in two verses (122, 132), the law is expressly extolled in every verse. Fausset.—God has not only commanded us to learn; He has promised to teach. He who wrote the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm knew that well, and therefore his Psalm is a prayer for teaching and a prayer for light. C. Kingsley.

This is the longest and the most elaborate of the alphabetical Psalms. It is arranged in twenty-two stanzas according to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. Each stanza is composed of eight verses, each verse consisting of two members only, and each beginning with the same letter of the alphabet. Thus each of the first eight verses begins with the letter Aleph, each of the next eight with the letter Beth, and so on throughout the alphabet. The great subject of the Psalmist’s praise is the law of God. In this respect the Psalm may be said to be an elaborate expansion of the latter part of Psalm 19. The date of the Psalm cannot be fixed with anything like certainty, though it may probably be referred to a time subsequent to the return from the Babylonish captivity. The law of which he speaks as his daily study, as his delight and his counsellor, must obviously have been the written law, and it may be inferred that it was now in the hands of the people. Whether this was the case to any extent before the exile, we have now no means of ascertaining. After the exile, copies of the Scriptures were multiplied. The efforts of Ezra and Nehemiah, which were directed in the first instance to the collection of the sacred books (2 Macc. 2:13), must have been di

11. Thy word have I laid up in mine heart, That I might not sin against thee. 12 Blessed art thou, O Lord: Teach me thy statutes. 13 With my lips have I declared All the judgments of thy mouth. 14 I have rejoiced in the way of thy testimonies, As much as in all riches. 15 I will meditate in thy precepts, And have respect unto thy ways. 16 I will delight myself in thy statutes: I will not forget thy word.

rected eventually to their dissemination. Accordingly, we find that copies of the “books of the law,” or of “the book of the covenant,” were in the possession of the people at the time of the Maccabees (1 Macc. 1:55, 56). P.

It is inconceivable that such a Psalm as this could have been written if there had not been at the time a code of laws in existence which were commonly acknowledged as of Divine origin and authority. The law of Moses was such a code, and there is no trace of any other. At the time then when the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm was written this code must have been in existence. The Psalm itself is at once a witness to it and the creation of it. Moreover, the spiritual character of the Psalm shows that the writer was imbued with the spirit of Deuteronomy, or the second law. It is no mere ceremonial rites that he will observe, but the requirements of Him who demanded the circumcision of the heart. Had the first four books of Moses alone existed, it is scarcely too much to say that the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm could not have been written; another element must have operated in its production, which was the influence of the latest words of the great Lawgiver. Leathes.

To the design of popular instruction, and especially to that of constant repetition and reflection, the Psalm is admirably suited by its form and structure. The alphabetical arrangement, of which it is at once the most extended and most perfect specimen, and the aphoristic character, common to all alphabetic Psalms, are both adapted to assist the memory, as well as to give point to the immediate impression. It follows, of course, that the Psalm was rather meant to be a storehouse of materials for pious meditation than a discourse for continuous perusal. At the same time, the fact of its existence in the Psalter is presumptive proof that it was used in public worship, either as a whole, or in one or more of the twenty-two stanzas into which it is divided, corresponding to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, all the eight verses of each paragraph beginning with the same Hebrew letter. A.

The things contained in Scripture and drawn from it are here called, First, God’s law, because they are enacted by Him as our Sovereign. Second, His way, because they are the rule both of His providence and of our obedience. Third, His testimonies, because they are solemnly declared to the world, and attested beyond contradiction. Fourth, His commandments, because given with authority, and (as the word signifies) lodged with us as a trust. Fifth, His precepts, because prescribed to us, and not left indifferent. Sixth, His Word, or saying, because it is the declaration of His mind, and Christ the essential, eternal Word is all in all in it. Seventh, His judgments, because framed in infinite wisdom, and because by them we must both judge and be judged. Eighth, His righteousness, because it is all holy, just, and good, and the rule and standard of righteousness. Ninth, His statutes, because they are fixed and determined, and of perpetual obligation. Tenth, His truth, or faithfulness, because the principles upon which Divine law is built are eternal truths. Henry.

According to this alphabetical series of eight stanzas, the Word is the source of happiness to those who walk by it (aleph), of holiness to those who give heed to it (beth), of truth to those whose eyes the Lord opens by His Spirit (gimel), of law to those whose heart He renews (daleth), begets perseverance by its promises (he), reveals the mercy and salvation of the Lord (cau), awakens the comfort of hope in God (zayin), presents the Lord as the portion of the trusting soul (cheth), makes affliction instructive and chastening (teth), begets a fellowship in the fear of God (jod), and a longing for the full peace of salvation (kaph), is faithful and immutable (lamed), commands the approval of the heart (mem), is a light to the path (nun), from which to swerve is hateful (samek), warrants the plea of innocence (ayin), is a testimony to God’s character and will (pe), is a law of rectitude (tsade), warrants the cry for salvation (qoph), and prayer for deliverance from affliction (resh), and from persecution without a cause (shin), and assures of an answer in due time (tau). There is here as much order as could be expected in a long alphabetical acrostic. M.

In the German translation of the Bible it has the admirable title: The Christian’s golden A B C of the praise, love, virtue, and usefulness of the Word of God; for here there is set forth in inexhaustible fulness what the Word of God is to man, and how man has to bear himself in relation to it. D. —This Psalm is a prolonged meditation upon the excellence of the Word of God, upon its effects, and the strength and happiness which it gives to a man in every position. These reflections are interspersed with petitions, in which the Psalmist, deeply feeling his natural infirmity, implores the help of God for assistance to walk in the way mapped out for him in the Divine oracles. In order to be able to understand and to enjoy this remarkable Psalm, we must, like its author, have learned to love and practise the sacred Word. For this Psalm is in some sort a touch-stone for the spiritual life of those who read it. A. de Mestral.

I know of no part of the Holy Scriptures where the nature and evidences of true and sincere godliness are so fully and largely insisted on and delineated as in the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm. The Psalmist declares his design in the first verses of the Psalm, keeps his eye on it all along, and pursues it to the end. The excellency of holiness is represented as the immediate object of a spiritual taste and delight. God’s law—that grand expression and emanation of the holiness of God’s nature, and prescription of holiness to the creature—is all along represented as the great object of the love, the complacency, and the rejoicing of the gracious nature, which prizes God’s commandments “above gold, yea, the finest gold;” and to which they are “sweeter than honey and the honeycomb.” Edwards.

The constant repetitions found in this and other Psalms has formed a source of perplexity to many. Is it not accounted for by the fact that they stand as the pre-eminent interpreters of the heart? Truth repeated in statement grows old and wearisome, truth repeated in experience is forever new and interesting. Hence the necessity of repetitions. The sense of sin, of the Divine love, longing or aversion, hope or fear, returns to the heart from time to time, and with every return the heart is moved by a repetition of its experience and led to a repetition of its utterance. Christian shame and penitence, and Christian joy and hope never grow old. The saved will not weary of crying through the heavenly ages, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain,” because at every repetition of the song, there will throb in the heart the renewed feeling of gratitude and joy that called it forth at the first. So this and other Psalms simply speak for the soul, touched again and again by each of a thousand influences from within and without, and responding under every impulse with a renewed expression of its experience. The child’s nature in a thousand different circumstances and connections cries, “I love you, I love you,” and the father never wearies of the words. So it may speak repeatedly of its father’s strength or goodness—one utterance is not enough. Heart language is always tautological. Anon.

It is strange that, of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother taught me, that which cost me most to learn, and which was to my child’s mind chiefly repulsive—the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm—has now become of all the most precious to me in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the law of God. Ruskin.

1. Blessed.** The Psalmist beginneth with a description of the way to true blessedness, as Christ began His Sermon on the Mount, and as the whole Book of Psalms is elsewhere begun. Blessedness is that which we all aim at, only we are either ignorant or reckless of the way that leadeth to it, therefore the holy Psalmist would first set us right as to the true notion of a blessed man, “Blessed are the perfect in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord.” Manton.

In the way. They are blessed who are in the way, not a way, any chance or uncertain road, but “the King’s Highway;” that path which the Lord Himself has declared to us, saying, “I am the way.” Hilary.—In this way there must be no standing, sitting, or reclining, but walking, so that all our movements may be regular, going on unto perfection. Geier.

Blessedness is ascribed to walking in God’s way. If we have not the habit of doing anything, we do it with difficulty and are ready to cease from doing it. Thence it is that the saints find their estate miserable till they form the habit which maketh them with facility and constancy walk with God. They count it of all things most blessed to have attained some degree of permanent habit in godliness. P. Bayne.—He who walks in God’s law walks in God’s company, and he must be blessed; he has God’s smile, God’s strength, God’s secret with him, and how can he be otherwise than blessed? S.

2. Testimonies.** The Word of God is called His testimony, not only because it testifies His will concerning His service, but also His favor and goodwill concerning His own in Christ Jesus. If God’s Word were no more than a law, yet were we bound to obey it because we are His creatures; but since it is also a testimony of His love, wherein as a Father He witnesseth His favor toward His children, we are doubly inexcusable if we do not most joyfully embrace it. W. Cowper.

Keep His testimonies. Faith, which is the reliance on a person and therefore trust in his word, passes into both forms of confidence in the word as promise and obedience to the word as command. We cannot cut faith in halves, and exercise the one aspect without the other. Some people’s faith says that it delights in God’s promises, but does not delight in His commandments. That is no faith at all. Whoever takes God at His word will take all His words. There is no faith without obedience; there is no obedience without faith. A. M.

Seek Him. There is so much said about men seeking pardon, and seeking peace, and seeking acceptance with God that we are apt to fall into a belief that these are in themselves the ultimate ends of our religion. But the Bible never represents them in that light, nor does it dwell upon them. It brings them forward as means to an end. Having found these inestimable blessings, we are not to rest there; there is something higher and better to which they are designed to lead us. In them we lay the foundation of the Divine life, but they are not that life itself. That life is in God, and it is only as we seek Him with our whole heart that we can enjoy that life. W. L. A.

Love makes long service short and hard service easy. Nothing is pain which love does. And this is Gospel obedience. It is faith working by love which refines duty into grace—the commandments are exalted into privileges—the ordinances become happy means of fellowship with God. The believer meets God in them, and by free converse he exercises and improves his love. He draws near to God, and God draws near to him in prayer, in praise, in hearing the Word, and the Lord’s Supper, and in all Sabbath duties. In these ways God manifests His gracious presence, and the believer rejoices in it. God communicates His grace, and the believer receives it with thankfulness. W. Romaine.

3. They do no unrighteousness**—that is, they make not a trade and common practice thereof. Slip they do, through the infirmity of the flesh, and subtlety of Satan, and the allurements of the world; but they do not ordinarily and customably go forward in unlawful and sinful courses. Greenham.—

To the doing of iniquity these three things must concur: First, a purpose to do it; next, a delight in doing it; thirdly, a continuance in it; which three in God’s children never concur; for in sins done in them by the old man, the new man makes his exceptions and protestations against them. It is not I, says he; and so far is he from delighting in them, that rather his soul is grieved with them. In a word, the children of God are rather sufferers of sin against their wills than actors of it with their wills, like men spiritually oppressed by the power of their enemy; for which they sigh and cry unto God, “Miserable man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” And in this sense it is that the apostle saith, “He who is born of God sinneth not.” W. Cowper.

They walk in His ways. Habitually, constantly, characteristically. They are not merely honest, upright, and just in their dealings with men; but they walk in the ways of God. Barnes.

4, 5. Thou hast commanded us to keep Thy precepts diligently (v. 4); this is God’s imperative, “O that my ways were directed to keep Thy statutes!” (v. 5); this should be our optative. T. Adams.—We are bound to obey the commands of God whether we can or not. What, then, remains for us but to return the mandate to heaven, accompanied with an earnest prayer that the Lord would write upon our hearts those statutes to which He requires obedience in His Word? “Thou hast commanded us to keep Thy statutes diligently.” We acknowledge, Lord, our obligation, but we feel our impotency. Lord, help us; we look unto Thee. “O that my ways were directed to keep Thy statutes!” Bridges.

5. “O that my ways were directed”—but the Hebrew word means established, confirmed—a very suitable thing to pray for. He longs to attain fixed, settled habits, in which his ways should, as the word suggests, become solid in the right. C.

The apprehension of spiritual realities, in their beauty and glory, does not come all at once, but it infallibly comes in the course of Christian experience. And not more truly and earnestly does the blind man express the topmost wish of his heart, “Lord, that I might receive my sight!” than the believer his longing, “O that my ways were directed to keep Thy statutes!” J. W. A.

6. Most men perhaps can look at some of the precepts with comparative freedom from reproof. But who can so look unto them all?

Yet this, also, the godly heart aspires to. In this verse we find the Psalmist consciously anticipating the truth of a word in the New Testament, “He that offendeth in one point is guilty of all.” Marchant.—Such as are Christians indeed exercise themselves, with Paul, to keep a good conscience in all things toward God and men. They have a regard unto all God’s commandments, as David speaks, they have a sincere love to God, which makes them study the exactest obedience they can reach. And this is an imperfect kind of perfection; it is evangelical but not angelical. L.

Such is the mercy of God in Christ to His children, that He accepts their weak endeavors, joined with sincerity and perseverance in His service, as if they were a full obedience. Be but so faithful as to do thy best, and God is so gracious that He will pardon thy worst. David knew this Gospel indulgence when he said, “Then shall I not be ashamed, when I have respect unto all Thy commandments,” when my eye is to all Thy commandments. The traveller hath his eye on or toward the place he is going to, though he be as yet short of it; there he would be, and he is putting on all he can to reach it; so stands the saint’s heart to all the commands of God; he presseth on to come nearer and nearer to full obedience; such a soul shall never be put to shame. Gurnall.

7. I will praise Thee when I shall have learned.** There is no way to please God entirely and sincerely until we have learned both to know and do His will. Practical praise is the praise God looks after. By learning he means his attaining not only to the knowledge of the Word, but the practice of it. For otherwise, if we get understanding of the Word; nay, if we get it imprinted in our memories, it will do us no good without practice. Manton.

Learned Thy righteous judgments. We see here what David especially desired to learn—namely, the Word and will of God; he would ever be a scholar in this school, that learning to know, he might remember; remembering, might believe; believing, might delight; delighting, might admire; admiring, might adore, adoring, might practise; and practising, might continue in the way of God’s statutes. This learning is the old and true learning indeed, and he is best learned in this art who turneth God’s Word into good works. Greenham.

Let us have it as one of our most sacred duties to the Bible, not to use it so as to shut ourselves and all that have it away from God’s immediate revelation by it. The external, verbal revelation is not given to be a substitute for the internal and immediate, but to be a guide into that. We are to find God after all by an immediate knowledge ourselves, just as all the older saints have found Him, only with an immense help in the Bible, which they had not. We are not to know God simply as reading the Book, and living thus on a mere second-hand knowledge. That is making a fence of the Book, requiring us to get all light from it, and not from God. No, the Bible is received only when it is spiritually discerned; that is, when it brings us in where God is, to know Him by our faith and love, and have Him in a first-hand knowledge, even as Abraham had, or Job, or Jethro, or Cornelius. The Bible tells us how others found Him, that we may find Him also. We only know Him by an immediate knowledge, even as they did. If we use the Book only for the second-hand knowledge it gives us, we even make a barrier of it, and put God farther away. The right use of it will not give us notions about God, but God Himself. It will make God nigh, and make it felt that He is nigh, both to ourselves and to others, present to knowledge, pressing into knowledge in all human breasts. Little do we conceive how very nigh He is, and how He is pressing in, through the Bible, through nature, everywhere and always, to be known by every human creature in the world. Bushnell.

Cultivate spiritual sympathy with the Bible; it is a spiritual Book. It is full of rich historical color, it abounds in curious facts and striking characters, and has an immense wealth of allusion to phenomena of nature and of human life; but all is pervaded by a supreme and controlling spirituality. Other things are very desirable for a just interpretation of Scripture. Spiritual sympathies, genuine and ever freshly cherished, are indispensable. J. A. Broadus.

8. Instantly upon forming his resolution, he recollects that the performance of it is beyond the power of human strength, and therefore the next moment he follows it with prayer, “I will keep Thy statutes; O forsake me not utterly.” Bridges.—The spiritual life of believers may be at a stand, and sin may break out, but they are not utterly forsaken. One way or other, God is still present; present in light sometimes when He is not present in strength, when He manifests the evil of their present condition so as to make them mourn under it; and present in awakening their desires, though not in giving them enjoyment. As long as there is any esteem of God He is not yet gone; there is some light and love yet left, manifested by our desire of communion with Him. Manton.

9. A young man. A prominent place—one of the twenty-two parts—is assigned to young men in the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm. It is meet that it should be so. Youth is the season of impression and improvement, young men are the future props of society, and the fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom, must begin in youth. The strength, the aspirations, the unmarred expectations of youth are in requisition for the world; oh, that they may be consecrated to God. J. Stephen.—God justly claims the first and the best. And is it not a most affecting proof of the alienation of the heart from God, that the youth of man, the bloom and freshness of his mind, should naturally be devoted to the service of sin? Bridges.

Taking heed thereto. God’s Word will not do without our watchfulness and a constant regard both to it and to our way, that we may compare them together. The ruin of young men is either living at large, or by no rule at all, or choosing to themselves false rules; let them ponder the path of their feet and walk by Scripture rules; so their way shall be clean, and they shall have the comfort and credit of it here and forever. H.—There is an especial necessity for this “Take heed,” because of the proneness of a young man to thoughtlessness, carelessness, presumption, self-confidence. There is an especial necessity for “taking heed,” because of the difficulty of the way. “Look well to thy goings;” it is a narrow path. “Look well to thy goings;” it is a new path. “Look well to thy goings;” it is a slippery path. “Look well to thy goings;” it is an eventful path. J. H. Evans.

Let him “take heed to his way, according to God’s Word.” Let him begin to meditate upon this Word as the rule of the Divine government; he will soon see the necessity of that mediatorial and restorative process which is brought to light in the Lord Jesus, “the Fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness.” Let him then go on, from time to time, putting away everything that he feels to be wrong, trying to conquer every bad habit, and to regulate his conduct by God’s Word; and he will be led to rejoice in the sanctifying Spirit, who shall carry on this work. But it is no use for you to pretend to desire the pardon of sin and reconciliation by the blood of Christ, if you do not put away every evil thing, and seek to “cleanse your way, according to God’s Word.” The two things must advance together—the putting away everything practically wrong and the seeking after that truth which is according to God’s Word. Binnie.

If at that season when our youth are preparing their minds for guiding affairs, by courses of early discipline in public schools, and those of second rank are entered to the various professions of life, if then no pains be taken to draw their attention to the sacred writings, and impress principles of piety and virtue upon their minds, how can it be expected that religion should even have a chance? One cannot always be learning; youth is for learning, manhood for acting, and old age for enjoying the fruits of both. The future lawyer, physician, or statesman is studying, each that he may prepare for filling a reputable station in the present world. Why is the future immortal not at the same time studying the two Testaments of God, in order to prepare for the world to come, in which every one of us hath a more valuable stake? If immortality be neither the dream of fond enthusiasts nor the trick of artful priests, but the revelation of the righteous God, then let us have the literature and the science, and the practice for the long after-stage of our being, as well as for the present time, which is but its porch. Irving.

10. With my whole heart sought Thee.** God looks not at the fulness of words and variety of expressions, but at the sincerity and devotion of the heart. Let but the matter of thy prayer be according to God’s mind, holy and warrantable, and the temper of thy heart humble and fervent, and no fear but thou shalt speed. Yea, let the prayer be old, pray to-day what thou didst yesterday, be but sure to bring new affections with thy old prayer, and thou shalt be friendly received into God’s presence, though thou canst not on a sudden put thy requests into a new shape. God will not shut His child out-of-doors, because he comes not every day in a new-fashioned suit. Gurnall.

Let me not wander. The best are sensible of their aptness to wander; and the more we have found of the pleasure there is in keeping God’s commandments, the more afraid we shall be of wandering from them, and the more earnest we shall be in prayer to God for His grace to prevent our wanderings. H.

11. To “hide in the heart” is not to conceal away even from his own view, but the very opposite; to put it in his memory, where it will be ever present and ready to guide his affections and purposes, and to rule his life. C.—Laid up in the heart the Word has effect. The laying of it up in the mere memory will not avail. The Word must be known and prized, and laid up in the heart. Then the threatenings, the promises, the excellencies of God’s Word, and God Himself realized, the young man would be inwardly fortified; the understanding enlightened, conscience quickened—he would not sin against his God. Stephen.

As soon as one touches a Gospel, he at once brings his mind into better order. But if there be added to this a careful reading, then his soul is purified and becomes better, while God converses with it through those writings. The reading of the Scriptures is a great preservative against sin, whereas ignorance of the Scriptures is a great precipice, a deep abyss, and to know nothing of the Divine law is altogether to throw away one’s salvation. It is this which has generated heresies, which has brought in a corrupt life, which has turned everything upside down. For it is impossible, quite impossible, that any one should go away without benefit who reads Scripture habitually and attentively. Chrysostom.—It is not enough for you to have a choice sentence of God’s Word written upon the walls of your churches; but let God’s law be written in your hearts and consciences, and practised in your lives, that all the world may see you live as men dedicated to the true God. Jenkyn.

12. What is the connection of thought between these two clauses? Perhaps this, Thou, Lord, art infinitely blessed in Thy purity, Thy benevolence, in the perfection of Thy entire moral nature. Oh, lead me upward to that same moral perfection! It is the noble purpose of Thy revealed law to bring Thy moral creatures up to Thine own standard of purity. Oh, help me to realize this purpose in my heart and life! C.—God cannot be unreal or remote to any who have learned to see, in the Bible, not a book of theology nor a volume of history, but a vital, throbbing, personal communication from our Father in heaven, full of infinite tenderness and wisdom, able to meet our daily spiritual requirement; inexhaustible and therefore Divine. God’s consolations cannot be small with those who have found the master key to this golden treasury of life and inspiration and peace. J. H. Barrows.

14. The way of Thy testimonies.** The “way” of God’s testimony is the practice of His Word, the doing of that which He hath declared to be His will, and wherein He hath promised to show us His love; and in very deed, the only cause why we find not the comfort that is in the Word of God is that we practise it not by walking in the way thereof. W. Cowper.

A child of God is delighted in obedience and in conformity to His Word. “I have rejoiced in the way of His testimonies as much as in all riches,” not only in the testimonies themselves—in the naked contemplation of these blessed truths—but in the way and practice of these things. He that loves His rule will study an exact conformity thereto. The true believer finds his delight when he can copy out the Word of God and transcribe it as the moral image of his God into his heart. Salter.

All riches. These are the only riches within the reach of all. If we are poor in this world, it is the Lord’s providence. If we are poor in grace, it is our own fault. “Things present and things to come;” something enjoyed and much more expected; the mercies of eternity added to the blessings of time; the riches of both worlds are all assured to him by the covenant of grace “in the way of the Lord’s testimonies.” But the riches of God’s testimonies only rejoice the heart when they are uppermost there.

15. I will meditate in Thy precepts.

Rejoicing in the testimonies of God will naturally flow in an habitual meditation in them. The thoughts follow the affections. C. B.—He who has an inward delight in anything will not long withdraw his mind from it. To some men meditation is a task; to the man of cleansed way it is a joy. He who has meditated will meditate; he who saith, “I have rejoiced,” is the same who adds, “I will meditate.” S.

The Hebrew word here translated “meditate” signifies properly to speak or converse with one’s self. Hence it conveys the idea of seclusion, retirement, solitude, and, at the same time, of mental activity. In meditation the mind retreats within itself; but it retreats thither to think, to ponder, to reflect. Meditation rivets Divine truth in the memory. Meditation on Divine things makes them really profitable to us. Meditation gives depth, seriousness, and earnestness to our religious profession and character. Religion, whatever else it is, is a mode of thought; and hence it is only as deep and earnest thoughtfulness is bestowed upon it that it can be developed in its higher and nobler forms. W. L. A.

The end of study is information, and the end of meditation is practice, or a work upon the affections. Study is like a winter sun, that shines, but warms not; but meditation is like a blowing up the fire, where we do not mind the blaze, but the heat. The end of study is to hoard up truth; but of meditation to lay it forth in conference or holy conversation. Manton.—It is not the bee’s touching on the flowers that gathers the honey, but her abiding for a time upon them, and drawing out the sweet. It is not he that reads most, but he that meditates most on Divine truth, that will prove the choicest, strongest Christian. Bishop H.

It probably is true of a great many regular readers of the Bible, that they lapse into a formal way of going over the chapters, one by one, and fail to drink in the spirit and deep meaning of the inspired words. Regular reading of the Scriptures is to be encouraged, of course. Every day ought to include an allotted time for communion with God, through the reading of His blessed Book and through private prayer. But regularity may be mechanical, or it may be full of life and enthusiasm. When one reads simply to cover so many verses each day, as if he were discharging an obligation, his regularity becomes mechanical and unprofitable. It is when one goes to the Bible daily to find something that he wants—goes as a searcher after the good things of God—and considers the meaning of what he reads with a lively and yet reverent interest, that he reads with profit and with sincere pleasure. A man, who has found the Bible to be the most interesting and helpful book in his house, states that he developed interest in it by reading one verse a day, at first, but he studied that verse in all its bearings and sought to discover its peculiar meaning for him. In this, as in other spiritual concerns, those who seek shall find. Interior.

For some daily portion, large or small, read, marked, and inwardly digested, you are bound to find time. Business has no right to interfere with a duty as plain as that of obedience to parents or of abstinence from profanity. To give to anything the time necessary for this, is to render unto Cæsar the thing that is God’s. There is far too great readiness on the part of Christians to excuse themselves from this duty on the ground of preoccupation; and their Christian lives starve for just this reason. They are spiritually lean and barren because they are not fed on the Word; and their leanness tells disastrously upon the fair heritage of the Church, as the seven thin and blasted ears consumed the seven full ones. None will go to the work of the day without the morning meal. But too many think nothing of plunging into the day’s cares and toils without a morsel of the bread which cometh down from heaven. God will not nourish you with other bread because you have no leisure to taste of the “angels’ food” He so freely gives you. And you may depend upon it that the time taken for the careful study of a portion of God’s Word, taken from business, if need be, will be more than made up by the wellspring of blessing which that truth shall set running in your heart, to cheer and to refresh you when your burdens are heaviest. Vincent.

As we drift along the swift, relentless current of time toward the end of life, as days and weeks and months and years follow each other in breathless haste, and we reflect now and then for a moment that, at any rate for us, much of this earthly career has passed irrevocably, what are the interests, the thoughts, ay, the books, which really command our attention? What do we read and leave unread? What time do we give to the Bible? No other book, let us be sure of it, can equally avail to prepare us for that which lies before us; for the unknown anxieties and sorrows which are sooner or later the portion of most men and women; for the gradual approach of death; for the passage into the unseen world; for the sights and sounds which then will burst upon us; for the period, be it long or short, of waiting and preparation; for the throne and the face of the eternal Judge. Looking back from that world, how shall we desire to have made the most of our best guide to it! how shall we grudge the hours we have wasted on any, be they thoughts or books or teachers, which only belong to the things of time! Liddon.

I will have respect. The one is the fruit of the other, “I will meditate;” and then, “I will have respect.” Meditation is in order to practise; and if it be right, it will beget a respect to the ways of God. We do not meditate that we may rest in contemplation, but in order to obedience, “Thou shalt meditate in the book of the law day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein” (Josh. 1:8). Manton.—I will have respect unto Thy ways, as the traveller has to his road, which he is in care not to miss, and always aims and endeavors to hit. We do not meditate on God’s precepts to good purposes, unless we have respect to them as our rule, and our good thoughts produce good works, and good intentions in them. H.

16. Surely those who are serving Him in this happy, filial walk are not likely to “forget His Word.” As the eye is continually turned to the object of its affection, so the eye of the soul, that has been fixed with delight on the ways of God, will be habitually resting upon them. As a wise heathen observed, “I never yet heard of a covetous old man, who had forgotten where he had buried his treasure.” The reason is abundantly evident. His heart is in it. C. B.—Delight preventeth forgetfulness; the mind will run upon that which the heart delighteth in; and the heart is where the treasure is. Such instructions as we take in with sweetness, they stick with us, and run in our minds night and day. Manton.

After all these thousands of years of the world’s existence, after all splendors of literature in all the nations and in all ages, there is no book in the whole world which can supersede the Bible as an instrument for the education of the young. After all these millennia it remains the most uniquely glorious book which the world has ever known. Alone of all books it is circulated in hundreds of millions of copies in every tongue spoken by man: its eclipse would be the return of chaos; its extinction would be the epitaph of history. “Its light,” says Cardinal Newman, “is like the beauty of heaven in all its clearness, its vastness like the bosom of the sea, its variety like the scenes of nature.” Perhaps testimony from a religious teacher might be regarded as purely official. Let me, then, quote the testimony of an eminent living man of science; the testimony of a man like Professor Huxley on this subject will, at least, not be suspected. “I have been seriously perplexed to know,” he says, “how the religious feeling which is the essential basis of conduct can be kept up without the use of the Bible. The pagan moralists lacked fire, and life, and color, and even the noble Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, is too high and refined for an ordinary child. For three centuries this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history. It forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilizations, and of the great past stretching back to the farthest limit of the oldest nations of the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanized or made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary interspace between two eternities, and earns the blessings or the curses of this and of all time, according to his efforts to do good and to hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment for their daily work?” Farrar.

Blessed book, bright as heaven when the sun has dissolved the clouds; beautiful as earth when the summer has clothed it with flowers; wondrous book, now all music, now all judgment, a fountain in the wilderness, a shadow of a great rock in a weary land, an infinite provision for the soul’s infinite hunger; not a man-made book at all, but quite full of God, throbbing with God, burning with God, awful, solemn, sublime with God. Other books come and go, but this book stands forever, because the world forever reads it. Anon.

“If we be ignorant,” said the translators of 1611, “the Scriptures will instruct us; if out of the way, they will bring us home; if out of order, they will reform us; if in heaviness, comfort us; if dull, quicken us; if cold, inflame us.” Tolle lege, Tolle lege; take them and read, take them and read. Only beware how you read. Read as a scoffer, read as a Pharisee, and it will be useless. Read rightly, and then the Bible will be a light unto your feet, and a lamp unto your path. Read teachably, read devotionally. The saving knowledge of Scripture is a science not of the intellect, but of the heart. Read, above all, as Christ taught us to read, not to entangle yourselves in the controversial or the dubious, but go to the very heart of the central significance. But read it in humility and in love, and then no Urim which the priest wore has ever gleamed with such lessons as it will reveal to you. However much it may be mingled with mystery which we are not required to unravel, and difficulties which we are not able to solve, the Bible contains plain teaching for men of every rank of soul and every state in life, and which, so far as they honestly and implicitly obey, they will be happy and innocent to the utmost powers of their nature, and capable of victory over all adversities, whether of temptation or of pain. For in the Holy Scriptures you find the secrets of eternal life, and they are they which testify of Jesus Christ. Farrar.

Bible Study. Bible reading may be an important element in Bible study, but is not in itself the study of the Bible. Bible memorizing has its incidental advantages to one who would have the words of Scripture always available; but Bible memorizing is never in itself Bible studying, nor is it even, like Bible reading, an important element in Bible study. Familiarizing one’s self with the contents of the Bible so as to be able to locate the text of any historic fact or special teaching, requires a certain measure of application in study; but it can hardly be called in itself Bible study. A careful analysis of the various books of the Bible, with a view to showing their date and authorship and immediate purpose of writing, together with an exhibit of their peculiarities of style and subject-matter, calls for patient investigation and demands a large measure of intellectual acumen; but all this knowledge may be mastered without touching the great truths of those books, which are of chiefest importance to him who would know and use the Bible aright. Tracking the use of a particular word or phrase throughout the Bible record, in proof of a presupposed duty or doctrine, without discriminating between the different meanings of that word or phrase in different connections, may be a means of Bible study that is not Bible study. Text-collating is not by any means the true study of texts.

Bible study may include any or all of these methods, but it must include something beyond them all in order to be true Bible study. There is a sense in which the Bible is like any other book, in being made up of words that must be noted in their connection and uses, and that therefore it is to be studied like any other book in order to arrive at its meanings. But there is another sense in which the Bible is unlike all other books, in that it contains God’s peculiar message to mankind through men whom He trained and inspired for that special purpose, and that therefore its study must be mainly for the ascertaining and understanding of the Divine truths that, unlike any other book, it has for ourselves as we are in our present needs and our ultimate destiny. Except for this difference in methods and objects of study, the Bible study of the baldest rationalist and of the most frigid agnostic is as much of a help toward truth as the Bible study of the warmest-hearted and most trustful Christian believer. No Bible study looks to the proper end of Bible study that does not seek to ascertain just what lesson it is that God would have this student gain from the passage immediately under study; and no student of the Bible has yet profited by his Bible study unless he is thereby helped toward truer completeness of manhood as a disciple of Christ. It is well enough to become familiar with the structure and contents of the different books of the Bible, and to memorize as many portions of it as there is time and mental strength for; but all this is but an incident to true Bible study, and not the thing itself. Bible study is for the purpose of gaining impulses and helps to the Christian life. H. C. T.

17. DEAL bountifully with thy servant, that I may live; So will I observe thy word. 18 Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold Wondrous things out of thy law. 19 I am a sojourner in the earth: Hide not thy commandments from me. 20 My soul breaketh for the longing That it hath unto thy judgments at all times. 21 Thou hast rebuked the proud that are cursed, Which do wander from thy commandments. 22 Take away from me reproach and contempt; For I have kept thy testimonies. 23 Princes also sat and talked against me: But thy servant did meditate in thy statutes. 24 Thy testimonies also are my delight And my counsellors.

25. My soul cleaveth unto the dust: Quicken thou me according to thy word. 26 I declared my ways, and thou answeredst me: Teach me thy statutes. 27 Make me to understand the way of thy precepts: So shall I meditate of thy wondrous works. 28 My soul melteth for heaviness: Strengthen thou me according unto thy word. 29 Remove from me the way of falsehood: And grant me thy law graciously. 30 I have chosen the way of faithfulness: Thy judgments have I set before me. 31 I cleave unto thy testimonies: O LORD, put me not to shame. 32 I will run the way of thy commandments, When thou shalt enlarge my heart.

17. Bountifully. Remembering what a weak, empty, and helpless creature the most experienced believer is in himself, it is not to be conceived that anything short of a bountiful supply of grace can answer the emergency. Standing as we do upon such high and sure ground, it is equally dishonorable to God, and impoverishing to ourselves, to ask only a little of Him. Rather let us, according to His own command, “open our mouths wide, and He will fill them.” C. B.

That I may live. Life is, therefore, a choice mercy, because it is an opportunity of obeying God in this world. “Not that I may live and grow rich, live and be merry; but that I may live and keep Thy Word, observe it myself, and transmit it to those that shall come after, which, the longer I live, the better I shall do.” H.

18. “Open Thou mine eyes, that I may see.” He asks for no new revelation. The request is not for more, but that he may employ well that which he possesses. He asks for no new faculty. The eyes are there already, and they need only to be opened. Ker.—The saints do not complain of the obscurity of the law, but of their own blindness. The Psalmist doth not say, Lord, make a plainer law, but Lord, open mine eyes; blind men might as well complain of God that He doth not make a sun whereby they might see. The Word is “a light that shineth in a dark place” (2 Pet. 1: 19). There is no want of light in the Scripture, but there is a veil of darkness upon our hearts. Manton.

Two forms of Divine teaching are implied in these words: Revelation and spiritual apprehension to receive that which is revealed, truth in the written Word and the inward illumination of the Holy Spirit, the one, therefore, universal, common to all men, the open Bible, the Gospel preached to every creature under heaven; the other personal, private, incommunicable by man to man. And in this prayer both these are equally recognized as God’s gift. “Open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law.” . . . It is an unspeakably consoling and delightful reflection that this impossibility of attaining spiritual truth apart from Divine teaching which God’s Word so plainly sets forth, puts no hindrance in any man’s way, no hindrance in the way of the simplest learner, no hindrance in the way of the unbeliever any more than of the believer, if only the unbeliever is desirous of knowing what is truth. . . . This prayer implies the Divine inspiration and authority of the Bible; for is it not plainly incontrovertible that if the Bible be a book which the wisest man cannot understand, and therefore cannot interpret, without Divine teaching direct from God, it must be a book which no man could have written without such teaching? E. R. Conder.

The man who uttered these words felt that he was under Divine law, and that it deeply concerned him to know it well; that to realize its sublimity and comprehensiveness, its marvellous wisdom, its perfect righteousness, would be light, and strength, and life to his soul, but that so to realize it God must vouchsafe to him a sacred influence, a spiritual enlightenment, and, he adds, sufficient faith in his God to believe that He was able and willing thus to help him. We need to have our eyes opened to see the law, our minds helped to understand the truth. The reason of man can no more act independently of God than his will can. Just as the will has been made to find its life in the holiness of God, reason has been made to find its life in the wisdom of God. Unless God open our eyes to behold the wonders of His law, no clearness in the outward revelation of its wonders will give us a true view of it. We shall see and yet not perceive. R. Flint.

Scripture can be savingly understood only in and by the inward illumination of the Holy Ghost. The Gospel is a picture of God’s free grace to sinners. Were we in a room hung with the finest paintings and adorned with the most exquisite statues, we could not see one of them, if all light were excluded. Now the blessed Spirit’s irradiation is the same to the mind that outward light is to the bodily eyes. Toplady. — As the sun can be seen only by its own light, so Christ can be known only by His own Spirit. The sun can make dark things clear; but it cannot make a blind man to see them. But herein is the excellency of this Divine Sun, that He illuminates not only the object, but the faculty; doth not only open the mysteries of His kingdom, but opens blind eyes to behold them. Leighton. — Wonders without grace cannot open the eyes fully; but grace without wonders can. And as man hath not an eye to see the wonderful works of God spiritually, until it is given; so, much less hath he an eye to see the wonders of the Word of God till it be given him from above. Caryl.

The Holy Spirit is needful to enable me so to understand the Bible that, instead of being a mere outer truth it may exercise an influence within, overcoming the hostility of my heart, sanctifying its governing principles, and giving new life and energy within. Hence it is the

Spirit that fills every symbol in it with celestial glory, that inspires every truth in the Bible with life, gives to its every promise sweet music, and communicates to the heart that studies its receptive power, and makes this Book the guide unto life everlasting. Cumming. — By removing the mists of prejudice, by taking away the scales of pride and self-sufficiency, and by rectifying the will, which causes the judgment to look at truth through a distorted medium, by influencing the heart, so that the affections shall no longer blind the understanding, the Holy Ghost enables men to behold the wondrous things of the law. Melvill. — The Bible is dull when I am dull. When I am really alive, and set in upon the text with a tidal pressure of living affinities it opens, it multiplies discoveries, and reveals depths even faster than I can note them. The worldly spirit shuts the Bible; the Spirit of God makes it a fire, flaming out all meanings and glorious truths. Bushnell.

The Bible is heaven-spoken; but we must separate heaven from the word which invests it, while it reveals it; and this is what Jesus Christ teaches us to do. It is an interpretation, moreover, which no commentary can supply for us; we must seek it upon our knees, saying to God, “Open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law!” Then we shall receive God’s witness within ourselves; then what is written in the heart will agree so well with what is written in the Book, that we shall recognize in both the work of the same Spirit. The Bible, we said, just now, is heaven-spoken; the Bible thus listened to, would be heaven seen, felt, lived! A. Monod.

The language of the Bible is divinely chosen; its words and figures are designed to be just what they are: “The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver tried, seven times refined.” We may, therefore, search them, and rationally search them, for a Divine significance. Not one jot or tittle of it shall fail to reward our study. Christ has given us assurance of this; the Light of the World hath told us that the Scriptures are everywhere full of Him and His salvation. He Himself found rich meanings lying under words and forms of speech in which the Sadducean rationalists of His day saw nothing. We may, therefore, expect to discover in them “treasures new and old.” We shall see “wondrous things out of the Divine law,” and these will be, not merely conceits of our own minds, but thoughts substantial, living ideas, having in themselves evidence that they are true fruits, not of any mere human thinking, but of the “ingrowing Word,”

the life-giving Word that saves; that is, heals, makes sound, our souls. T. Lewis.

We cannot understand our Scriptures without a spirit which is in harmony with them. In the neglect of true Christian culture, in the disuse of spiritual communion and a loving, obedient endeavor, the mind will grow dark. It is an appalling retribution that they who exclude the light gradually lose the power to see. If the real truth is disliked, or regarded with prejudice, the mind will be darkened to its perception. We meet a blind man, with downcast face and hesitating step, groping his way along the street, and are sad for our blind brother. But how much more an object of compassion is he of the sightless soul. W. A. Stearns.

The Word of God is the great subject of this Psalm, and it is surprising how much this man found in it, when we think how small a part of that Word was then in his hands. We can only account for it when we light upon a prayer like this, which shows such a desire to use it to full advantage, and an earnest request that God would help him in doing so. The great end of the Word of God then, as now, was practical. Ker.—What the age demands is a more intense study of the Holy Scriptures, accompanied by this prayer of the Psalmist. The Bible itself must be brought out, its mighty spiritual power unfolded, as the best answer to infidelity, the Bible subjectively, the Bible objectively, as the great standing miracle of human history, as presenting a train of events most unaccountable in their bearing, on the world’s course, as containing ideas which no philosophy, no theory of development can ever explain. To such study it will reveal itself as “the power of God. Taylor Lewis.

Bible students should constitute a body of sound, intelligent, magnanimous, eminently spiritual men and women, the salt of every church, the light of every village and city. Increased knowledge of the Scriptures they undoubtedly have. But is it not, in many cases, the mere letter, the historical fact, the geographical locality, or biographical incident? Do they live in that world of rich conceptions and of imperishable truths which is opened to them in the Bible? B. B. Edwards.

19. A sojourner in the earth.** The prayer is perfectly suited to the condition here described. “A stranger,” here but for a little, and yet morally beginning the great hereafter, “never continuing in one stay,” and yet possessing one being, and developing and settling that being into character. God’s commandments, revealed and brought home to the heart, will yield plentifully all that can be needed in the pilgrim state. In one way or other they touch all the chances and hazards of the journey and all the requirements of the traveler, while they all combine to make one supreme influence of preparation for what will come when the earthly journey is over. Raleigh.—The pilgrim-spirit is the pulse of the soul. All of us are travelling to eternity. The worldling is at home in the earth, a pilgrim only by constraint. The child of God is a stranger in the earth. Heaven is the country of his birth. His kindred, his inheritance, his Saviour, his hope, his home is there. C. B.

Hide not Thy commandments. Here is a creature of sensibility and affection standing in this world, self-severed from it, separate, disportioned, lonely, and all for the love of God and in order to keep the best place for Him and His heavenly gifts and joys. Is there not in the very condition a mighty argument for the enforcement of the prayer? It is not possible that God should leave such a prayer without answer. He will “hide” neither His “commandments” nor Himself from such an one. He will reveal. He will refresh. He will visit, surprising the stranger sometimes with the light of an unexpected presence, meeting the pilgrim at times on the upward way to give foretaste and some pre-enjoyment of that perfect blessedness which will come to him when he passes into a world where he will be stranger and pilgrim no more. Raleigh.

God’s law and His written Word are guides to present duty, which, if faithfully accepted, will help to set you in accordance with the mind of God and the plan He has laid for you. “I am a stranger in the earth,” said one, “hide not Thy commandments from me;” knowing that God’s commandments would give him a clew to the true meaning and business of his life. . . . The simple thought of a life which is to be the unfolding of a Divine plan is too beautiful, too captivating, to suffer one indifferent or heedless moment. Living in this manner, every turn of your experience will be a discovery to you of God, every change a token of His fatherly counsel. Whatever obscurity, darkness, trial, suffering falls upon you: your defeats, losses, injuries; your outward state, employment, relations; what seems hard, unaccountable, severe, or, as nature might say, vexatious, all these you will see are parts or constitutive elements in God’s beautiful and good plan for you. Trust God, have an implicit trust in God, and these very things will impart the highest zest to life! H. B.

20. The object of our desires is an inexhaustible spring. The longing of the soul can never over-reach its object. The cherished desire, therefore, will become the established habit, the element in which the child of God lives and thrives. Let not the fervor of desire here expressed be conceived to be out of reach; nor let it be expected in the way of some sudden manifestation or excitement. Rather let us look for it in a patient, humble, and persevering waiting upon the Lord. C. B.—The Psalmist longed for the Word at all times; in prosperity, to humble him; in adversity, to comfort him; in the one, to keep him from pride; in the other, to keep him from despair; in affliction, the Word was his cordial; in worldly increase, it was his antidote; and so at all times his heart was carried out to the Word either for one necessity or another. Manton.

Dr. Chalmers, after kindling churches and arousing nations to their duties, summed up his own attainments in the word “desirousness,” and took as the text that best described his inner state, this passionate, almost painful cry of David: “My soul breaketh for the longing that it hath unto Thy judgments.” But how grand was the attainment! To be in old age as simple as a little child before God! Raleigh.

21. The proud.** This is a style commonly given to the wicked, because as it is our oldest evil, so is it the strongest and first that strives in our corrupt nature to carry men to transgress the bounds appointed by the Lord. And what else is the cause of all transgression, but that man’s ignorant pride will have his will preferred to the will of God. W. Cowper.—The proud man hath no cause to be proud, as other sinners have; the covetous for riches, the ambitious for honor, the voluptuous for pleasure, the slothful for ease; but the proud man hath no cause to be proud but pride itself, which saith, like Pharaoh, “I will not obey.” Henry Smith.

We wonder not at this expression of the mind of God concerning pride. There is no sin more abhorrent to His character. It is as if we were taking the crown from His head and placing it upon our own. It is man making a god of himself; acting from himself and for himself. Nor is this principle less destructive to our own happiness. And yet it is not only rooted, but it often rears its head and blossoms, and bears fruit, even in hearts which “hate and abhor” its influence. It is always active, always ready imperceptibly to mix itself up with everything. Let no saint, therefore, however near he may be living to God, consider himself beyond the reach of this temptation. C. B.

Are cursed. The proud sinners bless themselves, God curses them; and though the most direful effects of this curse are reserved for the other world, yet they are often severely rebuked in this world; Providence crosses them, vexes them, and, wherein they dealt proudly, God shows Himself above them, and these rebukes are earnest of worse. H.

22. Hard words, indeed, and foul words break no bones, and yet they are very grievous to a tender and ingenuous spirit; therefore David prays, Lord “remove” them from me, that I may not be thereby either driven from any duty, or discouraged in it. H.—Kept Thy testimonies. If we have the testimony of our consciences that in the midst of a persecuting world we “have kept His testimonies,” here is our evidence of our Father’s special love, of the indwelling, comforting, supporting Spirit. Here, then, is our warrant of hope that the overwhelming weight will be removed from us. C. B.

23. What method he took to make himself easy under these abuses; he meditated in God’s statutes, went on in his duty, and did not regard them; as a deaf man, he heard not; when they spake against him, he found that in the Word of God which spake for him, and spake comfort to him, and then none of these things moved him. They that have pleasure in communion with God may easily despise the censures of men. H.

Thy statutes. It is impossible to live either Christianly or comfortably without the daily use of Scripture. It is necessary for our direction in all our ways before we begin them, and when we have ended them, for the warrant of our approbation of them, for resolving of our doubts, and comforting us in our griefs. For matter, it is wisdom; for authority, it is Divine and absolute; with an unspeakable power to stamp our heart. W. Struthers.

24. They who would have God’s testimonies to be their delight, must take them for their counsellors and be advised by them; and let those that take them for their counsellors in close walking take them for their delight in comfortable walking. H.—They who make the Word their delight will always find it their counsellor. The Christian is a man of faith every step of his way. And this habitual use and daily familiarity with the testimonies of God will show him the pillar and the cloud in all the dark turns of His heavenly road. The word will be to him as the “Urim and Thummim,” an infallible counsellor. Though it may not mark every precise act of duty, yet it determines the standard to which the most minute acting of the mind should be brought, and the disposition, which will reflect the light of the will of God upon our path. C. B.

25. It is not a strange experience for believers to be in this depressed condition; the soul cleaving to the dust. Sometimes there may be physical causes connected with a man’s state of health, and sometimes other providences of God are concerned in producing this state of things; but it is a stage in a man’s spiritual history. Generally it is connected with indwelling sin. More particularly it arises in connection with the failure of faith on the part of believers. Looking at it from the side of God’s providence, it is permitted by God just as a step in the believer’s history, because it is necessary that the believer’s history should include an enlarged acquaintance with himself, with his own insufficiency, with his own tendency to unbelief, and darkness, and sin. It is not characteristic of a believer to be contented in this condition. How can any one who believes in the reality and presence of a living God be content with a feeling of this deadness and depression, this awful contrast to the life and glory of that life-giving God? More than that, the believer has faith in the presence and power of a life-giving Christ. He has faith also in the life-giving Spirit, and in the mission and work of the Holy Ghost in its power, and gentleness, and love. How can a man who believes this be content to go on with his soul cleaving to the dust? Therefore he casts himself on God in prayer, and you find him declaring to God the condition in which he is: “My soul cleaveth to the dust,” and applying to God to meet this case of his: “Quicken Thou me according to Thy Word.” R. Rainy.

It is not a little remarkable that while the Psalmist says, “My soul cleaveth to the dust,” he should say in v. 31, “I have cleaved unto Thy testimonies;” for it is the same word in both verses. The thing is altogether compatible with the experience of the believer. Within there is the body of indwelling sin and the undying principle of Divine grace. There is the contest between them; “the flesh lusteth against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh” (Gal. 5: 17), and the believer is constrained to cry out, “O wretched man that I am” (Rom. 7: 24). So the believer prays, Cause that I be not put to shame. And keeping close to Christ, you shall not be put to shame world without end. J. Stephen.—It is the grand proof of a renewed mind that it fights vigorously against all sin, inward as well as outward; that it desires to “grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ;” that it “hungers and thirsts after righteousness;” that it longs to lay itself out for the glory of God, and to abound more and more in every good word and work. Where this is not the case, faith is not; and where faith is not, Christ is not; and where Christ is not, Satan must be. Hill.

From the great conflict with sin none come off without many a scar. We may wrestle and prevail, but there will be touches of the enemy, which will leave their long and bitter memories. The way to heaven is made of falling down and rising up again. The battle is no steady, onward fight, but rallies and retreats, retreats and rallies. The reason of our defeats is that the old sin of the character continues and continues with unabated force in the heart of a child of God. There are two ways in which sin breaks out and gains an advantage over a believer: First, a new temptation suddenly presents itself. Secondly, the old habit of sin recurs; recurs, indeed, sevenfold, but still the same sin. . . . All sin in a believer must arise from a reduction of grace. This is the result of grieving the Holy Ghost by a careless omission of prayer or other means of grace. There was an inward defeat before there was an outward and apparent one. But defeat is not final. It is not the end of the campaign; it is but one event in the war. It may even be converted into a positive good to the soul, for God can and will overrule guilt to gain. He allows the defeat to teach us repentance and humility. J. V.

Sanctification is not mending the old nature which we inherit from Adam; it is cultivating and developing the new nature which we receive from Christ. The old nature cannot be improved; it is under a ban and a curse; it is to be crucified with its affections and lusts, and mortified in its members; we are to put it off, as we put off a worn-out and defiled garment; nay, we are to count ourselves dead to it, as if it had no more relation to us, since we are alive to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. The soul is like a house of which strangers have taken possession, and lord it cruelly over the owner. What shall you do for your liberty? Pride will never be humble, lust will never be pure, selfishness will never think of a neighbor’s interests, envy will never exult in a neighbor’s joy. The only thing to be done is to turn them out by bringing in others stronger than they, who will, little by little, get the mastery over them. Thus the way to conquer pride is to cultivate humility; if we would be gentle, let us practise self-control; if we would think of others and help them, we must bear their burdens. The old affections must be expelled by new; the invading tyrants must be besieged and cast out by legitimate owners; and though we shall carry with us to our grave the roots of our old nature, though not till we have cast off the garment of our corruptible flesh shall we have our full liberty as sons of God, it is of infinite moment to us to ascertain that the only way of holiness is to overcome evil with good; and that there is no limit to the power of the grace of God save that which is imposed by ourselves. Thorold.

But this complaint is the language of conflict and humiliation, not of despondency. Mark the believer carrying it to the Lord. Quicken me. Breathe upon me Thine own life, that I may rise from the dust and cleave to Thee. This cry for quickening grace is the exercise of faith. We have a covenant to plead. Faith is the hand that takes hold of the promise, “according to Thy Word.” Can this Word fail? “He is faithful that hath promised.” The man who takes hold of this plea is “a prince who has power with God and prevails.” C. B.—The way from the deepest pain to the best consolation is through the humble, earnest, persevering prayer, that He who lives would also give life to our souls, and continue to increase it. This the God of life alone can work. Only, let us not forget that He who will quicken us according to His Word, also performs this through His Word. Let us, then, draw from out the eternally flowing fountain, and henceforth leave it unconditionally to Him how He will listen to our cry. Lord, do with us as seemeth good to Thee! Only let our souls live, that they may praise Thee here and eternally! Van O.

Quicken Thou me. This phrase occurs nine times, and only in this Psalm. It is of great importance, as it expresses the spiritual change by which a child of Adam becomes a child of God. Its source is God; the instrument by which it is effected is the Word. M.—No man can quicken his own soul. It is the sovereign work of almighty power. It is equally ascribed to the loving Father, redeeming Son, and sanctifying Spirit (John 5 : 21 ; 6 : 63). “I am come, that ye might have life,” saith Jesus. He quickeneth the dead in trespasses and sins; and then they cry to Him to have life more abundantly. And as they too often find themselves cleaving to the dust, to the sensible, earthly, vain enjoyments of this world, this alarms them; it is a burden and grief to them. Hence they pour out their complaints to their beloved Lord with, “Master, let it not be thus. Quicken my drooping spirit. Enliven my declining heart. Cheer my languishing soul, according to the Word of Thy grace and the truth of Thy promises.” Here is the blessed confidence of faith. His Word is our plea. By that we have assurance of being heard and answered. W. Mason.

The Word of God is called the sword of the Spirit. It is the instrument by which the Spirit worketh. He does not tell us anything that is out of the record; but all that is within it He sends home with clearness and effect upon the mind. He does not make us wise above that which is written, but He makes us wise up to that which is written. The Spirit does not add a single truth or a single character to the Book of Revelation. He enables the spiritual man to see what the natural man cannot see; but the spectacle which He lays open is uniform and immutable. It is the Word of God which is ever the same; and he whom the Spirit of God has enabled to look to the Bible with a clear and affecting discernment sees no phantom passing before him; but, amid all the visionary extravagance with which he is charged, can, for every one article of his faith, and every one duty of his practice, make his triumphant appeal to the law and to the testimony. Chalmers.

26. This verse contains a prayer, with a reason after this form: O Lord, I have oft before declared unto Thee the whole state and course of my life, my wanderings, my wants, my doubts, my griefs; I hid nothing from Thee, and thou, according to my necessity, didst always hear me. Therefore, now, Lord, I pray Thee to teach me; by Thy light illuminate me, that I may know Thy statutes and receive grace to walk in them. This is a good argument in dealing with the Lord; I have gotten many mercies and favorable answers from thee; therefore, Lord, I pray Thee to give me more; for whom He loves, He loves to the end; and where He begins to show mercy He ceaseth not till He crown His children with mercy. And so gracious is the Lord that He esteems Himself to be honored as oft as we give Him the praise that we have received mercies from Him, and therefore come to seek more. W. Cowper.

27. Mark the reiterated cries of the man of God for heavenly light. Teach me Thy statutes; make me to understand the way of Thy precepts. The need and the encouragement for these cries is equally manifest. Who has ever been known to understand the way of himself? And to whom, walking in a well-ordered conversation, has the Lord ever failed to show it? C. B.

He who lets one day slip by without feeding upon some portion of the Bible endangers the health of his soul as truly as the man defrauds his body who goes without food. And no sooner does he allow one day to pass thus forgetful of God and His truth, than a tendency is begotten which promises a second omission, and a third, and so on, until this bread of life, sent down from heaven for the nourishment of that which is immortal within us is wholly neglected, and leanness of soul results in spiritual decay. Anon.

28. In the midst of heaviness the child of God cannot forget that he is loved, that he is saved; and the recollection of this sovereign mercy makes his tears of godly sorrow tears of joy. When we are most sensible of utter helplessness, and most simple in reliance upon Divine strength, then the soul melting for heaviness is most especially upheld and established. “Heaviness in the heart of man maketh it stoop; but a good word maketh it glad.”

32. I will run. But how? By “the good hand of my God upon me,” delivering and enlarging my heart. He does not say, I will make no efforts unless Thou work for me; but if Thou wilt enlarge, I will run. Weakness is not the plea for indolence, but for quickening grace. “Draw me, and I will run after Thee.” C. B. The Christian life is represented as a race, a work, a labor, a conflict, a warfare. It needs a strong, constant, unwavering purpose, along with the constant, ever-present, omnipotent grace of God. God is our all in all. Christ’s strength must be made perfect in our weakness. The Psalmist says, I will run in the way of Thy commandments when Thou shalt enlarge my heart. Here is the purpose, I will run; here is the way, Thy commandments; here is the soul’s dependence, when Thou shalt enlarge my heart; and here is the source of power, the grace of God in the heart, in the deep heart. To this Paul answers, Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do. Blessed harmony of God’s working and man’s working, of God’s grace and man’s obedience! Cheever.

The heart is the master; the feet soon run when the heart is free and energetic. Let the affections be aroused and eagerly set on Divine things, and our actions will be full of force, swiftness, and delight. God must work in us first, and then we shall will and do according to His good pleasure. He must change the heart, unite the heart, encourage the heart, strengthen the heart, and enlarge the heart, and then the course of the life will be gracious, sincere, happy, and earnest. S.

The law is not perfectly fulfilled, except by love. But love is not commanded, it is inspired. The severest injunctions, and the most formidable threatenings could not create in the soul a single emotion of tenderness to God; love alone gives birth to love. Thus, as long as we have before us only the law with its threatenings, we do not fulfil it in the spirit by which it ought to be fulfilled; that is, we do not fulfil it at all. The Gospel has said that “love casteth out fear;” it is also just to say, that fear casteth out love; for we cannot love when we fear. It is the privilege and glory of the Gospel to give to the soul enlargement and freedom; grace being proclaimed and fear banished, we dare love, we can love. “I will run in the way of Thy commandments,” says the Psalmist, “when Thou shalt enlarge my heart.” The heart opens and expands under the gentle warmth of Divine love and the sweet rays of hope. Obedience becomes joyous; it is no longer a painful effort, but a spontaneous and involuntary soaring of the renovated soul. Thus obedience is the fruit of love, and love is the fruit of grace. A. Vinet.

The Psalmist was conscious that his heart was narrow. He craved for more freedom of faith, for larger desires after God, for fuller trust in Him, and for warmer and stronger love toward Him. There are few Christians who will not have the same feeling, and will not be conscious how small and low is their state of grace, how poor their service to their God compared to what it should be, and what it might be with God to help them. Here, again, our hope is in God. He can enlarge our hearts by more perfectly revealing Himself within them. He enters into the soul, and the soul grows with His presence. His glory, and greatness, and beauty snap the restraining bands, and stretch the heart in which He dwells till it becomes capable of peace and joy unknown before. E. Garbett.

It is evident that we may “go” in the way of commandments and not “run.” There is the slow creeping of a mere abstract sense of stern duty. There is the slow walk of simple conscientiousness. There is the slavish course propelled by fear. There is the capricious step, half feeling, half principle, which is continually halting. But all this is not to run. To run is a joyous thing, and shows that the affections and the heart are drawn to it. To run is free, and tells a mind unbound. To run is quick and constant progress; and the attainments are clear, and distinct, and large. To run is a light and easy motion, and marks facility. To run

Saddest of all is the practical depreciation of Christ, or of what He will do as a Saviour, experimentally, from sin. The possibilities of liberty, assurance, a good conscience, a mind entered into rest, are, by one means or another, let down, obscured, or quite taken away. To believe much is enthusiasm, to attempt much, fanaticism. The assumption is that Christ will, in fact, do only a little for us, just as there is only a little done; when the very sufficient reason is that there is only a little allowed to be done. As to any common footing with the ancient saints in their inspirations, guidances, and gifts, it is even a kind of presumption to think of it. Oh, it is a very sad picture! Dear Lord Jesus can it never be that better room shall be given Thee? H. B.

“Largeness of heart” is a pure gift of God. Still in this, as in everything, while all is of God’s grace, the grace itself lies within man’s responsibility. J. V.—We must enlarge our capacity for receiving large things from God. When we have fulfilled this condition and have been set free from the bondage of sin, how blessed, and happy, and joyous is the career before us. The resources of God are simply inexhaustible; the resources of the Christian life are the same. C. W. Furse.

HE.

33. TEACH me, O LORD, the way of thy statutes; And I shall keep it unto the end. 34 Give me understanding, and I shall keep thy law; Yea, I shall observe it with my whole heart. 35 Make me to go in the path of thy commandments; For therein do I delight. 36 Incline my heart unto thy testimonies, And not to covetousness. 37 Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity, And quicken me in thy ways. 38 Confirm thy word unto thy servant, Who is devoted to thy fear. 39 Turn away my reproach whereof I am afraid; For thy judgments are good. 40 Behold, I have longed after thy precepts: Quicken me in thy righteousness.

VAU.

41. Let thy mercies also come unto me, O LORD, Even thy salvation, according to thy word. 42 So shall I have an answer for him that reproacheth me; For I trust in thy word. 43 And take not the word of truth utterly out of my mouth; For I have hoped in thy judgments. 44 So shall I observe thy law continually For ever and ever. 45 And I will walk at liberty; For I have sought thy precepts. 46 I will also speak of thy testimonies before kings, And will not be ashamed. 47 And I will delight myself in thy commandments, Which I have loved. 48 I will lift up my hands also unto thy commandments, which I have loved; And I will meditate in thy statutes.

33-36. The sense of these four methodical petitions in this section is as follows: Make me to see, make me to understand, make me to go in, and make me to love to go in, the beaten and narrow path of thy testimonies. Luther gives almost the exact sense, for he translates the opening words of each verse by terms signifying respectively, “Point out to me,” “Explain to me,” “Lead me,” and “Incline (bend, slope) my heart.” Marchant.—Religion may come to be looked upon too much as a round or series of emotions, and the proof of its presence sought for too exclusively in the vividness and vigor of these emotions. The soul, instead of going out of itself after Christ, looking away to His cross and upward to His crown, searches within itself for the warrant of its hopes. The work of grace, which, as it comes from God should go out after Him, throbbing with a Divine pulse, sinks down and terminates too much within us. We make it a thing of feeling, which, from its very nature, may be delusive; or, if genuine, comparatively meagre and fruitless. Neither right beliefs nor lively emotions of joy and gratitude are enough. There is also something to be done; there are self-denials to be endured; there is a warfare to be waged; a lifelong service to be accomplished. R. D. Hitchcock.

33. Teach me, O Lord, the way of Thy statutes; and I shall keep it. If Thou continue a Teacher of me, I shall continue a servant to Thee. Perseverance cannot be unless continual light and grace be furnished to us from the Lord. Let us always pray that He would ever abide with us, to inform us by His light and lead us by His power in that way which may bring us to Himself. W. Cowper.—Under this influence we live, we endure, we cannot fail of keeping the way unto the end. Thus the end crowns the work. C. B.

34. Make me understand (it) and I will keep Thy law, and will observe it with a whole heart. The first verb is too vaguely rendered in the English versions (give me understanding. The form of the last verb is one expressing strong desire and fixed determination. With a whole heart, or with all (my) heart. A.

Understanding is needful in order that we may know what is commanded and what is forbidden, and how far; that we may avoid the snares laid for us in the way of duty; that we may respect things according to their due worth; that we may do good works in their proper time, place, and manner; above all, that the affections may be directed by the judgment, and not the judgment by the affections. Bishop Horne.—Knowledge gives us a sight, and love gives us a possession; we find God by knowledge, but we enjoy Him by love. Let us improve our knowledge of Him for inflaming our affections to Him, that we may be prepared for the glory of our eternal life. The understanding is but the door of the heart; to let God and Christ stick there, and not bring them into the heart, is to give a cold entertainment to that which deserves the best. Charnock

35. Not only do we need to know the path of God’s commandments, we need Divine help to go in it. Under the complete influence of Divine grace, when understanding has been given to discern the beauty of the path, the soul’s warmest desire is fixed upon it. Conscious helplessness looks upward. Make me to go. C. B.—God’s teaching begets obedience; He showeth us the path of life, and He maketh us to go in it. It is such instruction as giveth strength, that exciteth the sluggish will, and breaketh the force of corrupt inclinations; yea, it giveth not only the will, but the deed; in short, it engageth us in a watchful, careful, uniform, and constant obedience. Manton.

36. Incline my heart unto Thy testimonies, and not to gain. Here again the sense of absolute dependence or Divine influence is strongly implied. Gain, profit, lucre, here put for overweening love of it, supreme devotion to it. A.—The prayer, “Incline not my heart to covetousness,” is of the same sort with this: “Lead us not into temptation,” which by no means implies that God ever tempts men to evil, but only that we have occasion to beg His help to withstand such temptation. C.

The native principle of man draws him to his own self, to his own indulgence, pleasure, covetousness, assuming a thousand forms of gratifying self at the expense of love to God. There is probably no principle so opposed to the Lord’s testimonies. It casts out the principle of obedience, since the love of God cannot co-exist with the love of the world; and the very desire to serve mammon is a proof of unfaithfulness to God. In the midst, therefore, of temptation without and a world of sin within, go onward with the pilgrim’s prayer indelibly fixed on your heart, “Incline my heart unto Thy testimonies, and not to covetousness.” C. B.—Covetousness is of so malignant a nature, that one may have the poison of riches in the midst of poverty; grace is so powerful, that one may have the blessing of poverty in the midst of riches. God by no means permits Himself to be outdone in generosity; He gives all for all, or rather, all for nothing; heaven for earth, Himself for us. Quesnel.

Covetousness is used, for the most part, in connection with one particular form of it, the desire of money. But the word “covetousness” has a much broader meaning, namely, that earnest desire to make one’s own and possess for one’s self what belongs rightfully to another. There are numberless covetous persons who desire no man’s silver or gold; no man’s houses or lands, no man’s external possessions of any kind; for the commandment not to covet is exceeding broad, and the state pointed out very subtle and universal. The real nature and extent of covetousness is seen, when we take into consideration the difference there is between that state which looks at everything with a desire to obtain some personal and peculiar benefit, and that state which is content to be and do what it can and where it is, as part of the Creator’s whole. There is something vulgar in the race for power and wealth, for personal distinction and extra privileges and superior elevation. But more than this: it is true, as the spiritual Fénelon says, “that whoever regards any grace even, with the pleasure of appropriation, turns it into poison. As we abstain from desiring to possess ourselves in our own way, we lose ourselves in God.” And here we touch upon the great reality of all spiritual blessings, the only essential good. That which we all really need in this respect we shall grow into as we become pure and simple, free from desire and from personal greed. “To abstain from possessing ourselves in our own way,” is to place ourselves in that current of influence and activity wherein we shall receive what is best adapted to our state, and shall do what we can with spontaneous and joyous freedom and ease. It is one thing to be drawn by the attraction of the beautiful and true, and another to desire that I may be their individual possessor. In the one case, I love beauty and goodness, and in the other, I love myself. C. C. Shackford.

37. Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity. That sin may be avoided we must avoid whatsoever leads to or occasions it. The eye is apt to make a stand, or fix itself, when we come in view of an ensnaring object; therefore it is our duty to hasten it away, or to pray that God would make it pass off from it. He that feareth burning must take heed of playing with fire. Caryl.—Turn away mine eyes, lest looking cause liking and lusting. In Hebrew the same word signifieth both an eye and a fountain; to show that from the eye, as from a fountain, floweth much mischief; and by that window Satan often winds himself into the soul. Trapp.—Sin first entered man’s mind by the eye, and it is still a favorite gate for the incoming of Satan’s allurements; hence the need of a double watch upon that portal. The prayer is not so much that the eyes may be shut as “turned away;” for we need to have them open, but directed to right objects. S.

Weak dallying with forbidden desires is sure to end in wicked clutching at them. If you know that a thing cannot be won without transgression, do not tamper with hankerings for it. Keep away from the edge, and shut your “eyes from beholding vanity.” A. M.—The worldliness which most of us have most to fear is a negative worldliness, a worldliness without great sins, because it has not great temptations; a quiet, unobtrusive worldliness, so unpretending that it hides itself even from our own notice; a worldliness which the more effectually deposes God, because it does not overtly rebel against Him—nay, in words it owns His being, re-enacts, without reference to Him, some of His laws, yet shaped so that they should not press upon it; a worldliness which is the more hopeless, because it substitutes self for God so universally, yet so noiselessly and imperceptibly, that the soul, like Samson, does not know that God is departed from it, and that it is living without Him. To live as thousands live, mainly, it would seem, to store up their little dues, slowly or quickly to scrape themselves up a competence and leave the rest of their substance to their babes, to join in the race for wealth, to live without public spirit, without love to man, with no care but for our own selfish comforts, or interests, to take the print of a mammon-worshipping age, and so to live dismal, illiberal, acquisitive lives, is a terrible danger to us all. Anon.

Take heed that a subtle love of things seen does not supplant in you spiritual sympathies and aspirations. While you are alive to all that is noble and beautiful both in nature and art, be wise enough not to forget that the world and the most glorious things in it will by and by be dissolved, and that the objects of Christian faith alone will remain forever. J. D. Geden.—The love of the world is only unlearned by the love of the Father. And there is only one way in which that higher love is learned. The cross of Christ is the measure of God’s love to us and the measure of the meaning of man’s existence. When once a man has learned the spirit of the cross the power of the world is gone, and no man need bid him love not the world. F. W. R.

Quicken me. We must watch as well as pray. For as watchfulness without prayer is presumption, so prayer without watchfulness is self-delusion. But the most effectual way of avoiding temptation is to be quickened to more life, energy, delight, and devotedness in the way of my God. The secret of Christian progress is simplicity and diligence. This spirit leaves no wish of the heart for beholding vanity. C. B.—The prayer indicates our greatest need, more life in our obedience. It shows the preserving power of increased life to keep us from the evils which are around us, and it also tells us where that increased life must come from, namely, from the Lord alone. S.

38. “Word” refers to promise, “established” when fulfilled. In the last clause, the best critics suppose the word for “fear” to be used in the sense of fearers, thus: Confirm unto Thy servant Thy promise, which is for Thy fearers, given to those that fear Thee. C.—Confirm it: make it seem firm and true; let not my mind be vacillating or sceptical in regard to Thy truth. This seems to be a prayer against the influence of doubt and scepticism. There is a class of men whose minds are naturally sceptical and unbelieving, and for such men such a prayer is peculiarly appropriate. For none can it be improper to pray that the Word of God may always seem to them to be true; that their minds may never be left to the influence of doubt and unbelief. Barnes.

Who is devoted to Thy fear. He who hath received from the Lord grace to fear Him may be bold to seek any necessary good thing from Him; because the fear of God hath annexed the promises of all other blessings with it. W. Cowper.—If there be one point in human experience more dangerous than another, it is exactly the point between faith and practice, between inward love and outward work. Let us pray God to “stablish His Word” to us in this respect also, to make religion to us more than clear intellectual faith, more even than heart-joy. Let us ask Him to make it the supreme and practically regulative force of our whole life, calm, steady, onward, guiding and ruling us from duty to duty and from day to day. Raleigh.

39. The thought seems to be: Keep me from the reproach of breaking Thy commandments, for those commandments are not grievous but good, sweet, and full of blessing to one who longs after them as I do. P.—The reproach of bringing dishonor upon the name of God is feared and deprecated with most anxious, importunate prayer. The fear of this reproach is a practical principle of tender watchfulness and circumspection, and of habitual dependence upon an Almighty upholding power. C. B.

40. Where our longings are, there are we in the sight of God. If we have not attained perfection, it is something to have hungered after it. He who has given us to desire, will also grant us to obtain, and we may safely conclude that He who has begun the good work will carry it on. “Quicken me in Thy righteousness.” Give me more life wherewith to follow Thy righteous law. It is the Holy Spirit who can pour new life into us; let us not cease crying to Him. Let the life we already possess show itself by longing for more. S.—He who really longs after Divine truth, mourns that he does not long more. When the heart has no love the mind has no light, and can only judge the precepts erroneously. “The pure in heart” see better with the mind than can the impure. “Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness.” Love so enlarges discernment that he who really loves often finds that his judgment of the blessedness of truth has outstripped even his longing for it. Hence it is the quick who cry, “Quicken me;” it is those who have living desires who pray for yet more life in the way of righteousness. Marchant.

There is no holiness if Thou, Lord, withdraw Thy presence; no wisdom profiteth if Thy Spirit cease to direct; no strength availeth without Thy support; no watchfulness effectual when Thy holy vigilance is not our guard. For no sooner are we left to ourselves than the waves of corruption rush upon us, and we sink and perish; but if Thou reach forth Thy omnipotent hand we walk upon the sea and live. In our own nature we are unsettled as the sand upon the mountain; but in Thee we have the stability of the throne in heaven. We are cold and insensible as darkness and death; but are kindled with light and life by the holy fire of Thy love. Thomas à Kempis.

It is the Spirit that quickeneth. He does not merely prescribe. He transforms. He is perpetually asserting His presence by His spiritual transformations. He makes the feeble strong, the melancholy bright, the cold-blooded fervent, the irascible gentle, the uninstructed wise, the conceited humble, and the timid unflinching. Now, as of old, “He filleth the hungry with good things, but the rich He hath sent empty away.” He gives Himself most fully to those who ask for Him secretly and often. The soul hears Him, it sees Him not; the soul feels Him, yet as if insensibly. And His presence is itself that peace of God which passeth all understanding. Henceforth, enriched by His indwelling, the soul’s desire is to desire nothing, its will is to will for nothing, its care to care for nothing, its wealth to possess nothing out of God, its one, its everlasting treasure. This is not mysticism; it is the experience of those who have heard within themselves that there is a Holy Ghost. This is the subjective side of lives which have been spent in the purest and most unselfish benevolence, but the secret of whose strength has escaped the notice of ordinary lookers on. H. P. L.

41. Even Thy salvation.** Here is the first mention of salvation in the Psalm, and it is joined with mercy: “By grace are ye saved.” Salvation is styled “Thy salvation,”

thus ascribing it wholly to the Lord : " He that is our God is the God of salvation.” Salvation is an aggregate of mercies incalculable in number, priceless in value, incessant in application, eternal in endurance. To the God of our mercies be glory, world without end. S.

42. There is a play upon the two senses of the term " word," thus : " And I will answer my revilers a word, for I have trusted in Thy Word." Having trusted in Thy Word of promise, I shall have a word of reply to make to them when Thou shalt graciously hear this prayer. " Take not Thy Word of truth" (i.e., of promise) out of my mouth ; let me have it still to speak of before my enemies and to rest upon for my own soul. If God were to fail in fulfilling this Word of promise, it would, in the sense here contemplated, be quite taken out of his mouth. C.—A man of little learning, except that which he has derived from the Bible, may often silence the cavils and reproaches of the learned sceptic ; a man of simple-hearted, pure piety, with no weapon but the Word of God, may often thus be better armed than if he had all the arguments of the schools at his command. Barnes.

Take not the Word of truth utterly out of my mouth. Not only do not take it out of my heart ; but let it be ready in my mouth for a confession of my Master. Some of us know the painful trial of the indulgence of worldly habits and conversation, when a want of liberty of spirit has hindered us from standing up boldly for our God. C. B

44. He expresseth his vehemence of desire and purpose ; those that are deeply affected with anything are wont to express themselves as largely as they can. He heaps up several words, because his sense of them was so great : " Continually, and forever, and ever, and ever." They imply the continuity and perpetuity of obedience. Constancy and perseverance in obedience is the commendation of it. Manton.

The Psalmist entreats the Lord to open his eyes that he may behold the wondrous things of the law, to teach him His statutes, to remove from him the way of lying, to incline his heart unto his testimonies and not to covetousness, to turn away his eyes from beholding vanity, and not to take the Word of truth utterly out of his mouth. Each of these petitions shows how deeply impressed he was of his entire helplessness as regarded himself, and how completely dependent upon God he felt himself for any advancement in the knowledge of truth. All his studies in the Divine law, all his aspirations after holiness of life, he was assured, could never meet with success, except by the grace of God implanting in him a right desire, and acting as an infallible guide to the proper sense of Holy Scripture and to correct principles of action. G. Phillips.

45. Walk at liberty.** Literally, walk in a large place, a broad and easy path, God graciously fulfilling to me His promises, and my soul made strong and my steps guided wisely in His perfect way. C.—The glow of spiritual activity, and the healthfulness of Christian liberty are only to be found in a persevering and self-denying pursuit of every track of the ways of God. " If ye continue in My Word, then ye are my disciples indeed ; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. If the Son, therefore, shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." C. B.

Intellectual freedom consists in the subjugation of the understanding to the truth which delivers from errors, prejudices, and the babble of human opinion. Moral freedom consists in the submission of the will to duty, which is the practical outcome of truth. To do as we ought is liberty ; to do as we like is slavery. Spiritual freedom consists in the bowing down of the whole man to God, who is revealed by the truth, and to serve whom is to be master of self and things. A. M.—The Gospel is the law of liberty. Such an antagonist is it to all that is unfair and arbitrary and oppressive, that it is only where there is a reign of darkness that there can be a reign of despotism. Even as it is, every Christian is a freeman. His loyalty to God is liberty. It is freedom from tyrannical lusts and task-master passions. It is the bond of iniquity broken. It is emancipation from the thraldom of Satan. Hamilton.

I will walk at liberty ; for I seek Thy precepts. When the Bible says that a man led by the Spirit is not under the law, it does not mean that he is free, because he may sin without being punished for it ; but it means that he is free because being taught by God’s Spirit to love what His law commands he is no longer conscious of acting from restraint. The law does not drive him, because the Spirit leads him. There is a state of nature when we are under the law and not converted to the love of Christ. And then there is another state, when God writes His law upon our hearts by love instead of fear. The one state is this : " I cannot do the things that I would ;" the other state is this : " I will walk at liberty, for I seek Thy commandments " F. W. R.

Where the Spirit of God controls the inmost affections with absolute sway, there, certainly, the commands of religion cease to interfere with the man’s will; yea, no commands at all are given to such a man. What does he know of the command, Love God above all things else, when the love of God is to him the very life of his soul? What does he know of the command, Love thy brother, when brotherly love has become so much of a second nature to him, that he ceases to breathe when he ceases to love? The same may be said of all the commands of religion, of self-denial, chastity, humility. As it stands recorded of the pious man, that he is a tree planted by the water-brooks, which bringeth forth its fruit in its season, so all good works, in their season, that is, whenever they are called for from without, are performed by the man of this priestly spirit, without his even thinking of the fact that they are required by a command. Tholuck.

If the race were standing fast in love, perfect love, that love would be the fulfilling of the law without the law, determining itself rightly by its own blessed motions, without any statutory control whatever. It is only under sin, where the love is gone out as a principle, that we get up rules, work out adjudications, creep along toilsomely into moral customs and codes, contriving in that manner to fence about life and make society endurable. These are laws that God enacts for the lawless and disobedient; or which they, under God, elaborate for their own protection. But who will go to love and say, thou shalt not steal, or kill, or lie; does not love know that beforehand? These Decalogue statutes, love wants none of them; she fulfills them before they are given. In the perfect state of society and character in the future life moral codes and precepts are wanted no longer to regulate the conduct, all the legalities are gone by. There is no debate of reasons, no casuistry. The reign of simple love has come. H. B.

At liberty! The very word has music in it. How full of suggestion of all that is bright and cheerful. And yet what advantageth freedom if we know not how to use it? The true use of freedom requires in every case, either for the individual or for the nation, moderation, thoughtfulness, self-restraint, respect for the feelings of others, definite conceptions of duty, and a deep and adequate sense of responsibility. Without these liberty is simply suicidal; with them, and just in proportion to the firmness of its hold on these principles, it grows ever more and more unto perfection. Man’s liberty is twofold. There is a liberty from without: freedom from all outward check or control; and there is a liberty also from within. This is the liberty without which all other liberty is valueless. Thought, speech, and action may all be free; but if the soul itself be not free also, we shall still, whatever we may be in name, be but slaves in deed and truth. The text ascends with us to this higher thought: “I will walk at liberty; for I speak Thy precepts.” This is the very keynote to the music of heaven, God’s will acting upon our will, the Spirit of Christ subluing and assimilating our spirit to itself; this alone is true liberty; this is taking captivity captive, and bursting the bonds of the soul in sunder. Such service is indeed perfect freedom. T. H. Steel.

Compliance with all just law never fails to give to the soul the highest freedom it can possibly know. Obedience is the very heart and soul of liberty. The freest man is always the most punctiliously obedient of men. To unreflecting minds this is a mystery. With them, law and liberty, obedience and freedom, too often stand for opposites, and even contradictories. By liberty they mean license. And yet, history everywhere teaches that the freest communities have always been those in which all laws are most completely obeyed; and the most enslaved have been those in which lawlessness has prevailed. And as with communities, so with individuals. The soul in which appetite and passion have rioted, is sure, sooner or later, to cry out for the relief of even an enforced obedience. The control of iron-handed law is preferred to the trampling hoof of passion. But when the obedience of love, of love inspired by the reception of Christ as a personal Saviour, springs up in the heart, there comes with it the conscious freedom of sonship. Compulsion is changed into choice; law, from being an outward command, is transformed into an inward principle. The spontaneous expressions of the heart are, “I delight to do Thy will, O God;” “Oh, how love I Thy law; it is my meditation all the day.” E. G. Robinson.

When you are personally given up to Christ’s person, you are going where He goes, helping what He does, keeping ever dear, bright company with Him in all His motions of good and sympathy, refusing even to let Him suffer without suffering with Him. And so you will do a great many more duties than you even think of now; only they will all be sweet and easy and free, even as your love is. You will stoop low, and bear the load of many, and be the servant of all, but it will be a secret joy that you have with your Master personally. You will not be digging out points of conscience, and debating what your duty is to this or that, or him or her, or here or yonder; indeed you will not think that you are doing much for Christ any way, not half enough; and yet He will be saying to you every hour in sweetest approbation, “Ye did it unto Me.” H. B.

God never fails to prompt and teach a soul, which is simply desirous of pleasing Him. He will, if we are faithful to Him, show us how to escape the snares of a morbid self consciousness and scrupulosity. A man with his eyes in a right condition does not, when he walks, study every step he takes, nor even make the reflection that he is using his eyes; but he guides himself instinctively by his eyes, and with their help enjoys the landscape. And a man whose ruling aim is right and single, comes at last, through all perplexity, to feel that God’s service, so far from being a bondage of oppressive restraints, is perfect freedom, and that the only true way (as the Psalmist indicates) “of walking at liberty” is, “to seek His commandments.” Goulburn.

What a glow of healthful strength and liberty is felt by one who has made it the law of his life to do what God ordains at all hazards! His course is clear. What matters it to him whether man approves or disapproves? That which he seeks is not human approval, but the keeping of the commandments of God. When he has once discovered what his Master has required of him, all dubiety is ended. He will advance to the performance, though all the world should rebuke. J. W. A.

The test of discipleship is constancy in obedience. Truth itself is rendered intelligible by the spirit of obedience; the appreciative knowledge of truth dispels error, and, by showing the evil and the danger of sin, delivers the soul from its bondage and power. Sin is a hard taskmaster; and they who begin by yielding to its pleasures must end by paying its penalties. Christ alone can free us from such bondage; and to enter into union with Him by faith is to receive that Spirit of life which is the sense of true freedom. His religion is not a yoke of rules, a bondage of forms, but the perfect law of liberty; for its life is truth and its spirit love. J. P. T.

True freedom of intellect and heart and life consists in voluntary and exact obedience to the law of God. A compulsory obedience is mere hypocrisy. An inexact obedience is a perpetual weakness. Every step taken in the statutes of the Lord with a free will is a step of freedom. But, the moment a man lifts his foot from the law of the Lord, and sets it down outside, he places it in the nets of evil and is ensnared. But the modern and atheistic idea of liberty is the absence of all moral law, or the refusal to be controlled by law. In other words, it is licentiousness. C. F. Deems.

The wicked carry their prison about with them wherever they go, because their own heart is a dungeon, their passions chains and scourges to the soul; while those whom Jesus Christ has delivered, and who have renounced the world, experience the liberty of the children of God even in the midst of bonds. Marthe.

Political liberty is a blessing; liberty of thought is a blessing. But the greatest blessing is liberty of the conscience and the will. It is freedom from a sense of sin, when all is known to have been pardoned through the atoning Blood; freedom from a slavish fear of our Father in heaven, when conscience is offered to His unerring eye morning and evening by that penitent love which fixes its eye upon the Crucified; freedom from current prejudice and false human opinion, when the soul gazes by intuitive faith upon the actual truth; freedom from the depressing yoke of weak health or narrow circumstances, since the soul cannot be crushed which rests consciously upon the Everlasting Arms; freedom from that haunting fear of death which holds those who think really upon death at all “all their lifetime subject to bondage,” unless they are His true friends and clients who by the sharpness of His own death has led the way and “opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers.” It is freedom in time, but also and beyond, freedom in eternity. In that blessed world, in the unclouded presence of the Emancipator, there is indeed a perpetual service; yet, since it is the service of love made perfect, it is only and by necessity the service of the free. H. P. L.

46,47,48. In these last three verses he promiseth a threefold duty of thankfulness. First, the service of his tongue. Next, the service of his affections. Thirdly, the service of his actions. A good conscience renders always great consolation, and an honest life makes great boldness to speak without fear or shame. W. Cowper.

47,48. What is in the Word a law of precept, is in the heart a law of love; what is in the one a law of command, is in the other a law of liberty. “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” The law of love in the heart is the fulfilling of the law of God in the Spirit. It may well be said to be written in the heart when a man doth love it. Charnock.

48. And I will raise my hands to Thy com- mandments which I love, and I will muse of Thy statutes. The raising of the hands is a symbol of the raising of the heart or the affections to some elevated object. Which I love, or have loved, as in v. 47, the terms of which are studiously repeated with a fine rhetorical effect, which is further heightened by the and at the beginning, throwing both verses, as it were, into one sentence. As if he had said: I will derive my happiness from Thy commandments which I love and have loved, and to these commandments which I love and have loved I will lift up my hands and heart together. A.

Love and delight in the ways and Word of God will find natural exercise in an habitual “meditation in the statutes.” The breathing of the heart will be, “O how I love Thy law! it is my meditation all the day.” It is in holy meditation on the Word of God that all the graces of the Spirit are manifested. What is the principle of faith, but the reliance of the soul upon the promises of the Word? What is the object of hope, but the apprehended glory of God? What is the excitement of desire or love, but longing, endearing contemplations of the Saviour, and of His unspeakable blessings? Hence we can scarcely conceive of the influence of grace separated from spiritual meditation on the Word. It is this which, under Divine teaching, draws out its hidden contents and exhibits them to the soul as the objects upon which the principles and affections of the Divine life are habitually exercised. C. B.—If the Christian would have an abiding sense of the reality and glory of truth, he must meditate upon it till he discovers new grace in its proportions, new life in its lineaments, new loveliness in its beauty; until it becomes in his soul that living principle which is as exhaustless in its nature as it is glorious in the action to which it prompts. Homer.

The faith to which the Scriptures attach such momentous consequences, and ascribe such glorious exploits, is a practical habit, which, like every other, is strengthened and increased by continual exercise. It is nourished by meditation, by prayer, and the devout perusal of the Scriptures; and the light which it diffuses becomes stronger and clearer by an uninterrupted converse with its object, and a faithful compliance with its dictates; as, on the contrary, it is weakened and obscured by whatever wounds the conscience or impairs the purity and spirituality of the mind. R. Hall.

Prize the Scriptures, and be more diligent in hearing, reading, meditating on the blessed truths contained therein. The earth is the fruitful mother of all herbs and plants, yet it must be tilled, ploughed, harrowed, and dressed, else it brings forth little fruit. The Scriptures contain all the grounds of comfort and happiness; but we have little benefit unless daily versed in reading, hearing, and meditation. Manton.—But, you will say, “If we had so much time to spare as others, we would not be so unacquainted with the Scriptures; but, alas, we have so much business to do, and our hands so full with our worldly callings, that we hope God will excuse us, though we have not so much knowledge of His Word as others!” This is so far from mending the matter, that thou dost but cover one sin with another. Who gave thee leave thus to overlade thyself with the incumbrance of the world? Is not God the Lord of thy time? Is it not given by Him to be laid out for Him? He allows thee indeed a fair portion thereof for the lower employments of this life; but did He ever intend to turn Himself out of all? Gurnall.

God has so ordered it that the spiritual nutriment of His children is obtained in the performance of Christian duty. This is the economy of religion. The man who is faithful to the requirements of his God is furnished with so many barriers against temptation, while the negligent and sluggish disarm themselves of every weapon with which they could conquer the spiritual foe. The man who is faithful and diligent in the study of God’s Word cannot read those indignant reproofs of sin, and those exposures of its awful consequences, without having his hatred and his dread increased, and the lamp he lights at such an altar will not soon go out. The man who communes daily with God, who pours out to Him his soul in secret penitence, who prays for spiritual strength, will secure the aid for which he asks, will avoid the sin for which he mourns, will be raised above the power of earth by assimilation with the Infinite and Holy. The man who frequents the communion of the saints, in whose soul is a warm tide of Christian sympathy, who watches with fond jealousy for the good of his brethren, will find in turn his own errings kindly traced and reproved, his own feet recalled by tender and watchful affection, his own soul purified by intimacy with the friends of Jesus. The man who prays and labors for the conversion of sinners shall not only hide, but prevent a multitude of his own sins. He will be more careful for the consistency of his example, and at each temptation to stray, he will be drawn back by

Christians, let your inner life, fed and nourished by the indwelling Word of Christ, have, not ostentatious or self-confident, or noisy, but yet natural, continuous outflow and expression. So, light will come to you from the land of lights. So, you will draw from the infinite ocean of Divine love. It may seem to you, perhaps, that you have very little to express. That is too true of us all. Then you need not call it much; you need not sound a trumpet, or ring a bell, or put out a flag. But, be true, faithful, loving, sincere. Just remember this, that what purifies and refreshes your own life, and guides and cheers you amid the tasks and troubles of this earthly way, will do the same beneficent service for any other human life into which it is received. And remember this, that the constituted way by which this Divine thing does enter into and possess human lives, is by natural communication and outflow from other human lives. Raleigh.

49. REMEMBER the word unto thy servant, Because thou hast made me to hope.50 This is my comfort in my affliction : For thy word hath quickened me.51 The proud have had me greatly in derision : Yet have I not swerved from thy law.52 I have remembered thy judgments of old, O LORD, And have comforted myself.53 Hot indignation hath taken hold upon me, Because of the wicked that forsake thy law.54 Thy statutes have been my songs In the house of my pilgrimage.55 I have remembered thy name, O LORD, in the night, And have observed thy law.56 This I have had, Because I kept thy precepts.

n CHETH.

57. The LORD is my portion : I have said that I would observe thy words.58 I intreated thy favour with my whole heart : Be merciful unto me according to thy word.59 I thought on my ways, And turned my feet unto thy testimonies.60 I made haste, and delayed not, To observe thy commandments.61 The cords of the wicked have wrapped me round ; But I have not forgotten thy law.62 At midnight I will rise to give thanks unto thee Because of thy righteous judgments.63 I am a companion of all them that fear thee, And of them that observe thy precepts.64 The earth, O LORD, is full of thy mercy : Teach me thy statutes.

49. Remember the Word unto Thy servant.** This is the proper use of the promises as “arguments wherewith to fill our mouths, when we order our cause before God.” When thus pleaded with the earnestness and humility of faith, they will be found to be the blessed realities of unchanging love. C. B.—They have right to the promises and may justly lay hold upon them who are God’s servants; they who apply themselves to obey His precepts, these only can rightly apply His promises to themselves. Make it clear that you are God’s servants, and then these promises are your own, no less than if your name were inserted in the promise, and written in the Bible. Manton.

Thou hast caused me to hope. Those that make God’s promises their portion, may with humble boldness make them their plea. God gave the promise in which the Psalmist hoped, and the hope by which he embraced the promise. H.—Every promise in the Word of God let us turn into a prayer. God’s promises are His bonds. Sue Him on His bond. He loves that we should wrestle with Him by His promises. Lord, Thou canst as well cease to be God, as deny Thy promise, that is Thyself. “Lord, remember Thy Word.” I put Thee in mind of Thy promise, “whereon Thou hast caused me to hope.” Thou never failest those that trust in Thee, therefore keep Thy Word to me." Sibbes.

50. This is my consolation, that Thy Word hath quickened me. He felt the reviving, restoring, life-giving power of the Word as he read, as he dwelt upon it and meditated therein, and as he gave himself up to the way of the Word. The believer has all God’s unfailing promises to depend upon, and as he depends he gains strength by his own experiences of the faithfulness of the Word. J. Stephen.

In my affliction. He was encouraged to plead the Word of promise from the recollection of its “comfort in his affliction.” When, therefore, the Word assures us of the presence of God in affliction, of His continued pity and sympathy in His most severe dispensations, and of their certain issue to our everlasting good, must not we say of it, “This is our comfort in our affliction?” C. B.—The Word of God has much in it that speaks comfort in affliction; but those only may apply it to themselves who have experienced in some measure the quickening power of the Word. If through grace it makes us holy, there is enough in it to make us easy in all conditions and under all events. H.

Thy Word hath quickened me. No spiritual force has come into this world, nor ever will, so great as that which came in Jesus Christ, His life, and Word, and death, and Spirit; and therefore the mighty influence will travel on through the ages of the future as through the ages of the past; nor will it even be consumed in a burning world, or quenched with expiring time, for other worlds and eternal time will receive it. But that general influence is not what, in the ordinary and intelligible sense, we can call “the Word of Christ.” This is, manifestly, something which is to be apprehended by our intelligence, to be kept in our memory, which is to operate through the understanding upon the affections, and the conscience, and the will; which is to shape the habits and rule the life. Such Word of Christ we have only in the Book, which is all His now. He has fulfilled it, explained it, inspired it, made it a living Word from first to last, that He might by His Spirit give it living and blessed applications in the guidance and purification of human souls. Raleigh. — God’s Word, received, loved, obeyed, is the soul’s true life. It is not bread, and meat, and drink; it is not self-indulgence of those bodily appetites which the brutes share in common with you that makes your real life. It is love, it is faith, it is obedience, it is communion with God; this is the life the soul is to enjoy; this is the life that triumphs over temptation, that sings in the hour of pain, that feels angelic joy and hears angelic symphonies in the hour of death. S. W. Fisher.

52. Judgments, in the same sense as throughout the Psalm, God’s righteous laws which He revealed of old, which are ever true and ever in force. P.—That which he comforted himself with was the remembrance of God’s judgments of old, the providences of God concerning His people formerly, both in mercy to them and in justice against their persecutors. God’s judgments of old, in our own early days and in the days of our fathers, are to be remembered by us for our comfort and encouragement in the way of God, for He is still the same. H.—It is of the mercy and gracious wisdom of God that so much of His written Word records His “judgments of old.” “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning; that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” C. B.

54. Thy statutes have been my songs.** God’s statutes are his “songs,” which give him spiritual refreshing, sweeten the hardships of the pilgrimage, and measure and hasten his steps. D.—Statutes are things that stand, things that have always stood, and will stand to eternity. These certainties of God are the sources whence comes the inspiration of all true songs. Find and enter the sphere where the eternal realities and eternal laws have their scope, and you are in the home of everlasting song. J. Pulsford.

My pilgrimage. If men have been termed pilgrims, and life a journey, then we may add that the Christian pilgrimage far surpasses all others in the goodness of the road, the beauty of the prospects, the excellence of the company, and the vast superiority of the accommodation provided for the Christian traveller when he has finished his course. H. G. Salter.

Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage. These have been my pastime, with these I have refreshed my resting hours by the way, and cheered myself onward through the wearisome journey and across the scorching deserts of life. This one hundredth and nineteenth Psalm, which is, in every verse, an ode or hymn in praise of God’s law, sufficiently illustrates his meaning. Every man, even the most licentious and reckless, is a pilgrim; the atheist is a pilgrim; such are only a more unhappy class of pilgrims, a reluctant class who are driven across the deserts cheerfully traversed by others, and by the fountains where others quench their thirst. There is a perfect harmony between obligation to God and all the sources of pleasure and happiness God has provided, so that there is no real collision between the statutes over us and the conditions round us. It is only false pleasures that are denied us, those that would brutalize the mind, or mar the health of the body, or somehow violate the happiness of fellow beings round us. Bushnell.

The Psalmist knew that he was not at home in this world, but a pilgrim through it, seeking a better country. He did not sigh over this fact, but sang about it. He tells us nothing about his pilgrim sighs, but speaks of his pilgrim songs. Even the palace in which he dwelt was but “the house of his pilgrimage.” When we sing in the ways of the Lord it shows that our hearts are in them. Ours are pilgrim Psalms, songs of degrees; but they are such as we may sing throughout eternity; for the statutes of the Lord are the psalmody of heaven itself. S.

Amid defections and haltings, temptations and opportunities to return, the man of a heavenly mind utters his pilgrim’s confession by his life, sings his pilgrim-song and goes forward. If his longings had been for mere happiness he would have served the world like the others. But he with opened eye is seeking for a better country, that is a heavenly. It is not the extent of his dissatisfaction with the world which leads him on in his chosen course, but the conviction that there is a better country to which he can attain. And it is better not simply because it promises a greater amount of more lasting good, but because it lays before his hopes another kind of good, as different from earthly as possible. This difference between spiritual and temporal good he could not perceive until his eye was opened and his affections transferred. Since that great revolution in his character, weak and tempted and often vacillating as he has been, he has resisted the invitations of the world to rereturn to his old plan of life, because his desires are fastened on a new object, on the heavenly inheritance, which comprises all that is holy and truly blessed. Woolsey.

As the good and great society of the blessed is to be settled in this glorious harmony of law, and the statutes of the Lord are to be the song of their consolidated joy and rest, sing them also here; and, in all life’s changes, in the dark days and the bright, in sorrow and patience and wrong, in successes and hopes and consummated labors, everywhere adhere to this, and have it as the strength of your days, that your obligations to God are the best and highest privilege He gives you. Bushnell.—Come, then, Christian pilgrim, beguile your journey heavenward by “singing the Lord’s song in this strange land.” With “the statutes of God” in your hand and in your heart, you are furnished with a song for every step of your way. Such songs will smooth your path, and reconcile you to the many inconveniences of the way; while the recollection that this is only “the house of your pilgrimage” and not your home; and that “there remaineth a rest for the people of God,” will support the exercise of faith and patience to the end. C. B.

55. Thy name, as usual, all those qualities of character expressed by the word “name.” I have recalled to mind in my night meditations, and so, consequently, under their influence have I kept Thy law. So fitly and sweetly the pious mind turns its thought to God in the stillness of the night-watches and finds itself sustained in keeping God’s law. C.—In the day the statutes of God were his pilgrim song, in the night his happy meditation. And truly if we can ever spend the waking moments of the night with God, “the darkness is no darkness with us, but the night shineth as the day.”

56. This I had; this comfort I enjoyed, this support in trouble, this confidence I was enabled to maintain; not this I hoped for, but “this I had,” it was made my own, because I kept Thy precepts. C. B.—I had the comfort of keeping Thy law, because I kept it. God’s work is its own wages; a heart to obey the will of God is a most valuable reward of obedience; and the more we do, the more we may do and shall do, in the service of God; the branch that bears fruit is made more fruitful (John 15 : 2). H.—As the prophet (Hosea 6 : 3) speaks of the knowledge of God: “Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord;” that is, if we industriously labor to know God, we shall have this reward, to be made able to know Him more. So he that delights to keep God’s law shall have his reward, to be enabled to keep it more perfectly. Calamy.

57. My portion.** God is all-sufficient; get Him for your “portion,” and you have all; then you have infinite wisdom to direct you, infinite knowledge to teach you, infinite mercy to pity and save you, infinite love to care and comfort you, and infinite power to protect and keep you. If God be yours, all His attributes are yours; all His creatures, all His works of providence, shall do you good as you have need of them. He is an eternal, full, satisfactory portion. J. Mason.

58. I entreated Thy favor;** or, I seek Thy face. To seek the face is to come into the presence. Thus the Hebrews speak when desirous of expressing that familiar intercourse to which God admits His people when He bids them make known their requests. It is truly the same as speaking face to face with God. Vatablus.—He prayed with his whole heart; as one that knew how to value the blessing he prayed for; the soul entirely set upon the favor of God is, therefore, importunate for it; I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless me. H.

Mercy is the source of that “favor which we entreat;” and the Word is the warrant of our expectation, “Be merciful unto us, according to Thy Word.” As sinners we need this “favor.” As believers we “entreat” it in the assurance that praying breath, as the breath of faith, will not be spent in vain. C. B.—The rule and ground of confidence is, “according to Thy Word.” If we would have favor and mercy from God, it must be upon His own terms. We must ask according to God’s will, not without a promise, nor against a command. God is made a voluntary debtor by His promise. These are notable props of faith, when we are encouraged to seek by the offer, and urged to apply by the promise. Manton.—The promises are the food of faith and the soul of faith. As faith is the life of a Christian, so the promises are the life of faith. As the promises are of no use without faith to apply them, so faith is of no use without a promise to lay hold on. Calamy.

59. “I thought,” meditated deeply, pondered upon my past life, and then turned; as the Hebrew verb suggests, in the active sense, caused my feet to turn unto Thy testimonies. This might be called a metaphysical statement of genuine, thoughtful conversion. It is described yet more fully in the next verse: “I made haste to keep Thy commandments,” and permitted no dangerous, sinful delay. C.—He came to the Word, and then he came to himself, and this made him arise and go to his Father. Consideration is the commencement of conversion; first we think and then we turn. When the mind repents of ill ways the feet are soon led into good ways; but there will be no repenting until there is deep, earnest thought. S.

Such is the history of almost all solid conversion. The great destroyer of the souls of men is not so much wilful, deliberate sin as thoughtlessness. At first sinners do not think; then they will not think; at last they cannot think. This is the history of most of mankind; a thoughtless childhood, careless youth, too thoughtful manhood; one half of life without thought, the other with misplaced thought; thoughtful of things of time and sense, thoughtless of Him who made them and of their real selves. Pusey.—Consideration is that which we must all come to one time or other. Time will come when we shall consider and cannot help it, when we shall not be able to divert our thoughts from those things which we are now so loath to think upon. Our consciences will take their opportunity to bring our ways to remembrance, when some great calamity or affliction is upon us. And, perhaps, while we are wishing for more time eternity will swallow us up. But, alas! it will then be too late to consider; for then consideration will serve no other purpose but to aggravate our misery and multiply our stings. How much a wiser course would it be to consider these things in time, in order to our eternal peace and comfort; to think of them while we may redress them, and avoid the dismal consequences of them, than when our case is desperate and past remedy? Archbishop Tillotson.

Can that truth which sanctifies and saves, which is the weapon of the Spirit and the medium of His grace, produce effects if it is not appropriated and digested by the meditative occupation of our minds with it? What is all the Gospel to you unless it is consciously present to your understanding, and through your understanding is ruling your affections, and moulding your will, and directing and shaping the outgoings of your life? Nothing, nothing! A man may call himself a Christian; but the measure of his Christianity is the occupation of his mind and heart with the truth as it is in Jesus. When we “taste the good Word of God” we are made partakers of “the powers of the world to come.” Unless there be that occupation of my thoughts with God’s Gospel, there is no union between me and it. But the man and the Word of salvation stand over against each other; there the fulness, here the emptiness; there all that I want, here I wanting it all. There is no channel by which that fulness flows into this emptiness unless our thoughts, and by means of them our whole spiritual nature, be occupied with the truth which reveals Christ, and with the Christ whom the truth reveals. A. M.

Turned my feet unto Thy testimonies. Conversion begins in serious consideration. Consideration must end in a sound conversion. To what purpose have we thought on our ways, if we do not turn our feet with all speed to God’s testimonies? H.—Nothing comes of thinking on our ways if we do not turn from whatever we find to be wrong. Godly sorrow works repentance. A few tears amount to nothing if one goes on to-morrow in the same old paths. It is the man who forsakes his wicked ways and wicked thoughts, and returns to the Lord, who is abundantly pardoned. J. R. M.

This turn is the practical exercise of a genuine faith; and “because he considereth, and turneth away from all his transgressions that he hath committed, he shall surely live; he shall not die!” Nor is it a few transient thoughts or resolutions that will effect this turn of the heart to God. A man may maintain a fruitless struggle to return to God for many years in sincerity and earnestness, while the simple act of faith in the power and love of Jesus will at once bring him back. Thus, while “thinking on his ways” let him walk in Christ as the way of return, and he will walk in the way of God’s testimonies with acceptance and delight. C. B.—I thought on my ways, and turned my feet unto Thy testimonies. And this would not be done only in the great change of one’s first conversion from sin, but this double observance still continued every day, looking to His rule, and laying that rule to His way, and observing where the balk and nonconformity to the rule is, and renewing his repentance for that, and amending it the next day, that still the present day may be the better for yesterday’s error. Leighton.

Meditation gives depth, seriousness, and earnestness to our religious profession and character. A profession of Christianity is easily made, and the name of Christian is easily assumed. But religion, whatever else it is, is a mode of thought, and hence it is only as deep and earnest thoughtfulness is bestowed upon it that it can be developed in its higher and nobler forms. For want of this, Christianity often appears in its professors as it is not desirable that it should appear. Some there are who never go beyond the elements and alphabet of spiritual truth; theirs is a superficial Christianity, a gold-leaf religiousness, genuine so far as it goes, but marvellously attenuated, and not good for much, nor able to endure much. W. L. A.—Meditation on holy things brings one near to God; but active obedience cements the connection. Meditation which bears fruit in action is good; but meditation which loses itself in aimless speculation is to be deplored. It is a familiar simile, but a fair one and worth remembering, that the man who thinks about duty, and yet apprehends it not as something involving personal activity, is in danger of spiritual starvation; just as the man who sits at the dinner-table, thinking about the uses of the food set before him, but not partaking of it, is likely to suffer physical hunger. If we are to walk in the light of God, we must get in the line of Divine progress and keep moving. Humbly striving to do the Father’s will results not alone in growth in wisdom, but in growth in strength, in courage and in faith. Interior.

It is of great importance that all Christians should strive to unite habits of contemplation and of action. Our feelings ought to flow from the truth. We ought to think, and then to act; to meditate, and then, under the feelings which that meditation produces, to do our duty. We are to carry out into life what we have treasured up in our contemplations. Our bodies are not made for constant activity, nor our minds, while in connection with the body, for unremitted exertion. We must take time for prayer, for serious and habitual examination, for reflection on the Word and works of God, and to form resolutions of doing good. And we must also find time to act, to be rich in good works, to labor, to let the thoughts and feelings which we have gathered up in the morning, flow out and gladden our path during the day. The human mind is ever running into extremes. In one age it is prone to silent, cold, abstract, unintermitted contemplation, gazing on truth till men become more like statues than living beings. In another age, the tendency is to the other extreme; it is bustle, restless activity, constant excitement, an inability or unwillingness to think. Men do good, they know not how nor why. They are variable, capricious, going from object to object, not to be depended upon, especially in times of difficulty, and when some great object is to be accomplished. Mere reflection, contemplation unaccompanied by action, is like a deep fountain, which is always closed, always sealed up from public use and enjoyment. Action alone, without reflection, is a summer brook, which runs for a time with great rapidity and violence, but, not being fed by any living springs, falls in the hour of need, is dry when we are most in want of it. B. B. E.

60. I made haste, and delayed not.** The original word, which we translate “delayed not,” is amazingly emphatical. I did not stand what-whating; or, as we used to express the same sentiment, shilly-shallying with myself; I was determined, and so set out. The Hebrew word as well as the English, strongly marks indecision of mind, positive action being suspended because the mind is so unfixed as not to be able to make a choice. Adam Clarke.—Duty discovered should instantly be discharged. There is peril attending every step which is taken in the indulgence of any known sin, or in the neglect of any acknowledged obligation. A tender conscience will not trifle with its convictions lest the heart should be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. It is unsafe, it is unreasonable, it is highly criminal to hesitate to carry that reformation into effect which conscience dictates. “I made haste,” said the Psalmist, “and delayed not to keep Thy commandments;” that is, being fully convinced of the necessity and excellency of obedience, I instantly resolved upon it, and immediately put it into execution. J. Morison.

It is reluctance which usually puts the dragon. Slow obedience is often the germ of incipient disobedience. In matters of prudence and of intellect second thoughts are better than first, and third thoughts, which often come back to first ones, better than second; but in matters of duty first thoughts are generally best. They are the instinctive response of conscience to the voice of God, while second thoughts are too often the objections of disinclination, or sloth, or cowardice. It is easiest to do our duty when we are first sure of it. It then comes with an impelling power which carries us over obstacles on the crest of a wave, while hesitation and delay leave us stranded in shoal water. A. M.

In a matter of eternal life and eternal death, the call is too clear for debate, and there is no room for delay. Many a soul has been lost by waiting for “a more convenient season,” a period which probably may never arrive, and which the wilful neglect of present opportunity provokes God to put far away. To-day is God’s time. To-morrow ruins thousands. To-morrow is another world. “To-day, while it is called to-day; if you will hear His voice,” “make haste, and delay not.” Resolutions, however sincere, and convictions, however serious, “will pass away as the morning cloud and as the early dew,” unless they are carefully cherished and instantly improved. The instant movement,

“making haste, and delaying not,” marks the principle of the spiritual life. Thus was the prodigal’s resolution no sooner formed than in action. He said: “I will arise and go to my father, and he arose, and came to his father.” C. B.

The more we defer, the more difficult and painful our work must needs prove; every day will both enlarge our task and diminish our ability to perform it. We should consider that we are mortal and frail, and, therefore, any designs of future reformation may be cut off by death, which is always creeping toward us, and may, for all we can tell, be very near at hand. Dr. Barrow.—Shall we let day after day, year after year, pass over our heads, and we all the time think of nothing but the present; design nothing but just how to live easily here; nay, perhaps, only how to spend that single day which lies so upon our hands that we are at a loss for the employing of it? Why, fools that we are, our sand runs on; it runs apace all this while that we are a-doing nothing; and we know not how soon the glass will be out. And when it is, good God! what follows? Why, eternity; a bottomless gulf of infinity; that which will never have an end; that which is never capable of a change or alteration. Can we think of this and sit still? Is our day, that fatal, dreadful day of death, so certainly, nay, perhaps, so suddenly, a-coming, and can we live unconcerned? Oh! intolerable folly is it to put off the greatest business we have to do in the world, that business which, if it be not taken care of, we are undone forevermore, in hopes of the continuance of a life which we are not certain, no, nor is it possible we should have any certainty, that it will continue for a year; no, nor for a month; no, nor for a day. God Almighty give us grace so to consider these things, that we may all of us immediately “think of our ways, and turn our feet unto His testimonies,” that “we may make haste, and without further delay, enter upon the keeping His commandments.” Archbishop Sharp.

62. At midnight I will rise to give thanks.** Cares of this world, impatience of wrongs, a bad conscience, keep awake the ungodly and disturb their sleep (Rivetus); but what I awake for is to give thanks to Thee. Fauset.—How much more fervent would be our prayers; how much more fruitful in blessings, were they enlivened with more abundant delight in the “angelical work of praise.” Midnight wakefulness would be far sweeter than slumber; yea, night itself would be turned into day. C. B.

63. I am a companion.** He said in the

64. How does the contemplation of the Lord’s “mercy” in providence encourage our faith in the expectancy of spiritual privileges? The goodness or mercy of God pervades His whole universe, natural, plentiful, free, communicative. And all this mercy flows from Him “in whom” we are not only “blessed with all spiritual blessings,” but who is also the medium through which our temporal comforts are conveyed to us. How sweet to eye these mercies, as bought with the precious blood of that munificent Friend who bestows them upon us so richly; yea, who gives Himself with them all? C. B.

Teach me. The first verse of this eight is fragrant with full assurance and strong resolve, and this last verse overflows with a sense of the Divine fulness and of the Psalmist’s personal dependence. “Thou art my portion, O Lord,” is well followed by “teach me.” Those who have God for their portion long to have Him for their Teacher. Moreover, those who have resolved to obey are the most eager to be taught. “I have said that I would keep Thy words” is beautifully succeeded by “Teach me Thy statutes.” S.

65. THOU hast dealt well with thy servant, O LORD, according unto thy word. 66 Teach me good judgment and knowledge; For I have believed in thy commandments. 67 Before I was afflicted I went astray; But now I observe thy word. 68 Thou art good, and doest good; Teach me thy statutes. 69 The proud have forged a lie against me: With my whole heart will I keep thy precepts. 70 Their heart is as fat as grease; But I delight in thy law. 71 It is good for me that I have been afflicted; That I might learn thy statutes. 72 The law of thy mouth is better unto me Than thousands of gold and silver.

73. Thy hands have made me and fashioned me:

65. Thou hast dealt well with Thy servant, O Lord, according unto Thy Word. This is the summary of his life, and assuredly it is the sum

Give me understanding, that I may learn thy commandments.

74. They that fear thee shall see me and be glad; Because I have hoped in thy word. 75 I know, O LORD, that thy judgments are righteous, And that in faithfulness thou hast afflicted me. 76 Let, I pray thee, thy lovingkindness be for my comfort, According to thy word unto thy servant. 77 Let thy tender mercies come unto me, that I may live: For thy law is my delight. 78 Let the proud be ashamed; for they have overthrown me wrongfully: But I will meditate in thy precepts. 79 Let those that fear thee turn unto me, And they shall know thy testimonies. 80 Let my heart be perfect in thy statutes; That I be not ashamed.

of ours. God hath done all things well. In providence and in grace, in giving prosperity and sending adversity, in everything Jehovah hath dealt well with us. It is well on our part to tell the Lord that we feel that He hath dealt well with us, for praise of this kind is specially fitting and comely. S.—He knew that God is not weary of well doing, but will finish the thing He hath begun; and, therefore, he pleads past favors. Nothing is more forcible to obtain mercy than to lay God’s former mercies before Him. Faith, assuring us that all God’s benefits are tokens of His love bestowed on us according to His Word, is bold to ask for more. R. Greenham.

66. The knowledge meant is that continually prayed for in this Psalm, the knowledge of God’s will. The connection of the clauses seems to be that he has faith and would fain have knowledge; he takes God’s precepts upon trust, but then prays that he may understand them. A.—Literally, “Teach me goodness of judgment and knowledge,” i.e., the very best of their kind, such as Thy Word imparts. “For I have confidence in Thy Word;” I believe it to be from a perfect God, and therefore containing perfect wisdom and knowledge. Coming to Thee with such faith in Thee and in Thy Word, and with such longings to be taught of Thee, Thou wilt not thrust me away! C.—Teach me goodness, discernment, and knowledge; for I have believed or confided in Thy commandments. The principle of pleasing God may be within, and yet the mind may require to be enlightened in all duty; and again, though all duty be known, we may require spiritual discernment to see and feel it aright. J. Stephen.—Let all who would be greatly useful offer the prayer of this verse, “Teach me good judgment and knowledge.” S.

No school but the school of Christ, no teaching but the teaching of the Spirit can ever give this “good judgment and knowledge.” Solomon asks it for himself, Paul for his people. Both direct us to God as the sole fountain and author. It is recorded of one of the Reformers, that, when he had well acquitted himself in a public disputation, a friend begged to see the notes which he had been observed to write, supposing that he had taken down the arguments of his opponents and sketched the substance of his own reply. Greatly was he surprised to find that they consisted simply of these ejaculatory petitions—“More light, Lord—more light—more light!” How fully was the true spirit of prayer compressed in these short aspirations! Could they fail of success? “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.” C. B.

Never yet did there exist a full faith in the Divine Word (by whom light as well as immortality was brought into the world), which did not expand the intellect while it purified the heart; which did not multiply the aims and objects of the understanding while it fixed and simplified those of the desires and passions. In our present state it is little less than impossible that the affections should be kept constant to an object which gives no employment to the understanding, and yet cannot be made manifest to the senses. The exercise of the reasoning and reflecting powers, increasing insight, and enlarging views, are requisite to keep alive the substantial faith in the heart. Coleridge.

67. Before I was afflicted I went astray; but now have I kept Thy Word.** Though the Word and the Spirit do the main work, yet suffering so unbolts the door of the heart that the Word hath easier entrance. Baxter.—The sentiment of this verse has been echoed and its very words repeated by godly sufferers of every age—a strong proof that it was meant to be so used. At the same time it furnishes an exquisite description of the effect produced upon the Jews, as a body, by the Babylonish exile, and especially the end which it forever put to their continual lapses into idolatry, by which their early history was characterized, and with respect to which the whole race might well have said, Before I suffered I was (ever) straying. A.

Sorrow is in itself a thing neither good nor bad; its value depends on the spirit of the person on whom it falls. Fire will inflame straw, soften iron, or harden clay; its effects are determined by the object with which it comes in contact. Warmth develops the energies of life, or helps the progress of decay. It is a great power in the hot-house, a great power also in the coffin; it expands the leaf, matures the fruit, adds precocious vigor to vegetable life; and warmth, too, develops, with tenfold rapidity, the weltering process of dissolution. So, too, with sorrow. There are spirits in which it develops the seminal principle of life; there are others in which it prematurely hastens the consummation of irreparable decay.

It is a fearful thing to see how some men are made worse by trial. It is terrible to watch sorrow as it sours the temper, and works out into malevolence and misanthropy. Opposition makes them proud and defiant. Blow after blow falls upon them, and they bear all in the hardness of a sullen silence. F. W. R.

All depends on the inner state of the one who suffers. Grief is what we make it. It can produce humility or revolt, can regenerate the heart or render it tenfold worse; it is either an angel, gravely and gently restoring us to the true life; or a demon, beholding, with a cynical smile, all hope dashed to the ground; it opens the sacred stream of our tears of repentance, or it is a consuming fire which scorches and blasts every germ of the future down to the very depth of the soul. It is blessed, or accursed; it produces a new birth, or it destroys. The question, then, is not only whether we are afflicted, but whether that affliction is accepted as coming from God. When trial is accepted in this spirit, it is almost always followed by light. The more humble a man becomes, the more fully God enlightens him. He gets to understand the strange and singular dispensations by which God leads him. He learns to say, not theoretically, but from experience, that all things work together for good to them that love God. The more he advances, the brighter is the light that shines from heaven upon his way, and he feels that this beautiful promise is being realized for him: “The path of the just (why should we not say of the humble?) is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.” E. Bersier.

Sanctified affliction drives us from the world to God, teaches us to live by faith, warms the spirit in prayer, and urges prayer into supplication. We send up faint prayers in time of prosperity, when halcyon calms are upon our tabernacles; but in stormy times we fly to our Rock, and mourn sore like doves in the cleft of the mountains. S. Lee.—Prosperity leaves us to wander, and offers temptations to wandering. Afflictions alarm us and drive us back to the right path. Prosperity casts a glittering but delusive veil over Divine realities, and encourages unbelief. Afflictions rend and destroy this covering, and show us the truths of another world. Prosperity seldom leads to increase of faith. Affliction, by God’s blessing, is in many cases made the instrument of sanctification. J. W. A.

Did not the merciful hand of God confront us with weariness, disappointment, and trial, did He not prostrate with disease, did He not afflict with pain and bereavement, we should never pause to look inward, to question the spirit that inhabits and impels us, to inquire of its supreme and only vital interests, relations, condition and prospects. It is suffering under its varied forms that leads the soul to self-investigation, that impels it to the study of its own nature and destiny. In the silence of sorrow when external things are withdrawn from attention, the thought is turned inward. Then the soul begins to comprehend its vast capacities of thought, and will, and feeling, of action and happiness. Then first it communes with its aspirations and its weakness, its fears and its hopes. It recognizes its ignorance and its guilt, its necessities and its dangers. Above all, it realizes its relations to God as its Sovereign, Father, Redeemer, and Friend, and is led to seek and find reconciliation with Him. B.

68. Good (art) Thou and doing good, teach me Thy statutes. Good, both essentially and actively or practically; good in thyself and good to others. The participle denotes habitual, constant action (ever) doing good. It is characteristic of this Psalm, that the petition founded on the goodness of God’s nature, on His beneficence, and even on His infinite perfection, is still, Teach me Thy statutes. Make me acquainted with Thy will, and show me how to do it. A.

All the names of God are comprehended in this one of “Good.” All the acts of God are nothing else but the effluxes of His goodness, distinguished by several names, according to the object it is exercised about. When He confers happiness without merit, it is grace. When He bestows happiness against merit, it is mercy. When he bears with provoking rebels, it is long-suffering. When He performs His promise, it is truth. When He commiserates a distressed person, it is pity. When He supplies an indigent person, it is bounty. When He succors an innocent person, it is righteousness. And when He pardons a penitent person, it is mercy. All summed up in this one name—Goodness. C. B.

Here again we meet with the tacit inference, so beautiful morally, that God being benevolent, full of that goodness which delights in doing good, therefore we may surely trust Him to teach us His statutes for the purpose of moulding us into His own moral image, and so securing to us the highest blessedness possible. C.

69. The connection of the clauses is, that all the craft and malice of his enemies should only lead him to obey God with a more undivided heart than ever. With the same surprising skill and wisdom as in many other cases which have been already mentioned, this verse is so framed as to be equally well suited to such national and public evils as those described in the fourth chapter of Ezra, and to the sufferings of the individual writer. A.

70. If the heart of these people, who by their slanders make him the caricature of himself, is covered over, as it were, with thick grease

(a figure of insensibility and obduracy), so as to resist all the impressions of God’s Word, he, on the contrary, has his delight in God’s law. D.

71. It is good for me that I have been afflicted.** If we have no cross to bear to-day we shall not advance heavenward. A cross (that is, anything that disturbs our peace) is the spur which stimulates, without which we should most likely remain stationary, or blinded with empty vanities sink deeper into sin. A cross helps us onward in spite of our apathy and resistance. Alas, for those who have no daily cross! Alas, for those who repine and fret against it! Anon.—There are some things good, but not pleasant, as sorrow and affliction. Sin is pleasant, but unprofitable; and sorrow is profitable, but unpleasant. By affliction the Lord separates the sin that He hates from the soul that He loves. He does not always ordain it to take your spirit out of your flesh, but your flesh out of your spirit. Secker.

Afflictions are so far from being ground of discomforts that they are rather cordials in the issue, because they advance us more degrees in that knowledge of God which is the means of eternal life. We often learn more of God under the rod that strikes us than under the staff that comforts us. If the sun should perpetually shine in our hemisphere how could we understand God’s workmanship in those little spangles of the heavens? Though the night hide from us the beauty of the sun, yet it discovers the brightness and motions of the stars. Charnock.

There are no times so likely to lead men to trust in the Everlasting Arms as those in which the arm of flesh fails them utterly; none in which they can learn so truly that their strength is in “quietness and confidence,” as those in which they find that the reed on which they have leaned has broken beneath their hand, and pierced it. And we who live in easy circumstances, and to whom, in the common course of things, our daily life brings no hardships or dangers, have great need to remember how very close an utter godlessness may lie to that outward regularity. If we set our hearts on the treasures of earth, or its joys, or put our trust in princes, or in any child of men, we shall discover, sooner or later, that these idols of our souls come between us and God. Our perceptions of the truths which we profess will become ever fainter and dimmer. Plumptre.—There is very often some one special, darling, evil thing around which the will is found to wind and fasten itself with passionate clinging. Then we may be sure God sets Himself, not in any arbitrary way, not in jealousy of our joy, but in the very love wherewith He loves us, and that He may give us all heaven at last to take the idol out. We yield, unwillingly perhaps, at first, though in that case the pain will only be so much the greater. But by all means, at any rate, by ways that we had not known, by dealings that perplex and confound us, He begins to loosen the fatal fascination and take it away. F. D. H.

It may not have struck you, but you have been trying to create your own Eden, and it was an Eden with the living God left out. For a time the experiment seemed to prosper, but if it is blighted you have no right to complain; and though it should never blossom again, even the howling wilderness does you a service if it makes you a pilgrim and turns your face to the better land. Affliction is God’s message, saying to you, Come home. Hamilton.—It may be that thy outward comforts are taken from thee, that God may be all in all to thee. It may be while thou hadst these things they did share with God in thy affections; a great part of the stream of thy affection ran that way. Now the Lord would not have the affections of His children to run waste; He does not care for other men’s affections, but thine are precious, and God would not have them run waste. So those affections that run toward the creature God would have them run toward Himself, that so He may be all in all to thee here in this world. And a gracious heart can indeed tell how to enjoy God so as that God shall be all in all to it; that is the happiness of heaven to have God to be all in all. Burroughs.

Saved by suffering, not saved from it; that is the law of life revealed in Christ, the disciple’s prayer, the sufferer’s consolation. Character depends on inward strength. But this strength has two conditions: it is increased only by being put forth, and it is tested only by some resistance. So, if the spiritual force or character in you is to be strong, it must be measured against some competition. It must enter into conflict with an antagonist. Suffering, then, in some of its forms, must be introduced, the appointed minister, the great assayist, to put the genuineness of faith to the proof, and purify it of its dross. What special form it shall take for each, it is for God, who knows us better than we know ourselves, to decide. Marys and Marthas must weep, the world over; the sorrows of Bethany be revived in the homes of distant centuries and undiscovered countries, till the lengthening sisterhood of suffering clasps hands around the globe. Many Matthews, by the Atlantic and Pacific, as well as by the shore of Tiberias, must part with profits and gains for an unreserved apostleship. The most generous and beautiful children—the manliest sons and loveliest daughters—must be buried out of some families; and in others ingratitude or vice must spread a far more dreadful mourning. And because, in the mystery of God’s forethought, some souls are to have tasks and stations of peculiar honor offered them in His kingdom, from these one after another of the dearest and most delicious joys must vanish, light after light be quenched, till all are gone. Uncongenial companionships, unreasonable tempers, unreturned affections, unrealized ideals of goodness, unforeseen calamities to property, pinching poverty, slow disorders that overcloud the spirits or tire out patience; I need not enumerate the legions of ever-active and unwelcome ministers, abroad and busy throughout men’s dwellings, never invited, yet forcing their way in, made necessary by the weakness of our faith, ordained to discipline us into independence of the world, into heirship in immortality. F. D. H.

It may be said that none of us are at our best save through God’s ministry of sorrow to us, and in us, and through us; and that the measure of our tenderness, of our sympathy, of our practical helpfulness, and of our abiding and prevailing faith, corresponds with the measure of our wise improvement of our personal sorrows. And every truly admirable personal character, every great and noble character, every most winsome character, is a character which has known sorrow, and which has secured the gain of sorrow through the acceptance and improvement of sorrow in its noblest ministry. Our one Pattern of character and of attainment was “a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;” and it is divinely declared that it was needful that He should be made “perfect”—should be brought to the highest conceivable standard of character—“through sufferings.” God says to every child of His love, “I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction.” And every sorrow-smitten child of God will, sooner or later, have reason to say, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted.” S. S. T.

There have been many books that treat of the sympathy of sorrow, but only one that bids us glory in tribulation, and count it all joy when we fall into divers affliction, that so we may be associated with that great fellowship of suffering of which the incarnate Son of God is the head, and through which He is carrying a rere-demptive conflict to a glorious victory over evil. If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him. H. B. Stove.—Through the discipline of trial alone men have been trained to thought and action, to endurance and achievement. Truth, best known to the profoundest, devoutest student of the works of mind, it is that the greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers, the grandest energies of the greatest actors and reformers, have all passed through the fire of tribulation. Truth it is that the greatest poets have “learned in suffering what they taught in song.” So “all the foremost worthies of the world, all the spiritual heroes of our race,” all that have triumphantly battled against the false and the wrong, that have successfully toiled and striven for the truth and the right have, like their Divine Master, been men of sorrow and acquainted with grief. B.

72. The law of Thy mouth.** A sweetly expressive name for the Word of God. It comes from God’s own mouth with freshness and power to our souls. We do well to look upon the Word of the Lord as though it were newly spoken into our ear; for in very truth it is not decayed by years, but is as forcible and sure as though newly uttered. S.—Is better unto me. The Word of God must be nearer to us than our friends, dearer to us than our lives, sweeter to us than our liberty, and pleasanter to us than all earthly comforts. J. Mason.—Than thousands of gold and silver. Worldly riches are gotten with labor, kept with care, lost with grief. They are farthest from us when we have most need of comfort, as all worldlings find in the hour of death. Far otherwise with the Word of God; if we will lay it up in our hearts, as Mary did, its comfort shall sustain us when all other comfort shall fail. This it is that makes us rich unto God, when our souls are storehouses, filled with the treasures of His Word. W. Cowper.

You cannot carry the Bible from Genesis to Revelation in your memory every day, and all day long. Nor is there need. We do not need all the Bible every day. The world needs it all. Individually we need it as we need corn in the granary; as we need clothes in the wardrobe; as in a journey we need the hostel or wayside house to rest in when we come to it; as we need the boat to take us over the broad river which we can neither ford nor swim; as we need the lamp to go through the wood by night; as we need the guide across the mountains to the distant city. There is many a chapter and many a precious verse in the Bible, which lies thus in reserve for us. We glance at them to-day with a sincere but only a general interest, as knowing that they form part of the great treasure of Divine truth given to the world; but the day will come, and may be near, when perhaps those chapters will be better unto us than thousands of gold and silver, and we shall read them through our tears. Raleigh.

73. Thy hands have made me and fashioned me. In the vast universe of wonder, man is the greatest wonder—the noblest work of God. Every part of creation bears the impress of God. Man—man alone—bears His image, His likeness. Everywhere we see His track—His footsteps. Here we behold His face. What an amazing thought, that the three eternal subsistents in the glorious Godhead should have united in gracious design and operation toward the dust of the earth! Thus man was formed—thus was he raised out of his parent dust, from this low original, to be the living temple and habitation of Divine glory—a being full of God. C. B.

It is nearness, not distance, that the name Creator implies; and the simple fact of His having made us is the assurance of His desire to bless us and to hold intercourse with us. Communication between the thing made and its maker is involved in the very idea of creation. “Thy hands have made me and fashioned me: give me understanding, that I may learn Thy commandments.” “Faithful Creator” is His name (1 Pet. 4: 19), and as such we appeal to Him, “Forsake not the work of Thine own hands.” H. Bonar.

That I may learn Thy commandments. That he might learn them so as to know the sense and meaning of them, their purity and spirituality; and so as to do them from a principle of love, in faith, and to the glory of God; for it is not a bare learning of them by heart nor a mere theory of them, but the practise of them in faith and love, which is here meant. John Gill.

74. The goodness of God to one becomes the joy and comfort of all. What an excitement is this to close communion with our God, that the light which we thus receive will shine on those around us! What a comfort will it be in our own hour of temptation, if the hope we may then be enabled to maintain in the Word of God shall prove the stay, not only of our own souls, but of the Lord’s people! C. B.

75. God ordered all that befell him, and he loved to think so. He expresses a sure and happy confidence in all that God did, and would do, with regard to him. He trusted fully in God’s wisdom, God’s power, God’s love. “I know Thy judgments are right”—quite right, perfectly wise and good. He shows the firmest persuasion of this. “I know,” he says, merely, “I think.” But these very words, “I know,” clearly show that this was a matter of faith, not of sight. For he does not say, “I can see that Thy judgments are right,” but “I know.” And that Thou in faithfulness hast afflicted me. This means that in appointing trouble as his lot God had dealt with him in faithfulness to His Word, faithfulness to His purposes of mercy, with a faithful, not a weak love. He had sent him just what was most for his good, though not always what was most pleasing; and in this He had shown Himself faithful. Gently and lovingly does the Lord deal with His children. He gives no unnecessary pain; but that which is needful He will not withhold. F. Bourdillon.—Affliction and trouble are not only consistent with God’s love plighted in the covenant of grace; but they are parts and branches of the new-covenant administration. God is not only faithful notwithstanding afflictions, but faithful in sending them. The conduct of His providence is one part of the covenant engagement; He hath promised to His people to use such discipline as conduceth to their safety. In short, the cross is not an exception to the grace of the covenant, but a part of the grace of the covenant. Manton.

As God makes use of all the seasons of the year for the harvest, the frost of winter as well as the heat of summer; so doth He of fair and foul, pleasing and unpleasing providences, for promoting holiness. Winter-providences kill the weeds of lusts, and summer-providences ripen and mellow the fruits of righteousness. When He afflicts, ’tis for our profit, to make us partakers of His holiness. When He deals more gently in His providences, and lets His people sit under the sunny bank of comforts and enjoyments, fencing them from the cold blasts of affliction, ’tis to draw forth the sap of grace, and hasten their growth in holiness. Gurnall.

The hand which in faithfulness cuts, and often cuts deeply, is the hand of love, since it cuts away proud flesh, which, if left alone, would kill us. The rough hand which suddenly plucks us back from the edge of a precipice, is the hand of love, not of wrath. The Psalmist so understood it when he wrote, “In very faithfulness Thou hast afflicted me.” Tribulation, then, does not separate the Christian from the love of Christ, but is really an evidence of its existence. Anon.—It is good for a man to be checked, crossed, disappointed, made to feel his own ignorance, weakness, folly; made to feel his need of God; to feel that, in spite of all his self-confidence, he is no better off in this world than in a dark forest, unless he has a Father in heaven who loves him with an eternal love, and a Holy Spirit in heaven who will give him a right judgment in all things, and a Saviour in heaven who can be touched with the feeling of his infirmities. C. Kingsley.

When we begin to learn from the Scriptures that God is a God of love and tender compassion; that His very stripes are awakening us to fly; that He doth not willingly afflict and grieve, that whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth; when behind the lifted rod we discern a Father’s tears; and when, as being in covenant, we consider that the same afflictions are accomplished in our brethren that are in the world; that they are not by chance, but appointed with the full consent of Him who stands by the throne, and who loved us so that He died for us, and is now our Guardian, Trustee, Surety, Advocate, and Husband—when we find that He had brought us into this wilderness with an intention, and hedges up our way with preventive tenderness—the desert begins to smile; the thirsty waste seems moist with springs of water; the sandy plain appears newly clad with trees of pleasure; the “land is as the Garden of Eden;” the voice of the Lord is heard among the trees of the garden; after sultry heats, the cool of the evening reveals the form of the Shepherd; He leadeth us beside the still waters. J. W. A.

76. Even when a man recognizes that affliction is sent in “faithfulness,” that God has a wise purpose of love in sending it, still it is in itself bitter, and therefore he prays that he may have God’s “lovingkindness” and His “tender mercies” as his comfort in the midst of affliction. P.—The whole earth in its brightest visions of fancy, destitute of the Lord’s love, can never cheer nor revive the tried soul. Unless the Lord meets us and blesses us with His “merciful kindness for our comfort,” it is “a thirsty land where no water is.” C. B.

77. Let Thy tender mercies come unto me, that I may live. First he sought mercy to forgive his sins; then he sought mercy to comfort him in his troubles; now he seeks mercy to live and sin no more. Alas! many seek the first mercy of remission, and the second mercy of consolation in trouble, who are altogether careless of the third mercy, to live well. It is a great mercy of God to amend thy life; where this is not, let no man think he hath received either of the former. It is a great mercy of God, which not only pardons evil that is done, but strengthens to further good. W. Cowper.

79. Those that fear Thee . . . shall know.** Fear and knowledge make up a godly man. Knowledge without fear breedeth presumption, and fear without knowledge breedeth superstition. Knowledge must direct fear, and fear must season knowledge; then it is a happy mixture and composition. Manton.—The saints are God-fearing and God-knowing. They possess both devotion and instruction; they have both the spirit and the science of true religion. When fearing and knowing walk hand in hand they cause men to be thoroughly furnished unto every good work. If these are my choice companions I may hope that I am one of their order. S.

80. As the preservative from shame, he prays for a sound heart, filled with solid principle, delivered into the mould of the world; like the sacrifices of the law, entire for God. Often had he prayed for Divine teaching, now he begs for soundness in the Lord’s statutes. How many “have made shipwreck of faith and of a good conscience,” from an unsound heart! An unsound professor knows nothing of the true spirit of adoption, nothing of that holy familiarity with which a child of God unbosoms himself to his heavenly Father; and if he preserves an empty name in the Church, he will be put to shame before the universe of God. But the “sound heart” is connected with “a hope that maketh not ashamed”—the full blessing of scriptural confidence. C. B.

First and foremost among the products of the ages of the hidden life is this great Psalm. To the literary critic it has all the notes of a silver age. Its structure is artificial, its language stereotyped, its length excessive, its thought monotonous. It might be almost the latest utterance of the dying voice of Hebrew psalmody. And yet the words of this nameless sufferer epitomize exhaustively the religious aspirations and joys and sorrows of the human soul, and have remained, and will remain, without doubt, to the end of time, the great manual of Christian devotion. And we may well strengthen our wavering faith by looking as boldly as did the Psalmist at the spiritual fruitfulness of sorrow, and ask ourselves whether we are making our own sorrows bear their fruit. J. R. Illingworth.

81. My soul fainteth for thy salvation : But I hope in thy word. 82 Mine eyes fail for thy word, While I say, When wilt thou comfort me ? 83 For I am become like a bottle in the smoke ; Yet do I not forget thy statutes. 84 How many are the days of thy servant ? When wilt thou execute judgment on them that persecute me ? 85 The proud have digged pits for me, Who are not after thy law. 86 All thy commandments are faithful : They persecute me wrongfully ; help thou me. 87 They had almost consumed me upon earth ; But I forsook not thy precepts. 88 Quicken me after thy lovingkindness ; So shall I observe the testimony of thy mouth.

89. For ever, O LORD, Thy word is settled in heaven. 90 Thy faithfulness is unto all generations : Thou hast established the earth, and it abideth. 91 They abide this day according to thine ordi- nances ; For all things are thy servants. 92 Unless thy law had been my delight, I should then have perished in mine afflic- tion. 93 I will never forget thy precepts ; For with them thou hast quickened me. 94 I am thine, save me ; For I have sought thy precepts. 95 The wicked have waited for me to destroy me ; But I will consider thy testimonies. 96 I have seen an end of all perfection ; But thy commandment is exceeding broad.

81. He had living faith in his heart, though he fainted for the joy and comfort of faith ; he believed the Word of grace and salvation, and he hoped for the fulfilment of the promises of his Lord, to the reviving of his soul ; he honors his Lord’s Word, trusts in His faithfulness, and casts the anchor of his hope upon His truth. W. Mason.

Salvation ! What music is there in that word, music that never tires, but is always new, that always rouses yet always rests us ! It holds in itself all that our hearts would say. It is sweet vigor to us in the morning, and in the evening it is contented peace. It is a song that is always singing itself deep down in the delighted soul. Angelic ears are ravished by it up in heaven ; and our eternal Father Him- self listens to it with adorable complacency. It is sweet even to Him out of whose mind is the music of a thousand worlds. To be saved ! What is it to be saved in the fullest and utmost meaning ? Who can tell ? Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard. It is a rescue, and from such a shipwreck ! It is a rest, and in such an un- imaginable home ! It is to lie down forever in the bosom of God, in an endless rapture of in- satiable contentment. F. W. Faber.

I hope in Thy Word. That hope which is grounded on the Word gives rest to the soul ; ’tis an anchor to keep it steady. Which shows the unmovableness of that which our anchor is fastened to. The promise sus- tains our faith, and our faith is that which sup- ports us. A believer throws the whole weight of all his affairs and concernments, temporal, spiritual, and eternal, upon the promises of God. Cruso.—Believe under a cloud, and wait for Him when there is no moonlight or starlight. Let faith live and breathe, and lay hold of the sure salvation of God, when clouds and darkness are about you. Who dreameth that a promise of God can fail, fall aswoon, or die ? When we are pleased to seek a plea with Christ, let us plead that we hope in Him. Rutherford.

82. Faith may be exercised in not seeing His reasons, not being able to harmonize His prom- ises with His providences, or His outward dis- pensations with His Divine perfections. But let us leave this to Him, and “be still, and know that He is God.” Waiting time—what- ever weariness may attend it—is precious time, and not a moment of it will be lost. He waits, not because He is reluctant to give, but that we may be fitted to receive. C. B.

When wilt THOU comfort me ? Complain not of God, but to God. Complaints of God give a vent to murmuring; but complaints to God, to faith, hope, and patience. Manton.

The Scriptures are given to us, not primarily for comfort, but for guidance and instruction; and comfort is a resultant of obedience to the instruction. Because we are “compassed with infirmity,” and because we “have not passed this way heretofore,” God has very graciously given us His Word as a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path; and it is by taking heed to this light that our feet are to be kept in the path of peace, no matter where it leads. “If you keep My commandments, ye shall abide in My love;” and abiding in Christ’s love the Christian finds his fullest comfort. F. E. Smith.

83. He does not suffer anything to banish God’s Word out of His consciousness, although he has become like a leathern bottle shrivelled in the smoke. A leathern bottle which was not to be immediately used they hung up aloft; and that it was exposed there to the ascending smoke is intelligible from the absence of a chimney. The point of the comparison is that they have set him aside, and that he, as a sort of drudge, is continually exposed to the exactions of his persecutors. D.—When his soul was fainting, his hope in the Word kept him from sinking. Under the further continuance of the trial, the same recollection gives him support, yet I do not forget Thy statutes. C. B.

86. All Thy commandments are faithful. Whatever the command might cost him it was worth it; he felt that God’s way might be rough, but it was right; it might make him enemies, but still it was his best friend. He believed that in the end God’s command would turn out to his own profit, and that he should be no loser by obeying it. S.

Help Thou me. “God help me” is an excellent, comprehensive prayer; it is a pity it should ever be used lightly and as a by-word. H.—This is a golden prayer, as precious as it is short. It suits a thousand conditions of need, pain, distress, weakness, and sin. “Help, Lord,” will be a fitting prayer for labor and suffering, for life and death. No other help is sufficient, but God’s help is all-sufficient, and we cast ourselves upon it without fear. S.

88. The quickening he seeks is the “renewing day by day of the inner man,” of which the apostle speaks. As spiritual life is first given, so is it continued by the ceaseless process of Divine quickening. And as its source is the lovingkindness of God, so its effects are steadfast obedience to His revealed will. B.—He had prayed before, Quicken me in Thy righteousness (v. 40); but here, Quicken me after Thy lovingkindness. The surest token of God’s good-will toward us is His good work in us. H.

89. We have arrived at the centre of the Psalm, and the thread of the connection is purposely broken off. The substance of the first eleven strophes has evidently been: “Hitherto hath the Lord brought me; shall it be that I now perish?” To this the eleven succeeding strophes make answer, “The Lord’s Word changeth not; and in spite of all evil forebodings, the Lord will perfect concerning me the work that He hath already begun.” Thrupp.

Forever, O Lord, Thy Word is settled in heaven. These words are usually rendered as making but one proposition; but the accent showeth there are two branches; the one asserting the eternity of God; the other, the constancy and permanency of His Word. It implicit that as God is eternal, so is His Word, and that it hath a fit representation both in heaven and in earth; in heaven, in the constant motion of the heavenly bodies; in earth, in the consistency and permanency thereof; that as His Word doth stand fast in heaven, so doth His faithfulness on earth, where the afflictions of the godly seem to contradict it. Manton.

89-91. Thy Word is, as it were, anchored to Thy throne, made fast and sure where no such changes as those of earth and earthly things can ever reach it. Hence it is safe to say, Thy faithfulness extends to all generations; no lapse of time, no passing away of human generations can weaken its stability. Just as Thou hast made the earth fast and it abideth, so are Thy promises made fast and will abide to the end. C.

The law of God and the Word of His promise endure the same forever; but they have been revealed in several manners, according to the dispensation of times. For the law was first imprinted in that remnant of light of nature, which was left after the fall, being sufficient to accuse. Then it was more manifestly expressed in the written law; and was yet more opened by the prophets; and, lastly, expounded in the true perfection, by the Son of God, the great Prophet, and perfect Interpreter, as also Ful-filler of the law. That likewise the Word of the promise was manifested and revealed, first, by immediate revelation and inspiration; after, by figures, which were of two natures: the one, the rites and ceremonies of the law; the other, the continual history of the old world and Church of the Jews; which, though it be literally true, yet it is pregnant of a perpetual allegory and shadow of the work of the redemption to follow. The same promise or evangel was more clearly revealed and declared by the prophets, and then by the Son Himself, and, lastly, by the Holy Ghost, which illuminateth the Church to the end of the world. Bacon.

Nowhere do we find the ideas of natural law and order more distinctly set forth than in the Old Testament. It is, indeed, never parted from the Divine personality, but it is true law notwithstanding. It may not be scientifically known in its linked details, yet still there is the unmistakable recognition of an order of things, settled, firm, and universal. Long before the name of the Newtonian gravitation was even heard of, the Psalmist had said: “Forever, O Lord, Thy Word is settled in the heavens;” “all things stand according to Thine ordinances.” T. Lewis.

Law itself is forever inflexible. Does not the Scripture declare that He who made a “covenant with day and night” has established common “ordinances of heaven and earth,” that He has made “a decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning of the thunder,” that He has “made a weight for the winds,” that He has “shut up the sea with doors, and said, Hitherto shall thou come, but no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed;” that “the stork in heaven knoweth her appointed time.” Law is indeed inflexible, for He who “hangeth the earth upon nothing,” and hath “stablished it that it cannot be moved” (that is, “totter,” in going), who “bringeth forth the Zodiacal signs” in their order and “guideth Arcturus and his sons,” who hath set the “stars in their courses,” these heavenly movements being revealed by parallax or “shadow” of their “turning,” is Himself “the Father of lights, with whom is no parallax” (see the Greek) “nor shadow of turning.” The flood of worlds flows on, but “the Lord sitteth upon the flood; yea, the Lord sitteth King forever.” “Forever, O Lord, Thy Word is settled in heaven.” J. B. Thomas.

90. To generation and generation (is) Thy faithfulness; Thou hast fixed the earth and it stands. Resolved into our idiom, the meaning of this verse is, that the truth of God’s promises, or His fidelity to His engagements, is secured by the same Divine perfection which brought the world at first into existence and has ever since preserved it. A.—This accordance, in point of stability and sureness, between the utterances of God’s Word and the ordinances or laws of God’s world, teaches us to rely with as great security on the fulfilment of Bible promises and Bible declarations as on the constancy of nature. Let me be as settled, O God, in the truth of Thy Word as I am in the anticipations of light in the morning, or of the courses of the sun and moon in the firmament. Thus may I be settled and grounded in the hope of the Gospel, so as never to be moved away from it. Against all the likelihoods and fears of nature let me ever maintain a steadfast faith in the faithfulness of God. Chalmers.

It abideth. Creation is as the mother, and Providence the nurse which preserveth all the works of God. God is not like man; for man, when he hath made a work cannot maintain it; he buildeth a ship, and cannot save it from shipwreck; he edifies a house, but cannot keep it from decay. It is otherwise with God; we daily see His conserving power upholding His creatures; which should confirm us that He will not cast us off, nor suffer us to perish (since we are the works of His hands) if we so depend upon Him, and give Him glory as our Creator, Conserver, and Redeemer. W. Cowper.—In upholding the frame of the world those attributes are seen which are a firm stay to a believer’s heart, such as wisdom, power, and goodness. The covenant of grace is as sure as the covenant made after the deluge. We cannot look upon this earth without seeing therein a display of those same attributes which confirm our faith in waiting upon God till His promises be fulfilled to us. Manton.

91. They continue this day according to Thine ordinances. Which of the works of God are not pervaded by a beautiful order? Think of the succession of day and night. Think of the revolution of the seasons. Think of the stars as they walk in their majestic courses, one great law of harmony “binding the sweet influence of the Pleiades, and guiding Arcturus with his sons.” Look upward, amid the magnificence of night, to that crowded concave—worlds piled on worlds—and yet see the calm grandeur of that stately march; not a discordant note there to mar the harmony, though wheeling at an inconceivable velocity in their intricate and devious orbits! These heavenly sentinels all keep their appointed watch-towers. These Levites in the upper firmament light their altar fires “at the time of the evening incense,” and quench them again when the sun, who is appointed to rule the day, walks forth from his chamber. “They continue this day according to Thine ordinances; for all are Thy servants.” J. R. Macduff.

In this vast universe, “all are His servants.” “The stars in their courses,” “fire and hail, snow and vapors, stormy winds” fulfil His Word. Is not then the universe of nature a parable of grace, setting out on every side, in every view, a cheering display of the faithfulness of God? If His providence fails not, will the promise of His covenant disappoint us? C. B.—The precise and accurate movements of nature are corroborations of the changeless constancy of revealed truth. The moral is higher and greater than the natural. The handiwork of God furnishes but the theatre for the display of His eternal wisdom and love. This visible world is the instrument, the mechanism by means of which the Supreme accomplishes His great moral designs. The verities of Revelation present the vast and worthy end for which the worlds were made, and to which all that is made is subservient; and no one has yet learned to study and collate the works of God aright, who does not regard them as auxiliary to the grand purposes of His Word. The Son of God has carried this idea to its highest form of expression when He said: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but not one jot or tittle of My Word shall fail.” The truthfulness of nature will be falsified long before the truthfulness of Scripture. The confidence which man reposes in the stability of the earth and the regularity of the heavens will be disappointed, before any disappointment shakes the faith of those who trust in the Word of their Maker. The stars will break from their orbits in wild confusion, and the earth will be moved out of its place, before there is detected any deflection, uncertainty, or irregularity in that eternal law and Gospel of God for which the stars and the earth were created. W. Adams.

92. The support of the Word is as sure as its basis, and that in the time when other supports sink—in affliction. One promise applied by the Spirit of God is worth ten thousand worlds. And each promise is a staff, if we have but faith to lean upon it, able to bear our whole weight of sin, care, and trial. Well might Luther say, “I have covenanted with my Lord, that He should not send me visions, or dreams, or even angels. I am content with this one gift of the Scriptures, which abundantly teaches and supplies all that is necessary both for this life and that which is to come.” C. B.

93. With them Thou hast quickened me. The quickening Spirit delights to work by means of the Word; but though the Word be the means, yet the benefit comes from God: “For with them Thou hast quickened me.” Life comes from the fountain of life. There is a double quickening, when from dead we are made living; or when from cold, and sad, and heavy we are made lively, and so not only have life, but enjoy it more abundantly, according to Christ’s gracious promise; that they may be living, lively, kept still in vigor. Manton.—The secret mysteries of a Divine life, of a new nature, of Christ formed in our hearts, cannot be written or spoken; language and expressions cannot reach them; neither can they be ever truly understood, except the soul itself be kindled from within and awakened into the life of them. He is not a true Christian that is book-taught, but he that is God-taught; he that has “an unction from the Holy One” that teaches him all things; he that has the Spirit of Christ within him that searcheth out the deep things of God. Cudworth.

94. I am Thine.** This is an excellent motive to draw from the Lord help in trouble. Thine by creation, I was made by Thee; Thine by adoption, I was assigned over to Thee; Thine by donation, I was given to Thee; Thine by marriage, I was espoused to Thee; Thine by redemption, I was purchased by Thee; Thine by stipulation, I have vowed myself unto Thee. R. Greenham.—There is this encouragement and strength that the spirit of a man receives in thus arguing with God, that if he can say in truth, “I am Thine,” God much more will say to the creature, “I am thine.” If we have so much love to offer ourselves to God, to become His; much more will the love of God make Him to become ours; for God loves first, most, and surest. If mine heart rise toward God, much more is the heart of God toward me; because there love is in the fountain. J. Symonds.

Submission to God implies that we justify Him in everything that He does, that we approve all He does, and that we cleave to Him in the midst of all. It is as full of keen sensibility as of mighty self-denial. It is as tender as it is strong. It never questions, but it feels. It says, “Thy will be done,” and says it honestly. Anon.—Submission is the soul’s real and practical acknowledgment of God’s supreme majesty; it is its homage to its Maker, its self-dedication, than which nothing more suits the state of a creature or the spirit of a saint. It is that by which the blessed soul becomes in its own sense a consecrated and devoted thing, sacred to God, having its very life and being referred and made over to Him. Howe.—It says: Demand, enjoin, forbid; what wilt Thou have me to do? What wilt Thou have me to bear? exalted, abased, comforted, suffering, employed in Thy work, useless in everything; I shall ever adore Thee equally, by sacrificing all self-will to Thine. I have nothing left, but in all things to say with Mary, “Be it unto me according to Thy Word.” Fénelon.

If we really believed that God, of, and by, and in Himself, could make us happy; if we could learn to trust Him, and be content with Him apart from His gifts, in the deep conviction that He is more and better than them all; if, in our jealousy for His honor, and in our appreciation of His character, and in our sympathy with His purposes, and in our gratitude for His cross, we could come to have more of His mind about sin, more to understand His intense hatred and horror of it, more, with Him, to pity and yearn over the lost, more to perceive and know that the very greatest loss a human being can suffer is the loss of His image and presence, we should more cheerfully and readily cast ourselves into His arms, and yield ourselves to His purposes; we should say more continually, more fervently, more honestly, than most of us can say now, “Do what Thou wilt with me, only love me; and give me the power of loving Thee in return!” Thorold.

95. If the enemy cannot cause us to withdraw our thoughts from holy study, or our feet from holy walking, or our hearts from holy aspirations, he has met with poor success in his assaults. S.

96. He knows from experience that all (earthly) perfection has an end (inasmuch as, when it has reached its climax, it changes into its opposite); God’s command, on the contrary, is broad beyond all measure, unlimited both in respect of its duration and verification. D.—The verse exhibits a contrast between the measurable perfection of things that belong to man’s earthly existence and needs, and the immeasurable perfection, the surpassing breadth, of the law of God, as the expression of His excellency, between finite and infinite perfection. De Witt.

I have seen an end of all perfection: but Thy commandment is exceeding broad. It is not difficult, at least for an earnest and thoughtful person, to see “an end of all perfection” among men; and here below nothing comes to perfection. But we are reminded that there is something else that does not come to an end, something that cannot be exhausted, lost, depreciated, something that rises above us immeasurably high, and stretches away around us immeasurably far, with which, too, we are in vital relations from which we can never be released. “Thy commandment is exceeding broad.” This commandment extends over all the universe of intelligent life, higher and lower, over angels of every rank and men of every color and clime, over them, again, in no merely external way, for restraint and direction, but over all intelligence, over all responsibility, over all emotion, over all motive, and of course over words, and action, and conduct. Raleigh.

God’s commandments are of a vast latitude—beyond our apprehension. They are so deep that none can fathom them (Psalm 36: 6); so high that they are established in heaven (v. 48); so long that they endure forever, and so broad that none can measure them. They are not only “broad,” but “exceeding broad;” higher than heaven, longer than the earth, broader than the sea. The commands of God reach the inward parts, the most secret motions and retired recesses of the soul. They reach all the privy thoughts, they pierce even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and discern the thoughts and intents of the heart. They reach to all our actions: to those that seem smallest and of less concernment, as well as to those that are greater and of more concernment. Swinnock.

“Exceeding broad.” It is so, by the comprehensive applicableness of its grand, simple rules. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and soul, and strength, and thy neighbor as thyself.” It is so by the ample order of its special injunctions. It is so by laying an authoritative hand on the first principles and origin from which anything can proceed in human spirit and action; then it reaches to all things that do or can proceed thence. It asserts a jurisdiction over all thought and inward affection. All language is uttered under this same jurisdiction. Even over what is not done it maintains its authority, and pronounces its dictates and judgments. It is a positive thing with respect to what is negative, omission, non-existence. Let a man look back on all his omissions, and think what the Divine law can raise from them against him. Thus the law, in its exceeding breadth, is vacant nowhere; it is not stretched to this wide extent by chasms and void spaces. If a man could find one such, he might there take his position for sin with impunity, if not with innocence. Foster.

If it were possible that thou couldst break the connection of sin, so as to take off one link that pleaseth thee best, and not draw the whole chain after thee by committing this, yet know there is a connection of guilt also. “Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.” A man cannot stab any part of the face, but he will disfigure the whole countenance, and wrong the whole man. Thus the law is copulative; an affront done to one redounds to the dishonor of all, and so is resented by God the Lawgiver, whose authority is equally in all. Gurnall.—If we would be complete in our Christian profession, we must attend to all the virtues of it; whatever things are true, honest, just, or lovely, as well as those sublimer things which more immediately respect God and Christ, and heaven and eternity. The beauty of the Christian character is not formed so much by the gigantic size of one virtue, as from the harmony and consistency of all. Never, then, let it appear which virtue has been most approved by you, but cultivate every virtue. R. Hall.

As there is more mercy in the Gospel than we are able to comprehend, so there is more holiness in the law than we are able to comprehend. No man ever saw into the depths of that righteousness. There is an infinite holiness in the law. Caryl.—The spirituality of its requirements illustrates its Divine “perfection.” An angry look is murder; an unchaste desire is adultery; “covetousness” in the heart is idolatry; the thought as well as the act, the first conception of sin, as well as the after commission, brings in the verdict—Guilty. Can we, then, endure the sight of its “exceeding breadth”? Yes, for the commandment of the Gospel is equally broad, and covers all. We know who hath stood in our place, who hath satisfied Sinai’s unalterable requirements, and borne its awful curse. Broad as it may be, the love which hath fulfilled it is immeasurable. As a covenant, therefore, it has now lost its terrors. As a rule, we love it for its extent and for its purity; for the comprehensiveness of its obligations, and for the narrowness of its liberty for indulgence; nor would we wish to be subject to a less severe scrutiny, or a more lenient administration. C. B.

The law or commandment is “exceeding broad” because it is Gospel. It is an education, a development, a joy that never pails, a prospect that is never darkened, although our eyes are not always open to see it. This commandment of God, with the Gospel in it, is the very soul of consideration, and tenderness, and grace. It drops down rest on the weary, and brings balm to the wounded, and breathes fresh hope into despairing hearts. It seems to speak to us as though it were God, and says, “Cast all your cares on Me. I am broad enough and strong enough to bear them all.” Raleigh.—God will never take back the fair and perfect ideal of human life depicted in His law, never retract His purpose to raise the life of man till it touches and fulfils its ideal. And so the very law which is our despair is our comfort also; for if that be perfect we must become perfect; its perfection is the pledge of ours. Expositor.

Where God Himself exists and acts there as a counterpart and twin-presence lives and acts His immutable and perfect law. Emanating from Him, that law goes forth as an impersonation of all that is majestic, good, and glorious in His being, attributes, and character. As His vicegerent it stands everywhere a personal, living presence and power, holding forth the glittering sceptre of universal, Divine dominion over the myriads of created spirits peopling the immensity of space. And voluntarily or involuntarily, its sway is acknowledged above and below, in heaven, earth, and hell. To its standard and its dictates, with reverence be it spoken, the heart and the hand of Jehovah Himself ever unhesitatingly respond. And wherever in His wide universe a self-conscious being exists, wherever conscience lives, therein dwells this law as a sovereign ruling force speaking in her voice, producing and sympathizing with her smile, giving darkness and terror to her frown, and imparting anguish to her sharpened sting. And this Divine law is coexistent with the Divine Being, and therefore has neither beginning nor ending. There is no moment in the unmeasured past, there can be no moment in the immeasurable future when this grand law of the moral universe has not rested, or does not rest its whole pressure upon every existing spiritual being. There is no moment in the eternal world when it acts not upon the awakened moral sense, when it speaks not to the conscience of the good and the evil, no moment when it produces not a renewal and continuance of joy or anguish; and upon all the finally gathered spirits of heaven and of hell it will forever look down with its calm, fixed, majestic gaze, over all forever assert an unquestioned supremacy. As a broad belt of light overgirdling the arched firmament of the celestial abodes, it will beam a perpetual joy into every adoring and perfected soul, while as a keen and vivid flame it will unquenchably burn and consume the noble energies and affections of every remorseful, sin-ruined spirit. B.

Of that Divine, eternal law, Hooker has beautifully said, that “her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempt from her power, though each in different form and manner, yet all with uniform consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.” The Divine law is not subject to the mutations of time. Co-existent with the Deity who is its great administrator, its broad sweep is from eternity, into eternity, through eternity. The same yesterday, to day, and forever, it brings up the crime of a century’s growth as if it were but a moment old. Its action, like the being of God, is an eternal now; and upon the guilty it has its eye, ever with the same fixed gaze. He may hurry away into forgetfulness of himself and all around him, but the eye is there still. He may rush heedless into eternity, but the same eye meets him in the world of spirits, lighted up with new fires, which wake the memories of his old guilt from their long oblivion, and stir up the remorseful consciousness of present alienation from good. Here is the chief extent of the Divine law, that its obligations and its penalties are both eternal. Sometimes in this life it will begin the work of retribution, and kindle the flames of conscience with all the terrors of a present and living hell; but its grand sphere is in eternity, where the spirit is left bare to its searching gaze, to the recollection of past and the consciousness of present guilt, compelled to hear the constant mandate to do right, yet as often of its own free, evil nature drawing back to do wrong, and withering under that same eye which blazes on forever, and ever, and ever. This is the awful power of law when for the last time it seals up the book of account, and all its kind efforts to retrieve the criminal have proved unavailing, and obstinately and wilfully he enters the prison door, and invites the avenging stroke. O Lord, how long? may be his distressing interrogatory when ages on ages have rolled over his imprisoned spirit, till his own history looks like an eternal past. O Lord, how long? but the answer that comes from the judgment-seat, proclaims that the arm of the law is as broad as infinite duration, and its punishment must be as deathless as conscience and the soul.

It becomes us to tremble at such a law as this. Our own consciences and the Word of God proclaim that the Divine law is such, and that we are the subjects of it. It is a law that pervades the universe, and it fixes its eye and stretches out its arm over you and over me. It is a law that is all-penetrating, and it treasures up our secret as well as our outbreaking sins; it sits by our side in the sanctuary, and it follows us home to the fireside and the closet, and whether we sin with the hand or the tongue or the mind, it notes all down alike. It is a law that is eternal—in old age it binds us as it did in youth—in the grave corruption cannot stay its power—never, never, never shall we cease to hear its thrilling tones. It is a law whose worm, I speak the language of inspiration, whose worm if it be once let in upon the soul can never die, whose flame if it be once kindled, burns on and on, forever. Oh! from a law like this, so personal, so searching, so lasting, so terrible, which way shall we flee? Within is the despair of conscious guilt. Around, which way soever we turn, is that keen eye and that iron sceptre and that blazing scroll. But above them all, blessed be God for that sight, above them all is the cross of Christ, and on its front we trace in living characters—“Not to destroy, but to fulfil”—“Look unto Me and be ye saved all the ends of the earth.” Homer.

97. OH how love I thy law!

It is my meditation all the day.

98. Thy commandments make me wiser than mine enemies;

For they are ever with me.

99. I have more understanding than all my teachers;

For thy testimonies are my meditation.

100. I understand more than the aged,

Because I have kept thy precepts.

101. I have refrained my feet from every evil way,

That I might observe thy word.

102. I have not turned aside from thy judgments;

For thou hast taught me.

103. How sweet are thy words unto my taste!

Yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth!

104. Through thy precepts I get understanding:

Therefore I hate every false way.

105. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, And light unto my path.

106. I have sworn, and have confirmed it, That I will observe thy righteous judgments.

107. I am afflicted very much:

Quicken me, O LORD, according unto thy word.

108. Accept, I beseech thee, the freewill offerings of my mouth, O LORD, And teach me thy judgments.

109. My soul is continually in my hand;

Yet do I not forget thy law.

110. The wicked have laid a snare for me;

Yet went I not astray from thy precepts.

111. Thy testimonies have I taken as an heritage for ever;

For they are the rejoicing of my heart.

112. I have inclined mine heart to perform thy statutes,

For ever, even unto the end.

97-104. In every one of these eight verses the Bible is spoken of as the Lord’s, as, indeed, all through the Psalm. It was not fit that any should write of God but God Himself. So God wrote of Himself; by histories, laws, prophecies, and promises, and many other doctrines hath He set Himself forth to be the Creator, Preserver, Deliverer, and Glorifier of mankind; and all this is done in a perfect manner. Manton.

97. How I love Thy law! All the day it (is) my meditation, i.e., the subject of my solitary musing. This continual representation of God’s law, not as a mere rule, but as an object of affection and a subject of perpetual reflection, is characteristic of the Psalms, and appears at the very threshold of the whole collection. A.

He speaketh not of his knowing, reading, hearing, speaking, or outward practising of the law, but of love to the law; this is more than all the former; all the former may be without this, but this cannot be without the former. We may know, read, hear, speak, yea, preach the law and all God’s Word, as also outwardly perform outward works prescribed and commanded by the law, and yet not love it; but where this love is there cannot but be all the former. T. Stoughton.

The one feature prominent in this Psalm appears in its strength here, the love of God’s law, a love at once sincere, deep, strong, quenchless, effective upon the activities of the mind since it prompts to continual study of the law; effective also upon his purposes of life, since it controls his life absolutely and universally. If we are asked to give a reasonable account for such love of God’s law, we need only say, it deserves to be loved for its perfect purity and for its infinite rectitude and fitness; it justly claims this honor as coming from our beneficent Father; it rightly commands our heart’s love and appreciation as God’s own means of restoring human souls to His perfect moral image. What higher reasons for loving any law can be even conceived? Ask one who is humbly conscious of such love for God’s law and of such longing for personal holiness in conformity with its spirit, and he will testify that no aspirations seem to him so reasonable; that none other can be so blessed to himself; that nothing else so perfectly commends itself to his convictions. He only wishes this love were stronger and its fruits in his heart and life more abusing and more absolutely controlling. C.

The finishing stroke to the character of a good man is a heart inspired with a love to the law of God after the “inner man.” Considered as a transcript of the Divine perfections, as an expression of God’s immaculate holiness, as the instrument of his sanctification, it is the object of his devoted attachment. The dispositions which it enforces are wrought into his heart; the inward bias of his mind is directed toward the holiness which it prescribes. Hence those passionate expressions of attachment to the holy precepts of God which abound in the writings of David, and particularly in the one hundredth and nineteenth Psalm. “Oh, how love I Thy law!” “My soul breaketh for the longing that it hath unto Thy judgments at all times.” “I will delight myself in Thy commandments, which I have loved. My hands also will I lift up unto Thy commandments, which I have loved; and I will meditate on Thy statutes.” R. Hall.

My meditation all the day. This is one of many passages which show the thoughtful character of religious men under the old dispensation. The religions of the heathen were almost entirely an external service, with no obvious groundwork of doctrine or food for thought; but the religion of the Jews, with all its complex ceremonial, had a basis of thought which supplied pious minds, trained within its pale, with the materials for lifelong reflection. The pious Jew was not only religious, in so far as he saw the agency of God everywhere in the world, but he was meditative also, in so far as the constant object of his thinking was God in the works of His hand, in the history of His people, and in the law which proceeded from His mouth. His habit of meditation was encouraged and increased, we may believe, as from age to age the writings of inspired men increased the stock of religious thoughts; but from the first there seems to have been a tendency to thoughtfulness in the Jewish character, going hand in hand with conceptions of the character of God, which called for profound reflection. Woolsey.

The special want of our time is to make the Bible more human without making it less Divine. Christ and the great truths of His Gospel must always stand in the centre and pervade the whole; but we should seek to make them do it, as the Bible itself does, touching man’s nature and his history in every varied way. There is no Christian, however humble, who may not grow into the habit of such a study of the Bible, and thus make it to himself not only a divinely true, but an ever new book; life in its heart, manifold light in all its modes of presentation, till he can enter into the spirit of this speaker, “Oh, how love I Thy law; it is my study all the day!” And all the discoveries of the Bible will have this to commend them, that they speak to us in the language of personal friendship and love. They come laden with messages from the heart of the great God, and as His truths are new, His compassions which are in them “are new also every morning.” Ker.

Love of the law fastens the soul to the beloved object. “It is my meditation all the day.” This habit of love and holy meditation will spread its influence over our whole character. It will fill our hearts with heavenly matter for prayer, diffuse a sweet savor over our earthly employments, sanctify the common bounties of Providence, realize the presence of God throughout the day, command prosperity upon our lawful undertakings, and enlarge our usefulness in the Church. C. B.

A man never discerns the scope, the beauty of the truths delivered till he comes to meditate on them, and to go over them again and again in his own thoughts. Manton.—What the Bible brings to you will depend in large measure upon what you bring to it. You may have a crumb, or a loaf, or a granary full to bursting, just as you choose. There is gold on its surface, there are jewels in its mines, there are royal pearls in its depths. All are not equally equipped for its study; but every one of us can do his utmost in its patient, loving study, and no labors will bring a surer or a richer reward. Behrends.

98-100. The poet sets forth the philosophy of life, which the Word of God, so sweet to him for this very reason, supplies him with. God’s precious law, with which he busies himself unceasingly, makes him superior in wisdom, intelligence, and judgment, to his enemies, his teachers, and the aged. D.—Three sorts of men he mentioneth: “enemies,” “teachers,” “ancients,” the enemies excel in policy, teachers in doctrine, and ancients in counsel; and yet by the Word was David made wiser than all these. S.

98. They who have been taught of God, who have tasted that the Lord is gracious, have an experimental perception of the truth, which renders them proof against all the sophistry of infidels. I am persuaded we have many plain people here, who, if a wise man of the world was to suggest that the Bible is a human invention, would be quite at a loss how to answer him by arguments drawn from external evidences; yet they have found such effects from this blessed Book that they would be no more moved by the insinuation than if they were told that a cunning man, or set of men, invented the sun, and placed it in the firmament. Newton.

They are ever with me. A good man, wherever he goes, carries his Bible along with him, if not in his hands, yet in his head and in his heart.

99. By meditation we preach to ourselves, and so we come to understand more than our teachers, for we come to understand our hearts, which they cannot.

100. The Word of God gave him to understand things better than he could do by tradition, and all the learning that was handed down from preceding ages. In short, the written Word is a surer guide to heaven than all the doctors and fathers, the teachers and ancients of the Church; and the sacred writings kept and kept to, will teach us more wisdom than all their writings. H. —I understand . . . because I keep. Would we know the Lord? let us keep His commandments. “By Thy precepts”—that is, by the observance of Thy precepts, “I get understanding.” “If any man do My will, he shall know My doctrine.” N. Hardy.

It is love, humility, reverence, purity of heart that brings an individual or an age nearer to that which is most Divine, most central in the Divine thought. Here is the real progress through which we make a real approach unto Deity; this is the only progress that makes us better able to understand God when He speaks to us, whether it be in nature, in history, or in the Word. “I have more understanding than all my teachers, for Thy testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the ancients, because I keep Thy precepts.” Are we more holy, more loving, more unselfish, more obedient, more believing, than men of the olden time; then, and just in that proportion of our higher holiness, and our more loving obedience, and our purer, self-renouncing faith, may we hope that we are wiser in the Divine ideas. T. Lewis.

101. He is wiser than his enemies, his teachers, and the aged; and his wisdom leads him to refrain from all evil. P.

102. Thou hast taught me.** Divine truths lie thus far equally open to all, that though none can learn them unless they are taught of God, yet all who are sensible of their own weakness may expect His teaching, if they humbly seek it by prayer. There is none who teacheth like God. He can give not only light, but sight; not only lessons, but the capacity necessary for their reception. And while His mysteries are hidden from the wise and prudent, who are too proud to wait upon Him for instruction, He reveals them unto babes. Newton.

Have not turned aside. The teaching from above gives not only the light, but the principle to improve it. It not only points the lesson and makes it plain, but imparts the disposition to learn and the grace to obey. And His teaching will abide with you. It will win you by light and by love, and by a conquering power allure your heart with that delight in His judgments and fear of offending against them that shall prove an effectual safeguard in the hour of temptation. C. B.

103,104. Such deep and yearning love for God’s law makes even its words sweet. Precious associations cluster about them; they are music to the ear; honey to the tongue; beauty on the page. They give the best of understanding, viz., that which makes us hate and shun every false way. C.

103. Not of pardon, merely, is the believer in Christ assured, but of the love of God, a love full of solicitude and tender care. He knows that he is loved, and that it is God who loves him. And it is love that raises him to true liberty and to true obedience. He is no longer under the law; yet he is, and is more than ever, under the law. He is no longer under the external law; he is more than ever under the internal law. This law he reveres. He rejoices to bear its yoke; he loves it as he loves grace. The Gospel is in his eye law and grace combined. In the law and in grace united, he sees the complete expression of the will of God, the complete manifestation of His glory. He does not separate the one from the other, he does not prefer the one to the other, for in each he finds the other, grace in the law and the law in grace, and in each he sees God entire. For him the law is not merely perfect; it is delightful; he finds it sweeter than honey and the honeycomb. Be assured of this: at the end, if not at the beginning, the law must appear delightful as grace. Vinet.

Do we ask, What is it that gives this unutterable sweetness to the Word? Is it not that name, which “is as ointment poured forth?” Is it not “the savor of the knowledge in Christ,” that revives the soul in every page with the breath of heaven? Can the weary soul listen to the invitation to “all that labor and are heavy-laden,” and not feel the “sweetness” of those breathings of love? Who can tell the sweetness of those precious words to the conflicting, tempted soul, displaying the Divine sovereignty in choosing him, and the unchanging faithfulness in keeping him, and the almighty power of the Divine will in the gift of eternal life? C. B.

Pause at any verse of Scripture and shake every bough of it, that some fruit may drop down. Should this mode appear somewhat difficult at first, and no thought suggest itself immediately to the mind capable of affording matter for a short ejaculation; yet persevere, and try another and another bough. If your soul really hungers, the Spirit of God will not send you away empty. You shall at length find in one, and that perhaps a short verse in Scripture, such an abundance of delicious fruit that you will gladly seat yourself under its shade and abide there, as under a tree laden with fruit. Luther.—We all read the Bible too fast. We do not linger over the words as if we loved them, and were loath to pass on. “Oh, how sweet are Thy words unto my throat; yea, sweeter than honey unto my mouth,” said one of old time. Truly, the man must have delighted in the words of Holy Scripture who could so express himself! Burgon.

In the old time the Psalmist could say, “Oh, how love I Thy law!” “How sweet are Thy words unto my taste!” “Thy testimonies are wonderful!” What shall the modern man say of the testimonies, the statutes, the judgments, the law of the Lord, as they are spread out before him? If of old a young man might cleanse his way by heeding them, how much more now. If the Book as David and Daniel had it gave food for meditation, day and night, and delighted the soul, how much more our Scriptures in their fulness! Haydn.

104. Through Thy precepts I get understanding. God’s direction is our instruction. Obedience to the Divine will begets wisdom of mind and action. We are wise if we obey, and we grow wiser by obeying. S.—I hate every false way. When through the precepts the believer gets understanding, he learns to walk more uniformly and steadily, abiding in the light. In this spirit and atmosphere springs up a constant and irreconcilable “hatred of every false way” as contrary to the God he loves. C. B.—Those who hate sin as sin, will hate all sin, hate every false way, because every false way leads to destruction. And the more understanding we get by the Word of God, the more rooted will our hatred of sin be; for to depart from evil, that is understanding, and the more ready we are in the Scriptures, the better furnished we are with answers to temptation. H.

105. The two parts of this verse are not two different ways of saying the same thing. The Word of God is a lamp or lantern to the feet at night; it is a light like that of the sun by day. It makes provision in this way for the whole of life. It is the secret of life’s true sunshine; it is the guide when all around is dark. H. P. L.—It is not meant to shine upon miles of road, but in the darkest night it will always show us the one next step; then when we have taken that, carrying the lamp forward, it will show us another step, and thus on till it brings us out into the full, clear sunlight of coming day. It is a lamp, and it is designed to lighten only little steps, one by one. J. R. M.

What we all want is not to see wonders that daze us, and to be rapt in ecstatic visions and splendors, but a little light on the dark and troubled path we have to tread, a lamp that will burn steadfastly and helpfully over the work we have to do. The stars are infinitely more sublime, meteors infinitely more superb and dazzling; but the lamp shining in a dark place is infinitely closer to our practical needs. Expositor.—He who walks in darkness is sure, sooner or later, to stumble; while he who walks by the light of day, or by the lamp of night, stumbleth ‘not, but keeps his uprightness. Ignorance upon practical subjects breeds indecision and suspense, and these are uncomfortable; the Word of God by imparting heavenly knowledge leads to decision, and when followed by determined resolution brings with it great restfulness of heart. S.

The use of a lamp is by night, while the light of the sun shineth by day. Whether it be day or night with us, we clearly understand our duty by the Word of God. The night signifieth adversity, and the day prosperity. Hence we may learn how to behave ourselves in all conditions. The word “path” noteth our general choice and course of life; the word “feet” our particular actions. Now whether the matter wherein we would be informed concerneth our choice of the way that leadeth to true happiness, or our dexterous prosecution of the way, still the Word of God will direct a humble and well-disposed mind. Manton.—A loving, humble heart that comes to God in His Word for light God will never suffer to go seriously astray. And indeed a loving, humble heart not only has the light of God’s Word to go by, but possesses also the Interpreter of God’s Word, dwelling in the soul, even the “Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him,” but who will guard the soul from error, and lead it into all truth. Cheever.

The Bible is distinguished by a Divine exhaustlessness, a miraculous reproductiveness of meaning, life, and power. It is sometimes called a lamp. When a man first takes it for his guide, its light is very feeble. Perhaps he is not well acquainted with it. However, with its help he gets forward a few steps, and it begins to brighten up. He advances more securely, and it shines more clearly, till, no longer groping and stooping and putting forward a timorous foot, he stands erect and walks at liberty. And if the night grows darker, still the lamp burns brighter, and so step by step, and stage by stage, till at last the night is well-nigh past, but like a morning within the morning, the lamp is still clearer than the dawn, till he lays it down, for he has got where the Sun is shining. The path which it creates is brighter and brighter unto perfect day. Hamilton.

It is a pure light, a clear light, a steady light, an unfailing light. It burns with a lustre that never grows feeble, and casts a radiance from which nothing is hid. Think of its sufficiency. It is not only a light to lighten the eyes, not only a lamp to throw its lustre over our path; it is also a light to the feet, discovering to us all even the minutest features of the path we have to tread—all its roughnesses, all its breaks and hollows, all on it that would impede our progress or cause us to stumble if unobserved, but which observed we can avoid. And what a marvellous vitality there is in this light! Other lights have flashed and faded; other guides have offered themselves and been followed, and the blind has led the blind into the ditch, and both have perished. But this light abides as clear, and bright, and beneficent as ever. W. L. A.

I can truly affirm of myself that my studies have been profitable and availing to me only so far as I have endeavored to use all my other knowledge as a glass, enabling me to receive more light, in a wider field of vision, from the Word of God. Coleridge.

106. The sense of the vows of God which are upon you will strengthen you in an hour of temptation; and the recollection may encourage your humble boldness and freedom in applying to Him under the character and relation of your covenant God and Father, as exigencies may require. Doddridge.

107. The Psalmist was a consecrated man, and yet a chastened man; nor were his chastisements light. This he pleads before the Lord. He speaks not by way of murmuring, but by way of pleading; from the very much affliction he argues for very much quickening,

S.—There is a “need be” for the afflictions of the Lord’s people. The stones of the spiritual temple cannot be polished or fitted to their place without the strokes of the hammer. The gold cannot be purified without the furnace. The vine must be pruned for greater fruitfulness. The measure of discipline varies indefinitely. But very much affliction may often be needful. Yet will it be tempered by one whose fatherly pity will chasten “not for His pleasure, but for our profit.” And nothing will bear looking back to with comfort like those trials, which though painful to the flesh have tended to break our spirit, mould our will, and strengthen the simplicity of our walk with God. C. B.

108. Accept, I beseech Thee, the freewill offerings of my mouth, O Lord. The living praise the living God, and therefore the quickened one presents his sacrifice. He offers prayer, praise, confession, and testimony—these, presented with his voice were the tribute of his mouth unto Jehovah. S.—Teach me Thy judgments. We cannot offer anything to God which He will accept, but what He instructs us in the doing of; and we must be as earnest for the grace of God in us as for the favor of God toward us. H.

109. My soul is in my hand always, and (yet) Thy law I have not forgotten. The sense of the strong figure in the first clause is clear from Jud. 12:13; 1 Sam. 19:5; 28:21, where he who risks or jeopards his own life, in war or otherwise, is said to put his soul into his hand, as if to have it ready to give up or throw away at any moment. The same expression reappears in Job 13:14. The meaning of the whole verse is, that even amid the deadly perils which environed him, he still remembered the Divine law as an object of supreme affection. A.

111. God’s law is an everlasting possession, more truly so than the land of Canaan itself, which was given to Israel for an everlasting heritage. P.—Men highly prize and carefully keep their charters, privileges, conveyances, and assurances of their lands; and shall not the saints much more highly prize, and carefully keep in the closet of their hearts, the precious Word of God, which is to them instead of all assurances for their maintenance, deliverance, protection, confirmation, consolation, and eternal salvation? T. Brooks.—Bible history is valuable because in it we are distinctly pointed to God’s movement; because we are there shown a history developing along lines of providence. . . . And in the growth of these long, weary centuries, what a rich variety of testimonies God has accumulated. How many laws of conduct, for instance, have taken shape in the various situations in which the men of the Bible history have been placed; how many shining examples of distinct virtues: patience in Job, faith in Abraham, fidelity in Moses, brave hopefulness in Caleb, zeal in Elijah, affectionateness in John, earnestness in Peter; what wonderful varieties of character, illustrated in Samson, Samuel, Elisha, Balaam, Isaiah, Paul; what a variety of methods of teaching; the direct communications of God to Abraham and Jacob, the symbolic lessons of the Levitical code, the burning utterances of prophecy, the inspired melody of the Psalms, the Gospel, the Epistle, the Apocalypse. And the Bible gives unity to this whole mass of testimony, ranges it all round the one thought of God, makes all its variety tell of God’s teaching, God’s power, God’s purpose, God’s love, God’s hatred of sin. Thus it is summed up in the introduction to the Epistle to the Hebrews: “God, who at sundry times, and in divers manners spake unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son.” Abraham and Christ, though separated by such long time, though speaking in such diverse manners, yet speak one voice, and are parts of one heritage of testimony. V.

The rejoicing of my heart. The child of God looks round on the universe, on both worlds, on God Himself with His infinite perfections, and says, “All things are Mine.” My title is more sure than to any earthly heritage. Every promise is sprinkled with “the blood of the everlasting covenant,” as the seal of its blessings and the pledge of their performance. Let the recollection of the rich heritage of light, comfort, peace, and strength, furnished in the Word, be my abundant joy, and bind my heart to a closer adherence to its obligations, and to a more habitual apprehension of its privileges. C. B.

There is a joy in the Word of God; not merely because it is full of interesting narrative, charming biography, marvellous prophecy, grand argument of doctrine, grand revelation of the future; not merely for all that makes the Bible interesting and attractive to the common and secular mind, and will continue to make it so in all races and countries to the end of time; but the more because, here, God meets the human spirit which has been seeking Him, and has found it in order to lift it nearer Himself—to give it His own secret thought, if we may say so. As a friend touches our mind most, not merely in the book he writes, but in the letter addressed to us personally, so God makes the Bible a letter to the race, and to every soul within the race, in which His thought is communicated to it. As He does that—and we feel He does that—as we, meditating upon the law, see His righteousness; upon the death of Christ, see the glory of His self-sacrifice; meditating upon the discoveries of the future here made to us, see His plan for the world, and His plan for the redeemed soul in heaven—as we see all these, we feel a joy in the Word which we cannot find in any poetry, or philosophy, or eloquence, or discovery of man. The soul feels itself brought, by the Word, into fellowship with the Divine mind. It has an intense gladness of heart meditating upon the Word, whose mysteries then become to it arguments for its Divine origin, whose transcendent promises flash before it as with the effulgence of the Divine mind. R. S. S.

112. He inclined his heart to God’s commandments; took and bent his heart, as a thing bending too much to other things; set his mind musing on it. If he had not brought his heart to the Word, he had never meditated; the object cannot apply itself to the mind, but the mind must bring itself to the object. No holy duties will come to us, we must come to them. N. Ranew.—The believer is so charmed and won by the manifold adaptations of the Divine truth to his needs, so touched and penetrated by it, that he receives it into his inner life, and suffers it to become part of his very being; he prepares, so to speak, a sanctuary for it in the inmost recesses of his spirit, from which, like the Shekinah in the temple, it sheds a hallowing and enlightening influence through all the courts of his soul. Not only does he understand the Word, not only give it the sanction of his intelligence, and will, and affection, but he suffers it to become the guiding and shaping spirit of his life; insomuch, that he acts out its dictates as by instinct, has no need elaborately and distrustfully to argue them out, but at once recognizes them as both his law and his choice. Cox.—I love my Bible in its commands as well as in its promises. I do not need it merely to tell me that sin may be pardoned, but I want it to tell me how my conduct should be regulated. R. Hill.

In the days of King David, the Bible was a scanty book; yet he loved it well, and found daily wonders in it. Genesis, with its sublime narration of how God made the worlds, with its glimpses of patriarchal piety, and dark disclosures of gigantic sin ; Exodus, with its glorious marchings through that great wilderness, its thrilling memorials of Jehovah’s outstretched arm, and the volume of the written law ; Leviticus, through whose flickering vistas David’s eye discovered the shadows of better things to come ; Numbers, with its natural history of the heart of man ; and Deuteronomy, with its vindication of the ways of God ; Joshua and Judges, with their chapters of providence, their stirring incidents and peaceful episodes ; the memoirs of Job, so fraught with spiritual experience ; and the domestic annals of Ruth, which told to her grandson such a tale of Divine foreknowledge, and love, and care, all converging on himself, or rather on David’s Son and David’s Lord. These were David’s Bible, and so thankful was he for such a priceless possession, that he praised God for its righteous judgments seven times a day. But you have got an ampler Bible—a Bible with Psalms and prophets in it—a Bible with Gospels and epistles. How do you love that law ? How often have you found yourself clasping it to your bosom as the man of your counsel ? How often have your eyes glistened over a brightening page as one who had found great spoil ? How often have you dwelt on its precious promises, till they evolved a sweetness which made you marvel ? How many times have you praised the Lord for the clearness of its light, the sanctity of its truth, and the sureness of its immortality ? Hamilton.

If you will but open the Word of God’s truth and listen to the songs that break out there, under God’s statutes ; if you will behold the good of past ages bending over God’s law, as the spring of their sweetest enjoyments, crying each, Oh, how love I Thy law ; if you will observe, too, what enlargement and freedom of soul they find in their obedience, and how they look upon the mere natural life of the flesh as bondage in comparison ; if you will see how they disarm all their trials and dangers by this same obedience ; how they come away to God from the scorching sands of their pilgrimage, as to the shadow of a great rock, and refresh their fainting spirits by singing the statutes of the Lord ; if you will see what a character of courage, and patience, and self-sacrifice they receive ; how all great sentiments, such as carry their own dignity and blessing with them, spring up in the rugged trials of duty and obedience to God ; then, last of all, if you will dare to break over the confines of mortality ascending to look on, as spectator, in that world of the glorified, where the law of God makes full illustration of its import in the high experiences it nourishes and the benign society it organizes, you will by that time get, I am sure, an impression of the bliss, and greatness, and glory of obligation to God, such as will profoundly instruct you. What seems to you now to be a most unwelcome constraint, or even an annoyance to your peace, you will thus find reason, after all, to believe is only the best and dearest privilege vouchsafed you. Bushnell.

Recall constantly to your minds these three simple truths which form the essence of Christianity : The Word of God ONLY ; the grace of Christ ONLY ; the work of the Spirit ONLY ; and they will be truly a lamp to your feet, and a light to all your paths. These are the three great watch-lights which the Holy Spirit has raised in the Church ; their light ought to spread from one end of the world to the other. While these shine, the Church walks in the light ; as soon as these three lights are extinguished, or only obscured, darkness, like that of Egypt, is spread upon Christianity. D’Aubigne.

The Bible is already wrought into all the dominant forces of the civilization of the West. Christianity has wrought such revolutions of opinion ; it has thrown into the world so much of original thought ; it has organized so many institutions, customs, unwritten laws of life ; it has leavened society with such a powerful antiseptic to the putrescent elements of depravity ; and it has therefore positively created so much of the best material of humanity, that now the noblest type of civilization cannot be conceived of otherwise than as a debtor to the Christian Scriptures. The Bible discloses the only groundwork and process of a perfect civilization as a practicable result. The idea out of which the future civilization must grow is here, there, everywhere, in the Book of life. That idea is the moral regeneration of the individual. Christianity exalts spiritual over material forces. It intensifies individual being. Its whole process is a process of symmetrical elevation. It works a power which is diffusive. It is affluent in the production of certain auxiliary ideas. These, like itself, are spiritual ; and they take on social, and civil, and political forms. While throwing out these ideas, the Bible does exhibit a certain Divine consciousness that they must and will, and a purpose that they shall, become constructive elements in society. This is exhibited, e.g., in that most luminous fact in scriptural history that God educates nations as the representatives of principles. Starting thus with the idea of the moral

113. I HATE them that are of a double mind ; But thy law do I love. 114 Thou art my hiding place and my shield : I hope in thy word. 115 Depart from me, ye evil-doers ; That I may keep the commandments of my God. 116 Uphold me according unto thy word, that I may live ; And let me not be ashamed of my hope. 117 Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe, And shall have respect unto thy statutes continually. 118 Thou hast set at nought all them that err from thy statutes ; For their deceit is falsehood. 119 Thou puttest away all the wicked of the earth like dross : Therefore I love thy testimonies.

120. My flesh trembleth for fear of thee ; And I am afraid of thy judgments.

121. I have done judgment and justice : Leave me not to mine oppressors. 122 Be surety for thy servant for good : Let not the proud oppress me. 123 Mine eyes fail for thy salvation, And for thy righteous word. 124 Deal with thy servant according unto thy mercy, And teach me thy statutes. 125 I am thy servant, give me understanding ; That I may know thy testimonies. 126 It is time for the LORD to work ; For they have made void thy law. 127 Therefore I love thy commandments Above gold, yea, above fine gold. 128 Therefore I esteem all thy precepts concern- ing all things to be right ; And I hate every false way.

113. Of double mind. See the noun from the same root (1 Kings 18 : 21), “How long halt ye between two opinions?” and compare James 1 : 8. P.

Thy law do I love. God’s law is the highest revelation of His character, which is made prior to the coming of Christ into the world ; the law which is holy and just and good ; the law which extends not merely to the particulars of human action, but to the intimate secrets of human character, to the depths of the spiritual life in the soul ; a law which required love from man toward God as the root and motive power in all his conduct and in all his moral life. That law conserves the interests of the universe. That law is a great educating power in the spiritual creation. That law makes heaven possible, as it would not otherwise be. That law illustrates the Divine righteousness and the Divine wisdom, as stars do not, or tossing seas, or all the gorgeous flower tribes of the earth. When the Bible says there is a Divine law and this is it—love toward God and man and all the spiritual creation of God—it represents the highest fact in the Divine economy of the universe until we come to the cross of Christ. And no man who values law in society, who knows himself and his neighbor to be safer on account of its presence, who desires and demands it as a power for educating men in righteousness, should quarrel with the revelation which the Bible makes of a Divine law and of a Divine Law-giver in the heavens. R. S. S.

114. The completeness of our security is graphically portrayed, Thou art my hiding-place, to cover from danger, my shield, to protect me in it. Either I shall be kept from trouble that it shall not come; or in trouble that it shall not hurt me. Surely, then, the Word, which has discovered this security to us, is a firm warrant for our “hope.” And therefore every believer will be ready to declare, “I hope in Thy Word.” C. B.—God’s people are safe under God’s protection. He is their strength and their shield; their help and their shield; their sun and their shield; their shield and their great reward; and here their hiding-place and their shield. They may by faith retire to Him, and repose in Him as their hiding-place, where they are kept in secret. They may by faith oppose His power to all the might and malice of their enemies, as their shield to quench every fiery dart. H.

I hope in Thy Word. Of all the ingredients that sweeten the cup of human life, there is none more rich or powerful than hope. Its absence embitters the sweetest lot; its presence alleviates the deepest woe. Surround me with all the joys which memory can awaken or possession bestow—without hope it is not enough. But if the morrow shineth bright with hope, I am glad amid my woe. Of all the busy motives that stir this teeming earth, hope is the busiest. It is the sweetest balm that soothes our sorrows, the brightest beam that gilds our pleasures. Hope is the noblest offspring, the first born, the last buried child of foreseeing and forecasting man. Without it reflecting man should not, cannot be truly happy. W. Grant.

115. Depart from me, ye evil-doers.** Woe be to the wicked man, and woe to those who adhere to him and associate with him, saith Ben Sira. Even the pagans of old thought that a curse went along with those who kept evil company. To inhabit or to travel with an impious man, and one not beloved of the gods, was held by them to be unlucky and unfortunate. How much more, then, ought Christians to be thoroughly persuaded of the mischief and danger of conversing with wicked men! J. Edwards.

That I may keep the commandments of my God. Bravely resolved! like a saint, like a soldier; for true courage consists in a steady resolution against all sin and for all duty. Those that would keep God’s commandments must be often renewing their resolutions to do so. They are the commandments of God, of my God, and therefore I will keep them. He is God, and may command me; my God, and will command me nothing but what is for my good. H.—The word God only occurs in this one place in all this lengthened Psalm, and then it is attended by the personal word “my”—“my God.” S.

116. My plea is the Word of promise: “According to Thy Word,” “As thy days, so shall thy strength be.” “Fear thou not,” is the language of my upholding God, “for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God; I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of My righteousness.” Blessed be the goodness that made the promise, and that guides the hand of my faith to fasten upon it! C. B.

116,117. He prays for sustaining grace; for this grace sufficient he besought the Lord twice; uphold me, and again, hold Thou me up. He sees himself not only unable to go on in his duty by any strength of his own, but in danger of falling into sin unless he was prevented by Divine grace; and therefore he is thus earnest for that grace to uphold him in his integrity, to keep him from falling, and to keep him from tiring, that he might neither turn aside to evil doing nor be weary of well doing. We stand no longer than God holds us, and go no farther than He carries us. H.

117. Hold Thou me up, and I shall be safe.** Not only the consciousness of my weakness, but the danger of the slippery path before me, reminds me that the safety of every moment depends upon the upholding power of my faithful God. The ways of temptation are so many and imperceptible, the influence of it so appalling, the entrance into it so deceitful, so specious, so insensible, and my own weakness and unwatchfulness are so unspeakable, that I can do nothing but go on my way, praying at every step, “Hold Thou me up, and I shall be safe.” C. B.—God alone gives perseverance. Can any one who knows his own weakness, and considers all the seducements and temptations of life, trust at all to himself? We are so much the less secure of receiving this gift, the more confident we are of it; and we have so much the more reason to hope for it, the more unworthy we think ourselves thereof. It belongs to Him who has begun the work of salvation to finish and complete it in us. But in order to this, it belongs to us to fear, to pray, to humble ourselves, and to labor. Quesnel.

“It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.” Every agent in society, and every element in nature, may be charged with a blessing or a curse; and whether the one or the other should light upon us, can best be left to the determination of Him who knows both what we are and what we should be made. This arrangement is infinitely best for ourselves.

The task of first forming a human soul for glory, and then bringing that soul to its possession, is what none but God Himself could accomplish. Good men themselves also have felt the difficulty in reference to their own case; and the best of them have discovered their wisdom in proportion to the confidence they have reposed on the Captain of their salvation. “Hold Thou me up, and I shall be safe.” R. Hall.

118. If the wicked seem to triumph, it shall not be always so. “The ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.” How awful, then, their condition! “Their deceit is falsehood;” “deceiving and being deceived”—perhaps given up to believe their own lie—perhaps one or another “blessing themselves in their own heart,” saying, “I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of my own heart, to add drunkenness to thirst.” C. B.

119. There can be no government without a law. Every law has its sanctions—the hopes of proffered reward on the one hand, the fears of threatened vengeance on the other. Is the vengeance to be threatened only, but never to be executed? Take away from jurisprudence its penalties, or, what were still worse, let the penalties only be denounced but never exacted, and we reduce the whole to an unsubstantial mockery. The fabric of moral government falls to pieces; and, instead of a great presiding authority in the universe, we have a subverted throne and a degraded sovereign. If the judge is thus to be lost in the overweening parent, there is nothing of a moral government over us but the name, we are not the subjects of God’s authority; we are the fondlings of His regard. Under a system like this, the whole universe would drift into a state of anarchy; and, in the uproar of this wild misrule, the King who sitteth on high would lose His hold on the creation that He had formed. Chalmers.

121,122. He pleads not merit. He only asserts his innocence, the righteousness of his cause, not of his person. Though upright before man, he ever felt himself a sinner before God. The highest tone of conscious integrity is therefore consistent with the deepest prostration of evangelical humility. The Pharisee makes the appeal with undisturbed self-complacency and self-righteous pleading. The believer would ever accompany it with the publican’s prayer for mercy. Instantly, in a deep conviction of need, he appends the supplication, “Be surety for Thy servant for good.” C. B.—It is the prayer of Hezekiah in his trouble,

“O Lord, I am oppressed, undertake for me” (Isa. 38:14); it is the prayer of Job for a “daysman” to stand between him and God (Job 9:33); it is the confidence of every faithful soul in the perpetual intercession of our great High-Priest in heaven, which is to us the pledge of future blessedness. Anon.—The Son of God Himself became “Surety for a stranger,” and “smarted for it” (Prov. 11:15). At an infinite cost, the cost of His own precious blood, He delivered me from “mine oppressors”—sin, Satan, the world, death, hell.

123. Wonderful is that arrangement by which the Word of grace is made the Word of righteousness! God hath bound Himself to us by His promises of grace, which are not yea and nay, but “yea and amen,” under His own hand and seal. Cheering indeed is the thought that, amid the incessant changes in Christian experience, our hope is unchangeably fixed. We may not indeed always enjoy it; but our salvation does not depend upon our present enjoyment of its consolation.

124,125. As a “servant of God,” I can only come before Him upon the ground of “mercy.” For my best performances I need an immeasurable world of mercy, pardoning, saving, everlasting mercy; and yet by the blood of Jesus I dare to plead, “Deal with Thy servant according unto Thy mercy.” But I am ignorant as well as guilty; and yet I dare not pray for teaching, much and hourly as I need it, until I have afresh obtained mercy. These two blessings lead me at once to the foundations of the Gospel, in the work of Christ and the work of the Spirit, mercy flowing from the blood of the Son, teaching from the office of the Spirit. I must know the Lord as a Saviour before I can go to Him with any confidence to be my teacher. But when once I have found acceptance for my petition, “Deal with Thy servant according unto Thy mercy,” my way will be opened to enlarge my petition; yea, once and again to repeat it, “Teach me Thy statutes. Give me understanding, that I may know Thy testimonies.” C. B.

126. Made void Thy law.** This is not done by the indulgence of sin in action or thought, but in the heart. It is by the understanding and the conscience that the Divine law is to be apprehended in its amplitude. Now, nothing is more notorious than the baneful effect which indulged and practised sin has on both these. It inflicts a grossness on the understanding which renders it totally unadapted to take cognizance of anything that is to be “spiritually discerned;” as unadapted as our bodily senses are to perceive spirits. It throws a thick obscurity over the whole vision of the Divine law, so that nothing of it is distinctly perceived, except when sometimes some part of it breaks out in thunder. The conscience partakes the stupefaction; is insensible to a thousand accusations and menaces of the Divine law, every one of which ought to have been pungent and painful. Again, it is to be observed, that the general operation of self-love in a corrupted being is adverse to any clear and effectual acknowledgment of “the exceeding breadth” of the Divine law. The being has a certain sense of not being in a state of peace and harmony with God, but of alienation, opposition, and in a degree, hostility; but still devotedly loves itself. It has therefore a set of self-defensive feelings against Him. But since it could not defend itself against His power, it endeavors to defend itself against His law. It ventures to question the necessity or propriety of one point of His law; refuses to admit the plain interpretation of another, or to admit the clear inferences from undeniable rules. It makes large portions of the Divine laws refer to other men and times; to special and transient occasions and circumstances; is ingenious in inventing exemptions for itself; weakens the force of both the meaning and the authority of the Divine dictates, which it cannot avert from their application to itself. Thus it “renders void” much of both the spirit and the letter; and thus places itself amid a dwindled and falsified system of the Divine legislation. Add to this the influence of the customs and maxims of the world. For a moment, suppose these admitted to constitute the supreme law and standard. Let all that these adjudge superfluous be left out and rejected; all that these account indifferent be set down so; all that these warrant by practice be formally sanctioned; all that these pronounce honorable and admirable be inscribed in golden letters; all that these have settled as true wisdom be adopted as principles and oracles. Especially, let what the customs and notions of the world have mainly satisfied themselves with in respect to religion be admitted as the true scheme of our relations and duties to God. Now let this system be placed opposite to the Divine law! Would it not be like Baal’s prophets confronting Elijah? like Satan propounding doctrine to our Lord? like a holy angel and a devil looking in each other’s face? But, think, this is actually the system on which the notions and habits of the multitude are formed! Foster.

Everywhere among the children of the world the law of God is taken at a discount. Each accepts of it whatever he finds proportioned to his powers and convenient to his circumstances; each makes a law according to his own standard. Morality changes its form and dimensions with each individual. And, what is especially worthy of notice in this connection, is that they make only those sacrifices to the law which cost them nothing, those indeed which are no sacrifices at all. But each appears to demand favor for every cherished inclination, for every reserved vice, for every idol he has not the courage to break; the avaricious man, for the mania of gain and accumulation, the sensual for the indulgences he cannot renounce, the vain for the distinctions by which he is flattered. In a word, behind conscience, and amid the deep shadows of the soul, each cherishes, perhaps unknown to himself, some idolatrous altar. Vinet.

“Men have made void Thy law.” This might at first view seem impossible, as if it were the defeat of Omnipotence itself by the creature it has made; but there is a sphere in which even the function of Omnipotence itself becomes restrained or transformed, in order that there may exist created wills, and that there may be a kingdom in which subjects obey not because they must, but because they choose. The sphere and sweep of these laws and their action are not to be without the man, but within him. God stands related to us now chiefly through these laws. In conscience, in the Decalogue, and in the Gospel of His Son, the law of the Spirit of life—in all that expresses the Divine will—He speaks to us. They together make up that law which, in the words of our text, “men have made void.” If it be inquired how men have made void the law of God, we answer: By assailing its authority; in denying the personality of its source; in palliating the gravity of its transgression; in restricting the area of its rule; by disparaging its sufficiency. E. Mellor.

It is time for the Lord to work. Infidelity was never more subtle, more hurtful, more plausible, perhaps more successful than in the day in which we live. It has left the low grounds of vulgarity and coarseness and ribaldry, and intrenched itself upon the lofty heights of criticism, philology, and even science itself. It pervades to a fearful extent our popular literature; it has invested itself with the charms of poetry, to throw its spell over the public mind; it has endeavored to enweave itself with science; and it is espoused by a large portion of the cultivated mind of this generation. J. A. James.—There is a wonderful boldness in this language of the Psalmist—a summons of God to the rescue of His own world. And yet such challenge is the privilege of earnest men. It is the violence which takes heaven by force. God does not resent it; He hears it; He invites it; He answers it. When God arises to work, we know not what will be the form and fashion of His operations. If the Lord begins to work, we may expect a wondrous effusion of the Holy Spirit both upon His Church and the world, which is still estranged from His law and love. With the outpouring of the Spirit the Church in reality began. In the New Testament the work of Christ has no meaning, except as it is unfolded by the Holy Spirit; it has no power, except as it is applied by the Holy Spirit. The Gospel is as much the Gospel of the Holy Spirit as it is the Gospel of the Son of God. E. Mellor.

127. Everything betters a saint. Not only ordinances, Word, sacraments, holy society, but even sinners and their very sinning. Even these draw forth their graces into exercise, and put them upon godly, broken-hearted mourning. As the wicked are hurt by the best things, so the godly are bettered by the worst. Because “they have made void Thy law, therefore do I love Thy commandments.” Holiness is the more owned by the godly, the more the world despiseth it. The most eminent saints were those of Caesar’s (Nero’s) house (Phil. 4 : 22); they who kept God’s name were they who lived where Satan’s throne was (Rev. 2 : 13). Zeal for God grows the hotter by opposition; and thereby the godly most labor to give the glory of God reparation. Jenkyn.

The Psalmist was surrounded, as would appear, by widespread defection from God’s law. But instead of trembling as if the sun were about to expire, he turns himself to God, and in fellowship with Him sees in all the antagonism but the premonition that He is about to act for the vindication of His own work. Then, with another movement of thought, the contemplation of the departures makes him tighten his own hold on the law of the Lord, and the contempt of the gainsayers quicken his love: “Therefore I love,” etc. And, as must needs be the case, that love is the measure of his abhorrence of the opposite; and because God’s commandments are so dear to him, therefore he recoils with healthy hatred from false ways. So we have a fourfold representation here of our true attitude in the face of existing antagonism—calm confidence in God’s work for His law; earnest prayer, which secures the forthforthputting of the Divine energy; an increased intensity of cleaving to the Word, and a decisive opposition to the ways which make it void. A. M.

128. It is no compromising testimony to the integrity and value of the Lord’s precepts with which the Psalmist concludes, “I esteem all Thy precepts concerning all things to be right”—every command, however hard; every injunction, however distasteful; every precept, however severe; even cut off Thy right hand, pluck out Thy right eye; forget Thine own people and Thy father’s house; take up Thy cross daily; yea, Lord, even so, “all Thy precepts concerning all things are right.” Bouchier.

I hate every false way. His high esteem of every precept raised up in him a holy indignation against every evil way. A holy man knows that all sin strikes at the holiness of God, the glory of God, the nature of God, the being of God, and the law of God; and therefore his heart rises against all. T. Brooks.—As there is nothing good, but in some measure a godly man loves it; so is there nothing evil, but in some measure he hates it. And this is the perfection of the children of God; a perfection not of degrees; for we neither love good nor hate evil as we should; but a perfection of parts; because we love every good, and we hate every evil in some measure. W. Cowper.—The Being who loves the good with infinite intensity must hate evil with the same intensity. So far from any incompatibility between this love and this hatred, they are the counterparts of each other, opposite poles of the same moral emotion. J. W. Haley.

Every way, however pleasing to the flesh, that is opposed to the revealed will of God, is “hated,” as “false” in itself and “false” to his God. This “godly sincerity” will apply to every part of the Christian directory. So that any plea for the indulgence of sin, or any wilful shrinking from the universality of obedience, blots out all pretensions to uprightness of heart. If holiness be really loved, it will be loved for its own sake; and equally loved and followed in every part. C. B.

If there be any truth at all, to confess it is to deny its opposite, to cleave to this is to reject that, to love the one is to hate the other. As broad a liberality as you please within the limits that are laid down by the very nature of the case. “These things are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through His name.” Wheresoever that record is accepted, that Divine name confessed, that faith

Word should be manifested in the strength of your recoil from that which makes it void. “I love Thy commandments, and I hate every false way.” A. M.

D PE.

129. THY testimonies are wonderful: Therefore doth my soul keep them. 130 The opening of thy words giveth light; It giveth understanding unto the simple. 131 I opened wide my mouth, and panted; For I longed for thy commandments. 132 Turn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me, As thou used to do unto those that love thy name. 133 Order my footsteps in thy word; And let not any iniquity have dominion over me. 134 Redeem me from the oppression of man: So will I observe thy precepts. 135 Make thy face to shine upon thy servant; And teach me thy statutes. 136 Mine eyes run down with rivers of water, Because they observe not thy law.

137. Righteous art thou, O LORD, And upright are thy judgments. 138 Thou hast commanded thy testimonies in righteousness And very faithfulness. 139 My zeal hath consumed me, Because mine adversaries have forgotten thy words. 140 Thy word is very pure [Heb. tried, or, refined]; Therefore thy servant loveth it. 141 I am small and despised: Yet do not I forget thy precepts. 142 Thy righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, And thy law is truth. 143 Trouble and anguish have taken hold on me: Yet thy commandments are my delight. 144 Thy testimonies are righteous for ever: Give me understanding, and I shall live.

129. Thy testimonies are wonderful. The Bible itself is an astonishing and standing miracle. Written fragment by fragment, through the course of fifteen centuries, under different states of society, and in different languages, by persons of the most opposite tempers, talents, and conditions, learned and unlearned, prince and peasant, bond and free; cast into every form of instructive composition and good writing: history, prophecy, poetry, allegory, emblematic representation, judicious interpretation, literal statement, precept, example, proverbs, disquisition, epistle, sermon, prayer—in short, all rational shapes of human discourse, and treating, moreover, on subjects not obvious, but most difficult, its authors are not found like other men, contradicting one another upon the most ordinary matters of fact and opinion, but are at harmony upon the whole of their sublime and momentous scheme, Maclagan.

God’s testimonies are “wonderful” in their majesty and purity, which strike reverence into the hearts of those that consider; “wonderful” for the matter and depth of mystery, which cannot be found elsewhere, concerning God and Christ, the creation of the world, the souls of men and their immortal and everlasting condition. The Decalogue in ten words compriseth the whole duty of man, and reacheth to the very soul and all the motions of the heart. The Scripture is “wonderful” for the harmony and consent of all the parts. All religion is of a piece, and one part doth not interfere with another, but conspireth to promote the great end—of subjection of the creature to God. It is “wonderful” for the power of it. There is a mighty power which goeth along with the Word of God, and astonisheth the hearts of those that consider it and feel it. Manton.—He who foreknew every thought that would find an entrance into the minds of His people, has here secretly laid up seasonable direction and encouragement for every, even the most minute, occasion and circumstance of need. Here again is wrapped up, in words fitted by wisdom to receive the revelation, all that intercourse between God and man, throughout all ages of the Church, which is treasured up in the vast, unsearchable depository of the Divine mind and purpose. Can we, then, forbear repeating the exclamation, “Thy testimonies are wonderful?” C. B.

What do I not owe to the Lord for permitting me to take a part in the translation of His Word? Never did I see such wonders, and wisdom, and love in the blessed Book as since I have been obliged to study every expression; and it is a delightful reflection that death cannot deprive us of the pleasure of studying its mysteries, Henry Martyn.—Shortly before his death, Dr. Buchanan, giving to a friend some details of his laborious revisions of his Syriac Testament, suddenly stopped and burst into tears. On recovering himself, he said: “I was completely overcome with the recollection of the delight which I had enjoyed in this exercise. At first I was disposed to shrink from the task as irksome, and apprehended that I should find even the Scriptures fail by the frequency of this critical examination. But so far from it, every fresh perusal seemed to throw fresh light on the Word of God, and to convey additional joy and consolation to my mind.” C. B.

130. The opening of Thy words enlightens, making the simple understand. The common version of the first word (entrance) is inaccurate, and the one here given, though exact, is ambiguous. The clause does not refer to the mechanical opening of the Book by the reader, but to the spiritual opening of its true sense, by Divine illumination, to the mind which naturally cannot discern it. A.—Thy Word of truth thus unfolded to the mind enlightens it. The “simple” are the docile, the simple-hearted, who honestly desire to know the truth, with a heart willing and joyful to obey. C.—What is the Bible? To sight, it is “a book that may be read like any other book;” it is a vast, a beautiful, but a human literature. To faith, it is throughout inspired and unerring; it is the very voice of God speaking in human language to His listening children. H. P. L.

We will not give up reason to stand always as a priestess at the altars of human philosophy. She hath a more majestic temple to tread, and more beauteous robes wherein to walk, and incense rarer and more fragrant to burn in golden censers. She does well when exploring boldly God’s visible works. She does better when she meekly submits to spiritual teaching, and sits, as a child, at the Saviour’s feet; for then shall she experience the truth that “the opening of God’s words giveth light and understanding.” Melvill.—Even reason, which is nature, leads a man up to religion’s palace, though it shows him not all the private rooms within it. It brings him into the presence, though not into the privy chamber. It ushers him to faith, which, rightly understood, is little more than ratified and pure celestial reason. For of faith there is reason to be given; and though it be set in a height beyond our human perception, it is rather superelevated than contradictory to our reason. When man comes to faith he then runs out of himself, but not at all against himself. He but lifts up nature to a higher scale. Feltham.

The energies of the intellect, increase of insight, and enlarging views, are necessary to keep alive the substantial faith in the heart. They are the appointed fuel to the sacred fire. In the state of perfection all other faculties may, perhaps, be swallowed up in love; but it is on the wings of the Cherubim, which the ancient Hebrew doctors interpreted as meaning the powers and efforts of the intellect, that we must first be borne up to the “pure Empyrean;” and it must be seraphs, and not the hearts of poor mortals, that can burn unfuelled and self-fed. Coleridge.

It cannot be safe to separate the light of the Spirit from the light of the Word. The Word, indeed, moves in subserviency to the Spirit; but the light of the Spirit is nowhere promised separate from the Word. If it does not always guide directly by the Word, yet it is only manifested in the direction of the Word. Though the Spirit may by immediate light direct us to any path of duty, yet it is invariably to that path which had been previously marked by the light of the Word. Thus the Spirit and the Word conjointly become our guide, the Spirit enlightening and quickening the Word, and the Word evidencing the light of the Spirit. C. B.

131. I opened my mouth.** An expression denoting eager desire, as in Job 29: 23. Like one oppressed with burning heat, and longing for some cool spring of water, or some fresh breeze to fan his brow. P.

For I longed for Thy commandments. Longed to know them, to obey them, to be conformed to their spirit, to teach them to others. He was a servant of God, and longed to receive orders; he was a learner in the school of grace, and his eager spirit longed to be taught of the Lord. S.—The soul must be kept open to heavenly influence; so that, when the Lord touches us with conviction, inclines our hearts to Himself, and constrains us to His service, we may be ready to receive, to cherish, and improve the heavenly “longing after His commandments”; and may pant for more advanced progress in them. C. B.

The first condition of the freshness and energy of faith is constant devotion. The attrition of the world wears it thin, the distractions of life draw it from its clinging hold on Christ, the very toil for Him is apt to entice our thoughts from out of the secret place of the Most High into the busy arena of our strife. Therefore we have ever need to refresh the drooping flowers of the chaplet by bathing them in the Fountain of Life, to rise above all the fevered toil of earth to the calm heights where God dwells, and in still communion with Him to replenish our emptied vessels and fill our dimly burning lamps with His golden oil. The sister of the cumbered Martha is the contemplative Mary, who sits in silence at the Master’s feet and lets His words sink into her soul; the closest friend of Peter the apostle of action is John the apostle of love. If our work is to be worthy, it must ever be freshened anew by our gaze into His face; if our communion with Him is to be deep, it must never be parted from outward service. Our Master has left us the example, in that, when the night fell and every man went to his own home, Jesus went to the Mount of Olives; and thence, after His night of prayer, came very early in the morning to the temple and taught. The stream that is to flow broad and life-giving through many lands must have its hidden source high among the pure snows that cap the mount of God. The man that would work for God must live with God. A. M.

If we would but remember what the Word of God contains; if we would but lay it to our in-most meditation, that that Book holds within its leaves the only authentic record that exists of the will and purpose of the Being with whose will and purpose we are to be concerned for all eternity, not a Sabbath, not a day, would pass from us without bearing its burden of prayer and thanksgiving to that God who has, in His special favor, given to us that commandment which is “pure, enlightening the eyes.” “The entrance of Thy words,” cries the Psalmist, in a holy ecstasy, “giveth light; it giveth understanding to the simple. I opened my mouth and panted; for I longed for Thy commandments.” Oh Christians! shall we who live after the Advent of the Redeemer, and beneath the full effluence of the Spirit, the Comforter, be outdone in fervent desires by him who, however blest, could only in prophecy look for the future and distant appearing of his Saviour? W. A. B.

132. Have mercy upon me.** Mercy is indeed secured to him beyond the powers of earth and hell to despoil him of it; but the comfortable sense of this mercy is vouchsafed only according to the earnestness of his desires and the simplicity of his faith. And this is indeed a blessing with which no earthly source of satisfaction can compare. C. B.—While he could not be satisfied with anything less than their portion, he asks for nothing better; he implores no singular dispensation in his favor, no deviation from the accustomed methods of his grace. Says the suppliant before us, “Secure me their everlasting portion, and I am willing to drink of the cup they drank of, and to be baptized with the baptism they were baptized with. I want no new, no by-path to glory. I am content to keep the King’s high road. ‘Be merciful unto me, as Thou usest to do unto those that love Thy name.’ I ask no more.” W. Jay.

Love Thy name. One way or another, true love will make us evermore on the watch that the name of the Beloved which we carry about with us may in no way suffer through our neglect. Those who so love God’s name see what a mighty encouragement is held out to them. They are sure of being looked on and of obtaining mercy. For it is said, “Thou usest to do so unto those that love Thy name.” God will not turn His face away from them; He will be merciful to them when they confess their sins. He promises that nothing at all shall be lost which we do simply and truly for the love of His name. Keble.

If devoutness is so much rarer than it ought to be, the reason is not hard to find. For we love our God with such a feeble, meagre love, not in the least because He denies us the power of loving Him, or refuses to pour into our heart His love to us; but partly because we do not sufficiently appreciate the duty and the blessedness of loving Him; partly because we hinder the outcoming of His love to us, and the up-going of our love to Him by sloth or self-indulgence; partly also, because we do not fulfil the conditions, and use with such languor and indifference the aids and helps by which alone love to God can burn in the soul with a steady and bright flame. If professing Christians who are continually lamenting their want of love to God would really and thoroughly search their hearts about, some of them might discover that they have already as much of God’s love as they have any right to expect; and that the sense of His love to them, or theirs to Him, is in exact proportion to their real efforts after it. Bishop Thorold.

133. Order my steps.** The Psalmist recognizes and accepts his obligation to be subject to moral order. He prays that his daily life, not only in its large outlines but in its details, its “steps” may be ordered. The word “order” here combines two kindred ideas, “regulation” and “establishment.” We need a rule of life, and we need also to become established in a habit of loyalty to that rule. The prayer, “Order my steps” is, therefore, a prayer for habitual subjection to Divine order. It is not a prayer for great spiritual impulses or spring-tides of emotion. It is a prayer that the life may be right, and always and persistently right. Perhaps the Church needs no less preaching about the state of the heart, but it needs more preaching going to show how spiritual conditions everywhere touch practical life. It is a very comfortable theory that evil is so mighty in human nature that a man may as well give up all idea of moral consistency, and go blundering along anyway, provided he feels that he is justified by faith. That theory will not stand the test of the Gospel. God’s law, indeed, is perfect, while men are imperfect and weak, and they will inevitably stumble. The Lord Himself admits this in the very passage where He tells us that the steps of a good man are ordered of the Lord. But granting all that, any faith which does not issue in character, any faith which does not put a man’s life on the lines of moral order, any faith which calls weakly toward practical duty, any faith which does not charge his nature with the purpose, ever renewed amid all his lapses, to have his steps ordered in God’s Word, is a sham and a delusion, and will shrivel like gauze in the judgment fire. Character is what the world wants of Christian men, and not raptures. The strongest argument the Gospel can bring to bear on the world is a man whose life is an embodiment of heavenly order, who carries the mark of his heavenly citizenship in his common intercourse distinctly, and who moves straight out on the line of God’s Word, no matter whose word lies across the track. In Thy Word. Here we see that the Psalmist recognizes the source and centre of all moral order. God is its centre and God’s Word its manual, and to God he addresses himself in prayer, that he may be drawn and kept within the sphere of His heavenly order.

The Bible brings to bear upon a man a variety of influences, all tending to the ordering of his steps. First, it centres him. The Bible is, first of all, a revelation of God. It keeps God before him continually. All its own movement centres in God, all its sanctions are God’s. There is no detail but is referred to God. There is no escape from God. He must love God first and above all. He must obey God at all hazards. His life must take its highest inspiration from God, his trust must be in God only, he must work on God’s plans and be satisfied with God’s measure and quality of success. God must be all and in all, and the very keynote of his daily thought must be, “Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.” Secondly, it regulates him. The statutes of the Lord are right, and are meant, as some one has quaintly said, “to set us to rights.” It does not make itself superfluous. It does not bring man into the sphere of God’s order, and leave him there, but it leads him along in that order, ordering every step until he steps from earth to heaven. Thirdly, it restrains him. There is no order without restraint. Restraint is implied in guidance. How clearly the Psalmist recognized this restraining quality of the Word when he said: “Moreover by them is Thy servant warned; keep back Thy servant also from presumptuous sins.” And then, fourthly, it establishes him. The Bible brings the element of fixedness more and more into our lives. We throw away from our ideas of life and duty, as we grow older, much which at one time appeared to us vital, and the Bible encourages us to throw it away; but we settle down more and more upon a few great, underlying truths—God, Christ, worship, obedience, purity, love to our neighbor; and more and more, year by year, the Bible fastens us to these, and reveals in them new power and longer reach and greater variety of application. We become established in our convictions as we learn more of Christ—the Truth. We become established in godly living as we find out for ourselves that godliness is profitable. We become established in our love for God’s order, as we find, everywhere along its track, precious consolations, new hopes, substantial joys, sweet fellowships. So with these, and with its healthful and sometimes severe touch upon lax moral fibre and wavering resolution, the Bible builds up character, conveying into it more and more of the eternal stability of God’s character, rooting and grounding it in love, stablishing, strengthening, settling it in faith.

Well, then, may we join in the Psalmist’s prayer, “Order my steps in Thy Word.” This is not a text for special emergencies but for today and for to-morrow, and for every day, with its steps which lead us, now in many paths of routine, now through darkness, and now through light; for lives which are made up of multitudinous details, which are full of pettiness and of commonplace. We can take down into these no better prayer than this, “Order my steps in Thy Word.” Out of these things character is built. The great distinguishing stamp which is set upon our life as a whole comes through the right ordering of these details. Then aim for this. Aim to contribute to the Church’s work and to the world’s welfare this high, grand gift of character. Aim to keep before that portion of society which you touch the spectacle of a life regulated by a higher law than the world’s elastic law of expediency. And that you may do this, keep your lives in contact with the Word, and feed them from its living springs. So shall every step be ordered, and men as they behold you shall say, “He walks with God.” V.

Let not iniquity have dominion. It is not occasional surprisals, resisted workings, abhorred lusts, nor immediate injections of evil and blasphemous thoughts, but only the ascendancy of sin in the affections that proves its reigning power. The throne can admit but of one ruler, and, therefore, though grace and iniquity may and do co-exist within, they cannot be co-partners in one sovereignty. And it was the recollection of his continual forgetfulness and conscious weakness that prompted this prayer, Order my steps in Thy Word, implying that if his steps were not ordered, from want of their keeping, iniquity would regain its dominion.

How inestimably precious is the thought that deliverance from this cursed dominion is inseparably connected with a state of acceptance with God! The man who enjoys the unspeakable blessing of pardoned iniquity is he “in whose spirit there is no guile.” He has a work done within him as well as for him. His Saviour is a whole Christ, “made of God unto him sanctification and” complete “redemption,” as well as “righteousness.” He comes to the cleansing fountain as the double cure of his iniquity, equally effectual to wash from its power as from its guilt. C. B.

135. Make Thy face to shine upon**

Thy servant. The face of God shines upon us when, in His providence, we are guided and upheld; also when we are made to share in the good things of His providence, and when we are placed in a position wherein we can do much good. Much more does the face of God shine upon us when we are favored with tokens of His gracious favor; for then we grow under the consciousness of a loving God with rich supplies of His grace and Spirit. J. Stephen.—The believer’s incessant cry is, Let me see “the King’s face.” This is a blessing worth praying for. It is his heart’s desire, his present privilege, and, what is infinitely better, his sure, everlasting prospect. “They shall see His face.” The prayers of the Old Testament Church are not more distinguished for their simplicity, spirituality, and earnestness than for their unfettered, evangelical confidence. When they approached the footstool of the Divine majesty with the supplications, “Make Thy face to shine upon Thy servant.” Thou that dwelled between the cherubims, shine forth,” it was as if they had pleaded, “Reconciled Father, Thou that sittest upon a throne of grace, look upon us! Abba, Father, be gracious to us!” C. B.

Teach me Thy statutes. The man who reads or hears this Word of God unanimated by prayer and untaught by the Spirit is one who stands at the door of a temple he cannot enter; he holds the key of a treasury which he cannot unlock; he stands weak and thirsting beside a glorious and abounding torrent which he cannot stoop to drink. W. A. B.

136. Indignant grief for the dishonor done to God; amazement at the affecting spectacle of human blindness; detestation of human impiety; compassionate yearnings over human wretchedness and ruin, all combine to force tears of the deepest sorrow from a heart enlightened and constrained by the influence of a Saviour’s love. This was our Master’s spirit. And let none presume themselves to be Christians if they are destitute of “this mind that was in Christ Jesus;” if they know nothing of His melting compassion for a lost world, or of His burning zeal for His heavenly Father’s glory. C. B.—Those that can look with dry and undispleased eyes upon another’s sin never truly mourned for their own. It is a godless heart that doth not find itself concerned in God’s quarrel; and that can laugh at that which the God of heaven frowns at. Bishop H.

137. Righteous art Thou, O Lord.** Essentially, originally, immutably, and universally, in all His ways and works of nature and grace; in His thoughts, purposes, counsels, and decrees; in all the dispensations of His providence; in redemption, in the justification of a sinner, in the pardon of sin, and in the gift of eternal life through Christ. And upright are Thy judgments. They are according to the rules of justice and equity. He refers to the precepts of the Word, the doctrines of the Gospel, as well as the judgments of God inflicted on wicked men, and all the providential dealings of God with His people, and also the final judgment. Gill.—God’s judgments are always just; He never afflicts but in faithfulness. His will is the rule of justice; and, therefore, a gracious soul dares not cavil or question His proceedings. T. Brooks.

139. True zeal inflames the desires and affections of the soul. If it be true zeal, then tract of time, multitude of discouragements, falseness of men deserting the cause, strength of oppositions will not tire out a man’s spirit. Zeal makes men resolute, difficulties are but whetstones to their fortitude, it steels men’s spirits with an undaunted resolution. This was the zeal that burned in the Psalmist’s heart. A. Wright.—His “zeal” could not endure that they should “forget the words of his God.” Zeal is a passion whose real character must be determined by the objects on which it is employed, and the principle by which it is directed. There is a true and a false zeal, differing as widely from each other, as a heavenly flame from the infernal fire. The zeal which marks the true disciple of our Lord is enlightened by the Word of God, and quickened into operation by the love of Christ. It is indeed the kindled fire of heavenly love, exciting the most earnest desires and constant efforts for the best interests of every child of man, so far as its sphere can reach; and bounded only by a consistent regard to the general welfare of the whole. Thus earnest and compassionate in its influence, awakened to a sense of the preciousness of immortal souls, and the overwhelming importance of eternity, it is never at a loss to discover an extended sphere for its exercise. C. B.

Zeal any vital and conquering system must have. It is one of the manliest and mightiest attributes of our nature. To Christian character it is what heat is to the sun. Now, zeal implies convictions; not loose, vague, slippery notions, so carelessly held as to breed unconcern, or so falsely spiritual as to melt away before the eye into thin, vapory generalities; but convictions, definite, decided, special. These are the things that beget an honest zeal. F. D. H.

140. Pure (is) Thy Word, exceedingly, and Thy servant loves it. Pure—literally, purged, tried, assayed, refined, like precious metal. A.—In the original, “tried, refined, purified like gold in the furnace,” absolutely perfect, without the dross of vanity and fallibility which runs through human writings. The more we try the promises, the surer we shall find them. G. Horne.

Therefore Thy servant loveth it. The Word of God is not only “pure,” free from all base admixture, but it is a purifier; it cleanses from sin and guilt every heart with which it comes into contact. “Now ye are clean,” said Jesus Christ to His disciples, “by the Word which I have spoken unto you.” It is this its pure quality, combined with its tendency to purify every nature that yields to its holy influence, that endears it to every child of God. Here it is that he finds those views of the Divine character, those promises, those precepts, those representations of the deformity of sin, of the beauty of holiness, which lead him, above all things, to seek conformity to the Divine image. Because it is altogether pure, and because it tends to convey to those who make it their constant study a measure of its own purity, the child of God loves it and delights to meditate in it day and night. Morison.—God’s children love the Word for its purity. ‘Tis not comfort only must draw our love, but holiness. This argues the life and power of grace when we would not have the law of God less strict than it is, but love it for this very reason, because it is strict and holy. You would not think a beggar loves you because he like your alms, but is loath to stay with you for your service and live under the orderly government of your family. Most men’s love to the Word is such; they delight in the comfort of it as an alms, but hate the duty of it as a task; they had rather let the duties of it alone, if it could be without danger. But when your heart consents to the purity of the law, and you would choose that life which it points out to you rather than any life in the world, or the most absolute freedom that the heart of man can imagine, so that you love your Master the more because He has appointed such work—this is true affection to God and His Word. Manton.

141. I am small and despised.** Our complaints and miseries arise in no small measure from our failure to grasp the real meaning and to understand the universal experience of life. It is of infinite importance to ourselves and to the world that we should not yield to these feelings. We need for ourselves, the world needs for us as fellow-workers with God, all the joy, all the spring, all the elasticity, all the vigor, all the hope, which man will leave us. Our lot is nothing exceptional, nothing to complain of, nothing to be depressed at. It is just the common, the all but universal lot. Be good and true, and you cannot then be in reality or in the truth of things commonplace or insignificant. Each one of us is exactly as great as he is in God’s sight and no greater. Farrar.

142. The original is better expressed thus: “Thy righteousness is righteousness everlastingly, and Thy law is truth.” So the Septuagint. The English translation expresses the perpetuity of the righteousness, the original expresses also the character of it. Both statements are absolute. There is only this righteousness and only this truth.

143. The believer is never long at ease. He is in the world; he is in the flesh; there is indwelling sin; there are enemies around; there is the great enemy; besides all this, the Lord, for wise purposes, hides His face. Then the believer is in trouble and anguish. J. Stephen. — The child of God whose thoughts are habitually occupied in the Word will always find it to be his food and light, his joy and strength, witnessing within the presence and power of God. But specially is affliction the time that unfolds the delights of the Word, such as more than counterbalance the painful trouble and anguish of the flesh. Such cheering prospects of hope and deliverance does it set forth! Such mighty supports in the endurance of trial does it realize! So the bitterness of the cross best realizes the delights of the commandments. C. B.

144. Jehovah’s testimonies are forever righteous, so that all creatures must ascribe to them the honor of being in agreement with what is absolutely right. To have an ever-deepening insight into this their perfection is the growing life of the Spirit. For this life-giving insight the Psalmist prays. D.

The Word of the Lord has a mighty power over men. It has power over the intellect. It touches all its mystic springs, infusing new life. It opens up new wonders to newly awakened and more sensitive faculties. New suggestions of Divine wisdom, new motives for human action are seen. Light is poured around the new man, like one suddenly awakened from sleep. His intellect is taxed with new tasks, and he finds his ability growing with his desire. The

Bible is thought-inspiring and suggestive. In this respect it contrasts with the best of human works. Whenever its Divine pages are opened Divine truth shines forth in some new light. And it is a light that warms as well as illuminates. Not like the cold philosophies of infidelity, whose glimmering glare pierces not through the mists of our beclouded natures, this dissipates the clouds and warms the heart. The power of the Word reaches to the life. There is no greater evidence of the divinity of the Bible than is shown in its effects on a man’s life. It still lives, and guides, and directs, and inspires, in all the worldly wisdom, and above all the worldly maxims which man has shaped his course by. The converted man, though living in the same world, is no longer the same to the world, nor is the world the same to him. New motives incite him, new affections draw him, and new objects induce him. The power of this Word goes through life, and reaches to the shades of death; yes, even beyond death. Not even human sympathy, with its affectionate, beautiful ministries, can soothe now. Nature has not a word. Love speaks only in sobs. But when I open the Bible God lifts the cloud, and on its silver lining I read, “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord,” and I am comforted. He takes me by the hand, and I can look on the face of my dead without sorrowing; for He whispers softly in my ear, “He doeth all things well.” This word not only reconciles us to the death of our friends, but enables us to meet it ourselves without fear. We shrink back, we recoil as we approach its chilling gloom; but when we fall back on the arms of our Saviour God, and know that He laid His head there, our bondage of fear is broken, and we are jubilant in our freedom. E. R. Beadle.

Christians are not the Bible, after all, though they be the only Bible multitudes read. God has another Bible back of them, and that is the Bible God will support; that the standard He will bring and hold men to, and judge them by. His professed disciples may falsify every page, every doctrine, every precept; but that does not make it false. It abides notwithstanding, and will abide as eternal truth; its promises, its threatenings, its uttered doom will be accomplished. Now, cannot rational men see that this is the standard they ought to come to? Though all the Church were unmitigated blackness, there is light here. Does not the caviller see it is not enough that he has reasoned down the Christian’s life? There is no safety for him till he has gone beyond and reasoned down the Bible; not only blotted out the arguments arising from the Christian’s practice, but blotted out the arguments also, embodied in God’s great and authoritative sayings. But Christians, as a body, do not falsify the Bible. Certainly there are those who illustrate all its spirit and teaching; there are many who do this; they are lights in the world; they perfect, and point, and clinch the Bible argument. They speak in their life as God speaks in His Word. Is there any reason in making all this nothing? all this light nothing? all the sun’s shining nothing; his spots everything? God calls attention to this light. Men choose the darkness; they might walk to heaven in this light; there is enough of it, and more than enough. They prefer to wrap themselves up in the darkness they find, and in that go down to death. They allow one professor’s life that is wrong to sway them more than ten or twenty Christian lives that are right. Is there any reason in this? G. Shepard.

The Bible has stood the crucial test of translation in the languages of all quarters of the globe. From Greenland to Patagonia, in the western hemisphere; from Iceland through Europe and Asia to the Japanese and the Australians, in the eastern; from the Copts of Egypt to the Kafirs of South Africa; from the South Sea Islands of the Pacific through the oceans to Madagascar, the Bible has been rendered into their languages with triumphant success. Moses’s history of the creation and of the early world; Joshua’s wars and marches; the defeats and victories under the judges and kings; David’s penitential prayers and Psalms of praise; Solomon’s peerless proverbs; Isaiah’s splendid imagery; Jeremiah’s doleful lamentations; Luke the physician’s wonderful life-pictures of Christ on earth, and of the founding of the early Christian Church; Paul’s masterly orations at Athens, and before the Sanhedrim and Felix, and his doctrinal epistles, so full of strong meat; John’s marvellous revelation—these all come with the same force, and adaptedness, and sweetness, and conviction, in each of the more than two hundred languages into which the Divine Book has been already translated, and witness to us that, in this respect, it is perfect. Chamberlain.

It is immensely to the advantage of the Book which comes to guide us into the blessed way that it has all the fascinations of a matchless literature. This is a great thing for a book that is to be daily in our hands, and to be put into the tongues of the world! What do we not owe to its endless variety and its multiform riches? Haydn.—It contains the very wisdom of nine-tenths of all that is best and noblest in the literature of all mankind. There is scarcely any noble part of knowledge worthy of the mind of man, but from Scripture it may have some direction and light. The hundred best books, the hundred best pictures, the hundred best pieces of music, are ten times over involved in it. “The literature of grace,” says one, “which goes up like incense from the land of temples, has not half the influence of this book of a despised nation.” The sun never sets upon its gleaming page. “What a book,” exclaimed the skeptical poet Heine, after a day spent in the unwonted task of reading it. “Vast and wide as the world, rooted in the abysses of creation and towering up beyond the blue secrets of heaven; sunrise and sunset, promise and fulfilment, birth and death, the whole drama of humanity, are all in this book.” “In this Book,” said Ewald, the foremost of modern critics, when Dean Stanley visited him, and the New Testament which was lying on the table fell accidentally to the ground—“in this Book,” he said, as he stooped to pick it up, “is all the wisdom of the world.” Farrar.

145. I HAVE called with my whole heart; answer me, O LORD: I will keep thy statutes. 146 I have called unto thee; save me, And I shall observe thy testimonies. 147 I prevented the dawning of the morning, and cried: I hoped in thy words. 148 Mine eyes prevented the night watches, That I might meditate in thy word. 149 Hear my voice according unto thy loving- kindness: Quicken me, O LORD, according to thy judgments. 150 They draw nigh that follow after wickedness; They are far from thy law. 151 Thou art nigh, O LORD; And all thy commandments are truth. 152 Of old have I known from thy testimonies, That thou hast founded them for ever.

153. Consider mine affliction, and deliver me; For I do not forget thy law. 154 Plead thom my cause, and redeem me; Quicken me according to thy word. 155 Salvation is far from the wicked; For they seek not thy statutes. 156 Great are thy tender mercies, O LORD: Quicken me according to thy judgments. 157 Many are my persecutors and mine adversaries; Yet have I not swerved from thy testimonies. 158 I beheld the treacherous dealers, and was grieved; Because they observe not thy word. 159 Consider how I love thy precepts: Quicken me, O LORD, according to thy lovingkindness. 160 The sum of thy word is truth; And every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever.

145. Called with my whole heart.

There is no prayer acknowledged, approved, accepted, or rewarded by God but that wherein the heart is sincerely and wholly. God neither loves halting nor halving; He will be served truly and totally. The royal law is, “Thou shalt love and serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul.” God hears no more than the heart speaks. If the heart be dumb, God will certainly be deaf. T. Brooks.

146. Save me. From my sins, my temptations, all the hindrances that lie in my way, that I may “keep Thy testimonies.” We must cry for salvation, not that we may have the ease and comfort of it, but that we may have an opportunity of serving God the more cheerfully. H. — “Save me,” includes a sinner’s whole need—pardon, acceptance, access, holiness, strength, comfort, heaven, all in one word—Christ. Save me—from self, from Satan, from the world, from the curse of sin, from the wrath of God. This is the need of every moment to the end. C. B.

The prayer may be short; but if it come hot from the heart of one in the thick of the battle, will it not reach the ear to which it is sent? A few words—Lord, save us! we perish—roused up the Redeemer to save His disciples from the devouring sea. Ah! these prayers of men that struggle are dear to Him that hears them; they consecrate a life, they make a man’s heart a very church or temple in which worship is continually offered. Archbishop of York.

147. It is the lonely, confidential intercourse with our God that makes our closest walk with God. Secret prayer is most likely to be true prayer. There is no true prayer without it. The consecrated heart will always find time for secret duties, and will rather redeem it from sleep than lose it from prayer. C. B.

One of Melanchthon’s correspondents describes Luther thus: “I cannot enough admire the extraordinary cheerfulness, constancy, faith, and hope of the man in these trying and vexatious times. He constantly feeds these gracious affections by a very diligent study of the Word of God. Then not a day passes in which he does not employ in prayer at least three of his very best hours. Once I happened to hear him at prayer. Gracious God! what spirit and what faith is there in his expressions! He petitions God with as much reverence as if he was in the Divine presence; and yet with as firm a hope and confidence as he would address a father or a friend. ‘I know,’ said he, ‘Thou art our Father and our God; and therefore I am sure Thou wilt bring to nought the persecutors of Thy children. For shouldest Thou fall to do this, Thine own cause being connected with ours, would be endangered. It is entirely Thine own concern. We, by Thy providence, have been compelled to take a part. Thou therefore wilt be our defence.’ While I was listening to Luther praying in this manner, at a distance, my soul seemed on fire within me, to hear the man address God so like a friend, and yet with so much gravity and reverence; and also to hear him, in the course of his prayer, insisting upon the promises contained in the Psalms, as if he were sure his petitions would be granted.’ Milner’s History.

148. That I might meditate in Thy Word.** Meditation was the food of his hope, and the solace of his sorrow; the one theme upon which his thoughts ran was that blessed ‘Word’ which he continually mentions, and in which his heart rejoices. He preferred to forego necessary sleep for much more necessary devotion. It is instructive to find meditation so constantly connected with fervent prayer; it is the fuel which sustains the flame.

149. According unto Thy loving-kindness.** When God hears prayer according to His lovingkindness He overlooks all the imperfections of the prayer, He forgets the sinfulness of the offerer, and in pitying love He grants the desire though the suppliant be unworthy. It is according to God’s lovingkindness to answer speedily, to answer frequently, to answer abundantly; yea, exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or even think. Lovingkindness is one of the sweetest words in our language. Kindness has much in it that is most precious, but lovingkindness is doubly dear. S.—By quickening he means the renewing and increasing in him the vigor of his spiritual life. He beggeth that God would revive, increase, and preserve that life which He had already given, that it might be perfected and consummated in glory. He would be ever ready to bring forth the habits of grace into acts. Manton.—What a plea is it to ask for quickening influences, that this is the very end for which this gift of lovingkindness was vouchsafed, and that the gift itself is the channel through which the quickening life of the God-head is imparted! Could I ask for this grace on any other ground than lovingkindness? All ground of fitness or merit is swept away. C. P.

150,151. They are ’nigh’ to persecute and destroy me; thou art nigh, O Lord, to help me. P.—Thou art not only mightier than they, and therefore able to help me against them, but nearer than they, and therefore ready to help. It is the happiness of saints that when trouble is near God is near, and no trouble can separate between them and Him. He is never far to seek, but He is within our call, and means are within His call (Deut. 4: 7). H.

Thou art near. Even in the book of Thy providence, dark and mysterious though it be, I see Thee. There I read Thy wisdom, as developed in Thy world, Thy Church, Thy saints; the wisdom that guides, that guards, that bestows, that encourages, that corrects. There do I read Thy power, Thy justice, Thy faithfulness, Thy holiness, Thy love. But it is in Thy Son, Thy beloved Son, that I most clearly and distinctly see Thee as near. If in creation, if in providence, Thou art near, in Him Thou art very near, O Lord. J. H. Evans.

152. Mark this eternal basis of ’the testimonies of God.’ The whole plan of redemption was emphatically ‘founded forever;’ the Saviour was ‘foreordained before the foundation of the world.’ The people of God were ‘chosen in Christ before the world began!’ The great Author ‘declares the end from the beginning,’ and thus clears his dispensations from any charge of mutability or contingency. When, therefore, the testimonies set forth God’s faithful engagements with His people of old, the recollection that they are ‘founded forever’ gives us a present and unchangeable interest in them. And when we see that they are grounded upon the oath and promise of God—the two ‘immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie’—we may truly ‘have strong consolation’ in venturing every hope for eternity upon this rock; nor need we be dismayed to see all our earthly dependencies—’the world, and the fashion of it—passing away’ before us.

154. Plead Thou my cause.** If there is an accuser to resist, ‘we have an Advocate’ to plead, who could testify of His prevailing acceptance in the court of heaven, ‘Father, I thank Thee, that Thou hast heard me. And I knew that Thou hearest me alway.’ Our Redeemer does indeed plead our cause successfully for our deliverance. C. B.

‘Quicken me.’ We had this prayer in the last section, and we shall have it again and again in this. It is a desire which cannot be too often felt and expressed. As the soul is the centre of everything, so to be quickened is the central blessing. It means more love, more grace, more faith, more courage, more strength. God alone can give this quickening; but to the Lord and giver of life the work is easy enough, and he delights to perform it. S.

According to Thy Word. There are only two ways of knowing the Lord, and these are inseparable. First, by the letter of His Word; secondly, by the Spirit’s application of the letter of the Word. I have these two lights to guide me; the light of the book before my eyes; the light of the Holy Ghost in my heart. R. Hill.

155. Salvation is far from them, because they are far from God’s law. It does not fly from them, but they fly from it. Nay, such is their pride, that “they desire not the knowledge of His ways.” They say to God, “Depart from us;” God therefore will say to them, “Depart from Me.” They say to Christ, “We will not have this man to reign over us;” He will say of them, “Those Mine enemies, that would not I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.” It is not then so much God that punishes them, as they that punish themselves. C. B.

156. Great are Thy tender mercies, O Lord. The goodness of God’s nature, as it is His glory, so it is the joy of all the saints; His mercies are tender, for He is full of compassion; they are many, they are great, a fountain that can never be exhausted; He is rich in mercy to all that call upon Him. He had spoken of the misery of the wicked, but there were tender mercies sufficient in God to have saved them, if they had not despised the riches of those mercies. H.

Quicken me. He pleads the largeness of God’s mercy; yea, he speaks of mercies many, mercies tender, mercies great; and with the glorious Jehovah he makes this a plea for his one leading prayer, the prayer for quickening. Quickening is a great and tender mercy; and it is many mercies in one. Will not one so tender breathe new life into him? S.

158. I was grieved.** A fellowship with the joys of angels over repenting sinners will be accompanied with godly sorrow over the impenitency of those who “keep not the Word of God.” C. B.

159. He appeals to God concerning his love to His precepts; “Lord, Thou knowest that I love them; consider it then, and deal with me as Thou usest to deal with those that love Thy

Word. He does not say, “Consider how I fulfil Thy precepts;” he was conscious to himself that in many things he came short; but, “Consider how I love them.” Our obedience is then only pleasing to God and pleasant to ourselves, when it comes from a principle of love. H.—He saith not, consider how I perform Thy precepts, but how I love them. The comfort of a Christian militant is rather in the sincerity and fervency of his affections than in the perfection of his actions. He fails many times in his obedience to God’s precepts in regard of his action; but there is a grief in his soul that he should find in himself any will or desire contrary to the holy will of the Lord his God; and this proves an invincible love in him to the precepts of God. W. Cowper.

His petition thereupon, “Quicken me to do my duty with vigor; revive me, keep me alive; not according to any merit of mine, though I love Thy Word, but according to Thy lovingkindness;” to that we owe our lives; nay, that is better than life itself. We need not desire to be quickened any further than God’s lovingkindness will quicken us. H.—Often as the Psalmist had repeated his prayer for quickening grace, it was not a “vain repetition.” Each time was it enlivened with abundant faith, intense feeling of his necessity, and the vehemency of most ardent affection. If the consciousness of the faintness of our strength and the coldness of our affections should lead us to offer this petition a hundred times a day in this spirit, it would never fail of acceptance. C. B.

Let us ever maintain for the Spirit of Truth—and more than ever in these days, in which we are wont to hear the gravest truths of revelation questioned, or diluted, or overlooked—His own unparticipated right to illumine man, not indeed by making man no longer man, but by feeding the affections with holy food, by inviting them to holy objects. In this work He is alone. “It is the Spirit that quickeneth.” The old and the new creation are alike exclusively Divine. The revelation of God itself dare not dispute this honor with the Everlasting Spirit. That revelation is written in a language familiar to our daily thoughts and converse; it speaks of life, and death, and faith, and hope, and love—all household words, which in their earthly acceptance every man can speak of and define; but to pass from the earthly term to the heavenly purport, from the life of the flesh to the life of the spirit, from the love and hope that are entangled among creatures of clay to the love and hope that are busy

160. The Bible is like an ever-flowing fountain. Take what we will, and as much as we will, we ever leave more than we take to satisfy the wants of others. Neither the writers nor the thinkers of any one age can exhaust its fulness. For nearly eighteen centuries men have thought and written upon that one book, and if for eighteen more centuries men so write, yet will there still remain much that calls for fresh examination and fuller inquiry; new knowledge to be won, old truths to be better and more fully understood. The books of men have their day, and then grow obsolete. God’s Word is like Himself, “the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.” Time passes over it, but it ages not. Its power is as fresh as if God spake it but yesterday. R. Payne Smith.

There are ideas there the world has not yet fathomed; there are words and figures there whose rich significance interpretation has not yet exhausted. The scriptural style and the scriptural language are not meant for one age, but for all ages. Its Orientalisms will grow in the west; its archaisms will be found still young in the nineteenth century. Science is ever changing as it is ever unfinished, its language is ever becoming obsolete as it is ever superseded, philosophy is continually presenting some new phase of its ever-revolving cycles, the political world is ever a dissolving view, literature becomes effete and art decays, “but the Word of our God shall stand forever.” Not so sure are the types of nature as even the form and feature of this written Word, if it be indeed the Word of God, uttered in humanity, breathed into human souls, informing human emotions, conceived in human thoughts, made outward in human images, and indissolubly bound, as the wondrous narrative of the supernatural, in the long chain of human history. T. Lewis.

161. PRINCES have persecuted me without a cause; But my heart standeth in awe of thy words. 162 I rejoice at thy word, As one that findeth great spoil. 163 I hate and abhor falsehood; But thy law do I love. 164 Seven times a day do I praise thee, Because of thy righteous judgments. 165 Great peace have they which love thy law; And they have none occasion of stumbling. 166 I have hoped for thy salvation, O LORD, And have done thy commandments. 167 My soul hath observed thy testimonies; And I love them exceedingly. 168 I have observed thy precepts and thy testimonies; For all my ways are before thee.

169. Let my cry come near before thee, O LORD: Give me understanding according to thy word. 170 Let my supplication come before thee: Deliver me according to thy word. 171 Let my lips utter praise; For thou teachest me thy statutes. 172 Let my tongue sing of thy word; For all thy commandments are righteousness. 173 Let thine hand be ready to help me; For I have chosen thy precepts. 174 I have longed for thy salvation, O LORD; And thy law is my delight. 175 Let my soul live, and it shall praise thee; And let thy judgments help me. 176 I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek thy servant; For I do not forget thy commandments.

161. My heart standeth in awe of Thy Word. There is an awe of the Word that maketh us tender of violating it or doing anything contrary to it. This is the fruit of holy love; it is not afraid of the Word, but delighteth in it as it discovereth the mind of God to us; as in the next verse it is written, “I rejoice at Thy Word.” This awe is called by a proper name, reverence, or godly fear. Manton.—The spirit of adoption produces a dread of sinning against the tenderest Father, of grieving the dearest Friend. And this awe of God will naturally extend to His Word, so that we shall be tenderly afraid of disregarding its dictates. There is nothing slavish or legal in this fear. It is the freedom and the holiness of the Gospel; the very soul of religion; the best preservative of our joys and privileges, and the best evidence of their Scriptural character. C. B.

162. Here is a book which provides for human nature as a whole, and which makes this provision with an insight and comprehensiveness that does not belong to the capacity of the most gifted men. Could any merely human authors have stood the test which the Old Testament has stood? Think what it has been to the Jewish people throughout the tragic vicissitudes of their wonderful history. Think what it has been to Christendom. For nineteen centuries it has formed the larger part of the religious hand-book of the Christian Church; it has shaped Christian hopes; it has largely governed Christian legislation; it has supplied the language for Christian prayer and praise. The noblest and saintliest souls in Christendom have one after another fed their souls on it, or even on fragments of it, taking a verse and shutting the spiritual ear to everything else, and in virtue of the concentrated intensity with which they have thus sought for days and weeks and months and years to penetrate the inmost secrets of this or that fragment of its consecrated language, rising to heroic heights of effort and endurance. Throughout the Christian centuries the Old Testament has been worked like a mine, which is as far from being exhausted to-day as in the apostolic age. Well might the old Hebrew poet cry: “I am as glad of Thy Word as one that findeth great spoils.” Liddon.

The saints of God in all ages were taught by the same Spirit, looked for the same salvation, and were comforted by the same truths of God’s Word. Hence the Word is so precious to them; for it causes their souls to rejoice. Hath a conqueror cause for rejoicing who hath obtained a complete victory over and is enriching himself with the spoils of a wealthy enemy? how much greater has the Christian daily from the Word of the Lord! The joy of the one is but momentary and uncertain. But joy through the victory of Jesus, and the spoils the Christian reaps from His Word are durable and eternal. The victory of Christ Jesus is the Christian’s spoil. Here he beholds sin subdued, death conquered, Satan vanquished, hell overcome, and a crown of eternal life and glory which shall be enjoyed. In the written Word of the Spirit are given unto us “exceeding great and precious promises.” In the essential Word Jesus “all the promises are yea and amen to the glory of God.” By the former we understand “what is the hope of our calling, and what the riches of the glory of our inheritance in the saints.” By union with Jesus and faith in Him we obtain the happy assurance that all things are ours. Blessed be God for the Word of His grace, the Bible; and for His unspeakable gift, Jesus. Here is Thy treasure, O Christian; where should thy heart be but in meditation and delight herein daily? For thou canst get spiritual joy from no object but Christ set before thee in the Gospel. The clearer thou seest salvation by Him, the stronger will be thy faith in Him. “Rejoice in the Lord alway” (Phil. 4:4). W. Mason.

163. I hate and abhor lying. A double expression for an inexpressible loathing. Falsehood in doctrine, in life, or in speech, falsehood in any form or shape, had become utterly detestable to the Psalmist. He does not, however, alone refer to falsehood in conversation; he evidently intends perversity in faith and teaching. He set down all opposition to the God of truth as lying, and then he turned his whole soul against it in the intensest form of indignation. Godly men should detest false doctrine even as they abhor a lie. “But Thy law do I love,” because it is all truth. His love was as ardent as his hate. S.

164,165. Not merely morning and evening, but seven times; i.e., over and over again, apprehending every impulse to pray, he thanks God for His Word, which decides so righteously and guides so correctly, which is a source of infinite peace to all them that love it, and provided with which one is not exposed to any danger of stumbling. D.

164. Seven times a day do I praise Thee.** If we feel praise to be “good, comely, and pleasant,” it will be as needless to define its frequency as to prescribe the limit of our service to a beloved friend to whom our obligations were daily increasing. We should aim at living in praise, as the element of our souls, the atmosphere of our enjoyment, our reward more than our duty—that which identifies our interest with heaven, and forms our meetness for it. C. B.

165. (There is) much peace to the lovers of Thy law, and there is to them no stumbling-block. Peace, in opposition to the disquietude inseparable from a course of sin. A stumbling-block is a common scriptural figure for an occasion of unbelief or sin. The idea here is that the best preservative against temptation is a love to God’s commandments. A.—Here is the happiness of a child of God summed up in one word—peace. He loves the law of his God, and his heritage is peace. Every feature of the covenant bears some resemblance to its nature; full of grace, peace, and love. Two of the agents are fitly represented by the lamb and the dove—emblems of peace. The tendency of its principles “is first pure, then peaceable.” Its present enjoyment and privilege, peace, great peace. Its end will be universal, eternal peace. C. B.

They who love Thy law. The Spirit of inspiration ever honors His own Word of truth. All peace, comfort, and joy are derived from it through faith. We shall suffer no loss if we suspend judgment on comforts till we have tried them by this touchstone of truth. Be on your guard against the flatteries of false peace and the delusions of unscriptural joys. W. Mason.—To enjoy a peace which sets us above the power of evil; which places us out of the reach of fortune; which inspires us with courage in the midst of danger; which opens our eyes to look through the gloomiest scenes of sorrow to the blessed hope of future glory; which establishes our hearts in a patient expectation of God’s deliverance, so that nothing can terrify or dismay us; is that which the world can never give, and which can only proceed from the blessed Spirit of God, whose province it is to confirm the faithful to the end. This is that peace of which the Psalmist here speaks, and which is the peculiar lot and inheritance of the righteous, of him who loveth the law of God. Since this peace is but the forerunner of eternal peace, the earnest of future glory and immortality, it is worth all our pains to deny ourselves in this world, to take up our cross and follow Christ, to labor to do the whole will of God, that we may inherit that peace which belongs to those, and those only, “who love the law of God.” Bishop Sherlock.

Study pure and holy walking if you would have your confidence firm, and have boldness and joy in God. A little sin will shake your trust and disturb your peace more than the greatest sufferings; yea, in the greatest extremity of sufferings, your assurance and joy in God will grow and abound most if sin be kept out. That is the trouble-feast that disquiets the conscience, which, while it continues good, is a continual feast. So much sin as gets in, so much peace will go out. Afflictions cannot break in upon it to break it, but sin doth. All the winds which blow about the earth from all points stir it not, only that within it makes the earthquake. Leighton.

There is a perfect calm in the breasts of those who not only do the will of God, but “love” to do it. They are at peace with God by the blood of reconciliation; at peace with themselves by the answer of a good conscience and the subjection of those desires which war against the soul; at peace with all men by the spirit of charity. No external troubles can rob them of this “great peace,” no “offences” or stumbling-blocks, which are thrown in their way by persecution, or temptation, by the malice of enemies, or by the apostasy of friends, by anything which they see, hear of, or feel, can detain, or divert them from their course. Heavenly love surmounts every obstacle, and runs with delight the way of God’s commandments. G. Horne.

The Christian soul is one that has come unto God and rested in the peace of God. It dares to call Him Father without any sense of daring. It is in such confidence toward Him that it even partakes His confidence in Himself. It turns adversity into peace, for it sees a friendly hand ministering only good in what it suffers. In dark times it is never anxious, for God is its trust and God will suffer no harm to befall it. H. B.—A consistent Christian may not have rapture, but he has that which is much better than rapture, calmness—God’s serene and perpetual presence. Religion’s best gift, rest, serenity, the quiet daily love of one who lives perpetually with his Father’s family, uninterrupted usefulness—that belongs to him who has lived steadily and walked with duty, neither grieving nor insulting the Holy Spirit of his God. The man who serves God early has the best of it; joy is well in its way, but a few flashes of joy are trifles in comparison with a life of peace. Which is best, the flash of joy lighting up the whole heart, and then darkness till the next flash comes, or the steady, calm sunlight of day in which men work? F. W. R.

They have none occasion of stumbling. Hebrew, “they shall have no stumbling-block” (1 John 2 : 10), “There is none occasion of stumbling in him” who abides in the light, which makes him to see and avoid such stumbling-blocks. Wealth, tribulation, temptation, which are the occasion to many of falling, are not so to him. Fausse.-When God’s law is loved, instead of being struggled against, the conscience is at peace, and the inward eye is clear; a man sees his duty and does it, free from those stumbling-blocks which are ever occasion of falling to others. P.—They that have this character of God’s children will not be stumbled at God’s dispensations, let them be never so cross to their desires, because they have a God to fly unto in all their troubles, and a sure covenant to rest upon. Bunyan.

It is evidently our Father’s will that His children’s complete acceptance should not be with them a matter of present uncertainty. He intends not only that they should reach heaven at last, but that heaven should commence on earth in a state of conscious security and peace; not only that they should have eternal life, but that they should know that they have it (1 John 5 : 13). The Gospel, instead of forbidding this privilege, warrants, produces, and establishes it; for the conviction of the professor, the excitement of the slumbering, and the encouragement of the weak. Yet we must not so identify assurance with faith as to conclude all that are destitute of it to be unbelievers. “The assurance of faith,” as it properly respects a dependence upon the record, is indeed the essential principle of Christian life. But “the assurance of hope,” a conscious interest in the record, the real privilege of assurance, seems to be a distinct and separable idea. The Scripture seems fully to warrant the distinction prevalent among the Puritan divines, that assurance is “necessary to the Christian for his well-being, not for his being;” for his consolation and establishment, not for his salvation. C. B.

166. The first clause expresses the aspiration of his soul; the second, his performance of the conditions of success. He hopes for salvation, and to gain it observes God’s commandments, which is the only rational way. If any man wishes the Lord to save him, let him follow the Lord’s direction. C.

This is the true posture in which all the servants of God should desire to be found, hoping in His mercy and doing His commands. It is the hope of salvation which is the great and pervading motive to holiness, and it is the consciousness of obedience to the will of God which strengthens our hope of interest in the Divine mercy. J. Morison.—We cannot upon good grounds hope for God’s salvation unless we set ourselves to do His commandments (Rev. 22 : 14). But those that sincerely endeavor to do His commandments ought to keep up a good hope of the salvation; and that hope will both engage and enlarge the heart in doing the commandments. The more lively the hope is the more lively the obedience will be. H.

“Faith, which worketh by love,” is no less the characteristic of the Old than of the New Testament Church. For mark here the principle and the object of faith, “I have hoped for Thy salvation,” and the practical influence of faith, I have “done Thy commandments.” This “hope for the Lord’s salvation” is built on His faithfulness, not on our sincerity; on His promises, not on our frames; on His unchangeableness, not on our constancy. It is built not on the work of grace in us, but on the work of Christ for us—a work which has satisfied every claim, provided every security, and pledged all the Divine perfections on our behalf—a work finished and complete. But this “assurance of hope,” even in its weakest and lowest influence, is a practical principle, “I have done Thy commandments.” “Every man that hath this hope in Him purifieth himself, even as He is pure.” Hence the most assured believers will be the most devoted servants of their Master.

167. Let not our consciousness of daily failures restrain this strong expression of confidence. The most humble believer need not hesitate to adopt it “as an evidence of grace, not as a claim of merit.” This frequent repetition marks the godly jealousy of the man of God, mindful of his own self-deceitfulness and manifold infirmities, “giving” careful “diligence” to “make his calling and election sure.” He knew himself to be a poor sinner, but he was conscious of spirituality of obedience, “exceeding love” to the Word, and an habitual walk under the eye of his God, the evidences of a heart (often mentioned in the Old Testament) “perfect with Him.” C. B.

Holy admiration of God’s law is a powerful motive to obey, and it is produced by faith; for the soul in believing looks forth on the Law as brightly effulgent in the plan of redemption. Admiration of the law is admiration of infinite holiness, which is admiration of God. This is immensely more operative than cold approval of moral beauty or excellence; it takes a wider sweep; it goes nearer the primal source of all ethical relations; it gathers around conscience the kindling fires of ascending passion; it reflects the radiance of a personal glow from the face of Jesus Christ, who is our law. Personal holiness in perfection is the realization of law. Now, personal holiness in perfection not only is apparent in Jesus Christ, but is most of all apparent in His cross and passion. That which faith apprehends at the moment of the sinner’s conversion is this very glory of God as it shines in the face of Jesus Christ. The admiration of infinite loveliness can never rise higher than at this cross; and thus the very belief which makes the sinner a trophy of free grace subjects him, at the same time, to a motive of obedience. J. W. A.

168. I observe Thy precepts and Thy testimonies, because all my ways are before Thee. He does not affect to be prompted by a love exclusive of all fear, but only of a slavish dread. He stands in awe of God’s omniscience, and is influenced by dread of His disapprobation to obey His precepts, as well as by attachment to the law itself. My ways, my courses of conduct, mode of life, behavior. Before Thee, open to God’s infallible inspection, and subjected to His judgment. A.—The Hebrew word shamar, that is here rendered observe, signifies to keep carefully, diligently, studiously, exactly. It signifies to keep as men keep prisoners, to keep as a watchman keeps the city or the garrison; yea, to keep as a man would keep his very life. The reason that he kept the precepts and the testimonies of the Lord so carefully, so sincerely, so diligently, and so exactly you have in the latter words, “for all my ways are before Thee.” It is as necessary for him that would be eminent in holiness to set the Lord always before him, as it is necessary for him to breathe. T. Brooks.—Never let us lose sight of the recollection that “all our ways are before God!” that every act, every thought, every desire, every word, is registered by conscience as His vicegerent, and laid up in His book of remembrance! Well would it be for us if we walked less before men and more “before God;” if in secret, in business, at home and abroad we heard the solemn voice: “I am the Almighty God; walk before Me, and be thou perfect.”

169. The life of prayer is the “cry” of the heart to God. But we must see that our “cry comes near before the Lord;” that nothing blocks up the way or interrupts the communication. If we are believers, the way is open; “the middle wall of partition is broken down.” What an amount of privilege is it that this way to God is always open; that, as members of Christ, we have not only “access,” but “access with confidence;” yea, with the same confidence as the Son of God Himself!

169,170. It is beautiful to observe the oil of the Psalmist’s faith feeding the flame of his supplication. Every petition is urged upon the warrant of a promise, “according to Thy Word.” The promises were the very breath of his supplication; exciting his expectation for a favorable answer, and exercising ing his patience, until the answer should come. C. B.

171. My lips shall pour forth praise; for Thou wilt teach me Thy statutes. The first verb means to cause to gush or flow, and here denotes eager, abundant, and unceasing praise. The last clause expresses the confident expectation of the blessing so often and importunately asked throughout the Psalm. As if he had said, Now shall my lips praise, for I am about to receive what I had prayed for; Thou wilt indeed teach me Thy statutes. A.—How happy is it to bring to God a heart as large in praise as in prayer! The answer of the supplication for spiritual understanding and deliverance naturally issues in the sacrifice of praise. To speak of God and for Him will be the desire and delight of him whose heart and lips have been taught to pour forth praise.

172. “Lord, open Thou my lips, that my tongue may speak of Thy Word.” Honor me, O my God, by helping me to show that “all Thy commandments are righteousness.” In our own atmosphere and our own spirit how often do we pour out our words without waiting on the Lord for unction and power, speaking of the things of God without His sought presence and blessing! Were we living fully in the atmosphere of prayer, enriched with habitual meditation in the Word, how much more fluent would our tongue be to speak of His Word “to the use of edifying!”

173. Help me.** Dependence is a principle of deep humility and mighty energy. The thought that we are entering into work in the Lord’s strength is a great stay. Blessed be God for the help laid for us upon One that is mighty,” so that when we are most weak, then are we most strong! “For I the Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, ‘Fear not, I will help thee’ (Isa. 41: 12). C. B.

174. He was a partaker both of pardoning mercy and of sanctifying grace; yet still he longed for more of this salvation, that is, for a more assured faith of pardoning mercy and larger measures of sanctifying grace. Grace is not contented with a little; on the contrary, the more it hath received, the more it desires to receive. R. Walker.

175. It is as natural for the living soul to praise as for the living man to speak. And is not the life that the Psalmist is now praying for the salvation for which he was longing? The taste that he has received makes him hunger for a higher and continued enjoyment: not for any selfish gratification, but that he might employ himself in the praise of his God. The close of this Psalm exhibits that pervading character of praise which has been generally remarked in the concluding Psalms of this sacred book. C. B.

176. I wander like a lost sheep; seek Thy servant; for Thy commandments I do not forget. The English versions of the first clause (I have gone astray), although they adhere strictly to the form of the original, seem to make the primary idea that of sin, which is really included, but only as the cause of that which is directly intended; namely, misery, represented by the wandering of a lost and helpless sheep. Seek Thy servant, deliver from this wretched state one who is still Thy servant, and as such remembers Thy commandments, even in the midst of his worst sufferings. As the preceding verse sums up the petitions of the Psalm, so this sums up its complaints in the first clause and its professions in the last, connected by the short prayer (seek Thy servant) as by a single link. The predominant use of the past tense, even to the end, shows how deeply the entire Psalm is founded upon actual and previous experience. A.

A mixture of confession, of entreaty, and of holy resolution, which should meet in our prayers. “I have gone astray like a sheep that is lost,” is the confession; “oh, seek Thy servant,” is the entreaty; “I do not forget Thy commandments,” is the penitent and holy resolution. Without some such resolution either conceived or expressed there could indeed be no acceptable because no true prayer. To say, “I have gone astray like a sheep that is lost,” would be mere mockery if there was not at the same time in the heart the good purpose, “I do not forget Thy commandments.” But because that good purpose will not of itself prevail, but we should ever have to repeat in spite of it our confession of having gone astray like a sheep that is lost, therefore the entreaty for help is well interposed between them, and we say, and must say ever, “Oh, seek Thy servant.” May Thy help change my weak purpose into a strong and victorious resolution, that I may not go astray, but really and truly remember Thy commandments, remember them to do them. Thus confessing that we are Christ’s, declaring that we must pray to Him, that we cannot live without Him; that we go astray like a sheep that is lost, and must therefore implore Him to seek us and to save us; shall we not then be more ready to follow Christ’s commandments also without shame, and to do, or set ourselves heartily to do, all His holy and perfect will? T. Arnold.

There could not possibly be a more appropriate conclusion of such a Psalm as this, so full of the varied experience and the everchanging frames and feelings even of a child of God, in the sunshine and the cloud, in the calm and in the storm, than this ever-changing sense of his propensity to wander, and the expression of his utter inability to find his way back without the Lord’s guiding hand to restore him; and at the same time with it all, his fixed and abiding determination never to forget the Lord’s commandments. What an insight into our poor wayward hearts does this verse give us; not merely liable to wander, but ever wandering and losing our way, even while cleaving to God’s commandments! But at the same time what a prayer does it put into our mouths, “Seek Thy servant;” “I am Thine, save me.” Yes, blessed be God! there is One mighty to save. “Kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation.” Bouchier.—And thus will our Christian progress be checkered, until we reach the regions of unmixed praise, where we shall no more mourn over our wanderings, no longer feel any inclination to err from our Shepherd’s presence, no more experience the wretchedness of distance from Him, or the difficulty of returning to Him, where we shall be eternally safe in the heavenly fold, to “go no more out.” C. B.

It is impossible to read these Psalms without feeling that those who wrote them were, in their inner spiritual life, living under the Gospel; resting not in a law of works, but in a law of faith. And the reason of this was that they saw, and with no indistinct vision, the same mind and will of God as that which was manifested in Christ, and that wherever those are seen, however faintly, there something at least of the joy of forgiveness and reconciliation is felt accordingly, and men rise, or at least begin to rise from the fear which hath torment to the perfect love which casteth out fear. To these men God was known as a Father; they felt that amidst all their stubbornness and their many transgressions they were still the children whom He had nourished and brought up. He who sat between the cherubim was also He who led His people as a Shepherd leads His flock, and they, though they had gone astray, were still the sheep of His pasture. E. H. Plumptre.

Who will say that the uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the Protestant Bible is not one of the strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives on the ear like music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. Nay, it is worshipped with a positive idolatry, in extenuation of whose gross fanaticism its intrinsic beauty pleads availingly with the man of letters and the scholar. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its phrases. The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments; and all that there has been about him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent, and good, speaks to him forever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed and controversy never soiled. It has been to him all along as the silent, but oh, how intelligible, voice of his guardian angel; and in the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible. F. W. Faber (Roman Catholic).

I have been seriously perplexed to know how the religious feeling, which is the essential base of conduct, can be kept up without the use of the Bible. For three centuries this Book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history. It forbids the veriest herd who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilizations, and a great past stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanized and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary interspace in the interval between two eternities, and earns the blessings or the curses of all kind according to its efforts to do good and hate evil, even as they also are earning the payment for their work? Huxley.

The more difficulties I have found in myself and in the world, the more help has the Bible been to me. The Bible is not the cause of my perplexities, but the resolver of them. Of course there are a multitude of things in it which I do not understand; a multitude more in myself which I do not understand. But this has been my experience hitherto, and each year, almost each day, that experience is strengthened. Books of the Bible which were lying in shadow for me, in which I could see little meaning, have come forth into clearness, because I met with hard passages in myself or in society which I could not construe without their help. And I have found this to be the case more and more in proportion as I have rested my faith on the God whom the Bible declares to me. Because I have heard Christ for myself speaking to me out of this Book, and speaking to me in my heart, I know that He is indeed that Saviour who should come into the world. Maurice.

Every living soul may have, and every Christian soul does have, direct access for himself to the living Lord, the Eternal Word. Christ is the Teacher, the only Teacher, the Teacher for all men, the Teacher of all truth. He only is our Master, and gathered at His feet all we are brethren. It is His living influence that flows to us through the channel of His Word. It is His voice that speaks to us in all providences. It is He who makes the syllables that come from human lips eloquent to reach our understanding, and to calm and gladden our hearts. In every region of Christian culture and tuition, the real source of all the blessing is Christ Himself, and the real Master, Example, and Authority, Instructor, and Trainer is that ever-living Lord, who speaketh from heaven, who speaketh in His servants’ hearts, who uses as His medium the Book which records His life and death, and subordinately the events of life and the tongues of men; but is Himself the breath which breathes through these all. Is not this great and yet simple principle one that we sorely need to be reminded of, and to grasp more firmly? We think far too much of that Lord as a Lord gone from us, whose influence consists only in what He was and did. Blessed be His name! His influence is all built upon what He did once which lives forever, and the record of that is the great means which He uses for our instruction in righteousness. But it is no merely past Saviour that we have to look to for teaching, but the presence of an ever-living Lord; that active presence in the souls of all believers, that pleading approach to the souls of all who hear of His love; who hour by hour is seeking to bring us all closer to Himself. A. M.

It is when Christ quickens us that we call upon His name; when Christ teaches us that we keep the way of His statutes unto the end, when Christ cleanses us that we are made whiter than the snow; when Christ comforts us that we draw water with joy out of the wells of salvation; when Christ shines upon us with the light of His countenance that we are filled with joy that is unspeakable and full of glory; when Christ opens the windows of heaven and sends down upon us showers of the richest blessing, that we spring up like willows by the watercourses, and bring forth fruit like Lebanon. J. A. W.

Those blessings which constitute the Christian’s portion, Truth, Love, Beauty, Goodness, may become the common possession of myriads, each one of whom may yet be said to possess the whole. The same truths which fill my mind may become the spiritual nutriment of all my fellow-believers, undiminished to me though other minds apprehend them. The love to Christ which burns in one Christian’s breast does not become enfeebled if other hearts catch the flame from his, but rather by contact of congenial elements glows in each separate heart with a fervor all the more intense. The peace of God may be diffused through the spirits of a multitude which no man can number, and yet each redeemed soul may say of it, “It is all my own;” nay, better than if all or exclusively his own; for it is a peace, a joy, a happiness, which, by the electric flash of sympathy passing from heart to heart, becomes, by reason of the multitudes who share it, redoubled, multiplied, boundlessly increased to each. Caird.

If, in respect of its authorship and origin, the Bible be the Saviour’s Book, in regard of its destination and object, it is no less truly the sinner’s Book. It is not a meditation, but a message, a message from God to you and to me. It announces not God’s thoughts about the universe, but God’s thoughts and intentions about ourselves. It is not a speculative Book, but one intensely practical. It is a solemn Book to deal with; for just as it bears salvation in its bosom, so it carries Jehovah’s seal and sanction on its brow; as it brings salvation to our houses, so it carries back to God a report of that reception which we give to Himself and His beloved Son, Himself and His great salvation. And it is a Book entirely unique. If from it we cannot find how to be happy in God’s favor now, and how to secure a blessed immortality by and by, there is no book, no being in the world from whom we can ascertain it. Hamilton.

Let all, then, live the lives of believing men; at peace with God; rooted and grounded in love; free, happy, earnest, self-denied; never losing hold of the free love of God, and never losing sight of the glory to be revealed; walking not only in the love of God, but in the law of God, which is holy, and just, and good, keeping our eye continually on the “statutes,” and “judgments,” and “testimonies,” and “commandments” of the Lord our God, knowing that “great peace have they that love this law,” and that it is to this that we are called; “that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit.” H. Bonar.

We meet the mind that built the earth when we open the leaves of this Book of the World. It is the one bond of intellectual unity between countries and centuries. Other books pass away, however brilliant, however great. Only this abideth forever. And the skin-clothed spearman of the woods, converted to Christ, is brought through it to intellectual sympathy with the highest of Christian statesmen and scholars. The earliest age is linked to the latest through its influence upon each, and the figures that walk before our thought amid the auroral dawn of history stretch forward their hands to join and grasp in common love for it those white-robed saints who shine before us in coming ages, cinctured and crowned with millennial beauty. It is a Book full of stimulating force and purifying power. It is a vast treasury of intellectual and moral appeal, by which whoever lovingly ponders it shall be impressed, impenetrated, transformed, made a son or daughter of the Almighty, and assimilated in spirit to all that is godlike. Its fruits are seen in public life as well as in private. All welfare comes from it inspirations, and the best civilizations are conditioned on its power. R. S. S.