Psalms 8

His own rules of action; that He can innovate upon His work without forfeiting His perfection; that law is only one way of conceiving of His regularized working, and not an external force which governs and moulds what we recognize as His work. It dissolves into thin air as we look hard at it, this fancied barrier of inexorable law; and as the mist clears off, beyond there is the throne of the Moral King of the universe, in whose eyes material symmetry is as nothing when compared with the spiritual well-being of His moral creatures. H. P. L.

1. O LORD, our Lord, How excellent is thy name in all the earth! Who hast set thy glory upon the heavens. 2 Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou established strength, Because of thine adversaries, That thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger. 3 When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, The moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; 4 What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?

This is the first of a number of Psalms which celebrate the praise of God in the phenomena of the natural world. The sun by day (Psalm 19), the moon and the stars by night (Psalm 8), the glory and the order of creation (Psalm 104), the terrors of the thunder-storm and the earthquake (Psalm 29), are all dwelt upon in Hebrew verse, and are described with a force and animation, a magnificence of imagination and coloring, which have never been surpassed in the poetry of any nation. But the Hebrew odes are never merely descriptive. There are pictures in them of extreme beauty and vividness, but the picture is never painted for its own sake. Nature is never regarded, whether in her aspect of terror or of grace, whether in her tumult or her repose, as an end in herself. The sense of God’s presence of which the Psalmist is so profoundly conscious in his own spiritual life is that which gives its glory and its meaning to the natural world. There is a vivid realization of that presence as of a presence which fills the world, and from which there is no escape; there is a closeness to God, as of one who holds and compasses us about (Psalm 139), in the mind of the inspired minstrels of

5. For thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honour. 6 Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet: 7 All sheep and oxen, Yea, and the beasts of the field; 8 The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, Whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas. 9 O LORD, our Lord, How excellent is thy name in all the earth!

Israel, which, if it is characteristic of the Semitic races at large, is certainly in an emphatic degree characteristic of the Hebrews. This feeling lends its coloring to their poetry. Nature is full of God; nature is the theatre of His glory. All admiration of nature in a rightly tuned heart is a confession of that glory. To such a heart there can be no praise of nature apart from the praise of God. All things are “of Him and through Him and to Him.” The sun and the moon are His witnesses and heralds, the light is His robe, the clouds are His chariot, the thunder is His voice, the flashes of the lightning are His arrows and His spear. Apart from Him the universe is void and waste; He gives it its life and meaning.

This eighth Psalm describes the impression produced on the heart of David as he gazed upon the heavens by night. In such a country as Palestine, in that clear Eastern atmosphere, “the moon and the stars” would appear with a splendor and a brilliancy of which we can scarcely conceive; and as he fixes his eyes upon them, awed and solemnized, and yet attracted and inspired, by the spectacle, he breaks forth into admiring acknowledgment of that God, who, as the God of Israel, has set His glory so conspicuously in the heavens that it is seen of all eyes and confessed even by the lisping tongues of children. They praise Him, and their scarcely articulate homage is a rebuke to wicked men who disregard or resist Him. But as the poet gazes on into the liquid depths of that starry sky, there comes upon him with overwhelming force the sense of his own insignificance. In sight of all that vastness, before all that evidence of creative power, how insignificant is man! “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” is the natural utterance of the heart. What is man—man in his frailty, his littleness, his sin? What in the sight of Him who made those heavens, and planted in them those glittering orbs? This is the first feeling; but it is immediately swallowed up in another—the consciousness of man’s true greatness, in nature all but Divine, of the seed-royal of the second Adam, of highest lineage and dignity, crowned and sceptred as a king: “Thou hast put all things under his feet.” This is the principal thought; not man’s littleness, but his greatness. This subject is boldly but briefly handled, and then the Psalm is brought to a fitting close with the same ascription of praise with which it opened. P.

This Psalm, like Psalm 104 and others, is a lyric echo of the Mosaic account of the creation. Ewald calls it a flash of lightning cast into the darkness of the creation. D.

Estimate the theologic value of this Psalm, its inspired import, by reading it as a bold contradiction of errors all around it: the dreams of Buddhism, the fables of Brahminism, the atheism of the Greek Philosophy, and the malign atheism of our modern metaphysics. Within the compass of these nine verses the celestial and terrestrial systems and the human economy are only poetically set forth; but they are truly reported of, as the three stand related to Religious Belief and to Religious Feeling. The astronomy of Oriental sages and of Greek philosophers are well-nigh forgotten; but David’s astronomy lives, and it will ever live. I. T.

This Psalm connects the distant past with the far-off future—creation with redemption when complete—the first chapter of Genesis with the eleventh chapter of Isaiah; it is the poetic version of the former, and the germ of the prediction contained in the latter. This Psalm, moreover, is quoted three times in the New Testament. It is neither a directly Messianic Psalm, on the one hand, nor is its application to Christ a mere accommodation, on the other; the middle way is here the safe way, and so we regard it as typically Messianic. The type is the first Adam and the privileges of the human race in him; the antitype is the Second Adam and the glory, honor, and dominion of redeemed humanity as represented by Him. J. J. Green.

The Messianic import of the Psalm is not of a direct kind. It is, however, necessarily implied in that mysterious relation of man to God and that kingship over the inferior creatures of which the Psalm speaks, for this rests upon the incarnation. Man is what he is, because the Son of God has taken upon Him man’s nature. Man is very near to God, higher than the angels, because the Christ is both God and man. This is the profound truth on which the Messianic character of the Psalm depends. This truth is the key to its interpretation. But it does not follow that David saw this distinctly. He takes what must in any case be the religious view of creation, and of man’s relation to God on the one hand, and to the inferior animals on the other. David is manifestly speaking of the present. He sees the heavens witnessing for God; he sees man placed by God as ruler upon earth; he feels how high an honor has been put upon man; he marvels at God’s grace and condescension. Man is king, however his authority may be questioned or defied. In the New Testament, verses of this Psalm are twice applied to Christ (besides our Lord’s own quotation of v. 2). The incarnation explains the principle on which the quotations rest. In 1 Cor. 15: 27, Paul quotes, with a slight change, the words of v. 6, “Thou hast put all things under His feet,” as describing accurately the complete subjection of the universe to Christ. The words may be true of man, but they are in their highest sense only true of Christ as the great head of mankind, and of man only in Him. Similarly the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews (2: 6-9) argues that the words “Thou hast put all things under His feet” have not yet been literally fulfilled of man, and declares that their proper fulfilment is to be seen only in Jesus, whom God had made “a little lower than the angels,” and had “crowned with glory and honor.” He does not make use of the Psalm as a direct prediction, but he shows that man’s place in creation is his in Christ; his destiny as depicted in the Psalm is not, and cannot be, accomplished out of Christ. He is the true Lord of all. In Him man reigns; in Him man shall yet be restored to his rightful lordship, and shall really and completely be in the new world of redemption what now he is but very imperfectly—God’s vicegerent; ruling a subject creation in peace and harmony and love.

A thousand years later other shepherds were keeping watch over their flocks by night on the same hills of Bethlehem, while the same stars looked down upon them from heaven. But a brighter glory than the glory of the stars shone round about them; and they knew better than David himself the meaning of David’s words, “Lord, what is man, that Thou art mindful of him?” For to them it was said by the angel, “Unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” P.

Title. “Upon Gittith” probably refers either to the instrument or to the music with which it should be sung. It appears also in the titles to Psalms 81 and 84, which like this are joyous in character. C.

1. Our Lord. For the first time in the Book of Psalms the personal feeling is lost sight of in the national. Jehovah is not the God of David only, but of Israel; fitting prelude to a Psalm which forgets the individual in the contemplation of God’s glory in the universe. The thought which here appears is, in fact, the thought which is the key to the Book of Genesis, and indeed to the whole history of the Old Testament. The God who makes Himself known to Israel by His name Jehovah, as their Redeemer, is the God who created the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth. P.

Unable to express the glory of God, the Psalmist utters a note of exclamation, O Jehovah our Lord! For no heart can measure, no tongue can utter, the half of the greatness of Jehovah. The whole creation is full of His glory and radiant with the excellency of His power; His goodness and His wisdom are manifested on every hand. The countless myriads of terrestrial beings, from man the head, to the creeping worm at the foot, are all supported and nourished by the Divine bounty. The solid fabric of the universe leans upon His eternal arm. Universally is He present, and He worketh ever and everywhere. S.

Above the heavens. Not in the heavens, but even greater, beyond, and higher than they; “angels, principalities, and powers, being made subject unto Him.” As Paul says, He hath “ascended up far above all heavens.” And with this His glory above the heavens is connected, His sending forth His name upon earth through His Holy Spirit. And thus here: “Thy name excellent in all the world;” “Thy glory above the heavens.” I. Williams.

2. Children, not “babes;” they are more advanced in age than the sucklings; so that there is a kind of climax, “not children only, but sucklings.” As Hebrew mothers did not wean their children till they were three years old, this is no mere figure of speech. David speaks literally of children, and so our Lord Himself explains these words. P.—The simple heart of childhood loves to bear witness to the purity and glory of Jesus as it appeared when He entered Jerusalem in triumph. The same simple heart loves to bear like witness when it sees God in His great works in this beautiful and glorious world—which is the doctrine of our Psalm. Such testimony serves to silence the cavils of God’s enemies. The words quietly suggest that it is only from enemies to God—from those who are His enemies in their heart by reason of their wicked works—that any counter voice is heard, disparaging to the great God. No other voice ever needs to be put to silence save that of prejudiced enemies. C.

David implies that when the discontents and mutinies of men against the Divine Laws had disturbed his heart and lowered his hopes for humanity, he turned from men to babes and sucklings; and that he found in their trust and love, their content and peace, a stronghold from doubt and care. And he ranks this stronghold, the influence of children, with man’s lordship over nature—declares the one fact to be just as valuable and hopeful as the other. At first, indeed, there does seem a vast disproportion between David’s two grounds of hope for the human race. One ground is man’s sovereignty over the animate and inanimate creation; the other is the simplicity, the obedience, the trust and love of little children. But think what human life would be if we had no “babes and sucklings” to love, to work for, to play with, to reprove our grossness with their innocence, our worldliness with their unworldliness. Would it be worth having? Would not all the sweetness and spirituality of it be gone? Why, half our mirth, and more than half the motives which ennoble and purify our toils, half our piety and more than half our love come to us through children! What sports and recreations should we have, to call us away from our drudgery, but for them? What kind thoughts, what tenderness, what good resolves, what laughter, what tears, do we not owe to them! What lessons of heavenly wisdom and goodness do we learn while teaching them! How often do we suppress an evil word or look lest we should injure them! How often do we think of God that we may speak to them of Him! how often pray that we may teach them to pray, or because, more even than for ourselves, we desire God’s blessing on them! With what force do the simplest words of supplication from their lips strike upon our hearts! With what a pure and sacred gladness are we filled as we see them take delight in acts of kindness and self-sacrifice! It is the little children who save the world—save it from its worldliness, its selfishness, its hardness of heart. That God sent them in their innocence and simplicity to make us pure and simple—that He sends them generation after generation—is not that, after all, quite as weighty and hopeful a fact as man’s lordship over the beasts of the field, and the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea? Was not David right in regarding “babes and sucklings” as one of God’s greatest gifts to the race—a gift full of Divine promise and hope? Are they not a “stronghold” for our thoughts, our affections, our pious trust in God, when our hearts are fretted with cares and hardened with regrets? Cox.

3-5. David, familiar from boyhood with rural life, had learned to see God in nature, and thus to add to the beauty and glory of natural objects in themselves the thought of the Divine wisdom and goodness reflected in them all. His shepherd life in the open fields, and upon the slopes of the mountains, had acquainted him with the habits of birds and beasts, and had led him to observe the stars in his nightly watches. Those youthful experiences, matured by the meditations of riper years, find expression in this Psalm. In the nineteenth Psalm he celebrates the glory of the sun. But now, sitting at eventide upon the housetop, under the mild and lustrous Syrian sky, he is absorbed with the beauty and order of the moon and stars. These are God’s possession—"Thy heavens;" the work of His “finger,” manifesting beauty and skill; “ordained” with Divine wisdom and order, and established forever. The first thought awakened in him by the contemplation of this majesty and glory is of the littleness of man. What was David’s kingdom in comparison with a single star? what his royal splendor beside the brightness of the moon? Yet with this came the thought of the condescending goodness of God, who made man in His image, the representative of His glory and dominion. The word “angels,” Elohim, is commonly used for the name of God: “Thou madest man but little short of the Divine.” This high dignity and prerogative man disgraced and forfeited by the fall; but it was restored in Jesus, the Second Adam, “crowned with glory and honor.” While we praise God in His works, let us, above all, bless and honor Him in His Son, the head and glory of our redeemed humanity. J. P. T.

3,4. The Psalmist leaves the world, and lifts his imagination to that mighty expanse which spreads above it and around it. He wings his way through space, and wanders in thought over its immeasurable regions. Instead of a dark and unpeopled solitude, he sees it crowded with splendor, and filled with the energy of the Divine presence. Creation rises in its immensity before him, and the world, with all which it inherits, shrinks into littleness at a contemplation so vast and so overpowering. He wonders that he is not overlooked amid the grandeur and the variety which are on every side of him, and passing upward from the majesty of nature to the majesty of nature’s Architect, he exclaims, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that Thou shouldest deign to visit him?” Chalmers.

The first feeling is an overpowering sense of man’s insignificance in presence of the vastness and splendor, the mysterious depth, and the exceeding glory of the heavens, as seen at night. “The vault of the sky arched at a vast and unknown distance over our heads; the stars apparently infinite in number, each keeping its appointed place and course, and seeming to belong to a wide system of things which has no relation to the earth, while man is but one among many millions of the earth’s inhabitants; all this makes the contemplative spectator feel how exceedingly small a portion of the universe he is; how little he must be in the eyes of an Intelligence which can embrace the whole.” Add to this revelation of darkness the revelation of silence—the man is alone; the stir and noise of his own works, which in the light of day filled and absorbed him, are hushed and buried in darkness; his importance is gone; and “every person in every age and country will recognize as irresistibly natural the train of thought expressed by the Hebrew Psalmist.” P.

It can hardly be questioned that, of all scientific truths, those of astronomy are most calculated to impress upon the thoughtful mind the greatness and power of the Creator, the insignificance of man and earthly things, and at the same time to inculcate a profound reverence for the Divine something within ourselves—the “image of God,” in which we were created, and by virtue of which we human beings are, in a sense, greater than the whole material universe, as being able, in some degree, to master and comprehend it. It is well worth while, now and then, to spend a little time in quiet contemplation of the simple facts, to endeavor to grasp their magnitude and meaning, and mentally and spiritually to take the place and attitude which they indicate as reasonable—an attitude of humility and reverence toward God, and also of self-respect as His children and partakers of His nature.

In imagination we transport ourselves to the sun; we consider its bulk, huger than a million earths could fill, the ineffable glory of its light, and the unimaginable intensity and quality of its heat, which gives life and vigor to all the planetary systems, flowing out for centuries, seemingly, without diminution, and maintained in some mysterious way, which as yet we can only guess at; an unconsuming and apparently unreplenished fire, such as Moses gazed upon of old, when God appeared to him in the bush. We stagger under such conceptions of power and motion and immensity; but we have hardly made a beginning yet. We try to conceive of greater spaces and more tremendous forces. We consider the visible stars, so far away that though really suns, and many of them vaster than our own, they look like mere twinkling points; the nearest of them more than two hundred thousand times as distant as our sun, or nearly four years’ journey for a flash of light; and the remotest of them—no one knows—no one can tell how long light takes to bring its message from them, but unquestionably centuries, and perhaps millennia. Then we look into our telescopes, and the number of the stars increases many thousand-fold, clusters and nebulae come crowding into sight; and the range of distance and dimensions thus brought to human knowledge grows in proportion to the telescopic power as compared with that of the unaided eye. It is hopeless to image such immensities, and with weary helplessness we simply cease the struggle.

Our little world! The merest dust-mote dancing in the sunbeam is in bulk a vastly more important portion of the earth than the earth herself of even that portion of the stellar universe revealed by our present telescopes. And what of the beyond—that which is still unknown to us because of feeble vision or cosmic haze, or, perhaps, because separated from us by unfathomable spaces empty of the mysterious “ether” by which alone we are brought into sensible relations with distant orbs and worlds. So also when we measure human life and history in their time-relations against astronomical periods and cosmical affairs, we reach very similar proportions. A human life, even the longest, bears only some such ratio to the duration of a star as the bulk of the human body to that of the star. We have in astronomy to do with periods of time, some of them, it is true, short, even in comparison with earthly affairs, but mostly long, and some of them immeasurable and inconceivable. The scale of time is as vast as that of space; and when we set ourselves, our little lives and human interests, against the worlds and stars of heaven, we come to know the Psalmist’s meaning when he wrote, “Lord, what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visitest him?” C. A. Young.

3. The stars.** I cannot say that it is chiefly the contemplation of their infinitude, and the immeasurable space they occupy, that enraptures me in the stars. But the mere thought they are so far beyond and above everything terrestrial—the feeling that before them everything earthly so utterly vanishes to nothing—that the single man is so infinitely insignificant in the comparison with these worlds strewn over all space—that his destinies, his enjoyments, and sacrifices, to which he attaches such a minute importance—how all these fade like nothing before such immense objects; then, that the constellations bind together all the races of man and all the eras of the earth, that they have beheld all that has passed since the beginning of time and will see all that passes until its end; in thoughts like these I can always lose myself with a silent delight in the view of the starry firmament. It is in very truth a spectacle of the highest solemnity, when in the stillness of night, in a heaven quite clear, the stars, like a choir of worlds, arise and descend, while existence, as it were, falls asunder into two separate parts; the one, belonging to earth, grows dumb in the utter silence of night, and thereupon the other mounts upward in all its elevation, splendor, and majesty. When contemplated from this point of view, the starry heavens have truly a moral influence on the mind. Humboldt.

There can be no doubt that if the understanding of man (as well as his other faculties) were in the state of unimpaired simplicity, the spectacle of the universe would teach him piety, even if he had not learned it in some more direct way. First the exterior magnificence of the skies, so brightly symbolizing as it does the wealth and splendor of Almighty Regal Power, and then those severer calculations and rational conjectures, wherein the mind penetrates beyond the mere beauty and grandeur of the scene, and eagerly makes its path athwart the unmeasured spaces, and subjoins to what is visible, its own vigorous conceptions of magnitude, number, distance; from both these sources, a mind retaining its integrity would infer the great truth of the Divine Existence; and its power, and wisdom, and beneficence. I. T.

When man looks abroad on the universe and cries: “How can God be mindful of me,” is it not plain that his mind has taken the great thought of the universe, and the great thought of God, into itself? And what a mind that is which can thus soar away from itself; which can strive to fathom immensity and deplore its partial success! What a mind that is which mourns that its attainments fall so short of its desires! The weakness of man is one of the grandest proofs of his greatness, because it is a conscious weakness—a weakness from which, in thought and aspiration, he has already escaped. G. P. Fisher.

Science is the rival of imagination, and by teaching that these stars are suns has given a new interest to the anticipations of eternity, which can supply such inexhaustible materials of intelligence and wonder. Yet these stars seem to confess that there must be still sublimer regions for the reception of spirits, refined beyond the intercourse of all material lights; and even leave us to imagine that the whole material universe itself is only a place where beings are appointed to originate and to be educated through successive scenes, till, passing over its utmost bounds to the immensity beyond, they there at length find themselves in the immediate presence of the Divinity. J. F.—Great is the beauty of the earth, the brightness of the sun, the moon and the stars cheering the night. Yet is not my thirst stayed then; I admire these and praise these—I thirst for Him who made them. Augustine.

4. Thou art mindful of him.** Man is worse than weak, he is sinful. He broke the covenant of his God at the beginning; he has continued his rebellion from then till now. Yet God has not forgotten him. He was mindful of man when in the beginning He created the heavens. He was mindful of him when He arranged and organized them as they at present exist. He was mindful of him when He prepared this world as his place of abode, ordaining the sun to rule the day, and the moon to rule the night. He was mindful of man when He arranged the pleasing vicissitudes of the seasons; when He renewed His covenant with man, saying, “While earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease.” He is mindful of him when from year to year and season to season He makes the grass to grow for the cattle and herb for the service of man; when the eyes of all things wait on Him and do not wait in vain, for He openeth His hand liberally, and satisfeth the wants of every living thing. Given.—God is mindful of man at every moment of his existence—mindful of infancy, of boyhood, manhood in the toils of active life, of age, when all other mindfulness terminates, and when the ties of earth have been loosened one by one. He is mindful of us inasmuch as He has provided all things needful for our existence and happiness. And when, in the fulness of time, the Son of God was incarnate in furtherance of the purpose of the Father, surely God was mindful of His creatures then. Since the Son has ascended up to heaven, God has been mindful of man in the operations and influences of the Spirit. Punshon.

The Gospel alone discloses in God depths of compassion transcending even heights of power, and points us to a Being who crowns His own nature, as He crowns us, “with lovingkindness and tender mercy.” When we take this view, we see that man has been placed in this world in the midst of concentric circles of Divine attributes, which become charged with deeper interest as they press in closer toward him. The inmost circle of fatherly love and forgiving mercy remains in the approach of God to the individual soul. Such a circle there must be; and when we feel its clasp on our hearts, we learn, in the language of the poet, “that the world is made for each of us.” J. Ker.—Could we once break through this deadening influence of regularity, where the very love of God is hidden in its own constancy; could we see and feel that we are indeed utterly, and always, and afresh every instant, at our Maker’s disposal and dependent on His will—every fibre of the body kept in place by His care, and every breath inspired by Him, and the whole spirit subject and amenable to Him; could we then begin to consider His patience and recount His gifts—His patience with us from the cradle, and with the race from Eden—His gifts, as many as the organs, inlets, faculties, tissues, powers, of all our complex being multiplied by all the seconds of our life; could we then rise from this to some worthy conception of His own Infinite Life—boundless, fathomless, endless, yet all intensest life—the majesty, the might, the dominion—the purity, the pity, the wisdom, the love;—God forbearing with all this impious folly, God enduring all this abhorrent selfishness, God upholding all these unprofitable and unthankful creatures, if so be that possibly something may yet be recovered of their self-destruction, and the well-beloved Son dying for that;—and could we at last put in contrast with Him our lives, so mean, so weak, so bad—then should we not be ready to exclaim, with something more than a mere recitation of the memory, “Lord! what is man that Thou art mindful of him? God be merciful to me a sinner!” F. D. H.

5. Lower than God.** There is obviously a reference in v. 6 to Gen. 1: 26, and therefore here, doubtless, an allusion to the creation of man in the image of God. P.—The Psalmist had intimated the littleness of man, as we have seen, but here he dwells on the greatness of man. He is made in the image of God, and with dominion over the creatures of God. Given.—Man is a feeble reed, trembling in the midst of creation; but then he is endowed with thought. It does not need the universe to arm for his destruction. A breath of wind, a drop of water will suffice to kill him. But, though the universe were to fall on man and crush him, he would be greater in his death than the universe in its victory; for he would be conscious of his defeat, and it would not be conscious of its triumph. Pascal.

Soul, with its will, feeling, intelligence, and capacities for happiness and virtue, is universally felt by thinking men to be the highest as well as the most mysterious sort of known being. Not the grandest masses of matter, such as mountains, oceans, stars—not the most subtle and forceful material elements, such, for example, as produce the phenomena of light, electricity, and gravitation—not any conceivable combination of such elements can compare in wonderfulness and nobleness with the soul of a Newton. Burr.

And what shall we say of this mind of Man?—its power of reasoning, which grasps the facts of the external world and the truths of the inner world of consciousness, and weaves them into consecutive chains of ideas, and builds up fabrics of thought that will stand though the physical universe shall fall?—this Mind that, from a few arbitrary characters and a few articulate sounds, constructs a language that expresses thought, that stirs emotion, that kindles passions or allays them—language that makes the printed page glow with the fire and beauty of poetry, that makes the air pulsate with the throbs of eloquence?—this Mind that from a few arbitrary figures, that you may count upon your fingers, constructs the abstract science of mathematics, by which it weighs the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance; by which it measures the velocity of light and the distances and magnitudes of the stars? This Mind of Man, with its powers of Reason, Imagination, Memory, Will—with its hopes and fears, its joys and loves—this Mind that knows itself, and that dominates all matter and all life without itself—can it be less than the immediate offspring of God? J. P. T.

Man was not made for the world, but the world for man; all its laws were mute predictions of what he would be; all nature was preconfigured to him, and looked forward to his coming; the earth also was designed to be a temple for man’s worship, where he might find himself surrounded by the symbols of the God-head—where every object on which his eye may rest is either an “altar of memorial,” or an offering to be laid on it. “Even the earth itself, as it goes speeding through space, what should it be but an altar at which he should be perpetually ministering as the high-priest of nature?” J. Harris.—Man is the summit and pinnacle of creation, the crown of the completed whole, the priest in the finished temple of God, whence without him no note of worship worthy of God should ascend from rational and moral beings. Van O.

6-8. A crown is mentioned in v. 5, and a crown imports a king, and a king implies a kingdom; and so in vs. 6-8 we are informed of the extent of man’s dominion, and of the various subjects of his kingly rule. Thus man was set up as God’s viceroy on earth. He was invested with full kingly dominion under Divine suzerainty. Given.—All Thy creation hath not more wonder in it than one of us: other creatures Thou madest by a simple command; man, not without a Divine consultation; others at once; man Thou didst form, then inspire; others in several shapes, like to none but themselves; man, after Thine own image; others with qualities fit for service; man, for dominion. Man had his name from Thee; they had their names from man. How should we be consecrated to Thee above all others, since Thou hast bestowed more cost on us than other! Bishop H.

What, then, is the right effect upon our hearts of this discovery of God’s limitless working, His immeasurable condescension? It is to do away with our fear; it is to tell us that there is nothing incredible or preposterous in the thought that He visits us, and expends even upon us all the riches of His care and love. The heavens declare His glory, and proclaim it to be infinite. Why may not the Gospel be a similar declaration of His highest attribute, a witness borne to the universe that His mercy is infinite also? And if man is a being so precious, so unique in his origin and destiny, if God has bestowed such manner of love upon him as Christ bids us believe, then what an appeal is made to him to live up to his unspeakable dignity! “It is the highest effort of his culture,” says Bernard, “when a man comes to care for himself for the sake of his God;” when, that is, his sovereign desire is to be worthier of the rank with which God has invested him and of the love which God has lavished upon him. R. Duckworth.

Put all things under his feet. Man is a king. God has put a crown upon his head, and not only so, but has given him a territory and subjects. “All things under his feet,” with evident reference to the “let them have dominion,” of Gen. 1: 23. What David means by “all things” is then explained—beasts, birds, and fishes, which are in the same manner enumerated in Gen. 1. Paul, however, extends the meaning of the “all things” far beyond this. Jesus, as the true Lord of all, shall have a universal dominion. P.—The Psalmist extends his statement to the human race. The apostle does the same, but he looks up to Jesus, in whom alone the grand ideal of humanity is realized, and sees Him already crowned with glory and honor; and then he directs his gaze onward and forward anticipatively to the time when this text shall be fully accomplished, and all things completely subject to redeemed humanity and its glorified Head. G.ven.—The central point of the New Testament consciousness is indeed Jesus, the Restorer of what is lost. Redeemed humanity in the person of Jesus is already enthroned at God’s right hand. Everything is as absolutely subjected to Him as it is stated to be in the Psalm; not only the animal world, not only the earth, but the universe, with all the forces that are working in it, those that are hostile to God as well as those that are in His service, yea, even the power of death. D.

The highest fulfilment of these words can be found nowhere short of Him who loved to call Himself the “Son of man.” “Thou hast put all things under His feet.” This is what only God has either the right or the power to do. It is not merely supreme power that is here spoken of; it is supreme authority, as when our Lord said to His disciples, “All power is given to Me.” In the days of His flesh He constantly exercised four kinds of authority: the authority to forgive sin, the authority to declare truth, the authority to rule nature, and the authority over human hearts and consciences. The claim of universal and absolute obedience and these four are in close, inseparable moral unity. “All things”—small things as well as great. The hairs of your head are all numbered; your name is not unknown to Him. The chief lesson in these words is for every Christian a lesson of restful calm, peaceful, untroubled faith, but faith surely tempered with reverence. All things are naked and open to Him with whom we have to do. E. R. Conder.

9. The Psalm closes with the same expression of loving admiration with which it opened, but with added emphasis after the singer has told the tale of God’s goodness to man; just as the repetition of a passage in music falls more sensibly on the ear, and touches the heart with quicker emotions, than the same passage when it first occurs. P.—He has demonstrated the assertion that the name of Jehovah, whose glory the heavens reflect, is also glorious on earth. And so he can conclude by repeating the thought with which he began, only now in a fuller sense, and weave his Psalm as it were into a wreath. D.—More fit words no human mind has conceived or pen recorded. And if we may include in the scope of this Psalm not the material world only, but the moral also—not only man as a race with no Christ in it, but the race with an incarnate Saviour as part and even the chief part of it, how will the manifestations of God in all the earth—in all its moral history, in all the destiny of its once living men, saints and sinners, become the admiration, the wonder, the praise of the intelligent universe forever! C.

9. Our Lord.** If we turn to the sacred record of God’s creation of the world, we cannot overlook or mistake the two great religious truths which stand side by side on its page, the twofold revelation of one and the same God as the Creator of the material universe and as the personal Providence that watches over the life and actions of men. The whole scheme of Holy Scripture from the beginning to the end is one continuous record of God’s love and care for man in creation, government, redemption; and as such it is a revelation, not for this or that age alone, but for every generation of mankind, as our best and truest safeguard against an error into which human thought in every age is very prone to fall. Modern sophistry is ready to tell us that one law of cause and effect reigns supreme over mind as well as matter, that the actions of man, like the other phenomena of the universe, are but links in a chain of rigid and necessary consequences. Against this perversion Scripture furnishes a standing protest, and if read aright, a safeguard. God is revealed to man as He is revealed to no other of His visible creatures, not as God merely, but as our God, the personal God of His personal creatures. H. L. Mansel.

All the earth. We may boldly affirm that earth is not too small a globe to be thought worthy of giving birth to the heirs of immortality; nor is man too diminutive a being to hold converse with his Creator, or to be amenable to the Divine government. The very multiplicity of worlds, instead of favoring such a conclusion, refutes it by showing that the Creator prefers, as the field of His cares and beneficence, limited and separate portions of matter rather than immense masses. It is manifest that the omnipotent wisdom and power loves to divide itself upon the individuality of its works. To exist at all as a member of so vast an assemblage of beings, and to occupy a footing in the universe such as it is, involves incalculable probabilities of future good or ill. I. T.

There have been those who have stood under the starry heavens, and in contrasting the immensity of the universe as revealed by modern science with the earth, as a mere speck, and with man, in his brief day upon it, have felt that the great doctrines of the incarnation, and of redemption by the Son of God, could not be true. The impression is natural, and at times overwhelming, and yet it is but an impression. Seen in its true light, the very insignificance of the earth and the low rank of man are the indispensable condition for the fullest display of the Divine attributes, and so, for that is the same thing, of the Divine glory. Nor, in the light of modern science, is the obscurity of this earth, and the apparent insignificance of what takes place upon it, any bar to its fullest publicity in the remotest world in space, if so be that intelligent beings dwell there. When science says, as it does, that the action of gravitation is instantaneous throughout space, it shuts the mouth of incredulity when we assert a possible sympathy and unity of a higher kind in the intelligent universe of God. Knowing, then, that God could not be better than He is; that the love revealed in Christ could not be greater than it is; that the heaven provided for those who love God could not be more blessed than it is; finding in the Scriptures as much of optimism as we had a right to expect; finding, also, in them the revelation of a future which gives us a possible key to the fearful perplexities of the present state, we welcome each gleam of light, and wait with patience and hope the coming of that perfect day of “the restitution of all things of which God has spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began.” In the coming of such a day, thus revealed, we find that solution of the mystery of the present state for which our whole nature cries out. M. H.

Like its own Bethlehem Ephratah, little among thousands of worlds, our earth already stands alone in the universe, and will stand forth in the annals of eternity, illustrious for its fact without a parallel. It is the world on which the mystery of redemption was transacted; it is the world into which Christ came. And though lower than the angels, ours is the race which Jehovah has crowned with one peerless glory, one unequalled honor. It is the race which God has visited. Ours is the flesh which Incarnate Deity wore, and ours is the race for whose sinners the Son of God poured forth a ransom in His blood. This is the event which over our small planet sheds a solemn interest, and draws toward it the wondering gaze of other worlds. Hamilton.

If we believe in a God who created the world and made man in it, it is surely reasonable to believe also that He will guide His work to its proper end, and that the highest part of man’s nature will not be left to neglect. A dignified idea of either God or man will not incline us to believe that things are abandoned to chance-hazard here. If we see God exerting His power and wisdom in multiplying and adorning forms of dead matter—if we behold Him piling them in heaven-soaring mountains, brightening them into resplendent suns, and scattering them through space in infinitely varied combinations—it is not too much to expect that He will exert these same attributes in retrieving from loss and in raising to fresh spiritual power that immortal mind which is the true image of Himself—which alone of all His works can comprehend Him, and can return the expressions of His intelligence and love.

So far from what God has done for the world of matter, in the fields of astronomy, being any reason for discrediting what the Gospel declares He has done for the world of mind in man, it should be a reason for believing it. If He has lavished so much of pains and skill upon a universe of death, what may we not anticipate for one of life? If He has expended so much upon the mere pedestal and platform of being, what upon the thinking immortal spirit, on whose account alone the basement and outer furniture of the world are there? Belief in the Gospel will become an easier thing to us in proportion as we realize the greatness of the soul, and breathe the air of eternity. Ker.

If the contemplation of the universe presses upon us the question, What is man? and gives no answer to the question in which we can without difficulty acquiesce, no answer which reconciles the conflicting evidence of his greatness and his insignificance, or which gives an intelligible theory of the distinction between his relation to God and that of other creatures, then we find in the birth of Christ the very answer we need. The Word, who was with God and was God, became flesh: the Son of God became the Son of man. Then men are precious in the eyes of God: the race of man is glorified in the manhood of Christ; and each individual man may rejoice when he remembers that he is clothed in flesh, which God Himself condescended to assume. Bishop H. Goodwin.—It is the glory of the world, that He who formed it dwelt on it; of the air, that He breathed in it; of the sun, that it shone on Him; of the ground, that it bare Him; of the sea, that He walked on it; of the elements, that they nourished Him; of the waters, that they refreshed Him; of us men, that He lived and died among us; yea, that He lived and died for us; that He assumed our flesh and blood, and carried it to the highest heavens, where it shines as the eternal ornament and wonder of the creation of God. Christ on the cross is the measure of man’s worth in the eyes of God, and of man’s place in the creation; Christ on the throne is the prophecy of man’s dignity, and of his most sure dominion. When bordering on despair at the sight of so much going wrong, so much ignorance, sorrow, and vice, so many darkened understandings, and broken hearts, such wide tracts of savagery and godlessness, I can look up to Jesus, and can see far, far away—the furthest thing on the horizon—like some nebula, faint, it is true, and low down, but flickering with true starry light—the wondrous vision of many souls brought into glory, even a world redeemed. When conscious of personal imperfection and much sin, no thought will bring peace nor kindle hope but this, that Christ has died to bring me to God, and lives to bring me to glory. Then behold Jesus entered within the veil for us,

Here, from far beneath, look up through the heavens to Him who is “made higher than” them all. And hereafter, from the supreme height and pinnacle of the throne of Christ, we shall look down on sun, moon, and stars that once shone so far above us; and, conscious that His grace has raised us up on high, and put all things under our feet, shall exclaim with yet deeper thankfulness and more reverent wonder, “What is man, that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that Thou visitest him?” A. M.

The estimate we make of man’s place in God’s universe depends upon the criterion by which we judge. There is a sense in which, viewed as a physical force in the world of matter, man is nothing. The physical man compared with the stupendous forces of nature, or viewed from the standpoint of duration, or set in opposition to the omnipotence of God, is insignificance itself. If we contemplate man simply as a being of intelligence, the scale begins to turn. The fact of a thinking mind in man puts him above sun, moon, and stars. Mind is above matter, intelligence above force. But the importance of man in the universe is greatly heightened when we advance from the mental to the moral. “Two objects,” said Kant, “fill my soul with ever-increasing admiration and respect—above us the starry heavens, within us the moral law.” Man is a member of the kingdom of spirits. He is capable of virtue and of sin. He is the offspring of God, and in this lies his greatness. He is a free being, capable of self-improvement and self-destruction. He can contend with his Maker. “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” finds its answer here—“Thou hast made him to lack but little of divinity. Thou hast clothed him with glory and honor.” “Why visit him?” The answer is here—man is an immortal being. Man as a sinner is of special importance. Viewed simply as a sinner, he looms up in the Divine government above the stars. He has lifted up the hand of rebellion against God. Angels veil their faces and love and adore God. This man lifts his guilty hand and defies Him. A sufferer is a being of importance in God’s universe. Man is a sufferer, and is worthy of God’s thought and visitation. However feeble, as compared with the stupendous forces of nature, however obscure in rank; yet, if he suffers, and is liable to suffer forever, he becomes at once an object of the highest importance in the Divine government. Such is man—a great sufferer here, and liable to eternal pain hereafter. Hence the God of mercy is “mindful

of him,” and sets His heart upon him, and visits him every day. The crowning proof of man’s greatness and worth in the Divine government must be taken from God’s own estimate; and that is found in the sacrifice that God has made to restore man to the high place from which he has fallen. It is in view of the Incarnation and of the Cross that we see man “crowned with glory and honor.” In the Bible we have an account of the Creation and an account of Redemption. The story of Creation gives us an impression of the ease with which it was done. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” How different the account of Redemption! The moon and the stars cost nothing—the redemption of the soul cost God’s Only Begotten Son.