296 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1870- 



There are no human feelings so catholic and unchanging 

 in their character as those of true and deep personal 

 religion developed, as the religion of the Psalms was, in 

 contact with and under the guidance of God s special 

 Revelation to His own. The Psalter, as was to be expected 

 from its character as a Theocratic poetry a poetry of 

 God s Kingdom and Church is quite free from all that 

 one-sided individualism and fanaticism by which many 

 later hymns, however deeply they may express a real 

 personal conviction, are rendered unfit to express the 

 experience of the Church and of God s people at all times. 

 The Psalms are in the fullest sense hymns of the Old 

 Testament Church, sung that is by men whose sense of 

 personal relation to God was always based on and rooted 

 in their sense of God s redeeming relation to Israel. No 

 doubt there must have arisen in Israel hymns of another 

 kind, reflecting a disturbed, one-sided, impure religious 

 consciousness in a word, uninspired. That such poems 

 have found no place in the Old Testament Canon is 

 doubtless the fruit of a similar providence to that which 

 guided the New Testament Church to the rejection of 

 the Apocryphal Gospels. In neither case must the 

 separation between Canonical and Uncanonical be ascribed 

 to a judicious exercise of historical criticism as if 

 books and psalms were rejected which could not prove 

 themselves to be the work of men recognised as inspired. 

 Such considerations had at most a secondary part to play 

 in the selection, which was guided rather by the fact that 

 the same Spirit of God which breathes in the sacred 

 writings is the Spirit that providentially rules the Church 

 and that lives in every believer. The forming of the 

 Canon was a gradual thing, and before the collection of 

 Psalms was closed every one of them would have been 

 tested by its fitness to express the prayers and praises of 

 God s people for many years, or even for many generations. 

 And this testing process was rendered still more sifting 

 by two things, (i) The whole or the greater part of the 



