298 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1870- 



we should aim at, if we take them as an inspired expression 

 of the faith and hopes which we ourselves must seek to 

 realise if, that is, we read the Psalms in the light of our 

 own Christian life and strive, God helping us, to realise 

 more and more of the Spirit of the Psalms, in this way 

 without any scientific preparation, we may read the 

 Psalter aright and profitably, if only we are by grace 

 partakers of the same Spirit as wrought in the Psalmists. 

 And whatever may be said of the incompleteness of the 

 religious life of the men of the Old Covenant, and of a 

 supposed incompatibility between the more enlightened 

 Christian consciousness and some veins of thought that 

 run in the Psalms, I conceive it has yet to be proved that 

 any simple Christian ever suffered in his spiritual life by 

 unreservedly drinking in the streams of spiritual experience 

 that flow through these hymns. But while I confess that 

 to me it seems an idea too absurd to need refutation that 

 the Psalms require, as so many seem to think, a sort of 

 remodelling, Christianising, even to the mind of some 

 an expurgation before they can be safely taken into the 

 mouths of simple Christians while such an idea seems to 

 me to savour of Romanism, and to be nothing less than a 

 denial of the great Protestant principle that every part of 

 Scripture is precious to the meanest Christian who reads 

 with the help of God s Spirit while this is so, it must be 

 held that to understand the Psalter fully, to get from it all, 

 or nearly all, its proper richness of meaning, we must arm 

 ourselves with all the apparatus of a scientific criticism, 

 and prepare, as I have already said, to face and answer 

 not a few difficult questions both historical and theological. 

 And in particular there is no book to which more fully 

 than to the Psalter the great truth applies, that while 

 every one who is taught of the Spirit is able to learn from 

 the Bible, not every one is fit to teach from it no, not 

 every one even who has, what nowadays is often thought 

 to be sufficient, a familiarity with Bible language and a 

 certain readiness of speech. In a word, while no man is 



