i8 74 ] CRITICAL STUDY OF THE PSALTER 301 



spiritual life on both its sides. Now sympathy involves, 

 firstly, community of spirit. Where that is wanting, no 

 preaching can edify. The preacher, as we have already 

 said, can hope to build up his hearers only in so far as he 

 has a right to assume the presence of God s Spirit in the 

 visible Church, i.e. wherever the Word and Sacraments 

 are, there God s Spirit blesses the means. But there is 

 another thing necessary to sympathy, viz. recognised 

 similarity of position. Why, for example, does the 

 reading of the Decalogue often fail to move us, even 

 though there be in our hearts the germs of a true love to 

 God s Law ? It is because we come to the Decalogue 

 without having passed through the Red Sea and marched 

 through the Wilderness ; because we are not standing 

 beneath Mt. Sinai while the thunder rolls above us and the 

 lightnings flash in our eyes. And so the minister who 

 would preach effectively from the Decalogue must seek 

 so to set before his hearers the essential oneness of what we 

 have experienced of God s mercy, with that experience 

 which prepared the Israelites for Sinai. He must do this, 

 not in the fashion of the Jesuit preachers by simply 

 catching the outward aspects of the scene and impressing 

 these on the imaginations of his hearers, but by going 

 deeper into the heart of the matter, and bringing out by 

 careful critical and theological study the real oneness 

 of the spiritual meaning of the law then and now. He 

 must (i) reconstruct for himself by painstaking historical 

 study the position of the Israelites, and then (2) by theo 

 logical knowledge and by the help of his own Christian 

 experience and insight, he must lay hold of and draw out 

 of the historical situation the true and unchangeable 

 spiritual meaning which we are still called upon to enter 

 into, showing -how the Israelites, though they had come 

 through external manifestations of God s purpose towards 

 them more startling than we have known, yet at bottom 

 stood in no other spiritual relation to the law than we do. 

 Thus opening up to his hearers their essential similarity in 



