302 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1870- 



position to the men of the Old Covenant, the preacher 

 does his part to awake such a sympathy with the spiritual 

 meaning of his text as is the really edifying thing in the 

 reading and preaching of the Word. He helps his hearers 

 to feel God s message not merely as a general message 

 ,to man, but as a very special message addressing itself 

 directly to distinct needs and capacities in the first hearers 

 which are still needs and capacities of ours. Every Word 

 of God is plain, direct, and powerful in its true historical 

 setting. It is the restoration of this historical setting 

 which is the real task that lies at the basis of interpretation, 

 and therefore also of practical application. 



Now the Psalms do not so much give us the Word of 

 God to man in its direct form, as the true answer of faith 

 in which, of course, the promise on which faith rests is 

 taken up, and so expressed from the side of the believer. 

 But here also the truth comes in, that these models of the 

 believer s true attitude to God s Word will not work upon 

 us to the purifying and strengthening of our Christian life, 

 except in proportion as we add to the prime requisite of 

 the beginnings at least of grace in our own soul, an 

 appreciation of those points in which the experiences that 

 called forth these expressions of Old Testament faith are 

 our experiences also. No doubt this requisite is some 

 times attained through the heart alone without careful 

 study or analysis. The uneducated believer will learn 

 to understand the Psalms in this way He takes up his 

 Psalter under the influence of a particular phase of 

 devotional feeling. He finds that feeling expressed and 

 developed in a much fuller way in some Psalm, and so at 

 one and the same time his own spiritual life is nourished 

 and strengthened, and the Psalm becomes for ever clear 

 to him in such a way that it may afterwards serve to evoke 

 the feeling which at first it had only strengthened. But 

 this method can never apply to public teaching from the 

 Psalms. The preacher must so handle the Psalm as to 

 make it speak even to those who are not specially pre- 



