432 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1874- 



to the personal emotion of the singer can receive only a 

 subjective justification. The art of the Hebrew is true 

 art to those who can rise to the level of his passion. But 

 religious conviction is supreme where it exists at all. And 

 the aesthetic necessity that all things in heaven and earth 

 shall bend to the Divine purpose of salvation revealed to 

 the poet s faith, is also the ethical necessity on which the 

 whole religious life depends. That the things which are 

 impossible with men are possible with God is the first 

 axiom of a religion that shall rise with triumphant assur 

 ance over all the powers of evil and all the woes of life. 

 To assert with unwavering confidence the victory of 

 spiritual certainties over all empirical contradiction, to 

 vanquish earthly fears in the assurance of transcendental 

 fellowship with God, to lay down for all ages the pattern 

 of a faith which endures as seeing Him who is invisible 

 such is the great work for which the poetic genius of the 

 Hebrews was consecrated by the providence and inspira 

 tion of the Most High. How nobly this work was served 

 by that Hebrew intensity which carries one supreme 

 conviction with irresistible poetic fire through all things 

 in heaven or earth that rise up against it, may be read 

 alike in the personal utterances of the Psalter and in the 

 Messianic hopes of the prophets. Thus it was that the 

 Psalmist, surrounded on all sides by the contradiction of 

 sinners, bowed with sickness and grief, oppressed by the 

 consciousness of guilt, was yet able so to cling to the 

 unfailing certainty of his living fellowship with a redeem 

 ing God, that danger, and sickness, and sin itself were left 

 behind, and he pressed forward beyond the fear of death 

 to the assurance of immortality at God s right hand. 

 Thus it was that the prophets gazing on the certainties of 

 Jehovah s righteousness and grace saw the creation, now 

 stained with sin and blasted by the strokes of Divine 

 indignation, transformed in new perfection and holy 

 loveliness, and instinct in all its parts with a sweet intellig 

 ence, so that from voice to voice of things now deemed 



