THE BOOK OF PSALMS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVII, Issue 8354, 6 September 1890, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE BOOK OF PSALMS.

The Book of Psalms form* the subject of Mr. Gladstone's article in the -inly number of Good Words. The first paragraph of the first section (which treats their historic place in the devotion of all ages) is as follows John Bright has told me that he would be content, to stake upon the Book (if Psalms, as it stands, the great question whether there is or is not a Divine revelation. It \> as not to him conceivable how a work so widely severed from all the known productions of antiquity, and standing upon a level so much higher, could bo accounted for except by a special and extraordinary aid calculated to produce special and extraordinary results ; for it. is reasonable, nay, needful, to presume a due correspondence between the cause and the ellect. Nor does this opinion appear to be unreasonable. If Bright did not possess the special qualifications of the scholar or the critic, he was, 1 conceive, a very capable judge of the moral and religious elements in any case that had been brought before him by his personal experience." The second section deals with the antiquity of the Book of Psalms. "On this point of antiquity it is more than enough if a large portion of the Psalms are ascribablo to King David. I venture, however, to ofTer two suggestions : First, the Psalms come to ua through a channel supplied by the kingdom of Judah, not the kingdom of Israel. If they had been largely composed after the severance of the ten tribes from the two, would they not have presented some more definite indication of that severance ? The name of Israel is the name undor which in the Psalms the chosen people are described. \Vo have this name repeated twentysix times. The name of Judah was likely, it may bo supposed, after the schism, to become the prevailing and distinctive name, still more so after the captivity and the dispersion of the ten tribes, and as long as their remnants continued to maintain any serious and systematic rivalry with the Jews. Yet throughout the Psalter wo never find the name of Judah mentioned in this paramount sense. Could this have been so if tho Psalms had mainly been composed when Judah was the only acknowledged name for tho elect people, and Israel was a stranger, often an enemy, always tho symbol of a rival and proscribed worship ?"