evangelist. And to many of us his words are dear because we love the mountains almost more than we love the sea.

Two voices are there; one is of the sea,

One of the mountains-each a mighty voice,

says the poet of the mountains. And those who have been privileged to see mountains not inferior to Israel's Hermon and Lebanon will feel that the psalmist's words have a deeper meaning for them than for others, and that the truth of God's unchangeableness and eternity has grown more realizable since they have known intimately the vast but not changeless bulwarks of God's building. The Jews, at any rate, who feared the sea, loved the mountains. The captive prophet Ezekiel constantly refers to the mountains of Israel which he is to see no more; and when a symbol is wanted by a psalmist for God's righteous fidelity to His covenant-promises, it is the "mountains of God" which are selected.1 The symbol is indeed not perfect. As that great lover of nature who wrote the poem of Job says

The mountain falling fadeth away,

And the rock is removed out of its place.

It may be but a gradual alteration, but even the mountains are not exempt from the law of decay. But God not only was before the mountains were, but shall be when the mountains have ceased to be, for "Thou (O Jehovah) art God" from the age before time was, to the age when time. shall be no more-" from everlasting to everlasting." Far otherwise is it with the race of man. Those who can bring themselves to offer worship to Humanity have a poor substitute indeed for the "Rock of Ages." Humanity, apart from God, is, according to the inspired writers, but a succession of generations, and each generation is a mass of struggling atoms (a prophet compares them to grasshoppers), which, but for a supernatural helper, would be overpowered by the forces of nature. To all appearance, death is the end of everything: "Thou turnest man to dust, and sayest, Return, ye children of men"; i.e., probably, generation succeeds generation, and there is no natural, indefeasible right to immortality. A poor comfort, perhaps you will say, for the depressed Jewish believers in post-Exilic times. But the truth is that the psalmist only depresses man in order to exalt God, the God who is a refuge to successive generations. Only if we realize what we should be without God, can we with a full heart offer thanksgivings for what we are with God.

As yet we have only been told that we (that is, of course, not Israel alone, for in no period and in no country has God been without His faithful servants) have, in all ages, had a sure refuge in God. As yet, there is no definite suggestion as to the nature of the prospect which cheers the believer. We need not be surprised at this. All theology is inferential, except that part of it which has to do with the nature of God. To busy ourselves with the circumference of religious truth is worse than useless until

we have pitched our tent in truth's bright and glorious centre. One verse more is devoted by the psalmist to theology proper :

For a thousand years in Thy sight

Are but as yesterday when it is past,

And as a watch in the night..

This is the rendering of the Authorised Version, and it is a fine one. It is implied in a verse of the old hymn, "Jerusalem, my happy home," a verse which is generally omitted in the hymn-books

But there they live in such delight,

Such pleasure and such play,

As that to them a thousand years

Doth seem as yesterday.

But a still finer as well as more accurate rendering is that in the margin of the Revised Version

new.

For a thousand years in Thy sight

Are but as yesterday when it passeth.

Imagine yourselves standing on a bridge between the old day and the What a mere “span long" seems the old day as it vanishes from our gaze; what an ample space stretches before us in what we can hardly yet call "to-day!" The second figure forms a climax. A "watch in the night" has no duration at all to the unconscious sleeper; so time is neither short nor long to the First Cause of everything that is.

So ends the first part of the psalm. The closing verses are also fine, but, as we shall see, more by what they suggest than by what they express. The central portion of the psalm, if we examine it closely, is of mixed value. There is, as the heart of every Christian tells him, a Bible within the Bible, and it would be unreasonable to deny that within the same psalm there may be very different degrees of inspiration. It is to the central and less inspired, because less inspiring, part that we have now come.

The next two verses run thus:

5. Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they pass into sleep (i.e., the sleep of death); In the morning they are as grass which sprouteth again;

6. In the morning it flourisheth, and sprouteth again,

In the evening it is cut down, and withereth.

These are the eternal commonplaces of moralists. When the moralist is in earnest, he impresses us; when he is also a great poet, the fountain of our tears overflows. It is not merely the association of the first verse with closed chapters in our own lives which makes the 14th chapter of Job difficult to read composedly. It has the highest poetical merits in itself, and gives, probably, the most impassioned treatment of its theme which ancient literature supplies. But our psalmist's wings are feeble; he cannot rise very high. Perhaps he remembers that passage in Job, and will not even seem to compete with it. At any rate, the 2nd and the 19th verses of Job xiv. contain very similar images more poetically expressed; and the. second figure is also given in another book, which often reminds us of Jobthe Book of the Second Isaiah:

And I said, What shall I cry?

The voice said, Cry. All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. . . . The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

Hitherto, the psalmist has spoken in the name of the human race, for even the first verse applies to non-Jewish as well as Jewish believers. But now he pleads with God for his own people (vers. 7-9):—

For we are consumed by thine anger,

And by thy wrath are we vexed.

Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee,
Our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.
For all our days have vanished in thy displeasure,
We have brought our years to an end like a sigh.

Such is the language of other psalmists, too. When describing the calamities of their people, they use the figures of sickness and death :Jehovah, rebuke me not in thine anger,

Neither chasten thou me in thy wrath.

Have pity upon me, Jehovah, for I am languishing;

Heal me, Jehovah, for my bones are vexed.2

He hath brought down my strength in the way;

He hath shortened my days.3

I am afflicted, and at the last breath from my youth up;

I suffer thy terrors; I am distracted. 4

And there is another peculiarity common to the writer of Psalm xc. with other psalmists. In his tenderness of conscience, he accounts for the national calamities by assuming the existence of great national sins, and even of sins which no human penetration can discern. Let me quote one more passage, because both this and the former peculiarity are combined in it. The psalmist uses the figure of a dangerous sickeness for the national calamity, and traces it to an unconfessed sin. The speaker is most probably personified Israel, or rather (since there is no mere rhetorical figure in the case), it is the Church-nation regarded as a living organism, like that mystic eagle in Dante's Paradise, composed of myriads of ruby-souls, which, in speaking for itself, spoke for all.

When I kept silence, my bones wasted away

Through my roaring all the day long.

For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me;

My moisture was turned as in the drought of summer.
My sin I made known unto thee,

And mine iniquity I covered not;

I said, I will confess my transgressions unto Jehovah ;
And thou tookest away the guilt of my sin. "

Now, can we not see what Psalm xc. 7-9 means? Calamity presses heavily upon the people of Israel. The happy past of the national life is over; it has passed as quickly as a sigh. What remains is but the dregs of life, the "sere and yellow leaf," mown grass which will soon have withered away. And this is because, with all its numberless observances, Israel has not obtained 3 Ps. cii. 24.

1 Isa. xl. 6-8.

2 Ps. vi. 1, 2.

assurance of the forgiveness of its sins. God has not "cast their sins behind his back" for ever, but gazes upon them (as Israel believes) in the bright shining of His countenance.

To us the mystery of suffering still remains, but it has been softened by the light which streams from Calvary. We no longer think that misfortunes, whether of the people or of the individual, are necessarily the punishment of sin. We know that, not only of the Christ, but of each of His faithful followers, it is true that, for a wise purpose, "it pleased Jehovah to bruise him," or, as a New Testament writer says, "to make him perfect through suffering." No cross, no crown, is the teaching of Christianity. No doubt, sin is mixed up with our best endeavours-that is the ineffaceable distinction between the Christ and His followers,-but the psalmist's notion of "secret sins" which God searches out for punishment seems inconsistent with full Christian truth. The Spirit of holiness and of truth which the Christ promised, not only "convicts the world," but convinces believers of sin, and stirs the Christian up to follow more closely in his leader's footsteps. But though we can never cease to cry, "O Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us,' we can have no fear of God's anger. That were to doubt the efficacy of Christ's sacrifice, and to make the Heavenly Father subject to "variableness."5 In a fuller sense than the devout psalmist we can say, "Blessed are all they that take refuge in Him." But shall this admitted imperfection of the psalmist's theology only serve to intensify gratitude for our own privileges? No. That were to miss the object of the preservation of these ancient records. God wills that our religion should be historical-that our faith should be based, not on an infallible book, but on the records of a progressive revelation interpreted to us anew by the Spirit of God co-operating with our spirit. God wills that we should practise ourselves in separating the temporary from the permanent elements in His revelations, but not that we should undervalue the holy men of old because of the limitations of this vision. A psalm or a prophecy is a revelation not only of more or less spiritual truth, but also of the history of a soul. We know more of the author of the 90th Psalm than we do of many of the most celebrated heroes of the Bible, just as we know more of Shakespeare through his sonnets than we do through all the meritorious labours of his biographers. For the 90th Psalm, like the sonnets of Shakespeare, are an unintentional, and though fragmentary, perfectly accurate autobiography. He has not indeed told us his name, and age, and outward fortunes, but he has opened a window into his heart. And what is it that makes a man? Not the mere externals of life, but his moral and spiritual individuality, his peculiar way of meeting grave trials, his view of God and man and the world, in so far as it flows from his inmost nature, and is not merely caught up from others. And when this man speaks as the representative of a class, of 1Isa. xxxviii. 17. The song ascribed to Hezekiah is really, in the opinion of the best critics, a psalm of the Church-nation, like the psalms of (figurative) sickness in the Psalter. 2 Isa. liii. 10. 3 Heb. ii. 10. * John xvi. 8. 5 James i. 17.

the Church within the Church, when his trials are common to his brethren, and his way of meeting them is that of many hundreds or thousands of fellow-believers, then how precious do his soul-confidences become! And how easy it is for us to derive both comfort and stimulus from them!

For do not let us indulge in the dream of our perfection either in knowledge or in experience. The sad complaints of the psalmist, that God was angry with Israel, are a proof that he had not yet assimilated the great truths with which he opens the psalm. But do we not often furnish parallels to this? Does not the cry of so many struggling souls for a simpler and a deeper theology prove that the spirit of Christ's teaching has not yet thoroughly permeated the religion of the nineteenth century? I know that religion and theology are not the same. But they are closely connected. The instincts of the heart are better than the reasonings of the head, and the Christian man, like the authors of Job and of the 90th Psalm, almost always has light at eventide. Still, it is most sadly true that an imperfect theology acts injuriously on personal religion, and that we often carry about troubled and aching hearts when we ought to be rejoicing in the sunlight of an assured faith. Did the ancient psalmist find his way out into a brighter region? Was he enabled to vitalize for himself the glorious ideas with which he began? The answer to this question is to be derived from the latter part of the psalm.

THE MAMMON OF UNRIGHTEOUSNESS.*

BY W. TAYLOR SMITH, B.A.

Make to yourselves friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when it shall fail they may receive you into the eternal tabernacles.—LUKE xvi. 9.

In the whole recorded teaching of Jesus there is perhaps no saying which has so completely baffled the efforts of expositors, none which makes us long more for a report of the actual words uttered by our Lord. Attempt after attempt has been made by scholars whose learning and piety command universal respect, and still the reader turns away unsatisfied. Under these circumstances it would be rash in the extreme to propound an explanation with unhesitating confidence; but a few cautious suggestions may, without presumption, be submitted to the notice of the student.

I. The first point to be considered, and on which we venture to think too great stress cannot be laid, is the absolute necessity for the right understanding of such a saying as this, of as thorough an acquaintance as possible with the thoughts, feelings, and expressions of those to whom the words were in the first instance addressed. We must endeavour to place ourselves in the position of those to whom Jesus thus spoke. What would these words mean for them? What notions were current among them on the subject with which Jesus was dealing? This method, which ought to be

*This Expository Note has been awarded the Prize of One Guinea.