Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/58

 moment; as if with a silent, yet irresistible gravitation—a centripetal force.

"Thy word," says David, "is settled in Heaven;"—it is fixed as the constellations in the firmament; and if we would justly estimate what this undecaying force of the canon of Scripture imports, in relation to the ever-shifting variations of human thought and feeling, and in relation to the fluctuations of national manners and notions, from one fifty years to another, we should take in hand some portion of the Old Testament Scriptures—say such a portion as is this sublime Psalm—and trace its exegetical history through the long line of commentators—from the Rabbis, onward to Origen, Tertullian, Basil, Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, the Schoolmen, and Bernard of Clairvaux; then the pre-reformation Romanists; the Reformers, the Jesuits, the Jansenists, the Puritans of England and Scotland, the English Methodists; and so on till we reach these last times of great religious animation, and of little religious depth—times of sedulous exactitude in scholarship, and of feeble consciousness as toward the unseen future and the eternal;—times in which whatever is of boundless dimensions in Holy Scripture has passed beyond our range of vision, while our spectacled eyes are intent upon iotas.

But the Psalms of David, and of Moses, and of others, shall live on, undamaged, to the times that