Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/60

 which renders it largely independent of its embodiment in this or that form of language. There is no version of the Psalms—ancient or modern (or none which comes within the cognizance of a European reader)—which does not competently convey the theology and the ethical majesty, and the juridical grandeur, of the one Psalm that has here been referred to. In no version, even the most faulty—whichever that may be—does an awakened conscience fail to catch the distant sound of that thunder which—in a day future—shall shake, not the earth only, but heaven. In no such version does the contrite spirit fail to hear in it that message which carries peace to the humble in heart.

If indeed the Hebrew text had perished ages ago—say at the time of the breaking up of the Jewish religious state—and if, consequently, we could now make an appeal to nothing more authentic than to ancient versions, believed to be, on the whole, trustworthy, then the constant tendency toward deflection and aberration, in human opinion, could have received no effective check. In each age, the rise of schemes of opinion—sometimes superstitious and fanatical, sometimes philosophical and negative—would have produced successive vitiations of those unauthentic documents, until even these had lost their cohesive principle, and would have ceased to be thought of. This is not our position; and therefore versions and commentaries, some critical and exact, some popular and paraphrastic; comments wise, and com-