Make their faces ashamed, O Lord:
That they may seek Thy Name.
Once again, the 102nd Psalm breathes out the pathetic appeal of the exile, or the lonely, friendless watcher over the desolations of the holy city. His heart is "smitten down and withered like grass"; he has "eaten ashes as it were bread, and mingled his drink with weeping." But his fasting and tears are not for himself; there is the eternal background of hope; God is unchanging; future generations will know again the happiness of worship and service—his sorrow is for Zion:
Thy servants think upon her stones:
And it pitieth them to see her in the dust.
Do not experiences and prayers like these come home to Christians with a curious sense of familiarity? Is not this tragedy of faith repeated in every age? In every Christian generation it has been "given" to the Beast to war against the saints and overcome them (Rev. xiii. 7). His undying malice has too often been seconded by the impotence, the lack of unity, the fear of truth and its consequences, which have marred the Christian defence.
We find eloquent illustrations of this unceasing, heart-sickening warfare in such moments of history as that in the fourth century, when "the whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian";[[3]] in the seventh and eighth, when the armies of Islam swept away the divided and bickering Churches of the East and that Church of North Africa, once so glorious, where holiness had not kept pace with zeal; in the fifteenth, when Constantinople fell, and the great cathedral of S. Sophia passed into the hands of the Turks, and this very day, where once Christian worship was offered, and Christian emblems high on its walls still make their silent protest,
"Moslem prayers profane
At morn and eve come sounding;"
in the sixteenth, when the fair abbeys of England were despoiled and suffered to fall into ruin, through covetousness and irreligion masquerading under the garb of piety; in the seventeenth, when the voice of the Church's worship was stifled, and the faithful were interrupted in their very Christmas Communion by the levelled muskets of the Cromwellian troopers[[4]]; in our own day, when liberality can tolerate everything except the Catholic Faith? Verily these Hebrew Psalms are a Christian possession for ever. They speak to us and speak for us in accents of undying truth, and every year that passes verifies their witness and points more sharply their appeal.
But not only does the Psalter tell of the Church and her ideals, of her warfare and her failures, it insists with equal conviction on her stability. God's great promise to the line of David carried with it the preservation of David's city. The attacks of the heathen seemed to have reached their climax when Sennacherib's army had taken all the fortified cities of Judæa, and Jerusalem was left isolated and helpless (2 Kings xix.). Yet when human hope was gone, the prophet's word rang out with the certainty of faith. "I will defend this city to save it, for Mine own sake, and for My servant David's sake." The sequel was one of the most startling catastrophes in history. The Assyrian hosts were destroyed in a single night, and Assyrian invasions ceased. Again, in a later generation, when the promise seemed at last to have failed, and the Temple had fallen, the city was burnt and her king and citizens in captivity, the prophets never waver in their vision of a future restoration when sin has been repented and national guilt expiated. Zerubbabel and Joshua, Ezra and Nehemiah, Judas Maccabæus and his descendants, restore and maintain Temple and city to last till "the fulness of the time," when the true meaning of the Davidic promises was revealed.
The sense of this supernatural continuance has left its mark on the Psalms. The rout of the Assyrian armies is commemorated in one at least, the 76th: