Thus in no mere partisan or ecclesiastical spirit we are invited in the Psalms to express our love of the Catholic Church. On Whit Sunday, the Church's birthday, we take up the ancient strain of affection:
The hill of Sion is a fair place, and the joy of the whole earth.
We gaze with awe upon her jewelled foundations and her jasper walls; we wander with delight in her spacious golden streets:
Walk about Sion, and go round about her:
And tell the towers thereof.
Mark well her bulwarks, set up her houses:[[7]]
That ye may tell them that come after.
For this God is our God for ever and ever:
He shall be our guide unto death.
(xlviii.)
In another Psalm, the 122nd, one of the pilgrim-psalms recited of old as the faithful drew near to Jerusalem, we contemplate with joy and self-forgetfulness the ideal unity of the Church as the true centre of the earth, and as "the seat of judgment" to which all this world's shams and shadows must come sooner or later for their reformation or their sentence:
O pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
They shall prosper that love thee.
Peace be within thy walls:
And plenteousness within thy palaces.
For my brethren and companions' sakes:
I will wish thee prosperity.
Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God:
I will seek to do thee good.
It is an aspiration that should find an echo in the heart of every faithful son of the Church, especially in such "a day of trouble and of rebuke and blasphemy" as our own.
Thus while we recognise in the Psalter the expression, put into our lips by the Holy Spirit, of our own personal struggles and joys and sorrows in the spiritual life, while we remember with awe and gratitude that the Eternal Son of God Himself here speaks and prays and suffers as one of us, we shall find here also the voice of our corporate consciousness, our life and worship as citizens even on earth of that "Jerusalem which is above, which is the mother of us all."
And so as we conclude every Psalm in the Church's service with the Gloria, with that confession of our faith which prophets and kings would fain have known and knew not, let us lift up our hearts and give glory to the Father, Who has revealed to us His Name; glory to the Son, Who has vouchsafed in all things to be made like unto us His brethren; glory to the Holy Ghost, Whose word and power in the Church is undying, Who is still bringing forth from the ancient treasury old things which are ever new.