Then will I go unto the altar of God,
Unto God my exceeding joy.
Yea upon the harp will I praise thee,
O God, my God!
Why art thou cast down, O my soul,
And why art thou disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall yet praise him
Who is the health of my countenance and my God.
The tones of the harp gradually died away, and Helon remained absorbed in gratitude and devotion towards Jehovah.
At length he arose to perform his evening prayer. Since his return to the law of his fathers, he had been rigid in the performance of this duty, and without discriminating accurately, in the fervour of his new zeal, between the commands of God, and the usages established by tradition, he would gladly even have added to their length and frequency. There was at this time a distinction commonly made among the Aramæan Jews between the righteous man, who only aimed to fulfil the law as it was left by Moses; and the pious man, who, not content with this, endeavoured by the performance of other ordinances to attain a still higher degree of the divine favour. At an earlier period of Helon’s life, it would have seemed to him a superfluous trouble, to endeavour to deserve the character of the [righteous man]; now, nothing could satisfy him, but to aspire to the rank of a pious man.