"And read me a Bible verse of the Lord's goodwill toward men--
'Full of compassion and mercy, the Lord,' --let me hear it again;
'Full of compassion and mercy--long suffering.'"
Psalm 87. The motto of the University of Durham in England is taken from line 1. Lines 2 and 3 are the motto of Augustine's great work, "The City of God."
Psalm 90 was the favorite Psalm of the Emperor Charles V., of the Reformation period. It has had its place in the burial service of the Church of England since 1662. Newman's Dream of Gerontius uses a part of this Psalm as a chant of the souls in purgatory. Its solemn strains have very often been used in the church to recall men to the thought of the permanence of God and the fleeting life of man.
Psalm 91 is said to be the Psalm that was sung at the first attendance of Beza upon a Protestant service, and to have made a great impression upon him. In 1177, as a long and bitter conflict between the Emperor and the Pope ended in the triumphs of the latter, and Barbarossa bowed before the Pope Alexander, legend says that the Pope set his foot on the neck of the kneeling Emperor, repeating lines 27 and 28.
Psalm 93. In the days of the Scottish Covenanters it was believed that Psalm 93 was heard sweetly chanted by spiritual visitants. In the belief of such visions the Covenanters became strong to suffer and endure. Quite another use of the Psalm was as a proof of the fixity of the earth, as against the Copernican theory that the earth, not the sun, moved.
Psalm 95 was the battle cry of the Templars during the Crusades, sung as they marched to fight the Saracens. It was used in the more [{503}] peaceful campaign of missions. Schwartz, the greatest Danish missionary to India, inscribed lines 11 and 12 on the front of a church which he built in South India before the end of the eighteenth century.
Psalms 96, 103, 146, 147, are recommended by William Law as setting forth wonderfully "the glory of God," so that they may always be profitably used for devotion.
Psalm 100 gives the name to the familiar tune of "Old Hundred," which was the tune to which the Scottish version of Psalm 100 was sung. Edward Fitzgerald chose lines 2 and 3 to be put on his tomb.
Psalm 103 was chanted by the Protestants of Scotland at the communion. It is one of the most beautiful of Psalms.
Psalm 104 is one of the fine nature Psalms, the most elaborate of the group, which includes Psalms 8,19,29. It has had some curious uses, as when, in the Middle Ages, men opposed the theory of the motion of the sun with lines 11 and 12 and explained earthquakes from lines 57 and 58; when the tail of Leviathan is scorched by the sun, he seeks to seize it, and his movements shake the earth. But a great scientist, Humboldt, wrote, "The 104th Psalm may be said to present a picture of the entire cosmos . . . We are astonished to see, within the compass of a poem of such small dimension, the universe, the heavens and the earth, thus drawn with a few grand strokes."