THERE is strong reason to believe that the Songs of "the sweet singer of Israel" were, in the main, composed in his earlier years, before he had reached the full strength of his manhood's prime, and whilst mind and heart and character were in the making. There are songs of the shepherd life, fragrant with the balm-filled air of the pastoral solitudes of Bethlehem, resonant with the shocks of reverberating thunder, seamed with the fire of lightning flashes, and bright with the splendours of moon and stars; songs strong in the assertion of the divine possibilities of man, wholly joyous in their tone, free from the darkness of sin and the gloom of sorrow; songs, in fact, that must have taken poetic shape within the singer's spirit whilst he was "keeping those few sheep in the wilderness," "far from men and near to God," and rejoicing in his believing and bold speech to the Eternal Lord of the clear and far-stretching spaces of the Eastern sky.* * Cf Psalms viii., xxiii., and xxix. 182 THE PSALMS OF DAVID'S There are songs, too, that ebb and flow with the surging sorrows of the exile life, when, as a suspected and hated outlaw, though conscious of a king's destiny, he, separated from kith and kin, wandered about, hiding himself in dens and caves of the earth, a high-souled singer making melody in his heart to the Lord.* There are also songs of the opening years of kingly rule, full of exalted feeling; rich in grateful recognition of the God whose name is above all naming and whose goodness is beyond all speech; songs instinct with high purpose and saintly resolve; glad and humble in the presence of the dawning glories of a newly-acquired dominion, and yet withal quiveringly sensitive to the urgent need of the continuous power and unfailing love of God, inasmuch as yesterday's victory has not wholly released his hand from the sword-hilt, nor banished all fear from his heart.† But the throne once fairly won and the crown firmly fixed, the hands of the singer fill with royal cares, and there is not time to make the harp vocal with his genius and inspiring with his exuberant joy. Once the deeps of his soul are broken up by a volcanic outburst of passion, and an agonizing wail comes from the sin-tortured heart of the miserable man, who, alas! at fifty years of age has plunged headlong into the filthy sewers of sin; then, at about an interval of a year follows a subdued and tender strain, stealing over us like soft melodies in the stillness of a summer sunset as we sit by a river's edge, sung by the chastened spirit of the penitent, who, after the bitterness and pain of remorse has tasted that the Lord is gracious and long Cf Psalms v., vi, vii, lxi., lxiii. and lxiv. EARLY LIFE. 183 suffering, ready to forgive iniquity, transgression, and sin. Still later, and in those dark days of Absalom's cruel disloyalty, when that mistress Sorrow, who sends us all to school, forces his reluctant fingers once more to the almost forgotten lyre, he bursts forth in songs of renewed confidence in God and plaintive pleading for His allavailing mercy." With these few exceptions, the recorded songs of David bear unmistakable signs of the poet's youth. There is an absence of elaborate chiselling of figure and of phrase, ot subdued and calculated emotion, and of cautious self-restraint We feel the spontaneity and glow of youth, the bounding and irresistible fervours of full life, the swift and breathless movement of an unexhausted spirit, the burning passions of a fire-filled heart; and are startled by the rapidity with which figure follows figure like rain-drops in a storm; and shocked by the tremendous energy and daring with which he appeals to the righteous and all-judging God. The chief poet of the Hebrew Psalter is undoubtedly the young Shepherd and not the aged Ruler; the fugitive outcast battling for safety and position, and not the serenely victorious monarch swaying an unquestioned sceptre far and near.t * Of Psalms li., xxxii., iii., and iv. + There is sufficient evidence for the conclusion stated above, yet it must not be forgotten that there is great difficulty in determining (1) the actual number of the Psalms David composed, and (2) the period of his life to which each Psalm refers. The traditional titles of the Psalter credit David with seventy-three compositions out of the one hundred and one, whose authors are specified. Of the rest that have names, Moses and Ethan are assigned one each, Solomon, two, Asaph and the Sons of Korah, a dozen each. Many persons accept the traditional superscriptions with unhesitating confidence and resent with indignation the ejection of David from a solitary verse. But Dr. 184 THE SINGER TRAINING II. Now that fact is of too much importance to be forgotten in the study of the forces, human and divine, by which David worked out his personal salvation, and wrought his ministry for the world. Every man's work has two sides; in part it is the flower of his life, the outward and separable result and reportable sign of his inward being, the register-mark of his capacity, and of his acquired powers; but it is in a far larger degree the seed as well as the flower, the creator of the coming man, the active agent in the further growth of his nature. The worker builds himself by his work, as Maclaren, who certainly does not lack a strong conservatism in Biblical criticism, says, with a significant abundance of qualifying terms: "There seems to be about forty-five psalms which we may attribute with some confidence to David." (The Life of David as reflected in his Psalms, p. 13.)—Dr. Perowne, one of our chief English authorities, attributes twenty songs to David without any misgiving, viz :—iii, iv, v, vi, vii, viii, xvi. xviii, xix, xxiii, xxiv, xxviii, xxix, xxxii, li, lxi, lxiii, lxiv, ci, cx. Twenty-eight more are possibly David's, but the degrees of probability vary very much; in a few cases being somewhat strong, and in others so feeble as not to displace doubt Twenty-five bearing David's name he surrenders without any reservation. Judging from Cheyne's introduction and notes, David's share in the Psalter is even smaller than that allowed by Dr. Perowne. He says, after referring to the opinions of Ewald and Kuenen: "It is at any rate a great relief to realize that only a very small number of the Psalms can reasonably be ascribed to David, and that of those which remain, a large proportion are written either (like the complaints of Job) in the name of a representative righteous man, or of the pious Israel personified." Then, he applies this theory to the solution of the tough problem of the imprecatory Psalms-saying: “As long as they are interpreted of an individual Israelite they seem sadly inconsistent with the benevolent spirit of the finest parts of the Old Testament, if, however, they are spoken in the name of the nation, or at any rate of those with the most awakened consciences, the strong figures and intense feeling become intelligible."—(The Book of Psalms. Translated by the Rev. T. K. Cheyne, M.A., pp. xii-xiii.) But, however the question of the Authorship of the Hymns of the Psalter may be finally decided, it is probable that of those which give the strongest evidence of coming from the mind of David, by far the larger part of them belong to the earlier half of his life. HIMSELF BY SONG. 185 well as the edifice that is outside of him, and on which others look. I say "in a far larger degree," but this depends first upon the youth or age of the man, and next upon the inwardness or outwardness of his work. The younger the man, the more plastic and receptive his nature, and the more retro-active his deeds; as the sapling bends where the matured tree is stiff, and as the more fresh and supple the dyer's hand, the more easily is it subdued to the stain of the stuff he works in. But the dye that goes deepest, and stays longest, is that we produce within ourselves; and the work that makes the mind and heart, and fashions the man, is the work that is most inward, and of the soul; our eager scepticisms or battling faiths; our moody despairs or conquering hopes; our stolid content with what we are and have, or earnest stretching forward towards the ideal above us; our grovelling in the dirt of sensualism, or soaring upwards to the mounts of spiritual communion; our droning through life's opportunity, as though it were no more than a pleasure garden for the sense, or steadfast climb in all weathers, and under all skies, to the Highest and Best. As a man thinks and feels, wills and aspires, prays and sings in his heart, so is he, and so does he become more and more. The work that takes soul in doing makes soul in the doer. Looking to and hasting towards the things that are spiritual and eternal, we spiritualize our being, and make ourselves more and more partakers of the Divine nature. Hence David could not have gone to a better school, or secured more effective training than it seems likely he found under Samuel, the first of the prophets, and the |