Bible. O.T. Psalms, English, A Handbook to the Psalms PRAYER-BOOK VERSION BY THE REV. EDWARD M. HOLMES, LL.B. LATE RECTOR OF MARSH GIBBON, BUCKS PREFACE. THE Book of Psalms is the greatest treasury of devout thought that exists in the whole literature of the whole world. This is a fact of history and experience, quite independent of any theory as to the nature, kind, or degree of inspiration which we may assign to it; and the fact is independent also of the ways in which we attempt to account for it. There is no need to determine as a literary question, whether the writers of the several Psalms had a definite purpose to try to indite words that should express all human experience in the ideas and feelings that they deal with; or whether the clue to the answer may be that, as mere matter-of-fact, human experience has worked itself into the religious forms that the book furnishes by the training of thoughts and aspirations on an approved model, or by the realisation of the fact that the forms express very sufficiently the feelings which are themselves the result of the working of an inner life. We might argue that the Divine Spirit wrought in the minds of the writers with an operation of such universal efficacy that, enabling them to reach the depths of their own hearts in consciousness of sin and forgiveness, abasement and triumph, faith and hope, repentance and resolution, He gave them power DEC 131914 323194 5228 473 (RECAP) |