The process of the deliverance is not told here, as there was no need it should be in a hymn which is not history, but the lyrical echo of what is told in history; one image explains it all--'Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish with an east wind.' The metaphor--one that does not need expansion here--is that of a ship like a great unwieldy galleon, caught in a tempest. However strong for fight, it is not fit for sailing. It is like some of those turret ships of ours, if they venture out from the coast and get into a storm, their very strength is their destruction, their armour wherein they trusted ensures that they shall sink. And so, this huge assailant of Israel, this great 'galley with oars,' washing about there in the trough of the sea, as it were--God broke it in two with the tempest, which is His breath. You remember how on the medal that commemorated the destruction of the Spanish Armada--our English deliverance--there were written the words of Scripture: 'God blew upon them and they were scattered.' What was there true, literally, is here true in figure. The Psalmist is not thinking of any actual scattering of hostile fleets--from which Jerusalem was never in danger; but is using the shipwreck of 'the ship of Tarshish' as a picture of the utter, swift, God-inflicted destruction which ground that invading army to pieces, as the savage rocks and wild seas will do the strongest craft that is mangled between them. And then, mark how from this dramatic description there rises a loftier thought still. The deliverance thus described links the present with the past. 'As we have heard so have we seen in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God.' Yes, brethren! God's merciful manifestation for ourselves, as for those Israelitish people of old, has this blessed effect, that it changes hearsay and tradition into living experience;--this blessed effect, that it teaches us, or ought to teach us, the inexhaustibleness of the divine power, the constant repetition in every age of the same works of love. Taught by it, we learn that all these old narratives of His grace and help are ever new, not past and gone, but ready to be reproduced in their essential characteristics in our lives too. 'We have heard with our ears, O Lord, our fathers have told us what work Thou didst in their days.' But is the record only a melancholy contrast with our own experience? Nay, truly. 'As we have heard so have we seen.' We are ever tempted to think of the present as commonplace. The sky right above our heads is always farthest from earth. It is at the horizon behind and the horizon in front, where earth and heaven seem to blend. We think of miracles in the past, we think of a manifest presence of God in the future, but the present ever seems to our sense-bound understandings as beggared and empty of Him, devoid of His light. But this verse suggests to us how, if we mark the daily dealings of that loving Hand with us, we have every occasion to say, Thy