O Jehovah, thou art my God, early will I seek thee. My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee, In a dry and thirsty land. Would that I might see thy sanctuary, To behold thy power and glory.—Ps. lxiii. He knew by heart all the psalms which had any relation to Jerusalem, and no sooner had he finished one, than his fingers and his voice, unbidden, began another. When Israel went out of Egypt, The house of Jacob from a people of strange language, Judah was his sanctuary, Israel his dominion.—Ps. cxiv. His own pilgrimage to Jerusalem seemed to him like the departure of Israel from Egypt fourteen hundred years before, and he was transported at once to those remote ages with so lively a feeling, that the psalm seemed to him to spring fresh from his own soul, and to have been dictated by his own emotions. The forty-third Psalm occurred to his mind, and with the raised look, but subdued voice of humble devotion, he sung— Send out thy light and thy truth and let them guide me! Let them bring me to thy holy hill and to thy tabernacles! 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.