these; but in that wonderful spirit of the Hebrew playing upon words, just as he rose from his own occupation to exclaim, “The Lord is my shepherd,” so he rose from his own name, transforming it into a Divine synonym, searching for its origin and filling it out with divine and elevated ideas.[24] This was the spirit in which Watts in his version restored the Psalms to Christ, and removed them from the lower and more contracted circle of human personality to the suffering and reigning Messiah. Most readers were thankful for the noble restoration of the evangelical regalia to their rightful owner; and only here and there one or two, like the indecent and insolent Bradbury, took exception to the performance as “robbing them of their book of Praise,” as that rash and vehement man, referring to the version of Watts, said, “David is no longer suffered to be our Psalmist.” This, then, is the spirit in which Watts translated the Psalms, to the Christian sense preserving, as we have said, the Messianic idea throughout, as in that stirring call to Christian service: Arise, O King of Grace, arise And enter to Thy rest! Lo! Thy church waits with longing eyes Thus to be owned and blest. Enter with all Thy glorious train, Thy Spirit and Thy word; All that the Ark did once contain Could not such grace afford. The aim of Watts in his Book of Psalms was to translate the Old Testament phraseology into a New Testament language and experience. James Hamilton has illustrated this by an anecdote which it can scarcely be impertinent to quote here; he says: “I cannot tell it accurately, but I have heard of a godly couple whose child was sick and at the point of death. It was unusual to pray together except at the hours of ‘exercise;’ however, in her distress, the mother prevailed on her husband to kneel down at the bedside and offer a word of prayer. The good man’s prayers were chiefly taken from the best of liturgies, the book of Psalms; and after a long and reverential introduction from the 90th and elsewhere, he proceeded, ‘Lord, turn again the captivity of Zion; then shall our mouth be filled with laughter and our tongue with singing.’ And as he was proceeding, ‘turn again our captivity,’ the poor agonized mother interrupted him: ‘Eh, man, you are aye drawn out for thae Jews, but it’s our bairn that’s deein’,’ at the same time clasping her hands and crying, ‘Lord, help us; oh, give us back our darling, if it be Thy holy will; and if he is to be taken, oh take him to Thyself!’ And fond as I am,” continues James Hamilton, “of scriptural phrases in prayer, I am fonder still of reality. It is a striking fact that the prayers addressed to Christ in the Gospels are hardly one of them in Old Testament language; just as New Testament songs embed in a language of their own Old Testament phrases;” and, as we may add, just as the woman and her husband had the same purpose in their prayers.