This then is the reason, the chief reason, why these Psalms are appointed to be read every Sunday in church, and every morning and evening where there is daily service—to teach us that the Lord takes care not only of one man’s soul here, and another woman’s soul there, but of the whole country of England; of its wars and its peace; of its laws and government, its progress and its afflictions; of all, in short, that happens to it as a nation, as one body of men, which it is. It must be so, my good friends, else we should be worse off than the old Jews, and not better off, as all the New Testament solemnly assures us a thousand times over that we are. For in the covenant which God made with the Jews, and in the strange events, good and bad, which He caused to happen to their nation, not only the great saints among them were taken care of, but all classes, and all characters, good and bad, even those who had not wisdom or spiritual life enough to seek God for themselves, still had their share in the good laws, in the teaching and guiding, and in the national blessings which He sent on the whole nation. They had a chance given them of rising, and improving, and prospering, as the rest of their countrymen rose, and improved, and prospered. And when the Lord came to visit Judæa in flesh and blood, we find that He went on the same method. He did not merely go to such men as Philip and Nathaniel, to the holy and elect ones among the Jews, but to the whole people; to the _lost_ sheep, as well as to those who were not lost. He did not part the good from the bad before he healed their sicknesses, and fed them with the loaves and fishes. It was enough for Him that they were Jews, citizens of the Jewish nation. God’s promises belonged not to one Jew or another, but to the Jewish nation; and even the ignorant and the sinful had a share in the blessings of the covenant, great or small in proportion as they chose to live as Jews ought, or to forget and deny that they belonged to God’s people.