The consideration of these great truths will be reserved for subsequent lectures; but it would be impossible to speak of general principles in our Christian use of the Psalter without pointing out on the very threshold its indissoluble connection, historically and doctrinally, with the {19} "Author and Finisher of our faith," and with His Church "the household of faith." III. Once again, the Psalter is appropriate for Christian use because it is the book of Hope. The world estranged from God is without hope. The heathen looked back to a golden age; Virgil stands almost alone in his dream of its possible return.[6] The Israel of God is the fellowship of the future. It feels itself in harmony with an increasing purpose of God. The great revelation to Moses of the Name of God, "I will be that I will be" (Ex. iii. 14, R.V. marg.), left its mark on all subsequent history. So the Old Testament writers, under every imaginable difficulty and persecution and reverse, among the treacheries of friends, as well as the attacks of a hostile heathen world, are ever straining forward to a coming of God and a Kingdom of God. Like the spirits in Virgil's vision: Stabant orantes primi transmittere cursum, Tendebantque manus ripæ ulterioris amore.[7] {20} The Psalms throughout delight in this attitude. The most casual reader is struck by the constancy with which an outlook of hope and joy succeeds to the sorrow and stress of the opening verses of Psalm after Psalm. Even the darkest have their gleams of promise. And so the Christian Church, having learned what the hope of Israel meant, found the Psalms come naturally to her lips. She could sing with fuller meaning of the rising up again of the righteous (xli.), of the deliverances from the stormy waters and from the wandering out of the way in the wilderness (cvii.), of the bringing up of the sufferer "from the deep of the earth again" (lxxi.). The Psalter was and is to the Christian not merely the reflection of his characteristic sorrows and trials, but the book of the Resurrection, of the restitution of all things, of the doing away of the imperfect and the coming of the perfect. Thou shalt shew me the path of life; in Thy presence is the fulness of joy: And at Thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. (xvi. 12.)