Rightly are such Psalms as these called "Messianic." We feel that even those who {48} originally wrote them looked for more than "transitory promises." They were learning to look for the redemption of Israel and of the world itself through Israel and her kings. They were bold to believe, even when the crown was gone and the purple faded, and Israel was no longer a sovereign state, that the ancient word of God to David could never be exhausted. So when at last the great message of the Archangel came to the virgin of the house of David, it was felt by those who had read aright the history of their nation that here was no mere fanciful resuscitation of a dead past, but the vindication of God's undying purpose: "He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High: and the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of His father David: and He shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of His kingdom there shall be no end" (Luke i. 32, 33). It was therefore strictly legitimate, and in line with all the history of revelation, that the Christian Church should adopt these Messianic Psalms as her own thanksgiving for the mysteries of the Incarnation. Thus on Christmas Day she welcomes the Nativity in some of the Psalms already alluded to--in that which tells of the reconciliation of mankind with one {49} another and with God under the figure of the marriage between the anointed King and the king's daughter "all glorious within" (xlv.); in that which pleads the great promises to him who so loved God's presence that he would not "suffer his eyes to sleep nor his eyelids to slumber" until he had found a permanent resting-place for that presence among men (cxxxii.); or in that, again, which in the strength of faith can gaze even on the casting down of the throne and the breaking of the covenant, resting still on God's faithfulness among "the rebukes of many people" (lxxxix.). But there are other Psalms which, if they cannot strictly be called Messianic, yet bear their witness to another aspect of the same great hope of Israel. In the voice of prayer, or joyful confidence, they look forward to some _coming_ of God to earth, some visible manifestation of His righteousness and His world-wide purpose: For He cometh, for He cometh to judge the earth: And with righteousness to judge the world, and the people with His truth (xcvi. 13), {50} or-- Bow Thy heavens, O Lord, and come down: Touch the mountains, and they shall smoke. (cxliv. 5.) In the 85th, one of the Psalms appointed for Christmas Day, this advent of God is spoken of in words which are re-echoed in the prologue to S. John's Gospel (i. 14) as a dwelling or "tabernacling" of God's glory, not in the darkness of a Holy of Holies (as the later Jews imagined the Shekinah), but as a new and permanent fact in the moral order of the world: