pathos, its capacity of sorrow and of joy, its progress towards God, and its final apprehension and vision of God. This is the key to the most constant feature of the Psalter, the portrait of the Righteous Sufferer. Whether we regard it as the personification of the holy nation or the self-expression of human conscience in its moral witness and its conflicts, it is an ideal that is only fulfilled in the Just One, Jesus Christ. He appeared in the world as the pattern Man, in Whom the Divine image is perfected and Whose moral nature corresponds with that holiness which is God's essential character. He appeared, too, as the perfect realisation of the filial spirit, that spirit of sonship which is the true attitude of the creature towards the Creator. Therefore it is in Christ Himself that the witness of the Psalms to righteousness, their expression of man's effort towards his ideal, is taken up, illuminated, made perfect. Therefore it is that a New Testament writer is found applying directly and without question to Christ not only the descriptions of the self-revealing God of the Old Testament, "Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast {54} laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of Thy hands" (Heb. i. 10, from Ps. cii.), and the portrait of the Messianic King, "The sceptre of uprightness is the sceptre of Thy kingdom" (_ib._, from Ps. xlv.), but also the description of _man_ in his ideal excellence and supremacy: Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; Thou crownedst him with glory and honour, And didst set him over the works of Thy hands (Heb. ii., from Ps. viii.), and that word in which some unknown psalmist and prophet had consecrated the free obedience of his will to God, as a higher offering than the sacrifices of the Law: Wherefore when He cometh into the world, He saith, Sacrifice and offering Thou wouldest not, But a body didst Thou prepare for Me; In whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin Thou hadst no pleasure: Then said I, Lo, I am come {55} (In the roll of the book it is written of Me) To do Thy will, O God." (Heb. x., from Ps. xl.)