conquest but at the conversion and good of mankind, glorying not in privilege but in vocation, not in self but in the law of God. And this is the pattern for all time. The Christian Church may find in the Psalter her own just self-expression in a fuller manner than ever ancient Israel did or could. Indeed, we may trace indelibly stamped on the Psalter the true lineaments of the ideal Church. First in the Psalter there is the note of _comprehensiveness_. The heathen, the nations, so often denounced or prayed against in the Psalms, are, after all, not so much those who are outside the boundaries of Israel as those who are alien from her spirit. They are communities, societies, untouched by grace, governed by passion and worldly ambitions rather than by conscience or the Divine law. And side by side with threats and foreboding of their utter destruction in the day of God there are glimpses here and there of the possibility of {81} their conversion, and even of their becoming one family with Israel. The great Psalm of Whitsunday, the 68th, passes from the thought of God wounding the head of His enemies, of His warriors dipping their feet in the blood of the vanquished, to the hope of the princes coming out of Egypt, and Ethiopia making haste to stretch out her hands unto God. So, again, the 47th Psalm looks forward to the essential sovereignty of God over all the earth being recognised even by this world's rulers: The princes of the people are joined unto the people of the God of Abraham.[1] And lest it should be thought that such hopes referred only to an empire of external rule, like that of Solomon's, we have the startling predictions of Ps. lxxxvii. Here the people of Rahab (Egypt) and Babylon, the Philistines, the Tyrians, the Ethiopians, all types of the obstinate and idolatrous heathen world, are pictured as forsaking their natural lineage and descent to be born again in Zion, enrolling themselves there as citizens of the Lord's {82} glorious foundation upon the holy mountains, finding there their joy and the fount of their inspiration. The Lord shall count, when He writeth up the peoples: This one was born _there_. They that sing as well as they that dance shall say, All my fountains are in Thee. (R.V.) Surely this is one of the most remarkable foreshadowings in the Old Testament of the catholicity of the Church, and of that new birth of Baptism by which men of every race and tongue are grafted into the one body, "where there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman: but Christ is all, and in all" (Col. iii. 11). In this and in many other Psalms (_cf._ lxvii., xcviii., c.) we confess the essentially _missionary_ vocation of the Church; that she calls to all mankind, not to the Western nations only, nor to the progressive and civilised only. Hers is the one faith for all men, her citizenship unlimited by any barriers of race or temperament.