The proud are robbed, they have slept their sleep: And all the men whose hands were mighty have found nothing. At Thy rebuke, O God of Jacob: Both the chariot and horse are fallen. The secret of victory preludes the Psalm. Jerusalem is the seat of God's special presence: At Salem is His tabernacle: And His dwelling in Sion. The 46th may also refer to the same event. The flood of heathen invasion is breaking itself in vain against the walls of the city of God: God is in the midst of her, therefore shall she not be removed: God shall help her, and that right early. The great historical Psalm, the 78th, speaks at its close of the hill of Sion and the Temple "built there on high" as coeval with the earth itself; its foundation is "like the ground which He hath made continually."[5] And the later {96} Psalms seem even to unite Sion and Jerusalem and the sacred nation with the very eternity of God Himself: This shall be My rest for ever. * * * * * The Lord thy God, O Sion, shall be King for evermore. * * * * * Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem: Praise thy God, O Sion. For He hath made fast the bars of thy gates: And hath blessed thy children within thee. (cxxxii. 15, cxlvi. 10, cxlvii. 12, 13.) The end of earthly Jerusalem, when it came, was no less significant than her long continuance. The double destruction of the city by the Roman armies (A.D. 70 and A.D. 135) was consummated by the strangeness of the failure of Julian the Apostate to rebuild and re-establish the Temple; flames burst out from the foundations and the workmen fled in terror.[6] But long before this the Christian Church had recognised that in her world-wide citizenship and her worship, confined no longer {97} (as the Lord had foretold) either to Jerusalem or a mountain in Samaria, she had inherited in fuller measure these promises of continuance. Had it not been said, when the great Apostle made his confession of Christ's Divinity, "Upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it"? And in this consciousness the Catholic Church rightly appropriated to herself the songs of Sion's confidence. Just as early Christian art set above the altars the figure of the living Christ enthroned as the Eternal King of the universe, so the Church has always known in her darkest moments that her continuance is as certain as her Master's throne; and that as He remains the same, though the heavens and the earth decay, and are changed as a garment, the promise of the 102nd Psalm is hers for ever: The children of Thy servants shall continue: And their seed snail stand fast in Thy sight.