The prevailing thought of the 119th Psalm, that God's revelation is fixed and permanent and the law of human life, marks the great separation between the world and the Church. Such a belief is abhorrent and distasteful always to the natural mind, while it is familiar to and welcomed by the Catholic Church, as it was by the Jewish. The Church's witness to the world is of a revelation from above: she has _received_ it; she may not alter it without apostasy. Her mission in the world is not to be the mirror of each succeeding phase of human thought, nor merely the consecration of human aspirations, but rather to speak with a supernatural authority, to tell men what God is and what is His will, "whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear." And the Church can only deliver her message aright, in the face of the frowns of the princes of this world, so long as worship gladdens and confirms her {15} witness, so long as she herself finds her joy in contemplating her treasure and returning thanks for it to the Giver. As the devout Israelite found in the Psalter the natural expression of an intelligent devotion to the God Who had revealed Himself in Law and Prophets, so the Christian Church, with no break of continuity, found the Psalter still adequate to express her joy in her fuller knowledge. For that fuller knowledge was strictly in line with the old. The faith of Israel had not been changed, but carried forward, developed, illuminated. In the Law the Gospel lay hid, and the Christian Church felt in the old words of devotion no outworn or alien accents, but living utterances of the Spirit of Life, which renewed their youth with hers. So from the beginning she found strength and comfort in her warfare for the truth, in the praises of Israel. From the beginning she based her ordered worship on the services of Temple and Synagogue. The choirs of the Catholic Church find their most lasting and characteristic voice not in hymn or anthem, but in-- "The chorus intoned As the Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned." {16} II. A second great principle of the Christian use of the Psalter will be found in its humanism. The Psalms are profoundly human. They sympathise with the soul of man in all his varied efforts after God. They find a voice for him in his battles for truth and right, in his moments of defeat as well as his victories, in his doubts no less than his certainties. They put words into his mouth as he contemplates the variety, the beauty, and the law of nature, or the injustice, the obstinacy, the treachery of men. The Psalms make his bed in his sickness; they strengthen him in the inward agonies of faith; they go with him to the gates of death, and farther still, even to God's "holy hill and His dwelling"; they point him to the eternal morning, when he will wake up and be satisfied with God's likeness (_cf._ Pss. civ., x., xli., lxxvii., lxxxviii., xliii., xvii.).