We have all no doubt felt something of this abiding sympathy of the Psalter. Dean Church expressed it very remarkably in a letter written by him shortly before his death: The thought of what is to take the place of things here is with me all day long, but it is with a strange mixture of reality and unreality, and I wish it did me all the good it might. Books are not satisfactory--at least, I have always found it {17} so. It seems to me that there is nothing equal to letting the Psalms fall on one's ears, till at last a verse starts into meaning, which it is sure to do in the end (_Life and Letters_, p. 409, ed. 1897). The Psalter has in this way endeared itself to many generations of struggling and dying men, and appealed even to many who were alien from its spirit. It has interwoven itself with striking scenes and moments of history, as when Hildebrand chanted "He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh them to scorn" (ii.) before the encircling hosts of emperor and anti-pope; or when S. Athanasius, on that night of fear when the imperial soldiers had blockaded the doors of the church, and the fate of the faith of Nicæa seemed to hang in the balance, bade the deacon intone that Psalm which tells of God smiting great kings, "for His mercy endureth for ever" (cxxxvi.); or when Henry V. turned his face to the wall and died, confessing that his ideal was unfulfilled, and that God, and not he, must "build the walls of Jerusalem" (li.). This humanism of the Psalter makes it pre-eminently a Christian possession, for Christianity is human through and through. It is the religion of "the soul which is by nature Christian." It redeems and consecrates, as no other religion could ever dare to do, all the fulness of man's being. {18} And why? Here we touch the innermost secret of the Psalter. It is the book of the Incarnation. "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." God Himself has taken to Himself a human soul and spirit as well as a human body. And the Incarnate Word found on earth the voice of His communing with the Father, as the faithful of His own adopted nation did, in the words of the Psalms. These words rise naturally to His lips in the supreme agony on the Cross; they must have provided His prayers and thanksgivings, we may reverently imagine, not only in the public services which He attended, but in His home at Nazareth, and in His lonely vigils of prayer. He gathered together in Himself all the human experiences of the past which are reflected in the Psalter. Hence the Psalter is also the characteristic voice of His Church, that Church which was founded by Him, and is united to Him, and is the assembly of the first-born of humanity calling Him "Lord" and Mary "Mother."