Is this originally one psalm or bits of two, pieced together to suggest a comparison between the two sources of knowledge of God, which the authors did not dream of? The affirmative is strongly _main_tained, but, we may venture to say, not so strongly _sus_tained. The two parts are said to differ in style, rhythm, and subject. Certainly they do, but the difference in style accounts for the difference in structure. It is not an unheard-of phenomenon that cadence should change with theme; and if the very purpose of the song is to set forth the difference of the two witnesses to God, nothing can be more likely than such a change in measure. The two halves are said to be put together abruptly without anything to smooth the transition. So they are, and so is ver. 4 put by the side of ver. 3; and so does the last turn of thought (vv. 12-14) follow the second. Cyclopean architecture without mortar has a certain impressiveness. The abruptness is rather an argument for than against the original unity, for a compiler would have been likely to try to make some sort of glue to hold his two fragments together, while a poet, in the rush of his afflatus, would welcome the very abruptness which the manufacturer would avoid. Surely the thought that binds the whole into a unity--that _Jehovah_ is _El_, and that nature and law witness to the same Divine Person, though with varying clearness--is not so strange as that we should have to find its author in some late editor unknown. Vv. 1-6 hymn the silent declaration by the heavens. The details of exposition must first be dealt with. "Declare" and "makes known" are participles, and thus express the continuity of the acts. The substance of the witness is set forth with distinct reference to its limitations, for "glory" has here no moral element, but simply means what Paul calls "eternal power and Godhead," while the Divine name of God ("El") is used in intended contrast to "Jehovah" in the second half, a _nuance_ which must be obliterated if this is a conglomerate psalm. "His handiwork," in like manner, limits the revelation. The heavens by day are so marvellously unlike the heavens by night that the psalmist's imagination conjures up two long processions, each member of which passes on the word entrusted to him to his successor--the blazing days with heaven naked but for one great light, and the still nights with all their stars. Ver. 3 has given commentators much trouble in attempting to smooth its paradox. Tastes are curiously different, for some critics think that the familiar interpretation gives a flat, prosaic meaning, while Cheyne takes the verse to be a gloss for dull readers, and exclaims, "How much the brilliant psalm fragment gains by its omission!" _De gustibus_, etc. Some of us may still feel that the psalmist's contrast of the awful silence in the depths of the sky and of the voice that speaks to opened ears thrills us with something very like the electric touch of poetry. In ver.