Jonathan is shrined as richly and as unfadingly as Edward King or Arthur Hallam, and we may well believe that the man whom Jonathan loved as his own soul loved God from his inmost heart—that the author of the _Lament_ was the singer of the 18th Psalm. And if it be allowed that David wrote that song—‘the Psalm of Clovis and John Wesley’[37]—it is difficult, merely on the ground of personal character, to deny him any psalm in the whole book. I love Thee, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; My God, my strong rock, in Him will I trust; My shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower. I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised: So shall I be saved from mine enemies. In my distress I called upon the Lord, And cried unto my God: He heard my voice out of His temple, And my cry before Him came into His ears. Then the earth shook and trembled, The foundations also of the mountains moved And were shaken, because He was wroth. He bowed the heavens also, and came down; And thick darkness was under His feet. And He rode upon a cherub, and did fly: Yea, He flew swiftly upon the wings of the wind. He sent from on high, He took me; He drew me out of many waters. He delivered me from my strong enemy, And from them that hated me, for they were too mighty for me. They came upon me in the day of my calamity: But the Lord was my stay. He brought me forth also into a large place; He delivered me, because He delighted in me. It may be true that the value of the psalms to the Church does not depend upon the settlement, one way or another, of the rival claims of singers before and after the Exile, yet the question is of vastly more than mere literary or historic interest. We lose much if we lose David and the psalmists of the kingdom from ‘the glorious choir’ which sings for ever the praises of Israel’s God and David’s Son. And we are all the poorer if the sources of Christian song are to be sought, not by Siloa’s brook that flowed Fast by the oracles of God, but by the dull canals of Babylon, where the exiled people wept when they remembered Zion. Even the most extreme of modern English critics tells us that, ‘As mere academical exercises, by not merely unnamed but unknown individuals, the psalms will neither edify the Church nor charm the literary student.’[38] But, after all, we have not yet lost our fellowship with the men of David’s time. The psalms are to us a memorial of the golden days of Israel’s history. They are still to us, as to Francis Davison, Hymns which in the Hebrew tongue First were sung By Israel’s sweet and royal singer. Or, to put the case in prose: