These men who gave us our Psalms had learned how to bear adversity and affliction without being overwhelmed or defeated. “All thy waves and thy billows have gone over me,” one of them cries. He has lost his land and has only the _memory_ of Jordan and Hermon and Mizar. His adversaries are a constant “sword in his bones.” They jeer at him and ask, “Where now is thy God?” but his trust holds steadily on: “The Lord will command His loving-kindness in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be with me!” Even when the water-spouts of trouble break over him, when “the waters roar and are troubled,” when the “nations rage and kingdoms are moved,” when “desolations are abroad in the earth,” God abides for him “a very present help in time of trouble,” “a refuge and strength” for his soul. Dismay and trembling may be abroad; pain may come as on a woman in travail, yet this deep soul can calmly say, “God is our God forever; He will be our guide even unto death.” This element of _trust_ and _confidence_ has never anywhere had grander utterance. The Psalmist has got beyond reliance on “horses and chariots,” beyond trust in “riches,” “princes,” in “the bow or the sword,” or in “man, whose breath is in his nostrils.” He rests his case on God alone, and builds on naked faith in His goodness and care: “_Thou_ hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.” Puzzled he often is with the prosperity of the wicked, who “flourish like green bay-trees”; perplexed he sometimes is with God’s delay in coming to the help of the poor and needy and oppressed; but his faith holds on and he does not “slide.” It gives us almost a sense of awe as we see a valiant soul, hard pressed, hemmed around, deep in affliction and sorrow, “standing the world” and saying in clear voice: “Oh, give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good; His loving-kindness endureth forever!” We understand when we read such words why this collection of Psalms has held its place in the religious life of the world. It contains the living, throbbing _experience_ of great souls, who cared absolutely for one thing—to find God and to enjoy Him, and who, having found their one precious jewel, could do without all else, and by this inner experience could stand the world. II THE NEW AND LIVING WAY The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews declares that Christ has introduced into the world “a new and living way” to God. The concrete problems confronting this writer to a Jewish circle of the first century were very different from our own problems to-day, but he so succeeded in seizing an eternal aspect of the issue that his word about the new and living way is as vital now as it was then.