The Psalms

 The Psalms form the most wonderful expression of human feelings that was ever penned. Those who know the Psalms only slightly do not understand this. But those who are wise enough to know them well, to learn them by heart and use them, know that there is not any state of feeling, not any condition in life, for which that wonderful book does not furnish the most exact and well-fitted expressions that can be conceived or desired. With joy and thankfulness the Psalms run over; they abound in expressions of faith, and trust, and cheerful confidence in the mercy and goodness of God. Of penitential sorrow and distress for sins, of humble confession and repentance, they are so full that they almost seem to contain nothing else. For peaceful times, for anxious times, for times of affliction and grief, for reliance on God in the morning or in the evening, awake or asleep, at midnight or at midday, in solitude or in society,—none know so well as those who know the Psalms, or some of them, by heart, what a store of heavenly expressions they furnish by which Christian hearts may pour themselves out to God in strains the most beautiful, and most exactly suitable to all their various states of feeling and condition. It has been said of Holy Scripture in general, and it is more applicable to the Psalms than to any other book in it, that its eye follows us, like the eye of a picture, ever fixed upon us, turn where we will. Cook

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