APPENDIX A.
James Dodson
——
Psalms for both Testaments.
IN addition to the more direct argument by which we have established in our 2d chapter, the permanent appointment of the Book of Psalms as the church’s manual of praise, we quote the following from the pen of the learned author of “The Typology of the Scriptures,” embodying in our quotation the high commendations of this Book from the pen of another distinguished writer:—
“These psalms are chiefly summaries, in a poetical and impressive form, of great truths and principles, derived from the past acts and revelations of God, by some of the most gifted members of the church, and accompanied with such pious reflections and devout breathings of soul, as the subjects naturally suggested, through God’s Spirit, to their minds. In them is expressed, we may say, the very life and essence of the symbolical institutions and manifold transactions in providence, through which the members of the old covenant were instructed in the knowledge, and trained to the ser-
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vice of the true God—and so expressed as to be most admirably fitted for forming the minds of all to right views and feelings concerning God, and enabling them to give due utterance to these in their exercises of devotion. But was this the character and design of the Book of Psalms merely to the Old Testament church? Is it not equally adapted for the suitable expression of pious feeling, for a help to devotion, for a directory of spiritual thought and holy living, to the church of the New Testament? Is there a feature in the divine character as now developed in the gospel, a spiritual principle or desire in the mind of an enlightened Christian, a becoming exercise of affection or a matter of vital experience in the divine life, of which the record is not to be found in this invaluable portion of holy writ? And how could such a book have existed among the sacred writings centuries before the Christian era, but for the fact that the old and new covenants, however much they may have differed in outward form, and however the transactions respectively connected with them may have been inferior in the one case to the other, yet were alike pervaded by the same great truths and principles? Thus the Book of Psalms, standing mid-way between both covenants, and serving equally to the members of each as the handmaid of a living piety, is a witness of the essential identity of their primary and fundamental ideas. There the disciples of Moses and of Christ meet as on common ground, the one taking up as their most natural and fitting expressions of faith and hope, the hallowed words, which the other had been wont to use in their devotions ages before, and then be-
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queathed as a legacy to succeeding generations of believers. So intimately connected were they with the affairs and circumstances of the dispensation, which was to vanish away, that they one and all took their occasion from these, and are fraught throughout with references to them; and yet, so accordant are they to the better things of the dispensation that abideth, so perfectly adapted to the ways of God as exhibited in the gospel, and the spiritual life required of its professors, that they are invariably the most used and relished by those, who are most established in the grace, and most replenished with the blessing of God. It was confessedly carnal institutions, under which the holy men worshipped, who were employed by God to indite these divine songs, as it was also the transactions of an earthly and temporal life, which formed the immediate ground and occasion of the sentiments they unfold; yet, where in all scripture will the believer, who ‘worships in spirit and in truth,’ more readily go to find language for expressing his loftiest conceptions of God, for portraying his most spiritual and enlarged views of the character he is called to maintain, or for breathing forth his most elevated desires and feelings after divine things? So that the Psalms may well be termed, with Augustine, ‘an epitome of the whole Scriptures,’ and a summary, not as Luther said, of the Old Testament merely, but of both Testaments together, in their grand elements of truth and outlines of history. ‘What is there necessary for man to know,’ says Hooker, ‘which the Psalms are not able to teach? They are to beginners an easy and familiar introduction, a mighty augmen-
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tation of all virtue and knowledge in such as are entered before, a strong confirmation to the most perfect among others. Heroical magnanimity, exquisite justice, grave moderation, exact wisdom, repentance unfeigned, unwearied patience, the mysteries of God, the sufferings of Christ, the terrors of wrath, the comforts of grace, the works of Providence over this world, and the promised joys of that world which is to come, all good necessarily to be either known, or had, or done, this one celestial fountain yieldeth.’ We may, therefore, conclusively appeal to the character of this extraordinary book, as confirmatory of the general views, which it has been our object to establish. It renders clear as noon-day the perfect identity of those great truths and principles, on which both economies were founded as to the institutions of worship, and the providential dealings respectively connected with them. And as we know the one to have been all arranged in preparation for the other, consequently in pre-ordained connexion with it, we thus learn what was the real nature of the resemblances, which formed the connecting link between the things of the two covenants, and, how we are to explain the one as types and the other as antitypes.”*
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* Fairbairn’s Typology, &c., pp. 60–63. Ed. 1852.