allusion to the nation.1 Babylon was represented as a monster which swallowed and cast up Jonah, because the book of Jeremiah had already made that figure familiar to the Hebrews as a picture of the exile and the return.2 So this writer wrote his parable to teach, that Israel was carried captive for not doing her proper missionary work, and that after her escape from captivity she did it sullenly and in anything but the right spirit. When interpreted from this point of view the book becomes a most interesting missionary tract. It portrays well what a missionary or a missionary people should not be, and by contrast sets forth the ideal missionary character.1

It was this feature-the missionary preaching of Jonah-upon which our Lord seized as a sign or type of His own work,' and we

"That it was also the name of a prophet, may have influenced him too, see 2 Kings xiv, 25.

2See Jeremiah li, 35, 44.

"No one with literary feeling can read this book in connection with Amos and Hosea and not be convinced that it comes from very different age. It resembles Esther, Judith, and Tobit much more closely in style.

The fact that Christ refers to it does not prove that it is not an allegory. He often, as in the parable of the prodigal son, used imaginative material as parables.

Scholars generally recognize that Luke gives Christ's real teaching in this matter, and that Matthew is mistaken in making it refer to His entombment,

therefore have His example for regarding it in this light. It presents as the ideal that spirit of loving service for all the world. which was so characteristic of Christ. It caught a little of the spirit of that great commission: "Go ye therefore and make disciples of all the nations," and is a type of that Christlike missionary impulse, which in the last century has heard the cry for release from error coming

"From Greenland's icy mountains,

From India's coral strand,

Where Africa's sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sands,"

and has sought to meet the great need in the Master's way,-an impulse which must go forward until "the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ."

CHAPTER LII.

THE PSALTER.

"Sing us one of the songs of Zion." Psalm cxxxvii, 3.

"And so the shadows fall apart,

And so the west-winds play;
And all the windows of my heart
I open to the day."

- Whittier.

THE Psalter was the hymn-book of the second temple. While it contains here and there psalms which were composed in the days before the exile, those psalms were selected because they expressed the hopes and fears, the aspirations and the faith of the post-exilic days. Compilers of hymnbooks always allow themselves some editorial liberty. For example, Whittier wrote. for election day, 1842, a poem entitled “Democracy," beginning:

"Bearer of Freedom's holy light,

Breaker of Slaverys' chain and rod."

If I remember rightly, it was Samuel Longfellow who introduced extracts from it into a hymnal under the title "Christianity," and

with various editorial changes it has since found its way under this title into many hymn-books. Probably the editors of the psalter allowed themselves similar editorial liberties, but they secured a work which is capable of expressing the religious emotions of the world, because it so faithfully expressed their own.

Readers of the Revised Version will have noticed that the psalter is divided into five books. These books were collected and edited at different times as the Moody and Sankey hymns have been within the memory of many now living. The first of these collections seems to have been made in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah and was named after king David. The second and third were composed by putting together and rearranging three previously existing hymn-books, which were entitled "The Prayers of David," "The Psalms of Asaph," and "The Psalms of the Sons of Korah," and were completed by the end of the Persian period, about 330 B. C. The fourth and fifth books were completed by about 130 B. C., and include some Psalms

from the Maccabaean time.1 The last two books have incorporated in them previously existing smaller hymn-books. Thus "The Songs of Ascent,"-Psa. cxx-cxxxiv,—is a little collection of songs concerning the return from Babylon.

While modern study of the psalms has made it clear that we can trace few of them back to David in their present form, it has also made it very clear that the rich religious life of the ancient Jews produced many more inspired psalm-writers than we had supposed. God still speaks to us in these stirring lyrics. Through them He teaches us how to speak to Him. We know them to be inspired, not because we can connect them with the pen of this or that heroic figure, but because they still bring inspiring messages to our spirits.

The psalter is a type of the varied religious life of modern Christendom, just as it is

On the composition of the Psalter, see an article by the writer in The American Journal of Theology, Vol. iii, pp. 740-746, and W. Robertson Smith's Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 2 ed. N. Y., Appleton's 1892, ch. vii. The titles of the Psalms were added by editors, and in most cases were hasty guesses, which are often inconsistent with the contents of the Psalm. Thus, Ps. li, is ascribed to David by the title, while v. 18 shows it to come from the exile. The real value of the titles lies in the fact that they give us the history of the compilation of the psalter.