XXIV.

A Prayer of Moses, the Man of God."

"Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children. And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it."-Ps. xc. 16, 17.

ALTHOUGH Some difficulties have been started, there seems no reason to doubt that this Psalm is the composition of Moses. From the remotest period his name has been attached to it, and almost every Biblical scholar, from Jerome down to Hengstenberg, has agreed to accept it as a prayer of that man of God" whose name it has always carried.

If so, it is one of the oldest poems in the world. Compared with it Homer and Pindar are (so to speak) modern, and even King David is of recent date. That is to say, compared with this ancient hymn the other psalms are as much more modern as Tennyson and Longfellow are more modern than Chaucer. In either case there are nearly five centuries between.

The occasion on which it was written can only be

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conjectured; but from internal evidence we should say that it must have been either towards the end of the wilderness sojourn, or after that calamitous outburst which was punished by a lengthened detention in the desert, and from which it resulted that of those who were forty years old on leaving Egypt only two made out the fourscore and arrived in the land of promise (7-11).

This is enough to account for the tone of the Psalm, so pensive and plaintive. Moses himself was an exception. He had nearly made out the sixscore years, but this made him only the more lonely-the greater contrast to the youthful race which had started up around him. It gave him the feeling described by a poet of our own (Dr. Young),—

"One world deceased, another born,

Like Noah, they behold,

O'er whose white hair and furrow'd brows

Too many suns have roll'd.

Happy the patriarch! he rejoiced

His second world to see;

My second world, though gay the scene,

Can boast no charms for me.

To me this brilliant age appears

With desolation spread;

Near all with whom I lived and smiled,
Whilst life was life, are dead."

And although there is every reason to believe that

the new generation was an immense improvement

on its predecessor, it had the drawback of being dreadfully new. It contained no one with whom in the days of his youth the Psalmist had been acquainted. As if a flood had swept over the scene, that race had been carried completely away; and now he was left at once a spectator and a spectacle, in the midst of a race none of whom had known him when young,-like the primeval oak or elm looking down on a whole upstart forest, and himself the venerable monument of a generation which had utterly vanished.

Nothing can be more pathetic than the middle portion-verses 3-10; nor can anything be more expressive than the imagery under which the shortness of our earthly existence is described. Compared with the years of the Eternal it is nothing. Even although the original millennium were continued-even although the thousand years of Adam and Methusaleh were still vouchsafed, -they would pass, and after they were past,-" before God's sight," compared with the years of the Eternal, they would look no more than a rapid and returnless "yesterday." Life, he says, is like "a watch in the night.” The weary warrior lays him down, and he fancies that he has hardly closed his eyes-it does not look like forty winks-when he is roused to take his turn in the trenches or relieve the sentinel on the battlements, or join the forlorn-hope-the storming

party in the escalade. is our mortal history. dreams, and others wake up and see a ghastly apparition bending over us. "What, O Death! is that you already? It cannot possibly be time." And he answers, "Yes, indeed. The tale is told; the night is spent; and now you must turn out into the morning. Nor is it so short as you imagine. Look at the clock, and you will see that it has come to threescore and ten. Look into the mirror, and you will see that there are snows upon your head, that there are furrows on your brow, that there are crows'-feet in the corners of your eyes."

And like such a short "sleep" We have had some pleasant rather frightful: when we

From man's mortality the Psalmist seeks refuge in God's eternity. As the first and foremost thought it begins the Psalm; and there evidently underlies it the assumption that man's immortality is involved in the immortality of God. "Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations," and as at the bush Jehovah proclaimed, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," showing that these godly patriarchs still were extant, and still had a life in the great I AM, so from the wreck and desolation all around him, the Psalmist lifts his eyes to that true and only Potentate, who alone hath immortality. Of all the godly generations God is the eternal home. Nothing which He once blesses with His

friendship is ever blotted out of being, or is disappointed of that exceeding great reward to which He Himself has taught it to aspire. The tent is gone, but the pilgrim lives. The tent is torn and scattered amongst the elements; but the pilgrim has exchanged its frail and flimsy shelter for a house eternal. He has got better than any building made with hands, for He has passed in beneath the covert of the Almighty, and will henceforth have that home which God had for Himself before the mountains were brought forth, or ever He had formed the earth and the world.

If man be ephemeral, God is eternal. Such is the first consideration. But a second thought strikes the Psalmist. After he has depicted life's shortness he seems startled by his own description. Is it so? Is it really a dream-a sleep-a yesterday? Then how astounding is the universal delusion! what a mad mistake is this general hope that tomorrow will be as this day and much more abundant! "Lord, teach us so to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." On which Calvin remarks, "Children learn numbers as soon as they begin to prattle, and we do not need an arithmetical tutor to enable us to count a hundred on our fingers. So much the more shameful is our stupidity in never comprehending the short term of our life.

Even the most accomplished accountant