Christ and His Church in the Book of the Psalms - CCS by Andrew Bonar and published by Classics Publications.
Few of the Books of Scripture are richer than the Book of Psalms, that “Hymn-book for all times,” as it has been called. “There,” says Luther, “you look right down into the heart of saints, and behold all manner of joys and joyous thoughts toward God and his love springing lustily into life!”
Again, “you look into the heart of saints as into death and hell!” “How gloomy and dark their mournful visions of God.” Another has said, “The Psalms teach me to prize a much tried life.”
And Tholuok (who gives these quotations) remarks, “Songs which, like the Psalms, have stood the test of three thousand years, contain a germ for eternity.”
The Psalms are for all ages alike - “not more for David than for us. Even as the cry, ‘It is finished’ though first heard by the ear of John and the women from Galilee, who stood at the cross, was not meant for them more truly than for us;” so with the Psalms.
The writers were prepared by God, through personal and public circumstances, for breathing forth appropriately the mind of Him who used them, Irving, in his preface to Horne on the Psalms, has spoken some most valuable truths on this subject. He remarks that the Psalms, like the prophetic writings, “arose by the suggestion of some condition of the church, present in the days of the prophets, as the particular case.
But passing beyond this in time, and passing beyond it in aggravation of every circumstance, they give as it were a consecutive glance of all the like cases and kindred passages in the history of the Church, and bring out the general law of God’s providence and grace in the present, and in all the future parallel cases.”
