SERMON V.

PSALM xlv. 1.

I speak of the things which I have made touching the King," or "unto the King."

THIS

HIS forty-fifth psalm has for many ages made a stated part of the public service of the church on this anniversary festival of our blessed Lord's nativity. With God's assistance, I purpose to explain to you its application, both in the general subject and in each particular part, to this great occasion; which will afford both seasonable and edifying matter of discourse.

It is a poetical composition, in the form of an epithalamium or song of congratulation, upon the marriage of a great king, to be sung to music at the wedding-feast. The topics are such as were the usual groundwork of such gratula

VOL. I.

* Preached on Christmas-day.

F

The

tory odes with the poets of antiquity: They all fall under two general heads-the praises of the bridegroom, and the praises of the bride. The bridegroom is praised for the comeliness of his person and the urbanity of his address-for his military exploits-for the extent of his conquests -for the upright administration of his government for the magnificence of his court. bride is celebrated for her high birth-for the beauty of her person, the richness of her dress, and her numerous train of blooming bridemaids. It is foretold that the marriage will be fruitful, and that the sons of the great king will be sovereigns of the whole earth. In this general structure of the poem, we find nothing but the common topics and the common arrangement of every wedding-song: And were it not that it is come down to us in the authentic collection of the sacred hymns of the Hebrew church, and. that some particular expressions are found in it, which, with all the allowance that can be made for the hyperbolisms of the oriental style (of which, of late years, we have been accustomed to hear more than is true, as applied to the sacred

writers), are not easily applicable to the parties, even in a royal marriage, were it not for such expressions which occur, and for the notorious circumstance that it had a distinguished place in the canon of the Hebrew scriptures, we should not be led to divine, from any thing in the general structure of the poem, that this psalm had reference to any religious subject. But when we connect these circumstances with another, which cannot have escaped the observation of any reader of the Bible, that the relation between the Saviour and his church is represented in the writings both of the Old and New Testament under the image of the relation of a husband to his wife, that it is a favourite image with all the ancient prophets, when they would set forth the lovingkindness of God for the church, or the church's dutiful return of love to him; while, on the contrary, the idolatry of the church, in her apostacies, is represented as the adultery of a married woman,—that this image has been consecrated to this signification by our Lord's own use of it, who describes God in the act of settling the church in her final state of peace and perfec

tion, as a king making a marriage for his son ;the conjecture that will naturally arise upon the recollection of these circumstances will be, that this epithalamium, preserved among the sacred writings of the ancient Jewish church, celebrates no common marriage, but the great mystical wedding, that Christ is the bridegroom, and the spouse his church. And this was the unanimous opinion of all antiquity, without exception even of the Jewish expositors: For although, with the veil of ignorance and prejudice upon their understandings and their hearts, they discern not the completion of this or of any of their prophecies in the Son of Mary, yet they all allow, that this is one of the prophecies which relate to the Messiah and Messiah's people; and none of them ever dreamed of an application of it to the marriage of any earthly prince.

It is the more extraordinary, that there should have arisen in the Christian church, in later ages, expositors of great name and authority, and indeed of great learning, who have maintained that the immediate subject of the psalm is the marriage of Solomon with Pharaoh's daughter

and can discover only a distant reference to Christ and the church, as typified by the Jewish king

and his Egyptian bride. This exposition, too absurd and gross for Jewish blindness, contrary to the unanimous sense of the fathers of the earliest ages, unfortunately gained credit, in a late age, in the reformed churches, upon the authority of Calvin; insomuch, that in an English translation of the Bible, which goes under the name of Queen Elizabeth's Bible, because it was in common use in private families in her reign, we have this argument prefixed to the psalm: "The majestie of Solomon, his honour, strength, beauty, riches, and power, are praised; and also his marriage with the Egyptian, being an heathen woman, is blessed." It is added indeed, "Under this figure, the wonderfull majestie and increase of the kingdom of Christ, and his church now taken of the Gentiles, is described. "-Now the account of this matter is this. This English translation of the Bible, which is, indeed, upon the whole, a very good one, and furnished with very edifying notes and illustrations (except that in many points they savour too much of Calvin