calamities be overpast."

It was on God, then, that his which we might have inferred

heart was fixed; a truth from the text itself, and still more decisively, from the exulting strain of praise with which the Psalm concludes;" I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people; I will sing into thee among the nations; for thy mercy is great into the heavens, and thy truth unto the clouds."

This notice of the Psalmist's situation, besides pointing us to God as the object on which his heart was fixed, accounts also for the energy and fire with which he expresses himself in the text. His condition was destitute and perilous in the extreme. Without provisions, without adequate force, and without protection, he was hunted as a partridge on the mountains, by a powerful monarch. The fortified city dared not offer him a defence; for him the rock was no sufficient stronghold, nor its caverns a safe concealment. From the toils and hardships of a harassing flight, and from the utter hopelessness of a case for which there was no relief by human agency, he turned to God as his fortress and deliverer. Everywhere else there might be darkness and despair, but here there were light, consolation, and security. As he recalls to remembrance all that God had already done for him, and all that he had promised yet farther to do, his spirit enters a serener world, and he refrains from his complaint against his inveterate enemies. A new life is quickened within him; wherefore he strikes his harp to a new measure, and exultingly strikes it again, in giving utterance to the fulness of his confidence. "My heart is fixed, Q

God, my heart is fixed." He announces it with all the bold abruptness of a new and most joyful discovery; he repeats it with all the energy of matured and unalterable decision.

And it will be observed, that in fixing his heart on God, the Psalmist more especially contemplates those gentler features of the divine character, on which the regards of the guilty and dependant creature must ever most complacently rest. "I will cry unto God, most high,” he says; "unto God that performeth for me. He shall send from heaven and save me from the reproach of men that would swallow me up."-" God shall send forth his mercy and his truth." In another Psalm he exclaims, "O God, thou art terrible, out of thy holy places," thus uttering a sentiment to which the heart of every self-condemned sinner must often have responded. God, in his glorious majesty, commanding an obedient universe, as he appears in creation; or clothed with many thunders, as the Israelites saw and heard him on Sinai, cannot be otherwise contemplated by the guilty, than with awful apprehension. Upon the great Jehovah angels may gaze, unalarmed, though adoring, while the earth is quaking beneath his feet, and the heavens are rent and blazing around him; but that is no spectacle to be witnessed, or even endured by the eye of conscious guilt. Behold him in his stern dignity as a judge, stretching forth his arm to scatter fire and brimstone on Sodom, or frowning through thickest darkness on Egypt; behold him thus, and if you know him, and know yourselves, you must tremble and shrink back in dismay. "Our God is a consuming fire ;" and sin

ful flesh may not meet him as the author and avenger of his laws, without confessing, in deep amazement of spirit, that he is terrible. It is only when with David we see him sending forth his "mercy and his truth" to save us; it is only when we behold the glory of these attributes as they are emblazoned on the cross of his beloved Son, that our hearts, re-assured by this display of immeasurable love, turn to him with confidence and kindly affection. In the more imperial attributes of his holiness and justice, which are at eternal war with every form of evil, the hearts even of unreconciled sinners might, in some of their moods of feeling, be truly said to be fixed on God, though in a sense most remote from that of the text. With their eyes opened at last to their own sin and to the just judgment of God, and pierced through with that firiest bolt of divine vengeance-a remorse unsoftened, unrelieved by godly sorrowing-they might gaze upon him with a rooted horror, coiled up and crouching, as a man awaits the mortal thrust of his murderer. We must know Him as a merciful God, and be able to make our refuge under the shadow of his wings; we must see him in his mild and gracious character, as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, before those guilty and therefore trembling hearts of ours can cordially embrace and rest upon him. So David makes the mercy which He had promised, and the truth which guaranteed the promise, the first and the last themes, the beginning and the end of his song. "Be merciful to me," is the cry with which the Psalm opens. "God shall send forth his mercy and his truth," is the ground of the trust expressed in the third

verse; and the last cadences of the strain seem to linger affectionately over the same endearing attributes" thy mercy is great unto the heavens, and thy truth unto the clouds."

God, then, being the object on which the Psalmist had fixed his heart, it is next to be considered how, or with what sentiments, it was so fixed. Nor is this enquiry more difficult of solution than the last. The expressions of confiding regard which occur throughout the Psalm, indicate that the heart of the writer was fixed on God by faith. In faith it is that he exclaims, "My soul trusteth in thee, yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge;" and it is in the same faith too, that he purposes to pray, when he says, "I will cry unto God most high, unto God that performeth for me." Nor could his heart have been otherwise fixed on God, than by the virtue of that all-important principle which lies at the very source of practical godliness, admitting the light by which divine truth irradiates the soul, and constituting the assimilating power, by whose energy the things believed are converted into the bread of life. "He that cometh into God," says the great apostle, "must believe that he is, and that he is the rewarder of them that seek him." In truth, practically and in effect, God is not otherwise revealed than to faith only; for they who believe not in his existence, have not, and know not, the true God at all, any more than if he did not exist; and so cannot possibly set their hearts on him. Nay, before the heart can be fixed upon God, there must be a belief which holds far higher conclusions regarding him than that of his mere being, and which enters

much more deeply into the soul than any mere reasonable conviction; there must be a clear apprehension, among other truths affecting his nature, of his goodness and mercy; and these must awaken, within the believer, the echo of a responsive affection. David's faith was such as that of which Paul speaks, "a believing with the heart." He believed in God, not as some great abstraction-some almost wholly unknown power existing in the distant heavens, afar from his creatures, and indifferent to their interests. On the contrary, he trusted in Him with a firm reliance, and a constant affection, as a very present help in time of need, as his God, and friend, and deliverer. He believed, in short, with a vital and appropriating faith, in that divine merey which had so often been proclaimed in a general way, and in those special promises of it which had been made to himself in particular. He believed that, dark and disastrous as was his present condition and merely human prospects, he had yet not in vain been royally anointed by the prophet of God, and brought from peacefully following his flocks at Bethlehem, into the troubled career of public life. He believed that the glory and the power thus predicted for him, would certainly be accomplished by the God of truth, whose unerring word stood pledged to their accomplishment. Like Abraham, he believed the promises of God, even when their fulfilment seemed most hopeless and improbable, and thus believing, his faith was counted to him for righteousness.

This exercise of his faith, under the pressure of the heavy calamities with which he struggled, unquestion