Excellent Spiritual Reading
DURiNG many weeks of extreme languor the Psalms have never been out of my hands. I was never wearied of reading over and over those sublime lamentations, those flights of hope, those supplications full of love, which answer to all the wants and all the miseries of human nature. It is nearly three thousand years since a king composed those songs in his days of repentance and desolation; and we still find in them the expression of our deepest anguish, and the consolation of our sorrows. The priest recites them daily; thousands of monasteries have been founded in order that these psalms might be chanted at every hour, and that this voice of supplication might never be silent. The Gospel alone is superior to the hymns of David, and this only because it is their fulfilment, because all the yearnings, all the ardors, all the holy impatience of the prophet find their accomplishment in the Redeemer issued of his race. — Ozanam.
The Psalms, besides their inspiration, their majesty and pathos, their sublime poetry, and their prophetic character, have a threefold claim to our veneration — as the Prayer of David, the Prayer of Jesus Christ, and
