It1 ON THE IMPROVEMENT OP PSALMODY. so far as may be without public offence : Judah and Israel may be called England and Scotland, and the land of Canaan may be translated into Great Britain : The cloudy and typical ex- pressions of the legal dispensation should be turned into evange- lical language, according to the explications of the New Testa- ment : And when a christiau psalmist, among the characters of a saint; Ps. xv. 5. meets with the man that a puts not out his money to usury, he ought to exchange him for one that is no op- pressor or extortioner, since usury is not utterly forbidden to christians, as it was by the Jewish law'; and wheresoever he finds the person or offices of our Lord Jesus Christ in prophecy, they ought rather to be translated in a way of history, and those evangelical truths should be stript of their veil of darkness, and Brest in such expressions that Christ may appear in them to all that sing. When he comes to Ps. xi. 6. and reads these words, " Mine ears hast thou opened," he should learn from the apostle to say " A body hast thou prepared me ;" Heb. x: 5. Instead of " binding the sacrifice with cords to the horns of the altar ;" Ps. cxviii. 27. we should " offer up spiritual sacrifices, that is the prayer and praise of the heart and tongue, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ;" I Pet. ü.5. Where there are any dark expres- sions, and difficult to be understood in the Hebrew songs, they should be left out in our psalmody, or at least made very plain by a paraphrase. Where there are sentences, or whole psalms, that can very difficultly be accommodated to our times, they may be utterly omitted. Such is Ps. cl. part of the xxxviii, xlv, xlviii, lx, lxviii, lxxxi, cviii. and some others, as well as a great parr of the song of Solomon. Perhaps it will be objected here, that the book of Psalms would hereby be rendered very imperfect, and some weak per - sons might imagine this attempt to fall under the censure of Rev. xxii. 18, 19. that is, " of taking away from, or adding to the words of the hook of God." But it is not difficult to reply, that though the whole book of psalms was given to be read by us as God's word for our use and instruction, yet it will never follow from thence that the whole was written as a psalter for the chris- tian church to use in singing. For if this were the design of it, then every psalm, and every line of it might be at one time or another proper to be sung by ehrismians : But there are many hundred verses in that book which a christiau cannot properly assume in singing, without a considerable alteration of the words, or at least without putting a very different meaning upon them, from what David had when he wrote them; and therefore there is no necessity, of translating always entire Psalms, nor of pre- paring the whole book for English psahnotly. I might here add also Dr. Patrick's apology in his century of Psalms first pub- lished, that he took but the same liberty which is allowed to
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=