2$ PREFACE. form and repeat that worship in the ancient Jewish forms, wherever the psalmist uses them. There are several psalms indeed, which have scarce any thing in them personal or peculiar to David, or the Jews ; such as Psalm i. xix. xxv. xxxvii. lxvii. cx &c. and these, if translated into the plain national language, are very proper materials for psalm° dy in all times and places ; but there are but a few of this kind, in comparison of the great number which havesome- thing of personal concerns, prophetical darknesses, hebraisms, or Jewish affairs mingied.with them. I confess, Mr. Milburn and Mr. Darby, though in very different verse, have now and then given an evangelic turn to the Hebrew sense; and Dr. Patrick bath gone much beyond them in this respect, that be bath made use of the present language of Christians in several psalms, and left out many of the judaisms. This is the thing that bath introduced him into the favour of so many religious assemblies; even those very persons that have an aversion to sing any thing in worship but David's psalms, have been led insensibly to íh11 in with Dr. Patriekes performance, by a relish of pious pleasure, "never c."asidering that his work is by no means a ,lust translation, but a paraphrase and thereare scarce any that have departed farther from the inspired words of scripture than he bath often done, in order to suit his thoughts to the state and worship of Christianity. This I esteem his peculiar excellency in those psalms wherein he has practised it: This I have made my chief care and business in every psalm, and have attempted at least to exceed him in this as well as in the art of verse, and yet I have often kept nearer to the text. But,-after all, this good man bath suffered himself so far to be carried away by custom, as to make all the other personal characters and circum- stances of David appear strong and plain, except that of a Jew; and many of them he has represented in stronger and plainer terms than the original. This will appear to any one that compares these following texts in Dr. Pa. trick with the bible namely, Psalms iv. 2. and ix. 4, 5. and xviii. 43', and li. 4. and lx 6, 7. anti ci. 1. and cxli. 6. and cxliii. 3. and several others: So that it is bard to find, even in his version, six or eight stanzas together in any psalm, that has personal or national affairs in it, so fit to be assumed by a vulgar Christian, or so proper to be sung by a whole congregation. This renders the due performance of psalmody every where difficult to him that appoints the verses: But it is extremely troublesome in those assemblies where the psalm is sung without reading it line by line, which yet is, beyond all excep- tion, the truest and the best method : For in this way of singing there can be no omission of a verse, though it be never so improper; but the whole church must run down to the next division of the psalm, and sing all that comes next to their lips, till the clerk puts them to silence. Or, to remedy this in- convenience, if a wise man leads the song, he dwells always upon four or five and twenty pieces of some select psalms, though the whole hundred and fifty lie before him ; and he is forced to run that narrow round still, for want of larger provision suited to our present circumstances. I might here also remark, to what a hard shift the minister is put to find proper hymns at the celebration of the Lord's supper, where the people will sing nothing but out of David's psalm -book : How perpetually do they repeat some of the xxiiid or the cxviiith psalm? And confine all the glorious joy and melody of that ordinance to a few obscure lines, because the translators have not indulged an evangelical turn to the words of David ; no not in those very places where the Jewish psalmist seems to mean the gospel; but as ex` celleut a poet as he was, he was not able to speak it plain, by reason of the infancy of that dispensation, and longs for the aid of a Christian writer. 'i'boe ;b, to speak my own sense freely, I do not think David ever wrote a twit of sufficient glory and sweetness, to represent the blessings of this holy iostitntion of Christ, even though it were explained by a copious com-
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