4 Sermon Preached in Bubbling Well Chapel By Rev. Dean Triveit at Evensong on July 3 in drainage lon^ Peel 11:
Trxr.—"By the rivers of Babylon. show shall we sing the Lord's song IS Psálm has a poetic power hardly surpassed by anything in the whole book of the Psalms.
Even had it not been included in the Inspired Writings, it would have been given a high place in poetry. If in the closing verses we are repelled by those utterances of burning indignation, breathing direst hatred, we must remember "before we critize too severely, that the writer and those for whom he wrote, had lived through those days pictured in the last chapter of the Book of Chronicles, They had seen their temple burned, their city ruined and destroyed, their wives ravished and their children slain. And now in far off Babylon they are in bitter slavery under the same savage and remorseless power. The whole Psalm is a wonderful mixture of soft melancholy and fiery pa-triorism.
The hand. that wrote it must have known how to.smite sharply with the sword, as well as how to tune the harp. The words are burning words of a heart breathing undying love to his country, and also undying hate to his foe.
Israel were God's chosen people, to whom he might reveal his will, and through whom he might manifest his grace, And there is a very real sense in which they are typical of God's Church in all ages of the world, They are typical in many different ways of every individual believer.
With this thought of Israel's experiences as typical of the Christian's life and walk in the world, Let us look at the Psalm more closely. "These things were written for our: learning" Let us look first of all, to see what it meant for Israel, and then what it typifies for us, and the lessons we should learn from it.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.