The Bishop's Predictions
In 1876, William Alexander, the Bishop of Derry (and future Archbishop of Armagh), made two predictions in his Bampton Lectures at Oxford University (later published as The Witness of the Psalms to Christ and Christianity).
The predictions are unrelated – other than that both have proved uncannily true.
The first was that progress won’t make people happy. The second was that if God’s people forgot that Christ was in the Psalter, it would become almost unheard in churches.
Progress won’t make us happy
According to the Bishop, modern science promised a future ‘City of God minus God; a Paradise minus the Tree of Life; a Millennium with education to perfect the intellect, and sanitary improvements to emancipate the body from a long catalogue of evils’.
But what would be the result?
'Sorrow, no doubt, will not be abolished; immortality will not be bestowed. But we shall have comfortable and perfectly drained houses to be wretched in’.
In words that could be applied to the internet:
‘The news of our misfortunes, the tidings that turn the hair white and half break the strong man’s heart, will be conveyed to us from the ends of the earth by the agency of a telegraphic system without a flaw’.
Yet on the bright side:
‘The closing eye may cease to look to the land beyond the River; but in our last moments we shall be able to make a choice between patent furnaces for the cremation of our remains, and coffins of the most charming description for their preservation when desiccated’.
The Bishop then went on to predict the entombment of the Psalms.
Without Christ, the Psalter will become a closed book
The Bishop believed:
‘The best, the only explanation of the psalms….is this: that [Christ’s] Humanity found in them a collection of appropriate devotions: Prayer-book, liturgy, hymn-book, fitted and pre-harmonised for a Divine Sufferer and Pilgrim...They are lyrics primarily of the Humanity of our Lord, secondarily of ours'.
‘Read these psalms without this thought; they are petrifactions for a linguistic museum’.
For the Bishop, ‘The golden key of the Psalter lies in a Pierced Hand’. If this key were to be lost, the place of the psalms in the Christian church would likewise be lost:
‘not all the human universality of the Psalter; not all its unquestionable pathos, and cries from the depths; not all the mystic elevation of the “Songs of Degrees;” not all the ringing bells of its Hallelujahs, can alone preserve for it its present place’.
He gave the example of a recent convert from Hinduism. Given that he was an eminent Sanskrit scholar, it was expected that he would first study New Testament Greek (a related language). But his love for the Psalter was so deep that he first devoted himself to the study of Hebrew. Why? ‘For in the Psalter he finds Christ, and the Gospel; and, without that, he would, no doubt, prefer the ancient Hymns of his race and country’.
Custom/Tradition isn't enough
‘Without an intense conviction in the hearts of God's children that Christ is in the Psalter, that it is in sympathy with His Passion and His Glory, its words would, after a brief season of deference to ancient custom, be almost unheard in our Churches and Cathedrals. They would be comparatively silent, for the future, in sick rooms, and unbreathed by the lips of dying saints…The Psalms, for the future, might no doubt remain, and be read, in a book, of which successive editions might be called for. But the fitting symbol for the frontispiece of that book would be a broken lyre dropped from a dead man's hand.’
150 years later, the Bishop’s warning has surely proved true.
The message to Psalm-singing churches is clear: Show people that Christ is in the Psalms, because nothing else will keep God’s people singing them.