I. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. II. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments. III. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. IV. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. V. Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. Thou shalt not kill. VI. VII. Thou shalt not commit adultery. VIII. Thou shalt not steal. IX. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. X. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour's. - EXODUS 20: 3-17. Bible. Ergish Revised. You tank 16 SELECTIONS FROM THE PSALMS AND OTHER SCRIPTURES IN THE REVISED VERSION, FOR RESPONSIVE READING IN CHURCH SERVICES AND ON EDITED BY REV. JOSEPH T. DURYEA, D.D. BOSTON AND CHICAGO: COPYRIGHT, 1886, BY CONGREGATIONAL SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND PUBLISHING SOCIETY. Electrotyped and printed by Stanley & Usher, سے 199 DE PREFACE. THE following pages contain portions of the Sacred Scriptures selected chiefly from the Psalms, but also from the Prophets, the Gospels, the Epistles, and the Revelation, for the use of Christian congregations in public worship. The most of them are appropriate to the ordinary services of the Lord's Day. The rest are adapted to the special services of Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving Day, Fast Day, missionary meetings, and the Lord's Supper. These selections are not designed to be read with the aim of instruction, but to be recited for the ends of worship. The book is not a lectionary, but a manual of devotion. 1 In the view of the writers, both of the Old Testament and the New, worship is the offering to God of thought and emotion in some form of expression. The worshiper is not passive, but active; not the subject of impressions, but the agent of expressions. It is enough that his mind be engaged in thought, his heart excited to emotion. He must " direct," "lift up,” his soul to God, and signify or utter his sentiment, his thoughtful emotion, to him. This is clear enough with respect to those exercises which all agree in recognizing as acts of worship. These are all directed to God and expressive. Otherwise they are not complete, however proper and salutary they may be to the spiritual life. Contemplation of the majesty and perfection of God with emotions of reverence and admiration is not adoration; recollection of the divine mercies with the emotion of gratitude is not thanksgiving; consideration of dependence and need with the feeling of desire is not prayer. If the familiar lines, "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, be interpreted in the strict sense of the words and taken as a true description for guidance in practice, the result will be perilous, if not 1 The Greek word denotes an act of reverence, whether paid to man (see chap. 18: 26) or to God (see chap. 4: 10). Note IV of the American Committee to Revised Version. sustained by communion by "uttered" he means fatal, to that life which is quickened and with God. The poet is in error, unless spoken, and by "unexpressed," unspoken. Desire may be signified, and so become supplication or petition, by other tokens than those of articulate speech, as the poet himself says in his stanzas following. But, still, speech is the natural medium of devotion. Our Lord, when asked to teach his disciples how to pray, responded: "When ye pray, SAY, Our Father," etc. The apostle teaches, "In everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God." He who is revealed in the High-priest, who " can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities," no doubt regards the "burden of a sigh," and the "falling of a tear," does the fall of a sparrow, but it is not a prayer. so he From the earliest ages, among all races which have cherished the religious sentiments, song has been a natural, though not universal, means of expression in worship. The poet has framed the language of emotion in the lyrical form, and the musician has adapted to it fit melodies, sung often with the accompaniment of instruments. These hymns have been, for the most part, devotional, not indirectly, but directly so, addressed to God. The call to sing them night appropriately have been that which was so familiar to the Hebrew people, "O come let us sing unto the Lord!" Among their own psalms, preserved to us, by far the greater number were utterances of penitence, confession, aspiration, thanksgiving, petition, faith, hope, love to God. Though sung by sentences alternately, or, as we say, "responsively," or "antiphonally," they were sung in the spirit of the apostle's exhortation, "speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your hearts unto the Lord.” 1 There are, indeed, psalms in which the patriotic blends with the religious sentiments, and even such as the worshipers were wont to address to each other, designed to excite the emotions and incite to noble action in the service of Jehovah. But these simply make it evident that song has no religious uses aside from the ends of pure worship. But even these battle-songs and triumphal anthems were sung as in the presence of Jehovah, in the spirit of another exhortation of the same apostle, " teaching and admonishing one another in 1 Ephesians 5: 19. |