is used in the account of Enoch's translation) by God into His presence
and glory--hopes whose exuberance it is hard to confine within the
limits of any changes possible for earth.

The doctrine of a future state never assumed the same prominence, nor
possessed the same clearness in Israel as with us. There are great
tracts of the Old Testament where it does not appear at all. This very
difficulty, about the strange disproportion between character and
circumstances, shows that the belief had not the same place with them as
with us. But it gradually emerged into comparative distinctness.
Revelation is progressive, and the appropriation of revelation is
progressive too. There is a history of God's self-manifestation, and
there is a history of man's reception of the manifestation. It seems to
me that in these two psalms, as in other places of Old Testament
Scripture, we see inspired men in the very course of being taught by
God, on occasion of their earthly sorrows, the clearer hopes which alone
could sustain them. They stood not where we stand, to whom Christ has
'brought life and immortality to light'; but to their devout and
perplexed souls, the dim regions beyond were partially opened, and
though they beheld there a great darkness, they also 'saw a great
light.' They saw all this solid world fade and melt, and behind its
vanishing splendours they saw the glory of the God whom they loved, in
the midst of which they felt that there _must_ be a place for them,
where eternal realities should fill their vision, and a stable
inheritance satisfy their hearts.

The period, then, to which both David and Asaph look, in these two
verses, is the end of life. The words of both, taken in combination,
open out a series of aspects of that period which carry weighty lessons,
and to which we turn now.