The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

iii. 55-66.] DE PROFUNDIS 255
to " an unknown god " can excite but the feeblest and
vaguest devotion. Inasmuch as our Lord has greatly
enriched the contents of the name of God by His full
revelation of the Divine Father, to us Christians there
has come a more definite direction and a more powerful
impulse for prayer. Even though this is a prayer
de profundis it is an enlightened prayer. We may
believe that, like a star seen from the depths of a well
which excludes the glare of day, the significance of the
sacred Name shone out to the sufferer with a beauty
never before perceived when he looked up to heaven
from the darkness of his pit of misery.
It has been suggested that in this passage the elegist
is following the sixty-ninth psalm, and that perhaps
that psalm is his own composition and the expression
of the very prayer to which he is here referring. At
all events, the psalm exactly fits the situation; and
therefore it may be taken as a perfect illustration of
the kind of prayer alluded to. The psalmist is " in
deep mire, where there is no standing ;
" he has " come
into deep waters, where the floods overthrow " him
he is persecuted by enemies who hate him "without a
cause ;
" he has been weeping till his e3'es have failed.
Meanwhile he has been waiting for God, in prayers
mingled with confessions. It is his zeal for God's
house that has brought him so near to death. He
beseeches God that the flood may not be allowed to
overwhelm him, nor ** the pit shut her mouth upon
him." He concludes with an invocation of curses
upon the heads of his enemies. All these as well as
some minor points agree very closely with our poet's
picture of his persecutions and the prayer he here
records.
Read in the light of the elegist's experience, such a
;