Psalms 124

When the conflict was over, the venerable Theodore Beza, eighty years old, returned solemn thanks, and gave out the 124th Psalm to be sung. Every year since, on 12 December, it has been sung in Geneva Dr. Tholuck of Halle used to tell an anecdote of his father-in-law. He was a convert from Roman Catholicism; and as it happens sometimes that though the mind may be entirely emancipated, the desire for priestly absolution returns, his son-in-law asked him before he died, if he had any such feeling. The dying man expressed his sole confidence in the great High Priest, and, giving a wave of triumph with his hand, said in the words of Luther's version of the psalm—

Strick ist Entzwei, und wir sind frei.

Broke are their nets, and thus escaped we.

The biographer of M'Cheyne, giving an account of his death, tells that 'next day he continued sunk in body and mind, till about the time his people met for their usual evening prayer meeting, when he requested to be left alone for half an hour. When his servant entered the room again, he exclaimed with a joyful voice, 'My soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowler; the snare is broken, and I am escaped'. His countenance, as he said this, bespoke inward peace; and ever after he was observed to be happy.

—J. K.

References.—CXXIV. 7.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii. No. 1696. CXXIV.—International Critical Commentary, vol. ii. p. 452. CXXV. 1.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiv. No. 1450. CXXV.—International Critical Commentary, vol. ii. p. 453. W. Brock, Midsummer Morning Sermons, p. 74.