That which is said or implied here of Jerusalem is appropriate in a symbolic sense to the New Jerusalem, the Church of the living God.

I. FOR THE CHURCH IS AS A CITY.

1. Built. The result of thought and toil and care.

2. As Jerusalem, a captured city. It was once the home of all heathen abomination, but by David it was won for God. So the Church is a captured city, a trophy of God's omnipotent grace.

3. Has walls and bulwarks. Jerusalem had (ver. 7). So the Church (Isaiah 26:1). The Spirit, the Word, and the work of God in human hearts, these are her defenses.

4. And palaces. There were many of these in Jerusalem. The palaces of the Church are those spiritual privileges which those who are high in the favor of God are permitted to enjoy.

II. HER PEOPLE. Those who love God's worship, who love to be asked to go to the house of the Lord, and also to ask others. These are they in whom the Spirit of God dwells, and who are the people of the city of God.

III. SHE IS CHARACTERIZED BY UNITY, ORDER, STRENGTH. (Ver. 3, "compact together.") For Jerusalem this was inevitably so by reason of the site on which she stood, which allowed no room for indefinite enlargement (see Exposition; and Stanley's 'Sinai and Palestine'). And so when the Church of God has attained to its perker form, the divisions and discords, the disorder and consequent weakness, which too much characterize the Church now, shall all have disappeared. And even now there are Christian Churches which, by reason of their peace and unity and order, are strong - are as a city compact together.

IV. SHE IS THE CENTER OF UNITY FOR OTHERS. (Ver. 4.) Jerusalem and the temple were, in Israel's best days, the rallying-point of all her tribes. The strength which this gave them excited the jealousy of Jeroboam, and caused him to set up the rival worship of Samaria. And to-day the Church is the real bond of nations, and is becoming increasingly so.

V. THIS UNITY OF THOSE WHO GATHER TO HER IS A WITNESS FOR GOD, AND RENDERS HIM PRAISE. The gathering of the tribes of the Lord (ver. 4) at the great annual festivals bore testimony to all men that Israel was the covenant people of God, and that they rejoiced therein; thus they rendered praise to the Name of the Lord. And the united companies of believers bear a like testimony and render like praise.

VI. JUDGMENT JUST AND RIGHTEOUS GOES FORTH FROM HER. (Ver. 5.) From the judgment-thrones of the princes of the royal house went forth the decisions which the people obeyed in all matters on which judgment had been given. So today, from the real Church of God goes forth that law which hinds or looses the consciences of men. This is "the power of the keys" which Christ has given to his Church. What she says today all peoples will sooner or later accept as right and true. They may resist, but ere long they will yield. God wills it so.

VII. SHE IS TO BE DEVOTEDLY LOVED AND PRAYED FOR. (Vers. 6-9.) For God the Lord dwells within her (ver. 9). All her excellence, authority, and strength are because of this, and only this. Do our feet stand within her gates? - S.C.

The psalm was probably written by a pilgrim to Jerusalem. at some time previous to the Babylonish Captivity. On the one hand, it is clear that "the house of the Lord," the ancient Temple, was still standing; on the other, the reference to "the house of David" and the anxious prayer "for the peace of Jerusalem," its walls, its palaces, seem to point to a later period than that of David. The pilgrim who composed the psalm would have belonged to one of the ten separated tribes; but he had remained after the general defection true to the divinely-ordered worship at Jerusalem, and his psalm may well have been composed on the occasion of his first visit.

1. Now, one thing that would have struck a pilgrim to Jerusalem who should approach the city, as was natural, from its north-eastern side, would be its beauty. Possibly this pilgrim had seen Damascus straggling out amid the beautiful oasis which surrounds it in the plain of the Abana, or he had seen Memphis, a long strip of buildings, thickly populated, extending for some twelve or fourteen miles along the western bank of the Nile. Compared with those Jerusalem had the compact beauty of a highland fortress, its buildings are seen from below standing out against the clear Syrian sky, and conveying an impression of grace and strength that would long linger in the memory. No doubt in the eyes of a pilgrim in these old Jewish times, as afterwards, the physical beauty of Jerusalem must have suggested and blended with a beauty of a higher order. The beauty of the world of spirit imparts to the world of sense a subtle lustre which of itself it could never possess. "Walk about Zion, and go round about her, and tell the towers thereof; mark well her bulwarks; set up her houses that ye may tell them that come after." And why? "For this God is our God for ever and ever. He shall be our guide unto death."

2. And secondly, Jerusalem was the centre of the religious and national life of Israel. Jerusalem was what it was in a good Israelite's eyes less on its own account than because it contained the Temple. "Yea," cries the pilgrim, as he looks out on the fair city beneath him — "yea, because of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek to do thee good." And so, although the city of Solomon and its Temple passed away, and a new city and a new temple rose upon the ruins of the old, pilgrims still came up with the old psalm upon their lips and in their hearts: "Our feet shall stand in thy gates, O Jerusalem."

3. And a third characteristic of Jerusalem, which appealed to religious pilgrims like this psalmist-pilgrim, was, if I may so phrase what I mean, its unworldliness. This appears partly in its situation. Jerusalem was not on the sea, or on a navigable river. The little stream of the Kedron was dry for the greater part of the year in ancient days as now, and nothing but rude mountain-paths connected the city with Egypt on one side or with Syria on the other. It was thus cut off from those activities of commerce and intercourse with distant countries which are essential to the material well-being and development of a great capital.

4. As the centuries went on, Jerusalem, thus dear to the heart of Israel as being what it was in itself, became yet dearer to it by misfortune. Of all that is most beautiful in life, sorrow is the last consecration. Sorrow is the poetry, no less than the discipline of humanity. Certainly, if one thing is clear from Scripture and from experience, sorrows such as those of Jerusalem are the result of sin. And yet this could not kill out the sense of blessing which attached to the sacred spot in the eyes of successive generations of pilgrims. Thinking only of the sure mercies of David, thinking with the apostle of a later age, that the gifts and calling of God are indeed without repentance, again and again under Manasseh as under Hezekiah, under Jehoiakim as under Josiah, they uttered their song, "Our feet shall stand in thy gates, O Jerusalem." The events which make Jerusalem what it is in Christian eyes do not belong to the Old Testament. That wonderful self-manifestation of the Eternal Being among men which began at Bethlehem and Nazareth reached its climax at Jerusalem. On the hills around this favoured city, along its streets, in the courts of its great sanctuary, there walked in visible form, One who had already lived from everlasting, and who had folded around His eternal person the body and the soul of the sons of men. Just outside its walls, He condescended to die in agony and in shame only that He might rise in triumph from His grave, and on a hill hard by He went visibly up to heaven to reign for ever in glory. He conferred on it in Christian eyes a patent of nobility which will only become invalid when His Gospel disappears from among men. But the Jerusalem of Christian thought is no longer only or mainly the city of David. It is, first of all, the visible and universal Church of Christ. The towers and walls and shrines of the ancient city, as faith gazes on them, melt away into the outline of a sublimer prospect — that of redeemed humanity through all the Christian centuries gathered and harmonized into the city of God. This was what St. Paul meant when, writing to the Galatians, he contrasted with Jerusalem "that now is which is in bondage" — that is, to the Romans — "with her children"; the Jerusalem "that is above," or, as we should say, "the spiritual Jerusalem that is free, and is the mother of us all." That vast society in whose ample bosom the souls of Christian men from generation to generation find shelter and welcome and warmth and nourishment is the reality of which the old Syrian city was the material type. This is the Jerusalem of the Christian creed — "I believe in one holy Catholic Apostolic Church;" this is the Jerusalem of, perhaps, the greatest work of the greatest teacher of the Christian Church since apostolic days — 's treatise on "The City of God." There may be controversies among Christians as to the exact direction and extent of its wails, just as there are controversies among antiquarians as to the extent and direction of the walls of its material prototype, but as to its place in the thoughts and affections of all true Christian men there should be no room for controversy. No other association of men can have such claims on the heart of a Christian as the Church of God. What if sin and division have marred its beauty and its unity. The old Jerusalem did not cease to be Jerusalem in Jeremiah's eyes because of the sins of the priests, of princes, of peoples which he so unsparingly denounced. The factions which rent the city that fell beneath the legions of Titus did not kill out` the love and the loyalty of its noblest sons. The true remedy for disappointment and sorrow on the score of shortcomings and differences within the sacred city is to be found in such prayers as those which we offer in our holiest service to the Divine Majesty, beseeching Him to inspire continually the universal Church with the spirit of truth, unity, and concord. And this earthly Jerusalem suggests another city, a true haven of peace, with which the visible Church of Christ is already in communion, and into which all those true children of Zion who are joyful in their King will one day be received.

(Canon Liddon.)