ANSWER:  In the affirmative to both parts.

VII.  Whether the opinion can with probability be maintained of those among more recent writers who have endeavoured to show from merely internal indications or an inaccurate interpretation of the sacred text that not a few of the psalms were composed after the time of Esdras and Nehemias, or even after the time of the Macchabees?

ANSWER:  In the negative.

VIII.  Whether from the manifold testimonies of the Sacred Books of the New Testament, and the unanimous agreement of the Fathers, as well as from the admission of the writers of the Jewish people, several prophetic and Messianic psalms are to be recognised, as prophesying concerning the coming kingdom, priesthood, passion, death and resurrection of the future Redeemer; and that therefore the opinion is to be absolutely rejected of those who, perverting the prophetic and Messianic character of the Psalms, twist these same prophecies regarding Christ into merely a prediction regarding the future lot of the chosen people?

ANSWER:  In the affirmative to both parts.

On May 1, 1910, in an audience graciously granted to both Most Reverend Consultors Secretaries His Holiness approved the foregoing answers and ordered that they be published.

Rome, May 1, 1910.

PULCRANUS VIGOUROUX, P.S.S.

LAURENTIUS JANSSENS, O.S.B.

Consultors Secretaries.

The Psalms were always dear to the hearts of Christians.  Our Lord died with the words of a psalm on His sacred lips:  “Into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Psalm 30, v. 6).  Millions of dying Christians have repeated His great prayer.  On the Church’s very birthday, when St. Peter preached the first Christian sermon, he had three texts and two of them were from the Psalms (Acts II.).  To an educated and rigid Pharisee like St. Paul they were a treasure house of teaching.  To the early Christians the Psalms were a prayer book, for there was no Christian literature.  It was twenty-five years after the Ascension before the first books of the New Testament were written.  Hence St. Paul and St. James tell their fellow Christians to use the Psalms in worship (Ephesians, v. 19; Colos. iii. 16; I. St. James 5-13).  Some of the greatest of the early Christian writers and saints, Origen, St. Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, St. Ambrose, St. Chrysostom, Bede, and St. Augustine all studied the psalms deeply and wrote learned commentaries on them.  The works of later saints abound in happy and beautiful quotations from these religious poems.  With them, too, as with those holy people of whom St. Chrysostom wrote, “David is first, last and midst.”  For many years no priest was ordained who could not recite the whole Psalter without the aid of a book, This veneration of the inspired words deserves respect and imitation.  The learned Calmet (1672-1757) writing of the universal esteem and study of the Psalms, said that then there existed more than a thousand commentaries on them.  Since then, the number has been doubled; so great and universal is the reverence and esteem in which this book of Scripture is held.  To conclude this very long note on the Psalms I quote the quaint words of a mediaeval poet.  It shows how the saints of old found their Master in the songs of His great ancestor:—­