Acts 2:11

11. Wonderful works of God When the human spirit, wherein resides man’s susceptibility to the religious emotions, is breathed upon by the Divine Spirit, and awakened into ecstasy, it may call the poetic powers into action, and evolve itself in the psalm. And if the man be endowed with the gift of genius, his psalm, like those of David, may be a permanent gift of God to his Church. Even among our Aryan ancestors a few of the hymns of their Rig-Veda, or Psalm-lore, evince that there were even with them some faint breathings of the blessed Spirit. Minds less endowed, when awakened to religious devotion, rather avail themselves of the strains of their greater predecessors than succeed in producing psalms of pure and perfect originality. This present passage confirms the idea that Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46) was improvised and uttered in a spiritual ecstasy. And the Magnificat may be read as furnishing some idea of the nature of these raptured Pentecostal utterances.

Besides these strains in Luke’s first chapter, the New Testament age was not inspired to furnish any permanent psalmody to the sacred canon. There is nothing in the New Testament corresponding with the Psalms in the Old. The prose narrative, epistle, and prophecy, ending in the semi-poetic Apocalypse, were all that the Church’s discerning of spirits could recognise as entitled to a place in her new Scriptures.