influence on the opinions and practice of modern Christianity.

The story of a man so pre-eminently pious and wicked as David necessarily absorbs the attention of men desirous of reconciling the claims of religion with the attractions of Mammon. They see the Hebrew monarch guilty of errors which shock the proprieties of modern respectability, and yet they are assured on inspired authority that the royal sinner was a man after God's own heart. What therefore is the secret of divine favour? The question is easy of solution. David composed and sung more psalms to the honour and glory of God than all the prophets, saints, and martyrs known to sacred history. If therefore, tempted by Satan, we should unhappily fall into any of the sins of our age by adulterating human food, building with unbaked bricks and untempered mortar, betraying our trust for a commission, or issuing a legally unassailable but morally fraudulent prospectus, let us hasten to the nearest Temple of psalmody, and seek divine favour by singing the praise of the Lord in the most laudatory stanzas of the royal bard of Judah.

As this aspect of the question practically depicts David as the ancient father of modern Cant, it is due to his memory to inquire whether any episodes in his career identify his character with the vice of hypocrisy.

We read in 2 Sam. xx., 'There was a famine in the days of David three years, year after year; and David inquired of the Lord, and the Lord answered, It is for Saul and his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites.' This monstrous oracle, whether obtained by the divination of Urim or the fanaticism of

prophets, resulting in the cruel murder of seven members of the family of Saul, obviously cloaked the design of exterminating possible pretenders to the throne, in harmony with the immemorial practice of Eastern despots.

In chapter xvi. we find Shimei, a member of the house of Saul, cursing David as the murderer of his family. The king heard this abusive language with a mild humility, worthy of a modern apostle of peace: 'Let him alone and let him curse,' said David, ' for the Lord hath bidden him. It may be that the Lord will look upon mine affliction, and that the Lord will requite me good for his cursing this day.' Shimei subsequently made an abject apology, and was forgiven by the apparently magnanimous king. But, when David was on his death-bed, confiding his last wishes to Solomon, he said: 'And, behold, thou hast with thee Shimei, the son of Gera, a Benjamite of Bahurim, which cursed me with a grievous curse in the day when I went to Maha naim but he came down to meet me at Jordan, and I sware to him by the Lord, saying, I will not put thee to death by the sword. Now therefore, hold him not guiltless; for thou art a wise man, and knowest what thou oughtest to do unto him; but his hoar head bring thou down to the grave with blood.'1 Solomon, accordingly, on the death of the king, took the first favourable opportunity of murdering Shimei; and the entire narrative thus convicts David of systematic hypocrisy. The dying monarch still further withdrew the veil from his true character by suggesting to Solomon the murder of his old companion in arms, Joab, and the veteran * 1 Kings ii. 8, 9.

was accordingly sacrilegiously slain within the sanctuary of the tabernacle.

David has left a pernicious legacy to mankind in the superstition of the allotted period,' which cuts short the melancholy days of pious septuagenarians depressed by a sacred death-warrant. The Council of Trent, however, in canonising the Apocrypha, transformed the allotted period' into one hundred years; and they who accept the Wisdom of the son of Sirach as Scripture are all, therefore, possible centenarians.1

6

In comparing the annals of Saul and David, we find Hebrew history controlled by the same laws of causation which determine the fortunes of all human communities. Saul, a man of deep religious convictions, was so hopelessly crushed by superstitious terror of prophetic denunciation that his subjects were not only deprived of the social and political advantages, unattainable except through human experience and sagacity intelligently dealing with the ordinary course of natural events, but they were even plunged into misery and calamity for which the Thaumaturgist, who had blighted the career of their leader, supplied no remedy in his sullen abandonment of king and country.

David was also a religious enthusiast, but he possessed a practical wisdom which excluded priests and prophets from a preponderating influence in the state; and thus his subjects were partially protected from the extremes of fanaticism rampant during the reign of his rash and excitable predecessor.

Modern statesmanship inevitably recognises that David was right and the prophets wrong, on the ques

1 Ecclus. xviii. 9.

tion of a national census, as indispensable to responsible rulers three thousand years ago as now, for correctly estimating the available resources of the country. David did not, therefore, consult Nathan or Gad on an affair of state which would have merely aroused their fanaticism; but he first numbered the people, and, when this great public duty had been accomplished, he charmed his confessors with penitential psalms, in sackcloth and ashes.

The successful career of David as warrior and statesman probably inspired the Hebrew nation with hope that Jehovah had at length tardily fulfilled His covenant with Abraham, and bestowed on them the promised land as an everlasting possession. But superstition is stronger than princes, and more enduring than the life of a nation. Their warrior king had cherished and controlled an institution on which he fondly hoped his dynasty might rest throughout the unbroken succession of centuries: could he have foreseen that the prophets of futurity would destroy the national results of his sagacity and prowess, David would, most assuredly, have received an oracle, or seen a vision, instructing him to proscribe and exterminate the entire school of the prophets, which he would have accomplished, in the name of the Lord, with a purpose as inflexible as the spirit of Mehemet Ali, when he planned and accomplished the destruction of the Mamelukes.

CHAPTER X

SOLOMON.

THE wisdom of Solomon has not only been celebrated in the annals of Judah, but invested with all the marvels of Wonderland, in the traditions and legends of both Jews and Gentiles. We learn from the last words of David that his illustrious son had acquired a reputation for natural sagacity before his wisdom had assumed the imaginative form of a divine gift. Possessed, therefore, of a penetrating and far-reaching intelligence, Solomon had, doubtless, learned from the tragedy of Saul and the experience of David, that the social and political problem waiting successful solution was the administration of public affairs, in absolute independence of the disorganising intervention of prophets.

Even the wisdom and courage of Solomon would have inevitably failed in an unequal contest with the prophetic superstition of his age, if he had not supplemented the commanding influence of his genius by adopting some element of the supernatural. Socrates had his familiar spirit (Saóviov), and Numa his Egeria, to disarm the malice of envy by attributing personal wisdom to inspiration; and the sagacious monarch of Israel dreamt that, in an interview with Jehovah, he had been divinely chosen as the wisest man of all time.

There was not, of course, any eye-witness of the