For 2,000 years before the flood he winked at its vicious life, but then awoke to deal with the descendants of many corrupted generations, far differently from the manner in which he dealt with Adam and Cain,— young from the heavenly nurture of Eden, and the blissful tales of the sorrowing mother of mankind. The Patriarchs, selected for promises, were inheritors of penalties as well, and in due time their descendants stand manacled and trembling at the base of Sanai, riveted in bondage to an irksome law which was only broken to incur a curse.

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And holy, just and good as was the moral law, the ceremonial was not only grievous but bloody. Both priests and people were mitted to the actual slaying of animals when engaged in the highest offices of religion. But indeed in pastoral Israel every man was of necessity his own butcher, and ran into the herd to slay before he sat down with his guests. A boy like Samuel, therefore, entering the service of the priesthood from his youth would be as familiar with blood as a Roman Catholic acolyte with incense, and fired with a holy zeal for obedience, consuming every other feeling, could readily hew Agag in pieces before the Lord. Such a people, inured also to battle and hardship in the wilderness, were well fitted to act as the slayers of the Canaanites, whose land was ready to spue them forth on account of their filthy naughtiness. David knew that the land was theirs to whom the Lord had given it, and that the appointed executioners of divine vengeance upon a guilty race were his own nation, whose destiny was ruthlessly to exterminate and completely to possess. It was 500 years since the judgment that had long slumbered as before the flood, awoke upon the devoted people, and still the promise and the destiny were unfulfilled. Doubtless the young shepherd pondered it many times with troubled spirit, and burned to deliver his people from the galling yoke which in borders of Philistia compelled every man to go down to the heathen enemy in order to sharpen his coulter or his goad. His ardent admiration would be given to the heroes and heroines who had distinguished themselves, whether in fair fight, or in abominable treachery, as the champions of Israel. The times favoured this worship of the warlike. Israel was embedded amongst enemies. The Jebusites still held the future capital. The Hittites were in Ephraim; Ammon, Moab, Edom, and Amalek threatened the borders, and the Philistines, unremitting in hostility, were the habitual scourges of the conquerors.

Pent up in the corners of the land, and distressed by the growth of population, these remnants of the ancient occupiers were urged by hunger as well as by hatred when they burst in upon the territory of their fathers, and sought to rescue the cities, the vineyards, and the wells for which the Israelites had not toiled. As on the one hand the child of Abraham fed his imagination with the high destinies of his race, so on the other the heathen handed it down from father to son as a sacred legacy to avenge themselves upon the exterminating hosts. Such was the land of promise-the rest that remained for the people of God. Five hundred years had elapsed, and the thorns were still in their sides. "Lord, how long?" Until Israel is more zealous for righteousness than for dominion. Until she is girded with the strength of holiness. But nothing was clearer to David's mind than that the enemies of Israel were the enemies of the Lord. Notwithstanding his descent from Moab it was

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plain as the shadow of his staff, that God's face was light towards Israel and darkness upon all her borders. Jehovah was a respecter of persons -that was the dearest truth stamped upon the pages of his Bible-and he exulted in the fact that the Lord's enemies were his own. To slaughter the Philistines was not only patriotism but religion. To show mercy was to be ungodlike; to cut off every thing that breathed—man, woman, and sucking child, oxen, sheep, camel, and ass—this was to be heavenly-minded. By thus being commissioned to destroy property as well as persons, it was made clear that the judgment was not executed to feed a pet people with spoil, but to score into their hearts God's abomination of iniquity. And the adoption of such laws of war, in a country where war was chronic, was an ordination full of mercy. When races hate one another and the parents of the weaker are slain, to give the babes quick despatch at the same time is clemency itself. There was sore war against the Philistines all the days of Saul, and afterwards there was long war between the house of Saul and the house of David. practices of war with the heathen begot a fierce spirit which flamed up upon the slightest provocation. Thus David would have slain every son and servant belonging to Nabal in his anger at being refused an invitation to dinner. He went in and out upon his raids beating down the people who cried and there was none to save them, casting them out as dirt, and washing his footsteps in their blood, with the indifference of a wild beast. It was God who had taught his hands to war and his fingers to fight, even as he had given jaw teeth to the lion and claws to the tiger. It was in such an epoch of the world's development that God was educating his church. The hand of the great Potter must needs be soiled with the clay he works in. To temper the laws of war towards the heathen would have caused Israel to mistake the import of the Divine decree, besides frustrating the high purpose of making room for righteousness. And while warlike prowess, always the first idol of youth and of immature nations, became the adoration of Israel, at the same time piety of a deep, stern, and terribly earnest character was begotten out of circumstances in which men balanced the chances of life and death continually. "Enemies were in a manner in the air, but also God was everywhere. Saul was to David an object of genuine worship, he admired his valour and he reverenced him as the Lord's anointed. More than that, a singular bond of sympathy must have been established between them, when David beheld the spirit leave the disturbed countenance of the King and a smile of serene peace and gratitude greet the happy harper. It did not awaken anger, it rather deepened worship when the javelin of Saul flew past him to the wall, for the very basis of worship is the conviction that one's life is helplessly in the hands of the king.

Jonathan's love David rather received than reciprocated. It was Saul, who had sought to kill him and whose life he had so often spared, whom David's prosperity was to unseat from the kingdom,-it was Saul's death that he lamented with passionate regrets, in the heat of which his love for Jonathan glowed with an intensity that lovely youth had never seen in life.

Sure always of this high destiny, yet determined never to anticipate his hour by unlawful means; submitting himself to that mysterious will, which after anointing him king made his way to the kingdom not a whit

the easier on that account, appearing indeed perpetually to thwart rather than to further the purpose of the anointing; allowing him to be hunted like a partridge on the mountains-involving him in difficulties and extremities while yet the destiny was charged if possible with greater certainty than pertains to natural law-let David's example and experiences rebuke the faint-heartedness of Christians who in dark hours of conflict for the truth wonder if Christ really is God's anointed to the kingdom and supremacy.

Then, as now, and always, there were found adherents of the true and of the false. David and Saul were signs unto which gathered the sympathies of the temporisers, the worldly wise, the self-dependent on the one hand; and of the worldly foolish, the spiritual, the faith-upheld upon the other. It was indeed lamentable weakness which led David to accept the succour of the wretched Adullamites. They were no true representatives of his real party in the state and only brought his cause into disrepute. A great part of his troubles and temptations arose from this leaning upon an arm that was not God's. But what precious lessons do we learn from our errors! How strong was the recoil, how deep was the thirst after God, begotten by his association with fraudulent debtors, scape-graces, speculators for honours in his kingdom,-lawless and turbulent spirits, many of these doubtless often plotting to sell him to Saul, -and how greatly were his talents for government developed, and his fidelity to righteousness tested when restraining men whose real attachment was to a captain of banditti, and not to a psalm-singing king. And when he fled to Achish-another piece of weakness bringing on new trouble-what floods of light, what questionings of soul would pour in in consequence of his honourable treatment and of the insight he obtained into the common sympathies, the common difficulties and disabilities, the common subjection to unseen powers of evil, and the individual examples of nobleness and virtue which he found existing among a people who were appointed to die without being allowed that knowledge of God which he himself possessed. Was the Great One to come after him, to extend his kingdom over such as they?-not over deserts where extermination had made a lasting peace, but over the fruitful lands of pious, prosperous, and in the best sense, progressive peoples?

And yet his conscience was marvellously undeveloped, sensitive beyond measure to acts of treachery committed among his own people, and especially upon warriors, remembering to his dying day the sly poke by which Joab revenged upon Abner a brother's blood, he yet scrupled not to give orders that the lame and blind should be especially devoted to destruction in the capture of Jerusalem from the Jebusites. The case of Uriah, had he been a Jew and not a Hittite, would scarcely have been proof of a permanent discord in David's character, for never do we see a great breadth of human excellence displayed, but more than once in its unfolding, as in the spectrum, a line of darkness cuts it through. But one thing is clearly manifest in David, -he has no adequate conception of his own imperfections, nor any suggestions recommending his enemies. to mercy. His denunciations are utterly without discrimination-there is no light and shadow in his condemnation-all his foes alike are of one colour-black as Erebus. Hence before God he magnifies his own righteousness, and also before God calls down equal and indiscriminate

retribution not only upon the authors of the evil which afflicts him, but also upon their innocent descendants to remote posterity; and what I would beg the reader to notice is that he had warrant for this in the imperfect revelation of God then made. He was innocent of the oppressive weight of the "new" commandment. Outside of Israel was nothing to him. He never stopped to ponder conditions of human growth and development; why and how the thing that is became what it is,-the complex but incontestable influence of ancestry, parentage, moral atmosphere, spiritual darkness or twilight, physical constitution and necessities of living. The sermon on the mount would have slain him, but without it he was "alive," even when his cruelty was horrible.

His usual barbarity when warring against the heathen, and his imprecations in the psalms, will enable us to accept as literally true the account given of his conduct to the inhabitants of Rabbah, who, politically speaking, had only been guilty of patriotism. Pity he could feel, and divine resentment against merciless oppression, as when Nathan's parable prepared the way for his profound repentance, but that was a case supposed to be in Israel; whereas Rabbah was given to Israel as prey to a beast of prey. His magnanimity was noble, each one who thought to pave an avenue to his favour by privately making away with his enemies, met with the swift retribution they deserved, but it was also sullied by cruelty, for if the Amalekite's story had been true, he had been merciful in granting the hapless petition of Saul to have his agonies put an end to. Truly did Shimei curse him as a man of blood, and the sword did not depart from his house in consequence. Disgusting and not to be mentioned among us, as was the number of his wives and concubines, that was not made the ground of his disability to build the temple, for God makes large concessions to the saints in the years of the Church's pupilage; but it was because he was a man of blood he must not build. And age did not mellow his disposition or expand his sympathies, neither did the profound exercises of spirit that ensued upon his deep and towering crime. It was in the siege of Rabbah that Uriah fell. Religion came and met him on the spiritual plane in which his age and the Church's age had placed him, and to him all his own enemies were the enemies of God. Innocently he makes sure of this, and so long as he is sure of it his denunciations are justifiable and his cruelties meritorious. Hence he can exultingly say, "I did beat them as small as the dust of the earth, I did stamp them as the mire of the street, and did spread them abroad." Now what is done in self-defence is nocriterion of character, and when our fellow Christians in New Zealand shoot down Maories like cattle, they are not to be judged thereby, but when the siege is over and the wretched inhabitants are brought forth, then we see character consenting to supposed religious duty, when David put the people of Rabbah under saws and under harrows of iron, and made them pass through the brick kiln; and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon.

But ere he dies let us look at him once again in his blooming youth, ruddy and of a beautiful countenance, before the rust of age had dimmed every lustre he possessed. Much as he is given to war and in sympathy with warriors, he is also poet and musician, and before all things God's anointed. Greatness was thrust upon him, he sought it not. He never

planned or plotted for the throne. He met the exigencies of each hour as burdened with its duty and its trial, and let God drift him as sticks are drifted on a stream, with many a stoppage and many a turn, to the place of final anchorage. He is overpowered with a delightful sense of fellowship with God. He is making history for myriads of weeping eyes to the world's end. He acts like one who is drunk with inspiration. His kingly trappings seem to separate him from the main stay of his life. He will cast down his crown and strip himself to the ignominious dance that God may be honoured by his self-abasement, while he is strengthened by realising his dependence. Of course he is a wonder unto many, and all men who live in a lofty spiritual region of necessity must be. His aspirations were singly Godward, and the blame of God shrunk the sinews of his soul, so that he crept from Jerusalem oppressed with His disfavour, when Absalom threw stones at his heart, as Shimei at his person, "cursing as he went." And even when the end had come, the light and darkness of his imperfectly developed religious consciousness contended for the mastery. "David the son of Jesse said, and the man who was raised upon high, the anointed of the God of Jacob, and the sweet Psalmist of Israel, said, The Spirit of the Lord spake by me, and his word was in my tongue: He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God. And he shall be as the light of the morning when the sun riseth, even as a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain. Although my house be not so with God; yet he hath made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and sure: for this is all my salvation and my desire, although he make it not to grow." (2 Sam. xxiii. 1-5.)

Yet the same tongue gives directions for Solomon to cut off men whom he was afraid to touch himself, and whom he had sworn should live. It was on account of no personal affront that his faithful captain of the host was appointed to die, whose advice, if followed, would have saved him from numbering Israel and from a pestilence immediately spoiling the census. It was a zeal for righteousness, as Joab was guilty of one murder from ambition, but anyhow it is a miserable spectacle, David on his death-bed leaving such a legacy to a man who would mourn heavily over him. Worse, however, is the wretched subterfuge by which he thinks to destroy Shimei while saving his word of honour, as if it made any difference whether he or Solomon executed a decree originating with himself. Such was the man who wrote most of the Imprecatory Psalms.

(To be continued.)

* HENRY DEACON.

MAN GIVETH UP THE GHOST, AND WHERE IS HE?

JOB XIV.

AM unable to agree with "Fidus," that the language of Job in this chapter is that of "midnight despondency and despair." In verses 13-15, hope shines out distinct and visible; and in chapter xix. his triumphant assurance is placed beyond doubt. And although in chapter xiv. he states that "there is hope of a tree if it be cut down, that it will