king, exposed to all the temptations of a king of Ammon or Damascus then, of a Sultan of Bagdad or Constantinople in modern times. What follows, however, could have been found nowhere in the ancient world but in the Jewish monarchy.

A year had passed; the dead Uriah was forgotten, the child of guilt was born in the royal house, and loved with all the passionate tenderness of David's paternal heart. Suddenly the Prophet Nathan appears before him. He comes as if to claim redress for a wrong in humble life. It was the true mission of the Prophets, as champions of the oppressed, in the courts of kings. It was the true Prophetic spirit that spoke Apologue of Nathan. through Nathan's mouth. The apologue of the rich man and the ewe lamb has, besides its own intrinsic tenderness, a supernatural elevation which is the best sign of true Revelation. It ventures to disregard all particulars, and is content to aim at awakening the general sense of outraged justice. It fastens on the essential guilt of David's sin, not its sensuality, or its impurity, so much as its meanness and selfishness. It rouses the King's conscience by that teaching described1 as specially characteristic of prophecy, making manifest his own sin in the indignation which he has expressed at the sin of another. Thou art the man is, or ought to be, the conclusion, expressed or unexpressed, of every practical sermon. A true description of a real incident, if like in its general character, - however unlike to our own case in all the surrounding particulars,—strikes home with greater force than the sternest personal invective. This is the mighty function of all great works of fiction. They have in their power that indirect appeal to the conscience of which the address of

1 1 Cor. xiv. 24, 25.

Nathan is the first and most exquisite example. His parable is repeated, in actual words, in a famous romance which stirred the imagination of our fathers, and is the key-note of other tales of like genius which have no less stirred our own.

tent.

Repentance

As the apologue of Nathan reveals the true Prophet, so the Psalms of David reveal the true PeniTwo at least the 51st and 32d-of David. can hardly belong to any other period. He has fallen. That abyss which yawns by the side of lofty genius and strong passion had opened and closed over him. The charm of his great name is broken. But the sudden revulsion of feeling shows that his conscience was not dead. Our reverence for David is shaken, not destroyed. The power of his former character was still there. It was overpowered for the time, but it was capable of being roused again. "The great waterfloods" had burst over him, but "they had not come nigh" to his inmost soul.2 The Prophet had by his opening words, "Give "me a judgment," thrown him back upon his better nature. There was still an eye to see, there was still an ear to hear. His indignation against the rich man of the parable showed that the moral sense was not wholly extinguished. The instant recognition of his guilt breaks up the illusion of months. "I have sinned "against the Lord." The sense of his injustice to man waxes faint before his sense of sin against God. "Against "Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in "Thy sight." This is the peculiar turn given to his

1 Ewald, while acknowledging the Davidic origin of the 32d, doubts the 51st. But if verses 18 and 19 can be regarded as a later accommodation, the rest of the Psalm suits no other time or person equally.

Ps. xxxii. 6.

3 2 Sam. xii. 1 (Vulgate, and Thenius).

4 Ps. li. 4. For the legends of this incident see Fabricius, Cod. Pseudepig. V. T. p 1000; Koran, xxxviii. 20-24; Weil's Legends, p. 158-161, 167-170.

confession by the elevation and force of his religious convictions. He is worn away by grief; day and night he feels a mighty Hand heavy upon him; his soul is parched up as with the drought of an Eastern summer.' But he rises above the present by his passionate hopes for the future. His prayers are the simple expressions of one who loathes sin because he has been acquainted with it, who longs to have truth in his innermost self, to have hands thoroughly clean, to make a fresh start in life with a spirit 2 free, and just, and new. This is the true Hebrew, Christian, idea of "Repentance":— not penance, not remorse, not mere general confessions of human depravity, not minute confessions of minute sins dragged out by a too scrupulous casuistry, but change of life and mind. And in this, the crisis of his fate, and from the agonies of his grief, a doctrine emerges, as universal and as definite as was wrung out of the like struggles of the Apostle Paul. Now, if ever, would have been the time, had his religion led him in that direction, to have expiated his crime by the sacrifices of the Levitical ritual. It would seem as if for a moment such a solution had occurred to him. But he at once rejects it. He remains true to the Prophetic teaching. He knows that no substitution of dead victims, however costly, can fill up the gulf between himself and God. He knows that it is another and higher sacrifice which God approves. "Thou desirest no sacrifice-else would "I give it thee; but thou delightest not in burnt offer"ings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit "broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." And even out of that broken and heart, the dawn of a better life springs up.

- a

troubled “Be glad

"in the Lord, and rejoice O ye righteous; and shout for

1 P's. xxxii. 4.

2 Ps. li. 12.

3 Ps. li. 16, 17.

"joy, all ye that are true of heart."1 He is not what he was before; but he is far nobler and greater than many a just man who never fell and never repented. He is far more closely bound up with the sympathies of mankind than if he had never fallen. We cannot wonder that a scruple should have arisen in recording so terrible a crime; and accordingly the Chronicler throws a veil over the whole transaction. But the bolder spirit of the more Prophetic Books of Samuel has been justified by the enduring results. "Who is called the man

"after God's own heart?" so the whole matter is summed up by a critic not too indulgent to sacred characters:"David, the Hebrew king, had fallen into sins enough"blackest crimes there was no want of sin. And "therefore the unbelievers sneer, and ask 'Is this your "man according to God's heart?' The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a shallow one. What are faults, "what are the outward details of a life, if the inner “secret of it, the remorse, temptations, the often baffled, "never ended struggle of it be forgotten? . . . David's "life and history as written for us in those Psalms of "his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given us "of a man's moral progress and warfare here below. All "earnest souls will ever discern in it the faithful strug"gle of an earnest human soul towards what is good and "best. Struggle often baffled - sore baffled-driven "as into entire wreck: yet a struggle never ended, ever "with tears, repentance, true unconquerable purpose, "begun anew."2

As in the Psalms, so in the history, the force of the original character is seen to regain its lost ascendancy The passionate grief of the King over the little infant born to Bathsheba is the first direct indi- his child.

1 Ps. xxxii. 11.

Death of

9 Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-Worship, p. 7?.

cation of that depth of parental affection which fills so large a part of David's subsequent story. His impenetrable seclusion during the illness of the child, the elder brothers gathering round to comfort him, the sudden revulsion of thought after the child's death, with one of those very few indications of belief in another life that break through the silence of the Hebrew Scriptures, "I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me," -are proofs that, through all his lapses into savage cruelty and reckless self-indulgence, there still remained a fountain of feeling within, as fresh and pure as when he fed his father's flocks and won the love of Jonathan. But, though the "free spirit" and "clean heart" of The effects David came back, and though he rallied from amy. the loss of his infant child; though the birth of Solomon was as auspicious as if nothing had occurred to trouble the victorious return from the conquest of Ammon; the clouds from this time gathered over David's fortunes, and henceforward "the sword "never departed from his house." The crime itself had sprung from the lawless and licentious life, fostered by the polygamy which David had been the first to introduce; and out of this same polygamy sprang the terrible retribution.2

of his polyg

In order fully to understand what follows, we must return to the internal relations of the royal family. In his early youth he had, like his countrymen generally, but one wife, the Princess Michal. Her ardent love for him, his adventurous mode of winning

Michal.

1 2 Sam. xii. 10.

2 The Jewish tradition made the offence of David, which called down these calamities, to be the fraud which caused the massacre of the priests at Nob, and interpreted the

forty years of 2 Sam. xv. 7 (Jerome, Qu. Heb. ad loc.), to be the interval between the crime and the punishment. Contrast the far superior mor ality of the Biblical narrative.