THE CHARACTER OF DAVID.

"THERE never was a specimen of manhood so rich and ennobled as David, the son of Jesse, whom other saints haply may have equalled in single features of his character, but such a combination of manly, heroic qualities, such a flush. of generous, godlike excellencies, hath never yet. been seen embodied in a single man. His psalms -to speak as a man, to place him in the highest rank of lyrical poets, as they set him above all the inspired writers of the Old Testamentequalling in sublimity the flights of Isaiah himself, and revealing the cloudy mystery of Ezekiel ; but in love of country, and glorying in its heavenly patronage, surpassing them all. And where are there such expressions of the varied conditions into which human nature is cast by the accidents of Providence, such delineations of deep affliction, and inconsolable anguish, and anon such joy, such rapture, such revelry of emotion, in the worship of the living God! Such invocations to all nature, animate and inanimate, such summonings of the hidden powers of harmony, and of the breathing instruments of melody! Single hymns of this poet would have conferred immortality upon any mortal, and borne

down his name as one of the most favoured of the sons of men.

"But it is not the writings of the man which strike us with such wonder, as the actions and events of his wonderful history. He was a hero without a peer, bold in battle, and generous in victory; by distress or by triumph never overcome. Though hunted like a wild beast among the mountains, and forsaken like a pelican in the wilderness, by the country whose armies he had delivered from disgrace, and by the monarch whose daughter he had won-whose son he had bound to him with cords of brotherly love, and whose own soul he was wont to charm with the sacredness of his minstrelsy-he never indulged malice or revenge against his unnatural enemies. Twice, at the peril of his life, he brought his blood-hunter within his power, and twice he spared him and would not be persuaded to injure a hair upon his head-who, when he fell in his high plans, was lamented over by David, with the bitterness of a son, and his death avenged upon the sacrilegious man who had lifted his sword against the Lord's anointed. In friendship and love, and in domestic affection, he was not less notable than in heroical endowments, and in piety to God he was most remarkable of all. He had to flee from his bed-chamber in the dead of night, his friendly meetings had to be concerted upon the perilous edge of captivity and death-his food he

had to seek at the risk of sacrilege-for a refuge from death to cast himself upon the people of Gath-to counterfeit idiocy, and become the laughing stock of his enemies. And who shall tell of his hidings in the cave of Adullam, and of his wanderings in the wilderness of Ziph; in the weariness of which he had power to stand before his armed enemy with all his host, and by the generosity of his deeds, and the affectionate language which flowed from his lips, to melt into childlike weeping the obdurate spirit of Saul.

"David was a man extreme in all his excellencies -a man of the highest strain, whether for counsel, for expression, or for action, in peace and in war, in exile and on the throne. That such a warm and ebullient spirit should have given way before the tide of its affections, we wonder not. We rather wonder that, tried by such extremes, his mighty spirit should not often have burst control, and enacted the conqueror, the avenger, and the destroyer. But God, who anointed him from his childhood, had given him store of the best natural and inspired gifts, which preserved him from sinking under the long delay of his promised crown, and kept him from contracting any of the craft or cruelty of a hunted, persecuted man; and adversity did but bring out the splendour of his character, which might have slumbered like the fire in the flint, or the precious metal in the dull and earthy ore.

"But to conceive aright of the gracefulness and strength of David's character, we must draw him into comparison with men similarly conditioned, and then shall we see how vain the world is to cope with him. Conceive a man who had saved his country, and clothed himself with gracefulness and renown in the sight of all the people by the chivalry of his deeds, won for himself intermarriage with the royal line, and by unction of the Lord's prophet been set apart to the throne itself; such a one conceive driven with fury from house and hold, and through tedious years, deserted of every stay but heaven, with no soothing sympathies of quiet life, harassed for ever between famine and the edge of the sword, and kept in savage holds and desarts; and tell us, in the annals of men, of one so disappointed, so bereaved and straitened, maintaining not fortitude alone, but sweet composure and a heavenly frame of soul, inditing praise to no avenging deity, and couching songs in no revengeful mood, according with his outcast and unsocial life; but inditing praises to the God of mercy, and songs which soar into the third heaven of the soul; not indeed without the burst of sorrow, and the complaint of solitariness, and prophetic warnings to his blood-thirsty foes, but ever closing in sweet preludes of good to come, and desire of present contentment. Find us such a one in the annals of men and we yield the argument of this contro