David the Afflicted Man

It is not uncommon to read in the preface to works which good men have left as legacies to the church, that their lives, passed amid quiet scenes and in the routine of useful but common duties, furnish few materials for biography. Their course in life less resembles a river that often swells into floods, — here leaps the foaming cataract, there thunders among the rocks through which it has cut itself a path, and only rests in great deep pools, to gather strength, as it were, for another rush, — than one which, while adorning the landscape and imparting verdure to the fields it flows through, steals along in silence to the sea. Such tranquillity and monotony were not features of David’s life. It fills a much larger space in the Bible thar. any other — occupying as many as sixty-one chapters, though the history of Jacob is completed in eleven, and that of Abraham, the friend of God and father of the chosen race, in fourteen; and, as one might safely infer from that circumstance, it is full of interesting and important incidents. Indeed his history is one we should now-a-days call sensational; being crowded with events almost more strange and stirring than are usually represented on the stage, or woven into the pages of romance.

The curtain at its rising shows us a valley among the quiet hills of Bethlehem, where a beautiful lad leads his snowy flock to the banks of a silent stream; and sitting down on the sward beneath the shadow ofa great rock, passes the time in meditation — now casting his thoughts into the form of poetry, and now pouring them forth in song to the music of his harp. A peaceful scene! but how suddenly it changes! A terrific roar, the flying sheep, and a cry of pain startle the shepherd. Bounding from the thicket, a lion has seized a lamb, and is bearing it off in its bloody jaws. The stripling leaps to his feet; and dropping the harp for his staff, throws himself in the path of the spoiler. They close in deadly combat — a lad against a lion. Stunned by a shower of blows, the savage beast drops its prey to throw himself with a roar on his brave antagonist. With a brief prayer to God, he seizes the lion by the beard, and striking at the shaggy breast he offers, buries a knife in his heart; lays him dead at his feet.

The next scene presents a change breaking, like the rosy dawn, on David’s fortunes. Summoned from the flock, he returns to Bethlehem to find the whole town in a state of unusual excitement. Samuel, long the judge, and still the venerable prophet of Israel, has arrived there; and its rulers, who furnish an illustration of the saying, ‘‘ The wicked fleeth when no man pursueth,” conscious of guilt, dread that he has come to call them to account. His business is not with them; but with this youth, Jesse’s youngest son. Hitherto known only by the maidens of an obscure hill town for the beauty of his person, and among its shepherd lads. for his manly bravery, David is to be called to fill the throne. Saul was the choice of the people, but he is the choice of God. Modestly he enters the great man’s presence — wondering what he can have to do with him — and has no sooner appeared than the Lord says to Samuel, ‘‘ This is he; arise, anoint him!” — and there, beside a smoking altar, agitatec by the new and strange emotions the vision of a sceptre raises, David is kneeling at the prophet’s feet, and in the oil poured on his golden locks receiving the investiture of a king.

The next view shows us the path to his brilliant fortunes beginning to open. A messenger appears in Bethlehem, summoning him from the sheepfolds to the palace. Since the day the Spirit of the Lord left the king to abide on David, a darkness, like what falls on the earth when the sun deserts the sky, had fallen on the mind of Saul; and now, harp in hand, the stripling stands before the throne and its moody, gloomy occupant, to charm his ear with music, and with its soft and gentle magic to conjure the fiend away. But as a boat, though now raised high on their foaming crest, is soon lost to view in the trough of the waves, David, apparently the sport of fickle fortune, disappears once more into the obscurity of country life. He leaves the royal presence — happy probably to exchange a courtier’s for a shepherd’s attire; and escape from the jealousies and contentions of a palace to his pipe and harp and simple home, to the little flock and quiet hills of Bethlehem.

Again the scene shifts. Now he stands on the pinnacle of his fame; the cynosure of all eyes; his name familiar as a household word; his story told by every hearth; the acknowledged saviour of his country, and the burden of its songs; the envy of her youths, and the admiration of her high-born and fairest maidens. Goliath has fallen to his sling; the people go to gaze on the grim head that stands bleaching in the sun; and the giant’s sword is hung in the house of God — a trophy, not so much of David’s powers, as that he who delivered him from the paw of the lion, and the paw of the bear, also delivered him from the hands of the Philistine.

But as the waves of a flowing tide, though it advances steadily on the naked sands as each curls and breaks, retreat back again into the bosom of the sea, so David’s fortunes seemed to flow and ebb. The son-in-law of Saul, the beloved friend of Jonathan, the first man at court, the leader of the host, the idol of the people, he appears in the next scene flung as by a sudden change of fortune into the very dust. A price lies on his head; an outlaw no man dares to shelter, and whose fallen fortunes none follow but a few retainers in circumstances almost as desperate as his own, he is hunted, like a wild beast, from cave to cave, and hill to hill.

Yet as when a storm with flashing lightnings, and peals that shake the heavens, and rains that swell the streams, disperses the loaded clouds and restores sunshine to the earth, events occur to produce a favorable change in David’s circumstances. Fortune, as the world would say, smiles on him again. The fugitive of Engedi’s caves, the exile his country had cast out to seek protection from its hereditary enemies, is called to the throne ot Judah. A few years more, and every rival dea and gone, the sceptre of Israel falls into his hand; and retaining it till his grasp relaxes in death, he reigns sole monarch of a country among whose hills he had passed his youth as a shepherd, and in whose caves as a fugitive he had been often hiding for his life.

A strange, what a happy fortune! I am not sure of that — a doubt that recalls a story illustrative of the happiness which may be enjoyed in humble life; and also of the manner in which God sometimes, even in this world, crowns deeds of virtue, and makes the bread return which men in faith and kindness had cast on the waters. A century and more ago, a youth, impatient of control, left his native village and a widowed mother, who fell into sore poverty in the evening of her days. A humble neighbor, touched with pity, received her into his house; shared with her the earnings of long hours and his busy shuttle; assigned her the warmest corner at his fireside; honored her as a mother; nor ceased his kindness till he had laid her gray head in the grave. Long afterwards, a stranger, with furrowed brow and sun-browned face, appeared in the village. Having learned, in answer to his inquiries, the story of the widow and her benefactor, he repairs to the churchyard, and returns from her grave to seek the humble house in whose tenant she had found a son. The bread the cottager had cast on the waters returns in this stranger. He is the son who, long years ago, had left his mother to the care of others. Her benefactor had two children, just then blooming into ‘womanhood. He adopts them; and educating, endows them with the splendid fortune he had amassed in a distant land. One rose to be a countess, and, the object of a higher adoption, rose to the rank of an heir of grace; becoming as eminent for her piety in the church as for her position in the world. Yet, when raised to wealth and rank, she often said that these had never yielded such happiness as she enjoyed when, a sun-browned child, she herded her cattle on the lea, with larks singing above her head, and daisies springing at her naked feet. Similar, probably, was the experience of David.

“Covet the best gifts,” says the Apostle; but let us not covet great earthly things, or turn an envious eye on their possessors, or forget in whatsoever state we are therewith to be content. The tops of the mountains are naked, and cold, and bare: the heights which ambition eyes and braces its limbs to climb, are often wrapt in clouds, chill with mists, white with snows, swept by storms and shattered by lightnings, from which the valleys lying at their feet are happily exempt. So David found to his painful experience. He reaches the throne; but it is to recall with a melancholy pleasure the happy youth he spent under his father’s roof, and among the hills where, free from cares, he passed the livelong day with his harp and easy charge.

‘¢ At ease reclined beneath the verdant shade, No more shall I behold my happy flock Aloft hang browsing on the tufted rock.”

Taken from the sheepfolds to be a king, he bids farewell to ease, if not to peace of mind. His life gets crowded with events that tax his energies to the utmost — many, the result of his position, embittering with anxiety his days and nights; and some that sprang from the temptations to which he was peculiarly exposed, striking his soul with horror, covering his head with the deepest shame. In defending or enlarging the borders of his kingdom, the sword is almost never out of his hand. He finds peace neither abroad nor at home. Domestic quarrels wreck his happiness; treachery lurks within the walls of the palace; crimes are committed in the very bosom of his family that shock the land; acts where rebellion, rape, incest, adultery, and murder play their part, succeed each other on the stage — making his life, if one of the most interesting, the saddest recorded in the word of God. We have but to glance at the trials through which he passed to approve the title of this article, and understand the plaintive and dirge-like tones of many a psalm. Very different from that glorious scene where, under the eyes of the shouting host, he stands before Saul flushed with the excitement, and bearing in his hand the spoils of battle, one in reading these seems to see him in the solitude which sorrow courts; alone; an old and bowed-down man; crushed beneath a load of grief; the tears dropping from his cheeks as he bends over his harp with faltering voice, and hands that tremble as they touch the strings. No man, not Job himself, had more reason to cry, ‘‘O my God, my soul is cast down within me; deep calleth unto deep at the voice of thy water-spouts; all thy billows and thy waves are gone over me.” In some aspects explicable, in others inscrutably mysterious, there are scenes in this good man’s life which make one feel that he might have challenged the whole world, saying, “Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow!” Let us consider David’s affictions.

In the ills of poverty, the loss of children, the death of old friends, the numerous infirmities of age, troubles often gather around the prosperous in the decline of life, like clouds about a setting sun. Happy for them if these are sanctified: blessed by the Spirit of God to wean their affections from scenes they soon must leave, and prepare them, as trees which have the roots that bind them to earth locsened, for being transplanted to heaven! But unlike those who are long exempt from troubles, David and they were early acquaintances. Wherever there is sunshine there are shadows; and these fell coldly and early on his path. In consequence, probably, of his brothers having learned somewhat of the purpose of Samuel’s visit, he became the object of their bitter envy; of such jealousy as cost Joseph his liberty, and almost his life. Called from the flock to carry provisions to his brethren, he goes down to the host, to find them, and all Israel, panic-stricken. No man will face the giant. He will. Though a stripling, his faith and courage rise to the occasion. He turns to this soldier and to that, asking, ‘‘What-shall be done to the man that killeth this Philistine, and taketh away the reproach - from Israel?” and ever as the question is answered, his soul swells higher with a divine indignation, till under a power within that impels him to accept the challenge, he breaks out in this exclamation, ‘“Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God?” And what encouragement does he get from his brothers? No thanks to them for that day’s work! They eye

him with jealousy. Eliab, the eldest of them, wounds his feelings, and loads him with unmerited reproaches — ‘“Why camest thou down hither?” he asks, “and with whom hast thou left those few sheep in the wilderness? I know thy pride and the naughtiness of thine heart!” Thus, like Joseph, and one greater still — like Jesus, he was wounded in the house of his friends.

This was but the beginning of David’s sorrows. As the sun, on breaking through the haze to warm the air and shine in cloudless splendor, calls from their shades a swarm of insects, which pursue the traveller and pierce him with their stings, his prosperity exposed David to a host of evils. It awoke feelings in Saul’s breast, not of envy only, but of the bitterest hatred. From the day that joyous mothers and maidens sang, ‘Saul hath slain his thousands, but David his tens of thousands,” David was pursued with deadly animosity by him whose crown his valor had saved, and whose life he twice generously spared. The saviour of his country, no worse fate could have befallen its greatest enemy. He has to flee from the bosom of his family; he is driven from house and hold; dishonored as well as disgraced, his wife, the princess whom his courage won, is torn from his arms and given to another. Reduced to the most terrible straits, famine threatens him with death on this side, and the edge of the sword on that; than savage deserts and mountain caves, other home has he none, nor bed but the bare ground, nor associates but men in debt, discontented, and in distress — a base and lawless crew, from whose society, in other and happier circumstances, he had recoiled with disgust and horror.

The heathen said that a good man suffering’adversity well was a sight for the gods to look on. Such a sight is here. Some of his sweetest psalms, composed when he was hunted like a partridge on the mountains, remain to testify to the indomitab]: fortitude and heavenly composure which David maintained amid a sea of troubles. He uffered wrongs, nor sought to avenge them. Helovedthe country which had forsaken him; nor, unlike most other outlaws, did he ever draw his sword but against its enemies. So hemmed in on all sides - that, escape seeming as impossible as Saul remained im- “placable, he once despaired, and cried, ‘“‘I shall perish one day by the hand of Saul;” yet, when his courage twice placed his enemy in his power, twice he spared him. He put aside the spear that gleamed in the moonlight above the sleeping king, and which Abishai had raised to bury in his heart; and when at length Saul left the gloomy hut of Endor, to meet his fate in battle, this generous man, burying his enemy’s crimes and his own wrongs in one grave, lamented his fall, and avenged his death. Yet those afflictions he suffered, and suffered for years, at the hand of Saul, and of others also, were but the big drops that precede the storm. When Saul slept in his bloody grave, and he himself had exchanged the caves of Engedi for a palace, and the hardships of an outlaw for the pomp and pleasures of a throne, it burst out on him in its wildest fury. Te many a man his home offers a quiet retreat from the battle and struggles of life — he forgets them at evening in the bosom of his family. Alas for David! his horne was the scene of his most painful trials. Many foul crimes have defiled fair palaces, and murder has stained their floors with blood; but neither in robbers’ den nor in the lowest haunts of vice have worse deeds been done than wrecked the peace of David. Within walls sacred to the domestic virtues, to pure love, and the tenderest affections, his daughter stands before him, dishonored and deflowered — her brother the author of this shocking crime. Who can fancy David’s feelings when he looked on Tamar’s tears, and listened, with grief and consternation on his countenance, to a story that filled the whole land with horror? But hardly has that earthquake-shock passed away when another follows. Tragedy on tragedy! Th» crimea father allowed to go unpunished her brother avenges. Biding his time, and, when suspicion is lulled, drawing Amnon, the perpetrator of that monstrous wickedness, into his toils, Absalom gives the signal, and, smitten by his servants, his brother dies. But ah! the sword that Absalom passed through Amnon’s body pierced David’s heart. Was ever father so afflicted? Alas the day! Wails fill the palace; and there — a sadder sight than Job sitting beggared and childless on the grave of all his children — he rends his garments; and, struck down by the blow, falls prostrate to the ground, his children standing around him dissolved in tears, and mingling their cries with his.

He has to drink still deeper “of the wine of astonishment.” Hardly has time, the great healer, closed that wound, when Absalom, his favorite son, whom he had forgiven, inflicts a deeper one; commits a crime of yet darker dye. In reading how the Pope’s soldiers, to obtain speedy possession of their jewels, were wont to sever the fingers of Huguenot ladies from their bleeding hands, I have wondered at the savage cruelty; but what cruelty, or crime, to be compared with his who, to possess himself the sooner of his father’s crown, sought to sweep off his father’s head? But for that bloody purpose Absalom, plying every traitorous art, poisoned the ears, and stole away the hearts of the people; seduced his father’s soldiers and councillors from their allegiance; and sowed the seeds of discontent broadcast throughout the land. Now deeming things ripe for revolt, he drops the mask, and breaks out into open and monstrous rebellion. What sins too great for the man to commit whom God abandons, and the devil drives? Lost to shame, he publicly dishonors his father’s bed; and has rewards for the assassin who will bring his gory gray head and lay it at his feet. We have seen many a sad sight; but none to be compared to this aged monarch, full of honors and of years, worthy of all filial love and public veneration, who had no subject but should have fought, nor child but should have died for him, flying with a few followers, under the cloud of night, to escape the sword of his own son. And when tidings came of Absalom’s death, how terrible his grief! He wrings his hands, and, as he goes up to his chamber, ever and anon stops to raise his swimming eyes in mute appeal to heaven for pity, or give vent to the love and unutterable anguish of his broken heart, crying, ““O, my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, would God I had died for thee! O Absalom, my son, my son!”

The cause of his afflictions.

Our springs and streams rise in wet, and fall in

- 23 dry weather. They are formed, and fed by rain; and thus when the river, on some day of unclouded sunshine, suddenly rises and swells till it roars in - red flood “between bank and brae,” we conclude that the mountains from which it descends have been bellowing with thunder, and deluged with — showers of rain. Nor to any other cause than rainfall do we attribute the springs and streams of those regions where, as in Egypt, for instance, snow never falls, nor even rain, for a long course of years. Though the source of the Nile, and of those annual inundations to which Egypt, once the granary of Rome, owes its remarkable fertility, was long enveloped in the profoundest mystery, it was never doubted that the cradle of that ancient river lay in some mountain region on which the loaded air discharged enormous quantities of snow or rain. Now as rain, however remote the place where it falls he from the river where it flows, or the fountain where it springs, is the source of their waters, so, directly or indirectly, through an immediate or remote connection, all sorrow has its source in sin — “no sin no sorrow” is as true an adage as “no cross no crown.”

The song of every bird, the happy gambols of every lambkin, the merry mazy dance of insects in the warm air of a summer evening, present God to us in an aspect of divine benignity — as taking pleasure in all his works; and, careful for the enjoyment of his meanest creatures, as filling their hearts with gladness. No heretics are further from the truth than those who regard the Divine Being as indifferent to the happiness of his creatures; or as capable of doing what no kind, no just, no upright judge sd

would do — of punishing innocence, or laying afflictions on any one without cause. It is a canon of our courts of justice that it is better that nine guilty men should escape than that one innocent man should suffer; and, as the spectre asked of Eliphaz, “Shall a mortal man be more just than God? Shall a man be more pure than his Maker?” He has no pleasure in the death of him that dieth. And so far from regarding Him as, to use the words of the parable, ‘“‘an austere man who taketh up what he laid not down, and reapeth what he did not sow,” I believe that man to be in some respects most like God whose greatest happiness is to make others happy. How can I believe else of Him who so loved the world as to give his onlv begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him might not perish, but have everlasting life?

It is, I say, in no case God, but sin which is the source and cause of evil. This is the bitter fountain from which, directly or remotely, all sorrows flow; and the simple reason why there is no sorrow in heaven, is that there is no sin there. But while this is true, and the Fall, the sin of man in Eden, is the only key that opens to any extent whatever the mystery of world-wide suffering, men suffer many afflictions which cannot be traced directly and immediately to their sins. It is always well when we are afflicted to inquire whether there is any cause for the Lord having a controversy with us; at the same time Jesus warns us against the error of referring every special suffering to some special sin. This were, like Job’s friends, to persecute him whom God has smitten, and talk to the grief of those whom He has wounded. ‘“Think ye,” said vut blessed

Lord, “that those eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell, and slew them, were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, nay; but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” Meanwhile, the tares grow with the wheat, and not seldom grow the taller of the two; meanwhile, the goats go with the sheep, and climbing, according to their natural instincts, heights the others never reach, form often the most conspicuous part of the flock. It were a great mistake to suppose that the dispensations of Providence afford any infallible criterion by which to judge of our relationship, as friends or foes, to God — ‘ Many are the afflictions of the righteous” — ‘‘ Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son that He receiveth.” Blessed balm this to bleeding hearts; a truth graphically set forth in that story where piety, clad in rags, sits begging at the gate, while sin is clothed in purple and fine linen, and fares sumptuously every day!

Still — and let it be a warning both to saints and sinners — it often happens in the providence or God, and no doubt through divine intention, that men’s sins find them out. Justified through faith in the righteousness of Jesus Christ, his people are forgiven the iniquity of their sin; yet they are made to smart for it. Their sin produces suffering, and the suffering reminds them of their sin — the connection between the two being not remote but direct, — manifest as that between drunkenness and rags; between theft and a prison; between debauchery and an impaired constitution; between a woman’s fall from the paths of virtue and her loss of place, and character, and honest bread.

In this light David presents one of the most remarkable beacons ever set up to warn the unwary; and teach him ‘‘ that thinketh he standeth to take heed lest he fall.” Was his house rent asunder by domestic quarrels? Was it the scene of crimes such as have seldom broken a father’s heart, or stained the purity and wrecked the peace of families? It may seem a great mystery to some how so good a man should have been so sorely tried. But it is no mystery. Hereaped ashe had sowed. Ifa second wife and a second family often breed discord among ourselves, with a plurality of wives — numbering at least seven or eight — David had nothing else than dispeace to look for. His domestic troubles were the price he paid for the pleasures of polygamy — for disregarding the ancient law of Eden, and indulging in a practice which has proved the curse of every country where it prevailed. The offspring of different mothers, and inflamed by their jealousies, envyings, rivalries, and other bad passions, his children neither did, nor could regard each: other with the affection to which we owe the peace and purity of our Christian homes. Hence the troubles that distracted, and the crimes that disgraced his house. In these his sin found him out.

This retribution was still more painfully, and not less plainly exemplified in the unnatural and monstrous rebellion of Absalom. It may be traced to his sin in the matter of Bathsheba. In that crime he sowed the wind, in this rebellion he reaps the whirlwind — the death of the child, the fruit of their guilty love, being but the beginning, and the least, of all the sorrows of which his adultery was the fatal source. Bathsheba may not be known to many but as the wife of Uriah — that gallant soldier whose fate is so pitiful, and whose mutder, planned with the coolest deliberation, and accomplished by the basest treachery, is David’s blackest crime; one that constrains us to exclaim, ‘‘ Lord, what is man?” “Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?” But on examining the Scriptures we find something more about this woman of fatal beauty and too easy virtue — whose simplest effort to fly, Joseph-like, from temptation might have recalled the king to his senses and his saintship; saving both from a load of guilt, and a sea of troubles.

It appears from one genealogy that Bathsheba was the daughter of Eliam, and from another that her father Eliam was the son of Ahithophel, the Gilonite, David’s counsellor. This near relationship between Bathsheba and Ahithophel throws a flood of light on Absalom’s rebellion; for what more likely than that through means of that, Ahithophel sought vengeance for the wrongs which, in the double crime of adultery and murder, the king had committed against him and his house? Revenge is a strong passion in all, but especially in the bosom of eastern nations. There, concealed under smiling and specious appearances, it will lie burning for long years — like the fires of a volcano under the purple vineyards, and fair flowers, and umbrageous forests that clothe the mountain’s side. Ahithophel’s vindictive passions found their tool in Absalom; and their time when, like the pent-up fires of a volcano, the rebellion burst out. He lent it those extraordinary talents which constituted him David’s ablest statesman, and led men to say that ‘the counsel of Ahithophel was as if a man had inquired at the oracle of God.” With a devilish craft, for the purpose of making reconciliation between the father and son impossible, he counselled the shameless outrage that Absalom perpetrated on the royal concubines. The immediate pursuit, which would have crowned the revolt with success, was also his sagacious but bloodthirsty advice. He it was who fanned the flames of ambition in Absalom’s bosom; he steeled his heart against the relentings which would otherwise have stayed his hand. In this man, whom he had deeply wronged, David saw the head, and front, and mainspring of the conspiracy. Thus God reminded him of his crimes, and showeu him his sin in its punishment. His case presents a remarkable example of how long sin, so far as its effects are concerned, may slumber ere it breaks out — like a fire that, smouldering days and nights in some beam, at length bursts into flame, and reduces the fairest pile to a blackened ruin and a heap of smoking ashes.

If, like David, we are compelled to trace our sufferings to our sins, what a weight does that add to the load! Let us pray God, that, while He forgives their iniquity for Christ’s sake, and takes away their guilt through his. blood, he would not visit us for our sins. If we are to suffer, may it not be for sins, but for righteousness’ sake! A light load that — a fortune we should neither greatly dread nor deprecate. In words illustrated by those heroic spectacles of martyrdom where the saints praised God in prisons, took joyfully the spoiling of their goods, embraced the stake, and stretched out their hands with good, brave old Latimer to bathe them in its rising flames, Jesus says, ‘‘ Blessed are ye when men shall persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil falsely against you for my sake; rejoice, and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven.”

The use and profit of his afflictions.

When Queen Mary, by her marriage, was about to plunge herself and the kingdom of Scotland into dark and bloody trouble, Knox publicly condemned the step. For this she summoned the bold Reformer to her presence, complained bitterly of his conduct, and saying, ““I vow to God I shall be revenged,” burst into a flood of tears. Waiting till she had composed herself, he proceeded calmly to make his defence. It was triumphant; but produced no other effect on Mary than to exasperate her passions. Again she began to sob, and weep with great bitterness. While Erskine, the friend of both, and a man of mild and gentle spirit, tried to mitigate her grief and resentment by praising her beauty and accomplishments, Knox continued silent — waiting with unaltered countenance till the queen had given vent to her feelings. Then explaining how he was constrained to sustain her tears rather than hurt his conscience and by his silence betray the commonwealth, he protested that he never took delight in the distress of any creature; and that so far from rejoicing in her majesty’s tears, it was with great difficulty he could see his own boys weep when he corrected them for their faults.

In this beautiful expression we see the feelings of every father; and in these a faithful, though feeble, reflection of the kind heart of God. In no case does He afflict his people willingly; and always for their good.

‘“We have had fathers of our flesh,” says an apostle, “‘ which corrected us, and we gave them reverence. Shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of our spirits, and live? For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure, but He for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness.” A glorious object; and what precious consolation to his people — to them we may address the words of the prophet: ‘““O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted!” Why not comforted? God beats his people, but it is to make them better; nor when blow follows on the back of blow, are their trials other than the strokes of the flail on a threshing-floor — it falls not to bruise the grain, but to separate the chaff from the wheat. Deep no doubt were the sorrows that wounded, the anguish that tore David’s heart — ‘I am poor and needy,” he cries; ‘‘my heart is wounded within me. Iam gone like the shadow when it declineth. My soul is full of troubles, and my life draweth nigh unto the grave. Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit; in darkness, in the deeps. Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves. Lord, why castest thou off my soul? Why hidest thou thy face from me? Iam afflicted, and ready to die.” Yet in all this, in David’s as in every such case, God afflicted not willingly.

And how his gracious purpose was accomplished in the Psalmist’s afflictions, may be seen, for instance, in the sorrow, and even horror, with which he regarded his saddest fall. His bitterest enemies could not have exposed, nor his dearest friends lamented, it more than he did himself. Never man was less like those whom a prophet addresses, saying: ‘‘Hearken unto me, ye stout-hearted!” He was not stout-hearted. He lies prostrate in the dust, both before God and man — concealing nothing; offering no excuse, or palliation; his grief, as expressed in the 51st Psalm, not grief but agony. If for a time his heart seemed a flinty rock, struck by a power mightier than the rod of Moses, it pours forth a torrent of tears, and prayers, and the deepest sorrow. ‘‘ Have mercy upon me, O God,” he cries, ‘according to thy loving-kindness; according to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy Holy Spirit from me. Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation!”

Affliction proved, in his case, as in many others, the greatest preacher. Brought through it and the grace of God to a deep sense of the insufficiency of the world, and of the evil of sin, led thereby to earnest prayer, with strong crying and tears, for pardon, no wonder he said, ‘“‘It was good for me that I was afflicted.” But his afflictions have been good also for the Church. She owes not a few of his most prized and precious psalms to the afflictions that brought out the noblest features of his character, as the darkness of night does the stars, the crushing of some flowers their latent odors, and fire the shining metal which lies concealed in the earthy ore. We had been great losers if David had not been greatly afflicted. In these psalms he points us to our refuge in times of trouble; and furnishes us with language to express the wishes and relieve the burden of our hearts. So long as men have wounds to heal, and war with sin to wage, and faults to confess, and forgiveness to seck, and trials to endure, and death to face, so long will Lis words ascend to the ear of God, from Spiritual battle-fields and domestic altars, from prayingclosets and beds of death.

The greatest of ali affiictitm, as has been justly said, is an unblessec affliction. On the other hand, let the Holy Spirit, in answer to prayer, turn them into the means of our sanctification, and there are no greater mercies. How many, when they became poor in this world, have grown rich toward God! How many have found life in the death of dear ones! How many, by being brought to weep over a broken cistern, have turned their trembling steps to the fountain of living water! and when God sent storms to wreck their earthly happiness, how many ‘‘on the broken pieces of the ship” have reached the shore in safety! No chastening for the present is joyous, but grievous; yet let us not shrink from its pain, since our blessed Lord makes use of it to work out the peaceable fruits of righteousness. The harrow that tears up the bosom of the soil, laying it open to heavenly influences, to the showers and sunshine of the sky, brings joy in harvest. So shall it be with afflictions. Bitter frosts, by means of which God kills the weeds our hearts are so ready to throw up — thorns he lays on our pillow to prevent us spending our lives in sleep — sharp spurs, without whose touch most would make slow progress in the way to heaven; — afflictions are of the greatest advantage to God’s people. They teach us the vanity of the world; they call us to our senses; they remind us of our sins; they give depth to repentance; they give fervor to love; they give wings to prayer; and they quicken our longings, and, with them, our preparation for that happy worl?, where there is no death, nor sickness, nor sin, nos sorrow, and Jesus wipes away all tears from all ey-s.