^ Sensuality is a prolific cause of suicide. Impurity leads to melancholy, melancholy to despair, and despair to suicide. It is not only the woman who grows weary of breath and plunges into the swift flowing river. When young men from home fall into the ways of sin, they become callous and indifferent to the claims of affection. The brief, infrequent letter home finally ceases altogether. A young man was found drowned in the Clyde, and the newspapers said he was unknown. Within three days two hundred letters came from two hundred mothers asking for a description of the drowned youth. What a terribly suggestive fact is this, all too eloquent of wayward sons and aching hearts.^
11.
David's Discipline.
Of all the hours of agony in David's life — of all hours of merely human agony in the history of the Bible — that was, beyond all doubt, the darkest. First, in the loud bitter cry, as he rushed from the awestruck crowd of soldiers and messengers and the townsmen of Mahanaim, then from that chamber of sorrow over the gateway, in the long protracted wailing of a broken heart did that agony find vent — " 0 my son, Absalom, my son, my son Absalom ! would God I had died for thee ; 0 Absalom, my son, my son ! " Terrible was it to think that this was the end of that bright morning of beauty and joy in which his heart had exulted ; more terrible still to feel that his own sins had wrought out that fearful retribution. Had his own life been purer, that son might
» W. M. Taylor. « D. Watson, The Heritage of Youth, 89.
2 SAMUEL XVIII. ^^ 355
have been free from the guilt of incest ; had he done his duty as a father and a king, punishing at the right time, forgiving at the right time, all might still have been well. And now all was over. The doom of that great woe was irreparable. Of him also it was true, within the limits of man's vision, that " he found no place for repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears." And yet, not the less may we believe that, in that hour of shattered hopes, and agony beyond words, when there seemed to have fallen on him the horror of great darkness, the life of David, all un- conscious as he was of it, was passing through the refiner's fire, and becoming purer and brighter than it had ever been in the days of his most glowing victories, or the moments of his most ecstatic adoration. The darkest of all human sorrows brings him into contact with that which is superhuman.
Good Lord, to-day
I scarce find breath to say:
Scourge, but receive me. For stripes are hard to bear, but worse Thy intolerable curse;
So do not leave me.
Good Lord, lean down In pity, tho' Thou frown;
Smite, but retrieve me: For so Thou hold me up to stand And kiss Thy smiting hand,
It less will grieve me.^
IIL
Two Types.
We may take David's sorrow for Absalom as a type or human picture of the Divine Fatherhood and of its unlimited forgiveness. And, again, we may take David's cry, " Would God I had died for thee ! " as a type or forecast of the atoning act of Christ.
1. The Fatherhood of God. — David is called the man after God's own heart, and that word staggers us when we remember
1 C. G. Rossetti.
356 AN EXCEEDING BITTER CRY
some of his doings. But the word does not come amiss here. We feel that it is true in such scenes as this. Kneehng in his chamber and uttering that impassioned cry of pity, burning love, and forgiveness, we can see indeed something of God's own heart. In this great tribulation he is as one washed and made white, and his face is like the tearful Christ's, Godlike. His love for this guilty hard-hearted son was passing strange ; it was almost more than human. It was a love which gave a kiss for every blow, turned a forgiving face to every insult and stripe, and prayed for the criminal who was crucifying it. Through all the suffering and shame which Absalom's revolt had brought upon him, through all the infamous treachery, he clung with fond affection to the boy, the man who was still his child in spite of all. Ugly in his cruelty, hateful in his falsehood, he was still beautiful in his father's eyes. He had done every mean and dastardly thing, schemed and conspired like a very devil against his father, driven him from his house, robbed him of his friends, sought his life and would have trampled with fury on his corpse. Yet through all this, David's one thought was to woo and win back his boy, to restore him to the old place, to heap forgiveness on his crimes and cover them all with great waters of love as the sea hides its secrets and its dead.
All this is what we rightly call Divine. It is a broken light of God. It is the image of His Fatherhood. All worthy fathers and mothers have something of it. "What wrongs can entirely alienate and destroy a father's love? What insults can turn a mother obstinately against her child? What shame resting on our children's faces can make us hide our faces from theirs ? From what wanderings would we not fetch them back? Into what pit would we not descend to bring them up and wash them clean? What iniquities would repel us if they returned with tears of penitence and asked us to take them into our arms again? And when do we ever cease hoping and striving to redeem them when they have fallen ? Death itself can hardly stop us praying for them, though they have died in very sin.