^ Such a one is dead, gone (as we say) to his last account : it is a bad record which closes, a life vicious, reckless, false : the world sighs with relief to be well rid of him: the Joabs have struck their spears into him as he hung in calamity's grip, and
2 SAMUEL XVIII. 33 357
the multitude have cast each man his opprobrious stone to build up the monument of infamy over that disastrous life. But mean- while the news of that shameful ending has been borne to the towers of Heaven. Is it relief, is it exultation, is it opprobrium that greets it there ? I think not. Eather I think it is a Father, a Divine Father, mourning in His high place with a sorrow larger than the sorrow of man, over His son. True, He knows (for is He not Divine?), He knows better even than Joab and the multitude how bad a son this child has been ; He knows his follies, perversities, rebellions, treacheries, violences — who so well as He ? But it is something over which that infinite compassion, that unconquerable love, bends in sorrow. That Father is mourn- ing not the fool, the rebel, the profligate, but the son whom He. < knew before these evil days : the child of His desires, His hopes ; ^ the man who might have been, who was not, and now can never *• be. In that chamber over the gate of Heaven there sits a Presence which we image often to ourselves as the just, un- yielding Judge, impassively dealing out man's due. But if there be joy among the angels over one sinner that repenteth, shall there not be sorrow among them for one sinner lost to repent- ance ? And shall not the Lord of the Angels sorrow the most over the child whom He brought into the world, whom He made a living soul and on its birthday looked on it in love, and behold, then and there and thus at least, and as its Father had made it to be, behold, it was very good ? ^
*j| The Jewish Eabbis of a later time, in their strange legendary way, showed some sympathy with the yearnings of the father's heart. For each time that the words " my son " came from the lips of David, one of the seven gates of Gehenna (so they fabled) rolled back, and with the last the spirit of Absalom passed into the peace of Paradise.^ Augustine, on the contrary, here, as too often elsewhere, placing himself on the judgment-seat of God, passes sentence of condemnation, chiefly, it might almost seem, because he saw in Absalom's guilt a parallel to the rebellion of the Donatists against the Catholic Church, and read their doom in his doom.
^ Explorers opened an Egyptian tomb, a tomb shut hard and fast by the iron silence of three thousand years. There stood an exquisitely carved sarcophagus of a little child, and over it this inscription : " Oh, my life, my love, my little one ! Would God I had died for thee ! " Instinctively the men uncovered their
1 J. H. Skrine.
• Bartolocci, Biblioth. Eahbinica, ii. 128-162.
358 AN EXCEEDING BITTER CRY
heads, and with dim eyes stepped silently out into the light. They replaced and sealed the portal, and left love and death to their eternal vigil. How old is love ? Old as the human heart, old as God.^
2. The Atonement of Christ. — Again, and in the truest and deepest sense, the life of David is a type of a higher life, his agony a foreshadowing of the agony of Gethsemane. That passionate cry, "Would God I had died for thee — died in thy stead, delivering, redeeming thee"; that wonderful union of a father's righteous hatred of the evil, with a yearning, ever- deepening love for the poor wayward doer of the evil, were leading him through that living experience by which, and perhaps by which alone, the mystery of Atonement ceases to be a dogma of the Schools and becomes the most precious of all realities. So it had been before with Moses, when he cried in his intercession, " Blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written " (Ex. xxxii. 32). So it was afterwards with St. Paul, when he wrote in his great heaviness, " I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh " (Eom. ix. 3). That craving of man's spirit, when it is most after the likeness of Christ, to sacrifice its own peace, life, blessedness for the sake of others, helps us to understand, vain and fruitless as it may often seem to be (he who makes the sacrifice himself needing pardon), the perfect sacrifice of the Sinless One. " With men it is impossible, but not with God." What kings and prophets desired to do and could not, that the Son of God did, taking away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.
^ I must tell you of a touching (and it struck me peculiarly Northumbrian) saying I heard the other day from a poor old woman who wished her paralytic husband to be allowed a seat near the pulpit on the Communion Sunday, as he is deaf and does not go to church, and is, indeed, a Deist (very common in Blandford), but she thought seeing the tables covered might do him good. " For eh ! " she said in a faltering voice, almost in tears, "it is a lovely sight." Poor body, I could have cried myself to think of all she has probably passed through for that man, praying, as she said, night and morning for him, and he now old and almost out of hail with his infirmities.^