became the voice of the nation's worship, the expression of its faith and love and trust in its God. In this there waFI e. distinct advance, anfl a most pure and ennobling and spiritnal element was added, not merely to the ritual of the, temple, but to the worship of God in the homes of the people. The sacrifice was full of teaching, but its details were coarse, and to us would be revolting. In the psalms sang to bright melodies in the temple, we have a form of wol'ship so perfect, that it has lasted from David's day unto our own time ; and the similar use of hymns in oar services has enriched our Church with a body of spiritual poetry almost as precious as David's psalms. And like hymns in oar own days, the psalms would be learnt by the people, and sang in their homes ; and the worship of Israel would consist not merely of stately services in the temple, bat of the voice of prayer and praise chanted throughout the land to the tunes of Asaph and his brethren, and in David's words. In this respect we reap the benefit of David's varied experiences. Had he been a man of unblemished morality, his psalms would have struck no deeper note than those of Korab, or Asaph, or Jednthun. In Jeremiah alone we should have had a psalmist whose words were the outpouring of a troubled heart. As it is, the passion-fraught nature of David hnrried him into sins so terrible as to cover his character with disgrace, and bring upon him twenty years of severe punishment, ever following blow upon blow, and darkening even his death-bed with the fate of his eldest son, of the nephew who had been the pillar of his safety in every danger, and of the priest who, hn.ving alone escaped from the slaughter of his family at Nob, had been David's faithful companion all the days of his life. No regal splendour, no greatness of glory, could compensate for the lurid gloom of that death-bed. Bnt God overruled all this misery for lasting good; for David has been for all ages the psalmist of sorrow and of repentance. Myriads of sinners have found in the fifty-first psalm the best expression of feelings that were rending their hearts. Nor does this psalm stand alone. When we read utterances such as those in Ps. xx:xi. 9, 10; x.n::viii. 4; xl. 12, etc., the words wonld seem overstrained did we not know the greatness of David's sin, the depth of bis penitence, and the stern righteous- ness which punished him not once only, but with ever-recnrring severity. The words quoted by St. Paul from 1 Sam. xiii. 14, that David was a man after God's heart, often trouble the minds of believers, because they take them as the Divine verdict upon his whole character. Really they are spoken of him such as he was when Samuel anointed him, and when his youthful piety was still unstained. Yet to the very last he manifests such tenderness, such spirituality, and so devout and personal a trust in God as still to justify, though with large exceptions, this high estimate of him. And almost all his psalms belong to the days when trouble and anguish had stirred depths in his soul which otherwise would have remained stagnant. 'l'here are but few which belong to the days of his pure innocence. His poems then would hn.ve celebrnted the beauties of nature, the Creator's INTRODUCTION TO
goodnes11, the brave exploits of his countrymen, and the like. It wa,s after his terrible fall that the contrite and humbled David poured forth from the inmost recesses of & struggling breast the words of earnest penitence, of deep humiliation, and withal of intense trust in the God who was punishing him so sternly, and of unwavering faith in the Divine goodness, which wa,s manifesting itself to him as justice that could by no means clear the guilty. The Second Book of Samuel is thus the basis and the justifioa.tion of the Book of Psalms. The intensity of feeling ma.nifested there is proved to be no mere poetry, but the ory of real distress. And because of the reality of hie repents.nee David ~s forgiven; but his forgiveness did not save him from punishment. Never was history more sad than David's from the day when Nathan said, " Thon art the man ! " unto that last death-bed scene, when, troubled by the cry of rebellion, he was forced to condemn old friends in order to prevent civil war and save the throne of his chosen son. And as David's sin was the violation of domestic chastity, so all his sorrows sprang from the same source, and not only were his own sons the workers of his misery, but it was in and by his children that he was punished. Yet amidst it all, David was a man after God's heart in this respect at least, that there was neither rebellion nor stubbornness in his character.· His sins were greater than those of Saul, but they were not persisted in. David humbled himself before God, and bore his chastisement not only meekly, but with a clinging love to the hand that was scourging him. Let but God deliver him from blood-guiltiness, and amid the ruin of his earthly happiness he would sing a.loud of Jehovah's righteousness (Ps. li. 14). But besides the interest inseparable from the study of a character so.oh as David's, the Second Book of Samuel gives us the history of the founding of Israel's empire. War is a. dreadful thing, and involves a terrible amount of material loss and injury; but it is at once God's penalty upon national debasement, and his remedy against national meanness and selfishness. Nations rise to moral greatness through war, and when they have been sinking through social corruption and private immorality, it is generally war which reveals to them the gangrene in their midst, and either forces them by repeated disaster to humble themselves for it, or displaces them in order that a worthier people may fill their room. So Israel had displaced the Canaanite tribes in Palestine. And with n.11 their faults, the repeated acts of heroism of which we have _the record in the Book of Judges prove them to have been a race of sterling worth. No commonplace people could have produced such men as Saul and Jonathan, to say nothing of Samuel, whose wisdom and goodness and ability as the restorer of a crushed nation, and the founder of institutions which enriched it with intellectual and moral and religions life, rab!e him to an extra- ordinary pre-eminence. Yet the extraordinary men of a nation always hold some relation to its ordinary level, and Samuel did not stand alone. He was followed by David and the numerous worthies of his court. But Iarael could not have maintained its heroism and nobleness by the mere nm SECOND BOOK OF SAMUEL. ix