on the disastrous field of
Gilboa. Where is there a sadder and more solemn story of the fate of a
soul which makes shipwreck "of faith and of a good conscience," than
that awful page which tells how, godless, wretched, mad with despair and
measureless pride, he flung himself on his bloody sword, and died a
suicide's death, with sons and armour-bearer and all his men, a ghastly
court of corpses, laid round him? He had once been brave, modest, and
kind, full of noble purposes and generous affections--and he ended so.
Into what doleful regions of hate and darkness may self-will drag a
soul, when once the reins fall loose from a slackened hand! And what a
pathetic beam of struggling light gleams through heavy clouds, in the
grateful exploit of the men of Jabesh, who remembered how he had once
saved them, while yet he could care and dare for his kingdom, and
perilled their lives to bear the poor headless corpse to its rude
resting-place!

The news is received by the fugitive at Ziklag in striking and
characteristic fashion. He first flames out in fierce wrath upon the
lying Amalekite, who had hurried with the tidings and sought favour by
falsely representing that he had killed the king on the field. A short
shrift and a bloody end were his. And then the wrath melts into
mourning. Forgetting the mad hatred and wild struggles of that poor
soul, and his own wrongs, remembering only the friendship and nobleness
of his earlier days, he casts over the mangled corpses of Saul and
Jonathan the mantle of his sweet elegy, and bathes them with the healing
waters of his unstinted praise and undying love. Not till these two
offices of justice and affection had been performed, does he remember
himself and the change in his own position which had been effected. He
had never thought of Saul as standing between him and the kingdom; the
first feeling on his death was not, as it would have been with a less
devout and less generous heart, a flush of gladness at the thought of
the empty throne, but a sharp pang of pain from the sense of an empty
heart. And even when he begins to look forward to his own new course,
there is that same remarkable passiveness which we have observed
already. His first step is to "inquire of the Lord, saying, Shall I go
up to any of the cities of Judah?" (2 Sam. ii. 1). He will do nothing in
this crisis of his fortunes, when all which had been so long a hope
seemed to be rapidly becoming a fact, until his Shepherd sh