thing before mine eyes." For
himself, he begins his reign with noble self-restraint, not meaning to
make it a region of indulgence, but feeling that there is a law above
his will, of which he is only the servant, and knowing that if his
people and his public life are to be what they should be, his own
personal and domestic life must be pure. As for his court and his
ministers, he will make a clean sweep of the vermin who swarm and sting
and buzz about a throne. The froward, the wicked, privy slanderers,
proud hearts, crafty plotters, liars, and evil-doers he will not
suffer--but "mine eyes shall be upon the faithful in the land; he that
walketh in a perfect way, he shall serve me." He is fired with ambition,
such as has brightened the beginning of many a reign which has darkened
to cruelty and crime, to make his kingdom some faint image of God's, and
to bring the actual Israel into conformity with its ancient Magna
Charta, "Ye shall be to me a holy nation." And so, not knowing perhaps
how hard a task he planned, and little dreaming of his own sore fall, he
grasps the sword, resolved to use it for the terror of evil-doers, and
vows, "I will early destroy all the wicked in the land, that I may cut
off all wicked doers from the city of the Lord." Such was his
"proclamation against vice and immorality" on his accession to his
throne.

XI.--THE KING--_CONTINUED_.

The years thus well begun are, in the historical books, characterized
mainly by three events, namely, the bringing up of the ark to the newly
won city of David, Nathan's prophecy of the perpetual dominion of his
house, and his victories over the surrounding nations. These three
hinges of the narrative are all abundantly illustrated in the psalms.

As to the first, we have relics of the joyful ceremonial connected with
it in two psalms, the fifteenth and twenty-fourth, which are singularly
alike not only in substance but in manner, both being thrown into a
highly dramatic form by question and answer. This peculiarity, as we
shall see, is one of the links of connection which unite them with the
history as given in the Book of Samuel (2 Sam. vi.). From that record we
learn that David's first thought after he was firmly seated as king over
all Israel, was the enthronement in his recently-captured city of the
long-forgotten ark. That venerable symbol of the presence of the true
King had passed through many vicissitudes since the days when it had
been carried