in their armour, and rising from his bed to stroll on his
palace roof, and peer into the household privacies below, as if his
heart had no interest in the grim tussle going on behind the hills that
he could almost see from his height, as they grew purple in the evening
twilight. He has fallen to the level of an Eastern despot, and has lost
his sense of the responsibilities of his office. Such loosening of the
tension of his moral nature as is indicated in his absence from the
field, during what was evidently a very severe as well as a long
struggle, prepared the way for the dismal headlong plunge into sin.

The story is told in all its hideousness, without palliation or reserve,
without comment or heightening, in that stern judicial fashion so
characteristic of the Bible records of its greatest characters. Every
step is narrated without a trace of softening, and without a word of
emotion. Not a single ugly detail is spared. The portraiture is as vivid
as ever. Bathsheba's willing complicity, her punctilious observance of
ceremonial propriety while she is trampling under foot her holiest
obligations; the fatal necessity which drags sin after sin, and summons
up murder to hide, if it be possible, the foul form of adultery; the
stinging rebuke in the conduct of Uriah, who, Hittite as he was, has a
more chivalrous, not to say devout, shrinking from personal ease while
his comrades and the ark are in the field, than the king has; the mean
treason, the degradation implied in getting into Joab's power; the
cynical plainness of the murderous letter, in which a hardened
conscience names his purposed evil by its true name; the contemptuous
measure of his master which Joab takes in his message, the king's
indifference to the loss of his men so long as Uriah is out of the way;
the solemn platitudes with which he pretends to console his tool for the
check of his troops; and the hideous haste with which, after her
scrupulous "mourning" for one week, Bathsheba threw herself again into
David's arms;--all these particulars, and every particular an
aggravation, stand out for ever, as men's most hidden evil will one day
do, in the clear, unpitying, unmistakable light of the Divine record.
What a story it is!

This saint of nearly fifty years of age, bound to God by ties which he
rapturously felt and acknowledged, whose words have been the very breath
of devotion for every devout heart, forgets his longings after
righteousness, flings aw