the honor-roll of David's heroes is
starred with undying lustre. Thirty captains are mentioned, among them
three mightiest, and the record of these valiant men is like the record
written of Thor and his followers in the legendry of the stormy
Norsemen. There was one who slew an Egyptian, a giant five cubits high,
with a spear like a weaver's beam, and the champion went down to the
combat armed with a staff only, disarmed the Egyptian, and slew him with
his own spear. Another slew "a lion in a pit in a snowy day." One sees
the picture, the yellow-maned, fierce-eyed lion, the white drift of the
blinding flakes, the hole of the pit, deep-walled and narrow, a fit lair
for the wild beast. The incident of the well of Bethlehem belongs here.
The king was spent and athirst, and he longed for a drink from the old
well by the gate. But when three mighty men cut their way sword in hand
through the enemy's host, and brought the precious water, the king would
not drink it, but poured it out before the Lord in libation. "God
forbid," he exclaimed, "that I should drink the blood of these men, that
have put their lives in jeopardy!"

If David had always been as noble! But men have the defects of their
qualities. These mighty men of earth have often, on one side or another,
a special liability to temptation. In the seduction of Bathsheba and the
cowardly murder of Uriah, her husband, David committed a sin for which
he was punished not only in the denunciation of Nathan the prophet and
the loss of Bathsheba's first child, but by the stings of a deep
remorse, which expresses itself in a psalm which is a miserere. Yet
Bathsheba became the mother of Solomon, and Solomon was the heir chosen
by the Lord to preserve the kingly line of David, and to maintain the
kingdom in great glory and splendor.

In the quaint language of the sacred scribes, we find David's frequent
battles graphically described. Rapid and pitiless as Attila or Napoleon,
he "smote" the Amalekites, and the Ammonites, and the neighboring
warlike peoples, and compelled them to pay tribute. He was not more
rapacious than France has recently shown herself to Siam, or than
England to India, and he was emphatically the "battle-axe of God." It
was enlightenment against savagery, the true religion against the
idolatries and witchcrafts of a false worship. In every way David
displayed statesmanship, not carrying on war for the mere pleasure of
it, but strengthening his national line