ltan, or
fairy-tale Rajah--the prodigious king at once polygamous, unbridled,
insatiable by luxury, and learned, artistic, peace-loving, the wisest
among men. In advance of the ideas of his time, he was the great builder
in Israel, and the commerce of the country was of his making. He left
such a reputation for wisdom and justice that he came at last to be
regarded as an enchanter and wizard. Even Josephus tells us that he
wrote a book of Magic, of incantations for laying evil spirits; in the
Middle Ages he was said to have owned a magic ring, charms, forms of
evocation, secrets for exorcism; and in all these legends the image of
the king becomes confused.

And he would remain to this day a figure out of the Thousand and One
Nights, were it not that in the decline of his glory we see him as a
grandiose image of the mournfulness of life, the vanity of joy, the
nothingness of man.

His old age was melancholy. Exhausted and governed by women, he denied
God and sacrificed to idols. We discern in him wide gaps, vast clearings
in the soul. Weary of everything, sick of enjoyment, and drunken with
sin, he wrote some admirable reflections and anticipated the blackest
pessimism of our day, summing up the misery of him who endures the
condemnation of living, in phrases that are its final expression. What
distress is that of the Preacher: All the days of man are sorrow, and
his travail grief; better is the day of death than the day of birth; all
is vanity and vexation of spirit.

After his death, too, the old king remains a mystery. Had he expiated
his apostacy and his fall? Was he, like his fathers, received into
Abraham's bosom? And the greatest writers of the Church have not agreed
about it.

According to St. Irenaeus, St. Hilary, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St.
Ambrose, and St. Jerome, his penance was accomplished, and he is saved.

According to Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Augustine, and St. Gregory the
Great, he did not repent to amendment, and so he is damned.

Durtal turned over in his bed and tried to lose consciousness.
Everything was in confusion in his brain, and at last he fell into
disturbed slumbers mingled with hideous nightmares, in which he saw
Madame Mesurat standing in the place of the queen on a pedestal in the
porch; and Durtal fumed at her ugliness, raging against the Canons, to
whom he vainly appealed to remove his housekeeper and replace the queen.

CHAPTER XII.

This church symbolism, this ps