attering
unction to his soul. The first and the last business of every human
being, whatever his station, party, creed, capacities, tastes,
duties, is morality: Virtue, Virtue, always Virtue. Nothing that
man will ever invent will absolve him from the universal necessity
of being good as God is good, righteous as God is righteous, and
holy as God is holy.

Believe it, young men, believe it. Better would it be for any one
of you to be the stupidest and the ugliest of mortals, to be the
most diseased and abject of cripples, the most silly, nervous
incapable personage who ever was a laughingstock for the boys upon
the streets, if only you lived, according to your powers, the life
of the Spirit of God; than to be as perfectly gifted, as exquisitely
organised in body and mind as David himself, and not to live the
life of the Spirit of God, the life of goodness, which is the only
life fit for a human being wearing the human flesh and soul which
Christ took upon him on earth, and wears for ever in heaven, a Man
indeed in the midst of the throne of God.

And therefore it is, as you will yourselves have perceived already,
that I have chosen to speak to you of David, his character, his
history.

It is the character of a man perfectly gifted, exquisitely
organised. He has personal beauty, daring, prowess, and skill in
war; he has generosity, nobleness, faithfulness, chivalry as of a
mediaeval and Christian knight; he is a musician, poet, seemingly an
architect likewise; he is, moreover, a born king; he has a
marvellous and most successful power of attracting, disciplining,
ruling his fellow-men. So thoroughly human a personage is he, that
God speaks of him as the man after his own heart; that our blessed
Lord condescends to call himself especially the Son of David.

For there is in this man (as there is said to be in all great
geniuses) a feminine, as well as a masculine vein; a passionate
tenderness; a keen sensibility; a vast capacity of sympathy,
sadness, and suffering, which makes him truly the type of Christ,
the Man of sorrows; which makes his Psalms to this day the text-book
of the afflicted, of tens of thousands who have not a particle of
his beauty, courage, genius; but yet can feel, in mean hovels and
workhouse sick-beds, that the warrior-poet speaks to their human
hearts, and for their human hearts, as none other can speak, save
Christ himself, the Son of David and the Son of man.

A man, I say, of intense