I speak with all diffidence,
and merely as it seems to me--he is a broken man. His attitude in
Absalom's rebellion is all but imbecile. No act is recorded of him
to the day of his death but what is questionable, if not mean and
crafty. The one sudden flash of the old nobleness which he has
shewn in pardoning Shimei, he himself stultifies with his dying lips
by a mean command to Solomon to entrap and slay the man whom he has
too rashly forgiven. The whole matter of the sacrifice of Saul's
sons is so very strange, so puzzling, even shocking to our ideas of
right and wrong, that I cannot wonder at, though I dare not endorse,
Coleridge's bold assertion, that they were sacrificed to a plot of
State policy, and the suspicion of some critics, that the whole
scene was arranged between David and a too complaisant priesthood,
and God's name blasphemously taken in vain to find a pretext for a
political murder. And so David shivers pitiably to his grave, after
a fashion which has furnished a jest for cynics and infidels, but
which contains, to the eyes of a wise man, the elements of the
deepest tragedy; one more awful lesson that human beauty, valour,
wit, genius, success, glory, are vanity of vanities: that man is
nothing, and God is all in all.

But some may ask, What has all this to do with us? To do with us?
Do you think that the Scripture says in vain, 'All these things are
written for our example'? As long as human nature is what it is
now, and was three thousand years ago, so long shall we be tempted
to commit the same sins as David: different in outward form,
according to the conditions of society; but the same in spirit, the
same in sinfulness, and the same in the sure punishment which they
bring. And above all, will men to the end be tempted to the sin of
self-indulgence, want of self-control. In many ways, but surely in
some way or other, will every man's temptation be, to lose self-
control.

Therefore settle it in your minds, young men, that the first and the
last of all virtues and graces of which God can give is self-
control; as necessary for the saint and the sage, lest they become
fanatics or pedants, as for the young man in the hey-day of youth
and health; but as necessary for the young man as for the saint and
the sage, lest, while they become only fanatics and pedants, he
become a profligate, and a cumberer of the ground.

Remember this--remember it now in the glorious days of youth which
never