David, King Of Israel.

thought ; in the ministries of influence , he is a living man ofthe living present . He had a deep fellowship with men , and all his deeds and words are but the incidents that cluster around this brotherhood . And viewing his life in

this light , its record is the record on an universal field of the hopes and conflicts of all men . His own career was a path leading from wonder to wonder . From a simple shep herd in Bethlehem he is led by patience and

discip line to sit among the kings of the earth . And yet this man , so great an illustration of brotherhood of men , so strong and so weak , so erring and so penitent , so guilty and so spiritual , recedes from us as we seek to place him in

his nineteenth century with its magnificent nnfoldings of thought , and its splendour of achievement . But among the stately throngs of men who stand enshrined in the lettered niches of history , poets , warriors , philosophers ,

statesmen , thinkers , reformers , heroic achievers in the thick and saddening battles of life , no man of dead age presses into such close contact with the frailties and strength , the yearning and hopes of this individuality of

ours . His life-strength grew out of the weakness , his lifework was shaped out of those secret inner struggles , which are the heritage of mankind . His purity was not the purity of the unstained soul of a child , but a purity wrought

out and fashioned as the hot steel is fashioned by the quivering blows of hammer , by those fiercer conflicts with the evils that would destroy all that is best and noblest in the man . And out of such a life his words flow wide

and deep in their meaning as a many-voiced sea . They tell us of depths of wretchedness unfathomable ; of tempests more fierce than those that beat the seas into troubles ; of calmness that follows storms more gentle than the massed

calm of the still waters ; of alternations of joy and sorrow , such as pass into the heart of all ranks and principalities and classes of men . Beneath that varied life of the King there was then a bond of union and interest which makes

that life , in its victory and defeats , a life of high significance to the world and a personal present force . In the ceaseless progress and activities of our age there is , to the unseeming eye , no connection between the spirit

struggling for a higher life and the spirit of David . An eastern shepherd amid the sheepfolds is not the energetic toiler of a century that has swept into brief compass worlds of thought , of invention and discovery which call for every

faculty of man to make them things of use and power . And yet that shepherd is taken from his humble toil to mark out a destiny for himself and by his utterances a destiny for many people . The valleys and hills of Bethlehem were

his learning places . God was educating him amid the simple interchange of day and night , and the varying moods of nature . From the manifestations of the seen , he

was leading him to thoughts of the unseen . The lowly things were but the opening ways to higher things . His courage was disciplined to nobler daring in the defense of his flocks . Storms and sunshine were teachers of the

power of the invisible . In these he learned to lean on God , and , by means he knew not , was fitted for solemn times in a nation ' s history ; and made strong to guide the troublous times of human ignorance and human jealousy , and turn

them into channels of power . He was disciplined in this way for his kinghood by a higher discipline than by schools of philosophy ; for his statesmanship by wiser councils than the senates of men .

A divine guide was pointing out the path he should go , as ho points out the path for every man . And here is the connection between David and each living soul . A divine hand directs ; a divine voice speaks to it , amid the common

duties or the severer competitions of life . By this discipline he was led through times of waiting and times of peril One was guiding the manifold currents ° f his life , however wide or narrow , however calm or

tempestuous they might be . The hills and valleys of bethlehem were his learning places only as they revealed him who made them . He had watched from their summits or depths the grander march of the planets in the far off spaces , or seen the firmament break into starflame as the

day melted into night . He had heard the wind as it swept -hrough the mountain gorges or passed along the ravines , and had felt that He who created these things was greater , an the created . They taught him that he was surrounded

» y an infinite force . They lifted his spirit to think of a spirit greater than the passionless worlds which encompassed him ; and they educated his mind to a knowledge lat he was but a dependent creature amid the infinity which enclosed him . All nature was to him a larger

David, King Of Israel.

illuminated dwelling , calm , still , marvellous , but in it was a divine presence moving and directing by law those that inhabited it . The divine hand opened the gates of the

morning and revealed the glory of the day ; folded the

veils of the day and spread abroad the splendours of the night . The worlds above and around him were vocal of the God that was leading him from the small to the great ; from the pasture lands to the throne of material and

spiritual empire . His spirit was admitted behind the veil that curtains creation , and brought into the vision of Him who orders all things on wise and unlimited plans . As the

humble and the trusting are led to the shore of the sea by the products that are everywhere around them , and need no other proofs to tell them that there is the great wide sea ; so the poet shepherd did not need the sharper process of

reason , or the marshaled facts of argument to tell him that the hand of God was visible in creation , and that the wonders which encompassed him were but the unfolding of the infinite mind and will . He did not , like the modern

doubter , pierce into the unseen law of the countless worlds above him to confirm his doubt , but to acknowledge the truth that a divine power was in the movements of the heavens . He did not take the plant that grew at his feet

to assert that it spruug into being at its own will , but to accept it as the formation of one who sets His mystery in the smallest as the greatest . As the Mason before the inspired word needs no argument to confirm bis belief in

the truth that it is the word of God , and with bowed head and bended knee proclaims his faith , " I trust in God ; " so David , kneeling face to face with the infinite in the depths of his spiritual being , proclaims his belief in God , his

Creator . For God , by His wonders in nature and the outgoings of His Providence , had educated his soul to trust in Him , and disciplined it for the darkness or bightness of a throne .

And when the hour came in Israel ' s history for one to take the kingdom and govern it is a divine trust David was equal to the time and work . The questions that were waiting to be solved were questions that had a bearing not

alone on Israel , but on the nations that came after it . The time was a time of danger and perplexity , and needed the wisdom of the statesman and the tempered chivalry of the

hero . Aud it found them in that shepherd of the hills ; in David whose skill was the skill of the warrior , and whose wisdom was the wisdom of the leader of men . He was

the combined force of determination and gentleness—of gentleness because his spirit was tremulous at the thought of a Presence near at hand ; of determination because it trusted in that Presence . And he was lifted from his

shepherd life to the throne of Israel to make Judea a centre of influence and formulate fragments and tribes into a nation , and develop principles which were to be as widespread and healthful to humanity as the sea is widespread and healf ul to the thousand growths of the earth .

In those solemn silences of the hills his faith in God was so fashioned that it was strong to sustain him in all his after life , as warrior , poet , exile , " in the fierce light that beats about a throne . " It was the calm trust of a bird that falls and floats on the air ; of the wild fowl that , with

bowed head and folded wing , rests in the confidence of repose on the broad , dark waters . Like many of the leaders aud commanders of the people , his life was attempered by the unconscious forces that touch it in the

lonely places of nature . There is brought into the spirit in snch places the treasure of a conscious faith , a wealth of new revelations of power . The mind becomes its own

subject of thought , and learns the greatness of itself and of Him who made it , and gifted it with the imperial gilts of reason and imagination , of faith and aspiration .

God ' s power was manifest in that life of David , and by His presence working into visible action in the world- * around him and in the movements of his own beinrr . H "

had disciplined and kept and led him up to the unfolding of a grand purpose and providential design . Tlie K ng ha I given himself into God ' s hand , to guide by His rod and staff his life to dark or bright and more glorious issues ac the end .

That old life of Bethlehem and Judea unfolds a truth for all men . Whatever may be the outward form , whatever may be the action of men ' s lives , they come within the circle of a general and special providence , In human

life the great and small are working , showing th « orderly movement of a divine hand , and touching life and guiding it through its manifold work to immortal issue . There L a secret power meeting it at every point , and lying like a