2 Samuel i. 26. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan:
very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful,
passing the love of women.
Passing the love of woman? How can that be, we of these days shall
say. What love can pass that, saving the boundless love of him who
stooped from heaven to earth, that he might die on the Cross for us?
No. David, when he sang those words, knew not the depth of woman's
love. And we shall have a right so to speak. The indefeasible and
Divine right which is bestowed by fact.
As a fact, we do not find among the ancient Jews that exalting and
purifying ideal of the relations between man and woman, which is to
be found, thank God, in these days, in almost every British work of
fiction or fancy.
It is enunciated, remember always, in the oldest Hebrew document.
On the very threshold of the Bible, in the very first chapters of
Genesis, it is enunciated in its most ideal purity and perfection.
But in practice it was never fulfilled. No man seems to have
attempted to fulfil it. Man becomes a polygamist, lower than the
very birds of the air. Abraham, the father of the faithful, has his
Sarah, his princess-wife: but he has others beside, as many as he
will. And so has David in like wise, to the grief and harm of both
him and Abraham.
So, it would seem, had the majority of the Jews till after the
Captivity; and even then the law of divorce seems to have been as
indulgent toward the man as it was unjust and cruel toward the
woman. Then our blessed Lord reasserted the ideal and primaeval
law. He testified in behalf of woman, the puppet of a tyrant who
repudiated her upon the most frivolous pretext, and declared that in
the beginning God made them male and female; the one husband for the
one wife. But his words fell on unwilling ears. His disciples
answered, that if the case of a man with his wife be such, it is not
good for a man to marry. And such, as a fact, was the general
opinion of Christendom for many centuries.
But of that, as of other sayings of our Lord's, were his own words
fulfilled, that the kingdom of God is as if a man should put seed
into the ground, and sleep and wake, and the seed should spring up,
and bear fruit, he knew not how.
In due course of time, when the Teutonic nations were Christianised,
there sprang up among them an idea of married love, which showed
that our Lord's words had at last fallen on good ground, and were
destined to bear fruit an hundredfold.
Gradually, with many confusions, and sometimes sinful mistakes,
there arose, not in the cloister, not in the study--not even, alas!
in the churches of God, as they were then; but in the flowery meads
of May; under the forest boughs, where birds sang to their mates; by
the side of the winter hearth; from the lips of wandering minstrels;
in the hearts of young creatures, whom neither the profligacy of
worldlings, nor the prudery of monks, had yet defiled: from them
arose a voice, most human and yet most divine, reasserting once more
the lost law of Eden, and finding in its fulfilment, strength and
purity, self-sacrifice and self-restraint.
That voice grew clearer and more strong as time went on. It was
purged from youthful mistakes and youthful grossnesses; till, at the
Reformation, it could speak clearly, fully, once and for all--no
longer on the ground of mere nature and private fancy, but on the
ground of Scripture, and reason, and the eternal laws of God; and
the highest ideal of family life became possible to the family and
to the nation, in proportion as they accepted the teaching of the
Reformation: and impossible, alas! in proportion as they still
allowed themselves to be ruled by a priesthood who asserted the
truly monstrous dogma, that the sexes reach each their highest
excellence only when parted from each other.
But these things were hidden from David. One can well conceive that
he, so gifted outwardly and inwardly, must have experienced all that
was then possible of woman's love. In one case, indeed, he was
notably brought under that moral influence of woman, which we now
regard, and rightly, as one of the holiest influences of this life.
The scene is unique in Scripture. It reads like a scene out of the
Middle Age.
Abigail's meeting with David under the covert of the hill; her
turning him from his purpose of wild revenge by graceful
compliments, by the frank, and yet most modest expression of her
sympathy and admiration; and David's chivalrous answer to her
chivalrous appeal--all that scene, which painters have so often
delighted to draw, is a fore-feeling, a prophecy, as it were, of the
Christian chivalry of after ages. The scene is most human and most
divine: and we are not shocked to hear that after Nabal's death the
fair and rich lady joins her fortune to that of the wild outlaw, and
becomes his wife to wander by wood and wold.
But amid all the simple and sacred beauty of that scene, we cannot
forget, we must not forget that Abigail is but one wife of many;
that there is an element of pure, single, all-absorbing love absent
at least in David's heart, which was present in the hearts of our
forefathers in many a like case, and which they have handed down to
us as an heirloom, as precious as that of our laws and liberties.
And all this was sin unto David; and like all sin, brought with it
its own punishment. I do not mean to judge him: to assign his
exact amount of moral responsibility. Our Lord forbids us
positively to do that to any man; and least of all, to a man who
only acted according to his right, and the fashion of his race and
his age. But we must fix it very clearly in our minds, that sins
may be punished in this life, even though he who commits them is not
aware that they are sins. If you are ignorant that fire burns, your
ignorance will not prevent your hand from suffering if you put it
into the fire. If you are of opinion that two and two make five,
and therefore spend five pounds while you only possess four, your
mistake will not prevent your being in debt. And so with all mortal
affairs.
Sin, [Greek], means first, it seems to me, a missing the mark, end,
or aim of our existence; a falling short of the law, the ideal, the
good works which God has prepared beforehand for us to walk in; and
every such sin, conscious or unconscious, must avenge itself by the
Divine laws of the universe, whether physical or spiritual. No
miracle is needed; no intervention of God with his own laws. His
laws are far too well made for him to need to break them a second
time, because a sinner has broken them already. They avenge
themselves. And so does polygamy. So it did in the case of David.
It is a breach of the ideal law of human nature; and he who breaks
that law must suffer, as David suffered.
Look at the latter history of David, and at what it might have been.
One can conceive so noble a personage under such woman's influence
as, thank God, is common now, going down into an honoured old age,
and living together with a helpmate worthy of him in godly love and
honesty to his life's end; seeing his children Christianly and
virtuously brought up, to the praise and honour of God.
And what was the fact?
The indulgence of his passions--seemingly harmless to him at first--
becomes most harmful ere he dies. He commits a crime, or rather a
complication of crimes, which stains his name for ever among men.
I do not think that we shall understand that great crime of David's,
if we suppose it, with some theologians, to have been merely a
sudden and solitary fall, from which he recovered by repentance, and
became for the time to come as good a man as he had ever been. Such
a theory, however well it may fit certain theological systems, does
not fit the facts of human life, or, as I hold, the teaching of
Scripture.
Such terrible crimes are not committed by men in a right state of
mind. Nemo repente fuit turpissimus. He who commits adultery,
treachery, and murder, must have been long tampering, at least in
heart, with all these. Had not David been playing upon the edge of
sin, into sin he would not have fallen.
He may have been quite unconscious of bad habits of mind; but they
must have been there, growing in secret. The tyrannous self-will,
which is too often developed by long success and command: the
unscrupulous craft, which is too often developed by long adversity,
and the necessity of sustaining oneself in a difficult position--
these must have been there. But even they would not have led David
to do the deed which he did, had there not been in him likewise that
fearful moral weakness which comes from long indulgence of the
passions--a weakness which is reckless alike of conscience, of
public opinion, and of danger either to earthly welfare or
everlasting salvation.
It has been said, 'But such a sin is so unlike David's character.'
Doubtless it was, on the theory that David was a character mingled
of good and evil. But on David's own theory, that he was an utterly
weak person without the help of God, the act is perfectly like
David. It is David's self. It is what David would naturally do
when he had left hold of God. Had he left hold of God in the
wilderness he would have become a mere robber-chieftain. He does
leave hold of God in his palace on Zion, and he becomes a mere
Eastern despot.
And what of his sons?
The fearful curse of Nathan, that the sword shall never depart from
his house, needs, as usual, no miracle to fulfil it. It fulfils
itself. The tragedies of his sons, of Amnon, of Absalom, are
altogether natural--to have been foreseen, but not to have been
avoided.
The young men have seen their father put no restraint upon his
passions. Why should they put restraint on theirs? How can he
command them when he has not commanded himself? And yet self-
restraint is what they, above all men, need. Upstart princes--the
sons of a shepherd boy--intoxicated with honours to which they were
not born; they need the severest discipline; they break out into the
most frantic licence. What is there that they may not do, and dare
not do? Nothing is sacred in their eyes. Luxury, ambition,
revenge, vanity, recklessness of decency, open rebellion, disgrace
them in the sight of all men. And all these vices, remember, are
heightened by the fact that they are not brothers, but rivals; sons
of different mothers, hating each other, plotting against each
other; each, probably, urged on by his own mother, who wishes, poor
fool, to set up her son as a competitor for the throne against all
the rest. And so are enacted in David's house those tragedies which
have disgraced, in every age, the harems of Eastern despots.
But most significant is the fact, that those tragedies complete
themselves by the sin and shame of David's one virtuous and famous
son. Significant truly, that in his old age Solomon the wise should
love strange women, and deserting for their sakes the God of his
fathers, end as an idolater and a dotard, worshipping the
abominations of the heathen, his once world-famous wisdom sunk into
utter folly.
But, it may be said, the punishment of David's sin fell on his sons,
and not upon himself.
How so? Can there be a more heavy punishment, a more bitter pain,
than to be punished in and by his children; to see his own evil
example working out their shame and ruin? But do not fancy that
David's own character did not suffer for his sin. The theory that
he became, instantly on his repentance, as good and great a man as
he was before his fall, was convenient enough to certain theologians
of past days; but it is neither warranted by the facts of Scripture,
nor by the noble agonies, however noble, of the 51st Psalm.
It is a prayer for restoration, and that of the only right and true
kind: 'Take not thy Holy Spirit from me;' and, as such, it was
doubtless heard: but it need not have been fulfilled instantly and
at once. It need not have been fulfilled, it may be, till that life
to come, of which David knew so little. It is a fact, it was not
fulfilled in this life. We read henceforth of no noble and heroical
acts of David. From that time forth--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 will return, but in which you are sowing seed of which you
will reap the fruit until your dying day. Know that as you sow, so
will you reap. If you sow to the flesh, you will of the flesh reap
corruption; corruption--deterioration, whether of health, of
intellect, of character in some shape or other. You know not, and
no man knows, what the curse will be like; but the curse will surely
come. The thing which is done cannot be undone; and you will find
that out before, and not merely after your dying day. Therefore
rejoice in your youth, for God has given it to you; but remember,
that for it, as for each and all of his gifts, God will bring you
into judgment. And when the hour of temptation comes, go back--go
back, if you would escape--to what you all were taught at your
mother's knee concerning the grace of God; for that alone will keep
you safe, or angel, or archangel, or any created being safe, in this
life and in all lives to come.