by David with the bitterness of a son, and his death avenged upon the sacrilegious man who had lifted his sword against the Lord's anointed. In friendship and love, and also in domestic affections, he was not less notable than in heroic endowments; and in piety to God he was most remarkable of all. He had to flee from his bedchamber in the dead of night; his friendly meetings had to be concerted upon the perilous edge of captivity and death; his food he had to seek at the risk of sacrilege; for a refuge from death, to cast himself upon the people of Gath, to counterfeit idiocy, and become the laughing-stock of his enemies. And who shall tell of his hidings in the cave of Adullam, and of his wanderings in the wilderness of Ziph,-in the weariness of which he had power to stand before his armed enemy with all his host, and, by the generosity of his deeds and the affectionate language which flowed from his lips, to melt into childlike weeping the obdurate spirit of King Saul, which had the nerve to evoke the spirits of the dead? King David was a man extreme in all his excellencies,-a man of the highest strain, whether for counsel, for expression, or for action, in peace and in war, in exile and on the throne. That such a warm and ebullient spirit should have given way before the tide of its affections, we wonder not. We rather wonder that, tried by such extremes, his mighty spirit should not often have burst control, and enacted right forward the conqueror, the avenger, and the destroyer.

To conceive aright of the gracefulness and strength of King David's character, we must draw him into comparison with others in a similar condition, and then we shall see what hero in the vain world is to cope with him. Conceive a man who had saved his country and clothed himself with gracefulness and renown in the sight of all the people by the chivalry of his deeds, won for himself intermarriage with the royal line, and by unction of the Lord's prophet been set apart to the throne itself; such a one conceive driven with fury from house and hold, and through tedious years deserted of every stay but heaven, with no soothing sympathies of quiet life, harassed forever between famine and the edge of the sword, and kept in savage holds and deserts; and tell us, in the annals of men, of one so disappointed, so bereaved

and straitened, maintaining not fortitude alone, but a sweet composure and a heavenly frame of soul, inditing praise to no avenging deity, and couching songs in no revengeful mood, according with his outcast and unsocial life; but inditing praises to the God of mercy, and songs which soar into the third heavens of the soul,-not, indeed, without the burst of sorrow and the complaint of solitariness, and prophetic warnings to his bloodthirsty foes, but ever closing in sweet preludes of good to come, and desire of present contentment. Find us such a one in the annals of men, and we yield the argument of this controversy. Men there have

been, driven before the wrath of kings to wander outlaws and exiles, whose musings and actings have been recorded to us in the minstrelsy of our native land. Draw these songs of the exile into comparison with the Psalms of David, and know the spirit of the man after God's own heart; "he stern defiance of the one, with the tranquil acquiescence of the other; the deep despair of the one, with the rooted trust of the other; the vindictive imprecations of the one, with the tender regret and forgiveness of the other. Show us an outlaw who never spoiled the country which had forsaken him, nor turned his hand in self-defence or revenge upon his persecutors,-who used the vigor of his arm only against the enemies of his country,-yea, lifted up his arm in behalf of that mother which had cast her son, crowned with salvation, away from her bosom, and held him at a distance from her love, and raised the rest of her family to hunt him to the death; in the defence of that thankless, unnatural mother-country, find us such a repudiated son lifting up his arm and spending its vigor in smiting and utterly discomfiting her enemies, whose spoils he kept not to enrich himself and his ruthless followers, but dispensed to comfort her and her happier children. Find us, among the Themistocles and Coriolani and Cromwells and Napoleons of the earth, such a man, and we will yield the argument of this controversy which we maintain for the peerless son of Jesse.

But we fear that no such another man is to be found in the recorded annals of men. Though he rose from the peasantry to fill the throne and enlarge the borders of his native land, he gave himself neither to ambition nor to glory;

though more basely treated than the sons of men, he gave not place to despondency or revenge; though of the highest genius in poetry, he gave it not license to sing his own deeds, nor to depict loose and licentious life, nor to ennoble any worldly sentiment or attachment of the human heart, however virtuous or honorable, but constrained it to sing the praises of God and the victories of the right hand of the Lord of hosts, and his admirable works which are of old from everlasting. And he hath dressed out religion in such a rich and beautiful garment of divine poesy as beseemeth her majesty, in which, being arrayed, she can stand up, before the eyes of her enemies, in more royal state than any personification of love or glory or pleasure to which highlygifted mortals have devoted their genius.

The force of his character was vast, and the scope of his life was immense. His harp was full-stringed, and every angel of joy and of sorrow swept over the chords as he passed; but the melody always breathed of heaven. And such oceans of affection lay within his breast as could not always slumber in their calmness; for the hearts of a hun dred men strove and struggled together within the narrow continent of his single heart. And will the scornful men have no sympathy for one so conditioned, but scorn him because he ruled not with constant quietness the unruly host of divers natures which dwelt within his single soul? Of selfcommand surely he will not be held deficient who endured Saul's javelin to be so often launched at him, while the people without were willing to hail him king; who endured all bodily hardships and taunts of his enemies when revenge was in his hand, and ruled his desperate band like a company of saints, and restrained them from their country's injury. But that he should not be able to enact all characters without a fault, the simple shepherd, the conquering hero, and the romantic lover; the perfect friend, the innocent outlaw, and the royal monarch; the poet, the prophet, and the regenerator of the church; and withal the man, the man of vast soul, who played not these parts by turns, but was the original of them all, and wholly present in them all,— oh! that he should have fulfilled this high-priesthood of humanity. this universal ministry of manhood, without an error,

were more than human! With the defence of his backslidings, which he hath himself more keenly scrutinized, more clearly discerned against, and more bitterly lamented than any of his censors, we do not charge ourselves; but if, when of these acts he became convinced, he be found less true to God, and to righteousness; indisposed to repentance and sorrow and anguish; exculpatory of himself; stout-hearted in his courses; a formalist in his penitence, or in any way less worthy of a spiritual man in those than in the rest of his infinite moods, then, verily, strike him from the canon, and let his Psalms become monkish legends, or what you please. But if these penitential Psalms discover the soul's deepest hell of agony, and lay bare the iron ribs of misery, whereon the very heart dissolveth; and if they, expressing the same in words, shall melt the soul that conceiveth and bow the head that uttereth them,-then, we say, let us keep these records of the Psalmist's grief and despondency as the most precious of his utterances, and sure to be needed in the case of every man who essayeth to live a spiritual life.

Sometimes dhere comes a leetle schquall,
Dot's vhen der vindy vind vill crawl
Righd in its leetle schtomach schmall,---
Dot's too bad for der baby.

*Dot vas me himself.

Dot makes him sing at night so schveet,
Und gorrybarric he must eat,
Und I must chumb shbry on my feet,
To help dot leetle baby.

He bulls my nose and kicks my hair,
Und grawls me ofer everywhere,
Und shlobbers me-but vat I care?
Dot vas my schmall young baby.

Around my head dot leetle arm
Vas schqueezin me so nice and varm-
Oh! may dhere never coom some harm
To dot schmall leetle baby.

THE SPIRITUAL TEMPLE.

"And the house, when it was in building, was built of stone made ready be fore it was brought thither: so that there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building."-1 KINGS, vi. 7.

And whence, then, came these goodly stones 'twas Israel's pride to raise,

The glory of the former house, the joy of ancient days;
In purity and strength erect, in radiant splendor bright,
Sparkling with golden beams of noon, or silver smiles of
night?

From coasts the stately cedar crowns, each noble slab was brought,

In Lebanon's deep quarries hewn, and on its mountains wrought;

There rung the hammer's heavy stroke among the echoing rocks,

There chased the chisel's keen, sharp edge, the rude, unshapen blocks.

Thence polished, perfected, complete, each fitted to its place

For lofty coping, massive wall, or deep imbedded base, They bore them o'er the waves that rolled their billowy swell between

The shores of Tyre's imperial pride and Judah's hills of green.