And again, recording his bright vision of the blessed above who bear God's name written on their foreheads, thus writes the beloved Apostle: "I heard a voice from Heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps." There again, we believe, will the voice of the son of Jesse blend with the notes of a nobler instrument than that which he played upon earth; there may even we—the weak, the wayward, we whose lips have been so cold in praise and whose hearts in thanksgiving—lift up our voices with his! "Lord, I believe Thou hast prepared, Unworthy though I be, For me a blood-bought, dear reward— A golden harp for me. 'Tis strung and tuned for endless years, And formed by grace divine, To sound in God the Father's ears No other name than Thine!" [Illustration] [Illustration] XXIII. Absalom's Hair. IT is not without a cause that a record is preserved in those Scriptures "which are written for our learning," of the magnificent growth of Absalom's hair, which, like a golden harvest, was cut by him every year, and weighed, in the pride of his heart. It is remarkable that this very hair, this mass of rich beauty, was, through God's judgment, the instrument of Absalom's destruction. When the prince fled on his mule before the troops of his injured father, as Absalom was passing beneath a thick oak, the branches caught his head, and suspended him between the heaven and the earth, while his mule passed on through the wood; and there in agony and terror hung the miserable sinner, unable to release himself from the fetters of his own luxuriant hair, till death came in the form of a merciless kinsman, and three darts were thrust by Joab through the heart of Absalom as he was yet alive in the midst of the oak. There is no one in Scripture whose mortal beauty, is more vividly described than Absalom's. "In all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him." And there are few whose characters are represented to us as so loathsome and black with sin. This suggests a natural inquiry, Was the extraordinary beauty of Absalom in any way a snare to his soul; was it a bane to him throughout his life, as well as the immediate cause of his death? In a certain subordinate degree, perhaps, we may find that it was so. Absalom's great personal attractions probably increased the weak, doating partiality of David for his unworthy son, while they made it more easy for the prince to attain the object of his guilty ambition—"he stole the hearts of Israel."