But another thing which strikes any thinking man in David’s psalms, is his strong feeling for the poor, and the afflicted, and the oppressed. That is what makes the Psalms, above all, the poor man’s book, the afflicted man’s book. But how did he get that fellow-feeling for the fallen? By having fallen himself, and tasted affliction and oppression. That was how he was educated to be a true king. That was how he became a picture and pattern—a “type,” as some call it, of Jesus Christ, the man of sorrows. That is why so many of David’s psalms apply so well to the Lord; why the Lord fulfilled those psalms when He was on earth. David was truly a man of sorrows; for he had not only the burden of his own sorrows to bear, but that of many others. His parents had to escape, and to be placed in safety at the court of a heathen prince. His friend Abimelech the priest, because he gave David bread when he was starving, and Goliath’s sword—which, after all, was David’s own—was murdered by Saul’s hired ruffians, at Saul’s command, and with him his whole family, and all the priests of the town, with their wives and children, even to the baby at the breast. And when David was in the mountains, everyone who was distressed, and in debt, and discontented, gathered themselves to him, and he became their captain; so that he had on him all the responsibility, care, and anxiety of managing all those wild, starving men, many of them, perhaps, reckless and wicked men, ready every day to quarrel among themselves, or to break out in open riot and robbery against the people who had oppressed them; for—(and this, too, we may see from David’s psalms, was not the smallest part of his anxiety)—the nation of the Jews seems to have been in a very wretched state in David’s time. The poor seem in general to have lost their land, and to have become all but slaves to rich nobles, who were grinding them down, not only by luxury and covetousness, but often by open robbery and bloodshed. The sight of the misrule and misery, as well as of the bloody and ruinous border inroads which were kept up by the Philistines and other neighbouring tribes, seems for years to have been the uppermost, as well as the deepest thought in David’s mind, if we may judge from those psalms of his, of which this is the key-note; and it was not likely to make him care and feel less about all that misery when he remembered (as we see from his psalms he remembered daily) that God had set him, the wandering outlaw, no less a task than to mend it all; to put down all that oppression, to raise up that degradation, to train all that cowardice into self-respect and valour, to knit into one united nation, bound together by fellow-feeling and common faith in God, that mob of fierce, and greedy, and (hardest task of all, as he himself felt) utterly deceitful men. No wonder that his psalms begin often enough with sadness, even though they may end in hope and trust. He had a work