The best of kings is a title which adulation and servility have always conferred on the most contemptible, as well as the most detestable tyrants; and the frequency of its application to the object is ever in proportion as he is undeserving of it. Had the flattering sycophants of king David been satisfied with applying to him this common-place appellation, rational men, who form their conclusions from the result of general experience, would have inferred only that he had been one of the numerous herd of bad princes who have oppressed mankind, and there would have been nothing peculiar either in the fact or the inference. But when the extremity of adulation conferred on David the title of _The Man after God's own heart_, thinking men, who know the source from which such adulation ever flows, are prepared to expect, in the development of his history, a character pre-eminently wicked, and in this they are not deceived. All historians of credit agree in describing _God's chosen people_, the _Jews_, as the most vicious and detestable of mankind;* their own historians confirm this character of them, and the whole series of facts which constitute their history, prove it beyond a possibility of doubt. * Tacitus describes the Jewish people as formed of the worst outcasts of the surrounding nations, collected together by Moses, and kept for ever separated from the rest of mankind, by an opposition of manners, and hostility of sentiment. Nam passimus quisque, spretis religionibus patriis, tributa et stipes illuc congerebant; unde auctæ Judeorum res--ad versus omnes alios hostile odium--transgressi in morem eorum, idem usurpent; nec quidquam prius imbuuntur quam contemnere Deos, exuere patriam; arentes, liberos, fratres, vilia habere.-- Ticiti Hist. Lib. v. Among _the chosen people of God_--the most depraved of all nations--it is pretty certain that the worst and wickedest man of that nation was David, _The Man after God's own heart_. The truth of this proposition will be abundantly proved in the following short history.