this story was interpolated into the Bible during the first of the Third Century. In David’s case, summer and autumn quite fulfilled the promise of spring ❦ That eleventh chapter of Second Samuel, showing how he stole Bathsheba and then killed Uriah, her husband, reveals the quality of the man. But it was left for his dying act to crown a craven career ❦ With his last lingering breath—with the rattle of death in his throat—he gasped to his son, referring to a man who had never wronged him, “Let not his hoar head go down to Sheol in peace!” With the utterance of these frightful words his soul passed out into the Unknown ❦ In all that David wrote, not a word can I find that hints at his belief in a future life—he simply never thought of it—and dying as a dog dies, he gnashed at Shimei, whose offense was that thirty-five years before he had told David a little wholesome truth ❦ Shimei was a brave fellow and David dare not fight him, so he made a truce with him and swore an oath that he would never molest him, but dying he charged Solomon to search him out with a sword ❦ This is recorded by the Inspired Writer in the ninth verse of the second chapter of First Kings. With forty-one distinct crimes to David’s charge, the killing of nine hundred thousand men and two hundred thousand women and children, the houghing of thousands of horses, all of which is set down in infallible Holy Writ, his record is very bluggy. In fact, his whole life’s pathway is streaked with infamy ❦ David being a literary man of acknowledged merit, I have given him more attention than I would a plain, every-day king. And I now brand him as an all-round rogue. I do this calmly, holding myself personally responsible, and fully prepared to plead justification and prove my case should the heirs or next-of-kin consider my language libelous. ¶ And while I do not know anything about it for certain, it is my opinion that at the Last Great Day the folks who stayed around home and pruned their vines and tended their flocks and loved their wives and babies will fare a deal better than those other men who made war on an innocent people and tried to render them homeless ❦ Of course, I may be wrong about this, but I can not help having an opinion. Altogether, my sympathies are with the Philistines—who were so strong in personality that they gave their name to the Holy Land—Pelishton, Pelesheth, Philistia, Palestina, Palestine. ¶ Long years ago Professor Jowett called attention to the fact that the word Philistia literally meant Land of Friendship; the term having the same root as the Greek word _Philos_—Love. Max Muller has said, “The dwellers in the Valley of the Jordan, in the fifteenth century before Christ, recognizing the idea of Oneness or Fraternity, gave a name that signified Love-Land to their country: thus embodying the modern thought of the Brotherhood of Man.” ❦ In view of these things it was rather a strange move—a man so scholarly as Matthew Arnold applying the word