The first step in this study is to be clear as to the nature of the troubles God showed David. There was, then, the personal and the spiritual trouble of backsliding, consequent upon his murder of Uriah for his base purpose. And here we must discriminate. The trouble of David about Bathsheba was not sent by God; God permitted it; but in the heartless and cold-blooded plot in the tyrannical insolence and diabolical dastardliness of its execution--in the coarse, callous, and criminal height of its succeeding guilty rapture--it was of Satan, of sin, of David. For three-quarters of a year David played fast and loose with God and conscience; and it was when Nathan scared him that God showed him the trouble. Then came anguish, remorse, penitence. Then came the sorrowful sighing of the soul--all the greater in the awakening because it had slept so soundly and so long. Then came that lamentation over lost virtue, the penitential Fifty-first Psalm. It is the expression of a man lacerated by conscience. He seems to bleed at every pore. The agitation and alarm and agony are piteous beyond description. He appears in this psalm to look in every direction, and the ghost of his crime haunts him. Within, without, above, below, behind, beyond, he can see the furies of justice as the embassied troublers of his life. Original depravity, actual outrage, a heart black with the Egyptian darkness of fostered treachery, the warrior slaughtered by his mandate, the blood-guiltiness staining his soul, and then the wail ringing in the ears of God, "Cast me not away from Thy presence; and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me"--all these may be compared to a spiritual chamber of horrors, in which David found himself after the startling visit of Nathan.