These were some of the troubles God showed him. And their cause introduced more of a domestic, not to say of a political, kind. The sin brought scandal and reproach on the Church of God. The enemies blasphemed. Then Jehovah, vindicating His character for justice before the world, avenging the atrocious murder of Uriah, sent a series of domestic afflictions upon David unparalleled in human experience. One scene--a nameless scene--has its miserable match in the brutal bestiality of the Empire, when the sceptre of Rome was in the hands of a corpse. But the other experiences are easily related. They are as the outcome of a curse which hung heavily on the royal house. Amnon, the eldest son, was slain by young Absalom, who waited two years for an opportunity. This severed Absalom from home for three years. He then, by a singular artifice, returned, and won the hearts of the people by his consummate and accomplished address, his handsome presence, and adroit demeanour. His aged and royal father's statesmen proved false to the king, and one in particular advised the murder of David and a revolution. At length the conspiracy grew in defiance and dimension. David was obliged to flee from the capital. His flight was far more humiliating than that of the French emperor from Paris. Napoleon had not to mourn over the treason of his son as the cause of his exile. This was David's anguish. He ascended the Mount of Olives and looked back upon the city of palaces he had founded and ornamented--the seat for a generation of his power, his glory, his happiness. He was leaving it a miserable fugitive, driven forth by the nation he had established and the child he had reared. He could not, he did not, disguise his sorrow. With bared head and uncovered feet the exile began his pilgrimage, and every step the old king took recalled the crime and sin of earlier years, while it remained for one Shimei to load him with the bitterest and most contemptuous execrations. Then came the crisis. Such of the army as remained loyal engaged in battle with the revolutionary forces attracted to Absalom. David begged that his unhappy son might be spared in the conflict. The war began and issued in the success of the royalists. The first question of the venerable monarch was, "Is the young man Absalom safe?" He then learnt that order was re-established, but at the cost of Absalom's life. He was accidentally hanged, and while hanging he was speared by David's commander-in-chief.