time that he brought the Israelites out of Egypt, was offered “an house for him to dwell in,” but he declined to accept it during the lifetime of David, although he promised to permit the son of David to erect him such an abode. David being now a powerful monarch, and having many wives and concubines, saw one day the beautiful wife of one of his soldiers. To see with this licentious monarch was to crave for the gratification of his lust. The husband Uriah was fighting for the king, yet David was base enough to steal his wife’s virtue during Uriah’s absence in the field of battle. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” was one of the commandments, yet we are told by God of this David, that he was one “who kept my commandments, and who followed me with all his heart to do only that which was right in mine eyes” (1 Kings, xiv, 8). David having seduced the wife, sent for her husband, wishing to make him condone his wife’s dishonor. In modern England under a Stuart or a Brunswick, Uriah might have become a Marquis or a Baron. Some hold that virtue in rags is less worth than vice when coro-neted. Uriah would not be thus tricked, and David, the pious David, coolly planned, and without mercy caused to be executed, the treacherous murder of Uriah. God is all-just; and David having committed adultery and murder, God punished and killed an innocent child, which had no part or share in David’s crime, and never chose that it should be born from the womb of Bathsheba. After this king David was even more cruel and merciless than before. Previously he had systematically slaughtered the inhabitants of Moab, now he sawed people with saws, cut them with harrows and axes, and made them pass through brick-kilns. Yet of this man, God said he “did that which was right in mine eyes.” So bad a king, so treacherous a man, a lover so inconstant, a husband so adulterous, was of course a bad father, having bad children. We are little surprised, therefore, to read that his son Amnon robbed of her virtue his own sister, David’s daughter Tamar, and that Am-non was afterwards slain by his own brother, David’s son Absalom, and we are scarcely astonished that Absalom himself, on the house-top, in the sight of all Israel, should complete his father’s shame by an act worthy a child of God’s select people. Yet these are God’s chosen race, and this is the family of the man “who walked in God’s ways all the days of his life.”