preserved order at home. His foreign alliances also, were both numerous and important. Over the heathen nations immediately adjacent to his own border he exercised a sort of feudal superiority; the more distant were glad to purchase his forbearance, by sending him gifts and assurances of their good will. Yet, the nation did not escape visitations altogether, nor was the king without his troubles.

The first of these came in the year B. C. 1020. A famine then devastated the land, and David, on inquiring into the cause of the judgment, was told that a bitter wrong done to the Gibeonites by his predecessor called for vengeance. Let it not be forgotten that the Israelites were pledged, so early as the days of Joshua, to respect the lives and possessions of that tribe, which alone, among the Canaanites, had offered no resistance to the conquest of their country, when first attempted. Now Saul, on ascending his throne, at once assumed that being a monarch he had a right to abrogate this engagement; and many of the Gibeonites, without any just cause assigned, were put to death. It was necessary that the Israelites should be taught that with Jehovah alone rested the power of annulling engagements entered into under the sanction of his name. Wherefore, when the people of Gibeon required that some of Saul's descendants should die for the sin of their father, the king felt himself constrained to yield to their wishes. One member of the obnoxious family he took, however, under his own special protection. Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan, had been treated by him, ever since his accession, as a member of his own household. And he did not now withdraw from him or from his sons the favour which they had so long

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enjoyed. But seven of their kinsmen, namely, two of Saul's sons by a concubine, and five of his grandsons by his daughter Michal, were given over to the vengeance of the wronged tribe. The Gibeonites hanged them in Gibeon of Saul, and the famine ceased.

B. C. 1017.- The second visitation occurred three years later, and was occasioned entirely by the misconduct of the king. A false pride grew upon him. He had achieved so much, through God's favour, that in the end, he began to attribute the result to his own wisdom and strength; and in an evil hour he sent forth his officers to take the number of fighting men whom, in any case of emergency, he might call into the field. They obeyed him with reluctance, and returned with such a report as tended to confirm the mistaken principle on which the order had been given. But in the midst of his false joy, Gad the seer stood before him, and, reproving him for what he had done, desired him to choose between seven years of famine, three months of defeat, or three days' pestilence. "I am in a great strait," was the king's answer; "but let us fall into the hand of the Lord;" and the pestilence came. It ran its course from Dan to Beersheba, cutting off not fewer than seventy thousand men.

B. C. 1014. If David's sin was great, his penitence proved, on all occasions, to be deep and lasting. It was accepted, and the pestilence ceased. But the end of his days drew near; and clouds arising from the ill-regulated state of his family, threatened to obscure its approach. He had chosen, long before this, to be heir of the throne, Solomon, the second son whom Bathsheba, the widow of Uriah the Hittite, bore to him; and both in the

palace and throughout the land the personal qualities of the young prince, whose wisdom has passed into a proverb, were accepted as the best evidence that the selection was judicious. But the eldest of David's sons next after Absalom, whose name was Adonijah, felt aggrieved at the arrangement. He imagined that the throne ought, by right of seniority, to come to him; and he found more than one among the great men of the land to favour his views. Joab, the commander-in-chief, was of this number, so was Abiathar the priest, and they encouraged Adonijah to make friends with the people. But Nathan, David's faithful seer, and Zadok the priest, took part with Solomon; and they managed matters so well, that their point was carried without so much as a tumult. While Adonijah withdrew into the provinces, there to collect partizans, they prevailed on David to accept Solomon as his coadjutor; and the young prince was solemnly crowned amid the shouts of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Joab and Adonijah felt, at once, that they had failed. The latter hastened to make his submission, and was pardoned; the former fled for sanctuary into the tabernacle, and "laid hold of the horns of the altar." They were alike doomed men, as was Abiathar the priest, though they knew it not; for David himself settled their destiny with his last breath.

David felt his end approaching. He sent for Solomon, and gave him various instructions respecting his future conduct as king, advising him especially not to spare the heads of Adonijah's party. Joab in particular, he commended to his wrath, as well as a man of the house of Saul, named Shimei, whose life he himself had spared, but whom he always knew to be dangerous. Solomon did

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not forget either injunction. He would listen to no entreaties from Joab, but slew him before the altar. Shimei he confined within the city walls, and hearing that he had broken his parol, immediately put him to death. And Adonijah, his brother, he cut off in like manner, because the young man presumed to ask one of his father's handmaids to wife. But before either of these events befell, David had breathed his last, in the seventy-first year of his age, and after a long and prosperous reign of forty years.

It is to David that we must look as the true founder of the Hebrew monarchy. When he received the kingdom from Saul it was torn with democratic factions, and bled at every pore from the repeated and disastrous inroads of the neighbouring nations. David put an end to the former evil, by uniting all parties under himself; and not only averted the latter, but gave to the realm its just extent. But David was more than either a warrior or a king. As a poet, we find few to rival him, either among the ancient or modern weavers of song; and in many of his productions a spirit of the loftiest inspiration is shown. The Psalms, of which by far the larger portion are the outpourings of his genius, testify to the truth of these remarks. They are not only beautiful, considered as the composition of a man of genius, but they abound in prophecies, of which we find a ready accomplishment in the fate of Christ and of the Christian church. David was a great and on the whole a good man; his vices were those of the age in which he lived; his faith, piety, and unwavering sense of the majesty and protecting care of God, stand, as well in modern times as in ancient, well nigh unrivalled.

CHAP. XXVII.

FIRST BOOK OF KINGS AND FIRST BOOK OF CHRONICLES.

SOLOMON. THE TEMPLE BUILT.

IDOLATRY. HIS DEATH.

SOLOMON'S

B. C. 1014.THE reign of Solomon, who succeeded David, extended, like that of his father, over forty years. It was a season to Israel of almost uninterrupted peace; for David's fame in war kept the neighbouring nations quiet, and Solomon's skill and vigour in the affairs of state put down all seditious movements. The great work of his life was the building of the Temple, and of a palace, in which for many centuries his successors on the throne resided. The foundations of the former edifice were laid in the year B. c. 1012; and in B. C. 1005 it was roofed in and completed. The latter was begun at a later period, and there was less urgency in pushing it forward; but both, and indeed all, the edifices which this great king undertook, were of the most gorgeous character. I have not space to describe in detail the arrangements and distribution of either. Enough is done, when I state that in the construction of the temple, the pattern of the tabernacle was carefully followed; and that though gold, and brass, and costly stone, and timber were abundant, they all took their places, so as to embellish, without disguising, the court, the Holy Place, and the Holy of Holies. To be sure there arose about the temple, as there have arisen about Christian cathedrals, residences for the priests and Levites which ministered in the sanctuary. And in