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DAVID: FIVE SERMONS

NOTE:—The first four of these Sermons were preached beforethe University of Cambridge.

SERMON I.  DAVID’S WEAKNESS

Psalm lxxviii. 71, 72, 73.  He chose David his servant, andtook him away from the sheep-folds.  As he was following the ewesgreat with young ones, he took him; that he might feed Jacob his people,and Israel his inheritance.  So he fed them with a faithful andtrue heart, and ruled them prudently with all his power.

I am about to preach to you four sermons on the character of David. His history, I take for granted, you all know.

I look on David as an all but ideal king, educated for his officeby an all but ideal training.  A shepherd first; a life—beit remembered—full of danger in those times and lands; then captainof a band of outlaws; and lastly a king, gradually and with difficultyfighting his way to a secure throne.

This was his course.  But the most important stage of it wasprobably the first.  Among the dumb animals he learnt experiencewhich he afterwards put into practice among human beings.  Theshepherd of the sheep became the shepherd of men.  He who had slainthe lion and the bear became the champion of his native land. He who followed the ewes great with young, fed God’s oppressedand weary people with a faithful and true heart, till he raised theminto a great and strong nation.  So both sides of the true kinglycharacter, the masculine and the feminine, are brought out in David. For the greedy and tyrannous, he has indignant defiance: for the weakand helpless, patient tenderness.

My motives for choosing this subject I will explain in a very fewwords.

We have heard much of late about ‘Muscular Christianity.’ A clever expression, spoken in jest by I know not whom, has been bandiedabout the world, and supposed by many to represent some new ideal ofthe Christian character.

For myself, I do not understand what it means.  It may meanone of two things.  If it mean the first, it is a term somewhatunnecessary, if not somewhat irreverent.  If it mean the second,it means something untrue and immoral.

Its first and better meaning may be simply a healthy and manful Christianity,one which does not exalt the feminine virtues to the exclusion of themasculine.

That certain forms of Christianity have committed this last faultcannot be doubted.  The tendency of Christianity, during the patristicand the Middle Ages, was certainly in that direction.  Christianswere persecuted and defenceless, and they betook themselves to the onlyvirtues which they had the opportunity of practising—gentleness,patience, resignation, self-sacrifice, and self-devotion—all thatis loveliest in the ideal female character.  And God forbid thatthat side of the Christian life should ever be undervalued.  Ithas its own beauty, its own strength too made perfect in weakness; inprison, in torture, at the fiery stake, on the lonely sick-bed, in longyears of self-devotion and resignation, and in a thousand womanly sacrificesunknown to man, but written for ever in God’s book of life.

But as time went on, and the monastic life, which, whether practisedby man or by woman, is essentially a feminine life, became more andmore exclusively the religious ideal, grave defects began to appearin what was really too narrow a conception of the human character.

The monks of the Middle Ages, in aiming exclusively at the virtuesof women, generally copied little but their vices.  Their unnaturalattempt to be wiser than God, and to unsex themselves, had done littlebut disease their mind and heart.  They resorted more and moreto those arts which are the weapons of crafty, ambitious, and unprincipledwomen.  They were too apt to be cunning, false, intriguing. They were personally cowardly, as their own chronicles declare; querulous,passionate, prone to unmanly tears; prone, as their writings abundantlytestify, to scold, to use the most virulent language against all whodiffered from them; they were, at times, fearfully cruel, as evil womenwill be; cruel with that worst cruelty which springs from cowardice. If I seem to have drawn a harsh picture of them, I can only answer thattheir own documents justify abundantly all that I have said.

Gradually, to supply their defects, another ideal arose.  Thewarriors of the Middle Ages hoped that they might be able to serve Godin the world, even in the battle-field.  At least, the world andthe battle-field they would not relinquish, but make the best of them. And among them arose a new and a very fair ideal of manhood: that ofthe ‘gentle, very perfect knight,’ loyal to his king andto his God, bound to defend the weak, succour the oppressed, and putdown the wrong-doer; with his lady, or bread-giver, dealing forth bounteouslythe goods of this life to all who needed; occupied in the seven worksof mercy, yet living in the world, and in the perfect enjoyment of weddedand family life.  This was the ideal.  Of course sinful humannature fell short of it, and defaced it by absurdities; but I do nothesitate to say that it was a higher ideal of Christian excellence thanhad appeared since the time of the Apostles, putting aside the quiteexceptional ideal of the blessed martyrs.

A higher ideal, I say, was chivalry, with all its shortcomings. And for this reason: that it asserted the possibility of consecratingthe whole manhood, and not merely a few faculties thereof, to God; andit thus contained the first germ of that Protestantism which conqueredat the Reformation.

Then was asserted, once for all, on the grounds of nature and reason,as well as of Holy Scripture, the absolute sanctity of family and nationallife, and the correlative idea, namely, the consecration of the wholeof human nature to the service of God, in that station to which Godhad called each man.  Then the Old Testament, with the honour whichit puts upon family and national life, became precious to man, as ithad never been before; and such a history as David’s became, notas it was with the mediæval monks, a mere repertory of fancifulmetaphors and allegories, but the solemn example, for good and for evil,of a man of like passions and like duties with the men of the modern