of pity, but of punishment; and it may have been very good for David
to be taught by sharp personal experience, that those who robbed the
widow and put the fatherless to death, like the lawless lords of his
time; those like Saul, who smote the city of the priests for having
given David food--men and women, children and sucklings, oxen and
asses and sheep, with the edge of the sword; those who, like the
nameless traitor who so often rouses his indignation--his own
familiar friend who lifted up his heel against him--sought men's
lives under the guise of friendship: that such, I say, were persons
not to be tolerated upon the face of God's earth. We do not
tolerate them now. We punish them by law. We even destroy them
wholesale in war, without inquiring into their individual guilt or
innocence. David was taught, not by abstract meditation in his
study, but by bitter need and agony, not to tolerate them then. If
he could have destroyed them as we do now, it is not for us to say
that he would have been wrong. And what if he were indignant, and
what if he expressed that indignation? I have yet to discover that
indignation against wrong is aught but righteous, noble, and divine.
The flush of rage and scorn which rises, and ought to rise in every
honest heart, when we see a woman or a child ill-used, a poor man
wronged or crushed--What is that, but the inspiration of Almighty
God? What is that but the likeness of Christ? Woe to the man who
has lost that feeling! Woe to the man who can stand coolly by, and
see wrong done without a shock or a murmur, or even more, to the
very limits of the just laws of this land. He may think it a fine
thing so to do; a proof that he is an easy, prudent man of the
world, and not a meddlesome enthusiast. But all that it does prove
is: That the Spirit of God, who is the Spirit of justice and
judgment, has departed from him.