Babylonians, Egyptians, caravan drivers, strangers and travellers,
camels and dromedaries from Midian and Sheba, traders to the fairs,
pedlers with their foreign cloths and trinkets, all spreading immorality
and heresy, and filling the cities with strange customs and
degrading dances.

Nor was there, in that absolute monarchy which Solomon centralized
around his throne, any remedy for all this, save assassination or
revolution. The king had become debauched and effeminate. The love of
pomp and extravagance was followed by worldliness, luxury, and folly.
From agricultural pursuits the people had passed to commercial; the
Israelites had become merchants and traders, and the foul idolatries of
Phoenicians and Syrians had overspread the land. The king having lost
the respect and affection of the nation, the rebellion of Jeroboam was a
logical sequence.

I have not read of any king who so belied the promises of his early
days, and on whom prosperity produced so fatal an apostasy as Solomon.
With all his wisdom and early piety, he became an egotist, a sensualist,
and a tyrant. What vanity he displayed before the Queen of Sheba! What a
slave he became to wicked women! How disgraceful was his toleration of
the gods of Phoenicia and Egypt! How hard was the bondage to which he
subjected his subjects! How different was his ordinary life from that of
his illustrious father, with no repentance, no remorse, no
self-abasement! He was a Nebuchadnezzar and a Sardanapalus combined,
going from bad to worse. And he was not only a sensualist and a tyrant,
an egotist, and to some extent an idolater, but he was a cynic,
sceptical of all good, and of the very attainments which had made him
famous. We read of no illustrious name whose glory passed through so
dark an eclipse. The satiated, disenchanted, disappointed monarch,