Here is one of the illustrious Bible characters who has been held up to the world for several thousand years as the "sweet singer of Israel," and "the man after God's own heart;" whose life is stained by the commission of a long list of crimes of the blackest character, some of which would send him to the State prison for life if committed in this morally enlightened age.

1. One of his first acts of moral delinquency was that of turning traitor to Achish, King of Gath. After the king had kindly given him a rulership over the city of Ziklag, he manifested his ingratitude by waging an unprovoked war for plunder upon the king's friends and relatives, to rob them of their cattle (1 Sam. xxvii.).

2. David, with an army, committed a similar act of aggression and spoliation upon the rights and property of Nabal, to attain his cattle by robbery (1 Sam. xxv.).

3. David at one time turned traitor to his own nation by joining the army of Achish to fight them (1 Sam. xxix.).

4. David obtained possession of the kingdom of Ishboshett by bribery and intrigue, after acknowledging him to be a righteous man (2 Sam. iii.).

5. David robbed Mephibosheth, the son of his bosom-friend Jonathan, and a poor cripple, of one-half of his estate, upon the plea that might makes right (2 Sam. xvi.).

6. David connived at some of the most abominable and atrocious crimes of his sons (2 Sam.).

7. The manner in which David obtained his first wife Michal is shocking to all who possess kind and philanthropic feelings. Saul had proposed a hundred foreskins of the Philistines as the price of his daughter; but David, in wanton cruelty, killed two hundred for this purpose.

8. The manner in which David obtained his beautiful wife Bathsheba, to add to his list of wives, might be tolerated in that era of barbarism; but it must be looked upon at the present time as an act of cruelty and wickedness. He said to Joab, "Set Uriah in the front of the battle... that he may be smitten and die" (2 Sam. xi. 15); which was equivalent to slaying him with his own hands, and for no crime, but solely to get his widow for a wife.

9. Thus, we see, David was not only a polygamist, but he obtained his wives by fraud, murder, and intrigue.

10. David's dancing naked in public was an indecent act, although several cases are reported of "the holy" men of that age appearing in public in a state of nudity. His wife Michal upbraided him for "uncovering himself to the eyes of the handmaids, his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself" (2 Sam. vi.). It is said that "David danced before the Lord with all his might." Can we suppose the Lord would fancy such sights?

11. David's treatment of the Moabites in killing two-thirds of them without any just provocation is an act that would hang any man of the present day (2 Sam. viii.).

12. The fiendish act of David in placing the Moabites under saws and harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and making them walk through brick-kilns (2 Sam. xii.), bespeaks a heart callous with cruelty, unmerciful as a tiger. The very thought of it is calculated to chill the blood of a person with the feelings of common humanity.

13. David's murder of five step-sons and two brothers-in-law, to gratify a malignant grudge toward the house of Saul, is another act showing the fiendish character of the man.

14. When David was so old and stricken in years that no amount of bed-clothing could keep him warm, he made this a plea for marrying another wife—and a young maid at that—to lie in his bosom him warm (1 Kings i. 1). Lust knows no failure in expedients.

15. David's advice to his son Solomon on his death-bed, to assassinate Joab and his other enemies, shows that his ruling passions—animosity and revenge—were strong in death.

16. And finally David's wicked prayer, as found in the hun-dred and ninth Psalm, in which he invokes a string of the most horrid curses upon his enemies, culminates his immoral history. It completes the demoralizing picture of the "man after God's own heart." Now, we ask in solemn earnest, is it not evident that a book indorsing such characters as David, placed in the hands of the heathen of other countries or the children of our own, must have a demoralizing tendency? Most certainly, if

Franklin was right in saying, "The reading of bad examples will make bad morals." Remember, the perpetrator of all these crimes is said to be "a man after God's own heart." If so, then God must have approved of all his crimes. But such a God will not do for this age; and to teach children and heathen such a lesson is calculated to effect their moral ruin.

II. CHARACTER OF SOLOMON.

Solomon's writings and history both show that he was a libertine, a tyrant, and a polygamist. His tyrannical monopoly-of seven hundred wives and three hundred prostitutes, making him a practica "Free-lover" on a large scale, is an indelible stigma upon his character. It was a usurpation of the rights, and a trespass upon the liberties, of nearly two thousand men and women. It prevented them from filling the mission or sphere in life that God designed them to enjoy. The organization of the sexes shows they were designed to be husbands and wives and parents. And the nearly equal number of the sexes is an evidence that nearly a thousand men were deprived of wives by Solomon's monopoly of women; while, on the other hand, those women were prevented from sustaining the true relation of wives. When he could not see those women more than once in three years by calling on one of them each day, it is a farce, and an insult to reason, to call them wives. Could a woman sustain the practical relation of wife to a man she only saw as husband once in three years? The very idea is ridiculous, and a mockery of the true marriage relation. And yet this is the man who is represented as being such a special favorite of God as to receive a portion of his divine wisdom. It is a slander, if any thing can be, upon Infinite Wisdom. By reading his amorous song, we can learn his motives for enslaving such a large number of women.

If this "wise man" is to be accepted as authority (and he should be if he got his wisdom directly from God), then we must relinquish all hope of an immortal existence. Hear him: "For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth the beasts:... as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath, so that a man hath no pre-eminence over a beast" (Eccles. iii. 19). Here is a plain and unequivocal denial of man's conscious existence beyond the grave. Nor does the Old-Testament writer teach the doctrine. Job denies it in still more explicit terms, if possible. (See Job xiv. 10.)

III. LOT AND HIS WIFE AND DAUGHTERS.

The act of Abram's brother Lot delivering up his two daughters to the Sodomites, "to do to them as is good in your eyes" (Gen. xix. 8), must excite reflections in the highest degree revolting to the mind of every father who has daughters. The act of a father voluntarily offering up his virtuous daughters to gratify the depraved passions of a mob is too shocking to contemplate.

And to accept such a character as a "righteous man" must certainly weaken the faith of the Bible believer in a true system of morality, and plant in his mind a very low standard of the moral perfections of God.

We are told (Gen. xix. 26) that Lot's wife was converted into a pillar of salt as a penalty for the simple act of looking back. Several absurdities are observable in this story:—

1. It is difficult to conceive how any sin or crime could be attached to the natural act of turning the head to look in any direction, especially when no injunction had been laid upon the act.

2. If there were any thing so inherently wrong in the act of looking back as to be visited with such direful penalties, pillars of salt would soon become more numerous than frogs were in Egypt.

3. Reason would suggest that, to put the thing in shape to be believed by future generations, the woman should have been converted into some imperishable substance, such as granite, gold, silver, or pig-iron. A woman made of salt, or salt of a woman, would soon dissolve and disappear.

4. The Hindoos relate that a woman in India was once converted into a pillar of stone for an act of unchastity; and "the stone is there unto this day." Here is a story with a better foundation: the Egyptians have the tradition of a woman being converted into a tree for the act of plucking some fruit after it had been interdicted. How many of these stories should we credit?