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IV.

The Taunt.

"Wilt thou leave me thus,' I cried,
'Whelm'd beneath the rolling tide?'
Ah! return and love me still;

See me subject to Thy will;

Frown with wrath, or smile with grace,

Only let me see Thy face!

Evil I have none to fear,

All is good, if THOU art near.

King, and Lord, whom I adore,

Shall I see Thy face no more?"

- Madame Guyon.

"There is a persecution sharper than that of the axe.

There

is an iron that goes into the heart deeper than the knife. Cruel sneers, and sarcasms, and pitiless judgments, and cold-hearted calumnies-these are persecution."

"My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God?"—Verse 3.

IV.

THE TAUNT.

WE are called, in this chapter, to contemplate a new experience-David in tears! These, his tears, brought sin to his remembrance. As, in looking through the powerful lens of a microscope, the apparently pellucid drop of water is found to be the swarming haunt of noxious things,-fierce animalculæ devouring one another; so the tears of the Exile formed a spiritual lens, enabling him to see into the depths of his own soul, and disclosing, with microscopic power, transgressions that had long been consigned to oblivion.

Ten years of regal prosperity had elapsed since the prophet Nathan, the minister of retribution, stood before him, in his Cedar Palace, with heavy tidings regarding himself and his house. Time may have dimmed the impressions of that meeting. He may have vainly imagined, too, that it

had modified the Divine displeasure. Now that his head was white with sixty winters, he may have thought that God would exempt him from further merited chastisement, and suffer him to go down to his grave in peace. But the day of reckoning, which the Divine patience had long deferred, had now come. He was called to see the first gleamings of that sword which the anointed prophet had told him would "never depart from his house." (2 Sam. xii. 10.) The voice of long averted judgment is at last heard amid the thickets and caves of Gilead,— "These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself: but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes.” (Ps. 1. 21.) Nature, in her august solitudes, echoed the verdict! The waters. murmured it-the winds chanted it-the forest wailed it-the thunders rolled it—and the tears of the lonely Exile himself wept it,-"Be sure your sin will find you out!" As he sat by the willows of Jordan, with his crownless head and aching heart, he could say, in the words of an older Psalmist, "We are consumed by Thine anger, and by Thy wrath are we troubled. Thou has set our iniqui

ties before Thee, our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance." (Ps. xc. 7, 8.)

How apt are we to entertain the thought that God will wink at sin; that He will not be rigidly faithful to His denunciations-unswervingly true to His word. Time's oblivion-power succeeds in erasing much from the tablets of our memories. We measure the Infinite by the standard of the finite, and imagine something of the same kind regarding the Great Heart-Searcher. Sin, moreover, seldom is, in this world, instantaneously followed with punishment; sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily;" and the long-suffering patience and forbearance of the Almighty is presumptuously construed by perverse natures into alteration or fickleness in the Divine purpose. But "God is not a man that He should lie!" Even in this our present probation state, (oftener than we suppose,) the time arrives for solemn retribution; when He makes bare His arm to demonstrate by what an inseparable law in His moral government He has connected sin with suffering.

panting, wounded

A new missile pierces this Hart on the mountains of Israel. One of those who

F

hurled the Javelin is specially mentioned in the sacred narrative. His poisoned dart must have been rankling in David's soul when he penned this Psalm.

When the King was descending the eastern slopes of Olivet, on his way to the Valley of Jordan, Shimei a Benjamite of Bahurim, of the house of Saul, came out against him, "and," we read, "cursed still as he came. And he cast stones at David, and at all the servants of King David: and all the people and all the mighty men were on his right hand and on his left. And thus said Shimei when he cursed, Come out, come out, thou bloody man, and thou man of Belial: the Lord hath returned upon thee all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose stead thou hast reigned; and the Lord hath delivered the kingdom into the hand of Absalom thy son: and, behold, thou art taken in thy mischief, because thou art a bloody man. And as David and his men went by the way, Shimei went along on the hill's side over against him, and cursed him as he went, and threw stones at him, and cast dust." (2 Sam. xvi. 5-8, 13.) Besides this son of Gera, there were many obsequious flatterers and sycophants at Jerusalem-men once his

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