old religious leaders, while the tendency to Oriental luxury which outward prosperity favored alarmed the more thoughtful.  It was not a pleasant sight for the princes of Israel to see the whole land overrun with Phoenicians, Arabs, 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, prematurely old, and worn out by self-indulgence, passed away without honor or regret, at the age of sixty, and was buried in the City of David; and Rehoboam, his son, reigned in his stead.

The Christian fathers and many subsequent theological writers have puzzled their brains with unsatisfactory speculations whether Solomon finally repented or not; but the Scriptures are silent on that point.  We have no means of knowing at what period of his life his heart was weaned from the religion of David, or when he entered upon a life of pleasure.  There are some passages in the Book of Ecclesiastes which lead us to suppose that before he died he came to himself, and was a preacher of righteousness.  This is the more charitable and humane view to take; yet even so, his moral teachings and warnings are not imbued with the personal contrition that endeared David’s soul to God; they are unimpassioned,