Saul and his army had been horribly cut to pieces.  Mount Gilboa was ghastly with the dead.  On the morrow the stragglers came on to the field, and they lifted the latchet of the helmet from under the chin of the dead, and they picked up the swords and bent them on their knee to test the temper of the metal, and they opened the wallets and counted the coin.  Saul lay dead along the ground, eight or nine feet in length, and I suppose the cowardly Philistines, to show their bravery, leaped upon the trunk of his carcass, and jeered at the fallen slain, and whistled through the mouth of the helmet.  Before night those cormorants had taken everything valuable from the field:  “And it came to pass on the morrow, when the Philistines came to strip the slain, that they found Saul and his three sons fallen in Mount Gilboa.”

Before I get through to-day I will show you that the same process is going on all the world over, and every day, and that when men have fallen, Satan and the world, so far from pitying them or helping them, go to work remorselessly to take what little is left, thus stripping the slain.

There are tens of thousands of young men every year coming from the country to our great cities.  They come with brave hearts and grand expectations.  They think they will be Rufus Choates in the law, or Drapers in chemistry, or A.T.  Stewarts in merchandise.  The country lads sit down in the village grocery, with their feet on the iron rod around the red-hot stove, in the evening, talking over the prospects of the young man who has gone off to the city.  Two or three of them think that perhaps he may get along very well and succeed, but the most of them prophesy failure; for it is very hard to think that those whom we knew in boyhood will ever make any stir in the world.

But our young man has a fine position in a dry-goods store.  The month is over.  He gets his wages.  He is not accustomed to have so much money belonging to himself.  He is a little excited, and does not know exactly what to do with it, and he spends it in some places where he ought not.  Soon there come up new companions and acquaintances from the bar-rooms and the saloons of the city.  Soon that young man begins to waver in the battle of temptation, and soon his soul goes down.  In a few months, or few years, he has fallen.  He is morally dead.  He is a mere corpse of what he once was.  The harpies of sin snuff up the taint and come on the field.  His garments gradually give out.  He has pawned his watch.  His health is failing him.  His credit perishes.  He is too poor to stay in the city, and he is too poor to pay his way home to the country.  Down! down!  Why do the low fellows of the city now stick to him so closely?  Is it to help him back to a moral and spiritual life?  Oh, no!  I will tell you why they stay; they are the Philistines stripping the slain.