of indestructible existence, and he would as soon expect to see the sun blotted from heaven as a parent removed from earth!  And when his ethical perceptions awake, he has another experience of a similar character.  His father and mother stand to him for the very moral order itself!  To his mind, it is inconceivable that they should ever err, and the bare suggestion that those august and venerable beings can really sin, fills him with horror and incredulity.  If he, therefore, sometime learns that they have committed a trifling indiscretion, he trembles, and if, in some tragic moment, irresistible proof is brought to bear on him that they have been guilty of a dark and desperate deed, the whole moral system seems to undergo a sudden and final collapse!  There is no longer any standing-ground beneath his feet and he could not be driven into a deeper despair if God himself had yielded to temptation.  This discovery and this despair had fallen to the lot of David, and he had cherished the impressions, formed in that dark hour, through all these many months.  But now, returning to the scenes of his boyhood and bringing back his burdens of care and sin, bringing back also his deepened experience of life and his enlarged ability, to comprehend its difficulties and sorrows, he suddenly saw the conduct and character of his mother in a new light.  He, too, had met temptation, had fallen, had gone down into the depths, and in that awful and interpretative experience, comprehended the victory which his mother had won on the field of dishonor and defeat!  He was now enabled to reconstruct, by the aid of his enlightened imagination, a true picture of the events which she had sketched so imperfectly in those few brief words.  He realized what she must have had to struggle against, and could measure the whole weight of guilt and despair that must have rested on her heart.  He knew only too well how easy was the road into darkness, and how rugged the one leading up into the light; yet this frail woman had followed it and scaled those heights!  She had been able to put that past into the background, and keep it where it belonged.  She had hidden her sorrows in her heart; nothing had daunted her; no discouragement had cast her down.  By a wonderful grace she had concealed her sin from some, and made others fear even to whisper the knowledge they possessed.  She had made that sin a torch to illumine her future.  She had used it as a stepping stone to ascend into purity and holiness.  He could not remember in all those long years of devotion and of love, that she had ever permitted him to feel a moment’s distrust of her perfect purity and goodness; and this seemed to him a miracle!  That purity and goodness must have been real!  So protracted an hypocrisy would have been impossible.  Whence, then, had she derived the power thus to rise superior to her past?  She had shown its terrific spell over her sensibilities by dying with shame when she at last proclaimed it, and yet for twenty years she had kept it under her feet like a writhing dragon, while she calmly fought her fight.  It was incredible, sublime!