piteous signs of distress, and what they betoken.  He gazes on the wan, anguished features of his wife as she bends over her child; his thoughts revert hurriedly to her surpassing beauty when first he saw her—­a vision of the murdered Uriah flits before him—­the three victims of his guilt and the message of Nathan, which he has just received—­the stern words, “Thou art the man,” bring a full and realizing sense of the depth to which he has fallen, and overwhelmed with remorse and wretchedness, he leaves the chamber to give vent to his grief, to fast and weep and pray, in the vain hope of averting the threatened judgment.

Seven days of alternate hope and fear, of watching and care have fled, and Bathsheba is childless.  Another wave has rolled over her.  God grant it be the last.  Surely she has drained the cup of sorrow.  She sits solitary and sad, bowed down with her weight of woes; her thoughts following ever the same weary track; direful images present to her imagination; her frame racked and trembling; the heavens clothed in sackcloth, and life for ever divested of happiness and delight.  The king enters and seats himself beside her.  And if Bathsheba is changed, David is also from henceforth an altered man.  “Broken in spirit by the consciousness of his deep sinfulness, humbled in the eyes of his subjects and his influence with them weakened by their knowledge of his crimes; even his authority in his own household, and his claim to the reverence of his sons, relaxed by his loss of character;” filled also with fearful anticipations of the future, which is shadowed by the dark prophecy of Nathan—­he is from this time wholly unlike what he has been in former days.  “The balance of his character is broken.  Still he is pious—­but even his piety takes an altered aspect.  Alas for him!  The bird which once rose to heights unattained before by mortal pinion, filling the air with its joyful songs, now lies with maimed wing upon the ground, pouring forth its doleful cries to God.”  He has scarcely begun to descend the declivity of life, yet he appears infirm and old.  He is as one who goes down to the grave mourning.  Thus does he seem to Bathsheba as he sits before her.  But there is more in David thus humble, contrite and smitten, to win her sympathy and even love, than there was in David the absolute, and so far as she was concerned, tyrannical monarch, though surrounded with splendors, the favorite of God and man.  A few days since had he assayed the part of comforter, she would have felt her heart revolt; but now repentant and forgiven, though not unpunished by Jehovah, she can listen without bitterness while he speaks of the mercy of the Lord which has suffered them both to live, though the law could have required their death, and which sustains even while it chastises.

* * * * *

Another message—­by the hand of the prophet to David and Bathsheba—­a message of peace and tender consideration—­a name for their new-born child, the gift to them from his own hand.  “Call him Jedediah—­beloved of the Lord.”