Transcribed , email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
NOTE:—The first four of these Sermons were preached beforethe University of Cambridge.
Psalm lxxviii. 71, 72, 73. He chose David his servant, andtook him away from the sheep-folds. As he was following the ewesgreat with young ones, he took him; that he might feed Jacob his people,and Israel his inheritance. So he fed them with a faithful andtrue heart, and ruled them prudently with all his power.
I am about to preach to you four sermons on the character of David. His history, I take for granted, you all know.
I look on David as an all but ideal king, educated for his officeby an all but ideal training. A shepherd first; a life—beit remembered—full of danger in those times and lands; then captainof a band of outlaws; and lastly a king, gradually and with difficultyfighting his way to a secure throne.
This was his course. But the most important stage of it wasprobably the first. Among the dumb animals he learnt experiencewhich he afterwards put into practice among human beings. Theshepherd of the sheep became the shepherd of men. He who had slainthe lion and the bear became the champion of his native land. He who followed the ewes great with young, fed God’s oppressedand weary people with a faithful and true heart, till he raised theminto a great and strong nation. So both sides of the true kinglycharacter, the masculine and the feminine, are brought out in David. For the greedy and tyrannous, he has indignant defiance: for the weakand helpless, patient tenderness.
My motives for choosing this subject I will explain in a very fewwords.
We have heard much of late about ‘Muscular Christianity.’ A clever expression, spoken in jest by I know not whom, has been bandiedabout the world, and supposed by many to represent some new ideal ofthe Christian character.
For myself, I do not understand what it means. It may meanone of two things. If it mean the first, it is a term somewhatunnecessary, if not somewhat irreverent. If it mean the second,it means something untrue and immoral.
Its first and better meaning may be simply a healthy and manful Christianity,one which does not exalt the feminine virtues to the exclusion of themasculine.
That certain forms of Christianity have committed this last faultcannot be doubted. The tendency of Christianity, during the patristicand the Middle Ages, was certainly in that direction. Christianswere persecuted and defenceless, and they betook themselves to the onlyvirtues which they had the opportunity of practising—gentleness,patience, resignation, self-sacrifice, and self-devotion—all thatis loveliest in the ideal female character. And God forbid thatthat side of the Christian life should ever be undervalued. Ithas its own beauty, its own strength too made perfect in weakness; inprison, in torture, at the fiery stake, on the lonely sick-bed, in longyears of self-devotion and resignation, and in a thousand womanly sacrificesunknown to man, but written for ever in God’s book of life.
But as time went on, and the monastic life, which, whether practisedby man or by woman, is essentially a feminine life, became more andmore exclusively the religious ideal, grave defects began to appearin what was really too narrow a conception of the human character.
The monks of the Middle Ages, in aiming exclusively at the virtuesof women, generally copied little but their vices. Their unnaturalattempt to be wiser than God, and to unsex themselves, had done litt