David, the shepherd boy, was beautiful, brave, musical and poetic. I think he often forgot the sheep in his reveries. There in the solitude he struck the harp-string that is thrilling through all ages. David the boy was at work gathering the material for David the poet and for David the man.
Like other boys, David was fond of using his knife among the saplings, and he had noticed the exuding of the juice of the tree; and when he became a man he said: “The trees of the Lord are full of sap.”
David the boy, like other boys, had been fond of hunting the birds’ nests, and he had driven the old stork off the nest to find how many eggs were under her; and when he became a man he said: “As for the stork, the fir trees are her house.”
In boyhood he had heard the terrific thunder storm that frightened the red deer into premature sickness; and when he became a man he said: “The voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve.”
David the boy had lain upon his back, looking up at the stars and examining the sky, and to his boyish imagination the sky seemed like a piece of divine embroidery, the divine fingers working in the threads of light and the beads of stars; and when he grew up he wrote:
“When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers.”
When he became an old man, thinking of the goodness of God, he seemed to hear again the bleating of his father’s sheep across many years, and to think of the time when he tended them on the Bethlehem hills, and he cries out: “The Lord is my shepherd.”
There is one scene in the life of David that you may not have pondered.
You have seen him with a harp, playing the devil out of Saul; with a sling, smashing the skull of Goliath; with a sword, hacking to pieces the Philistines; with a scepter, ruling a vast realm; with a psalm, gathering all nations into doxology.
But now we have David playing the fool.