That never ought to be the lot of man.”
IN DEADLY PERIL UNAWARES.
1 Samuel xxvi. 8-25.
Soundly the stalwart king of Israel slept within the trench, while David and Abishai gazed on him by stealth in the night-watches—his spear stuck in the ground at his bolster, and Abner and the people lying round about him. Abishai was for smiting him with the spear at once, promising that once should be quite enough. Could David hesitate? Was it not a special Providence? Had not God delivered his enemy into his hand? Let but David give the word, the look, the nod, and Abishai would at one fell swoop send Saul to his account, with all his imperfections on his head. “Now, therefore, let me smite him, I pray thee, with the spear, even to the earth at once, and I will not smite him the second time.” But David was inflexible in repudiating the regicide. Not for him was it to stretch forth a hand against the Lord’s anointed. So Saul slept on, and the shadow of death passed away. Unaware of the peril that had approached him, his awaking was an ordinary awaking. But, to convict the watchers of unwatchfulness, if not to convince the king of a narrow escape and a generous foe, David took the spear and the cruse of water from Saul’s bolster; and he and his companion gat them away unperceived—for no man saw it, nor knew it, neither awaked; for they were all asleep; because a deep sleep from the Lord was fallen upon them. Anon David roused the host with the story of that narrow escape, charging Abner with criminal neglect worthy of death. And as he recited the story, Saul was touched; and there was emotion in his voice and in his words when he felt what the peril had been, and knew whom he had to thank for its harmless issue.
Had we eyes sharp enough, observes Cowper in a letter to Hayley, we should see the arrows of death flying in all directions, and account it a wonder that we and our friends escape them but a single day. Many years previously the poet had written to the same effect to Unwin,—that could we see at a glance of the eye what is passing every day upon all the roads in the kingdom, we should indeed find reason to be thankful for journeys performed in safety, and for deliverance from dangers we are not perhaps even permitted to see. “When in some of the high southern latitudes, and in a dark tempestuous night, a flash of lightning discovered to Captain Cook a vessel which glanced along close by his side, and which but for the lightning he must have run foul of, both the danger and the transient light that showed it were undoubtedly designed,” as Cowper is devoutly convinced, “to convey to him this wholesome instruction, that a particular Providence attended him, and that he was not only preserved from evils of which he had notice, but from many more of which he had no information or even the least suspicion.” It is noticeable, as Mr. de Quincey points out, that a danger which approaches, but wheels away—which threatens, but finally forbears to strike—is more interesting by much on a distant retrospect than the danger which accomplishes its mission. “The Alpine precipice, down which many pilgrims have fallen, is passed without much attention; but that precipice, within one inch of which a traveller has passed unconsciously in the dark, first tracing his peril along the snowy margin on the next morning, becomes invested with an attraction of horror for all who hear the story.” In another of his books, and the most celebrated of them all, the same impassioned master of English prose, recites the thoughts that arose within him, at a crisis in his youthful life, on the suggestive opening of that beautiful collect, “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord!” in which the great shadows of night are made symbolically significant—those great powers, night and darkness, that belong to aboriginal chaos, being made representative of the perils that, unseen, continually menace poor afflicted human nature. “With deepest sympathy I accompanied the prayer against the perils of darkness,—perils that I seemed to see, in the ambush of midnight solitude, brooding around the beds of sleeping nations; perils from even worse forms of darkness shrouded within the recesses of blind human hearts; perils from temptations weaving unseen snares for our footing.” As Marcello has it, in Beddoes’ tragedy,
“Each minute of man’s safety he does walk
A bridge, no thicker than his frozen breath,
O’er a precipitous and craggy danger
Yawning to death!”