"To understand David," said the Abbé Plomb, "you must not think of him apart from his surroundings, nor take him out of the age in which he lived, otherwise you measure him by the ideas of our own time, and that is
absurd. In the Asiatic conception of royalty, adultery was almost permitted to a being whom his subjects regarded as superior to the common run of humanity; besides, women were then as a species of cattle belonging almost absolutely to him as the despot and supreme master. It was but the exercise of his regal power, as has been plainly shown by Monsieur Dieulafoy in his study of that king. And, on the other hand, if he is accused of tortures and bloodshed, why, the whole of the Old Testament is full of them! Jehovah Himself pours out blood like water, and exterminates men as if they were flies. It is well not to forget that the world then still lived under the Law of Fear. So it is not very surprising that, with a view to terrifying his enemies, whose manners and customs were not indeed any milder than his own, he should have tortured the inhabitants of Rabbah and baked the Ammonites.
"But in contrast to these acts of violence and the sins which he expiated, see how generous he was to Saul, and admire the magnanimity and charity of the man whom the followers of Renan would have us regard as a bandit chief and outlaw. Remember, too, that he taught the world, as yet ignorant, the virtues which at a later time Christ was to preach—humility in its most touching form, and repentance in its bitterest shape. When the prophet Nathan reproved him for the murder of Uriah, he confessed his sin with tears, fell on his face before God, bravely accepted the most terrible punishment: incest and murder in his family, the rebellion and death of his son, treason, misery, and a desperate flight in the woods; and with what urgency he implores for pardon in the 'Miserere,' with what love and contrition he cries to the God he had offended!
"He was a man whose vices were small and few if compared with those of the kings of his time—of admirable and exceptional virtues if compared with those of sovereigns of any time of every age. Why, then, fail to understand that God should have chosen him as a precursor? Besides, Jesus came to ransom sinners, He took upon Himself the sins of the whole world. Was it not natural, then, that He should take to prefigure Him, a man who, like others, had sinned?"
"Yes; that is true, no doubt."
And that evening, when he was away from the Abbé
Plomb, from whom he parted on the church steps, as Durtal stretched himself on his bed, he recapitulated in his memory this theory of the Old Testament personages and the sculpture in the porch.
"To epitomize this north front," said he to himself, "it must be regarded as an abridged history of the Redemption prepared so long beforehand, a table of sacred history, a compendium of the Mosaic Law, and at the same time foreshadowing the Christian law.
"The vocation of the Jewish nation is set forth in these three doorways, their whole mission from Abraham to Moses; from Moses to the Babylonian Captivity; from the Captivity till the death of Christ, comprehending three phases of its history: the making of Israel, its independent existence, its life among the Gentiles.
"And how slowly, with what difficulty, was this fusion of tribes achieved! With what waste and what ejection of dross! What massacres were needed to discipline those rapacious wanderers, to quell the greed and licentiousness of the race!"