Franklin was right in saying, "The reading of bad examples will make bad morals." Remember, the perpetrator of all these crimes is said to be "a man after God's own heart." If so, then God must have approved of all his crimes. But such a God will not do for this age; and to teach children and heathen such a lesson is calculated to effect their moral ruin.
II. CHARACTER OF SOLOMON.
Solomon's writings and history both show that he was a libertine, a tyrant, and a polygamist. His tyrannical monopoly-of seven hundred wives and three hundred prostitutes, making him a practica "Free-lover" on a large scale, is an indelible stigma upon his character. It was a usurpation of the rights, and a trespass upon the liberties, of nearly two thousand men and women. It prevented them from filling the mission or sphere in life that God designed them to enjoy. The organization of the sexes shows they were designed to be husbands and wives and parents. And the nearly equal number of the sexes is an evidence that nearly a thousand men were deprived of wives by Solomon's monopoly of women; while, on the other hand, those women were prevented from sustaining the true relation of wives. When he could not see those women more than once in three years by calling on one of them each day, it is a farce, and an insult to reason, to call them wives. Could a woman sustain the practical relation of wife to a man she only saw as husband once in three years? The very idea is ridiculous, and a mockery of the true marriage relation. And yet this is the man who is represented as being such a special favorite of God as to receive a portion of his divine wisdom. It is a slander, if any thing can be, upon Infinite Wisdom. By reading his amorous song, we can learn his motives for enslaving such a large number of women.
If this "wise man" is to be accepted as authority (and he should be if he got his wisdom directly from God), then we must relinquish all hope of an immortal existence. Hear him: "For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth the beasts:... as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath, so that a man hath no pre-eminence over a beast" (Eccles. iii. 19). Here is a plain and unequivocal denial of man's conscious existence beyond the grave. Nor does the Old-Testament writer teach the doctrine. Job denies it in still more explicit terms, if possible. (See Job xiv. 10.)
III. LOT AND HIS WIFE AND DAUGHTERS.
The act of Abram's brother Lot delivering up his two daughters to the Sodomites, "to do to them as is good in your eyes" (Gen. xix. 8), must excite reflections in the highest degree revolting to the mind of every father who has daughters. The act of a father voluntarily offering up his virtuous daughters to gratify the depraved passions of a mob is too shocking to contemplate.
And to accept such a character as a "righteous man" must certainly weaken the faith of the Bible believer in a true system of morality, and plant in his mind a very low standard of the moral perfections of God.
We are told (Gen. xix. 26) that Lot's wife was converted into a pillar of salt as a penalty for the simple act of looking back. Several absurdities are observable in this story:—
1. It is difficult to conceive how any sin or crime could be attached to the natural act of turning the head to look in any direction, especially when no injunction had been laid upon the act.
2. If there were any thing so inherently wrong in the act of looking back as to be visited with such direful penalties, pillars of salt would soon become more numerous than frogs were in Egypt.