It is because human nature has never changed; what our fathers were, we are: what Absolom and David felt, we feel.
When the brilliant, wayward Jewish boy goes astray and meets his untimely fate, we mourn with his broken father as he wails—"O Absolom my son, O my son Absolom!"
That which women have already been, women continue to be. Helen of Troy was not essentially different from Madame de Pompadour; Cleopatra was a more refined Catherine of Russia; Aspasia was the forerunner of Madame Maintenon: Sappho was another "George Sand;" Lilly Langtry was a modern Phryne; and Pauline Bonaparte had all the charm and voluptousness of Nell Gwynne.
One reason why the Old Testament continues to be a modern book is, that it is so full of human nature. Our first instinct, when we became violently enraged is, to kill. In the Old Testament, they do it. Considered as a mere human document, there is more raw slaughter in the Old Testament than any book you ever read, and the details are given with frightfully fascinating realism.
No cloak is thrown around Jacob and Abraham and Lot. Those citizens are painted with all the warts on. In some of them, indeed, the warts fill most of the canvass. That affair of David and the other man's wife: how modern it is! If you will glance over the daily newspaper, you will find that somewhere or other in this world of today, another David has seen the loveliness of Uriah's wife; and the first thing you know this modern David (in a Derby hat and tailor-made clothes) is running away with Bathsheba in an automobile. As to Solomon and his harem—including the Ethiopian woman—the subject is too delicate for polite treatment in a high class publication. I must leave such matters to Mr. William Randolph Hearst, whose Sunday editions and monthly outputs deal in "sex" novels, Gaby Deslys, Lina Cavalieri, Evelyn Thaw, Mrs. Keppel, and scarlet people generally.
The point I desired to make is that God made men and women to mate with one another, and thus reproduce and perpetuate the human species.
There are no bachelor eagles, no spinster swans, no monks among the lions, no nuns among the deer. When we want to make a bachelor out of a horse, we resort to surgery. Most of us know what Mooley, the cow, does in the Spring time, if she is shut up in the pasture with no other company than other Mooley cows.
Without pursuing this line of illustration farther, it is sufficient to say that all animal nature is under the same law. Of course, there are exceptions to all rules. Some men repel women: some women abhor men. Some men actually marry, believing that they are fit for it and then discover that they are not. A tragic instance of this was Thomas Carlyle: another was Frederick the Great. Our President James Buchanan was wise enough not to marry; and Charles Sumner was so fatuous as to do so.
But the great law of Nature is, Mate and reproduce! It applies to the flowers, to the plants, to the insects, to the fishes of the sea, and to the fowls of the air. I have often wondered why we become so accustomed to the outrageously informal conduct of hens and roosters, pigeons, ducks, turkeys, &c., that we see it and don't see it: we know it, and don't know it: it happens right under our eyes, and yet we never learn anything from it, or think anything about it.
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