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- 486 seize—his opportunity. I may not tell his eventful story here, but there is one feature of it which any one of us who wants to do any worthy work in the world, whether for God or man, may well remember. I suppose that it was not only because the situation was so desperate, but because King Saul saw in David something that somehow made him believe in him, that led the King to say to David, “Go.” But evidently he did not believe in him enough to be willing that he should go as he was. And so he harnessed him with a coat of mail, which David had no sooner tried on than he promptly and most sensibly took off.
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488 That is the difference between David and a great many people to-day. The world is full of men and women who are thinking what a grand fight they could make if they had somebody else’s sword and helmet and coat of mail. A boy looks at a box of tools, and then at a finished piece of work, and says, “Oh yes, I could make that if I had such tools to
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491 make it with.” David knew better than that. He had no use for any tool that he had not learned to handle, and on the other hand (and that I think was the finest feature of the whole business), he knew how, when the opportunity came for it, to do the largest piece of work with the very simplest possible tool. Such knowledge may almost be said to be the whole secret of any really great achievement of life. To know how, when the call for a great deed comes, to find *in yourself*, under God, the resources to meet it, and to put those resources to the best possible use; that is pretty much the whole of it. If I were a boy and were choosing a coat of arms to be engraved on a seal, I think I should take David’s sling and five stones, for that is just what they mean.
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493 And thus the lad took his first step on that steadily ascending pathway that led him “no step backward” to the high places of the world. Soldier, ruler, king, poet, singer, who has voiced the deepest cry of the human heart for all ages and
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495 races and ranks of men—it all began, that bright, splendid, and though, alas! not unstained, yet eternally instructive, even as it is infinitely pathetic, career, with that first choice of weapons.
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497 But long before that splendid career had approached its zenith there happened the meeting of David and Jonathan in the wood of Ziph.
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499 And that brings me to Jonathan—a character so noble and beautiful that one has rarely been found to match it. Jonathan was the eldest son of King Saul, and a man of magnificent powers as a fighter. The story of the garrison at Michmash is a specimen of what he could do, and it is a story well worth reading. I may not tell it here, but this is the end of it: “And that first slaughter, which Jonathan and his armor-bearer made, was about twenty men, within as it were a half-acre of land, which a yoke of oxen might plough” (1 Samuel, xiv. 14). Two against twenty at least, and twenty dead on the field. “It was like
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