GEHAZI.

GEHAZI.

BIBLE CHARACTERS

DISCUSSED AND ANALYZED BY THE SCHOLARLY DIVINE,

Joseph Parker, D. D.

ABIJAH.

We forget Abijah’s character in his eloquence. He carries a spell with him. Judging from his speech, one would suppose him faultless—entirely noble in every aspiration and impulse and sublimely religious and unselfish.

The whole Abijah is not here. This is but the ideal Abijah. Who ever shows himself wholly upon any one occasion? Who does not sometimes go forth in his best clothing?

We must read the account of Abijah which is given in the Book of Kings before we can correctly estimate the Abijah who talks in the Book of Chronicles.

It is, perhaps, encouraging that while men are upon the Earth they should not be so dazzlingly good as to blind their fellow men. Yet it is pitiful to observe how men can be religious for the occasion. Nearly all men are religious at a funeral; but few men are religious at a wedding.

Abijah has a great cause to serve, and he addresses himself to it not only with the skill of a rhetorician but with the piety of a mind that never tenanted a worldly thought. God knows the whole character—how bright we are in points, how dark in many places; how lofty, how low. Knowing all, He judges correctly, and His mercy is His delight. Neither God nor man is to be judged by one aspect, or one attribute, or one quality. We must comprehend, so far as we may be able, the whole circuit of character and purpose before we can come to a large and true conclusion.

But as we have to do with the ideal Abijah, let us hear what he has to say in his ideal capacity. We will forget his faults while we listen to the music of his religious eloquence.

Abijah comes before us like a man who has a good cause to plead. He fixes his feet upon a mountain as upon a natural throne, and from its summit he addresses a king and a nation, and he addresses his auditors in the sacred name of “the Lord God of Israel.” He will not begin the argument at a superficial point, or take it as starting from yesterday’s new raw history—history hardly settled into form. He will go back, and with great sweep of historical reference he will establish his claim to be heard. In II. Chronicles, thirteenth chapter and fifth verse, Abijah asks:

“Ought ye not to know that the Lord God of Israel gave the kingdom over Israel to David for ever, even to him and to his sons by a covenant of salt?”

The binding covenant—the covenant that even pagans would not break. If you have eaten salt with a man you can never speak evil of him with an honest heart. You must forget your criticism in the remembrance of the salt. You are at liberty to decline intercourse and fellowship and confidence; you are perfectly at liberty to say: “I will have nothing to do with thee in any association whatsoever.” But you can not be both friend and enemy. You can not eat salt with a man and smite him in the face, or wound him in the heel, or hurt him in any way, at any time, in any line or point.

That was pagan morality.

We are fallen a long way behind it in many cases, for what Christian is there who could not eat all the salt a man has, and then go out and speak about him with bitterness, plunder him, frustrate his plans, anticipate him in some business venture, and laugh at him over his misplaced confidence?

Abijah recognized the perpetuity of the covenant. The kingdom was given to David for ever—if not in words, yet in spirit; if chapter and verse can not be quoted, yet the whole spirit of the divine communion with David meant eternity of election and honor. It is right to hold up the ideal covenant; it is right that even men who themselves have broken covenants should insist that covenants are right. We must never forget the ideal. Our prayers must express our better selves. A dying thief may pray. Again and again we have to fall back upon the holy doctrine that a man is not to be judged in his character by the prayers which he offers, inasmuch as his prayers represent what he would be if he could.

Abijah, having to deal with a perpetual covenant, charges Jeroboam with breaking it:

“Yet Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, the servant of Solomon, the son of David, is risen up, and hath rebelled against his Lord.”

All rebellion is wrong, unless it arises from a sense of injustice, untruthfulness or dishonesty. No man has a right to dissent from the national Church unless his dissent be founded upon conscience, a right conception of the nature of the Kingdom of Christ upon the Earth, which leads him to say to certain men: “Stand off.”

No part of the empire has a right to arise against the central authority, of which itself constitutes a part, merely for the sake of expressing political prejudice or selfish design. Every rebellion must be put down that can not justify itself by the very spirit and genius of justice. Separation becomes schism when it but expresses a whim, an aversion, of a superficial or technical kind; and every rebellion is wickedness, is born of the spirit of the pit, that can not justify itself by appeals to justice, nobleness, liberty and God.

Yet our rebellions have made our history.

We should have been in slavery but for rebellion. The rebels are the heretics that have created orthodoxy. We owe nothing to the indifferent, the languid, the selfish, the calculating, the let-alone people who simply want to eat and drink and sleep and die. That they were ever born is either an affront to nature or is the supreme mystery of human life.

Abijah, therefore, is perfectly right when he insists upon mere rebellion being put down; but when rebellion expresses the spirit of justice and the spirit of progress—the new revelation, the new day—all the Abijahs that ever addressed the world can only keep back the issue for a measurable period.

The accusation of Abijah was that Jeroboam had “gathered unto him vain men, the children of Belial.” For “vain men” read “sons of worthlessness”—empty fellows, who will join any mob that pays best; men who will cheer any speaker for a half-crown an hour, and put out anybody on any plea on any side for extra remuneration.

Where do these men come from? Whose language do they speak? Whose image and superscription do they bear?

They are in every country; they worship in the sanctuary of mischief and bow down at the altar of selfishness. They know not what they do. They will make a cross for a day’s wages. Evil company follows evil men. Worthless fellows are soon dissatisfied with the company of righteousness; the intercourse becomes monotonous and suffocating. A bad man could not live in Heaven. It is not in the power of mercy to save men from hell, for they carry hell with them; they are perdition.

Who can wonder if desecration followed in the steps of worthlessness? Abijah asks:

“Have ye not cast out the priests of the Lord, the sons of Aaron and the Levites, and have made you priests after the manner of the nations of other lands, so that whosoever cometh to consecrate himself with a young bullock and seven rams, the same may be a priest of them that are no gods?”

Let them bring the offering, and then they may become priests and do what they please at altars that have no foundations, the incense of which is a cloud that Heaven will not absorb. William Rufus declared that church bread was sweet bread. How many men have eaten church bread who ought to have died of hunger! What responsibility attaches to some people in this matter! Church bread ought never to be given away—ought never to be dishonored with the name of a “living.” No man should be in the Church who could not make five times the money out of it that he ever made in it. It should be felt that if he put forth all his power—both his hands, his whole mind and strength—he could be the greatest man in the commonwealth.

Jeroboam would admit any one to the altar; he would make room if there was none; he would cast out a priest of the Lord to make room for a priest of Belial. This is the accusation which Abijah brings against Jeroboam and his company of rebels.

Now Abijah turns to state his own case. He tells us what he and his people are:

“But as for us, the Lord is our God, and we have not forsaken Him; and the priests, which minister unto the Lord, are the sons of Aaron, and the Levites wait upon their business. And they burn unto the Lord every morning and every evening burnt sacrifices and sweet incense; the shew-bread also set they in order upon the pure table; and the candlestick of gold with the lamps thereof, to burn every evening; for we keep the charge of the Lord our God; but ye have forsaken Him.”

What a character Abijah gives himself!

Let us remember that we are dealing with an ideal man, and not with the real personality.

Take this, however, as an ideal representation, and how perfect it is in every line! “The Lord is our God.” We have a sound and vital theology; we have a clear upward look, and no cloud conceals the face divine; no idols have we—no images of wood, no pillars, no groves, no high places where idolatry may be performed as an entertainment.

The man reasons well. He insists upon having corner stones in any edifice or argument he puts up. When he accuses, he goes back to the covenant of salt; when he claims a right position, he claims that it is a theological one. He holds the right God. Losing the right theology, we lose all the detail with it. When the conception of God is wrong, no other conception can be right. It is only bold because it is true to say that if a man has not the right desire after the right God he can not keep correct weights and scales. The custom house, the inland revenue, the excise—call it what you please—may to some extent keep him up to the right mark, but in his soul he takes in every customer that comes near him; if he does not, he loses sleep. This applies to the so-called heathen as well as to the Christian. It is not necessary that a man should have a clear and perfect revelation of God, but that in his heart he feels that he is a creature, not a creator; a subject, not a sovereign; that he is under responsibility, and not above it. In that proportion only can he deal righteously and nobly with his fellow men.

“And the priests, which minister unto the Lord, are the sons of Aaron, and the Levites wait upon their business.”

Here is apostolic succession before the time of the invention of the term. Here is an excellent pedigree, a most complete genealogy. Our priests are in the Aaronic line, and the Levites know their business and keep to it; every thing is in order in our Church.

That is beautiful, and that is right. We need not shrink from adding, that is necessary. We must have nothing to do with men who are not in the Aaronic and apostolic succession; they must not occupy our pulpits, nor be allowed to make pulpits of their own; no man must sell them wood or stone with which to construct a pulpit; they must be forbidden by the genius of law from ever preaching or attempting to preach.

When we let go the doctrine of apostolic succession we let go a vital treasure and blessing.

We may differ as to our definition of “apostolic succession,” but surely there can be no difference among frank and enlightened hearts and minds as to what apostolic succession is. No man is in the apostolic succession who is not in the apostolic spirit, and no man is out of the apostolic succession who is animated by the spirit of the apostles. That is not a spirit which is conferred by the tips of any fingers; that is the gift of God.

Do you see your calling, brethren? God has chosen you. What a Church is God’s! Not a Church of wax-works, all made at one factory, and all charged for in one invoice; but living men, characterized by innumerable individualities—some broad as the firmament, others beautiful and tender as little flowers that can only grow in the fullest sun-warmth; some military in argument and in discipline, others persuasive in pathos, sympathy and tenderness.

There is no monotony in God. One star differeth from another in glory; no two blades of grass are microscopically identical. There is a common likeness in the worlds and in the sub-economies of Nature, but the more penetrating our vision is made by mechanical and scientific aids the more wondrous in difference are discovered to be the very things which are supposed to be identical.

We must never allow the apostolic succession to be handed about without its being accompanied by the apostolic spirit. Every man is in the apostolic succession who believes in the apostles, who follows them as they followed Christ, and who would know nothing among men but Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

“And they burn unto the Lord every morning and every evening burnt sacrifices and sweet incense; the shew-bread also set they in order upon the pure table; and the candlestick of gold with the lamps thereof, to burn every evening.”

At that time piety was mechanical. It could not be otherwise. God never forces history. The days come, each with its own burden and its own blessing, its own dawn and its own apocalypse. We can not have today what is due tomorrow. God’s seasons move in measured revolution, and come to us in orderly and timely procession; and no man can hasten them by lighting his camp fire, or striking his matches, or kindling his little inflammable powder.

We can not imitate the Sun.

Some have tried to mimic the stars; but where is the image of the Sun that the Sun has not obliterated by one mid-day look?

The time came when all these ordinances were set aside. There was to be no more burning; there was to be no morning sacrifice and evening sacrifice and sweet incense, or shew-bread and candlestick of gold and lamps thereof for evening burning.

“Ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire, nor unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and the voice of words; which voice they that heard intreated that the word should not be spoken to them any more; but ye are come unto Mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the first-born, which are written in Heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel.”

So we may misuse history by going back and making that necessary which has already been abrogated. We may thus ill-treat the day of rest, by measuring it and weighing it in Jewish scales. We may cast a cloud over the day of jubilee that comes every week, by measuring its beginning and its ending by Jewish arithmetic; we may make the whole week sabbatic by Christian consecration. There will always be ordinances, because while man is in the body he needs external helps, collateral assistances and auxiliaries. He is not always equally awake; he is not always equally spiritual. He needs the communion of saints, the coming together in holy fellowship, all the associations of a sacred time and a sacred place, and through the active yet subtle ministry of these he comes to feel that he is in touch with God. “Here in the body pent” we need such aids as can penetrate our prison and minister to the liberty of the soul.

Now Abijah says, as a kind of climax:

“And, behold, God himself is with us for our captain, and His priests with sounding trumpets to cry alarm against you. O children of Israel, fight ye not against the Lord God of your fathers; for ye shall not prosper.”

How steadfastly Abijah abides by the altar! He can not be tempted one step from the throne of God. His appeal is sublime because it is religious. It is historically religious. “The Lord God of your fathers.” It would seem to be a solemn thing to cut off oneself from all the currents of history—to bury our fathers over again in a deeper grave; yea, to bury them at night-time, so that when the morning came we could not tell where they were interred.

Abijah will have a historic line. He maintains the doctrine of philosophic and personal heredity and organic unity. He will insist upon it that the men of his day represented the men of dead generations, and were to do what they would have done had they then lived. Not only was it historically religious, but it was religion accentuated by motives, such as act most powerfully upon human conduct—“for ye shall not prosper.” That appeal they could understand.

The double appeal constitutes God’s address to men. He is bound to point out consequences, though He would not have life built upon them. There is no other way of getting at certain people than by telling them that if they believe not they shall be damned. They are so curiously and fearfully made that only hell can excite their attention. The preacher does not declare this doctrine of fire, or mere penalty, for the sake of revealing God and acting upon human thought and conduct. He knows it is an appeal more or less tinctured with possible selfishness. He can not but despise the man who asks for Heaven simply because he has smelt the fire of hell.

But the Christian preacher will begin where he can. He has to do with all classes and conditions of men. All men do not occupy the highest point of thought—do not approach the Kingdom of Heaven from the noblest considerations—and he is the wise pastor, he has the great shepherd heart, who receives men by night, by day, through the gate of fear, through the portals of love; who keeps the door ajar for men, not knowing when they may come home.

He is but a poor preacher, and he knows it, who bids people come to God that they may get to Heaven; but he is aware that some people can only understand through the medium of such terms, if ever; and he really hopes for them that by experience they may eventually rise to a nobler level, and desire God for God’s own sake. He only is in the Spirit of Christ who would pray as much, give as much, suffer as much, if he knew he had to die this night, and be blotted out for ever, as he would do and give if he knew he were this night going into everlasting glory.

To be good in order to buy Heaven is not to be good. To be religious in order to escape hell is not to be religious.

Yet we must always so judge human nature as to provide for people who can only act through fear, and through love and hope of reward. Their education will be continued and completed, and some day they will look back upon their infantile beginning and pity themselves.

The great thing, however, is to begin. If we are afraid of hell, let us ask great questions. If we are in hope of Heaven, let us begin to do great services. Hell and Heaven have nothing to do with it in reality, but they have to do a great deal with it initially, instrumentally and educationally.

What was the upshot of the war? Who needs to inquire? When Omnipotence goes forth to war, what can be the issue of the battle? God takes out His glittering sword, and His hand lays heavy in judgment; can grasshoppers stand before Him? Oppose a wooden fence to a boundless conflagration, and you may act almost rationally—most rationally—as compared with those who set a grasshopper to oppose the march of God.

The writer in the Book of Kings takes a much worse view of Abijah’s character than we find in the Book of Chronicles. From the first Book of Kings we learn that Abijah endeavored to recover the kingdom of the Ten Tribes, and made war on Jeroboam. No details are given, but we are also informed that he walked in all the sins of Rehoboam—idolatry and its attendant immoralities—and that his heart “was not perfect before God, as the heart of David, his father.”

In the second Book of Chronicles Abijah’s war upon Jeroboam is more minutely described, and he makes a speech to the men of Israel, reproaching them for breaking their allegiance to the house of David, for worshiping the golden calves, and substituting unauthorized priests for the sons of Aaron and the Levites. He was successful in the battle against Jeroboam, and took the cities of Bethel, Jeshanah and Ephraim, with their dependent villages. Nothing is said by the writer in Chronicles of the sins of Abijah, but we are told that after his victory he “waxed mighty, and married fourteen wives”—whence we may well infer that he was elated with prosperity, and like Solomon, his grandfather, fell during the last two years of his life into wickedness, as described in Kings. Both records inform us that he reigned only for the period of three years.

AHAB.

God is the time-keeper. He says: “Now.” We wonder we can not go just when it is convenient to ourselves. We think we see the exact juncture when it would be right to go, but if we went just then a serpent would bite us on the road.

We want to go to Heaven, but God says: “Not yet.”

We want to begin the battle, but God says: “Wait.”

In the eighteenth chapter of the first Book of Kings we read:

“And it came to pass, after many days, that the word of the Lord came to Elijah in the third year, saying: ‘Go, show thyself unto Ahab; and I will send rain upon the Earth.’ And Elijah went to show himself unto Ahab. And there was a sore famine in Samaria.”

Think of waiting “many days” and doing nothing! But what if waiting be the best working? What if we can best do every thing by simply doing nothing? There is a time to stand still and see the salvation of God.

Mark another thing in these verses. The Lord said “Go,” and Elijah went. Not Elijah “objected,” Elijah “reasoned,” or Elijah “pointed out the difficulties,” but simply Elijah “went.”

That is the true ideal of life.

Always be ready.

Contrast with this the case of Jonah. Elijah had no fear of Ahab. He who fears God can not fear man. If you go up to your duties in your own strength, you will find them difficult; if you come down upon them from high communion with God, you will find them easy.

The governor of the house of Ahab was called Obadiah. The word Obadiah means “servant of Jehovah,” and it would seem to have been a true description of the man, for we read that “Obadiah feared [or reverenced] the Lord greatly.”

It is possible for a man to be very bad in one direction and very tolerant in another. It was so in the case of Ahab. He was the worst of the kings of Israel, yet he kept a governor over his house who feared the Lord greatly.

The Lord causes the most wicked men to pay His religion the homage which is due to its excellence. A bad king employs a good governor. He who himself disobeys Jehovah yet engages a servant who fears the Lord greatly. The thief likes an honest man for steward. The blasphemer likes a godly teacher for his child. The great speculator prefers an unspeculative man for book-keeper. It is thus that virtue has many unconscious votaries.

He who is the slave of idolatry becomes an easy prey to the power of cruel tempters. We do not know that Ahab was a cruel man, but we do know that Jezebel was a cruel woman, and Ahab was greatly influenced by his passionate and sanguinary wife. Ahab’s provocation of the Lord may have been in the direction of idolatry alone; but to be wrong in your conception of worship is to expose yourself to every possible attack of the enemy. To pray in the wrong direction is to be weak in every other.

Ahab was a speculative idolater; Jezebel was a practical persecutor. Ahab showed that speculative error is consistent with social toleration. You must distinguish between Ahab and Elijah in this matter. It was Jezebel who slew the prophets of the Lord, and Ahab knew that his servant, Obadiah, had hidden fifty of these prophets in a cave; and yet Ahab kept Obadiah in his service. But redeeming points do not restore the whole character. “One swallow does not make a Summer.”

In the same character may be met great faith and great doubt. Obadiah risked his life to save fifty of the prophets of the Lord, yet dare not risk it, without first receiving an oath, for the greatest prophet of all! This mixture we find in every human character. “How abject, how august, is man!”

In Ahab, Obadiah, Elijah and Jezebel we see a fourfold type of human society. There is the speculator, the godly servant, the far-seeing prophet and the cruel persecutor.

Society has got no farther than this today. The Ahabs of the age are leading us away into speculation that ends in idolatry and in infinite provocation of the Lord; the Obadiahs of the age are still praying, and serving God, and saving even the worst households from the wrath of Heaven; the Elijahs of the age are still hurling their divine thunders through the corrupt and stagnant air, and piercing with lightning shafts the gloomy and threatening future; and the Jezebels of the age are still narrow, bitter, indignant, vengeful and sanguinary.

O wondrous combination! So checked, so controlled, by invisible but benignant power! Speculative error has its counterpart in actual cruelty, and patient worship has its counterpart in daring service.

We sometimes hear that Ahab was a covetous man. Are we quite sure that the charge is just and that it can be substantiated?

This charge is based on the affair of Naboth’s vineyard. How could Ahab be covetous? He proposed terms, saying:

“Give me thy vineyard, that I may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house, and I will give thee a better vineyard than it; or, if it seems good to thee, I will give thee the worth of it in money.”

The terms do not, upon the face of them, appear to be unreasonable or inapplicable. Surely this is not mere covetousness, if covetousness at all. The vineyard was close to the palace, and that fact was assigned as a reason for wishing to open negotiations concerning its transfer. But do we not sometimes too narrowly interpret the word covetousness? It is generally, at least, limited to money. When a man is fond of money, wishes to add to it, and is not scrupulous as to the means by which he seeks to enhance his fortune, we describe him as covetous. The term is perfectly applicable in such a case.

But the term “covetous” may apply to a much larger set of circumstances, and describe quite another set of impulses and desires.

We may even be covetous of personal appearance; we may be covetous of popular fame, such as is enjoyed by other men; we may be covetous in every direction which implies the gratification of our own wishes; and yet, with regard to the mere matter of money, we may be almost liberal.

This is an astounding state of affairs.

A man may be liberal with money, and yet covetous in many other directions. Sometimes, when covetousness takes this other turn, we describe it by the narrower word, “envy.” We say we envy the personal appearance of some; we envy the greatness and the public standing of others.

But under all this envy is covetousness.

Envy is in a sense but a symptom; covetousness is the vital and devouring disease. Under this interpretation of the term, therefore, it is not unfit or unjust to describe Ahab as a covetous man.

Look at his dissatisfaction with circumstances. He wishes to have “a garden of herbs.” That is all. He is king of Israel in Samaria; but there is one little thing of which he has not yet possessed himself, and until he gets that in his hand he can not rest well. There is a dream that troubles him; there is a nightmare which makes him afraid to lie down to sleep.

Look at what he has. Who can measure it? Who can run through the enumeration of his possessions? Who can take an exhaustive inventory of all the riches of the king of Israel?

But there is one little corner that is not his, and he wants it, and until he can get it all the rest goes for nothing.

The great Alexander could not rest in his palace at Babylon because he could not get ivy to grow in his garden. What was Babylon, or all Assyria, in view of the fact that this childish king could not cause ivy to grow in the palace gardens?

Ahab lived in circumstances; he lived in the very narrowest kind of circumstances. As a little man, he lived in little things, and because those things were not all to his mind it was impossible for him to be restful or noble or really good.

Once let the mind become dissatisfied with some trifling circumstance, and that fly spoils the whole pot of ointment. Once get the notion that the house is too small, and then morning, noon and night you never see a picture that is in it, or acknowledge the comfort of one corner in all the little habitation. The one thing that is present in the mind throughout all the weary hours is that the house is too small.

Once get the idea that the business is undignified, and you go to it late in the morning and leave it early in the afternoon, neglecting it between times; you are also ashamed to speak of it, and will not throw your whole heart and soul during business hours into its execution.

Once get the notion that the neighborhood is unfashionable, and it goes for nothing that the rooms are large and airy, that the garden is one of the best you ever had, that there is ample scope for a rich library, that all the neighbors are men of peculiar intelligence and goodness. All go for nothing, because the tempter has said: “This neighborhood is not a fashionable quarter of the town, and when people come to know that you are living here they will lose confidence in you and respect for you.”

If we live in circumstances, we shall be the sport of events; we shall be without dignity, without calmness, without reality and solidity of character. Let us, therefore, betake ourselves into inner thoughts, into spirituality of life, into the soul’s true character, into the very sanctuary of God. There we shall have truth and light and peace; there the stormy wind can not disturb us, and the great darkness is but an outside circumstance, for within there is the shining of the light of God.

Then notice in Ahab a childish servility to circumstances.

The Prophet Amos.

From the Painting by Gustave Dore.

The Despair of Judas.

From a Photograph of the Character in the Passion Play.

“Ahab came into his house heavy and displeased … and he laid him down upon his bed, and turned away his face, and would eat no bread.”

Yet he was the king of Israel in Samaria! He actually had subjects under him. He was in reality a man who could give law, whose very look was a commandment, and the uplifting of his hand could move an army. Now we see him surely at his least. So we do, but not at his worst.

All this must have an explanation. We can not imagine that the man is so simply childish and foolish as this incident alone would describe him. Behind all this childishness there is an explanation. What is it?

We find it in the twenty-fifth verse:

“But there was none like unto Ahab, which did sell himself to work wickedness in the sight of the Lord, whom Jezebel, his wife, stirred up.”

That explains the whole mystery. The man had sold himself to the devil. And men are doing that self-same thing every day.

If it were a transaction in the market place—if the auctioneer were visibly interested in this affair, if he could call out in audible tones “So much is the price, and the man is about to take it,” people would shrink from the villainous transaction.

But this is an affair which does not take place in the open market or in the open daylight. It is not conducted in words. If the men involved in such transactions could speak the words, the very speech of the words might break the spell and destroy the horrible infatuation. But the compact is made in darkness, in silence, in out-of-the-way places. It is an understanding unwritten, rather than an agreement in detail signed in the presence of witnesses. It is a mystery which the heart alone can understand, which even the preacher can not explain in terms, but he can only throw himself upon his own consciousness, and throw others upon their consciousness, and call for a united testimony to the fact that it is possible to sell one’s very soul to evil.

Now we understand King Ahab better. We thought him but little, frivolous of mind, childish and petty, without a man’s worthy ambition; but now we see that all this was only symptomatic, an outward sign, pointing, when rightly followed, to an inward and mortal corruption.

Now, let us look at the case of Naboth and the position which he occupied in this matter.

Naboth possessed the vineyard which Ahab is said to have coveted. Naboth said: “The Lord forbid.” He made a religious question of it. Why did he invoke the Eternal Name and stand back, as if an offense had been offered to his faith? The terms were commercial; the terms were not unreasonable; the approach was courteous, and the ground given for the approach was not an unnatural ground. Why did Naboth stand back as if his religion had been shocked?

The answer is in the Book of Numbers, thirty-sixth chapter and seventh verse:

“So shall not the inheritance of the children of Israel remove from tribe to tribe; for every one of the children of Israel shall keep himself to the inheritance of the tribe of his fathers.”

So Naboth stood upon the law.

In Ezekiel we read:

“Moreover, the prince shall not take of the people’s inheritance by oppression, to thrust them out of their possession; but he shall give his sons inheritance out of his own possession, that My people be not scattered every man from his possession.”

So Naboth was not answering haughtily or resentfully. He was answering both solemnly and religiously. When money was offered for his fathers’ inheritance, he spurned the offer. There are some things, blessed be God, we can not pay for.

When Ahab said “I will give thee for it a better vineyard than it” he knew not of what he was speaking. There can be no better vineyard than the vineyard of the fathers; there can be no vineyard equal to the vineyard that is sown with history, planted with associations, solemnized and endeared by a thousand precious memories. There ought to be some things which we can not barter. Surely there ought to be some things which we should never try to sell.

Verily, when we hear propositions made to us that money shall be given in exchange for certain things, our whole soul should rise in horror and indignation, and repel the approach of a barter which itself expresses an infinite, because a most spiritual, injustice. So Naboth’s position was strong, and he had the courage to answer the king in these terms.

Kings must submit to law. Kings ought to be the subjects of their own people. Ahab was taught that there was a man in Samaria who valued the inheritance which had been handed down to him. Have we no inheritance handed down to us—no book of revelation, no day of rest, no flag of liberty, no password of common trust? Do we inherit nothing? Did we make the age as it is, and is civilization a creature of our own fashioning? And are we not bound to hand on to others what was handed to us intact and unpolluted?

Let us live in a sacred past, and regard ourselves as trustees of many possessions, and only trustees, and as bound to vindicate our trust and have an ample acquittal at the last.

So Ahab lay down upon his bed, turned away his face, and would eat no bread. But there is a way of accomplishing mean desires. There is a way of obtaining what we want. Take heart! There is a way of possessing oneself of almost whatever one desires. There is always some Merlin who will bring every Uther-Pendragon what he longs to have; there is always some Lady Macbeth who will show the thane how to become king. There is always a way to be bad. The gate of hell stands wide open; or, if apparently half closed, a touch will make it fly back, and the road is broad that leads to destruction.

Jezebel said she would find the garden or vineyard for her husband. She taunted him. “Dost thou now govern the kingdom of Israel? Arise and eat bread, and let thine heart be merry. I will give thee the vineyard of Naboth, the Jezreelite.” Jezebel threw into the word “govern” a subtle and significant emphasis.

How will she proceed? She will be ceremoniously religious; she will proclaim a fast. O thou sweet, white, pure religion, thou hast been forced into strange uses! “Proclaim a fast;” lengthen your faces; mimic solemnity; promise your hunger an early satisfaction, but look as if you were fasting.

It is a sure sign of mischief when certain men become serious. The moment they appear to be religious the devil is just adding the last touch to the building which he has been putting up within their souls. When they talk long words—when they speak about responsibility, obligation, duty, conscience, compulsion of conviction—they are walking over tesselated pavement into the very jaws of hell.

They do not mean their words; they do but use them. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.”

First of all, then, be ceremoniously religious, Jezebel; then trample down truth. “Set two men, sons of Belial, before him, to bear witness against him, saying: ‘Thou didst blaspheme God and the king.’” Falsehood is always ready. A great black lie is always willing to be loosed and to be set going in the minds of men to pervert them and mislead them. It is always open to the bad heart to speak the untrue word. Nor is the untrue word always frankly and broadly spoken. If so, it could be answered in some cases.

The false word is hardly spoken at all; it is uttered in a whisper. Falsehood is made to use signs and gestures; even silence is made to bear witness to falsehood. Truly, again we may say: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” Tell a lie big enough about any man, and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to do away with the consequences of the false accusation. People will always be found to say: “There must be something in it; it may not be just as rumor has it, but surely a statement of that kind never could have been invented. Allowing a good deal for exaggeration, there must be something in it.”

Nor is it always possible to get even righteous men to purge their minds of that damnable sophism. Men who ought to stand up and say “There is nothing in it” hang down their heads, and with a coward’s gesture let the lie pass on.

This is how men insult the Son of God, and crucify the Man of truth. They will not be thorough, bold and fearless, and make the enemy ashamed of himself for either having invented or repeated a falsehood. Nor may the man escape because he says he heard the lie. Tell him he may have heard it, but he is yet responsible for repeating it. He may have no control over the hearing, but the moment he repeats it he adopts it, and renders himself amenable to the Eternal Righteousness.

Make the very law an instrument of injustice! First charge this man with blasphemy and treason, and then take him out and stone him, that he may die! Do not give him time to speak; do not ask for his defense; do not give him an opportunity of interrogating the witnesses. But who would cross-examine two “sons of Belial?” Better almost to die than to taint the hands and eyes with the touch and look of such children of blackness!

“Then they carried him [Naboth] forth out of the city, and stoned him with stones, that he died.” It is all over! Jezebel did this. Jezebel—a woman, a king’s wife—did this. High position goes for nothing when the heart is wrong. Great influence means great mischief when the soul is not in harmony with the spirit of righteousness.

Is Naboth quite dead? Yes, he is dead. Take the vineyard—take possession of it instantly. Now grow herbs, and grow them plentifully. The vineyard is now at liberty—take it. “Ahab rose up to go down to the vineyard of Naboth, the Jezreelite, to take possession of it.” But who is that looms in the distance? Is it Naboth? No.

How comes this man to be here just now—aye, just now? How the end is marked off into points, and how does providence reveal itself at unexpected times and in ways unforeseen! Who is this? He looks stern. He has an eye of fire. His lips are shut as if they could never be opened. He does but look.

Who is he? “Elijah, the Tishbite.” He has a message:

“Thus saith the Lord: ‘Hast thou killed, and also taken possession?’ … Thus saith the Lord: ‘In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood, even thine.’”

A sad walk!

Ahab went down to take possession of a vineyard, and a death warrant was read to him! After all, it is safe to live in this universe; there is law in it, there is a genius of righteousness, there is a Force that moves on toward noble issues.

“And Ahab said to Elijah: ‘Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?’ And he answered: ‘I have found thee; because thou hast sold thyself to work evil in the sight of the Lord.’” Ahab went out to take possession of a garden of herbs, and there he stands face to face with righteousness—face to face with honor—face to face with judgment.

Now take the vineyard. He can not! An hour since the Sun shone upon it, and now it is black as if it were part of the midnight which has gathered in judgment.

There is a success which is failure. We can not take some prizes. Elijah will not allow us. When we see him we would that a way might open under our feet that we might flee and escape the judgment of his silent look.

In the Septuagint version the twentieth chapter of the first Book of Kings immediately precedes the twenty-second. The three years without war is a period which is reckoned from the peace which was so rashly made by Ahab with Ben-hadad.

It is clear that Ben-hadad has recovered his independence, and is probably in a position of superiority. It is certain that he has not restored Ramoth-gilead, as he had promised to do, and his reconstructed army now seems to him to be sufficient to encounter successfully the united hosts of Israel and Judah. In the forty-second verse of the same chapter we have seen how Ahab was rebuked for allowing the enemy to escape.

It has been supposed that this conduct on the part of Ahab may have been due partly to compassion and partly to weakness. The judgment of the Lord was, however, expressed in the severest terms:

“Because thou hast let go out of thy hand a man whom I appointed to utter destruction, therefore thy life shall go for his life, and thy people for his people.”

In the third verse we see these words signally fulfilled. The king of Israel seems to have a good cause when he said to his servants: “Know ye that Ramoth, in Gilead, is ours, and we be still, and take it not out of the hand of the king of Syria?” On this occasion Ahab entered into an alliance with Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, for the purpose of taking back the city which belonged to Israel. Jehoshaphat made a deferential as well as a friendly reply, but insisted upon the fulfillment of a religious condition. Jehoshaphat would make inquiry at the word of the Lord.

Thereupon four hundred prophets were gathered together, and with one consent they advised that the attack should be made upon Ramoth-gilead. Surely this was enough to satisfy the judgment and the conscience of the most religious man, yet Jehoshaphat was not content with the unanimous reply which four hundred prophets had returned.

“There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.”

All external unanimity goes for nothing when the conscience itself dissents from the judgment which has been pronounced. There is a verifying faculty which operates upon its own responsibility, and which can not be overpowered by the clamor of multitudes who eagerly rush down paths that are forbidden. Even when imagination assents to the voice of the majority, and when ambition is delighted with the verdict of the prophets, there yet remains the terrible but gracious authority of conscience. Through all the clamor that authority makes its way, and calmly distinguishes between right and wrong, and solemnly insists that right shall be done at all hazards and in view of all consequences.

A vital lesson rises here to all who are anxious to know the right way under difficult circumstances. It is not enough to have great numbers of authorities on our side; so long as the conscience remains unsatisfied all other authorities are “trifles light as air.”

Jehoshaphat was uneasy, therefore, notwithstanding the prophets had said: “Go up; for the Lord shall deliver it into the hand of the king.” He inquired: “Is there not here a prophet of the Lord besides, that we might inquire of him?” The word which Jehoshaphat used was the great word, Jehovah. It was not enough for him to use a religious or sacred term. He must have the prophecy identified with the awful name, Jehovah; then it would come with final authority.

The king of Israel knew that there was another man whose very name signified “Who is like Jehovah?” Ahab frankly admitted that he hated Micaiah because he never prophesied good concerning him, but always evil.

Observe the madness of Ahab’s policy, and note how often it is the policy which we ourselves are tempted to pursue. We suppose that if we do not consult the Bible we may take license to do what seems good in our own eyes, and we imagine that by ignoring the Bible we have divested it of authority. We flatter ourselves that if we do not listen to an exposition of the divine word we shall be judged according to the light we have, forgetting the solemn law that it is not according to the light we have that we are to be judged, but according to the light we might have if we put ourselves in right relations to the opportunities created for us by divine providence.

We know that if we go to hear a certain preacher he will insist upon “righteousness, temperance and judgment to come;” and, supposing that we already know every thing that he will say, we turn away from him and listen to men who do not profoundly treat vital subjects, or press home upon the conscience the terrible judgments of God.

What is this but closing our eyes to light, and supposing that darkness is safety? What is this ostrich policy but one that ought to be condemned by our sense as well as shrunk from by our piety?

Our duty under all critical circumstances is to go to the truth-teller, and to get at the reality of things at all costs. Where the truth-teller disturbs our peace and disappoints our ambition, we ought surely to learn that it is precisely at that point that we have to become self-rectifying. The truth-teller is only powerful in proportion as he tells the truth. Officially, he is nothing; his power is simply the measure of his righteousness.

But do not men love to be flattered, even in courses of evil? Is it not pleasant to go to forbidden war amid the huzzas of thoughtless and irresponsible multitudes?

Jehoshaphat, however, was a just man, and as such he protested against the sin of the king of Israel, saying: “Let not the king say so.” Jehoshaphat being so bent upon a complete judgment of the case, Micaiah was sent for. The king of Israel wished to overawe the despised prophet by the pomp and circumstance under which he was introduced to the royal presence. “The king of Israel and Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah, sat each on his throne, having put on their robes, in a void place in the entrance of the gate of Samaria,” and, to increase the impressiveness of the occasion, all the prophets prophesied before the kings.

A singular addition was made to the surroundings of the occasion which was intended to impress the imagination and stagger the courage of the despised Micaiah. A man bearing the name of Zedekiah (“righteousness of Jehovah”) made him horns of iron. The use of symbolical acts is quite common in biblical history. We have already seen Abijah engaged in acts of this kind. He “caught the new garment that was on him and rent it in twelve pieces, and said to Jeroboam: ‘Take thee ten pieces.’”

The enthusiasm of Zedekiah inflamed all the other prophets to the highest point of excitement, and they shouted as with one voice:

“Go up to Ramoth-gilead, and prosper; for the Lord shall deliver it into the king’s hand.”

In this instance the prophets, overborne by the enthusiasm of Zedekiah, actually ventured to use the name of Jehovah, which had not been used in the first instance. The excitement had passed the point of worship and had become more nearly resembling the frantic cry that was heard on Mount Carmel: “O Baal, hear us.”

Is it possible that there can be found any solitary man who dare oppose such unanimous testimony and complete enthusiasm?

The messenger who was sent to call Micaiah was evidently a man of considerate feeling and who wished the prophet well. Seeing that the words of the prophets had all declared good unto the king with one mouth, the messenger wished that Micaiah should for once agree with the other prophets, and please the king by leaving undisturbed their emphatic and unanimous counsel.

Thus the voice of persuasion was brought to bear on Micaiah, and that voice is always the most difficult to resist. The temptation thus addressed to Micaiah was thus double in force. On the one hand, there were the pomp and the terror of the king who had sold himself to do evil, and who would shrink from the infliction of no cruelty that would express his unreasoning and unlimited anger; on the other hand, there was the good will of the messenger, who wished Micaiah to escape all danger and penalty, and for once to take the popular side. Micaiah’s reply is simply sublime: “As the Lord liveth, what the Lord saith unto me, that will I speak.”

The humility of this answer is as conspicuous as its firmness. Its profound religiousness saves it from the charge of being defiant. Micaiah recognizes himself merely in the position of a servant or medium, who has nothing of his own to say; who is not called upon to invent an answer or to play the clever man in the presence of the kings. He was simply as a trumpet through which God could blow His own blast, or a pillar on which God would inscribe his own message, or a voice which God would use for the declaration of His own will. It is unjust to attribute obstinacy or any form of self-will or self-worship to Micaiah. If he had consulted his natural inclination alone, he would have sought favor with the king, and the logical effect of his subsequent position would have been that Ahab would have endeavored for ever to silence him by constituting him the prince and leader of the four hundred prophets. Micaiah said, in effect, what was said centuries afterward: “We have this treasure in earthen vessels.”

Micaiah lived in God, for God, and had nothing of his own to calculate or consider. Until preachers realize this same spiritual independence, they will be attempting to accommodate themselves to the spirit of the times, and even the strongest of them may be betrayed into connivances and compromises fatal to personal integrity and to the claims of truth.

Now came the critical moment. Now it was to be seen whether Micaiah was to be promoted to honor, or thrust away in contempt and wrath. It is easy to read of the recurrence of such moments, but difficult to realize them in their agony. Yet these are the moments which make history in its sublimest lines.

It is not too much to say that there have been points of time at which if certain men had given way the whole economy of the world have been wrecked.

The king addressed himself to the prophet, saying: “Shall we go against Ramoth-gilead to battle, or shall we forbear?” The answer of Micaiah must have been a surprise to all who heard it, for he said: “Go, and prosper; for the Lord shall deliver it into the hand of the king.”

This is an answer which can not be understood in print. It was evident, however, that Ahab was in no doubt as to its meaning, for the tone of the prophet was a tone of almost contemptuous irony. If King Ahab had taken Micaiah’s literal answer, he would have gone forth to the battle comforting himself with the thought that he was carrying out the will of Heaven; but he knew in his own soul that Micaiah was not uttering that which expressed the reality of the case. With anger the king said unto him: “How many times shall I adjure thee that thou tell me nothing but that which is true in the name of the Lord?”

Then Micaiah replied in symbolic language, the full meaning of which was vividly clear to the mind of Ahab; for, turning to Jehoshaphat, he said: “Did I not tell thee that he would prophesy no good concerning me, but evil?”

Thereupon Micaiah charged the whole band of prophets with being under the inspiration of a lying spirit, and thus he put a stigma upon their judgment and extracted from it every particle of dignity and authority.

But this was not to be borne, for Zedekiah went near and smote Micaiah on the cheek and taunted him as being the only prophet in Israel. Micaiah had to bear the sarcasm conveyed in the inquiry: “Which way went the Spirit of the Lord from me to speak unto thee?”

Micaiah, like a true prophet, leaves his judgment to the decision of time. He will not stoop to argue, or to exchange words either of anger or of controversy; he simply says that Zedekiah will one day see the meaning of the whole prophecy, and until that day controversy would be useless.

Micaiah had to pay for his intrepidity. He was carried unto Amon, the governor of the city, and to Joash, the king’s son, and was to be put in prison and fed with the bread of affliction and with the water of affliction until Ahab returned in peace.

Micaiah thus disappears from history. Of his fate we know nothing; but there can be no difficulty in forecasting it a cruel death. Micaiah knew well the meaning of the king’s message. It may be difficult for the commentator to explain the expression, “bread of affliction and water of affliction,” but Micaiah knew the full meaning of the terms, and yet, while their cruel sound was in his ears, he looked at the king and said: “If thou return at all in peace, the Lord hath not spoken by me.”

Micaiah also made his appeal to the people, and thus committed himself to the verdict of history, saying: “Hearken, O people, every one of you.”

See whether it is not a moment to be proud of when Micaiah turns away in the custody of his persecutors, having delivered his soul with a fearlessness that did not cower or blanche, even at the sight of death in its most ghastly form. Surely, it is due to history to recognize the fact that there have been men who have not counted their lives dear unto themselves when they were called upon to testify for truth and goodness.

The martyrs must never be forgotten.

Joseph Interpreting Pharaoh’s Dream. Genesis, xli.

St. Paul.

From the Painting by Raphael.

Dark will be the day in the history of any nation when the men who shed their blood that truth might be told and honor might be vindicated are no longer held in remembrance. In vain do we bring forth from our hidden treasure the coins of ancient times, the robes worn in high antiquity by kings and priests, the rusty armor of warriors, if there is no longer in our heart the most tender recollection of the men who wandered about clad in sheep-skins and goat-skins—being destitute, afflicted and tormented—that they might save the torch of truth from extinction and the standard of honor from overthrow.

Away the kings have gone, and instead of relying upon the word of the Lord, or taking refuge in the sanctuary of great principles, they invent little tricks for the surprise and dismay of the enemy.

The king of Israel disguised himself, and Jehoshaphat made himself as the king of Israel; but all their inventions came to nothing. A certain man drew a bow at a venture, and smote the king of Israel between the joints of the harness. The poor king was fatally struck. He “was stayed up his chariot against the Syrians, and died at even; and the blood ran out of the wound into the midst of the chariot.… And one washed the chariot in the pool of Samaria; and the dogs licked up his blood; and they washed his armor; according unto the word of the Lord which He spake.”

So will perish all the enemies of the Lord.

Differences of merely accidental detail there will ever be, but no honor can mark the death of those who have gone contrary to the will of Heaven, and taken counsel of their own imagination. How long shall the lessons of history be wasted upon us? How long will men delude themselves with the mad infatuation that they can fight against God and prosper? Horsemen and chariots are nothing; gold and silver are valueless; all the resources of civilization are but an elaborate display of cobwebs. Nothing can stand in the final conflict but truth, right and purity. These are the eternal bulwarks, and unto these are assured complete and unchangeable victory. If God be for us, who can be against us? And if God be against us, it will matter not what kings are for us; they shall be blown away by the wind as if contemptuously, and cast out as refuse which is of no value.

My soul, be thou faithful to the voice of history, nor tell lies to thyself, nor operate merely through imagination, ambition or selfish calculation; for the end of this course is death—not heroic death, not death over which coming men and women will weep, but death that shall be associated with dishonor, a thing to be forgotten, an event never to be named without bitterness and shame.

The first and second Book of Kings constitute a section of Jewish history, and originally formed only one book in the sacred writings. It was customary with the Jews to name the sacred books from the word or words with which they commenced; and, while this practice may have given rise to the designation, “Kings,” it is right to observe that the title is well fitted to indicate the character of these historic compositions.

The annals given in these sacred registers are necessarily brief; but they extend from the close of David’s reign till the commonwealth was dissolved, a period of 427 years. Succinct as is the history contained in these books, there are some peculiarities in them which should not be overlooked, and from which not a little may be learned. There is not here a simple biography of the various kings that occupied the thrones of Judah and Israel, nor is there a mere detail of national movements and events, nor even a tabular register of ecclesiastical affairs. The throne, the state and the church are all exhibited in their mutual relations and bearings upon each other. Kings and people are held up to view as existing and acting under the immediate government of God; and hence the character of the ruler is always tested by the mode in which he adheres to the laws of the Most High and develops the moral excellences of the people. The notice of his accession to royal office is generally accompanied with an estimate of his conduct, and the standard to which he is likened or with which he is contrasted is either the character of David, of his own father or of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, “who made Israel to sin.”

All the political events which are recorded have been brought forward chiefly to exhibit the influence of religion on national prosperity, and in this way to show how the divine King of Israel observed the conduct of his subjects, and rewarded their fidelity or avenged their wickedness with expressions of righteous indignation. And the affairs of the Church are all portrayed with the evident design of giving prominence to the same important truth.

Idolatry in Israel was treason against their King; religious defection was open revolt, and every act of overt wickedness was an act of rebellion. Hence there is a constant comparing or contrasting of religious state and feeling with those of former times, and especially are the oracles of truth continually elevated as the perfect standard to which the thoughts and actions of all should be conformed.

The Mosaic promises and warnings are strikingly verified in the Books of Kings. For this object they were written, and to the manifestation of this the author has made his whole narrative conduce.

Much variety of opinion exists with reference to the author of these records and the period of their composition. Jewish tradition ascribes the authorship of the treatise to Jeremiah, the prophet—a supposition which is greatly strengthened by the similarity of style and idiom which is traceable between the language of the Books of Kings and that of Jeremiah.

AHAZIAH.

Ahaziah was the son of Ahab and Jezebel. He was badly born. Some allowance must be made for this fact in estimating his character.

Again and again we have had occasion, and shall indeed often have, to remark upon the disadvantages of children born of wicked parents. It is not for us to lay down any final doctrine of responsibility; we must leave that in the hands of a just and gracious God.

A terrible spectacle, however, it is to see a man whose father sold himself to work wickedness in the sight of the Lord, who bound himself as for a price to show rebellion on the very floor of Heaven.

Ahaziah was a prince of evil—a man who said he would defile the sanctuary and commit his supreme sin within the shadow of the altar, and whose mother laid the plans for the murder of Naboth, and who all but personally superintended their execution. What can we expect from such a child of darkness? Who can gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Was he responsible for his own actions? Society is often hard on such men—not unreasonably or unnaturally. Yet society is often very gracious to such men, saying with an instinctive piety and sense of justice: “After all, such men are not to be personally blamed for their antecedents; they may indeed be open to some measure of suspicion, but even they must have their opportunity in life.”

Let us consider the case of Ahaziah and see how matters stand for our own instruction.

To understand the matter thoroughly, we must go to the twenty-second chapter of the first Book of Kings: “Then said Ahaziah, the son of Ahab, unto Jehoshaphat: ‘Let my servants go with thy servants in the ships.’ But Jehoshaphat would not.”

Jehoshaphat was right when he acted upon his instinct. By-and-by he came to act upon a basis of calculation, and then a compact was entered into. But who dare set aside the voice of instinct—the very first voice that rises in the soul to make judgment and to give direction?

Jehoshaphat, on hearing the proposal of the son of Ahab, said: “No. I have known thy father too well. I am too familiarly acquainted with thy family history. Thou shalt not send thy servants with mine.”

It would be well for us if we could sometimes act more promptly upon our instincts. It would have been well for Jehoshaphat if he had acted upon his instinct.

Ahaziah fell through the lattice, and in his helplessness he became religious. Man must have some God. Even Atheism is a kind of religion. When a man recoils openly from what may be termed the public faith of his country, he seeks to apologize for his recoil, and to make up for his church absence by creating high obligations of another class. He plays the patriot; he plays the disciplinarian; he will be a Spartan in personal training and drill—in some way he will try to make up for or defend the recoil of his soul from the old altar of his country.

It is in their helplessness that we really know what men are. Do not listen to the frivolous and irresponsible chatter of men who, being in robust health, really know nothing about the aching, the sorrow, the pain, the need and the agony of this awful human life.

What does our helplessness suggest? Instantly we go out of ourselves to seek friendship, assistance and sympathy. “Oh, would some gentle hand but touch my weariness!” Thus cries the helpless one. All that, being fairly and duly interpreted, has a religious signification. The cry for friendship is but a subdued cry for God.

Sometimes men will invent Gods of their own. This is what was done, practically, by Ahaziah. Men will go out after novel deities. This is what is being done every day—not under that name, but the mere name makes no difference in the purpose of the spirit. Say new enjoyments, new entertainments, new programs, new customs—these, being interpreted as to the heart of them, mean new altars, new helpers, new gods.

It is said of Shakespeare that he first exhausted worlds, and then invented new. That was right. It was but of the liberty of a poet to do so. But it is no part of the liberty of the soul. Necessity forbids it, because the true God cannot be exhausted. He is like His own nature, so far as we know it in the great creation; He is all things in one, gleaming and dazzling as noon-tide, soft and gentle as the balmy wind, strong as the great mountains and rocks, beauteous as the tiny fragrant flowers, musical as the birds that make the air melodious, awful as the gathered thunder which hovers above the Earth as if in threatening.

Who can exhaust nature?

Who can exhaust nature’s God?

Still, the imagination of man is evil continually. He will invent new ways of enjoying himself. He will degrade religion into a mere form of interrogation. This is what Ahaziah did in this instance: “Go, inquire of Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron, whether I shall recover of this disease.” All that we sometimes want of God is that He should be the great fortune teller.

How true it is that Ahaziah represents us all in making his religion into a mere form of question asking—in other words, into a form of selfishness!

The messengers have now come. They have taken their speech from their king, and they are on the road to consult Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron. But who is this who meets them, and who asks:

“Is it not because there is not a God in Israel that ye go to inquire of Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron?”

The men had said nothing about their errand. Who is it that reads the heart night and day, to whom the darkness and the light are both alike, and from the fire of whose eye nothing is hid? How do we get the impression that when we have perfected our lie it is in some sense public property? We are sure the man whom we meet knows it. He looks as if he did.

Elijah is an abrupt speaker. The “hairy man” and “girt with a girdle of leather” did not study the scanning of his sentences. He struck with a battering ram; his interrogations were spears that quivered in the heart; his looks were judgments. What an effect he produced upon these men! Why did they not go past him and say: “Keep thy speeches to thyself, thou hairy man, nor interfere with the king’s messengers”?

We can not do that. We know that some men are not to be turned away so. We may attempt to deceive, evade or disappoint them, but they have a magnetic and most marvelous influence upon us. Though they do not speak in the imperative mood, they speak with imperative force.

The men turned back like whipped children to tell the king what they had heard, and Ahaziah was surprised at their early return. He can not sleep. He asks that the book of the chronicles may be brought, that he may look up events and see where the loop slipped, where the wrong entry was made, or where the minutes were not carried out in detail.

All this means that Elijah lives in some form or other and will meet us and confront us and have it out with us.

Look at the conflict between Ahaziah and Elijah, the Tishbite. Ahaziah is the king and Elijah is only the prophet, and the king ought to have every thing his own way ex-officio. Now we shall see what metal Elijah is made of. He handled kings as if they were little children. He took them up and set them down behind him and said: “Wait there until I return, and stir at your peril.”

The prophet should always be the uppermost man. Kings are nothing compared to teachers and seers—men who hold the judgments of God on commission. The great men of the nation are the prophets, the teachers, the educators of thought, the inspirers of noble sacrificial enthusiasm. See how Elijah tramps among the kings. He has no favor to ask. If he were driven to ask for one morsel of bread, he would be Elijah no more.

Ahaziah sends to Elijah and says: “Come down.” These words sound very commanding and imperative. Elijah answered: “If I be a man of God, then let fire come down from Heaven and consume thee and thy fifty. And there came down fire from Heaven and consumed him and his fifty.”

Look at the conflict and its parties. On the one hand, petulance; on the other, dignity. On the one side, anger—fretful, fuming, petty; on the other, judgment—calm, sublime, comprehensive, final.

Ekron was one of the royal cities of the Philistines. Its situation is pointed out with considerable minuteness in Scripture. It is described as lying on the northern border of Philistia and of the territory allotted to Judah. It stood on the plain between Bethshemesh and Jabneel. Jerome locates it on the east of the road leading from Azotus (Ashdod) to Jamnia (Jabneel). From these notices we have no difficulty in identifying it with the modern village of Akir. Akir stands on the southern slope of a low and bleak ridge or swell which separates the Plain of Philistia from Sharon. It contains about fifty mud houses, and has not a vestige of antiquity except two large and deep wells and some stone water troughs. Ekron means “wasteness.” The houses are built on the accumulated rubbish of past ages, and, like their predecessors, if left desolate for a few years they would crumble to dust. The most interesting event in its history was the sending of the ark to Bethshemesh. A new cart was made and two milch kine yoked to it, and then left to choose their own path; “and they took the straight way to the way of Bethshemesh,” the position of which can be seen in a gorge of the distant mountains eastward. The deity worshiped at Ekron was called Baal-zebub, and we may conclude from the story of Ahaziah that this oracle had a great reputation, even among the degenerate Israelites. Ekron was a large village in the days of Jerome, and also in the age of the crusades.

ASA.

Asa was a good king of Judah. He “did that which was good and right in the eyes of the Lord, his God.” Not only “good and right,” because these might be variable terms. There are persons who set themselves to the presumptuous and impious task of settling for themselves what is “right” and what is “good.”

In the case of Asa, he did not invent a righteousness, nor did he invent a goodness which he could adapt to his own tempers, ambitions and conveniences. He was right and good and “did that which was good and right in the eyes of the Lord, his God.”

While the land had peace, Asa set to work and built walls, towers and fences, and did all that he could for the good of his country.

Zerah, an Ethiopian warrior, did not understand silence. He mistook quietness for languor. He made the vulgar mistake of supposing that quietness was indifference. He did not know that repose is the very highest expression of power.

Zerah brought against Asa, king of Judah, no fewer than a million soldiers—to us a large number, but to the Orientals quite a common array. Zerah’s host was the largest collected army of which we read in Scripture, but it does not exceed the known numbers of other Oriental armies in ancient times. Darius Codomannus brought into the field at Arbela a force of 1,040,000. Xerxes crossed into Greece with certainly above a million combatants. Artaxerxes Mnemon collected 1,260,000 men to meet the attack of the younger Cyrus.

What was to be done? Asa did not shrink from war, though he never courted it. He must meet the foe in battle. Before doing so he must pray.

“Lord, it is nothing with Thee to help, whether with many or with them that have no power. Help us, O Lord, our God, for we rest on Thee; and in Thy name we go against this multitude. O Lord, thou art our God; let not man prevail against Thee.”

Having risen from their knees, they launched themselves against the Ethiopians, and were mighty as men who answer straw with steel. They fought in God’s name and for God’s cause, and the thousand thousand of the Ethiopians were as nothing before the precise and terrific stroke of men who had studied war in the school of God.

The defeat of Zerah is one of the most remarkable events in the history of the Jews. On no other occasion did they meet in the field and overcome the forces of either of the two great monarchies between which they were placed. It was seldom that they ventured to resist, unless behind walls. Shishak, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander and Ptolemy I. were either unopposed or only opposed in this way. On the other occasion on which they took the field—which was under Josiah against Necho—their boldness issued in a most disastrous defeat.

Asa, then, began upon a good foundation; he established himself upon a great principle. That is what all, young people especially, should take to heart right seriously. Do not make an accident of your lives—a thing without center, purpose, certitude or holiness. Be right in your great foundation lines, and you will build up a superstructure strong, after the nature and quality of the foundation upon which you build. Do not snatch at life. Do not take out an odd motto here and there and say: “This will do for the occasion.” Life should be deeply laid in its bases, strongly cemented together in its principles, noble in its convictions; then it can be charitable in its concessions and recognitions.

“And Asa took courage, and put away the abominable idols out of all the land of Judah and Benjamin, and out of the cities which he had taken from Mount Ephraim, and renewed the altar of the Lord.”

Let us not trifle with the occasion by suggesting that we have no idolatries to uproot, no heathen groves to examine, to purify or to destroy. That would indeed be making light of history and ignoring the broadest and saddest facts of our present circumstances. The world is full of little gods, man-made idols, groves planted by human hands, oppositions and antagonisms to the tried Theism of the universe.

We are apt to think that the idols are a long way off—far beyond seas; or that they existed long centuries ago and spoke languages now obsolete or forgotten.

Nothing of the kind. They live here; they build today. Our gods are a million strong. We do not call them gods, but we worship them none the less. Luck, Accident, Fortune, Fashion, Popularity, Self-Indulgence—these are the base progeny of idols that did once represent some ideal thought and even some transcendental religion. Idolatry has retrograded; polytheism has gone quickly backward.

Asa said, in effect: “We must be right about our gods before we can be right with one another.” That is true teaching. With a wrong theology we never can have a thoroughly sound and healthy economic system.

This was the corner-stone upon which Asa built his great and gracious policy. What was the effect of it upon other people? We find that the effect then was what it must always be:

“They fell to him out of Israel in abundance when they saw that the Lord, his God, was with him.”

Such is the influence of a great leadership. If Asa had been halting, the people would have halted, too. Asa was positive; and positiveness, sustained by such beneficence, begets courage in other people. “They fell to him out of Israel in abundance”—that is, they came over to him and were on his side. They ranked themselves with Asa; they looked for his banner and called it theirs, “when they saw that the Lord, his God, was with him.”

Nations perish for want of great leaders. Social reforms are dependent to a large extent upon the spirit of the leadership which has adopted them. The Church is always looking around for some bolder man, some more heroic and dauntless spirit, who will utter the new truth, if any truth can be new—say, rather, the next truth; for truth has always a next self, a larger and immediately impending self, and the hero, who is also martyr, must reveal that next phase of truth and die on Golgotha for his pains.

Can we not, in some small sense, be leaders in our little circles—in our business relations, in our family life, in our institutional existence? Many people can follow a tune who can not begin one. That is the philosophy we would unfold and enforce.

Regard all leaders with prayerful hopefulness in so far as they want to do good and to be good. Sympathize with them; say to Asa, even the king: “What thou hast done thou hast well done; in God’s name we bless thee for the purification of the land and for the encouragement of all noble things.”

Asa showed the limits of human forbearance and human philosophy. He broke down in the very act of doing that which was right because he went too far. He made a covenant, and the people made it along with him.

Solemn renewals of the original covenant which God made with their fathers in the wilderness occur from time to time in the history of the Jews, following upon intervals of apostacy. This renewal in the reign of Asa is the first on record. The next falls three hundred years later, in the reign of Josiah. There is a third in the time of Nehemiah. On such occasions the people bound themselves by a solemn oath to observe all the directions of the Law, and called down God’s curse upon them if they forsook it.

“And they entered into a covenant to seek the Lord God of their fathers with all their heart and all their soul; that whosoever would not seek the Lord God of Israel should be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman.”

That is the danger. You can not make men religious by killing them, by threatening them, by inflicting upon them any degree of penalty. Do not force a child to church. Lead it; lure it; make the church so bright and homelike and beautiful that the child will eagerly long for the time to come when the door will be opened.

Asa was impartial. There was a touch of real grandeur about the man. He would not even allow his mother to keep an idol. The queen had an idol of her own “in a grove.”

“And also concerning Maachah, the mother of Asa, the king, he removed her from being queen, because she had made an idol in a grove; and Asa cut down her idol, and stamped it and burnt it at the brook Kidron.”

Thus ruthlessly Asa disestablished that little royal church. See how burningly in earnest the man was, and what a man will do when his earnestness is fervent! He knows nothing about fathers, mothers, partialities or concessions. He says: “Light is the foe of darkness, and you can not have any little dark corner of your own. This light must find you out, chase away every shadow and purify every secret place in human life and thought.”

Some have supposed that Maachah, the mother of Abijah, and Maachah, the “mother” of Asa, were different persons, the former being the daughter of Absalom, the latter the daughter of Uriel of Gibeah. There are really no grounds for this. Maachah, the mother of Abijah, enjoyed the rank of queen mother not only during his short reign of three years, but also during that of her grandson, Asa, until deposed by him on account of her idolatry.

The original word for “idol” appears to signify a “horrible abomination” of some monstrous kind; and instead of “in a grove” we should read “for an asherah,” the wooden emblem of the Canaanitish deity.

There seems little doubt that some obscene emblem is meant, of the kind so often connected with worship of the productive powers of nature in ancient religions—substituted, as a still greater abomination, for the ordinary asherah. Clearly, the act of Maachah was one of so flagrant a kind that Asa took the unusual step, on which the historian here lays great stress, of degrading her in her old age from her high dignity, besides hewing down her idol and burning it publicly under the walls of Jerusalem.

“Now,” said Asa, in effect, “what is good for the public is good for the individual; what is good for the subject is good for the queen.”

ATHALIAH.

Athaliah was a king’s daughter and a king’s wife. She had a son whose name was Ahaziah, but, as he was an invalid, he did not occupy the throne longer than about twelve months.

As soon as his mother saw that he was dead a fierce and most murderous passion seized her heart. She then resolved to be queen herself.

In order to carry out this nefarious purpose, she slew all the seed royal, so that, there being no successor to the throne, she ascended it and reigned as queen.

It is very wonderful that some of the most cruel and startling things in the world have been done by women. One called Laodice poisoned her six sons one by one, that she might be empress of Constantinople. Another, ironically named Irene, took the eyes out of her own boy, that he might be incapable of empire, and that she might reign alone.

These things were done in the ancient time. Is any of the cruelty of heart left still? The accident may be changed—what about the passion and purpose of the heart? Let every one answer the question individually.

Athaliah made her heap of corpses and laughed in her mad heart, saying that now she was queen. But always some Fleance escapes the murderer’s clutch. In that heap of corpses there was an infant boy, hardly twelve months old; he was spared. The sword had not taken his little life, but the queen knew not that the child Joash had escaped. He was taken and with his nurse was hidden in the Temple, and there he was trained by the good priest, Jehoiada, for some six years. All the while the queen was reigning and doing evil.

The little boy was saved by his aunt, Jehosheba, and when six years had passed and the boy was seven years of age, being twelve months old when he was snatched from impending ruin, Jehoiada called the rulers together and all the chief and mighty men of Israel. He then revealed the secret to them.

Having disposed these dignitaries in military order and with military precision around the person of the young king, Jehoiada brought the crown and put it upon his head, and he gave him the testimony or Book of Leviticus; and, having gone through all this ceremonial process, the young king stood upright by the pillar of inauguration in the Temple, and all that great throng then clapped their hands and shouted: “God save the king!” Louder the shout rang till the queen heard it in her own house, which was not far off.

“The nearer the church, the farther from God,” has been wittily said.

Athaliah hastened to the sacred place to know the reason of this hilarious tumult, and when the case was made clear to her she shrieked and cried:

“Treason! Treason!”

But her voice found no echo in the hearts of men. Not a soul fluttered—not a heart started up in the royal defense. The woman—the evil daughter of an evil mother—was taken out by the way along which the horses came into the king’s house, and the sword which she had thrust into the throats of others drank her own blood.

In an event of this kind there must be some great lessons for all time. These are not merely momentary ebullitions of wrath or malice. They have history in them; they are red with the common blood of the whole race.

Very few men stand out in ancient history with so fair and honorable a fame as good Jehoshaphat. It is like a tonic, intellectual and spiritual, to read his vivid history. He was a grand king—long-headed, good-hearted, honest and healthy in purpose of doing wondrous things for his kingdom and for the chosen of God.

But is there not a weak point in every man? Does not the strongest man stoop? Does not great Homer sometimes nod?

Jehoshaphat had this weakness, that he hankered after some kind of connection with the wicked house of Ahab. He had a son, whose name was Jehoram (or Joram), and he wanted his son married. He must look around for royal blood. Explain it as we may—no man has explained it fully yet—Jehoshaphat wanted to be connected with the evil house of Ahab. To that house he looked for a wife for his son, Jehoram. His son married Athaliah, and she brought into the kingdom all the idolatry of Ahab and the fierce blood-thirstiness of Jezebel. That was the root of the mischief. Some roots lie a long time before they begin to germinate. There may be roots in our lives which will take ten years or forty years to develop, but the root will bring forth according to its kind. Let us take care what roots we plant in our lives—what connections we form.

Jehoram, the son of good Jehoshaphat, walked in the evil ways of the kings of Israel, and he wrought that which was evil in the sight of the Lord. Mark the reason given by the inspired historian: “He had the daughter of Ahab to wife.”

What secrets were indicated by that one reason! What a whole volume of tragedy is wrapped up in that brief sentence!

The responsibility seems to a large extent transferred from Jehoram and placed upon his wife, who was a more subtle thinker, a more desperate character, with a larger brain and a firmer will, with more accent and force of personality. Jehoram played the evil trick, repeated the foul habit, went in the wrong direction, bowed down to forbidden altars, for—“he had the daughter of Ahab to wife.” She lured him; the seduction was hers; she won the conquest. When he would have bowed the knee to the God of Heaven, she laughed at him and mocked him into Baal worship. He fell as a victim into her industrious and cruel hands.

“Be not unequally yoked together.” Do not look upon marriage lightly; do not suppose that it is a game for the passing day, a flash and gone, a hilarious excitement, a wine-bibbing, a passing around of kind salutations, then dying away like a trembling echo. Beware what connections you form, and do not suppose that the laws of God can be set aside with impunity. Get out of your heads the infinite mistake that you can do as you like and escape the operation of divine law. Deliver yourselves from the cruel delusion that you can sow tares and reap wheat. Be not deceived. God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows that shall he also reap.

Our family life explains our public attitude and influence. What we are at home we are really abroad.

Wives, do not destroy your husbands. When they would do good, help them. When they propose to give to the cause of charity, suggest that the donation be doubled, not divided. When they would help in any good and noble work, give them sympathy, prayer and blessing. We never knew a man yet of any enduring public power that was not made by his wife, and we never knew a public man yet that fully appreciated the value of that ministry. It is secret; it is at home; it does not show. It is chalked on a black-board, and not gilded on a high ceiling; it is silent, but vital.

We have seen a man go down in his church life, and we have wondered why. It was his wife—the daughter of Ahab—who was degrading him, narrowing him and dwarfing him in his thinking and sympathy.

We have seen a man go up in his public influence, and we have found that it was his wife who was encouraging him, helping him, telling him that he was on the right way, and wishing him good luck in the name of the Lord.

See to it that your home is right. Have a beautiful home—morally and religiously; a sacred house, a sanctuary where joy is the singing angel. And then, when you come abroad into the market-place, into the pulpit, into parliament, into trade and commerce or into any of the social relations of life, you will bring with you all the inspiration which comes from a home that blooms like a garden or glows like a Summer sun.

Do not suppose that the divine purpose can be set aside by Athaliahs, Irenes, Laodices or any false, furious or desperate characters of any kind.

The Lord promised David that he should always have a candle in Jerusalem. The light was very low sometimes—it was reduced to a spark in young Joash; but it was God’s candle, and Athaliah’s wild breath could not blow out that light. The word of the Lord abideth for ever.

Observe a very strong peculiarity in human nature, as shown in the conduct of Athaliah. She went into the Temple and saw the young Joash with a crown upon his head, and she shrieked out: “Treason! Treason!”

Poor innocent Athaliah! Who would not pity so gentle a dove, with a breast of feathers and a cruel dart rankling in it? Sweet woman—gentle and loving creature—injured queen! Her hands were perfectly clean; she was the victim of a cruel stratagem. She was outwitted by heads longer than hers. She, poor unsuspecting soul, had been brought into this condition, and all she could do was to cry in injured helplessness:

“Treason! Treason!”

How moral we become under some circumstances! How very righteous we may stand up to be under certain provocations! Who could but pity poor Athaliah, who had nursed her grandchildren with a wolf’s care? We do this very self-same thing very often in our own lives. Where is the man who does not suppose that he has a right to do wrong? But let other people do wrong, and then hear him!

Given a religious sect of any name whatsoever, that has the domination of any neighborhood, and the probability is that that religious sect will use its supremacy somewhat mischievously in certain circumstances. It will not let anybody who opposes its tenets have an acre of ground in that neighborhood, nor will it allow any sect that opposes its principles to build a church there. No! It takes a righteous view of the circumstances; it will not trifle with its responsibilities; it can allow no encroachment. It is charged with the spirit of stewardship, and must be faithful to its sacred obligations.

So it cants and whines, whatever its name be. If it be the name we bear religiously, so much the worse. We speak of no particular sect, but of any sect that may be placed in such peculiar circumstances as to claim the domination and supremacy in any neighborhood.

Now, let any member of that sect leave that particular locality and go to live under a wholly different set of circumstances, and apply for a furlong of ground, or for a house that he may occupy as tenant. Then let it be found that his religious convictions are a bar to his enjoyment of local properties and liberties. He will cry out: “Persecution! Persecution!” How well it befits his lips! The very man who in one district persecuted to the death those who opposed him removes to another locality, where a screw is applied to his own joints, and he raises the cry of persecution. It is Athaliah’s old trick, and will have Athaliah’s poor reward.

See how the cry of the wicked is unheeded. Athaliah was a woman, and by so much had a claim upon the sympathy of the strong. Yet no man’s heart went out to her in loyal reverence.

Jehoash (or Joash, as the name was shortened) was trained in the Temple, under the good Jehoiada. He was blessed in his aunt—for it was his aunt who took him, the daughter of Ahab, but not by the mother of Athaliah—and Joash did good all the days of Jehoiada, the priest. See the influence of a noble life. See how religion may help royalty, and how that which is morally true lifts up patriotism to a higher level. No country is sound at heart—through and through good and likely to endure—that draws not the inspiration of its patriotism from the loftiness and purity of its religion.

All these tragedies are making the Earth reek with abomination today. Athaliah lives in a vigorous progeny.

BALAAM.

Balaam comes into the narrative most suddenly—but he will never go out of it again. Other men have come into the Bible story quite as suddenly, but they have only remained for a time. Balaam will never disappear; we shall read of him when we come to the Book of the Revelation of John the Divine.

There are some historical presences that you can never get rid of. It is useless to quibble and question. The same mystery occurs in our own life. Some persons, having been once seen, are seen for ever. You can not get away from the image or the influence, or forget the magical touch of hand or mind or ear; they turn up in the last chapter of your life Bible. You can not tell whence they come. Their origin is as great a mystery as is the origin of Melchisedek; they come into your lifelines as quickly and abruptly as came Elijah, the Tishbite; and they take up their residence with you—subtly coloring every thought, secretly and mightily turning speech into new accents and unsuspected expressions full of significance and revealing that significance in ever-surprising ways and tones.

Why sit down and look at the story of Balaam as though it were something that occurred once for all? It occurs every day. God teaches by surprise. He sets the stranger in our life, and while we are wondering He turns our wonder into a mystery more sublime.

Who would have a life four-square, in the sense of limitation, visible boundary, tangible beginning and ending? Who would not rather be in the world as if he had been in some other world, and as if he were moving on to some larger world? We lose power when we lose mystery. Let us not chaffer about words. If the spirit of mystery is in a man, the spirit of worship is in him; and if the spirit of worship is in him, it may detail itself into beliefs, actions and services which are accounted right, and whose rightness will be proved by their beneficence. Balaam comes as suddenly as Melchisedek, as unexpectedly as Elijah; but we shall find him at the very last an instructive historical character.

He is called Balaam, the son of Beor, and he is domiciled at Pethor, on the River Euphrates. At that time the king of Moab was called Balak, and when Balak saw how Israel had destroyed the Amorites he said:

“Fighting is out of the question. If we have to come to battle, we may as well surrender before we begin; the numbers are overwhelming. Now shall this company lick up all that are round about us, as the ox licketh up the grass of the field.”

You can hear the lick and the crunch, and be present at the destruction. It was a day of fear and much sorrow in Moab.

What, then, was to be done?

Herein came the wisdom of Balak. He also lives to the end of life’s chapter, for to the end of that chapter we shall find the touch of superstition in the human mind. Balak would have recourse to supernatural help. He had heard of Balaam, the soothsayer of Pethor—a man of divination, a person who had power to bless and to curse—the Simon Magus of his day. So he took advantage of his superstition, and thought to sow the air with curses which would work where his little sword could not reach.

That is not a mean thought. Call it perversion or superstition—you do not touch the inner and vital mystery of the case. The great agonies of life are not to be explained by calling them perversions, or labeling them superstitions, or denouncing them as nightmares or dreams; they are there. Man must obey voices which are not always articulate and reportable as to words and tones. It may be more superstitious to deny the supernatural than to affirm it. Never forget the cant that is talked against cant.

Do not believe that they are the heavenly, pure and brilliant souls who have no church, no religion, no altar; who live under the dome of their own hats and walk on the marble of their own boots. Whose prophets, pray, are they? They must be accounted for, as well as the Melchisedeks, the Balaams and Elijahs of old time. What is their history? Where have they made their mark? What marvels of beneficence have they performed? Or do they only live in the very doubtful region of sneering at other people’s piety?

Balak’s was a great thought. We do not adopt its form, but we should perhaps do unwisely to reject its spirit and intent. Balak said: “Numbers are against us. If it is to be a mere contention of army against army, Moab will be destroyed at once. The thing to be done—if it can be done—is to enlist the service and the action of the supernatural.” Quite right. We say so now. If that can be done, any other thing that can be done is contemptible in comparison.

So Balak sent for Balaam, who made answer that he would not come. By-and-by Balak sent other princes more honorable still, with offers of promotion and honor and abundant wages. Balaam said he would ask God. He asked God, and angered Him by so doing. Some second prayers are worse than superstitions.

So God said: “If the men come to call thee, rise up, and go with them; yet the word which I shall say unto thee, that shalt thou do.” But God’s anger was kindled against Balaam.

“And God’s anger was kindled because he went; and the angel of the Lord stood in the way for an adversary against him. Now, he was riding upon his ass, and his two servants were with him. And the ass saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way, and his sword drawn in his hand; and the ass turned aside out of the way, and went into the field; and Balaam smote the ass, to turn her into the way. But the angel of the Lord stood in a path of the vineyards, a wall being on this side and a wall on that side.”

When Balak heard of Balaam’s arrival he was glad. Gold went for nothing, now the soothsayer had come. Riches were as water poured forth. In those days the supernatural went for something in the market-place. It is the cheapest of all things now. Ideas are without value; religious thoughts are mere breath. But Balaam remembered that he was only to speak what God told him; so he began to play the priest. He would have altars put up.

He took up his parable, and said: “Balak, the king of Moab, hath brought me from Aram, out of the mountains of the east, saying: ‘Come, curse me Jacob,’ and ‘Come, defy Israel.’”

Balaam would have altars put up and sacrifices rendered. But the answer was: “No. Israel can not be cursed.”

So Balak took him to another point of view, where perhaps, the multitude looked greater or did not look so great. “And he took up his parable, and said: ‘Rise up, Balak, and hear; hearken unto me, thou son of Zippor.’” And again the people were to rise like a lion, and lift up themselves as a young lion; and the people were not to lie down until they had eaten of the prey and drunk of the blood of the slain.

“Well, then,” said Balak, “if that be the case, this thou must do for me: Neutralize thyself; be nothing; act as if thou hadst not come at all. Neither curse them at all, nor bless them at all.”

But Balaam said: “No. You can not treat God’s messengers in that way. As a matter of fact, they are here; you have to account for them being here, and to reckon with them while they are here.”

We can not quiet things by ignoring them. Simply by writing “Unknowable” across the heavens we really do not exclude supernatural or immeasurable forces. The ribbon is too narrow to shut out the whole Heaven. It is but a little strip, and looks contemptible against the infinite arch. We do not exclude God by denying Him, nor by saying that we do not know Him, or that He can not be known. We can not neutralize God, so as to make Him neither the one thing nor the other.

So Balaam was the greatest mystery that Balak had to deal with. It is just the same with the Bible—God’s supernatural Book. It will not lie where we want it to lie. It has a way of getting up through the dust that gathers upon it and shaking itself, and making its pages felt. It will open at the wrong place. Would it open at some catalogue of names it might be tolerated, but it opens at hot places, where white thrones are and severe judgments, and where scales are tried and measuring wands tested. It will speak to the soul about the wrong doing that never came to any thing, and the wicked thought that would have burned the heavens and scattered dishonor upon the throne of God.

Balak said, in effect: “Would to Heaven I could get rid of this man.” He took Balaam to another point of view, and Balaam “set his face toward the wilderness, and took up his parable.” He sang a sweet and noble song: “How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob! And thy tabernacles, O Israel! As the valleys are they spread forth, as gardens by the river’s side, as the trees of lign aloes which the Lord hath planted, and as cedar trees beside the waters. He shall pour the water out of his buckets, and his seed shall be in many waters, and his king shall be higher than Agag, and his kingdom shall be exalted. God brought him forth out of Egypt; he hath, as it were, the strength of an unicorn; he shall eat up the nations his enemies, and shall break their bones and pierce them through with his arrows. He couched, he lay down as a lion, and as a great lion; who shall stir him up? Blessed is he that blesseth thee, and cursed is he that curseth thee.”

Balak made a bad bargain that day. He added unto his troubles, instead of diminishing them.

Balak would gladly have parted with Balaam, but he could not get rid of him; and Balak was wroth. It became a king to become angry. And Balak’s anger was kindled against Balaam, and he smote his hands together and said unto Balaam: “I called thee to curse mine enemies, and, behold, thou hast altogether blessed them these three times. Therefore, now flee thou to thy place. I thought to promote thee unto great honor, but lo, the Lord hath kept thee back from honor.”

Balaam then made a great speech to Balak. He said: “Is this not precisely what I said to the king’s messengers? Did I not say: ‘If Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold, I can not go beyond the commandment of the Lord, to do either good or bad of mine own mind; but what the Lord saith, that will I speak’? Now, I will tell that which I see.”

And then came the parable of the man whose eyes are open:

And he took up his parable, and said: “Balaam, the son of Beor, hath said, and the man whose eyes are open hath said, he hath said which heard the words of God, and knew the knowledge of the Most High, which saw the vision of the Almighty, falling into a trance, but having his eyes open; I shall see him, but not now; I shall behold him, but not nigh; there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Scepter shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth. And Edom shall be a possession, Seir also shall be a possession for his enemies; and Israel shall do valiantly. Out of Jacob shall come he that shall have dominion, and shall destroy him that remaineth of the city.”

Then the parable is continued, Balaam looking Balak full in the face; and last of all “Balaam rose up, and went and returned to his place, and Balak also went his way.”

You can not carve your God into any shape that will please your fancy. You can not send for any true faith and bribe it to speak your blessings or your cursings. Balaam was a man of noble sentiments. Look at some of his words: “Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his.” And again: “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent.” And again: “I shall see him, but not now; I shall behold him, but not nigh.”

Then take the grand words which he spoke to Balak, as reported in the prophecies of Micah. Never did man preach a nobler sermon than this: “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”

Who can amend that speech? Who can refine that gold? Who dares touch that lily with his mean paint? Who taught Balaam that great speech?

We sometimes say we find, scattered up and down in ancient literature, morals as beautiful as any we find in the Bible. Possibly so. Who wrote them? Whence did they come? Is God the God of one corner of the creation? Is God a parochial Deity?

Is there not a spirit in man—universal man—and does not the Spirit of the Most High give him understanding? Wherever there is a line of beauty, God wrote it; wherever there is a sentiment which is charged with the spirit of beneficence, that may be claimed as a good gift of God.

Apostle Paul never uttered a nobler sentiment than is uttered by Balaam, as reported in the prophecies of Micah. This is the Sermon upon the Mount in anticipation. That is the vicious Church, built on the wrong foundation, aiming at the wrong Heaven, which does not recognize in every literature and in every nation all that is good, noble, wise, prophetic.

Balaam’s convictions and wishes disagreed sometimes. Therein he was most human. He knew he ought not to go to Balak, and yet he wished to go. He would ask the second time; he would doubt his own convictions, or he would adjust them according to the shape and temper of circumstances. Wherever he came from, he claims herein to be quite a near neighbor of ours. Doubt may exist as to the exact relation of Pethor to the river upon which it was built, but there can be no doubt whatever of the blood relationship between Balaam and our own age. Speaking impulsively from the center of his convictions, he said: “No. Nothing shall tempt me to go. You speak of gold and silver. Were Balak to give me his house full of gold and silver, I would not go. I am the Lord’s servant, and the Lord’s work alone will I do.”

Then the thought occurred to him—a second message coming, borne by more honorable princes: “Perhaps I might go and obtain this wealth and honor, and still do my duty.”

He is on the downward road now. A man who thinks to do forbidden things and spend the bounty for the advantage of the Church is lost; there is no power in him that can overcome the gravitation that sucks him downward. He says: “I will bring back all Balak’s gold and silver, and add a transept to the church or another course of marble to the altar.”

He will never return. God will not have His house so patched and bungled; nor does He want Balak’s gold for the finishing of His sanctuary. A nobler spirit was Abram, who said no to the king of Sodom, “lest thou shouldest say: ‘I have made Abram rich.’”

The whole story of Balaam is intensely Oriental and primeval. The first deputation is dismissed in obedience to a divine warning; but, so far as we know, “the wages of unrighteousness,” which Balaam loved, are carefully retained. A second embassy of nobler messengers, carrying richer gifts, succeeds. He does not at once dismiss them, as God had required, but presses for permission to go with them, which at last is granted.

Balaam would earn the fame and honor apparently within his grasp, yet he knows that when the prophetic afflatus comes on him he can only utter what it prompts. With a feigned religiousness, he protests that if Balak were to give him his house full of silver and gold he could not go beyond the word of Jehovah, his God, to do less or more; but he also bids them wait overnight to see if he may not, after all, be allowed to go with them. If his ignoble wish to be allowed to curse an unoffending nation be gratified, he has the wealth he craves; if it be refused, he can appeal to his words as proof of his being only the mouth-piece of God.

That Balaam should have been allowed to go with Balak’s messengers was only the permission given every man to act as a free agent, and in no way altered the divine command, that he should bless, and not curse. Yet he goes as if at liberty to do either, and lets Balak deceive himself by false hopes, when the will of God has been already decisively made known.

Balaam’s was a maneuvering life—very truthful, and yet very false; very godly, and yet very worldly—a most composite and self-contradictory life, and still a most human life. Balaam never breaks away from the brotherhood of the race in any of his inconsistencies. When he is very good, there are men living today who are just as good as Balaam was; when he is very bad, it would not be difficult to confront him with men who are quite his equals in wrong doing. When he is both good and bad almost at the same moment, he does not separate himself from the common experience of the race. He was always arranging, adjusting, endeavoring to meet one thing by another, and to set off one thing over against another. It was a kind of gamester life—full of subtle calculation, touched with a sort of wonder which becomes almost religious, and steeped in a superstition which reduces many of the actions of life to a state of moral mystery wholly beyond ordinary comprehension.

ELAH.

There was once a king in Israel named Elah. He reigned over Israel, in Tirzah, two years. He had a servant called Zimri, who was a captain of his chariots.

Zimri was a born traitor. Treachery was in his very blood. In the case of Elah, Zimri had a marked advantage, for Elah was a drunken fool. He was in the habit of visiting the house of another of his servants, a steward called Arza. There he had what drink he asked for, and he asked for a great deal—so much that he was often drunk in his servant’s house. On one of these occasions Zimri went in and killed him, and reigned in his stead.

These are the facts with which we have to deal. Are they very ancient, or are they happening about us every day? Is Elah dead? Is Zimri clean gone for ever? And is the house of the servant Arza closed, so that the master can drink no more with the steward?

Elah lives in every man who has great chances or opportunities in life, but allows them to slip away from him through one leak in the character. Elah was a king and was the son of a king, so his openings in life were wide and splendid; but he loved strong drink, and thus through that leak in his character all that might have made him a man oozed away, and left him a king in nothing but the barren name.

Strong drink will ruin any man. It is the supreme curse of England. I will say nothing now of the old, but to the young I may speak a word. I care not, young man, how many and how brilliant in life your chances are, if you drink wine in the morning, as many young men in London do, you are as good as damned already. You think not, but that only shows the infinite deceitfulness of the enemy. He tells you:

“Nothing of the kind. This is parson’s twaddle. Take your wine when you want it, and let it alone when you do not care for it.”

There is suppressed mockery in that high challenge. There is no soundness of health in it. Every drink but leaves you weaker. Every emptied glass is another link added to the strong chain thrown upon your limbs.

Zimri still lives in all persons who take advantage of the weaknesses of others. Zimri knew that Elah was a drunkard, and he further knew through Elah’s habit of drunkenness alone could he be reached. On every other side of his character Elah may have been a strong man—acute, shrewd and far-sighted—but when in drink he was, of course, weak and foolish. Zimri played his game accordingly. He said:

“Elah goes to Arza’s house after sundown. In half an hour after going, he will begin to fall under the effects of wine; then the worst wine will be brought out, and he will go mad under its poison and become drowsy. I must get Arza out of the way. The fool will go on any errand I name, on promise of another horse; that is it.”

The Bible says: “And Zimri went in and smote him and killed him.” He took advantage of his master’s weakness, and his progeny is numerous on the Earth.

Some people trade on the weaknesses of others. They study them. They adapt themselves to them. They watch for striking time, and seldom miss the mark. How else could the net be always ready for the bird? How else could the pit be always prepared for the unsuspecting and bewildered traveler? There is an infernal science in these things—a devil’s black art!

And does not Arza still live in those who find the means whereby men may conceal their evil habits and indulge their unholy desires? They seem to say: “In my house you may do what you please. I shall not look at you. Come when you please; go when you like; I am nobody, if you like to call me so.”

Tirzah, whose name means pleasantness and which was Elah’s capital, was an ancient royal city of the Canaanites, captured by Joshua. After its conquest it is not again mentioned in history till the time of Jeroboam, who appears to have chosen it as his principal residence. The geographical position of Tirzah has not been given by any ancient geographer. Zimri reigned only seven days in Tirzah. Omri, captain of the host, was made king over Israel in the camp. He besieged Tirzah and took it. Zimri, seeing that the city was taken, went into the king’s palace, set it on fire and perished in it. The last mention of Tirzah in Scripture history is in connection with Menahem, who went from Tirzah to Samaria, “and smote Shallum, and reigned in his stead.” Solomon made the comparison: “Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah.”

ELIJAH.

Elijah means “Jehovah is my God.” There is often much in a name. It is a history, sometimes—the summing up of generations; it is sometimes an inspiration, recalling memories that stir the soul to high daring.

There are two places called Tishbi—one in Gilead and the other in Galilee. Elijah belonged to the former. Sometimes character is mysteriously and very deeply affected by country. Gilead was a wild and mountainous district, bordering on Arabia, and consequently half Arab in its customs. There was a wonderful similarity between the man and the region; stern, bleak, grand, majestic and awful were they both. John the Baptist seemed to bring the wilderness with him when he came into the city. Children born in luxury are apt to be themselves luxurious. Children born in slavery will hardly ever be free, though slavery has been abolished. To the end of life we carry the color which first impressed itself on our vision.

All revelations seem to us to be sudden. Look at the suddenness of the appearance of Ahijah to Jeroboam, and look at the instance before us: “Elijah, the Tishbite, said unto Ahab.” The total apostasy of the Ten Tribes (Israel) was now almost accomplished, and yet a faithful prophet of the Lord stands up in the degenerate land and declares that Jehovah is his God, and in sacred solitariness protests against the abominations of Israel and her king.

No mild man would have been equal to the occasion. God adapts His ministry to circumstances. He sends a nurse to the sick room and a soldier to the battle field. The son of consolation and the son of thunder can not change places. You are right when you say that the dew and the light and the soft breeze are God’s; but you may not, therefore, suppose that the thunder and the hurricane and the flood belong to a meaner lord.

Imagine the two men standing face to face—Ahab, the dissolute king, and Elijah, the faithful prophet. Probably there is no finer picture in ancient history. Terrible indeed is the national crisis when king and prophet come into collision. There is not a combat between two men. Mark that very closely. It is Right against Wrong, Faithfulness against Treachery, Purity against Corruption. Look at them—Ahab and Elijah—as they face one another! Consider the boldness of the prophet. Religion is never to be ashamed of its own testimony.

As we look at the scene, not wanting in the elements of the highest tragedy, we see the value of one noble witness in the midst of public corruption and decay, and the grandeur as well as necessity of a distinct personal profession of godliness. It is not enough to be godly; we must avow it in open conduct and articulate confession.

Let us now observe how Elijah proceeds to deal with Ahab. “There shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.” Here is physical punishment for moral transgression. So it is; and that is just what a parent does when he uses the rod upon his child for falsehood. You can only punish people according to their nature. The garroter can submit to any number of censures and lectures, but he dreads the cat-o’-nine-tails.

Physical punishment for moral transgression is the law of society. So the liar is thrown out of his situation; the ill-tempered child is whipped; the dishonorable man is expelled from social confidence.

With regard to the particular punishment denounced against Ahab, it is to be remembered that drought is one of the punishments threatened by the law if Israel forsook Jehovah and turned after other gods.

This, then, was the brief communication which the prophet addressed to the king. God’s threatenings are terrible in their conciseness. He leaves no room in a multitude of works for ambiguity and verbal wriggling. The soul that sinneth shall die. “The wages of sin is death.” “There is no peace, saith the Lord, unto the wicked.”

And as He can be concise in threatening, so He can be concise in promise: “I will give you rest.” “I will give you living water.” “He that believeth shall be saved.” “Ask, and it shall be given you.”

Thus great things can be said in few words: “God is light.” “God is love.” “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” “Ye must be born again.”

At the bidding of the word of the Lord, Elijah turned eastward and hid himself by the brook Cherith, a place nowhere else mentioned in the Bible, and “no place like it has as yet been discovered in Palestine.” It was a torrent-course facing the Jordan, “but whether it was one of those which seam Mount Ephraim or of those on the opposite side of Jordan, in the prophet’s own country, is uncertain.”

But what is the meaning of the extraordinary expression: “I have commanded the ravens to feed thee”? By omitting the points, which are generally allowed to have no authority, the Hebrew letters may signify Arabians. Then the passage would read: “I have commanded the Arabians to feed thee.” Or, if we retain the present pointing, the word may be translated “merchants,” according to “The Speaker’s Commentary.” But it is better to allow the word “ravens” to stand. It implies a miracle; but the whole Bible is a miracle, and so is our own daily life, could we but see the inner movement and look beyond all symbols to the spiritual reality.

But Elijah’s brook dried up. Prophets may be overtaken by the operation of their own prophecies. The great laws are impartial, yet wonderful is the scope within which exceptions may be established. This incident gives an instance in point.

“Arise, get thee to Zarephath, which belongeth to Zidon, and dwell there. Behold, I have commanded a widow woman there to sustain thee.” This place is called Sarepta in the New Testament. It lay upon the great public road which connected the two towns. A little village called Sarafend now occupies the situation.

But how did it come about that Elijah was sent to a place so near the city of Jezebel’s father? It has been suggested that it would be the last place that he would be suspected of having chosen as a retreat. When Elijah came to the gate of the city the widow woman was there gathering sticks, and he asked her for a little water in a vessel, that he might drink. And as she was going to fetch it, he asked her to bring also a morsel of bread in her hand. But she had no bread—not so much as a cake—only a handful of meal in a barrel and a little oil in a cruse.

She was just going to dress this little food for herself and her son, “that we may eat it and die.” But Elijah claimed it in the name of the Lord, and gave to her in return the gracious promise: “The barrel of meal shall not waste, neither shall the cruse of oil fail, until the day that the Lord sendeth rain upon the Earth.”

We may here admire and imitate one of the finest instances of ancient faith. The woman was asked for all she had, and she gave it. But mark, she was put in possession of a promise. This is God’s law. He gives the promise first, and then asks for the faith of man. It was so in the ease of Abraham. It is so with ourselves today.

“And the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail.” This is the continual miracle of nature; this is the security of life. We are puzzled by it, but what of that? Are possibilities to be determined by our weakness or by God’s strength? We could have increased the flour had we sown the seed, reaped the grain and called in the aid of the miller. Now let us venture on the supposition that Almighty God is able to do just a little more than we can do, and the whole difficulty is gone. The air wastes not, nor the light, nor the force of nature; what if God can touch points which happen to lie beyond the range of our short fingers? We must allow something for Deity.

And now sorrow fell upon the poor woman’s house. Her only child died, and her heart was lacerated even to torment and agony. But the Lord was merciful. Elijah took the dead child away into a loft—the upper chamber, which was often the best part of an Eastern house—and cried unto the Lord, and stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried again and again unto the Lord, and the child’s life returned. Then the glad mother hailed Elijah as a man, and one in whose mouth was the word of the Lord.

Elijah had put himself beyond the reach of Ahab—not because he feared him or distrusted the power of God in critical circumstances—but because God’s providence or government is a great scheme with innumerable sides, and requires time for its full disclosure and accomplishment. We are not to hasten the march of God. To every thing there is a season. Everywhere we see this idea of time observed and honored. Though there is famine in the land, we can not urge the seasons forward. The child, too, must have years of growth, though his father be disabled and there be none to earn the household bread but himself.

So in the case before us. Ahab must be wearied out with searching for Elijah. He must be made to see how fruitless may be the efforts even of a king. And at last, when success does come, it must come not from his side at all.

We have said that Ahab was a speculative idolater rather than a cruel persecutor. Jezebel acted the part of cruelty; Ahab acted the part of unbeliever and spiritual rebel generally. A proof of the probable correctness of this view is found in the incident before us, for when Ahab met Elijah he did not show a spirit of cruelty. He said unto the prophet: “Art thou he that troubleth Israel?” He did not threaten Elijah with the sword; he did not demand his immediate surrender and arrest. He seems rather to have looked upon Elijah with wonder—perhaps not unmixed with admiration of a figure so independent and audacious.

The tone of the king’s mind may be inferred from the kind of challenge which he accepted. It exactly suited his speculative genius. Elijah proposed a trial between himself and the idolatrous prophets, 850 in number—proposing that the god who answered by fire should be God. The idea instantly commended itself to Ahab as excellent. He liked the high and practical speculation. He was fond of intellectual combat, and he warmed at the notion of a holy fray. The man who could accept a notion of this kind was not cruel, wild or fond of human blood. Ahab was even wickedly religious; the more altars and groves the better—yea, altar upon altar, until the pile reached to Heaven; and grove after grove, until the line met itself again and formed a cordon around the world. If he had started from a right center, Ahab had been the foremost evangelist in the ancient Church.

Let us now look at the controversy itself.

This plan was proposed by the prophet of the Lord, and not by the servants of Baal. Truth addresses a perpetual challenge to all false religions and all wicked and incompetent workers. Its challenges have heightened and broadened in tone from the first ages until now.

Moses challenged the necromancers of Egypt; Elijah challenged the priests of Baal; Christ challenges the world.

At first the challenge was more strictly physical; but now it is intensely spiritual. What religion produces the highest and finest type of character? That is the challenging question.

That sane men should prefer a display of physical power or skill to a spiritual contest is an illustration of the infancy and rudeness of their minds, and not a proof of the best form of competition. Where, in Christian or in pagan lands, have we the finest men, the purest character, the most sensitive honor? Where are schools, hospitals, asylums and charities of every kind most abundant?

That Christian countries are disgraced by some of the foulest crimes possible in human life, may but show that their very foulness and atrocity never could have been so vividly seen and so cruelly felt but for the enlightenment and culture furnished by Christianity. In any other countries they would have been matters of course; but in Christian lands their abomination is seen by the help of Christian light.

The appeal or challenge was forced upon the prophets of Baal; it was not spontaneously accepted by them. This should be made very clear, as it is a point apt to be overlooked.

Perhaps the common impression is that Elijah challenged the prophets directly, standing face to face with them, without any medium of communication.

Nothing of the kind. Elijah first challenged King Ahab, who snatched eagerly at the sensational chance, little knowing what he was snatching at. Having spoken first to the king, Elijah spoke next to the people, and demanded why they hesitated between two opinions, insisting that they should make a choice between Jehovah and Baal. Then Elijah made his grand appeal to the people of Israel, and they answered and said: “It is well spoken.” Having secured the approval of the king and the people, Elijah called upon the prophets to proceed to trial.

Today Christianity appeals not to a few sectarian prophets, nor to a few bewildered speculators, nor to a few scientists who are wild with boy-like joy because they have found a bird’s nest, though they have never seen the bird that built it; but Christianity makes its appeal to the great and broad heart of human nature, to the common sufferings of the race, to the indestructible sentiments of mankind. In Elijah’s day the people said: “It is well spoken.” Of Christ it is said: “The common people heard him gladly.”

Every assault upon truth must bring mockery and death upon the assailants. Elijah mocked the prophets on Carmel and slew them at Kishon.

Elijah was a prophet of truth, but of sternness and terror. He lived in a tempestuous atmosphere. Lightning seemed to play around his temples, and his voice was as thunder.

Van de Velde gives a vivid delineation of the precise locality of the Carmel contest. He was, it is believed, the first traveler who identified the site of the “Burning.” The rock shoots up in an almost perpendicular wall, more than two hundred feet in height on the side of the vale of Esdrelon. This wall made the burning visible over the whole plain and from all the surrounding heights, so that even those left behind and who had not ascended Carmel would still have been able to witness, at no great distance, the fire from Heaven that descended on the altar. Here the place must have been, for it is the only point of all Carmel where Elijah could have been so close to the brook Kishon as to take thither the priests of Baal and slay them, return again to the mountain and pray for rain, all in the short space of the same afternoon. Down 250 feet beneath the altar plateau is a vaulted and very abundant fountain. While all other fountains were dried up, one can well understand that there might have been found here that superabundance of water which Elijah poured so profusely over the altar.

ELISHA.

When Elijah supposed that his work was done he was ordered by Jehovah to go up and return on his way to the wilderness of Damascus; and he who supposed that his ministry was concluded had yet to anoint Hazael to be king over Syria and Jehu, the son of Nimshi, to be king over Israel.

But the anointing of these kings was a comparatively insignificant circumstance. The great point of the commission is contained in this sentence:

“And Elisha, the son of Shaphat of Abel-mehola, shalt thou anoint to be prophet in thy room.”

Probably it had not occurred to Elijah that he could have a successor. A very subtle indication is thus given of his approaching end. The Lord, instead of telling Elijah that he had many a year left to spend in holy service, gave him to understand that even he, mighty prophet though he was, could be dispensed with, and a man of almost unknown name would be qualified by divine inspiration to take his room. We can not imagine Elijah’s feelings under these circumstances. If a great demonstration of regard had been made, on the part of the Lord God of Israel, because Elijah was weary, the prophet might have supposed himself to be of vital consequence to the divine economy; but to be told that Elisha, a man who was plowing the twelfth plow in the field while his eleven servants were plowing beside him, would succeed to the high dignity was really to inflict in the most gracious way a very solemn humiliation upon a man who had become so self-conscious as practically to ignore the resources of the living God.

Elisha was a man in what we should now term comfortable circumstances. As he was plowing in his field of Abel-mehola (“the meadow dance”) Elijah drew near and threw over the plowman his prophetic sheep-skin mantle, and passed on in silence, leaving Elisha himself to interpret the graphic symbol. Elisha instantly comprehended the purpose, and, running after Elijah, he begged to be allowed to kiss his father and mother, after which he promised to follow the senior prophet.

It is noteworthy that at this time Elisha must have been quite a young man—an inference which may be fairly drawn from the fact that sixty years after this event he was still in the exercise of his prophetic office.

It is a noticeable circumstance, which repeats itself even in our own day, that Elisha was in many respects the exact counterpart of Elijah.

By choosing all kinds of character and capacity to represent the divine kingdom, God shows His infinite wisdom in a way which even the dullest understanding can hardly fail to appreciate. He is not dependent upon one particular aspect of genius, or one particular aspect of eloquence; but He calls whom He will to the prophetic office and the ministerial function, and it should be our part to accept His vocations, however much we may be surprised at the course which they take and at the social consequences which they involve.

At the time in which Elijah and Elisha exercised their functions religion and morals had gone down to the lowest possible point in Israel. The very schools of the prophets had themselves felt the corrupting influence of the times. Ahab was able to gather four hundred false prophets at a time, the remarkable circumstance being that they were not prophets of Baal, but false prophets of the Lord himself.

It can hardly be a matter of surprise, therefore, that a man of burning spirit, arising under such circumstances, should begin his ministry with displays of power which can hardly escape the charge of being stern or even violent.

The second chapter of the second Book of Kings introduces us to the beginning of Elisha’s ministry. He had just seen Elijah ascend, and he felt that he was left alone to carry on the great work which had been so wondrously conducted by a master hand.

In the twelfth verse we see how Elisha estimated the character and service of Elijah. He exclaims: “My father! My father!” He thus indicates the most serious loss which can befall human life. This is not altogether a cry of reverence, but it is also a cry of orphanhood. In their brief intercourse, one with the other, Elijah had naturally taken the paternal place, and Elisha, as a very young man, had felt the comforting influence exercised upon him by the mighty prophet.

This is a cry of young sensibility. The almost child feels himself to be quite alone. He who an hour ago supposed that, after all, he might be able to continue the work of Elijah now felt how terrible was the void that was created by Elijah’s absence.

We do not know the bulk and value of some ministries until they are removed from us. We become quite familiar with them, and attach no particular significance to their exercise; we come to think we have some right in them, and that by some means or other they will be present with us always. When, however, the great removal does take place and we look around for the familiar face and expect to be touched by the familiar hand, but find our expectations disappointed, the natural cry is: “My father! My father!”

These words, too, may fairly be construed as suggesting an aspect of Elijah’s character which is generally overlooked. Probably it has hardly occurred to us to regard Elijah as a man of special tenderness. We think of him as a great comet, or as a flash of lightning, or as a mighty whirlwind, or under any figure that suggests grandeur, majesty and force; but we have never associated with Elijah the notion of graciousness, tenderness, love and that easy familiarity which constitutes the very soul of friendship.

Now, however, by the ascription of his name we do seem to know somewhat of the genial intercourse which passed between father and son—the senior prophet and the young apostle of God; and it is delightful to infer that such intercourse had been conducted on the one side paternally and on the other side filially.

We do not know altogether what men are when we only see them in public life. The great parliamentary orator may be the simplest of all men when he is in the domestic circle. The great commander of armies, whose courage never quails, may have the heart of a woman when he stands in the presence of suffering childhood. It is important for all who attempt to delineate the characters of public men to remember that they see only one aspect of those characters, and are not qualified to pronounce upon the whole man.

The next expression of Elisha is: “The chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof.”

This is an apparently incoherent exclamation. When properly understood, however, it conveys a further tribute to the ministry which was exercised by the ascending prophet. The real meaning is: “My father—so much better than all chariots and horses; in thy absence the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof are useless. They were used by thee, and under thy conduct could be turned to good account; but, now that thou art gone, they do but mock our loneliness and make us feel still more bitterly our helpless condition.”

A greater question than “Where is Elijah?” now occurred to the desolate young man. Instantly he seizes the reality of the occasion, and by exclaiming “Where is the Lord God of Elijah?” he shows that he is not called to a merely official position, but that he is elected to represent the divine majesty upon Earth.

The young man thus begins well. There is nothing frivolous in his inquiry or in his interpretation of events. The very depth of his feeling gives us an index to the capacity of his mind. Rely upon it, that he who can feel as Elisha did must have a mind equal in its proportions to the fine emotions which enlarge and ennoble his heart. Had the young man deported himself in a way which suggested self-sufficiency, his prophetic office would have been destroyed well-nigh before it was created.

It is when we stand back in humility and in almost despair, and cry out in our desolateness “Where is the Lord God of Elijah?” that we begin our work in the right spirit, and only then.

In this whole ministry of righteousness and redemption there is no place for self-sufficiency. Apostle Paul said: “Our sufficiency is of God.” The great inquiry “Who is sufficient for these things?” keeps down human ambition and vanity, and prepares the heart for the utterance of prevailing prayer. The question which was thus propounded by Elisha is full of suggestion to ourselves. When we come to read the Bible we should not inquire so much where inspiration is, but where is wisdom which can be applied to our own circumstances and be made unto us as the very staff of life.

We need not exclaim, in considering the Christian ministry of our own day: “Where are the miracles of the Lord Jesus Christ and His apostles?” Our inquiry should be: “Where are the healed men, the comforted hearts, the forgiven souls, the rejoicing spirits?”

Who care to inquire into the mechanism of the organ when he can hear its music and be bowed down by its most solemn appeals?

“And when the sons of the prophets which were to view at Jericho saw him, they said: ‘The spirit of Elijah doth rest on Elisha.’ And they came to meet him, and bowed themselves to the ground before him.”

There was no mistaking that spirit. Who can mistake the presence and influence of fire? Better that our spirit should be discovered than that our credentials should be examined.

Of what avail is it that a man can produce a whole portfolio of testimonials, if nobody has discovered in him the presence and effect of the divine Spirit?

This tribute is also to the credit of the sons of the prophets, for their judgment was vital, and was not accidental. There are men who will only regard providence as operating in one way, or as operating in one form. These sons of the prophets did not belong to such an inferior class of judges.

It is remarkable, too, that the organic unity of the prophetic office is hereby recognized. The sons of the prophets do not treat Elisha as a novelty, a new sensation, or as representing a new point of departure. They unite the old with the new; though the man has changed, the spirit remains the same.

This is what must be always regarded in reading Christian history and in watching the course of the Christian ministry. Old ministers depart, but when new men come they come with the old spirit and with the old truth, or if they come with any other spirit or any other doctrine, they should, in the degree of the change, be suspected of being other than genuine successors of the prophets.

Elisha begins his ministry by doing good—that is to say, by healing the water that was diseased. This appeal to the prophet to do something for the city of Jericho was itself a tribute to the genuineness of the prophetic office as exercised by him. It is always beautiful to notice how great power is associated with the doing of good. What is it to be a prophet of any age, if the age is not practically benefited by the exercise of the office? The age does not want ornamental prophets, nominal prophets, official prophets. The age is crying out for men who can give it bread, who can heal its water, who can mitigate its sorrows, who can destroy its oppressions.

By this sign must all prophets live or die. It would have been a poor thing on the part of Elisha to have shown the mantle of his predecessor if he could not also show his power. We are only in the apostolic succession as we are in the apostolic spirit.

We may have all the relics which the apostles left behind—the cloak that was left at Troas, the parchment, the staff and the vessels out of which they ate and drank—we may even have the scrolls which they used in reading the Holy Scriptures; but all these things will constitute only a burden if we have not, along with all other possessions, the mighty and eternal Spirit of the living God, without whose energy even the apostles themselves were but common men.

Elisha, having cured the water, went up from the depressed plain of Jericho to the top of the highland of Jordan, to the height of three thousand feet, that he might come unto Beth-el—which, alas, became the chief stronghold of the calf worship. The popular sentiment was debased to the lowest possible point; even the little children were tainted with the awful disease of contempt for the greatest names and the greatest thoughts in all Israel.

“And he went up from thence to Beth-el; and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him: ‘Go up, thou bald head! Go up, thou bald head!’ And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them. And he went from thence to Mount Carmel, and from thence he returned to Samaria.”

This miracle has occasioned no little difficulty to those who read it only in the letter. It is not a narrow incident which can be regarded as a mere anecdote and treated, as it were, within the limits of its own four corners. We must understand the spirit of the age in which the incident occurred. We must realize that the whole air was full of idolatry and blasphemy. We must also remember that the very Church of Israel itself was deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, with hardly one spot of health on all the altar from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot. We must keep steadily before our minds the fact that the places which are mentioned in this incident had become as Sodom and Gomorrah—not, perhaps, in the physical and carnal sense, but in the still worse sense of spiritual alienation and spiritual contempt for every thing associated with the name of the living God.

When Elisha, therefore, wrought this deed of violence—this miracle of destruction—his action must be regarded typically and as strictly in keeping with the necessities of the occasion. Only this kind of miracle could have been understood by the people among whom it was worked and who had an opportunity of feeling its effects, either directly or incidentally. How often it happens that the first miracle is one which is marked peculiarly by a destructive energy!

This would seem to be the miracle which our own first zealous impulses would work, had they the power to express themselves in such a form. When the soul is alive with the purity of God, when the heart glows and burns with love, when the whole being is in vital sympathy with the purposes of the cross of Christ, the first and all but uncontrollable impulse is to destroy evil—not to reason with it, or make truce with it, or give it further treatment of any kind, but instantly and violently to crush it out of existence.

This impulse will be trained unto other uses in the School of Christ.

We see, in the opening of the sixth chapter of the second Book of Kings, some of the simple and happy relations which existed between the elder and the younger prophets.

Is it not possible to revive some of these relations? Look at the case:

“And the sons of the prophets said unto Elisha: ‘Behold, now, the place where we dwell with thee is too strait for us.’”

Put into modern language, the statement amounts to this: “Our college is getting too small, and we want more room. Let us, therefore, consider this practical question, and see what can be done.”

Elisha did not live with the young men. That, perhaps, was rather a happy than an unhappy circumstance—though a very beautiful picture could be drawn concerning domestic collegiate life. A college or a school with the teachers and the students all living together must, one would surely say, be a little Heaven on Earth. What can be, ideally, more perfect than the old prophet surrounded by all the younger prophets, eating and living together, having a common room, a common hostelry—a common home? What can be, imaginatively, more taking, pathetic and satisfactory?

Without pronouncing a judgment upon that inquiry, it is enough to be so far just to the text to say that Elisha did not adopt that system of collegiate life. He went around from place to place; he visited the schools of the prophets in the various localities, and when he came to this place the young men said: “We have not room enough; we must consider our circumstances, and endeavor to enlarge our accommodation.”

What did they propose?

It is well now and again to hear what young men have to suggest. It is useful to listen to young politicians in national crises, that we may hear how they would treat the patient. It is most desirable that young voices should mingle with old voices in the common council.

Now it is the turn of the young men to speak. What will they propose to Elisha?

The answer is given in the second verse: “Let us go, we pray thee, unto Jordan, and take thence every man a beam, and let us make a place there where we may dwell.”

The city was not situated exactly upon the Jordan, but upon a stream a little way from it, which flowed into that great river; and now the young men proposed to get a little nearer to the main stream, for the district of it was called The Valley of Palms.

Palestine was notably destitute of trees, but in this particular locality timber was to be got. So the young men made the proposition to Elisha. What does the proposition amount to? It amounts to something which in this day might horrify a good many of the successors of Elisha.

The young men said: “Let us go and cut down our timber, and enlarge our college with our own hands.” Did they propose that the question should be “reported upon”—that it should be brought first under the attention of the general committee, then be referred to a sub-committee being bound to make a report to the general committee, and the general committee being unable to attend, or to constitute a quorum, and so go on to forget the whole business? The young men said:

“We want room; let us make it. We want a larger college; let us build it.”

Why not adopt the same principle today? There is nothing so easy as to send around an appeal for a contribution and never get any reply to it.

We, wanting to be missionaries, should go by the next boat; wanting to preach the Gospel to the heathen, we should ask: “When does the ship start?” Being unable to pay the fare, we should work our passage. If people should ask us what we are doing, and whether we have lost our senses, we should say: “Yes; if we be beside ourselves, it is unto God.”

Then an impression might be made upon those who look on. They would say: “Surely, these men are in earnest; be they right or be they wrong, be they fanatical or sober-minded, their earnestness burns in them like a fire, and such men can neither be put back nor be kept down.”

However, without wishing to modernize the details of this incident, which, owing to our civilization, would be impossible, it is enough to remember that, in the early days of collegiate and school life, the scholars were prepared to do something toward helping themselves. They did not send for builders from Jerusalem, or even from the city of Jericho; they undertook the work at their own impulse and at their own charges.

There is a line of beauty even in the proposition of the young men. They desired Elisha’s permission. They said, in effect: “Father, may we go?” They were enthusiastic, but they were under discipline; they had fire enough, but they responded to the touch of the master. And one said to Elisha: “Be content, I pray thee, and go with thy servants.” They were stronger when the elder man was with them.

Sometimes the eye is the best master. It often happens that the man who is standing in the harvest field, resting upon his rake, a picture of dignity and ease, is doing more than if he were sweltering himself by cutting down corn with his own sickle. His eye is doing the work, and his presence is exerting an immeasurable and happy influence upon the whole field.

Elisha was not asked to go and fell the timber, but to be with the young men while they did the hard work; and, becoming young again himself, as old men do become young when associated with young life, he replied:

“I will go. The work is a common work. It belongs to me as well as to you; it belongs to all Israel, in so far as all Israel is true to the living God. Come, let us go in one band; union is strength.”

Now, they went—the old and the young together. Why would they not go alone? Perhaps they were all reminded of what happened when once they did go alone. Elisha ordered that food should be prepared, and when the seething pot was on, one of the young men went out and gathered something and threw it into the pot, and nearly poisoned the whole college. Small wonder if one of them, remembering this, said:

“No more going out alone, if you please. We once took the case into our own hands, and I remember how many of us fell sick, and how we cried to Elisha: ‘Master, there is death in the pot!’ And he kindly took up a handful of meal, sprinkled it into the vessel and restored its healthfulness. The pot was relieved of all the disease which it had contained, and the meal most happily proceeded.”

We should remember our blunders, and learn from them. We are always safer in the company of the old and wise than when we are in our own society. Happy is the man who takes counsel with his elder neighbors, and who can sometimes renounce himself and say unto wise men: “Such and such are my circumstances; now, what would you advise me to do?”

Elisha and the young men have now gone down to the Jordan. Elisha felled no tree but he did his own particular kind of work.

The Syrian king could not rest. In his heart he hated or feared the king and the hosts of Israel. There was chronic war between Israel and Syria. The king of Syria said: “I will fix my camp in such and such a place.” Of this the sacred record says: “And the man of God sent unto the king of Israel, saying: ‘Beware that thou pass not such a place, for thither the Syrians are come down.’”

There is a ministry of warning. Men may not go themselves to battle, and yet they may be controlling the fortunes of war. We need statesmen, spiritual interpreters, religious teachers, men of thought and men of prayer; and they may be doing more practical work than is being done by those who are engaged in the physical work of leading armies and commanding military hosts.

This is what Elisha did.

He felled no tree; he wielded no sword. Yet, alike in the building of the college and in the direction of the war, his was the supreme mind. The prophet saved the king. This must always be the case.

The great man of the nation is the man who can think most profoundly and most comprehensively. The architect is a greater man than the builder. The prophet is a greater man than the king. He reads more; he sees farther; he grasps a larger field. He is master of metaphysical principles, which alone endure. They wear the clothes of the present time; they adopt the form of the passing generation, but they go on from age to age—themselves always the same, their adaptations being addressed to the immediate and pressing necessities of the people.

We have been told that “Justice is not an intermittent apparition.” That is perfectly true in one sense; but justice is often a deferred creditor, and sometimes that may be done tomorrow which can not be justly done today. The prophet sees all this. He looks ahead; he has a larger horizon than is accessible to the vision of other men.

So let it stand, an eternal lesson, that the greatest men in any nation are the men who can think most, pray best, feel most deeply and penetrate the metaphysics and the inmost reality of politics and of civilization.

Spiritual power is not only useful in one direction; it is alarming in another. When the king of Syria felt himself baffled, all his plans thrown into uncontrollable bewilderment, his heart was sorely troubled. It is the Immeasurable that frightens men. It is the Unknown Quantity that troubles all their calculations and causes them to feel that after they have completed their arithmetic their conclusion is a lie.

What was in the air? Whose was this ghostly presence that was upsetting Ben-hadad’s well laid schemes? What was it, or who, that always went before him, and that made his proposals abortive and turned all his policies into mocking nothings?

Had there been any man who was visible and measurable, that man could have been dealt with. There is always a quantity equal to any quantity that is known. What is wanting in one way can be made up in another—as, for example, what is wanting in number may be made up in quality. As one great leader said in ancient history, when his soldiers were saying they were too few for the battle: “How many do you count me for?” That touched the fire of the army, and inspired the soldiers with confidence.

Now, the matter was revealed to the king, and he took means to remove the spectral influence. He made this arrangement: “Go and spy where he is, that I may send and fetch him.” When he knew that Elisha was in Dothan the king sent “thither horses and chariots and a great host.”

What unconscious tributes bad men pay to good influences! Men do not know wholly what they are doing. Why, this was but a poor prophet, wearing a hairy robe that had descended to him; he was no king; he had no sword or horse; he was but a man of prayer. How did Ben-hadad propose to capture him?

The king sent “horses and chariots and a great host” to take a man whose sword was the word of God, whose helmet was the defense of the Most High, whose breastplate was Righteousness!

Here are three arms of the Syrian service—footmen, horsemen and chariots; and remember that these were all employed to bring one poor man to the king’s presence. Well might Elisha have said, before Antigonus uttered it: “How many do you count me for?” Elisha might have taunted the king of Syria, saying: “Why all this ado? Would not one soldier have been enough to take one prophet? He might have come on foot; a horse was not necessary, and certainly not a sword. One soldier might surely have arrested me.”

But bad men unconsciously pay tribute to good men. They say, in effect: “Elisha is only one, but a stubborn one; only one tree, but his roots seem to have spread themselves through the Earth, and to have taken hold of the entire scheme of things; he is only one, yet, what is strange, he is many in one.”

And this, indeed, was the interpretation given by Elisha, for he said: “They that be with us are more than they that be with them.”

Who can tell how many angels are round about the praying man? How is it that when the arresting hand is laid upon some men it becomes softened, the muscles relax and have no more pith in them, and the men come back to say: “Never man spake like this man; arrest him we can not”? This is a tribute paid to the Christian religion. Men have passed parliamentary statutes against it, but the religion of the cross has outlived the statutes—has seen them grow into yellow letters, has observed them being canceled or otherwise passing into obsoleteness.

We are now brought to a very striking point in the incident. The servant of Elisha came back, saying: “Alas, my master, how shall we do? I have been up early, and behold, a host compasses the city—both with horses and chariots.”

Then Elisha said: “Lord, open his eyes; let this young man see. At present he can only look upon appearances, which are not realities. The universe is within the universe. The Bible is within the Bible. The man is within the man. This servant of mine sees only the outer circle—the rim or rind of things. Lord, show him the reality; let him see, and then he will be at peace.”

There is a view of sight; there is a view of faith. The worldly man goes by what his bodily eyes notice or discern; the spiritually minded man walks by faith, not by sight.

The telescope does not create the stars; the telescope only reveals them, or enables the eye to see them. If, then, a telescope can do this, shall we deny to that spiritual power within us called Faith the power which we ascribe to a mechanical instrument which our own hands have fashioned?

Look upon a given object—say, you take a piece of glass two inches square; look upon it and ask: “Is there any thing on that glass?” Looking with the naked eye, the sharpest man would say: “That glass is perfectly free from blot, stain, flaw or inscription of any kind whatsoever.”

Now, put that same two-inch square of glass under a microscope, and look through the microscope. What is upon it? The Lord’s Prayer, upon a speck not discernible by the naked eye.

If, then, we ascribe such wonderful powers to a glass which we ourselves have determined as to its size and its relation to other glasses, shall we deny to a certain spiritual faculty the power of seeing that which can not be discriminated by unaided reason?

By all the pressure of analogy, by all the reasoning of inference, we insist that, if such wonderful things can be done mechanically, things at least equally wonderful can be done by forces that are spiritual.

The Sun does not make the landscape; the Sun only shows it. A man may stand upon a high hill on a dull-gray day and say: “I can imagine what this would be when the Sun was shining.” But no man can imagine light. It stands as a sacred mystery in our life that the Sun never comes within the lines of imagination. The Sun light is a continual surprise, even to the eyes that have most reverently and lovingly studied it.

When the Sun looks upon the landscape there are new colors, new distances, new forms; a whole work is wrought upon the landscape which can only be described by the word “wizardry.”

So it is with the Bible, the great work of the living God. Look at it with the natural vision, and you may discover in it particular beauties. You may say: “The poetry is noble; the English is pure; and the moral sentiment of the book is not without a certain elevation.”

But the Bible wants no such reluctant or impoverished compliments. Let the soul be touched by the Spirit that wrote the book; let the eyes be anointed by the living God; and then the Bible is like a landscape shone upon by the noonday’s cloudless Sun.

Elisha took his own way with the Syrian army, and here occurs a point worthy of special note. When the Lord smote the people with blindness, according to the word of Elisha, the latter said unto them: “This is not the way, neither is this the city; follow me, and I will bring you to the man whom ye seek.” But he led them to Samaria.

What! Then did the man of God resort to a false strategy? This is a very serious case, indeed, and has occasioned much difficulty. Nor need we wonder, for in “The Speaker’s Commentary” we find such words as these:

“Untruth has been held by all moralists to be justifiable toward a public enemy. Where we have a right to kill, much more have we a right to deceive by stratagem.”

When words like these occur in a Christian commentary, no wonder that infidelity should seize upon the annotation as a prize, or use it as a weapon. No such comment can we adopt in perusing this portion of sacred Scripture. It can not be justifiable to treat a public enemy by untruth or deception. We have no right to kill, and therefore we have no right to deceive by stratagem. This is not the way to recommend the word of the living God.

The incident must be taken in its totality. The reader must not arrest the progress of the narrative by stopping here or there to ask a question. He must see the incident in its completeness, and, seeing it, he will have reason further to glorify God for the pure morality of the book and the noble spirit of the record.

Elisha might well so far follow his illustrious predecessor as to use the weapon of irony or taunting in dealing with the Lord’s enemies.

Elijah said to the prophets of Baal: “Cry aloud; for he is a god.” As well might we stop there, and say: “By Elijah’s own testimony deity was ascribed to Baal.” We forget the irony of the tone; we forget that Elijah was mocking the debased prophets.

So Elisha might say: “This is not the way, neither is this the city; follow me, and I will bring you to the man whom ye seek.”

There was a taunt in the tone; there was sarcasm in the emphasis. Nor is the verse to be read in its unity. It is to be read as part and parcel of a whole narrative.

Now, what became of all this so-called deception and stratagem?

When the people were come into Samaria, Elisha said: “Lord, open the eyes of these men, that they may see.”

He prayed, first, that their sight might be taken away. That seemed to be cruel. Now he prays that their sight may be given to them again.

“And, behold, they were in the midst of Samaria. And the king of Israel said unto Elisha, when he saw them: ‘My father!’” As if he had become a convert. The son of Ahab and Jezebel said to Elisha: “My father!” A reluctant and hypocritical compliment, for Jehoram could be neither reverent or true.

But, said he, observing the prize that was before him: “Shall I smite them? Shall I smite them?” This was a Hebraism equal to: “Smiting, shall I smite?” So Jehoram said: “Shall I, smiting, smite them?”

Elisha answered: “No.”

Now, let us hear what this man can say who has been judged guilty of untruth and of stratagem.

Elisha said to Jehoram: “Thou shalt not smite them. Wouldst thou smite those whom thou hast taken captive without thy sword and without thy bow?” This is the same as saying: “If you yourself have won the victory, then you can smite; but you did not take these men, and therefore you shall not smite them. What you have taken by your own sword and spear may be your lawful prize in war; but here is a capture with which you have had nothing to do.”

What, then, is to be done? Hear Elisha: “Set bread and water before them, that they may eat and drink and go to their master.”

And so great provision was prepared, “and when they had eaten and drunk, he sent them away, and they went to their master.”

We might even excuse a strategic act in order to secure such a conclusion.

Elisha was supposed to be about a hundred years of age when he died. We have seen that he was a domestic rather than a public prophet. He was unlike his great predecessor and father. The awful Elijah dwelt alone. He came upon society now and then—came down like a flood from the threatening clouds; shot out like a fire, and burned the men whom he approached.

Elisha was exactly the contrary. He worked his miracles in the house. He often called upon people; he was quiet, serene, most sympathetic and tender-hearted. Now and then he could stand bolt upright and send away proud men from his door with a disdain that they could never forget; but in the usual process of his life he was a mother-man in Israel. He went into people’s houses and asked how they were. He consented to increase their oil and their flour, and to bless their family life with prophetic benedictions.

GEHAZI.

The name Gehazi means “valley of vision,” and is appropriate enough if we think of what Gehazi saw as to the nature of wickedness when the prophet opened his eyes.

Let us note what points there are in this case which illustrate human life as we now know it. In this way we shall test the moral accuracy of the story—and that is all we are now principally concerned about.

Gehazi was “the servant of Elisha, the man of God.” Surely, then, he would be a good man? Can a good man have a bad servant? Can the man of prayer, whose life is a continual breathing unto God of supreme desires after holiness, have a man in his company, looking on and watching him, and studying his character, who denies his very altar and blasphemes against his God? Is it possible to live in a Christian house and yet not be a Christian? Can we come so near as that, and yet be at an infinite distance from all that is pure and beautiful and true?

If so, then we must look at appearances more carefully than we have been wont to do, for they may have been deceiving us all the time.

Surely, every good man’s children must be good, for they have had great spiritual advantages. They have, indeed, had some hereditary benefits denied to many others. Their house has been a home, their home has been a church, and surely they must show by their whole spirit and tone of life that they are as their father as to all spiritual aspiration and positive excellence.

Is it not so?

If facts contradict that theory, then we must look at the theory again more carefully, or we must examine the facts more closely, because the whole science of Cause and Effect would seem to be upset by such contradictions. There is a metaphysical question here, as well as a question of fact. A good tree must bring forth good fruit; good men must have good children; good masters must have good servants. Association in life must go for something.

So we would say—emphatically, because we think reasonably.

But facts are against such a fancy.

What is possible in this human life? It is possible that a man may spend his days in building a church, and yet denying God. Does not the very touch of the stones help him to pray? No. He touches them roughly; he lays them mechanically, and he desecrates each of them with an oath.

Is it possible that a man can be a builder of churches and yet be a destroyer of Christian doctrine and teaching generally? Yes.

Let us come closer still, for the question is intensely interesting and may touch many.

It is possible for a man to print the Bible and yet not believe a word of it. On first hearing this shocking statement we revolt from it. We say it is possible for a man to handle type that is meant to represent the greatest revelation ever made to the human mind without feeling that the very handling of the type is itself a kind of religious exercise. Yet men can debauch themselves in the act of printing the Bible; can use profane language while putting the Lord’s Prayer in type; can set up the whole Gospel of John without knowing that they are putting into visible representation the highest metaphysics, the finest spiritual thinking, the most tender religious instruction.

Let us come even closer. A man can preach the Gospel and be a servant of the devil. Who, then, can be saved? It is well to ask the question. It is a burning inquiry; it is a spear-like interrogation. We would put it away from us if we dare.

Now, let this stand as our first lesson in the study of this remarkable incident, that Gehazi was the servant of Elisha, the man of God, and was at the same time the servant of the devil. He was receiving wages from both masters. He was a living contradiction; and in being such he was most broadly human. He was not a monster; he was not a natural curiosity; he is not to be accounted for by quietly saying that he was an eccentric person. He represents the human heart, and by so much he brings against ourselves an infinite impeachment.

It is in vain that we shake our skirts as if throwing off this man and all association with him and responsibility for him; this can not be done. He anticipated ourselves; we repeat his wickedness. The iniquity is not in the accident, in the mere circumstances, or in the particular form; the iniquity is in the heart—yea, in the very heart itself. Marvel not that Christ said: “Ye must be born again.”

Gehazi did not understand the spirit of his master. He did not know what his master was doing. How is it that men can be so far separated from one another? How is it that a man can not be understood in his own house, but be thought fanciful, fanatical, eccentric and phenomenally peculiar? How is it that a man may be living among men, and yet not be of them; may be in the world and yet above the world; may be speaking the very language of the time, and yet charging it with the meaning of eternity? See here the differences that still exist, and must ever exist, as between one man and another:

Elisha—living the great spiritual life, the grand prayer-life and faith-life.

Gehazi—grubbing in the Earth and seeking his contentment in the dust.

These contrasts exist through all time, and are full of instruction. Blessed is he who observes the wise man, and copies him; who looks upon the fool, and turns away from him, if not with hatred yet with a desire not to know his spirit.

Gehazi had a method in his reasoning. Said he, in effect:

“To spare a stranger, a man who may never be seen again; to spare a beneficiary, a man who has taken away benefits in the right hand and in the left; to spare a wealthy visitor, a man who could have given much without feeling he had given any thing; to spare a willing giver, a man who actually offered to give something and who was surprised, if not offended, because his gift was declined! There is no reason in my master’s policy.”

It never occurred to Gehazi that a man could have bread to eat that the world knew not of. It never occurs to some men that others can live by faith, and can work miracles of faith by the grace of God.

Are there not minds that never had a noble thought? It is almost impossible to conceive of the existence of such minds, but there they are. They never went beyond their own limited location; they never knew what suffering was on the other side of the wall of their own dwelling place. They were never eyes to the blind, or ears to the deaf, or feet to the lame; they never surprised themselves by some noble thought of generosity. How, then, can they understand the prophets of the times?

Yet how noble a thing it is to have among us men who love the upper life, and who look upon the whole world from the very sanctuary of God, and who say:

“A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth, but a man’s life consists of his faith, love and charity.”

We can not tell how much the prophets are doing to refine their age, to give a new view to all human duty, to inspire those who otherwise would fail for the lack of courage.

We can not tell where the answers to prayer fall, or how those answers are given, but we feel that there is at work in society a mystic influence, a strange, ghostly, spectral action, which keeps things together, and now and again puts Sabbath day right in the midst of the vulgar time.

There are facts of a high and special kind, as well as what we commonly call facts, which are often but appearances and dramatic illusions. What about the secret ministry, the unnamable spiritual action, the holy, elevating and restraining influence? What is that hand which will write upon palace walls words of judgment and keep the world from plunging into darkness infinite?

Surely, God is in this place, and I knew it not. This—wherever it be, garden or wilderness—is none other than the house of God and the gate of Heaven.

Gehazi prostituted an inventive and energetic mind. He had his plan: “My master hath sent me, saying: ‘Behold, even now there be come to me from Mount Ephraim two young men of the sons of the prophets. Give them, I pray thee, a talent of silver and two changes of garments.”

The case was admirably stated. It was stated, too, with just that urgency which increases the likelihood of that which is declared.

Elisha spent his time among the sons of the prophets. They all looked to him as a father, as he had once looked to Elijah. He was the young man’s friend—the young minister’s asylum. They all knew the gracious, gentle, Christ-like Elisha—the ante-type of the Messiah; and what was more likely than that two of them, in the course of their journeying, should have called on Elisha unexpectedly?

It was a free and gracious life that the old ministers lived. They seemed to have rights in one another. If any one of them had a loaf, that loaf belonged to the whole fraternity. If one of them, better off than another, had a house or part of a house, any of the sons of the prophets passing by could go and lodge there.

It was a gracious masonry—a true brotherhood.

Gehazi was no model man in a moral sense. His invention was a lie; his cleverness was but an aspect of depravity; his very genius but made him memorable for wickedness.

But Gehazi was successful. He took the two talents of silver in the two bags, with the two changes of garments. He brought them to the tower, and bestowed them in the house. Then he sat down—a successful man! Now all is well; lust is satisfied, wealth is laid up. Now the fitness of things has been consulted, and harmony has been established between debtor and creditor, and Justice nods because Justice has been appeased.

Were the test to end with the twenty-fourth verse of the fifth chapter of the second Book of Kings, we should describe Gehazi as a man who had set an example to all coming after him who wished to turn life into a success.

Who had been wronged?

Naaman pursues his journey all the more happy for thinking he has done something in return for the great benefit which has been conferred on him. He is certainly more pleased than otherwise. The man of God has at last been turned, he thinks, into directions indicated by common sense.

All this has come about in the way of business; for nothing that is not customary has been done.

Gehazi is satisfied, and Elisha knows nothing about it. The servant should have something, even if the master would take nothing. It is the trick of our own day. The servant is always at the door with his rheumatic hand, ready to take any thing that may be put into it. We leave nothing with the master; it would be an insult to him.

So far the case looks simple, natural and complete; and we have said Elisha knows nothing about it.

Why will men trifle with prophets?

Why will men play with fire?

When will men know that what is done in secret will be published on the house tops?

When will men know that there can be nothing confidential that is wicked?

Observe Gehazi going in to his master as usual, and look at his face; not a sign upon it of any thing having been done that is wrong. Look at his hands—large, white, innocent-looking hands that never doubled their fingers on things that did not belong to them.

Look at Elisha. Fixing his eyes calmly upon Gehazi, he asks:

“Whence comest thou, Gehazi?”

“Thy servant went no whither.”

Gehazi meant it to be understood that he had been on the premises all the time; always within call; the lifting up of a finger would have brought him.

Then came the speech of judgment, delivered in a low tone, but every word was heard—the beginning of the word and the end of the word—and the last word was like a sting of righteousness.

“Went not mine heart with thee?”

Oh, that heart! The good man knows when wickedness has been done. Christ knows when He enters into the congregation whether there is a man in it with a withered hand.

“Went not mine heart with thee?” Was I not present at the interview? Did I not hear every syllable that was said on the one side and on the other? Did I not look at thee when thou didst tell the black, flat and daring lie?

Then came the infliction of the judgment:

“The leprosy, therefore, of Naaman shall cleave unto thee, and unto thy seed for ever.”

Thou, Gehazi, hast touched the silver, not knowing that it was contagious and held the leprosy; thou didst bring in the two changes of garments, not knowing that the germs of the disease were folded up with the cloth. Put on the coat; it will scorch thee.

“He went out from his presence a leper as white as snow.”

A splendid conception is this silent departure. Not a word was said, not a protest uttered. The judgment was felt to be just. “Cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness.” “These shall go away into everlasting punishment.”

Oh, the hush—the solemn silence! The judgment seemed to begin with the sound of trumpets and the rending of things that apparently could not be shaken; at the end there is simply a going away, a silent motion, a conviction that the sentence is right.

See Gehazi as he goes out of Elisha’s presence, and regard him as a specimen of those who, having been judged, on the last day will depart.

Men should consider the price which they really pay for their success.

The grateful Syrian would gladly have pressed upon Elisha gifts of high value, but the holy man resolutely refused to take any thing, lest the glory redounding unto God from this great act should in any degree be obscured. But his servant, Gehazi, was less scrupulous, and hastened with a lie in his mouth to ask, in his master’s name, for a portion of that which Elisha had refused.

The illustrious Syrian no sooner saw the man running after his chariot than he alighted to meet him, and being glad to relieve himself in some degree under the sense of overwhelming obligation, he sent him back with more than he ventured to ask.

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