Baseless Pride.

Baseless Pride.

Nothing more is known of Naaman.

We afterward find Gehazi recounting to King Joram the great deeds of Elisha, and in the providence of God it so happened that when he was relating the restoration to life of the Shunnammite’s son, the very woman with her son appeared before the king to claim her house and lands, which had been usurped while she had been absent abroad during the recent famine. Struck by the coincidence, the king immediately granted her application.

As lepers were compelled to live apart outside the towns, and were not allowed to come too near to uninfected persons, some difficulty has arisen with respect to Gehazi’s interview with the king. Several answers occur. The interview may have taken place outside the town, in a garden or garden house, and the king may have kept Gehazi at a distance, with the usual precautions which custom dictated. Some even suppose that the incident is misplaced, and actually occurred before Gehazi was smitten with leprosy. Others hasten to the opposite conclusion, and allege the probability that the leper had then repented of his crime, and had been restored to health by his master.

HEZEKIAH.

So far in our Bible studies we have had many weary wanderings among bad men. The fear was that, to some extent, familiarity with them might blunt our own moral sensibility.

Man after man has passed before us out of whose very countenance the image of God had faded. How pleasant it is, and how spiritually exhilarating, to come upon a case in which we read of a different pattern of man! Of Hezekiah it is recorded in the eighteenth chapter of the second Book of Kings:

“And he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, according to all that David, his father, did.”

After a long journey underground we seem to have come suddenly upon a sweet garden, and the sight of it is as Heaven. The charm is always in the contrast. If things are not quite so good as we supposed them to be, they are all the better by reason of circumstances through which we have passed, which have made us ill at ease and have impoverished or disheartened us; then very little of the other kind goes a long way.

A man comes up out of the underground railway and says, when he emerges into the light:

“How fresh the air is here! What a healthy locality! How well to live in this neighborhood!”

Why does he speak so kindly of his surroundings? Not because of those surroundings intrinsically, but because of the contrast which they present to the circumstances through which he has just passed.

Hezekiah was no perfect man.

We shall see how noble he was, and how rich in many high qualities, yet how now and again we see the crutch of the cripple under the purple of the king.

It is well for us that he was occasionally and temporarily weak, or he would have been like a star which we can not touch, and at which we can not light our own torch.

Even Hezekiah was a man like ourselves in many particulars, and therefore what was good and sound in him is all the more attractive and is all the more possible to us.

Who can mistake an honest man?

If all men were upright, where would be the peculiarity of any individual man’s integrity? But, given a corrupt state of society, when the honest man appears we say: “The wind has changed. It blows balmily and healthfully. It comes from a fine origin, and brings with it many a blessing.”

Who can mistake the atmosphere of the sea? How it blows away all the city dullness! How it quickens the blood! How it throws off increasing years, and makes the voyager feel almost young again!

It is so with honesty, nobleness, charity and goodness of character when the surrounding air is charged with some kind of poison or pestilence.

So it is that we come upon Hezekiah.

Perhaps it is well for him that we approach his case after such an experience. He thus gets advantages that otherwise might not have been accorded to him. He looks the higher for the dwarfs that are round about him, the whiter because of the black population amid which he stands—at once a contrast and a rebuke.

But from Hezekiah’s point of view the case was different. Behind him were traditions of the most corrupt sort. He was as a speckled bird in the line of his own family. It is hard to be good amid so much that is really bad. All attempts at goodness are accounted examples of affectation, conceit, vanity and pharisaism; and under such circumstances sometimes a man’s foes may be the people of his own household. They wish he was more pliable, less sabbatarian, less devoted to his Bible, less constant in his attendance at church. He might go once a day, and give himself one end of the rope not tethered to the altar; but he will not.

Has that man an easy time of it?

No hard word may be spoken to him—certainly no bitter word—and yet all the while he may be made to feel that perhaps, after all, he may be affecting somewhat of piety and purity, and that those who are looking on may be better critics of him than he is of himself.

At all events, there come to him periods of trial, and sometimes he says within himself:

“Shall I today be as constant as I have been, or may I not break away now? Have I not built up a character, and may I not retire upon my moral competence, and live henceforth the life of a latitudinarian? After a long spell of many years, surely I might intermit just a little.”

Who shall say that the temptation is not subtle and strong? Some men have to force their way to church through innumerable and unnamable difficulties. This ought to be reckoned. Some credit must be due to men who are thus constant to their sense of public duty and religious obligation. Men are not always at church with the entire consent of those who are round about them.

What, then, must be done?

One of two things. Either yield to the temptation or resist it. You can not trifle with it. You can not compromise, and then recur to firmness, and again connive, and again balance, consider and hesitate. Virtue is not an intermittent grace. We must stand, or we must fall.

Hezekiah had a wicked father. How will that wickedness come out in the son? Not, perhaps, as wickedness, but as infirmity, weakness, and want of constancy in some directions, though there may be no want of firmness in others.

Can a man wholly escape the bad blood inherited of his father?

We must not forget that Hezekiah’s mother’s name was Abi, the daughter of Zachariah. How she came to marry a wicked husband must remain a mystery. But the mother will come up in the son.

She was the daughter of Zachariah, and Zachariah was a prophet, or seer—a man with double sight—one of those strange men who can see beyond the merely visible and palpable, and can read things that lie behind.

Zachariah came up again in his daughter, and the mother came up again in the son, and so there was a mysterious play of inheritance, transfer, transition, reappearance, somewhat of resurrection—a great tragic mystery of transformation and representation.

We speak about a man as if he were self-contained—just standing upon so much ground, without relation behind or before, on the right hand or on the left. But no man is thus insularly placed; no man is an absolute solitary.

Every man has in him the blood of the past and the life of the future.

Can a son of a good mother be altogether bad? Most surely not. You must have mistaken the case if you thought so. Your very thinking so may constitute an element of hopefulness in your case. Take comfort from that suggestion.

So long as you can think of yourself seriously and of the past and of your advantages, and can compare what you are with what you might have been, there is hope of you.

But can there be in all history such an irony as this, that a man should have had a praying mother and himself be a prayerless man?

No! It can not be. Somewhere—at some time and in some way—the better nature will assert itself, and out of a good seed surely there will come a good harvest.

But the lesson does not lie upon one side only. Here is encouragement to the praying fathers and to praying mothers.

Zachariah, read on; read between the lines of things; interpret events symbolically; read the apocalyptic sense of what is happening—and out of all this mental elevation and spiritual conduct there will come results in your daughter or your son.

Abi, pray on. Be just to your father’s memory, and say: “He was a holy man. I must prove it by being a holy woman. He can not live upon a written character; he must live in my life. I will prove that such a child must have had a good father.”

So the vital lessons fall—on the right hand, on the left, and around about us. Shame be to us if, amid this shower of monition and encouragement and stimulus, we be deaf and dumb and blind, unfeeling, unresponsive.

Hezekiah will now go to work and prove himself to be an energetic reformer.

“He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made; for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it; and he called it Nehustan.”

He must have been a strong man. He had no colleague, no ally; no one to say to him: “Be brave, be true.” He went straight against the hardest wall that ever was built by the stubbornness and perversity of man.

It is not easy to begin life by a destructive process of reformation. Who would not rather plant a tree than throw down a wall? Who would not rather plant flowers and enjoy their beauty and fragrance than give himself the severe toil and the incessant trouble of destroying corrupt and evil institutions?

Whoever attempts this kind of destructive work, or even a constructive work which involves preliminary destructiveness, will have a hard time of it. Criticism will be very sharp, and selfishness will be developed in an extraordinary degree.

If a man be more than politician—if he be a real born statesman, looking at whole empires at once and not at mere parishes, and if in his thought and purpose he should base his whole policy upon fundamental right—he will not have an easy life of it, even in a Christian country. In proportion as he bases his whole policy on righteousness, temperance and judgment to come, he will be pelted with hard names and struck at with unfriendly hands.

This holds good in all departments of life, in all great reformations, in all assaults made upon ignorance, selfishness, tyranny and wrong of every name.

The children of Israel always seemed to live a foolish life. They were the veriest children—so, at least, we would say but for fear of branding sweet children with an evil stigma.

They were infantile, weak, treacherous to themselves, uncertain at every point—and so, having kept the brazen serpent, they burned incense to it. They liked a visible God. When the calf appealed to their religious feelings they danced around it as if at last they had found a deity.

But who can worship a spirit—invisible, impalpable, far away, near at hand, without a name, without a shape which we can verify and say: “It comes to thus much, and this is the weight and this is the value of it?”

It requires a mind of some mental strength to stand up, take hold of the brazen serpent and call it “Nehushtan”—a contemptuous term, meaning a piece of brass; dead brass, useless and worthless brass, a relic but not a God.

Let us give credit to the men who have been bold—religiously intrepid—in the midst of circumstances of a most discouraging and overbearing kind. They are the men to whom we owe our present privileges. We have the Bible in our mother tongue because they were valiant. Not a church would have been built today in which men could assemble with a sense of freedom—sweet, joyous liberty—but for the Hezekiahs and others who went forth and, at great cost and great peril, destroyed things evil and black, by the power of God’s almightiness—overthrew them, and set up a better kingdom.

What was the root of Hezekiah’s character? At present we have seen phenomena of a gracious kind; we like what we have seen of this man.

“He trusted in the Lord God of Israel; so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah nor any that were before him. For he clave to the Lord, and departed not from following Him, but kept His commandments, which the Lord commanded Moses.”

At length a man arose who said: “I will do God’s will, God helping me. I will not only read the commandments, but I will incarnate them. I will not only speak religious words, but live a religious life.”

Tender and yet emphatic are the words: “He trusted,” “he clave,” “he kept.”

He “trusted”—that is to say, he had no other trust. His religion was not a convenience, one thing among many things, an occasional exercise in piety; but it was a perpetual confidence, the one trust, the all-centralizing and all-ruling fact.

Then he “clave”—he kept close to. He would not allow any thing to come between his hand and the God he seized. The hand could do nothing except cleave to God and what was possible through that cleaving; and much is possible of a helpful and beneficent kind.

He “kept the commandments”—counted them one by one; examined himself in them; took himself daily to task about the whole ten. We live an off-hand life.

Religion is now as easy as a wave of the hand, a salutation across a thoroughfare; it is something that can be taken up, laid down, forgotten and resumed.

What wonder if the Rab-shakehs of the age come and taunt us, mock our piety and blow back our prayers before they get to the skies?

We want more trust, more cleaving piety, more keeping of the commandments, living in them and having no other life that is not consonant with them.

Now came, as we have often seen, the inevitable temptation. We pass instantly to the visit of Rab-shakeh. This Rab-shakeh was an eloquent man. He had the gift of mockery; he could gibe well. He was not without a certain logical qualification.

He made a long and offensive speech to the people under Hezekiah’s rule, and he thought he had them at both ends of the argument.

Having mocked their piety, laughed it down, challenged it, spat upon it, he said:

“Perhaps you will say: ‘We trust in the Lord, our God,’ but you forget that this very man, Hezekiah, has thrown down His altars, has taken away His groves, has rooted up the house of your God by the foundations.”

Rab-shakeh did not understand the destructive reformation wrought out by Hezekiah. He heard of the groves being cut down and the holy places being removed, and he said:

“This is so much to our advantage. The king of Assyria shall hear of this, and we shall make good commerce of it.”

Rab-shakeh did not distinguish between idolatry and piety—between a reform essential to health and a mere accident in history. That which was good in Hezekiah seemed to be wickedness to Rab-shakeh.

Rab-shakeh assaulted the people, trampled on them, leaped over their bodies, mocked their refuges and their trust, and thrust his fist into the face of Egypt and said:

“Come away from Hezekiah. Trust him not; he is blind; he is incapable. Leave him, and I will tell you what the king of Assyria will do for you.”

And he held this out to them:

“I will come and take you away to a land like your own land—a land of corn and wine, a land of bread and vineyards, a land of olive oil and of honey—that ye may live, and not die; and hearken not unto Hezekiah, when he persuadeth you, saying: ‘The Lord will deliver us.’”

It is but an empty saying: “Come, and I will give you a great Canaan!”

Sometimes it does seem as if the enemy had the best of it. Every thing lies so handily to him. He says:

“I will get you through this difficulty. I know a lie that would deceive a king. I can instruct you in a policy that would blind a judge. I could get the money for you; you need have no difficulty about that. Why, I say, in confidence, I can let you have it now!”

What can the preacher do in the presence of such a Rab-shakeh?

Or, he may not offer temptation in that direction, but in another. He may say:

“All these arguments I could answer, if I cared to do so. Who wrote the Bible? Who has seen the original manuscripts? Who has ever seen God? It is utterly impossible to know the infinite. Come, and I will make you rich at once in real, solid, practical things. I can give you work instantly, and wages immediately the work is begun. I can give you something in advance. Leave the preacher, the altar, the Bible and the church. Come and work in the open streets, and be doing something that you can handle and about which there is no manner of doubt.”

People begin then to wonder.

They should adopt the policy which was imposed on the children of Hezekiah:

“But the people held their peace, and answered him not a word, for the king’s commandment was: ‘Answer him not.’”

Nothing is to be got out of wordy controversy. Live the Christian life; grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. While the controversialist is contemning you, taunting you and smiting you, show to him that you are growing broader, more massive in character, more tender in disposition, more benevolent in every aspiration and desire and purpose, and thus by well-doing “Put to silence the ignorance of foolish men.”

Defend your Christianity by the eloquence of your life.

The servants of Hezekiah said to him: “What Rab-shakeh has said may come to pass. Let us go to Isaiah and tell him all.”

Hezekiah himself thought that perhaps there might be something in it, after all. There he and his servants fell into a state of incertitude.

“So the servants of King Hezekiah came to Isaiah.” They came to the right man. Standing up like a king, he said:

“Thus shall ye say to your master: Thus saith the Lord: ‘Be not afraid of the words which thou hast heard, with which the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed Me. Behold, I will send a blast upon him, and he shall hear a rumor, and shall return to his own land; and I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land.’”

He would make no violent attack on the men. He would summon no legion of angels to overwhelm this great Oriental potentate. He would simply “send a blast.” He would change the wind; he would scatter something upon it and bid it blow across the brain of the king of Assyria, and the king would not know his right hand from his left, nor the morning from the night; he would be calling everybody by the wrong name, and be asking for things that he did not wish to possess, and be, generally, thrown into a state of unbalanced and wandering mind.

“I will send a whisperer to him. He shall simply go to the ear of the king of Assyria and say something, and the king will take fright and fly away in a panic. O Hezekiah, continue thy prayer, repeat thy morning sacrifice and thine evening oblation; and, as for the king of Assyria, I will send a blast and a rumor. I will answer Rab-shakeh.”

Let the contempt of the enemy be answered by the contempt of Heaven.

Rab-shakeh, having found that the king of Assyria was warring against Libnah, returned; and when he heard that Tirhakah, king of Ethiopia, was come up to war, he once more addressed Hezekiah in terms of exultation and contempt.

Rab-shakeh was pretendedly anxious that Hezekiah should not be deceived by the Lord, his God, and then he taunts him with many a history in which Assyria had been conqueror over opposing nations. He completes his taunt by asking:

“Where is the king of Hamath, and the king of Arpad, and the king of the city of Sepharvaim, of Hena, and Ivah?”

This message came to Hezekiah in the form of a letter, or letters, and he instantly “went up into the house of the Lord, and spread it before the Lord.”

There is no need to regard this as in any sense involving a heathenish custom. The meaning simply is that Hezekiah consulted the Lord on the whole matter, and declined to take any thing into his own counsel or power. He acknowledges the dignity of God by the expression: “O Lord God of Israel, which dwellest between the cherubims.”

Then he pointed to the letter which more immediately concerned himself, thus showing his consciousness that the majesty of the Lord did not separate Him from taking an interest in earthly things. We are not to stop at the point of majesty, but are to reason that, because God is so majestic and august, He will pay attention to the prayers and desires of the beings whom He has created in His own image and likeness. The divine majesty is not a rebuke to human approach, but is an encouragement to human prayer. When Hezekiah says “Thou art the God,” the emphasis is to be laid on the pronoun. Thou art the true God, and Thou alone. When he desires God to bow down His ear, and hear, the reference is not so much to listen to Hezekiah’s prayer as to the words of Sennacherib.

The meaning of the whole petition may be:

“Interpose immediately and energetically between me and mine enemy. Let Thine ears hear, let Thine eyes see, and let Thine arm be extended.”

Hezekiah acknowledges that the kings of Assyria had destroyed the nations and their lands, and had cast the gods of the nations into the fire. By so much he gives the Assyrians credit for having spoken the truth, and for having thus founded their project against Israel upon the success which they had already attained.

Hezekiah acknowledges, indeed, that the gods of the nations were no gods. At the same time he feels that to the minds of the Assyrians they may have been as real deities, and their overthrow may have encouraged the Assyrians to believe that Jehovah was like unto them.

Thus the prayer of Hezekiah was argued and ordered in logical and historical form, and was intended to excite, as it were, the very jealousy of the Lord God of Israel.

We now turn to the reply which was made to Hezekiah through the lips of Isaiah, the son of Amos. The reply was manifestly given in a contemptuous tone:

“The virgin the daughter of Zion hath despised thee, and laughed thee to scorn; the daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee.”

This is a poetic personification of place, Zion being regarded as mother of the people dwelling there. While the term “virgin” may denote the inviolable security of the citadel of Jehovah, it may also intimate that a woman—even a solitary woman—was enough, when under the inspiration and protection of God, to repel the assault of the most boastful and audacious king.

The expression, “hath shaken her head at thee,” has been literally rendered: “Hath nodded behind thee.” It signifies an act of security—as, for example, in the Twenty-second Psalm: “All they that see me laugh me to scorn; they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying: ‘He trusted on the Lord that He would deliver him. Let Him deliver him, seeing He delighted him.’”

The people of Jerusalem are represented by this expression as nodding their heads in contempt at the retiring envoys of Sennacherib.

The answer of Isaiah to Hezekiah was a religious revelation to the king of Assyria.

The twenty-second verse puts into interrogative form a reproach against the ignorance of the king:

“Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed? And against whom hast thou exalted thy voice and lifted up thine eyes on high?”

The meaning evidently is that the king did not know the real nature of the God of Israel and Judah, and that he was making an infinite mistake in confounding that nature with what he had already seen of the idols of the nations.

Humiliation is promised to the king of Assyria. A hook is to be thrust into his nose, a bridle is to be put on his lips, and he is to be turned back by the way which he came.

While the king of Assyria is humiliated, the remnant that escaped of the house of Judah is promised again to take root downward and bear fruit upward—literally, shall add root to root, shall take firmer root than ever, as a tree often does after a storm; the ravaged land was to be newly stocked by the remnant that was to be saved out of Jerusalem.

All these statements are supported by the declaration: “The zeal of the Lord of Hosts shall do this.”

Thus the promise is not made in any human name or guaranteed by the conquests of human history. It is immediately connected with the very purpose and power of the Most High. Nor is this the only instance in which divine strength is promised on behalf of Judah and of Israel. We read: “For I will defend this city, to save it, for mine own sake, and for my servant David’s sake.”

We must always be careful to notice that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, and that no occasion is ever given for man to glory in man, but that everywhere from the beginning of religious history, as given in the Bible, it is God who is King, Ruler and Protector, and to Him all the glory of deliverance and conquest undividedly belongs.

And that night “the angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand; and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.”

Again and again we say: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

Let Rab-shakeh talk—let him deliver his burning messages—and when he has ceased his mockery it is not necessary for us to answer. God will defend His own cause.

Here we stand. We think all history is on the Christian side. But let us not forget that the finest argument in favor of Christianity is a Christian life.

JABEZ.

The ninth verse of the fourth chapter of the first Book of Chronicles contains a reference to Jabez. The whole history is brief:

“And Jabez was more honorable than his brethren; and his mother called his name Jabez, saying: ‘Because I bear him with sorrow.’ And Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying: ‘Oh, that Thou wouldst bless me indeed, and enlarge my coast, and that Thine hand might be with me, and that Thou wouldst keep me from evil, that it may not grieve me!’ And God granted him that which he requested.”

Nothing more is known of this Jabez or of his brethren. “The Speaker’s Commentary” regards the fact as remarkable that Jabez should be introduced without description or patronymic, as if a well-known personage, and supposes that he was known to those for whom the Book of Chronicles was written, either by tradition or by writings which have perished.

The word Jabez signifies sorrowful.

Jabez was distinguished in some way above his brethren. By this distinction we are not to infer the exercise of an undue partiality in the spirit of his parents. Account for it as we may, some men appear to be born with what may be called a larger religiousness of nature than other men. It is easy for them to pray; it is a delight to them to peruse all sacred writings; it is a positive pain to them to be deprived of religious privileges.

We must leave this mystery as insoluble. It is a very pleasant mystery to those who are gifted with religious intuition; but, on the other hand, it is a most appalling mystery to those who seem to be what we can not better describe than by calling them natural Atheists.

The name which Jabez bore was a memorial of his mother’s sorrow—not a prophecy of his own. Yet Jabez was animated by that inexplicable superstition which discovers in names and circumstances omens and predictions which the imagination can never treat with disregard.

Jabez might intellectually know that his name did but represent what his mother had endured, yet a subtle feeling took possession of him, as if he himself would in some way be involved in the same sorrow. Nor was this an irrational conclusion.

As a matter of fact, some men are born to more sorrow than others—as certainly as by constitution some men are more religious than others.

Here, again, is a dark and painful mystery. We see the operation of this mystery even in the same family, where one of the children may be full of sunlight, hope and music, and another may be doomed to walk in darkness throughout a lifetime—unable to discern between Summer and Winter, loaded with trouble and oppressed with undefinable apprehensions.

Jabez is known to history as pre-eminently a man of prayer. Although it has been considered that the prayer of Jabez was uttered in view of some imminent battle or other dreaded experience, yet by common consent Jabez has been regarded by Christian students as a typical man of prayer.

Judging the case within the narrow limits of the history given in verses nine and ten, it would seem as if Jabez started life in an act of prayer. The image is at once graphic and beautiful. Think of a young man standing at the door of his house, looking abroad at the unknown and unmeasured world, listening to the conflicting voices which troubled his native air, and then turning his eyes to Heaven and asking divine direction before he would take a single step from the threshold of his home.

Nothing of the nature of mere romance attaches itself to this picture.

This, indeed, is what every young man ought to do before going out to battle or labor. It would appear, from instances which have come under our view, that God condescends to receive from men promises of religious life on certain providential conditions. We can not understand this now, but it is perfectly clear, from such instances as Jacob and Jabez, that God was willing to respond to propositions of obedience founded upon the realization of specified blessings.

The prayer of Jabez must be judged to be good, for the sufficient reason that it was answered—“and God granted him that which he requested.”

Is the conduct of life, then, open to regulation upon such high and sacred lines? May a young man come before the Almighty, speak out all his heart and receive promises of continual guidance and defense from the Living One?

If we could realize the certainty of this holy commerce as between Earth and Heaven, our whole life would be lifted to a noble level, our spirit would be released from the dominion of fear, and instead of laboring in toilsome prayer, we should be filled with the spirit of triumphant thankfulness and praise.

What privileges are open to the young! It lies within their power to give a whole life-time to God. Those who have advanced considerably in life can now but give a fraction of their days, but the young soul can give God the brightness of the morning, the glory of noonday and the tranquility of evening.

Let the young think of this, and give themselves diligently to the study of such instances as that of Jabez, knowing that if they remember their Creator in the days of their youth increasing age will mean increasing joy.

JEHORAM.

Jehoram undertakes an expedition against King Mesha, but in doing so he pays a tribute to the power of the king of Moab by allying with himself Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, and also the king of Edom. A remarkable character is given of Jehoram. He was not an imitator of the evil of his father as to its precise form, but he had his own method of serving the devil.

We should have thought that Ahab and Jezebel had exhausted all the arts of wickedness, but it turns out that Jehoram had found a way of his own of living an evil life.

Warned by the untimely fate of his brother, which had fallen upon him expressly on account of his Baal worship, Jehoram began his reign by an ostentatious abolition of the Phenician state religion, which his father had introduced.

Jehoram went back to the olden times, and re-established the worship of the calf, after the pattern which Jeroboam, its founder, had patronized. His doing so, however, he found to be quite compatible with a secret allowance that the people should practice their own form of worship.

There is room in wickedness for the exercise of genius of a certain limited kind. The limitation is imposed by wickedness itself—for, after all, wickedness is made up of but few elements.

Many persons suppose that if they do not sin according to the prevailing fashion they are not sinning at all. They imagine that by varying the form of the evil they have mitigated the evil itself.

A good deal of virtue is supposed to consist in reprobating certain forms of vice. A man may be no drunkard, according to the usual acceptation of the term, and yet he may be in a continual state of intoxication. It is possible to shudder at what is usually known as persecution, and yet all the while to be beheading enemies and burning martyrs.

Jehoram made a kind of trick of wickedness. He knew how to give a twist to old forms, or a turn to old ways, so as to escape part of their vulgarity and yet to retain all their iniquity.

A most alarming thought it is to the really spiritual mind that men may become adepts in wickedness—experts in evil doing—and may be able so to manage their corrupt designs as to deceive many observers by a mere change of surface or appearance.

We do not amend the idolatry by altering the shape of the altar. We do not destroy the mischievous power of unbelief by throwing our skepticism into metaphysical phrases, and thus making verbal mysteries where we might have spiritual illumination. We are deceived by things simply because we ourselves live a superficial life and read only the history of appearances.

What is the cure for all this manipulation of evil, this changing of complexion and of form, and this consequent imagining that the age is improving because certain phenomena which used to be so patent are no longer discernible on the face of things?

We come back to the sublime doctrine of regeneration, as the answer to the great inquiry: “What is the cure for this heart disease?”

“Marvel not that I said unto thee: ‘Ye must be born again.’”

We may change either the language or the manners of wickedness, or the times and seasons for doing wicked things, and we may decorate our wickedness with many beautiful colors, but so long as the heart itself is unchanged decoration is useless—yea, worse than useless; for it is a vain attempt to make that look true which is false—an endeavor even to deceive Omniscience itself.

“And Mesha, king of Moab, was a sheepmaster, and rendered unto the king of Israel an hundred thousand lambs and an hundred thousand rams, with the wool. But it came to pass, when Ahab was dead, that the king of Moab rebelled against the king of Israel.”

Enduring masteries are not of a physical kind. Ahab held Mesha simply by a strong arm, and the consequence was that, as soon as Ahab was dead, Mesha refused to render the tribute.

This historical circumstance, limited so far as the mere letter is concerned, is full of significance to the Christian Church and to all Christian countries.

Let us not call ourselves masters of positions or of men, simply because we happen to have the stronger arm. The dominion which is acquired by mere strength and held by superior force is an illusion wherever it is found.

The men whom we may so hold may be hypocrites enough to assume an acquiescent attitude, or even to display a complacent demeanor; they may even go so far as to appear to be grateful for the rule which they can not set aside. But all such appearances are of necessity without reason, and therefore without continuance. They are always to be suspected.

This would be so in the case of the Christian faith, had we the power of imposing even its nominal belief upon any nation. Suppose we say that any man not professing the Christian faith shall certainly be fined, imprisoned or otherwise punished. It is easy to see that such a threat might in many instances bring about an appearance of acquiescence. But it must be, by the very necessity of the case, appearance only.

Faith is a question of the individual judgment and of the individual heart, and can not be controlled in any degree by external authority.

Suppose we create a law making it penal to open places of business on the Sabbath day. Looking upon all commercial houses whose business was suspended for a particular time, we might say: “See how unanimously and happily the Sabbath day is observed in this country!”

But such would be an altogether superficial and mistaken judgment. The Sabbath day can not be kept by law. If the Sabbath is not kept by the reason, and is not hailed with thankful delight by the very heart, it can never be kept at all.

All shops may be closed, all places of amusement may suspend their entertainments, all toys may be put away from the nursery, all out-door enjoyments and avocations may be withdrawn for the time, but the people who have retired in apparent acceptance of these conditions, but not in heartfelt acquiescence with them, are breaking the Sabbath every moment they breathe.

Here is a great law for the house, the church and the nation. The head of the family who rules by mere dread or tyranny is not training an obedient household, but he is preparing an outburst of sedition, which sooner or later must transpire, and when it occurs his ruin is certain.

The same law applies in the matter of capital and labor. The man who only works that he may receive his wages never truly serves or makes his labor into a delight. The man who can threaten the laborer by withdrawment of pecuniary recognition never elicits from that laborer a response to duty, though he may insist on a formal compliance with law.

What a blessed mastery is that of Jesus Christ in this respect.

For Christ reasons with men, and addresses the very highest form and quality of mind; He sets before men the alternative courses of life, and beseeches them to accept the straight and narrow way leading to repentance. Certainly he threatens, He denounces, He declares an awful issue for the wicked man, but it is not mere threatening or mere denunciation; it is the solemn disclosure of a sequence which even Almighty God could not suspend and yet retain the integrity of His throne and the security of the universe. We must never accuse Jesus Christ of what is termed “threatening.” His denunciations are revelations, and not the expressions of merely angry feelings.

The way of the approach having been settled, the kings proceeded to fetch a compass of seven days’ journey around by the south end of the Dead Sea. They little knew the difficulty that would arise in their way. We do not read that they made any religious inquiry at the outset of their journey, and therefore no responsibility could be charged upon God for the misadventure which occurred. The three kings seem to have consulted only with themselves, and to have resolved in their own counsel and strength upon their expedition against Mesha.

What was the misadventure which occurred? It is related: “And there was no water for the host and for the cattle that followed them.”

Even kings are dependent upon nature. Think of three kings, who supposed themselves at least to be very mighty, and all their people, stopped in their career simply for want of water!

A very pitiable and yet very instructive picture is this of three kings and their armies standing still merely for want of water. The so-called little things of life are often turned into not only things that are great, but into things that are vital.

Blessed indeed would be the man who sees even in natural arrangements and daily providences a call to him to lift up his head toward the heavens and ask great questions about being and duty and destiny.

So we have the usual religious appeal: “Is there not here a prophet of the Lord, that we may inquire of the Lord by him?”

Elisha now assumes a new attitude, and one certainly not destitute of spiritual grandeur. Turning to the king of Israel, he said:

“‘What have I to do with thee? Get thee to the prophets of thy father, and to the prophets of thy mother.’ And the king of Israel said unto him: ‘Nay; for the Lord hath called these three kings together, to deliver them into the hand of Moab.’”

Observe that this address was made to the very king of Israel. It simply means that the God of Israel had nothing to do with the king of Israel, and yet Israel was understood to be a theocracy. The form was theocratic, but not the power.

Think of a man bearing the name of God, and yet being godless! A temple deserted of its deity is surely a melancholy sight, but what shall be said of the man from whose heart the Spirit of the living God has utterly departed?

Elisha seems to have inherited the taunting spirit of his great predecessor: “Get thee to the prophets of thy father, and to the prophets of thy mother.”

Who can say with how bitter a taunt the word “mother” was pronounced in this connection?

The evil that men do goes on for many a day—not only to the end of their life-time, but it lives after them.

This is a taunt that is founded on reason. If men have been serving a god for seven years past, surely it can not be unreasonable to refer them to that god in the time of their extremity. What is faith if it can not be tested? What is the value of an altar if you can not go to it and find lying upon it direct answers to your prayer?

Is there any thing meaner in all the history of cowardice than that a man should ignore the living God all his life, and then whiningly repent upon his death-bed? Why does he not go to the trusts to which he has committed himself, and say he will die in them as he has lived in them? Surely, the cowardice of men should teach those who observe it something regarding the nature and uses of religious faith.

The appeal of Elisha was perfectly fair.

If the gods of Jehoram were worth any thing, they could find water for him in the time of his necessity. Let them do it. If they will do it, then they will establish their claim to be regarded with reverence, and indeed be honored and worshiped.

We must insist upon making the same appeal in our own day. Men must be made to feel their irreligion.

Jehoram did feel his in this instance, for he protested against the decision of Elisha. Throughout the course of Scripture men are referred to their gods, and are made to test the value of their religion.

Possibly many a Jehoram may be acting under influences which he himself can not explain—so much that he becomes a puzzle to his own mind, wondering how it is that he takes one road when he has decided upon another, and that he mistakes substances for shadows and shadows for substances, so that his whole life is turned into a mocking bewilderment.

The answer is given in Scripture: “I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them; because when I called, none did answer; when I spake, they did not hear; but they did evil before Mine eyes, and chose that in which I delighted not.”

Now we come to a better phase of this history—namely, to the saving element—which appears and reappears in the course of our changeful life.

Elisha was not to be placated by the king of Israel. In his eyes a vile person was contemned. The king of Israel was but a poor, frail thing in the presence of a man who lived with God and was commissioned to denounce the judgments of Heaven against evil. But the world is not made up of Jehorams. Blessed be God, there are men of another type, whose very presence saves society from judicial ruin.

“And Elisha said: ‘As the Lord of Hosts liveth, before whom I stand, surely, were it not that I regard the presence of Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah, I would not look toward thee, nor see thee.’”

Now we know that the spirit of Elijah rested upon Elisha. We seem to hear the very tones of the old master in the new disciple. Is it not always so in life—that it is one man who saves many; that the ten righteous men save the city, and that Paul saves all those who sail with him in the midst of the tempestuous sea?

Your house is saved because of your little child. Your whole estate is protected from ruin because your wife is a praying woman. Your life would be cut off tomorrow in shame and disgrace were it not that you have entered upon an inheritance of prayers laid up for you by those who went before.

Life thus becomes very sacred and very tender, and we know not to whom we are under the deepest obligations. Enough to know that, somewhere, there is a presence that saves us, there is an influence that guards our life, and that we owe absolutely nothing in the way of security or honor to bad kings or bad men of any name.

The remainder of the chapter is occupied with a prophecy of Elisha and by a statement of the overthrow of the king of Moab.

Nothing now could save Mesha. A strong delusion was sent upon him to believe a lie. When water came down by way of Edom, and the whole country was filled with it, the Moabites rose up early in the morning, and as the Sun shone on the water the Moabites saw the water on the other side as red as blood.

It looked so like blood that they declared it to be blood; and, believing that the kings were slain who had come up against them, the Moabites advanced to the spoil. Alas, they advanced to their ruin.

The king of Moab saw that the battle was too sore for him. In his despair he took with him seven hundred men that drew swords, to break through even unto the king of Edom, but through the iron wall he could not force his way. In his madness he took his eldest son, who should have reigned in his stead, and flung him for a burnt offering upon the wall.

But the Lord will not be pleased with thousands of rams or with ten thousand rivers of oil, nor will He accept the first-born for a man’s transgression or the fruit of his body for the sin of his soul.

JEHORAM, KING OF JUDAH.

Verses sixteen to twenty-nine, inclusive, of the eighth chapter of the second Book of Kings should be compared with the twenty-first chapter of the second Book of Chronicles. The name Joram is an obvious contraction of Jehoram. Joram and Jehoram were practically interchangeable terms. The king of Israel is called Joram, and the king of Judah Jehoram. In another place Joram is the name of the king of Judah. In two other places both kings are called Jehoram.

Jehoram “walked in the way of the kings of Israel, as did the house of Ahab”—in other words, as the house of Ahab acted. Jehoram, as son-in-law of Ahab and Jezebel, gave his patronage to the worship of the Tyrian Baal.

Jehoram had examples enough before him of the fate which had befallen idolatrous worship, and yet, turning his eye backward upon all the ruins which had been created by divine anger, he pursued his evil way as if the Lord had approved the house of Ahab and its idolatry rather than manifested His judgments upon them.

Rational men may well ask themselves how it is that history is lost on some minds. They look backward and see that from the beginning sin has always been followed by punishment, and punishment has in many cases been carried as far as death itself. Yet in view of all the suffering, and in full sight of the innumerable graves dug by the hand of justice, they continue the same policy without one particle of alteration.

One would have supposed that, looking at the history of the kings of Israel, Jehoram would have said:

“I see now exactly what to avoid; and to see what to avoid is to begin to see what to cultivate and establish. It is perfectly evident that the worship of Baal is doomed, or that wherever it is set up divine anger instantly and severely attests the displeasure of God. It must be my care, therefore, to destroy every trace of idolatry, and build up faith in the true God.”

This would have been called reflective and philosophical on the part of the king, and indeed any thing that stood opposed to this course of reasoning would seem to be marked by incredible fatuity.

The contrary, however, is the exact fact. With all the evidences of divine displeasure around him Jehoram continued in the worship of Baal, or in some other form of idolatry which might appeal to the popular imagination or gratify the desires of his own corrupt fancy.

It is easy for moralists to condemn this neglect of history, and to point out to those who, having neglected it, come into suffering and loss, that they ought to have been wise before the event; but the very same thing is done even by the moralists who criticize the course of Jehoram and his predecessors.

This is the sin of every age, and it should be looked at clearly and acknowledged frankly, because until we do bring ourselves into vital relation to it our reasoning will be founded on false bases and will hasten itself to false conclusions.

All history is teaching us that the wages of sin is death; that the way of transgressors is hard; that, though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not go unpunished; that the face of the Lord is as a flint against evil doers. Yet, with this plainest of all lessons written on the very face of history, men are doing today as their predecessors did centuries ago, and will probably continue to repeat the folly and the wickedness until the end of time.

Surely, this is as curious a puzzle as any that occurs in all the annals of human history. It would seem, indeed, to be more than a puzzle; to be, in fact, indicative of a suicidal disposition on the part of the actor. It would not be tolerated in any other department of life.

If a man had known that a hundred of his ancestors were killed by drinking a certain liquid, and he thus knowingly put that liquid to his lips, the iniquity of his suicide would be aggravated by the knowledge of what had occurred in the records of his family.

How many murders, then, may he be said to accomplish who murders himself as to his moral nature and spiritual cultivation? He does not do it in ignorance. All history is surrounding him with its evidence, and is doing its utmost to secure his attention, and he himself is not unwilling to acknowledge that the testimony of history is uniform and absolute. Yet some immeasurable force within him drives him with infinite fury to the repetition of every sin and the defiance of every judgment.

What was the reason of all this patronage and support of idolatry?

Jehoram had an excellent father, and if any thing was to be expected from the operation of the law of hereditary dispositions, it would be that Jehoram would be of the same quality as Jehoshaphat.

Some curious and energetic influence must have been at work to throw back all hereditary quality and convert the man into a totally different nature. What was that influence? An expression in the eighteenth verse explains its nature and its scope: “For the daughter of Ahab was his wife.”

Wherever we find the name of Ahab we also find the presence of evil. Ahab lived again in his daughter, though Jehoshaphat did not repeat himself in his son. “The evil that men do lives after them.” Jehoram was under home influence; and is not home influence most potent of all? It is a daily influence; it begins with the early morning and continues all the day through. It does not assume aggressive attitudes or excite suspicion by tumult and defiance of temper. It is noisy or quiet, persistent or reluctant, energetic or languid, according to the peculiar circumstances of the family history. At this moment a word too energetically spoken might defeat its own object; at another moment a languid reference might be more than a vehement appeal; and on still other occasions anger, fury and clamor may bring to a point a long process of suggestion and education.

This is the mystery of home life.

The plotter waits for opportunities, creates them, puts them in the way of his victim, measures distances, regulates the methods of approaches. He studies his prey, watches him with an evil eye, remembers all his words, weighs them, calculates all their unspoken meanings, and at the right moment interposes his own influence. Wicked men in this respect are often models to good men.

The enemy of souls never rests.

“Your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”

Nor is he always a lion. Sometimes he is as a serpent, and sometimes even as an angel of light. But his evil policy never hesitates. When he blesses, it is that he may curse; when he leads his victim into the light, it is that he may have the greater influence over him to persuade him into the darkness.

Is it of no consequence with whom we live our daily life? Is the married relation one that expresses mere taste or momentary pleasure? Are not the companionships of life its true sources of tuition and inspiration?

A man who is in happy fellowship at home may over-get some of the worst hereditary infirmities and disabilities, and may be encouraged into attainments of correct self-discipline and virtue which under other circumstances would be simply impossible.

The conversion of the world, it would seem, must begin at home. We must have happier married relations, fuller domestic confidence, riper household trust and sympathy.

Out of all this daily education, under happy influences, there may come a kind of character rich in its own quality and beneficent in its influence on society.

Jehoram had provoked the Lord, yet so pitiful is the God of Heaven that He spared Judah for the sake of David, His servant, as He promised to give David always a light. But Jehoram was, nevertheless, severely punished for his wickedness.

In his days Edom revolted from under the hand of Judah, and made a king over themselves. Libnah also revolted at the same time. Thus the peace of the kingdom was broken up, and Jehoram was made indirectly to suffer for the sin of idolatry.

How quietly the twenty-third verse reads! It says: “And the rest of the acts of Joram, and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?” It would seem as if the bad king had simply fallen asleep like a tired child.

But in the second Book of Chronicles we read that Jehoram died of sore diseases, and that “the people made no burning for him”—that is, the usual honors of a sovereign were withheld in this particular case.

Jehoram died in contempt and neglect. He departed without being desired; in other words, he departed without regret—died unregretted. He was not refused burial in the city of David, but his body was not laid in the sepulchers of the kings.

Thus, sooner or later, wickedness finds out a man, and brands him with dishonor. If, under other conditions, wickedness is carried to the grave amid great pomp and circumstance, it is only that the dishonor may be found in some other quarter—in the hatred of good men and in the bitter recriminations of those who have been wronged.

Set it down as a sure doctrine that, whenever a bad man is buried, dishonor attaches to his whole name, and contempt withers every flower that may be planted over his grave.

The words “but not in the sepulchers of the kings” may receive a larger interpretation than the technical one which belongs to this immediate circumstance. Men are buried in the sepulchers of the kings when their lives are full of beneficence, when their names are the symbols of noble charity, large-minded justice, heroic fortitude, tender sympathy for others. Their burying place is not a merely topographical point. Their relation to the hearts that knew them, their place in the memory of those who lived with them, the tears which are shed over the recollection of their good deeds, the void which has been created by their removal—all these constitute the royalty of their interment.

The end of Jehoram, king of Judah—who would choose it?

JEHOSHAPHAT.

In succeeding to the throne of Judah Jehoshaphat simply followed the course of a law, but in strengthening himself against Israel he indicated a personal policy.

How definitely the statement reads!

“And Jehoshaphat, his son, reigned in his stead, and strengthened himself against Israel.”

There is no doubt or hesitation in the mind of Jehoshaphat as to the course which ought to be pursued. He did not simply think that he would strengthen himself against Israel; he had not a merely momentary vision of a possible fortification against the enemy; but he carried out his purpose, and thus challenged northern Israel. On the other hand, how peaceful is the declaration that is here made! There is not an aggressive tone in all the statement.

Innocent Jehoshaphat simply “strengthened himself against Israel”—that is to say, he put himself into a highly defensive position, so that if the enemy should pour down from the north Jehoshaphat would be secured against his assaults.

Every thing, therefore, depends on the point of view which we take of this policy. But the thing which history has made clear is that a man often lays down a policy before awaiting the issue of events which would determine its scope and tone.

All this was done by Jehoshaphat before he connected himself by marriage with the northern dynasty.

A marriage may upset a policy; a domestic event may alter the course of a king’s thinking, and may readjust the lines of a nation’s relation to other kingdoms.

The wise man holds himself open to the suggestion and inspiration of events. No man is as wise today as he will be tomorrow—provided, he pay attention to the literature of providence which is being daily written before his eyes. Our dogmatics, whether in theology or in state policy, should be modified by the recollection that we do not now know all things, and that further light may show what we do know in a totally different aspect. Our policy, like our bread, should in a sense be from day to day.

When men are omniscient they may lay down a theological program from which departure would be blasphemy; but until they are omniscient they had better write with modesty and subscribe even their best constructed creeds with reservations which will leave room for providence.

“And the Lord was with Jehoshaphat, because he walked in the first ways of his father, David, and sought not unto Baalim.”

The Lord was not with Jehoshaphat because he strengthened himself against Israel, nor because he had placed forces in all the fenced cities of Judah, and set garrisons in the land of Judah and within the streets of Ephraim. Not one of these little triumphs is referred to as affording God a basis for the complaisant treatment of the new king.

As ever, the Lord’s relation to Jehoshaphat was determined by Jehoshaphat’s own moral condition. A very beautiful expression is this: “He walked in the first ways of his father, David.” That is to say, in the former or earlier ways of David, as contrasted with David’s later conduct.

Some have found here a tacit allusion to David’s greatest sin, which he committed when he was advanced in life. A somewhat mournful thing it is that a man’s first ways should be better than his last. The other relation would seem to be the one which reason would approve and God would specially honor—namely, that a man’s old age should be the ripest and best part of his conduct—rich with wisdom, strong with experience, and chastened by many a pensive recollection.

Sad when you have to go back to a man’s youth to find his virtues or his most conspicuous excellences; but most beautiful when a man’s earlier mistakes are lost in the richness and wisdom of his later conduct.

Jehoshaphat’s conduct in this matter is the more notable because of the constant observation of mankind that it is easier to follow the evil than to imitate the good. When imitation enters into a man’s life he is apt to copy that which is inferior, and to leave without reproduction that which is lofty and disciplinary.

In this instance Jehoshaphat sets an example to the world. His conduct, too, is represented negatively as well as positively—“and sought not unto Baalim.” The word “Baalim” is in the plural number, and the literal reading might be: “Jehoshaphat sought not the Baals.” The Baals were different local aspects or phases of the Sun god.

It is to be specially noted that the term Baal includes an aspect even of Jehovah—that is to say, Israel had degenerated so far as to suppose that in worshiping Baal they were worshiping at least one phase of the true God.

It is often difficult to abandon a popular custom. More people might be in favor of Jehoshaphat strengthening himself against Israel than in returning to the first ways of David and abandoning the altar of the Baals.

History and religion are always considered in their separate distribution.

There are politicians who would vote for a war who would on no account surrender a superstition. On the other hand, there are men who pride themselves on being free of the influence of superstition, yet who would enter willingly into the most sanguinary wars for the extension of empire or the glory of some particular throne.

In Jehoshaphat we seem to come into contact with a complete character—in other words, a man who in every point was equally strong, a man of foresight, a man of reverence, a man of an honest heart, a man who felt that idolatry and true worship could not co-exist in the same breast.

“But sought to the Lord God of his father, and walked in His commandments, and not after the doings of Israel.”

We must be prepared for singularity if we are genuinely prepared to be good. Let a man settle it with himself in prayerful solitude whether he means to walk with God or to identify himself with the spirit and customs of his age.

Jehoshaphat laid down a clear program for himself, and he followed it out with patient and faithful industry. “The Lord God of his father” was not a mere term in a crowd; it was the object of daily search and quest. Jehoshaphat inquired for Him, and operated constantly upon the doctrine: “Ask, and it shall be given you; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

Nor was Jehoshaphat’s religion merely speculative—that is to say, an intellectual quest after an intellectual God. Whatever was speculative in the mind and service of Jehoshaphat was sustained and ennobled by a solid moral element. He read the Decalogue; he studied the Word of God; he would take no action—personal, regal or social—that was not first examined and approved in the light of the divine statutes.

All this might have been comparatively easy if Jehoshaphat had started at an independent point; but at such a point no man can start, for he must take up the age as he finds it, and must first disembarrass himself from all the stipulations and claims of custom, usage and popular superstition.

Jehoshaphat sought not after the doings of Israel. He set himself up in this respect against the kingdom. He was not afraid of peculiarity; in a word, Jehoshaphat’s religion was characteristic; it had lines, points and colors of its own, about which there could be no reasonable mistake.

What is our religion?

Do we intellectually assent to the existence and sovereignty of one God, and then degenerate into self-worship? Do we admit that there must be an ultimate morality, a philosophy of conduct founded on eternal metaphysics; and then do we measure our own behavior by the canon of custom?

These are questions that search the heart, and no man can answer them for his brother.

What became of all this noble conduct arising out of this high religious conception? We shall see in the following verse:

“Therefore the Lord established the kingdom in his hand; and all Judah brought to Jehoshaphat presents, and he had riches and honor in abundance.”

Whatever was doubtful about the ascent of Jehoshaphat to the throne was removed, and the king was enabled to realize his power. When he closed his hand on the royal scepter he found that he was not grasping a shadow but a reality.

There are times when men become fully conscious of their influence and of their proper social position; happy are they if in this consciousness they detect a prevailing religious element, which constrains them to acknowledge that honor and wealth, power and dignity are the gifts of God. Is not this an anticipation of the Savior’s great doctrine: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you”?

Jehoshaphat did not seek riches and honor. But he sought to the Lord God of his father and walked in the divine commandments, and as a result he enjoyed all that kings delight in as indicating strength, renown and influence.

“And his heart was lifted up in the ways of the Lord; moreover, he took away the high places and the groves out of Judah.”

The expression “his heart was lifted up” is an awkward one. The lifting up of the heart signifies increase of pride, a sensation of vanity, a desire to gratify personal ambition, and to make an idol of his will. In this instance the marginal reading is to be preferred—“was encouraged;” or otherwise, “his courage rose high.” It has also been rendered: “Jehoshaphat grew bold”—that is to say, he was not a timid reformer or a timid worshiper, nor a trimmer or time server in any sense. He was a heroic worshiper of the living God. When he saw that reform was necessary he went forward with a steady step and an energetic hand.

We should call Jehoshaphat a man of conviction and a man who had the courage of his convictions. Altogether, this is the outline of a noble personage—a born king, a man who has a right to the purple and the scepter. When such men ascend thrones nations should be glad and rejoice with a great joy, for their character is grander than their office and their spirit is the best guarantee of the elevation and utility of their regal policy.

Becoming conscious of his power, knowing that his kingdom was established from on high, Jehoshaphat not only did not seek the Baals himself, but he took away the high places and groves out of Judah.

Jehoshaphat was not content with a merely personal religion. He could not convert the hearts of his people, but he could destroy all the symbols of unholy worship.

Men are only required to do that which lies in their power. A proprietor may not be able to make people sober, but he can forbid the introduction of temptations to drunkenness. A parent may not be able to subdue the spirit of pride, but he can in many instances limit the means of gratifying it.

There are reforms which are open to us all—in personal custom, in social habit, and it may be even in imperial ways. Let each Jehoshaphat seize his opportunity and magnify it.

All this would have been comparatively in vain but for another step which Jehoshaphat took. In the third year of his reign he sent to his princes—that is to say, he sent his princes—and he sent Levites, all of whose names are given; and he sent also two priests, Elishama and Jehoram, and their business was purely educational.

“And they taught in Judah, and had the book of the law of the Lord with them, and went about throughout all the cities of Judah, and taught the people.”

This was a mixed commission—partly civil, partly ecclesiastical. The men here mentioned are otherwise unknown. We identify them as educational reformers, or reformers who operated through the medium of education. They were not warriors, destroyers, revolutionists, but men who addressed the mind and understanding and conscience, and caused men to know that the true law was from above and not from beneath.

The book which the commission had in hand was the Pentateuch, or the law of Moses. This was known to be the law which alone could touch all the vital necessities of the commonwealth. Again and again we are constrained to admit that there is a law beyond man, above man, in a sense apart from man. Men are not driven within themselves to find a law, an instinct, or a reason. They have a written statute, an authoritative declaration, a book which Christian teachers do not hesitate to describe as a revelation, and to that they call the attention of men.

If the teacher were teaching out of his own consciousness he would be but an equal, often exposing himself to the destructive criticism of his more advanced and penetrating scholars; but the teacher takes his stand on a book—on the Book, the Bible—a revelation which he believes to be divine and final.

Say what we will, the effect of Bible teaching must be judged by its fruits.

Where are the nations that are most distinguished for wide and varied intelligence, for large and exhaustive sympathy, for missionary enterprise, for philanthropic institutions and for all the elements which give grace and beauty to social existence?

The question should admit of definite reply.

The facts are before men; let them judge fearlessly and honestly, and we need have no apprehension concerning their verdict.

Wherever the word of the Lord has had free course superstition has been chased away, human slavery has been abolished, every instance of intolerance, injustice, unkindness has felt the influence of holy thought. In all these matters discussion should be limited strictly to facts. Thus kings can help nations, not by forcing education, not by attempting to rule opinion, not by setting up standards of orthodoxy to fall short of which is to incur penalty; but by spreading education, by extending light, by cultivating a spirit of inquiry, and by a generous multiplication of all the instrumentalities needed for the destruction of ignorance. What may come of this we are not supposed at this moment to know.

Meanwhile, let us be thankful that we are face to face with a man who has conviction, courage, independence, high patriotism and generous impulse, and let us hope that his end may be as beautiful as his beginning was promising.

JEHU.

While Jehoram was lying ill of his wounds Elisha had called one of the children of the prophets and sent him on a special mission to Ramoth-gilead.

It has been conjectured that this messenger was the Jonah who is mentioned in the twenty-fifth verse of the fourteenth chapter of the second Book of Kings.

Jehu was left in supreme command of the forces at Jehoram’s departure. Nothing is known of Jehu’s origin. From the first, however, it is evident that he was called to special functions. He was one of the men who had been foreseen by Elijah, the prophet, under the divine inspiration.

Elijah was ordered to return unto the wilderness of Damascus, and in the course of his progress he was to anoint Jehu, the son of Nimshi, to be king over Israel. Whether any communication had been made to Jehu we know not. Yet it is not improbable that this had been done, as we may infer from the way in which he made answer to the appeal when it was addressed to him by the messenger of Elisha.

All the circumstances of the communication are full of dramatic color and impressiveness.

The young man was to take a vial of oil and pour it on Jehu’s head, and say: “Thus saith the Lord: ‘I have anointed thee king over Israel.’” Instantly he was to open the door and flee from the presence of the new monarch. A tremendous charge was delivered to Jehu by the young man:

“And thou shalt smite the house of Ahab, thy master, that I may avenge the blood of My servants, the prophets, and the blood of all the servants of the Lord, at the hand of Jezebel. For the whole house of Ahab shall perish; … and I will make the house of Ahab like the house of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, and like the house of Baasha, the son of Ahijah; and the dogs shall eat Jezebel in the portion of Jezreel, and there shall be none to bury her.”

Having delivered this message, the young man then “opened the door and fled,” as if pursued by fire. We know not whether to pity Jehu under the delivery of this charge. The Lord must have many servants in His household, and some of them are entrusted with hard work. If we could choose our places in the divine economy, who would not elect to be a minister of sympathy, consolation and tenderness to broken hearts? Who would be willing to go forth to fight the battle and endure the trial and hardship of military service? Above all, who would be willing to accept the ministry of shedding blood and cleansing the world of evil by putting to death all evil doers?

We must recognize the diversity of function in the Christian Church, and in every department of human life. Few men could do what Jehu did, but where the special qualification is given the special service is also demanded.

It is pitiful criticism that stands back and shudders at the career of Jehu; it is wanting in large-mindedness and in completeness of view.

The Lord’s work is many-sided, and all kinds of men as to intellectual energy and moral daring, and even as to physical capability, are required to complete the ministry of God.

Today one man is gifted with the power of intercession, another with the talent of controversy, another with the genius of exposition, another with the supreme gift of consolation; one minister must tarry at home and work close to the fireside at which he was brought up; in another is the spirit of travel and adventure, and he must brave all the dangers of enterprise and hasten to the ends of the Earth, that he may tell others what he knows of the Gospel of Christ.

We must recognize this diversity, and the unity that it constitutes; otherwise we shall take but a partial view of the many-sided ministry which Jesus Christ came to establish, and to which He has promised His continual inspiration.

SOLOMON

The Judgment of Solomon. I Kings, iii.

When Jehu came forth he was taunted by the servants of his Lord; they called the young man “mad.” From their manner, Jehu began to wonder whether the whole affair had not been planned by themselves with a view to befooling him by the excitement of his ambition. He said to them, in effect:

“Ye know the man, and his communication in this matter is one of your own arranging. Ye think to make a fool of me, and through the intoxication of my vanity to lead me to my ruin.”

But they denied the impeachment, and their tone so changed that Jehu reposed confidence in them, and told them what the man had said.

Instantly, on hearing the message, they hasted, took every man his garment or coat, and put it under Jehu on the top of the stairs, which they constituted a kind of temporary throne, and then amid loud blasts of the trumpet they cried: “Jehu is king!”

Thus Jehu was suddenly called to royalty and all its responsibilities.

Men should be prepared for the sudden calls of providence. “What I say unto you I say unto all: Watch.”

One is struck by the obedience of Jehu to the heavenly call. There was no hesitation. Men but show themselves to be yet under bondage when they hesitate regarding the calls which God addresses to them.

Jehu was determined to make complete work of his mission. Not one was to escape or go forth out of the city to tell what he was about to do to those who were in Jezreel.

Springing into his chariot and calling for a detachment of cavalry, Jehu set out on his journey of sixty or seventy miles. You can see him almost flying down from Ramoth, which was about three thousand feet above the sea level. Swiftly he crosses the Jordan, and then, turning to the north, he fled over the spurs of Ephraim; then he darted up the Valley of Trembling, made famous in the day of Gideon, and finally he came to the Plain of Esdraelon, where was Jezreel.

Jehoram was unaware of the approach of Jehu. One messenger after another was sent out to make inquiry, but the messengers were ordered behind, and Jehu came forward until he and the king met at the vineyard of Naboth.

The king asked what news was being brought—news of peace or of war.

The question was answered with another question: “What peace can there be so long as the idolatrous whoredoms of thy mother, Jezebel, and her witchcrafts are so many?”

Jehu thus referred to fundamental wrongs. Instead of trifling with details he went straight to the fountainhead, and by the delivery of a profoundly religious message he excited the alarm of those who heard him.

Jehoram was weak and feeble and sought to flee, but Jehu drew a bow with his full strength and smote between his arms, and the arrow went out at the king’s heart, and he sank down in his chariot.

Then Jehu ordered his captain, or squire, to take up Jehoram and cast him into the portion of the field of Naboth, the Jezreelite, that the word of the Lord might be fulfilled.

And when Ahaziah, the king of Judah, saw this he sought to flee, but Jehu followed him, saying: “Smite him also in the chariot.” After a hot pursuit Ahaziah was struck at the declivity of Gur, where his chariot was forced to slacken its speed.

Then came the most tragical of all the acts.

No sooner was Jehu come to Jezreel than Jezebel, now old and withered, heard of it, and her blood tingled at the news. She was not one who was easily deterred.

According to the custom of Oriental ladies, Jezebel painted her eyebrows and lashes with a pigment composed of antimony and zinc. The intention of the dark border was to throw the eye into relief and make it look larger. She adorned her head with a tire, or a headdress, and after donning her royal dress she looked out at a window, designing to impress Jehu.

As Jehu looked up to the window he exclaimed: “Who is on my side?” He ordered the two or three eunuchs who looked out to throw down the painted woman. Jehu knew that the cruel queen was intensely hated by the palace officials.

The two or three eunuchs who had been accustomed to crouch before her in servile dread now saw that Jehu was in the ascendant, and in obedience to the demand of the regicide they threw her out of the window.

Such has ever been the policy of sycophants—the rats of court—who only linger there with a view of seeing how much they can appropriate or destroy.

No sooner was Jezebel thrown down than some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall and on the horses, and she was trodden under foot.

Here, again, we see the end of wickedness. For a time there is escape, but in the long run there is ruin.

Look at Jezebel, and learn the fate of the wicked. No such fate, in a merely physical sense, may await the iniquitous now; but all those intermediate punishments simply point to the last great penalty: “The wicked shall go away into everlasting punishment.”

One can pity Jezebel as her flesh was eaten by the dogs and her carcass was made as dung on the face of the field in the portion of Jezreel, and we almost shudder with horror as we think that she was to be so torn to pieces that none should be able to say: “This is Queen Jezebel.”

But all this is wasted sentiment, unless we reason from it toward spiritual conclusions.

We are so much the victims of our senses that we can pity with great compassion those who are smitten with bodily disease, or are torn limb from limb in consequence of some wicked deed; but it seems impossible for us to rise to the conception of the terrible penalty which is to fall upon the soul for violating God’s commandments and defying God’s power.

Instead of being appeased by the fate of Jezebel, Jehu sends out a decree that the whole family of Ahab shall be massacred—that the kinsmen of Ahaziah and the Baal worshipers shall be extirpated from the face of the Earth. He takes a new point of departure when he challenges the sons of Ahab, saying:

“Look even out the best and meetest of your master’s sons, and set him on his father’s throne, and fight for your master’s house.”

All this was a declaration of warlike intention on the part of Jehu. But Jehu’s character as a soldier was too well known to permit the rulers of Jezreel and the elders to entertain the thought of encountering him in open battle. So they made this answer:

“We are thy servants, and will do all that thou shalt bid us; we will not make any king. Do thou that which is good in thine eyes.”

Then Jehu set up a test of their obedience. He did impose on them hard work. He said:

“If ye be mine, and if ye will hearken unto my voice, take ye the heads of the men your master’s sons, and come to me to Jezreel by tomorrow this time.”

The word was enough. The heads of seventy men were put into baskets and sent to Jehu at Jezreel. Jehu pronounced the men who had beheaded the sons of Ahab guiltless in respect of their deaths, because what they did had been done judicially, under royal command.

Some think that Jehu wished to make them guilty of the massacre of the princes, while he had slain but one king. On the whole, however, it is better to consider that Jehu exculpates the men who had only executed his command.

The slaughter of the priests is one of the most dramatic incidents in all this portion of biblical history. Jehu proceeded by way of strategy. It is impossible to justify the spirit of the policy of Jehu in this matter. He said he would serve Baal “much.”

It has been thought that he was thinking of his intended holocaust of human victims; but, whatever his thoughts, it is impossible to deny that the impression he produced was that Jehu was about to become a worshiper of Baal. This reading is imported into the narrative in these words: “But Jehu did it in subtilty, to the intent that he might destroy the worshipers of Baal.”

Now a solemn assembly for Baal was proclaimed. From all Israel the devotees of Baal came, so that there was not left a man that came not. The house of Baal was full from one end to the other. And they were all clothed with appropriate vestments.

Jehu was careful that not one worshiper of Jehovah should be in the assembly, but those of Baal only.

When the worshipers went in to offer sacrifices and burnt offerings Jehu stationed fourscore men without, and said: “If any of the men whom I have brought into your hands escape, he that letteth him go, his life shall be for the life of him.”

Then came the moment of massacre.

“And they smote them with the edge of the sword; and the guard and the captains cast them out, and went to the city of the house of Baal.”

Jehu’s guards, having completed their bloody work in the court of the temple, hastened up the steps into the sanctuary itself, which, like the Temple of Solomon, was made after the pattern of a fortress.

The images of Baal were brought forth out of the house of Baal and burned. The image of Baal was broken down, and his house was broken down, and the whole scene was utterly dishonored and desecrated.

“Thus Jehu destroyed Baal out of Israel.”

But the way was wrong. Perhaps, for the period within which the destruction took place, it was the only ministry that was possible. The incident, however, must stand in historical isolation, being utterly useless as a lesson or guide for our imitation.

We are called upon to destroy Baal out of Israel, but not with sword or staff or implement of war.

“The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but are mighty, through God, to the pulling down of strongholds of Satan.”

Jehu did his rough-and-ready work—a work, as we have said, adapted to the barbaric conditions under which he reigned. But there must be no Jehu in the Christian Church, except in point of energy, decision, obedience and single-mindedness of purpose. A Christian persecution is a contradiction in terms.

When Christians see evil, they are not to assail it with weapons of war; they are to preach against it, to argue against it, to pray about it, to bring all possible moral force to bear upon it, but in no case is physical persecution to accompany the propagation of Christianity. Not only so. Any destruction that is accomplished by physical means is a merely temporary destruction. There is in reality nothing in it.

When progress of a Christian kind is reported it must not be tainted by the presence of physical severity. We can not silence evil speakers by merely closing their mouths. So long as we can hold those mouths there may indeed be silence, but not until the spirit has been changed—not until the very heart has been converted and born again—can the evil-doer be silenced and his mouth be dispossessed of wicked speech and filled with words of honesty and pureness. Jehu himself was not a good man. “From the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, Jehu departed not from after them.”

For reasons of state policy, Jehu maintained the worship of Bethel and Dan.

“But Jehu took no heed to walk in the law of the Lord God of Israel with all his heart; for he departed not from the sins of Jeroboam, which made Israel to sin.”

Jehu had done homage to Jehovah by extirpating the foreign Baal worship, but he patronized and actively supported the irregular mode of worshiping Jehovah established by Jeroboam as the state religion of the northern kingdom. He attempted to serve God and Mammon. Religion was to him but a political instrument.

Jehu did the particular kind of work which had been assigned to him—a work of destruction and blood. Perhaps he alone of all the people of his time could have accomplished this task. But Jehu must stand in history as a warning rather than as an example.

JOB.

Sometimes I have most clearly seen the whole tragedy of Job in a waking dream, the whole passing before me in twilight shadows, losing itself in thick darkness, reappearing in light like the dawn—always changing, always solemn, always instructive; a thing that surely happened, because a thing now happening in all the substance of its eternal meaning.

Is it a pillar grand in height, and finished all over with the dainty care of an artist whose life has been spent in learning and applying the art of color?

How stately! How Heaven seeking because Heaven worthy! While I admire, I wonder religiously.

I see the hosts of darkness gathering around the erstwhile flashing capital, and resting over it like midnight sevenfold in blackness; then the lightning gleams from the center of the gloom, then the fire-bolt flies forth and smites the coronal once so glorious, and dashes it in hot dust to the Earth, and the tall stalk—so upright, so delicate, so like a well-trained life—reels, totters and falls in an infinite crash!

Is it true?

Every word of it. True now—may be true in thee and me, O man, so assured of stability and immovableness. There is danger in high places. Is there a Spirit which hates all noble-mindedness and seeks to level the spiritual pile with mean things? Evil Spirit! The very Devil—hating all goodness because hating God!

But stop.

After all, who smote the pillar? Whose lightning was used to overthrow the fair masonry?

O God of gods, the devil’s Creator and Master, without whom Satan could not be, nor hell, nor trees forbidden, nor blast of death—O Mystery of Being—what can our souls say in their groaning? And how, through anguish so intolerable, can they pray?

I am afraid to build, because the higher the tower the more deadly the fall. Dost Thou watch our rising towers and delight to rain Thy fires on them, lest our pride should abound and our damnation be aggravated by our vanity?

And God’s own Book it is that tells the good man’s pains, and that revels in swelling rhetoric over the rottenness and despair of the man who feared God and eschewed evil! And what unguided hands—if hands unguided—set the tale of wrong and woe and sorrow next to the very Psalter? Is not the irony immoral, because cruel? Or is there meaning in all this?

Is it Life’s story down to the very letter and jot of reality? How better to come out of the valley than to the harping and song of musicians who have known the way of the Almighty and tasted the counsels of Heaven?

Cheer thee, O poor soul! Thou art today miserable as Job, but tomorrow thou mayest dance to the music of David. Tomorrow thou mayest have a harp of thine own.

A tree of the Lord’s right hand planting arises loftily and broadly in the warm air. Birds twitter and sing as they flit through its warp and woof of light and shade. It is a tree whose leaves might heal the nations.

What sudden wind makes it writhe? What Spirit torments every branch and leaf? What Demon yells in triumph as the firm trunk splits and falls in twain? Was it grown for such a fate as this?

Better if the seed had been crushed and thrown into the fire than that it should have been thus reared and perfected and then put to shame among the trees of the field.

Who can give speech to this flood as it plunges from rock to rock in the black night time? Hush! There is a man’s voice in the infinite storm: “Let the day perish in which I was born! Let it be darkness; let that night be joyless, let no song enter into it; let them who curse the day stigmatize it who are ready to stir up the leviathan. Why died I not from the womb? Then had I lain down and been quiet; I had slept; … there the wicked cease from troubling, and there the wearied mighty rest; the prisoners sweetly repose together, they hear not the voice of the exactor, and the slave is free from his lord.”

These are human words, but are they not too strong, too rhetorical, to be true?

No! For who can mechanize the rhetoric of woe?

“Why is life given to the miserable, and to one who would be blithe to find a grave? I have no quiet, no repose, for trouble on trouble came, and my sighs gush out like waters long dammed back.”

No doubt the rhetoric is lofty, yet with a strange familiarity it touches with happy expressiveness all that is most vivid in our remembrance of woe.

“I loathe my life. I will give loose to my complaint. I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. To God I will say: ‘Condemn me not. Show me why Thou contendest with me. As the clay Thou hast fashioned me, and to dust Thou causest me to return. Thou hast poured me as milk and compacted me as cheese. As a fierce lion Thou huntest me; then Thou turnest again and showest Thyself marvelous.’”

Job has found fit words for all mourning souls. So they borrow of him when their own words fail like a stream which the Sun has dried up. What woe the poor little heart can feel! Herein is its greatness. It is, in its own way, as the heart of God.

“Truly, now, He hath worn me out. Thou hast made all my household desolate, and Thou hast shriveled me up. God giveth me up to the ungodly, and flingeth me over into the hands of the wicked. He seized me by the throat and shook me. He breacheth me with breach on breach. He rusheth on me like a man of war.”

In what good man’s sick chamber is not Job welcome? Welcome because he can utter the whole gamut of human woe. He can find words for the heart that is ill at ease, and prayers for lips which have been chilled and silenced by unbelief. His woe belongs to the whole world. All other woe is as the dripping of an icicle compared with the rush of stormy waters.

In the case of Job the internal is proved to be greater than the external. When the trials came one after another like shocks of thunder, “in all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.”

But did he speak? That is the point. If he did not, perhaps he was dazed. He felt a tremendous blow on the forehead, and he reeled, and was not in a condition to bear witness about the matter. If he said any thing, let us know what he did say. Could he speak in that tremendous crisis?

Yes, he spoke. His words are before us. Like a wise man, he went back to first principles. He said:

“Circumstances are nothing; they are temporary arrangements. The man is not what he has, but what he is. I do not hold my life in my hands, saying ‘It weighs so much,’ and count up to a high number.”

Job went back to first principles—back to elementary truths. He said:

“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither [that is, as I began]. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away [as He had a right to do; I had nothing of my own]. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Could Job look over the ages that have been healed and comforted by his example—stimulated to bear the ills of this life by the grateful memory of his invincible patience—surely, even now, in Heaven, he would be taking the reward of his long-continued and noble endurance of the divine visitation.

It may be so with you, poor man or woman. You do not get all the sweet now. This shall be a memory to you in Heaven, long ages hence. The wrestling you have now may minister to you high delight, keen enjoyment and rapture pure and abiding. Who can tell when God’s rewards end? Who will venture to say: “This is the measure of His benediction?”

God is able to give and to do abundantly beyond all that we ask or think. Should any one inquire of you as to your compensation, say: “It is given by instalments—today and tomorrow, in death; in the resurrection, all through the ages of eternity. Ask me thousands of ages hence, and I will reply to your question concerning compensation.”

Life is not limited by the cradle and the tomb, and it is not between these two mean and near points that great questions are to be discussed or determined.

Job has been read by countless readers. His was, of course, a public trial—a tragedy that was wrought out for the benefit of multitudes in all generations. Nevertheless, it is literally and pathetically true that every man, even the most obscure, has his readers—fewer in number, it may be, but equally earnest in attention.

Think you that your children are not taking notice of you—seeing how you bear your temptations, difficulties and anxieties?

Think you not that your eldest boy is kept away from the table of the Lord because you are as atheistic in sorrow as ever Voltaire was?

Do you know that your daughter hates the church because her pious father is only pious in the three Summer months of the year? He curls under the cold and biting wind as much as any Atheist ever did. Therefore, the girl says: “He is a sham and a hypocrite—my father in the flesh, but no relative of mine in the spirit.”

You have your readers. The little Bible of your life is read in your kitchen, in your parlor, in your shop and in your warehouse; and if you do not bear your trials, anxieties and difficulties with a Christian chivalry and heroism, what is there but mockery on Earth and gloating in hell?

May God give us grace to bear chastisement nobly and serenely; bless us with the peace which passeth understanding—with the quietness kindred to the calm of God; help us when death is in the house, when poverty is on the hearth-stone.

When there is a storm blinding the only poor little window we have, let us say: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him. If I perish I will pray, and perish only here.” That is Christianity—not some clever chatter and able controversy about metaphysical points; but noble temper, high behavior, faultless constancy and an invincible fortitude in the hour of trial and in the agony of pain.

MICAIAH.

Micaiah was the son of Imlah, a prophet of Samaria, who, in the last year of the reign of Ahab, king of Israel, predicted his defeat and death, B. C. 897. This was three years after the great battle with Ben-hadad, king of Syria, in which the extraordinary number of 100,000 Syrian soldiers is said to have been slain, without reckoning the 27,000 who, it is asserted, were killed by the falling of the wall at Aphek.

Ahab had proposed to Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, that they should jointly go up to battle against Ramoth-gilead, which Ben-hadad was bound by treaty to restore to Ahab.

Jehoshaphat assented in cordial words to the proposal, but he suggested that they should first “inquire at the word of Jehovah.” Accordingly, Ahab assembled four hundred prophets, while in an open space at the gate of the city of Samaria he and Jehoshaphat sat in royal robes to meet and consult them.

The prophets gave a unanimously favorable response. Among them was Zedekiah, the son of Chenaanah. He made horns of iron as a symbol, and announced, as from Jehovah, that with those horns Ahab would push the Syrians till he consumed them. For some reason which is unexplained, and can now only be conjectured, King Jehoshaphat was dissatisfied with the answer, and asked if there was no other prophet of Jehovah at Samaria.

Ahab replied that there was yet one—Micaiah, the son of Imlah; but in words which obviously call to mind a passage in the “Iliad” (i. 106), he added: “I hate him, for he does not prophesy good concerning me, but evil.”

Nevertheless, Micaiah was sent for; and after a vain attempt had been made to tamper with him, he first expressed an ironical concurrence with the four hundred prophets, and then boldly foretold the defeat of Ahab’s army and the death of Ahab.

In contradiction of the false four hundred, Micaiah said he had seen Jehovah sitting on His throne, and all the host of Heaven standing by Him—on His right hand and on His left. He said Jehovah asked: “Who shall persuade Ahab to go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?” A Spirit came forth and volunteered to do so. On being asked “Wherewithal?” the Spirit answered that he would go forth and be a lying Spirit in the mouth of all the prophets.

Irritated by the account of this vision, Zedekiah struck Micaiah on the cheek.

Then Ahab ordered that Micaiah be taken to prison, and be fed on bread and water till his return to Samaria. But Ahab was killed, and Micaiah’s fate is unknown.

This incident is found in both the first Book of Kings and in the second Book of Chronicles.

The Cross From the Painting by Gustave Dore.

MOSES IN THE BULRUSHES.—Exodus, ii.

MOSES.

Moses loses nothing by diffuseness. Even in days that were made long by intolerable monotony—in which men lived centuries because of weariness—Moses did not shrink from a condensation unparalleled in human literature.

Considered as embracing the history of one month only, the third Book of Moses may claim to be the most remarkable book in the Old Testament. Containing twenty-seven chapters, ranging its contents under sixteen different categories, and requiring to be actively represented within the space of twenty-eight days—it may, in its own degree, claim an energy not inferior to the Book of Genesis.

The same fearlessness of treatment is distinctive of both books. The reverent audacity which represented creation as the work of six days—whatever the measure of a day may be—did not shrink from focalizing into one month the whole discipline of life.

Moses’ words could hardly have been fewer if he had lived in our time of feverish haste and tumult. To put up the Heavens and the Earth in one chapter was a miracle in authorship. Yet, well pondered, it was the only thing to be done. Any poet could have built them in endless stanzas, and any philosopher could have begun the infinite story in a book too large for the world to hold.

Moses chose the more excellent way, creating creation with a swiftness that has dazed a literal criticism ever since—literal criticism that has but one season in its dreary year, a year that knows nothing of snow-blossom or wedded light and song. But this very haste was part of the man.

The Moses of Poetry required fifty-one days for the revolution of his “Iliad”; the Moses of Revelation only took a week for the settlement of the Heavens and the Earth, and in that week he found one whole day of rest for the Creator.

This action was entirely characteristic of Moses, for he was the most wrathful man as well as the meekest—killing, smiting, destroying and burning with anger, as well as praying like the father-priest of his people.

In a sense obvious enough he was the protoplastic Christ—for was not he who described himself as “meek and lowly in heart” the scourger of trespassers, and did he not burn the religious actors of his day?

Moses and Christ both did things with most startling rapidity. In their very soul they were akin. They were “straitened” until their work was “accomplished.” The Pentateuch and the Gospels have action enough in them to fill innumerable volumes, yet there is an infinite calm in both—the haste being in the temporary framework, the calm being in the eternal purpose.

Think of these twenty-seven chapters constituting the discipline of one month! The reflections started by this circumstance culminate in a sense of pain, for who can bear this grievous toil or endure this sting of accusation? There is no respite.

Egyptian burdens were for the body, but these wilderness exactions tormented the soul, and by so doing made Egyptian memories bright. The trial of muscle is nothing to the trial of patience. Men may sleep after labor, but an unquiet conscience keeps the eyes wide open. This discipline afflicted both the body and the soul, and thus drained the entire strength of the people.

This conscious toil must have been accompanied by unconscious inspiration—a reciprocal action impossible in theory but well understood in spiritual experience.

We resume our burdens in the very act of dreading them. We pray the next prayer in the very process of waiting for answers to a thousand prayers to which God has paid no known heed. Yesterday’s sacrifice has nothing to do with this day’s sin, except to remind us that today must provide its own sacrifice.

This was so with the Jews; this is precisely so with ourselves. Yet we boast our liberty, and suppose that in leaping one inch from the Earth we have broken the tether of gravitation.

As put before us in this manual called Leviticus, the discipline of the month seems to be more than we could endure; and this we say in ignorance of the fact that our own manual imposes a more severe discipline. Our pity for the Jews arises out of the apparently ineradicable sophism that spiritual service is easier than bodily exercise. A most deadly sophism is this, and prevalent yet, notwithstanding the rebuke and condemnation of universal history.

In no spiritual sense is Leviticus an obsolete book. Moses is not dead. The inventors of the alphabet have some rights even in “Paradise Lost,” and quite a large property in “Euclid.” It is not grateful on our part to forget the primers through which we passed to the encyclopedias, though their authors were but our intellectual nurses. In no mere dream was Moses present when Christ communed with Him concerning the Exodus that was to be accomplished at Jerusalem, and in no dramatic sense did Elijah watch the consummation of prophecy.

The wonder is that Christians should be so willing to regard the Pentateuch as obsolete. This is practically a foregone conclusion—to such an extent, certainly, that the Pentateuch is tolerated rather than studied for edification by the rank and file of Christians.

Without the Pentateuch, Christ as revealed in the Gospels would have been impossible; and without Christ the Pentateuch would have been impossible.

I venture upon this proposition because I find no great-event in the Pentateuch that is not for some purpose of argument or illustration used by Christ or by His disciples and apostles in the interests of what is known as evangelical truth.

It lies within easy proof that Christ is the text of the Old Testament and that the Old Testament is the text of Christ. What use is made in the New Testament of the creation of the universe, the faith of Abraham, the rain of manna, the lifting up of the serpent and the tabernacle of witness! The sublime apology of Stephen epitomizes the Old Testament, and the Epistle to the Hebrews could not have been written but for the ritual of Exodus and Leviticus. In its purely moral tone the Old Testament is of kindred quality with the New.

Take an instance from Leviticus. Three forms of evil are recognized in one of its most ardent chapters—namely, Violence, Deceit and Perjury. This is a succession amounting to a development, and, unwittingly it may or may not be, confirming that law of evolution which is as happily illustrated in morals as in physics.

Men begin with acts of violence, then go on to silent deceit and calculation, and close with a profanation of the holiest terms. The early sinners robbed gardens and killed brothers; the later sinners “agreed together” to “lie unto God.” It is something, therefore, to find in so ancient a book as Leviticus recognition of an order which is true to philosophy and to history.

But the proof that Moses and Christ are identical in moral tone is to be found in the process which offenders were commanded to adopt. By no sacerdotal jugglery was the foul blot to be removed; by no sigh of selfishness could the inward corruption be permitted to evaporate; by no investment of cheap tears could thieves compound for felony.

First, there must be restoration; second, there must be an addition of a fifth part of the whole; third, the priest must be faced as the very representative of God and a trespass offering be laid on the altar. After atonement forgiveness would come—a white angel from Heaven—and dwell in the reclaimed and sanctified heart. All the past would be driven away as a black cloud and all the present filled with a light above the brightness of the Sun.

What is this but an outline or forecast of what Christ said when He drove the hostile and vindictive man from the altar, bidding him first be reconciled with his brother and at peace with society? Christianity is not a substitute for morality; it is morality inspired, glorified and crowned. Say that the ritual was sanitary rather than doctrinal or theological. What then? All divine things are first sanitary, but not necessarily bounded by that term.

It will be found that the practice of genuine cleanness, chemical as well as mechanical, will be followed by a philosophy, and that the morality of cleanness will be followed by a theology.

Accustom a man to look out for bullocks and rams and lambs “without blemish,” and he will find that he can not stop at that point. He has begun an education which can only culminate in the prayer: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Yet no word of that holy thought was named in the original instructions.

Leviticus is the gospel of the Pentateuch—glistening with purity, turning law into music and spreading a banquet in the wilderness. But its ritual is dead. This is hard to believe—hard because religious vanity is fond of ritualism, which makes no demand on the conscience. Yet ritualism had a divinely appointed function in the education of the awakening mind, and was the only influence which could hold the attention of a people to whom freedom was a new experience.

Spectacular religion is alphabetic religion; therefore, to revert to it is to ignore every characteristic and impulse of manhood and progress. But they who say so be prepared to complete the philosophy which that contention initiates.

It is not enough to dismiss ritualism on the ground that it has been displaced by spiritual worship. Admit that such is the case, and other and broader admissions are involved in the plea, and can only be shirked at the expense of consistency.

It is generally admitted, for example, that the Old Testament law has been displaced by a New Testament principle. So Ritualism and Law, in their ancient forms, have passed away. But let us be careful. When we say Ritualism and Law, we mean in reality the letter, and it is evident that if any one letter can be displaced every other letter may be outlived and completed. And what is “the letter” but a symbol of flesh—visibleness, objectivity, historic fact and bulk?

Apostle Paul went so far as to say that even Christ was no longer known “after the flesh”—yea, though He had been known after the flesh, that kind of knowledge was for ever done away, and another knowledge had permanently taken its place.

The Church has never adopted the whole meaning of that teaching. Willing enough to consign Leviticus to the shades, the Church still clings to some sort of bodily Christ—the figure of a man—a bulk to be at least imaginatively touched. This is easily accounted for without suggesting superstition, and yet it might be done away with without imperiling faith. We are held in bondage by a mistaken conception of personality. When we think of that term we think of ourselves.

But even admitting the necessity of this, we may by a correct definition of personality acquire a higher conception of our own being. Instead of saying personality is this or that, after the manner of a geometrical figure, binding it to four points and otherwise limiting it, say that personality is the unit of being, and instantly every conception is enlarged and illuminated—the meaning being that personality is the starting point of conscious existence; not the fullness, but the outline; not the maximum, but the minimum; the very smallest conception which the mind can lay hold of—the Euclidic point, to be carried on into ratios and dimensions which originate a new vocabulary.

We do not, then, define “God” when we describe Him as a “Person,” but we merely begin to define Him; in other words, we say that God can not be less than a Person. What more He is, we must gradually and adoringly discover.

So far as Christ is concerned, there is one enlargement of His personality which no school of thinkers will dispute. This is rhetorically expressed by M. Renan, when he says of Jesus:

“A thousand times more living, a thousand times more loved, since Thy death than during the days of Thy pilgrimage here below, Thou wilt become to such a degree the Corner-Stone of humanity that to tear Thy name from this world would be to shake it to its foundations.”

If ritualism has been displaced by spirituality, and if law has been suspended by a principle—in other words, if the local has made way for the universal—why shrink from the admission that limited Personality has been exchanged for unlimited Influence?

How would Moses regard nineteenth century worship—say, of a Low Church and Evangelical type, as the true evolution of Leviticus? Where is the resemblance? The eye that can see the similitude is surely looking through an adapted medium. Yet the mystery would be dissolved if the Book of Leviticus were not open to reference.

The man is the completion of the child, but the child is no longer in existence.

The fruit is the fulfillment of the blossom, but the blossom is no longer available for comparison and for contrast.

Christianity is the consummation of Leviticus, but Leviticus remains—unlike the child and the blossom—and offers a series of dissonances or dissimilarities of the most positive quality.

Yet if Moses were living now he would be unchurched if he refused to identify the meaning of Leviticus in the service of the Christian sanctuary—the Papist nearest in gorgeousness, the Protestant claiming to be nearest in doctrine.

The Nonconformist Moses, in the absence of inspiration, would in this matter be the arch-heretic of the century.

NEBUCHADNEZZAR.

The moral character of Nebuchadnezzar is not such as entitles him to our approval. Besides the overweening pride which brought on him such terrible chastisement, we note a violence and fury common enough in Oriental monarchs of the weaker kind, but from which the greatest of them have usually been free; while at the same time we observe a cold and relentless cruelty that is particularly revolting. The blinding of Zedekiah may possibly be justified as an ordinary Eastern practice, though it is the earliest case of the kind on record; but the refinement of cruelty by which he was made to witness his sons’ execution before his eyes were put out was more worthy of a Dionysius or a Domitian than of a really great king.

Again, the detention of Jehoiachin in prison thirty-six years for an offence committed at the age of eighteen is a severity surpassing Oriental harshness.

Against these grave faults we have nothing to set, unless it be a feeble trait of magnanimity in the pardon of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego—when he found that he was without power to punish them.

It has been thought remarkable that to a man of this character God should have vouchsafed a revelation of the future by means of visions. But the circumstance, however it may disturb our preconceived notions, is not really at variance with the general laws of God’s providence, as revealed to us in Scripture.

As with His natural gifts, so with His supernatural gifts—they are not confined to the worthy. Even under Christianity, miraculous powers were sometimes possessed by those who made an ill use of them. And God, it is plain, did not leave the old heathen world without some supernatural aid, but made His presence felt from time to time in visions, through prophets, or even by a voice from Heaven.

It is only necessary to refer to the histories of Pharaoh, Abimelech, Job and Balaam in order to establish the parity of Nebuchadnezzar’s visions with other facts recorded in the Bible. He was warned, and the nations over which he ruled were warned through him, God leaving not Himself “without witness” even in those dark times.

Abydenus, a heathen writer who generally drew his inspiration from Berosus, ascribes to Nebuchadnezzar a miraculous speech just before his death, announcing to the Babylonians the speedy coming of “a Persian mule,” who, with the aid of the Medes, would enslave Babylon.

QUEEN OF SHEBA.

The Queen of Sheba is a model to all inquirers. It was not enough for her to have heard of the fame of Solomon and to have admired him at a distance as a unique genius. Her admiration excited her interest and suspicion, and, being a woman of penetrating mind, she desired to put riddles and enigmas whereby she could test the proverbial wisdom of Solomon.

When she arrived at his court she did not put flippant questions to King Solomon. She rather sought out the most difficult inquiries which she could possibly make.

It is recorded that Solomon told the queen all her questions, and there was nothing hid from Solomon which he told her not. She was astounded by what she heard and what she saw. She declared that the half had not been told her.

The visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon, though not strictly commercial, arose out of commercial intercourse. The territory of Sheba, according to Strabo, reached so far north as to meet that of the Nabathæans, although its proper seat was at the southernmost angle of Arabia.

The very rich presents made by the queen show the extreme value of her commerce with the Hebrew monarch. This early interchange of hospitality derives a peculiar interest from the fact that in much later ages—those of the Maccabees and downward—the intercourse of the Jews with Sheba became so intimate and their influence and power so great. Jewish circumcision took root there, and princes held sway there who were called Jewish.

The language of Sheba is believed to have been very different from the literate Arabic; yet, like the Ethiopic, it belonged to the great Syro-Arabian family, and was not alien to the Hebrew in the same sense that the Egyptian language was.

The great ease with which the pure monotheism of the Maccabees spread itself in Sheba gives plausibility to the opinion that even at the time of Solomon the people of Sheba had much religious superiority over the Arabs and Syrians in general. If so, it becomes clear how the curiosity of the southern queen would be worked on by seeing the riches of the distant monarch, whose purer creed must have been carried everywhere with them by his sailors and servants.

REHOBOAM.

“So Jeroboam and all Israel came and spake to Rehoboam, saying: ‘Thy father made our yoke grievous. Now, therefore, ease thou somewhat the grievous servitude of thy father, and his heavy yoke that he put upon us, and we will serve thee.’”

A cause so stated must succeed. There will be difficulty, but the end is assured.

The reasonable always triumphs, due time being given for the elucidation of its purposes and the manifestation of its real spirit. Violence can have but a short day; the tempest cries itself to rest.

The speech of this man was a speech strong in reason. “Ease thou somewhat the grievous servitude of thy father, and his heavy yoke that he put upon us, and we will serve thee.” They wanted ease for service—for loyalty. Where there is no ease how can there be homage, thankfulness, devotion or any of the high qualities of patriotism?

Men who are not disquieted are prone to tell others to bear their burdens uncomplainingly. We ought to hear what they have to say who feel the iron. Our inquiry should be: “How does it suit you? What is the effect of the piercing iron on the soul? How does manhood bear the heel of oppression?”

The sufferers should sometimes be admitted to the witness-box.

There is a danger lest our personal comfortableness should disqualify us for judging the case of down-trodden men.

Wherever there is weakness the Christian Church should be found. Wherever there is reasonableness the Christian sanctuary should offer hospitality. The Christian sanctuary ceases to be the Tabernacle of God among men when it shuts its door on the cries of reason, the petitions of weakness, the humble requests of those who ask for nothing exaggerated, but simply ask to have their misery mitigated somewhat, that their loyalty may be of a larger and better quality. The names are ancient, but the circumstances may be painfully modern.

It is the peculiarity of the Bible that it is always getting in our way. It has a word on every subject. Is there any thing more detestable than that a man who has his own way seven days a week, whose footsteps are marked by prosperity, whose very breathing is a commercial success, should stand up and tell men who are bleeding at every pore to be quiet and contented, and not create disturbance in the body politic?

If Jeroboam had come with a petition conceived in another tone it ought to have been rejected. It would have been irrational, violent and contemptuous; but the reasonableness of the request will insure its victory in the long run.

How easy it is to think of Rehoboam as the foolish son of a wise father! But are we not unjust to the son in so regarding him? Was Solomon the wise man he is often made out to be? The answer would be: “Yes—No.” There was no greater fool than Solomon; and he attained his supremacy in folly because there was no man so wise. “If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” “How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” If he had not been son of the morning some shallow pit might have held him; but, being son of the morning and detaching himself from the gravitation of God, the pit into which he falls is bottomless.

Pliny says no man can be always wise. That is true philosophically and experimentally; for all men have vulnerable heels, or are exposed to temptations to lightness of mind, amounting in some instances almost to frivolity. They are also the subjects of a most singular rebound, which makes them appear the more frivolous because when we last saw them they were absorbed in the solemnity of prayer.

Solomon was not wise in this matter of government. The history shows that the people were appealing, not against Rehoboam, who had yet had no opportunity of proving his quality as a king, but against his father. “Thy father made our yoke grievous.” We are prone to copy the defects of our ancestors and our idols rather than their excellences.

Folly has often more charms for us than wisdom. When Diogenes discoursed of philosophy his auditors turned away from him, but when he began to play frivolous music or to sing frivolous songs the crowds thronged about him, and he said: “Ye gods! How much more popular is folly than wisdom!” Even there he spoke as a philosopher.

Rehoboam made a cautious reply, and therein he began well. He said to the petitioners: “Come again unto me after three days.” This looked hopeful.

King Rehoboam utilized the interval by taking counsel with “the old men who had stood before Solomon, his father, while he yet lived, saying: ‘What counsel give ye me to return answer to this people?’ And they spake unto him, saying: ‘If thou be kind to this people and please them, and speak good words to them, they will be thy servants for ever.’”

Rich is the king whose old men talk in such a strain. They were patriots and philanthropists and philosophers; they were Christians before the time.

Marvelous is the power of kindness. They will do most in life who are most considerate. They may be charged with sentimentalism by those who do not understand the power of human feeling, but they will be given credit for philosophy by men who understand the genius of sympathy.

What a message would this have been to return to the complaining people! If, when the people returned after three days, Rehoboam had spoken so, the welkin would have rung with the resonant cheers of a delighted and thankful people. Kindness is not weakness.

But Rehoboam forsook the counsel which the old men gave him, and took counsel with the young men who had been brought up with him and who stood before him. He asked them the same question he had asked the old men. Their answer was:

“Say unto them: ‘My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s loins. For, whereas my father put a heavy yoke upon you, I will put more to your yoke. My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.’”

Woe to the nation whose young men talked so! A young oppressor is an infant devil. Young men talking so will ruin any occasion.

Are there such things in history as retorts, reprisals, rebounds and consequences? Let it be known and laid down as the basic principle of all action—social, ecclesiastical and imperial—that there is no right of tyranny.

It might be supposed that the king had taken a most patriotic course in consulting the young and the old. He had done nothing of the kind. He had omitted to consult Him who had called his house to the royalty.

Rehoboam should have consulted the King Maker whose throne is on the circle of the Earth, whose scepter touches the horizon and whose will is the law of both monarchy and commonwealth.

The greater the man, the nearer should he stand to God; yea, he should be within whisper-reach of the Lord of lords, asking Him in every crisis of national history what Israel ought to do—what the country ought to answer—what is the will of Heaven.

Rehoboam answered the people roughly, and forsook the counsel of the old men. “So the king hearkened not unto the people.”

The Gospel never gives liberty to oppression. Employers may adopt this course if they please, but they will find it end in ruin. We must recognize the difference between employing cattle and employing men. A parent may adopt this course of Rehoboam, if he so chooses, but his children will chastise him and sting him with many a disappointment; or, if he does not live to see the wreck of their manhood, they will execrate his unfragrant memory.

Rehoboam will be punished; have no fear of that. “With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” You can make your whips thongs of scorpions, but on your own back shall the lacerating lash be laid; you can play the fantastic trick before high Heaven and make the angels weep, but the bitterness shall be yours. The triumphing of such a policy is short, and the end is everlasting punishment.

SHISHAK.

Shishak was a king of Egypt contemporary with Jeroboam, to whom he gave an asylum when he fled from Solomon. This was indicative of his politic disposition to encourage the weakening of the neighboring kingdom, the growth of which under David and Solomon was probably regarded by the kings of Egypt with some alarm.

After Jeroboam had become king of Israel, and probably at his suggestion, Shishak invaded the kingdom of Judah (B. C. 971) at the head of an immense army, and after having taken the fortified places advanced against Jerusalem.

Satisfied with the submission of Rehoboam and with the immense spoils of the Temple, the king of Egypt withdrew without imposing any onerous conditions on the humbled grandson of David.

Shishak has been identified as the first king of the twenty-second or Diospolitan dynasty, the Sesonchis of profane history. His name has been found on the Egyptian monuments in the form of Sheshonk. He is said to have been of Ethiopian origin, and it is thought that, with the aid of the military caste, he dethroned the Pharaoh who gave his daughter to Solomon.

SOLOMON.

The first prominent scene in the reign of Solomon is one which presents his character in its noblest aspect. There were two holy places which divided the reverence of the people—the ark and its provisional tabernacle at Jerusalem and the original Tabernacle of the Congregation, which, after many wanderings, was then pitched at Gibeon.

It was thought right that the new king should offer solemn sacrifices at both.

After those at Gibeon there came that vision of the night which has in all ages borne its noble witness to the hearts of rulers.

Not for riches, long life or victory over enemies did the son of David—then, at least, true to his high calling, feeling himself as “a little child” in comparison with the vastness of his work—offer his supplications, but for a “wise and understanding heart,” that he might judge the people.

The “speech pleased the Lord.”

There came in answer the promise of a wisdom “like which there had been none before—like which there should be none after.” So far all was well. The prayer was a right and noble one. Yet there is also a contrast between it and the prayers of David which accounts for many other contrasts.

The desire of David’s heart is not chiefly for wisdom, but for holiness. He is conscious of an oppressing evil, and seeks to be delivered from it. He repents and falls, and repents again.

Solomon asks only for wisdom. He has a lofty ideal before him, and seeks to accomplish it, but he is as yet haunted by no deeper yearnings, and speaks as one who has no need of repentance.

Then began Solomon’s marvelous development as a builder and statesman.

He was not content to build the house of the Lord alone. This is a remarkable circumstance, as illustrating the spirit which is created and sustained by all truly religious exercises. It would have been ambition enough for any man religiously uninspired to have erected such an edifice as the Temple. Most men are contented to do one thing, and to rest their fame on its peculiar excellence.

Having completed the house of the Lord and his own house, Solomon began to build the cities which Huram had restored to him, and to cause the children of Israel to dwell there.

A religion that ends only in ceremony building is little better than a superstition. No man can be zealously affected in the interests of the Church without having his whole philanthropic spirit enlarged and ennobled, so that he may become a builder of cities as well as a builder of churches. It must be remembered, on the other hand, that he who builds a synagogue really helps to build the town in which it is located. A synagogue, temple or church is not to be looked on in its singularity, as if it were so many walls, with so many doors and so many windows. A church is a representative institution, through which should flow rivers that will fertilize all the districts of the city—rivers of knowledge, rivers of charity, rivers of brotherhood, rivers of co-operation—so that men should turn to the Church, assured that every rational and healthy expectation would be satisfied by its provisions.

Having completed for the time being the measure of building on which his mind was set, Solomon went forth to war.

It would seem as if, in ancient days, kings could not be satisfied to dwell at peace. Even Solomon, whose very name signifies peace, had in him the military spirit which was characteristic of his race and time; it was in him, indeed, as the word of the living God. Solomon did not go forth to war for the sake of war; he believed he was obeying a divinely implanted instinct, or carrying out to the letter some divinely written law.

Having passed through another military period, King Solomon began once more to build. He built Tadmor, and all the store cities; he built Beth-horon the Upper and Beth-horon the Lower, and fenced cities with walls, gates and bars.

A busy time it was in the reign of Solomon. But even all this building is not without its suggestion of a corresponding evil.

Why were the cities fenced? Why the gates? Why the bars? We have instances of the same kind in our own civilization—silent witnesses against the honesty of the society in which we live. Every bolt on the door is a moral accusation; every time we turn the lock we mean that there is an enemy outside who may endeavor to violate the sanctity of the house.

We sometimes forget the moral suggestiveness even of our commonest institutions and plans of procedure. Every precaution that is taken for our preservation implies the presence of hostile elements in the society that is round about us.

Solomon may be taken in this instance as representing the great doctrine that men should seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and afterward attend to minor matters, or even leave those minor matters to the adjustment of providence.

Solomon is represented as first most anxious about the Temple, giving himself wholly to its erection, occupying his thoughts night and day, turning every thing to account in its relation to the Temple. Having finished that marvelous structure, he was prepared to descend to other levels and do the commoner work which lay to his hand.

Many persons leave the temple half finished. What wonder if they go out to the war and return wounded and disabled? Our religious purposes are broken off. What wonder if our political ends pierce us and sting us by way of retribution?

“But of the children of Israel did Solomon make no servants for his work; but they were men of war, and chief of his captains, and captains of his chariots and horsemen.”

The statesmanship of Solomon is as distinctly proved by this arrangement as by any thing we have yet seen in his whole policy. Solomon knew that one man was not as good as another, however much democratic philosophy may have endeavored to prove the contrary. One man is a genius, but another man is a slave—an imitator, a hewer of wood; very serviceable, and in fact indispensable, but not adorned with the very highest excellence and dignity of mind.

Solomon made a distribution of classes, saying in effect that some men can do the drudgery, some men can dig and build, some can pull down and take away and make ready for the exertions of others; the higher class of men can think and direct, for they are inspired with the genius of administration, and are men of powerful mind, of fertile resources in government and in war. So Solomon made the best use of the material at his disposal—not getting great men to do small work or setting small men to fail in great work.

Adaptation is the secret of success. For want of knowing this, many men fail in life.

There are employers who are making themselves but little better than toilers, when they might by an expenditure of money apparently distinctly not economical very greatly assist the progress and solidity of their fortunes. A man may be industrious in a way which involves the absolute frittering and humiliation of his energies.

We are to be careful not only to be industrious, but industrious about the right things and in the right proportion. A man might slave himself to death cutting down wood or in throwing away stones, but if some other man of inferior mental faculty could be employed to do that work the superior man should turn his attention to other and nobler pursuits, and thus with smaller expenditure of strength he might be doing immeasurably greater good.

If the thinker is not to degrade himself to the level of a drudge, neither is the drudge to attempt to force his way to positions for which he is not qualified. Nothing is mean that is not meanly done.

The Canaanites might be as useful as the Israelites in their own way. With the eye of a statesman and with the inspiration of a genius, Solomon saw that he must distribute and classify men, and set each man to do that for which he was best fitted. Even Solomon could not do all the work alone.

“And Solomon brought up the daughter of Pharaoh out of the city of David unto the house that he had built for her; for he said: ‘My wife shall not dwell in the house of David, king of Israel, because the places are holy whereunto the ark of the Lord hath come.’”

This may be taken as an instance of punctilious morality. We are not able to understand all that was involved in the incident. Evidently we are in the presence of conscience working under some eccentric law or suggestion. Yet here is a conscience, and by so much the action of Solomon is to be respected. He will not have any place or institution even ceremonially defiled. He will go back to precedents; he will consult the genius of history; he will preserve the consistency of the royal policy. Solomon felt that the ark of the Lord had sanctified every locality into which it had come, and that a broad distinction must always be maintained between heathenism and Judaism—between the idols of pagan lands and the Spirit of the living God.

In these matters Solomon’s wisdom was displayed as certainly as in the greater concerns of State and Church. We are to remember that at the beginning Solomon was endowed with the spirit of wisdom and of a sound mind. The Lord quickened his sagacity and gave him that marvelous insight which enabled him to penetrate into the interiors and cores which were hidden from the scrutiny of other men.

We are, therefore, to give Solomon credit for being at once wise and conscientious; we are to see in his action the working of a tender conscience. Even though he may be appeasing his conscience by some trick or ceremony, yet he is showing us the working of the moral nature within the kingly breast.

Yet there is a point to be noted here which is common to human experience. Why should Solomon have married the daughter of Pharaoh? Why should he, in the first instance, have placed himself in so vital a relation to heathenism? Are there not men who first plunge into great mistakes, and then seek to rectify their position by zealous care about comparatively trifling details? Do not men make money by base means, and then most zealously betake themselves to bookkeeping, as if they would not spend money except in approved directions?

There is nothing more misleading than a conscience that does not rest on a basis of reason. We are to beware of the creation of a false conscience, or a partial conscience, or a conscience that operates only in given directions, but which makes up for sins of a larger kind by ostentatious devotion at the altar of detail and ceremony and petty ritual.

“Then Solomon offered burnt offerings unto the Lord on the altar of the Lord, which he had built before the porch, even after a certain rate every day, offering according to the commandment of Moses—on the Sabbaths, and on the new moons, and on the solemn feasts, three times in the year, even in the feast of unleavened bread, and in the feast of weeks, and in the feast of tabernacles.”

Solomon was great in burnt offerings. Do not men sometimes make up in burnt offerings what they lack in moral consistency? Is not an ostentatious religion the best proof of internal decay? It ought not to be so.

The hand and the heart should be one; the outward and the inward should correspond; the action should be the incarnation of the thought. We are not always to look on the ceremonial action of the Church as indicative of its real spirituality.

Solomon did not live to a very great age, since he was not more than twenty years old when he ascended the throne. Whether Solomon turned to the Lord again with all his heart—a question widely discussed by the older commentators—can not be ascertained from the Scriptures.

If the Preacher (Koheleth) is traceable to Solomon so far as the leading thoughts are concerned, we should find in this fact an evidence of his conversion, or at least a proof that at the close of his life Solomon discovered the vanity of all earthly possessions and aims, and even declared the fear of God to be the only abiding good with which a man can stand before the judgment of God.

The Temple of Solomon was, according to our ideas of size, a small building. It was less than one hundred and twenty feet long, and less than thirty-five feet broad; in other words, it was not so large as one of the ordinary parish churches of our own land. Much less did it approach to the size of the colossal buildings in Babylon or Egypt. But in Jewish eyes, at the time that it was built, it may have been “great”—that is to say, it may have exceeded the dimensions of any single separate building existing in Palestine up to the time of its erection. It may even have been larger than the buildings which the neighboring nations had erected to their respective gods.

Ancient worship was mainly in the open air, and the temples were viewed as shrines for the Deity and for His priests—not as buildings in which worshipers were to congregate. Hence their comparatively small size.

“And Solomon slept with his fathers, and he was buried in the city of David, his father; and Rehoboam, his son, reigned in his stead.”

This seems to be a lame and impotent conclusion. Yet it distinctly sets forth the common humanity of this most extraordinary and brilliant king. Literally, the passage means that Solomon lay down with his fathers. He might hardly be recognized from the humblest of them. The Sun dies at evening with scarcely a reminder of the glory which shone from him at mid-day.

BASELESS PRIDE.

(This pride-humbling survey of man and his destiny was written by William Knox, a Scotchman.)

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