IX.]

THE PROPHET ONE OF THE PEOPLE.

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perhaps of traditional information on such matters than the Phoenician priests of Jezebel's court. But what they had they would make use of; looking rather to the secret powers of things than to their outward mechanism; referring the former in all cases to the government of a personal being; believing that in many, perhaps in most, cases they were subject to man as His vicegerent.

Supposing the habitual belief and work of the prophet to have been of this kind, it does not seem very strange that he should have been an educator of others, or that one main object of his education should have been to fit them for the exercise of functions like his own. It would have been the most glaring contradiction to all his professions if he had regarded the prophetical power as something bestowed for his honour, a gift to separate him from the rest of the people. In a prophet of Baal such an opinion would have been most natural; in a prophet of the Lord God of Israel it would have been most detestable. God had given His law to the whole nation. All were under it; therefore all might study it and delight themselves in it. It was a law which imported a government over the inner man, over the conscience and heart and will. The conscience and heart and will of every man might be awakened to know the nature of this government, to receive light from the source of light. And since light is given that it may be communicated, since it shines into a mind that it may shine forth from that mind, there was no reason why any one of the Lord's people should not be prophets. It could not indeed be taken for granted that every one would be so. He who worketh all things according to the counsel of His own will, might determine otherwise; He might have other work for his servant to do different from that of de

144

THE TEACHER OF ALL ORDERS.

[Serm.

nouncing the sins of king or priest or people, or of revealing God's judgments and the blessings that would come out of them. But the training of the prophet would not be less suitable for those other works. It would teach the king the ground of his authority, his relations to those whom he governed, his responsibility for the government of them. It would teach the elders of the city that they were not to obey the commands of an evil woman, when she told them to charge an innocent man with blaspheming God and the king that she might get possession of his inheritance. It would teach the priests that they were not to pollute the sacrifices of God, or offer them to devils and not to Him. It would teach the owners of the land, that the land was held by them of Him who had committed it to them in trust for the good of His whole people. It would teach the seller the sin of having the false measure and the bag of deceitful weights. It would teach the master the sin of oppressing the hireling in his wages. It would teach all that they were the members of one commonwealth, over which a higher than Ahab or Jehoram was ruling, and who could and would set aside their rule to assert his own.

The sons of the prophets then were a continual witness to the Israelites against certain errors into which they were apt to fall respecting the prophetical office. The man of God might have been looked upon as a mere separate being, cut off by the awfulness of his character and dignity from the rest of his countrymen; an object of distant admiration or dread, not an example of what they ought to be. These men taken from among themselves and associated with him, declared that he was only withdrawn from their communion that he might the better claim privileges for them which they were in hazard of losing; that he was only chosen out

IX.]

ELISHA'S MIRACLES.

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by the Lord God of Israel, that he might the more clearly understand, and help them to understand, their national calling. If he did any strange acts or put forth any marvellous powers, the people would see that they were exercised not in his own name, but in the name of the Lord God; not for his sake, but for theirs; since some very humble person, scarcely distinguished by a name, known only as one of an order, could perform some of the most important and perilous tasks which were committed to his master. If the sons of the prophets were entrusted with messages like that which one of them bore to Jehu, a proof would be given that the prophet was merely declaring and carrying out a purpose which must be accomplished; he did not go himself to plot against an existing order, or to earn the favour of some particular chieftain.

The repeated allusions to these sons of the prophets in the story of Elisha, are specially worthy of note because there are more passages in that story which favour the notion that the man of God is a worker of prodigies and portents, than in all the rest of the Bible. I do not mean that there is any great number of those stories. Open at hazard the life of almost any conspicuous saint in the Middle Ages, and you will find five miracles attributed to to him for one that is given to Elisha. Of those that are given to him, the greater part are of the same character with those which we have considered hitherto. He teaches the Syrian leper that there is a God in Israel who can deliver from plagues and restore health, as well as the more precious and humbling lesson, that a prophet does not work by enchantments; that a man cannot purchase the mercy and favour of God by great acts and sacrifices; that a simple word, simply obeyed, carries with it a power which does

L

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THE CURSING OF THE CHILDREN.

[Serm. not lie in Abana and Pharphar, the rivers of Damascus, no nor in Jordan, the river of Palestine. Elisha testifies that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, when he sets before a hundred men twenty loaves of bread. He signifies that there are instruments, and those natural instruments, which by the power of God may remove the effects of poison and heal the springs of waters. Finally, he raises the son of the Shunammite woman to life; the story of this raising being no mere repetition of that which is ascribed to his master, but one full of distinct and living incidents, suggesting far more to the heart respecting the love of God. and the way in which He uses His creatures as the ministers of His love, than it suggests to the understanding respecting the peculiar gifts of Elisha. This I say is the general character of these records, and the more strong one's apprehension is of the degradation of the Israelitish people at that time, of their low sensual idolatry, of their reverence for evil powers, the more one feels how acts of this kind must have been needed to counteract their materialism, to undermine their religion of fraud and hatred, to establish, as no words or arguments could, the proof of an actual and a gracious ruler.

But there are some deeds attributed to Elisha, I allude especially to the cursing of the children at Bethel, of which I have never heard any explanation that seemed to me satisfactory. It is easy to dispose of such narratives by saying that they accord with the character of the Old Testament though not of the New; but as I have not availed myself of that plea in other cases I cannot in this. The old dispensation I believe reveals the same God as the new; less perfectly no doubt, oftentimes through clouds which the

IX.] RIGHT WAY OF TREATING DIFFICULTIES.

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risen sun has scattered, but a God exhibiting righteousness, mercy, truth; demanding them of his creatures; cultivating them in all who submit themselves to Him and acknowledge Him as their Lord. Nor can I merely resolve the difficulty by telling you that if you accept the Bible as the word of God, you must take each passage of it as part of the whole, without asking any questions. The Bible itself forces us to ask a multitude of questions. Because I receive it as a revelation of God, I am bound to ask what it reveals concerning God. Because I receive it as a whole book, as a continuous revelation, I am bound to ask how one part of it accords with and interprets another. We must not fear to make this demand. It is distrusting the Bible, distrusting God, to have such a fear. And when we have not found the answer in any special instance we should say so frankly. It cannot shake our faith to feel such ignorance and to confess it. If there were a hundred passages which I was unable to interpret, but which puzzled me as to their moral significance, I should believe in the God whom the rest revealed to me, and ask Him to instruct me what I should think of them. And this I believe in good time He would do, if I did not lose my hold upon that which I had, or attempt by hasty efforts of my own to grasp that which I had not. A man who takes this course is, I believe, in an infinitely safer moral condition, and shows far more reverence for the Bible than one who takes the whole book nominally upon trust or upon evidence, and does not care what the contents of it are, does not strive to bring them into connexion with himself, does not desire to understand from them what God is.

This story however is not one of a number which I find it hard to reconcile with the general teaching of the book. I