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THE HOUSE SENTENCED.

[Serm. me that I should be king. And take with thee ten loaves and cracknells and a cruse of honey, and go to him. He shall tell thee what will become of the child."-1 Kings, c. xiv.

The sight of the sick boy whom he cared for, brought back perhaps the thought of himself when he had still youthful freshness and hope, when he felt the wrongs which Solomon was inflicting upon the land, and dreamed that he might be its deliverer. And with these thoughts would come the recollection of the man who had told him how, if he walked in right ways, God would make him a sure house. A sad and profitable reflection if he had paused to dwell upon it. But the lying habit of mind which he had contracted by converse with the priests of the high places, only urged him to consider how he could bribe Ahijah to tell him something about the child which he would like to hear.

The other person in the story is scarcely less changed since we last met with him. "And the King Jeroboam's wife came to Shiloh, to the house of Ahijah. But Ahijah could not see, for his eyes were set by reason of his age. And the Lord said unto Ahijah, 'Behold the wife of Jeroboam cometh to ask a thing of thee for her son, for he is sick. And thus shall thou say unto her; (for it shall be when she cometh in, she shall feign herself to be another woman,) go, tell Jeroboam; thus saith the Lord God of Israel. Forasmuch as I exalted thee from among the people and made thee prince over my people Israel, and rent the kingdom away from David and gave it to thee; and yet thou hast not been as my servant David, who kept my commandments; but hast gone and made thee other Gods and molten images to provoke me to anger, and hast

VII.] THE PEOPLE SUFFER WITH THE KING.

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cast me behind thy back, therefore the Lord shall raise Him up a king over Israel who shall cut off the house of Jeroboam that day. But what? Even now. And he shall give up Israel because of the sins of Jeroboam, who sinned and made Israel to sin.' This was the main burden of the message. There was another part of it, more afflicting to the wife of Jeroboam, more soothing to the reader, which told her that "the son of whom she enquired, should come to the grave, because in him was found some good thing towards the Lord God of Israel."

This fragment of Ahijah's history, compared with that which we heard last Sunday, marks out with much clearness the office of a prophet in Israel. Living under the brilliant government of Solomon, where all had the outward face of prosperity and continuance-living under the tyranny of Jeroboam, where all was new and revolutionary—he had still to say, 'There is an eternal order which cannot be violated. Whosoever defies it, will bring ruin upon himself and upon his house. God is; a power which sets Him at nought and substitutes changeable things in His place, cannot abide. It may be appointed to punish an evil which has been working secretly; it will last its hour; but it is doomed. The mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.'

The prophets could speak this word knowing it to be true. And they could speak another which was more terrible. They could say, Israel must suffer for Jeroboam's sin. Not by an arbitrary decree, which punishes one for the crimes of another; but because the heart of the people has gone along with the ruler; because a ruler embodies in himself and presents in open act the temper and spirit of those whom he rules; because if they would be saved from

118

THE SUCCESSION TO CRIMES.

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the consequences of his evil doings, they must turn to the everlasting King. This is a universal principle which comes out with fresh power in each stage of Jewish history.

Nadab, the son of Jeroboam, reigned for two years over Israel. Then Baasha, of the tribe of Issachar, conspired against him and slew him. There is nothing in the records of conspiracies like this, which separates the Bible history from ordinary history. We have, on a very small scale, in the annals of a few petty tribes, just what we have expanded to its highest power in the history of the Roman or of the Byzantine Empires. Nor is the result different. The new house is like the old. The rebel and murderer becomes the tyrant. It will be said 'There is a grandeur about crimes and miseries which affect a world; but what interest can we feel in the story of men so diminutive in influence, so insignificant in character as Jeroboam or Baasha ?' I answer, The Scripture wishes us to feel none, except so far as by a small experiment we may discover a truth for all ages and nations. Such a truth is contained in my text.

"Then the word of the Lord came to Jehu the son of Hanani, against Baasha, saying, 'Forasmuch as I exalted thee out of the dust, and made thee prince over my people Israel, and thou hast walked in the way of Jeroboam, and hast made my people Israel to sin, to provoke me to anger with their sins; behold, I will take away the posterity of Baasha and the posterity of his house; and will make thy house like the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat. Him that dieth of Baasha in the city shall the dogs eat; and him that dieth of his in the fields shall the fowls of the air eat.""

The general law is repeated with the same stern sim

VII.]

THE SECOND HOUSE DESTROYED.

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plicity, to one man as to another. Whether you came in by right means or by foul; whether you are a legitimate heir or a conspirator God has made you a prince. Your crime is your own. Your power is His. Trying to be something in yourself, you pronounce your own sentence. When you

think to make gods, God unmakes you." The principle is again affirmed, that a regular succession, a sure house, is a blessing to a land; that a man who desires to found such a one, desires a good gift; but that it is a gift; that as a witness of God's permanence and presence it is good; that succession apart from Him is a mere transmission of curses. The particular phrase "provoke me to anger," is used here as it is used every where else in the Bible. God is contemplated as jealous over His people, feeling like a husband or a father to a rebellious wife or child. It is presented with all boldness to men who had the lowest, most grovelling conceptions of the divine nature, not to flatter them but to counteract them, to destroy the fiction that God is indifferent to His creatures or hates them, which is the foundation of all idolatry, to prepare the way for the full revelation of that truth which interprets His jealousy, and is the ground of all right faith in man, "God is Love."

I may have many opportunities hereafter of pointing out the difference between the rude monotonous utterances of these first prophets to the ten tribes, and the various manysided teachings of those who were at once the poets, preachers, and statesmen of the two. But another still more striking contrast is suggested to us on this day. When one thinks of St. Paul now speaking to the savages of Lycaonia, now holding converse with the Stoics and Epicureans of Athens, adapting himself perfectly to the feelings of the one respect

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ST. PAUL AND THE OLD PROPHETS.

[Serm. ing a sender of rain and fruitful seasons, entering into the heart of the pantheism and hero-worship of the other; one moment a Hebrew of the Hebrews, versed in all rabbinical and cabalistical lore, then writing to the Ephesians in the dialect of commerce; to-day penetrating the different party tendencies at Corinth, to-morrow addressing himself to the sense of law and righteousness which had been cultivated through many generations and was not yet extinct in the mind of the Romans-one may be disposed to think very meanly of the Man of God who came to Bethel, or of Ahijah, or of Jehu the son of Hanani. Still more when one thinks that all the intellectual gifts of St. Paul were united with and subordinate to that beautiful play of the affections, which made him burn with every one who was angry, and wish himself accursed from Christ for the sake of his kinsmen after the flesh, and feel all the slights of the Corinthians, and never bow the knee to the Father of the whole family in Heaven and earth without thinking of his converts and of their sins or sorrows-one may half despise the narrow circle of sympathies in which these men of the old time revolved, with the perversities, inconsistencies, sometimes insincerities, into which they fell. No such feelings, we may be sure, ever dwelt in the mind of St. Paul himself. These heroes of his nation were to him dear and venerable names, the recollection of which cheered him in lonely hours and went with him to the tribunals of kings and governors. In all essentials he will have felt that their hopes were one, the end, the source of them the same. While he was denouncing the exclusiveness of his people, "enemies to God and contrary to all men," he was in fact denouncing an idolatry, a separate worship, which though