Hewing and Building And the house, when it was in building, was built of stone made ready at the quarry: and there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building.—1 Kings 6:7. 1. The erection of the Temple was, it is felt instinctively, the great event of Solomon’s reign. Not that midnight cry for wisdom; not the marvellous insight which, as the reward of that petition, God gave him into the secrets of the universe; not the wealth and honour in which, by an unasked blessing, he excelled all his contemporaries; none of these has made him so essential a part of the world’s history as the fact that he was the man who raised up the first sanctuary for the worship of the true God. 2. As the House of God, the Temple was the chief joy of Israel and the glory of the Jewish Economy. St. Paul, in his Epistles, frequently alludes to that Temple, and employs it as a figure or type or symbol to set forth some great Christian truth. Sometimes he speaks of the individual Christian being the temple of God. He admonishes the Corinthians not to degrade or pollute the body, for the reason that “the body is the Lord’s.” “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you?” (1 Corinthians 6:19). Sometimes he speaks of the Church collectively as the temple of God. “Ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them” (2 Corinthians 6:16; 1 Corinthians 3:16-17). 3. In the heart of the chronicle, in the midst of architectural details, which we pass with little interest, is this verse which captures the imagination and shapes before the mind the picture of a temple growing silently into shape and beauty, with no sound of hammer or axe or any tool of iron heard while it is building. It is a verse which suddenly frees the fancy in the midst of the completely prosaic. It reads like an interruption in the narrative, and the Biblical critic tells us that it has either become misplaced or is an addition by a later hand. It matters little whether the hand that wrote it was the earliest chronicler or a later commentator. It was the hand of a genius. It added a touch which turns a builder’s table of specifications into a poem and a parable. “The house was threescore cubits long and twenty cubits broad and thirty cubits high. The porch was twenty cubits long and ten cubits broad. The inner chamber was five cubits broad and the middle was six cubits,” and so on; and the only person interested is the architect, who has the plans of a far finer building pigeon-holed at home. The rest of us are not wildly excited by cubic measures. This is the prose of the building trade. But here is poetry and mystery: “The house when it was in building,” etc. This verse comes like a touch of magic, and you feel the silence and the mystery as of the city which the Apostle saw coming down from God out of heaven. Now in the text two facts are mentioned about the building of the Temple: the stones were prepared beforehand in the quarry, and so the actual building was accomplished with no noise. Thus we have— I. The House of God is Built of Prepared Stones. II. The House of God is Built Silently. I The House of God is Built of Prepared Stones 1. There is one “sight” in Jerusalem, often left unvisited by those who go to the Holy City. This is the great cavern under a portion of the city, known locally as Solomon’s quarries. The entrance to this cavern is found just outside the Damascus Gate, on the north side of the city, and opposite Jeremiah’s Grotto. The entrance is very small and obscurely located. For some reason, the place is little thought of by the local guides; but it is certainly well worth a visit. The “quarries” are not a natural cavern, but a cavern made by the taking out of immense quantities of rock. The cavern extends for a long distance under the city, gradually sloping towards the south. It Isaiah 700 feet to its inner end; it varies from 60 to 300 feet in width, and averages 30 feet in height, the roof being supported by large pillars of the native rock. In the walls and overhead the traces of chisels are everywhere to be seen, and the chips from the hewn rock lie thick under foot. In many places the stones have been left half cut out, and the marks of the chisel and pick are as fresh as if the quarrymen had only just left their work; even the black patches made by the smoke of their lamps are still visible. The best archæologists agree that there is no improbability in the supposition that the great stones used in the substructure of the Temple of Solomon and in its surrounding walls were obtained from this quarry and fitted for their places in this underground workshop. The stones were prepared in this quarry and in others, were made to the right shape and size, and were then taken to the Temple site; and the building went up from prepared material, without the sound of hammer or axe or any tool of iron while it was in building. As I wandered round the walls of Jerusalem with one who knew intimately all that is at present known of its antiquities, how well I remember the sudden surprise that came upon me when he said: “There you see those blocks, with huge chamfered edges, and rough middle dressings. They are by their tooled edges and the masons’ marks, of which some have been discovered, probably, almost certainly, the work of Solomon’s builders.” There, now level with the ground, as Christ said they should one day be, and extending from forty to eighty feet below it, according to the disposition of the native rock underneath, was in very deed stone lying close to stone even as on that day when, as we read in the sixth chapter of the First Book of the Kings, “Solomon built the house, and finished it.” It took one’s breath away; such centuries had passed and the stones had not cried out, but to-day they were eloquent. And as I gazed upon those gigantic blocks of Judæan limestone, bedded together so nicely that a sixpence could not pass between, my thoughts naturally went off to the masons who built so wonderfully and laid the stones so well. In gazing I saw again the swart-faced builders of Solomon, and the dark-eyed, dark-bearded masons of Hiram who did hew the stones, and the “stone squarers” working so diligently with plumbline and square. But though about me the air seemed to breathe the scent of the cedar and the fir from the great side galleries, the porches, and the chambers that Solomon built, and to feel the dazzle of the golden lilies and knops and pomegranates and the glory of the “palmtrees and cherubim,” one could not forget the motive for all those wonderful buildings—those mighty stones which, you remember, so touched the heart of one of the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, ten centuries after, that as he went out of the Temple he said, as we read in St. Mark 13:1, “Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here”—one could not, I repeat, forget that that motive was worship and praise of the Invisible, the worship of Jehovah, the praise of the great I Amos 1 [Note: H. D. Rawnsley.] 2. The stones in the spiritual House of God are prepared beforehand. Believers having been hewn out from the quarry of humanity by the grace of God are called by St. Peter “living stones.” They are not inert masses of rock, not senseless blocks of marble, but full of life, feeling, and action; and they are thus designated because Christ, as “the tried corner-stone,” “the sure foundation,” is called “a living stone,” and diffuses His own life through all parts of the spiritual temple which rests on Him. So every stone in it, from the foundation to the top-stone, is made a precious, a glistering, a living stone, through the indwelling life of Jesus, the Prince of life. So long, then, as the soul of the believer rests on Jesus Christ alone for salvation, and on nothing else, it has spiritual Life. Build it upon any other foundation, and it is a senseless stone; only as laid by the Holy Ghost “upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ being the chief corner-stone,” can it receive in itself the life of Christ, and become through the impartation of His own vitality a living stone. 3. Yet how much spiritual trimming and dressing, how much hewing and squaring does he need to fashion him aright for the position which the Divine Architect intends he shall occupy hereafter! There are sharp angles of character to be rounded off; unsightly protuberances of conduct to be chipped away; many roughnesses of temper to be smoothed down; many flaws and cracks of mind and heart to be chiselled out; and then, when the general form of the stone is prepared, how much severe friction is required to give it the right polish, and bring out all its beauties, so that its smooth surface may fling back the rays of the Sun of righteousness! One would think, from such words as those of the text, that there was no room for struggle in the religious life, or in the conversion into that life. The whole building grows up softly, silently, almost mystically, and we are tempted to feel as if there were no sympathy in that temple with the wrestling of our hearts. Nay, but hast thou forgotten that the struggle was all past ere ever the building was begun? Forgotten that the stone was “made ready before it was brought thither”? What a world of meaning lies unspoken in that little clause! Before these stones came into unity they all existed in individual separation, in isolation, in solitude. Before they passed into the stage of silent building they had each to go through a process of noise and conflict, had each to be hewn into symmetry with its place in the coming temple. There is a great unrecorded battle of the spiritual life hinted at in this “making ready”; it is but a flash of thought, but it is a flash that lights up our whole experience and reveals us to ourselves. It tells us that the silence is not the first but the last thing, that there is a making ready for the symmetry ere the symmetry is reached. It tells us that Saul of Tarsus has his struggle ere the light from heaven breaks upon his view—that conflict where he finds it so hard to kick against the goads. It tells us that Nicodemus has his solitary walk by night ere he can take up the dead Christ from the shadow of the cross—that solitary walk wherein he feels deserted by the old and not yet convinced by the new.1 [Note: G. Matheson.] 4. The greater part of the preparation to which we are subjected as professing Christians is of a disciplinary character, and hence is fitly represented by the axe, the hammer, and the tool of iron. Prosperity not only is the destruction of fools, but in the great majority of cases it hardens the heart of the nominal Christian, so that Christ Himself is forced to say, “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!” And for many hundreds of years, God by the voice of Jeremiah has complained, “I spake unto thee in thy prosperity; but thou saidst, I will not hear. This hath been thy manner from thy youth, that thou obeyedst not my voice.” Afflictions come more immediately to the heart, and operate with a more searching and purifying influence upon the life. They show a man his weakness and sinfulness; lay open the moral anatomy of his nature; subject to severest test his principles of action, and cause him to retire into the chambers of his soul and learn there, in the light of the Bible and the light of conscience, his relations and duties to God and man. Now the axe seems driven into the root of his happiness; now he is broken as a block of granite under the blows of the hammer of God’s word; and now the iron of a sore adversity has entered into his soul, and he feels himself stricken, smitten, and afflicted. In these dispensations, however severe, he is being fitted by the hand of God Himself for a place in glory. Marvellously comforting is this message to many a struggling soul. Art thou perplexed by thine inward disquietude? Art thou tossed upon a sea of doubt and wrapt in a mist of uncertainty? Art thou experiencing the accusations of a conscience that speaks louder and louder every day? Say not that, therefore, there is no place for thee within the silence of the mystic temple; it is just therefore that there is a place for thee. This struggle of thine is thy making ready. This loudness of thy conscience is the hewing of thy hardness into symmetry—the symmetry that will fit thee to be a stone in the temple of Christ. Thy solitude is not the neglect of thee, thy struggle is not the absence of thy God from thee; it is the eye of thy God upon thee. He has taken thee up to the wilderness that He may make thee ready. All the pain He sends thee is the sign of His interest in thee, the proof that He is preparing thee for the symmetry of the temple of peace. Thy wilderness is the vestibule into thy heaven. Bless the Lord, O my soul.1 [Note: G. Matheson.] ’Tis the Master who holds the chisel; He knows just where Its edge should be driven sharpest To fashion there The semblance that He is carving; Nor will He let One delicate stroke too many Or few be set On forehead, or cheek, where only He sees how all Is tending—and where the hardest The blow should fall Which crumbles away whatever Superfluous line Would hinder His hand from making The work divine. With tools of Thy choosing, Master, We pray Thee, then, Strike just as Thou wilt; as often, And where, and when The vehement stroke is needed. I will not mind, If only Thy chipping chisel Shall leave behind Such marks of Thy wondrous working And loving skill Clear carven on aspect, stature, And face, as will, When discipline’s ends are over, Have all sufficed To mould me into the likeness And form of Christ. 5. Three processes are mentioned here through which the living stones pass to be prepared for their place in the House. (1) First, there is the process of testing. There were thousands of stones in the distant quarries that had been tried and cast back into the pile of refuse—some that had been tried and tried again and at last cast aside, having proved unworthy of a place in the Temple. One of the most awfully serious views of life to me is that each one of us is being constantly tested and proved, that we are every day revealing ourselves, disclosing what there is in us to God and the universe. We are every hour, as it were, under His hammer. He tries us, proves us, to see whether we are fit and willing to be prepared for the eternal temple, or fit only to be cast away for ever with the trash, the rubbish, the sweepings of the world.1 [Note: E. H. Evans.] Even in our surface worldly-wise opinions, which float lightly on the stream of thought, we admit much of this. We admit that the test of faith in anything is willingness to suffer. The test of courage is when a real occasion calls for it. The test of patriotism is readiness to make sacrifice for country. Lukewarm adherence to a party or a cause is a source of weakness. All the fighting has to be done by men of other mould. When victory in anything is assured, there are plenty of brazen throats to scream hallelujah and brazen brows seeking to be crowned by the laurels of triumph. The faith which costs nothing is worth nothing. It does not go deep enough. Some men, as the Scottish proverb goes, will put their hand twice to their bonnet for once to their pouch. It does not cost much to salute a man or a scheme. The test of all manner of devotion must be practical. The lady in the age of chivalry set her knight-errant to do some difficult task which he accomplished for love of her or died in the attempt. The principle is right, though the applications were often absurd.1 [Note: Hugh Black, Comfort, 60. (2) Next, there is the preparation proper, the hewing and polishing. There were 80,000 hewers of stone and wood in the distant mountains of Lebanon, and some stones prepared for the foundations were over five yards long. When the stone was found to be sound—without a single flaw—it was then handed over to be made ready, by the hammer, the file, the saw, and the iron tools. So is it with the Christian when he has obeyed God by believing in Jesus. He has passed the first process; he is then handed over, as it were, to be made “meet to be a partaker of the inheritance of the saints in light.” He receives the title to the inheritance the day he obeys and believes; but he must be polished, sanctified, before he is “meet.” And this making ready, the lopping off of the rough corners, the polishing with the tools of iron, is often a rough work, hard to bear. We ask, under our trials, if God loves us; now that we are His acknowledged children, why is it that He does not keep away from us the griefs and Sorrows? why the many afflictions even of the righteous? Why? Because this is a world of “making ready.” We are here in the land of the quarries, the land of the tools of iron, the axe and the hammer, and the rasp and the file. The land where “stones are being made ready.” We have all of us some rough side that needs polishing, a temper that needs smoothing down, a passion that must be lopped off. There is much work yet to do before we are ready for “the inheritance of the saints in light.” We cannot be taken to the “light” until we are “made ready.” We are here to be sanctified as well as saved, and our sanctification is far more important in the sight of God now than our present happiness. Our heavenly Father loves us enough to keep away from us all trouble and anxiety, but He knows that if all things were made pleasant to us here, we would soon forget Him—and heaven. Those are very expressive words in the 55th Psalm, “Because they have no changes, therefore they fear not God.” Their life here is so smooth and prosperous, they have no changes, it is always the same with them; therefore they “fear not God.” There is more to be said about the nature of trial than that it is a test. The strain is not put merely to see who will stand and who will fail. We see this further use in it, that it is not merely to try good but to increase good. Strength comes through the strain. “The bruising flails of God’s corrections” are meant to thresh out the useless chaff, and give value to the wheat. Tribulation is not merely trial, but discipline, and occasion for growth, to deepen faith and enrich life. The first fresh rapture has to be transmuted into the crowning quality of endurance. Discipline is not exhausted either by the thought of punishment or by the thought of testing, but is itself a means of giving power. There comes the new strength of a surrendered life, gaining in power and in beauty.1 [Note: Hugh Black, Comfort, 63. I remember, when apprenticed to a draper as a very young lad, I complained that I was obliged to do all the drudgery—that I had to pull down the shutters, and dust the shop, and clean the windows—while the other young men looked on. My mother, wiser than I, consoled me: “They have all gone through the drudgery before you, and if you will only keep on, you’ll reach their position.”2 [Note: E. H. Evans.] Men continually quarrel with this world for being what God designed it to be—a workshop, a timber-yard, a stone-quarry, a forge. When you go to a manufactory, you go prepared for noise and heat; you arm yourself to bear fatigue, and you seek to deaden the sensitiveness of your auditory nerves. Noise and dust you know to be inseparable from such places, and you make your arrangements accordingly for meeting them there. And shall I enter the solemn workshop of Life, and marvel that it is no summer arbour of delight, no shady bower of rest? Shall I complain that its dust turns me sick, and beg that its hammers would cease ringing, to rest my poor aching head? Verily no. The living stones of human hearts must be squared at any cost: the axe of affliction must fall, and the hammer of chastening ring, whether I am able to endure their piercing tones or not. The temple must be set up in Jerusalem, and, in order to it, here on Lebanon must be heard the groans of repentance, the wailings of bereavement, ay, and even the piercing death-cry itself.1 [Note: G. Dawson.] We do best when we take it in faith, bearing as firmly as we may the bereavements, disappointments, the bodily afflictions, the mental strain, the spiritual oppression, doubt, loneliness, which God sees fit to use as the instruments of our discipline. We do best when we endure these patiently and in trustful simplicity, believing in the good which they are to accomplish. For … Life is not as idle ore, But iron dug from central gloom, And heated hot with burning fears, And dipt in baths of hissing tears, And batter’d with the shocks of doom, To shape and use. (3) Lastly, there is the process of conveying to the destined place. The materials for this temple were collected from all parts. The workmen of the king of Tyre were cutting the cedar and fir in Lebanon, and squaring, boring, chiselling, and mortising all manner of beams. Thousands of men were quarrying stone, others were rafting the whole along the sea to Joppa, others teaming it up to Jerusalem. The huntsmen were gathering skins in the east, the miners searching for gold in Ophir, and the Jewish maidens preparing the hangings of silk in Jerusalem; each working at his or her own special work, but all for the Temple. When they were ready, they were to be brought from all parts to the builders on Mount Moriah. So to-day men and women are being got ready for God’s home above. Then, from all quarters of the globe, death bears them above. There is no making complete the family gathering, no finishing the heavenly temple, without the aid of death. A man who occupied a prominent ecclesiastical position in the north of England, the late Dean of York, was lying on his death-bed. One day he said to me that the kindness of so many friends almost broke his heart. “Well,” I said, “it would be strange if, considering what you have done for others, our hearts were not concerned for you.” For a moment he seemed pleased, but almost instantly he said sternly, “Never speak like that again!” “Why?” I asked with surprise. “When you come to lie where I am, you will know that there is nothing you have done worth looking at. The only comfort for a dying man is the infinite mercies of his Saviour. I thank God it is perfect peace.”1 [Note: Canon G. Body.] II The House of God is Built Silently We have already seen that in the New Testament sometimes the individual Christian and sometimes the Church is spoken of as the Temple of God. We shall accordingly speak first of the silent building up of character in the individual, and next of the silent progress of the Kingdom of God. i. The Silent Building of Character We know that in our midst are lives and characters immature and unshaped, but every day and every week they are adding something to themselves which will determine the quality and power of their maturity. Every father and mother, every Sunday-school and day-school teacher, has been made to feel over and over again how subtle, secret, and silent is the process by which the boy becomes the man, the girl the woman, and character takes its shape. We may do our careful utmost to bring that raw and malleable material under the best moulding influences we know, but with what result we can seldom or never see at the time. All that is given us are fleeting signs which sometimes encourage and sometimes depress, and which may be wholly illusive and unreliable; but all the time we know that the building of the house of life is going forward, and the young builders are gathering material from many quarries and incorporating it into the fabric. Silently and ceaselessly goes forward the shaping of life, as Troy in its legendary beginning— Like a mist, rose into towers. 1. Think first of the formative years. What is it you see when you look deep into the eyes of a child? You see the soul going out with an eager demand, asking of all things material for life. That is the child’s demand. He asks life of thee. There is a perfect openness, a receptiveness, which will not be his in later years. This is the child mind, eager to learn, and with a vast hospitality to thoughts too great to be grasped, but which he will grapple himself to by the one fragment he can lay hold upon: an earnest pressing to the heart of things, and an unconsciousness of all human substitutes for the intimacy of personal knowledge. Worldly considerations are nothing to him, deference to prejudice he knows nothing of. He is just a living soul, loyal to question, impulse, aspiration, with a heart and mind that want to know and possess, and are always listening and always taking. And with this receptiveness there is a huge and pathetic confidence. He takes from anybody, he takes anything, quite unconscious that men often invent formulas only to cover ignorance, lay down dogmas only to shelter their hesitations, and set up conventions out of fear or indolence of investigation. The child knows nothing of this, and with a mighty confidence takes what is given; for as yet he has no experience to test it by. It is the plastic time, but it is the determinative time. “As the twig is bent, the tree inclines,” runs the saying; and it is truer than most proverbs. We know that its philosophy is true, and yet we do not habitually recognize how true. Sometimes some accident or incident makes us realize how large a part of what makes us to-day became part of us in careless days of childhood. We gain experience and knowledge in manhood and womanhood, our estimates and standards change, our views broaden in some ways and contract in others, but when we come to regard ourselves closely, how often it appears beyond dispute that a very large and permanent part of our mental and moral furnishing became ours when we were children.1 [Note: T. Yates.] I found a piece of plastic clay And idly fashioned it one day, And as my fingers pressed it still, It moved and yielded to my will. I came again when days had passed, The piece of clay was hard at last; The form I gave it still it bore, But I could change that form no more. I took a piece of living clay And gently formed it day by day, And moulded, with my power and art, A young child’s soft and yielding heart. I came again when years had gone, It was a man I looked upon; He still that early impress bore, And I could change him never more. The time of suffering, when you were beaten on the anvil, is justified by the appearance of the result. Character has acquired a new power of endurance, and become tough and smooth as hammered steel. The natural man suffers, like those trees of Lebanon when the bark is peeled off, and he feels the edge of saw and chisel; but he is of no use in the spiritual temple till these have done their work. In short, the strength, the stability, the uprightness, the graces of charity, of sympathy, which form and adorn a human soul at its last and best, are ever prepared amid trial and pain, and put together in silence.1 [Note: W. Granger.] 2. Notice next the materials out of which character is made. The materials come from far. Other people have had much to do with making us what we are. “The house, when it was in building, was built of stone made ready at the quarry.” To begin with, there is the ancestral quarry, the human stuff and stock out of which the child gets his first materials for the house of life. Think of the body. Happy the child who has as his birthgift a fit physical basis for the character he must build for himself, who starts with the five senses unclogged which are the gateways through which journey all earth’s sights and sounds and thoughts. But think more of the mind. The mind of the child is not a blank piece of paper; its history did not begin with its first conscious impression. The “tabula rasa” idea has vanished before a larger revelation of the store of past inheritance and experience which each child carries with it into the world. (1) So there is first the quarry we call Heredity. The child does not start clear. It finds, like Solomon, materials left by its father. It is handicapped with poor stuff or enriched with capital piled up by the effort of many generations. The “heir of all the ages,” as he lies on his mother’s knee, has in every eddy of his blood, in every pulsation of his heart, in every throb of his nerves, in every tremor of his brain, the memorial of a human past. (2) There is also the quarry we call Environment. The child is building from the world outside self the fibre of its own being, the structure of the inner mind. Whittier describes in a poem the development of the universe in the mind of a child, and tells how, as the child goes forth from day to day, the wind and the sun, the procession of the cattle with their bells, the music and the salt scents of the sea, become not only memories of the child, but part of the child. The environment of the child in Whittier’s poem contrasts greatly with that of most children. Most are town children, perhaps in some ways to their gain; but the gain is superficial, while the loss is deep and the perils are increased. The loss lies in the absence of real intimacy with Nature; the peril is that with too little of Nature there is too much of man. Man is not the creature, but the architect of circumstance. It is character which builds an existence out of circumstance. Our strength is measured by our plastic power; from the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels; bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks, until the architect can make them something else.1 [Note: Carlyle.] (3) There is the quarry of Christian Faith and Experience. We believe that the stone made ready at the quarry of Christian faith and experience is the material children need most, and that the issue will prove it both by its beauty and by its stability. The great attributes of God appeal naturally to the child; the life and character of Jesus are perfectly intelligible and endlessly fascinating to the child, and the attraction of the Gospels, if you do not mar its effect by doctrinal subtleties, is irresistible. Souls are built as temples are— Sunken deep, unseen, unknown, Lies the sure foundation stone, Then the courses framed to bear Lift the cloisters pillared fair, Last of all the airy spire, Soaring heavenward, higher and higher, Nearest sun and nearest star. Souls are built as temples are— Inch by inch in gradual rise Mount the layered masonries. Warring questions have their day, Kings arise and pass away, Labourers vanish one by one, Still the temple is not done, Still completion seems afar. Souls are built as temples are— Here a carving rich and quaint, There the image of a saint; Here a deep-hued pane to tell Sacred truth or miracle; Every little helps the much, Every careful, careless touch Adds a charm or leaves a scar. Souls are built as temples are— Based on truth’s eternal law, Sure and steadfast, without flaw. Through the sunshine, through the snows, Up and on the building goes; Every fair thing finds its place, Every hard thing lends a grace, Every hand may make or mar. Which has the greater influence in the making of character, heredity or training?—the influences before birth, or those after? The question has been asked by scores of persons. It is surprising how often it has been met with hesitancy, as though a thing not thought into. And surprising, too, how indecisive the replies usually are. Yet careful thought makes it plain, and then plainer, that while heredity is great beyond any power of calculation, training is infinitely greater. Or it would be better said thus: training may be made infinitely greater. Training can be made the greater, yet with the vast majority, as a matter of fact, it is not. The bent before birth, and the chance, weedy growth after, actually make up the character of the great crowd, with training, properly so called, playing no part, because it has no chance. Training is by far the greater in its possible power. Heredity, with the chance environment it has stumbled across, has actually been the most potent factor, and is. If the start be early enough, heredity can be wholly overcome by training, though it rarely is. In many instances it is partially overcome. With the vast crowd, the child runs wild like an unkempt vine, or rank weed, and so heredity plus whatever is absorbed by mere chance decides the life. Bad blood is bad. Bad training is yet worse. Good blood is good, but good training is better. It is easier to train where there is good blood. But then most blood is good, though the pedigree is not recorded. It is rather startling to remember that good training with bad or not-good blood, if you can begin early enough, will give a better life than the best of blood with bad training, or with the shiftless, weedy no-training.1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Home Ideals, 236. ii. The Silent Building of the Church The Church of God is spoken of sometimes as on earth, sometimes as in heaven. Let us take it in its entirety. The real end for which God hath chosen us in Christ Jesus before the world began, and fitted us on earth by His providential dispensations, is, “that in the dispensation of the fulness of times, he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth, even in him.” This recapitulation of all things in Christ is to be effected by building all things on Christ as the sure foundation which God Himself has laid in Zion; and Christians, as living stones chosen of God and precious, are, in the language of St. Paul, built upon the foundation of the apostles, “in whom all the building fitly framed together, groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.” This structure the same apostle designates in another place as “a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” The spiritual temple will in its day of completion be far nobler than that of Solomon. It will never be pillaged, as that was when Shishak, king of Egypt, came and took away its treasures—for of the unseen temple it is said no thief can break through and steal. It will never be polluted, as Zion’s Temple was by the wickedness of Manasseh—because “there shall in no wise enter into it anything that defileth, neither worketh abomination.” And it can never be destroyed, as Solomon’s was when Nebuzaradan burnt the House of the Lord—for it is built of living stones which can never perish. 1. Now notice that for the building of the Church of God hewers are needed as well as builders. (1) The building of the Temple of God is largely unseen work. Most of the work of Solomon’s Temple was done where it would not show for much. Workmen were in the quarry cutting and shaping those stupendous stones whose size is still the wonder of the world, and whose accuracy of fit is so exquisite that the blade of a knife can hardly be inserted between them. Other labourers in the plain between Succoth and Zarthan were forming clay moulds in which the molten metal might be shaped. Others were away in the forest of Lebanon, where axes were ringing, and giant trees were falling. Others, again, brought these down as lumber, some bearing burdens, and others placing the rollers on which the heavy masses of wood and stone were brought to their appointed places. The worshippers in the completed Temple probably never saw these men; their names were unknown to them as to us. Their work was like that of the sculptors of those marble figures which adorn the roof of Milan Cathedral, or like that of the carvers of stonework in the marvellous roof of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge—splendid work done by unknown workers. My guide and friend took me round the north-eastern angle of the Temple area and by the wall till nearly opposite the well-known gate of Jeremiah—a hundred paces from the gate through which Stephen passed to die, two or three hundred yards at most from that “Green hill far away, without a city wall,” which is, even to-day, in shape so “like a skull.” He stopped close beside the wall that Saladin built—“You see that hole in the earth? A wounded partridge was the means of its discovery a few months ago. Follow me!” We entered a long sloping gallery that led, or seemed to lead, right under the city walls in the direction of the Temple. Right and left, as the lamps flared and showed us the vast caverns, we saw evidences of the masons who had chipped their stones to size, detached them from their bed in the quarry, and worked them and tooled them into squares. Deeper and further we went into the cool darkness. Our guide put up his torch and showed us little nicks or niches in the still upstanding blocks, blackened with soot. “You know what those were for?” he said. “Those were the niches hewn out by the men of Hiram and Solomon of old time, on which to place their little earthen lamps while they laboured at the stone.”1 [Note: H. D. Rawnsley.] I believe that much of the best work accomplished for the world, and for the Church, is never seen or heard of at the time. But the Lord is mindful of His own; He remembereth His children. And if He sent His angel to show us where true and lasting service is being done, possibly He would not lead us to magnificent buildings, or to stately worship, or to popular preaching. Perhaps He would draw aside the veil which hides a Christian home, and show us a mother patient with her wayward lad, pleading with him, praying for him; seeking by her gentle, watchful love to shape his character to true nobility, that she may present him at last as one of God’s polished stones. He might show us a Christian going up the creaking staircase to some wretched attic, where a smile lights up the face of a dying man to whom the visitor speaks of a Saviour who is loving and of a heaven that is near. In that foul miserable room rests the foot of the ladder whose top is in heaven. Or possibly the angel might point us to a writer for the press, working far into the night, pale and tired, but penning words which will affect the world on the morrow—turning men from the love of war, rebuking iniquity in high places, and preparing the nation to choose the ways of righteousness, liberty, peace, and love.1 [Note: A. Rowland.] The hands that do God’s work are patient hands, And quick for toil, though folded oft in prayer; They do the unseen work they understand And find—no matter where. The feet that follow His must be swift feet, For time is all too short, the way too long; Perchance they will be bruised, but falter not, For love shall make them strong. The lips that speak God’s words must learn to wear Silence and calm, although the pain be long; And, loving so the Master, learn to share His agony and wrong.2 [Note: William Ordway Partridge.] (2) It is varied work. Had we been in Jerusalem, we should have noticed great differences between the kinds of work done. Some was arduous and mechanical, and some was very pleasant, giving opportunity for the exercise of artistic taste. Some was dignified and some was undignified. Still, every kind of work had its place. None could be neglected. The toil of the poor clay moulder was as necessary as the skill of the clever designer. It would be an onerous task even to mention all the forms of Christian activity. Suffice it to say that something can be done by every man, woman, and child for the establishment of Christ’s Kingdom. Nor ought we to disregard such service as is quite outside the organization of the Church. For example, as Christian citizens we should take our share of responsibility, and, if need be, of reproach, in the defence of the liberties of the people, and in the furtherance of all legislation which will put down the prevalence of vice and wrong. I stood by fields and farms where men Were working with a glad intensity As works the swallow bent to feed her young. All knew they did not spend their strength for naught, That every action was a seed whose plant Should bloom in Heav’n and therefore used the spade The axe, the saw, as tools wherewith to shape Their individual hope. Although no minds Were like, yet all were tempered to the whole Intent of God—the many wires of one Well-tunèd dulcimer. Thus all who shaped Their proper Paradise laid stones upon The walls of new Jerusalem. The Sun Diffused a sacrificial will among The very birds and beasts, who lent themselves With conscious pleasure to the ends of man. The tiller of the soil was gladdened by The brown earth’s charity, and he that hewed The rock rejoiced together with the cliff Whence it was hewn. The angels, lily fair And swallow fleet, passed everywhere to help Or guide at need.1 [Note: Anna Bunston, The Porch of Paradise.] (3) All true work is after the Divine plan. The work of Solomon’s builders, however widely distributed, however secretly done, was all tending towards an appointed end—the completion of a Temple, in which God would be worshipped, and where He would reveal Himself. That building existed in the mind of the Master-Builder before it had an actual existence; for an architect not only draws plans, but makes a specification, and perhaps takes out his quantities; so that he thinks through the whole work and knows its minutest details. It is so with the Great Architect, the Originator and Upholder of all things. The Divine purpose is controlling our activities, is appointing to each of us his responsibilities, and God will at last bring out of what appear to be confused and contradictory events “new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.” God is a great executive, the great executive of the universe. He planned the vast scheme of worlds making up the universe, and every detail. The whole universe in its immensity, and the intricacy of its movements, is kept in motion by Him. And every detail, down to the smallest, the falling of one of the smallest birds, is ever under His thoughtful eye and touch. And He is our God. He has each of us on His heart.1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Service, 214. This is the secret of giving dignity to trifles. As units they are insignificant; they rise in importance when they become parts of a plan.2 [Note: F. W. Robertson, Life and Letters, 209. (4) And all true work is painful work. The thing that must instantly occur to us, the moment that we have read about the silent way in which this temple-building was prepared for and accomplished, is that, after all, the noise was not got rid of; but simply separated from the ultimate construction. You cannot quarry a stone without noise. No huge boulder was ever lifted out of its primeval bed or riven from its parent rock without blows and sweat and strain and thunderous percussion. No tree was ever felled without that sharp smiting and steady thud of the workman’s axe which has made ten thousand forests ring. In preparing the metals which we employ in rearing any lowliest temple, with what a heat and noise those metals must be forged! Nay, if we could have been among the craftsmen at Mount Lebanon where the timbers of the Temple were prepared, or in the quarries where the stones for its foundations were hewn and dressed, we should have found there no lack of clamour, and strife, and unrest. No least detail of that holy and beautiful house was made ready save at the cost of countless blows, of manifold discussion, of ceaseless weariness and fatigue. Doubtless there were all the catastrophes, the maladjustments, the sacrifice of individual life or limb to a great undertaking that there are in similar undertakings to-day. The reason why “there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building,” was because for days and weeks and months beforehand there had been incessant noise, untiring toil, infinite and undiscouraged pounding and smoothing and planing and hammering almost night and day. And do you suppose there was nothing more? The men who built the Temple were not angels, but children of a race trained by long bondage to the chain and the lash. Pharaoh’s taskmasters had beaten them when the tale of bricks was short. Is it likely that Solomon’s taskmasters were persons of such pre-eminent gentleness and infinite patience that they never struck a blow or spoke a harsh word? If we could have the unwritten history of that splendid building I presume we should find that its stones were moistened more than once with the salt tears of workmen who had always done their best, or who, striving to do it, had not always and instantly achieved the best result. This huge task was not accomplished without cost; and here, as always in the achievement of any great work, the costliest expenditure was not in money, but in human sweat and in human sorrow. Your tears unheeded, and your prayers made nought, Thus and no otherwise through all have wrought, That if, the while ye toiled and sorrowed most The sound of your lamenting seemed all lost, And from my land no answer came again, It was because of that your care and pain A house was building, and your bitter sighs Came hither as toil-helping melodies, And in the mortar of our gem-built wall Your tears are mingled mid the rise and fall Of golden trowels tinkling in the hands Of builders gathered wide from all the lands.— —Is the house finished? Nay, come help to build Walls that the sun of sorrow once did gild Through many a bitter morn and hopeless eve, That so at last in bliss ye may believe; Then rest with me, and turn no more to tears, For then no more by days and months and years, By hours of pain come back, and joy passed o’er We measure time that was—and is no more.1 [Note: William Morris.] 2. But more especially we are expected to observe how silently the building proceeds. The silence amid which the building of Solomon’s Temple was carried on was partly due to the reverential feeling in which that holy work was undertaken. The deepest emotions in the human heart are generally the quietest. Our profounder feelings shrink from babble and noise. If we stand before a masterpiece of art and try to take in the harmonies of colour, or the symmetry of form, the frivolous remarks of a companion distress us. If we walk in the depths of a forest glade, or if we delight our eyes with the falling of gleams and of shadows upon the sward till we are lost in a pleasant day-dream, an incursion of jocund excursionists is resented as being almost a sacrilege. If we have to say farewell to friends we love, and the hour of parting, long-dreaded, has come at last, we feel that it is not a time for fluent talk, or for sparkling fun, but rather for the silent grip of the hand and the tearful “God bless you!” And when we enter some stately cathedral, rich in solemn associations, it is natural that we should be hushed and quiet. Thus the rearing of the Temple is not so much an example for literal imitation as it is a prophecy of ultimate realization. There must have been a reason for that peculiar and exceptional method of building which was adopted in the case of the Temple, and that reason must have been a Divine one. It did not occur to this semi-barbarous people to build the Temple in this way. The method was revealed to them. What was its reason? Doubtless, in the first place, to educate a race with imperfect ideas of reverence into a higher conception of the sacredness of Divine things. The average Jew entered the Temple with a deeper awe when he remembered the august sanctities with which its erection had been hedged about In silence mighty things are wrought,— Silently builded, thought on thought, Truth’s temple greets the sky; And like a citadel with towers, The soul with her subservient powers Is strengthened silently. Soundless as chariots on the snow The saplings of the forest grow To trees of mighty girth; Each nightly star in silence burns, And every day in silence turns The axle of the earth. The silent frost with mighty hand Fetters the rivers and the land With universal chain; And smitten by the silent sun, The chain is loosed, the rivers run, The lands are free again. O Source unseen of life and light, Thy secrecy of silent might If we in bondage know, Our hearts, like seeds beneath the ground, By silent force of life unbound, Move upwards from below. And if our hearts well rooted be, Their love, like sap within the tree, With silent quickening moves; Enlarged and liberated powers, More light and balmier warmth are ours, And God His presence proves. O Saviour, who, that silence keeps, But sometimes at the story weeps Of all that he has known? That we are what we are, how strange! How gradual the silent change By which our souls have grown!1 [Note: Thomas Toke Lynch, The Rivulet, 110. (1) There is a certain sacredness in silence; reverence is ever quiet. In a room where one is lying dying, whoever enters, by a natural instinct treads softly and speaks low. From our earliest years we have been taught that in a church, where reverence is due to the sacred functions and uses of the building, our behaviour ought to be the reverse of loud and boisterous. And this, which early training and habit have made a second nature to us even in respect of buildings which in themselves are not fitted to inspire awe, or even respect, is felt to be natural and instinctive when the church, by its structure, possesses that power. In an old Gothic church or cathedral, where the height, the gloom, the mass, the antiquity, all at once impress one, every reverent-minded person will experience an instinctive repulsion to frivolity or clamour. And as we, in God’s house, in recognition of His holy Name and worship, restrain ourselves from loud speech and secular noises, so on the other hand the vast and impressive silences of Nature may at times convey to us a sense of the presence of God. In mountain solitudes on an early summer morn, there is such a silence as may be felt. It is Nature paying her devotions to her Maker. Such sounds as there are do not break the silence, they only make it audible—the whisper of a breeze in the grass, the murmur of water from among the trees. It is as if Nature were holding her breath, yet finding just voice enough to say, “The Lord is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him.” When God created the heavens and the earth there was heard no sound of hammer or axe. The slow-revolving ages, the six grand epochs with their alternate lights and shadows, graduated one into the other, marking off His successive creative acts. We speak of the creative fiat as if God did, with an audible voice, call out of nothing the things which are. He said, Let there be light! Grim Darkness felt His might And fled away. Then startled seas and mountains cold Shone forth all clad in blue and gold And cried, ’Tis day! ’tis day! One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee, One lesson which in every wind is blown, One lesson of two duties kept at one Though the loud world proclaim their enmity— Of toil unsever’d from tranquillity; Of labour, that in lasting fruit outgrows Far noisier schemes, accomplish’d in repose, Too great for haste, too high for rivalry. Yes, while on earth a thousand discords ring, Men’s fitful uproar mingling with his toil, Still do thy sleepless ministers move on, Their glorious tasks in silence perfecting; Still working, blaming still our vain turmoil, Labourers that shall not fail, when man is gone.1 [Note: Matthew Arnold.] (2) This is God’s method everywhere, not only in Nature but also in History and in Grace. It is His method in History. History as written is for the most part the history of what made a noise. The sound of warriors rushing to battle, the clashing of armour, the groans of the conquered, and the shouts of the conqueror fill our ears. Take up any ordinary English History, and is it not so? Does it not concern itself mainly with the movements of kings and earls and generals, and a few prominent men in Church and State who did something illustrious? And yet it is evident that these were at no time the whole of life. The vast body of life is always unhistoric; the quiet world is not reported because it is quiet; and yet it is in this region that much of the best life has been lived. The landing of Cæsar with his hosts in Britain was not so significant an event as the landing of St. Augustine bearing a white Christ on a silver cross. The marching forth to the Crusades of Richard Cœur de Lion was not so important in its ultimate issues as the quiet demand of Stephen Langton in the meadow at Runnymede. The victories of Drake upon the high seas were of less real moment than the embarking of a few pilgrims from Delft Haven in search of religious freedom. The charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava was not so worthy of immortality in song as the play of a bare-legged lad in an English village, who at about that time was making clay engines furnished with hemlock sticks for pipes. The best history of Anglo-Saxon civilization is Green’s History of the English People, which is constructed on the assumption that the victories of peace are more renowned than those of war.2 [Note: D. J. Burrell.] The oak grows silently, in the forest, a thousand years; only in the thousandth year, when the woodman arrives with his axe, is there heard an echoing through the solitudes; and the oak announces itself when, with far-sounding crash, it falls. How silent too was the planting of the acorn; scattered from the lap of some wandering wind! Nay, when our oak flowered, or put on its leaves (its glad Events), what shout of proclamation could there be? Hardly from the most observant a word of recognition. These things befell not, they were slowly done; not in an hour, but through the flight of days: what was to be said of it? This hour seemed altogether as the last was, as the next would be.1 [Note: Carlyle, The French Revolution, bk. ii. ch. 1. (3) In Grace. The beginning of the Christian life is commonly without observation. It is true that Saul of Tarsus was felled to the earth, blinded by a sun-burst, and addressed by a voice from heaven. But even of this case it is written that those that were with him saw the light but heard not the voice. The operation of the Spirit in the human heart is not with violence. He cometh down as rain upon the mown grass. To the majority of believers their passing out of darkness into the light is as when the traveller crosses the tropics; he cannot mark the instant. We are not scourged but wooed into the Divine arms. I have drawn thee, He says, with the cords of a man. The best penitents are those whose penitence does not wear out, but is always an under-current in their daily lives. You call him a fool who starts for a long race at his greatest speed, and he who is most demonstrative in his first repentance will often be found afterwards among the backsliders. Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control That o’er thee swell and throng; They will condense within thy soul, And change to purpose strong. As quietness is the mark of the true life, so will it mark its close. As the most beautiful sunset brings peace rather than excitement, even so will be the laying down of life. Nay, inasmuch as disease is painful and the physical wrench often keen, we may say that the afterglow is brighter than the sunset itself. But, in spite of pain, the death itself is peaceful. There is little triumph in the Christian death-bed, but there is peace. And I would pass in silence, Lord, No brave words on my lips, Lest pride should cloud my soul, and I Should die in the eclipse. But when, and where, and by what pain, All this is one to me; I only long for such a death As most shall honour Thee. (4) And so, finally, in silence does the Kingdom of God come. It “cometh not with observation.” This is true of its progress in the world. God is in “the still small voice,” not in the wind or in the earthquake or the fire. Christ’s own career, how silent it was! The spread of the Kingdom was unnoticed by the world’s great ones—Cæsars, philosophers, patricians—and it silently grew underground. So is it with the consummation of the Kingdom in glory. Earth is the Lebanon to which Heaven shall furnish the Jerusalem. Time is the noisy workshop of Eternity. Literature Brown (A. G.), God’s Full-Orbed Gospel, 216, 229. Burrell (D. J.), The Gospel of Gladness, 281. Dawson (G.), Sermons on Daily Life and Duty, 242. Evans (E. H.), True and False Aims, 64. Granger (W.), The Average Man, 47. Hutton (W. R.), Low Spirits, 88. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: 2 Samuel and Kings, 172. Macleay (K. A.), The Never-Changing Creed, 165. Matheson (G.), Moments on the Mount, 187. Potter (H. C.), Sermons of the City, 325. Roberts (E.), My Jewels, 42. Rowland (A.), The Burdens of Life, 175. Stevens (W. B.), Sermons, 123. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), vi. No. 630. Williams (T. R.), Belief and Life, 344. Woodford (J. R.), Sermons: Old Testament Series, 80. Christian World Pulpit, xxxvi. 310 (Rawnsley); i. 299 (Ormsby); lxxvii. 347 (Yates). Contemporary Pulpit, 1st Ser., iv. 1 (Body); vi. 190 (Burn). Treasury (New York), xv. 921 (Chapin); xxii. 952 (Hallock). Halting between Two Opinions And Elijah came near unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.—1 Kings 18:21. I The Situation 1. This scene is one of the most memorable and striking in history. It represents one of those great culminating points when life suddenly becomes dramatic, when, as it were, the confused groups of men and women on the stage of life suddenly shift themselves into place and position, and the curtain rises on the acts of a great tragedy. Such culminations occur also in the individual life, when the still river of our days deepens, and rushes on in loud thunder, and all our scattered energies become concentrated in one vast struggle. In such moments life is felt to be infinitely significant, and we know that it fulfils itself in the open eye of the angel-crowded heavens. In such moments the character of coming centuries is determined, and individual destiny is sealed and fixed. 2. From the challenge of Elijah to the falling of the fire from heaven, the interest grows and the excitement deepens. It was one of the most memorable national convocations ever held in Israel. Old men were there, and they could not remember such a bitter time in the nation’s history. For years no rain had fallen at the appointed seasons, and the land was literally burnt up with the drought. By famine and hunger God had appealed to the conscience of the nation, and the appeal had apparently been in vain. They had not risen up in wrath and repentance to cast the new and false religion out of the land. Fear of the king and queen and priest had deterred them. Fashion ruled them even in their misery. Lack of conviction, mental and spiritual instability, had been their undoing. Since the cruel famine began, Elijah had been in hiding, and there had been no decisive voice ringing out clearly for Jehovah and His cause. Now he has come forth from his retirement. It is at his instance that this assembly has been convened; and by his lips, and by the manifestation of His own might, Jehovah is about to make His final appeal to them. They would see such a sight that day as would, for a time, drive all hesitation out of their hearts, and force from each one of them, in the face of Ahab and the masterful priests of Baal, the confession, “The Lord, he is the God.” 3. How the pulse quickens as we read the story! In his splendid isolation stands Elijah against king, court, and nation. For three years he has been a hunted fugitive; for three years Jezebel has enjoyed her wicked triumph; but this one man is unsubdued and unsubduable. At last he comes forth from his desert, and he comes like a thunderbolt. He bars the way of the king’s chariot with a gesture, and silences him with one stern accusation: “Thou and thy father’s house have made Israel to sin!” Never was the fearlessness of right so splendidly illustrated, or the impotence of evil so conclusively exposed. The hunter is dumb before his prey; the tyrant quails before his victim. There is a royalty in righteousness before which all other royalty is but tinsel; there is a supremacy in goodness which strikes the wicked dumb. Are you armed with that supremacy? Dare you stand fearless in the right though the heavens fall? Only then is man invulnerable. No one can defeat a man who is in the right. He may be a wild man of the desert and stand in tattered garb, but the chariots of wrong stop at his signal, and kings fear his face. When Elijah says, “Gather to me all Israel unto Mount Carmel,” Ahab knows he must obey. So to Carmel Israel is gathered; there the broken altars are rebuilt, and there the pregnant question of the text is put to the vast multitude, who at last, when the fire of God descends, cry in fearful acquiescence not less than profound conviction, “The Lord, he is the God; the Lord, he is the God.” 4. We have in this story of Elijah the record of the actual struggle which went on in Israel for at least fifty years between monotheism and idolatry, between puritanism and immorality, between the individual conscience and a despotism, between nationalism and foreign influences. Politically, socially, morally, and religiously Elijah represented and concentrated this struggle. No figure can be more grand than he, standing there alone, above the wild dance and crying of the priests of Baal! All the desert majesty is upon his face; all the glory of the great conception of one God, of one righteousness, is shining in his eyes; all the power of that thought, and of being the servant of its law, speaks in his iron attitude, even in his scornful speech—one against the world, and in mortal danger. There are few who have the steady inward power to take and keep that post. It needs courage, not only physical, but moral; it needs determined will; it needs intense conviction of the right of that for which the stand is made; it needs to have lived a blameless life. All these things belonged to Elijah, and their power in him made him majestic. Every soul that saw him that day, erect upon the rock, felt the strength and awe of his solitude and solitary faith in God flow like a river from him into their hearts. Every soul felt the baseness, in comparison with his stern manhood, of the court of Ahab; the noble contrast between his life and the luxury of the city, the indifference of the people, the world, the flesh, and the devil. Every one knew that there was in him something higher than earthly power; that the soul of man was here greater than the whole world. Each man, as the long hours of the day drew on, looked, knew that God was there, and said within his heart— “The Lord sat as king at the Flood; Yea, the Lord sitteth as king for ever.” 5. It was not only human courage, will, and goodness that gave Elijah majesty. It was his faith in God. The man was possessed with God; behind him stood One whom none might see, but from whom streamed into His servant a spiritual might and inspiration. Elijah felt it; he knew that God had seized him, and he held to that faith with an intensity which made the man seem transfigured. This was the deep root of his courage, of his resolute will, of his scorn of all that men could do unto him, of the certainty which made him mock his foes, and call on all the folk of Israel to watch the falling of the fire before it fell. This, too, was the root of his calm; all the day long, he waited, “like Teneriffe or Atlas, unremoved”; silent till the end; wrapt in his mantle, wrapt in faith; at peace in the midst of turbulence. Yet within him, born too of faith in God and hatred of oppression, of fierce contempt of evil, and love of his mighty thought that God was one and undivided, there was also that without which nothing great in morals, nothing sublime in spiritual life is ever wrought—passion at white heat; not bursting like that of the priests of Baal into wild cries, fanatic self-torture, and maddened dancing, but self-restrained and ruled, cool at its centre, mastered by will, inspired by a cause which in its origin was not his own, exalted by an idea the source of which was beyond himself in God. 6. We see Elijah stand here, in his full strength, on Carmel, at a great crisis in the fate of Israel. To that crisis he was equal; nay, in it he stood the first. By might of character he was then the monarch of all Israel; by the same might he swept into agreement with himself all the wavering, all the indifferent, all the worldly-minded. Against him stood the court, the weak king, the cruel and masculine queen, the whole body of the priesthood of Baal, the whole of the foreign and idolatrous tribe that had invaded the religion of Jehovah. That religion was often fierce and ruthless, but it was not foul. It held to two great principles of the deepest importance for the progress of the world. It held to the unity of God, and to justice and purity as the necessities for His worship. Both these principles were traversed by the worship of Baal and Astarte. On one side, then, was the crowd and the court, on the other only one man. But, lonely as he was, so great was his thought, and so grand his character, that Ahab trembled in his palace when he thought of Elijah, and Jezebel heard at night his voice, crying aloud her doom. And were it wisely done If we who cannot gaze above, should walk the earth alone? If we whose virtue is so weak, should have a will so strong, And stand blind on the rocks to choose the right path from the wrong? To choose, perhaps, a love-lit hearth instead of love and heaven, A single rose for a rose-tree which beareth seven times seven? Until in grieving for the worst, we learn what is the best? Dear God, and must we see All blissful things depart from us or ere we go to Thee? We cannot guess Thee in the wood, or hear Thee in the wind; Our cedars fall around us ere we see the light behind. Ay, sooth, we feel too strong, in weal, to need Thee on the road, But woe being come, the soul is dumb that crieth not on God! 7. It was the battlefield of two religions, and Elijah concentrated the struggle in the first words that fell from his lips, words marked as much by his stormy contempt as by his religious passion; words that carry their impassioned appeal to us: “How long halt ye between two opinions? if the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him.” For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along, Round the earth’s electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong; Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity’s vast frame Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;— In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal gain. Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by for ever ’twixt that darkness and that light. Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand, Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land? Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet ’tis Truth alone is strong, And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.1 [Note: James Russell Lowell, The Present Crisis.] II Jehovah or Baal i. The Decision Elijah called the people to decide between two Gods—Jehovah and Baal. This decision has to be made in every age. Now Baal, the male, and Ashtaroth, the female, represented the fertilizing and productive principle in nature, and their worship was that of power. To the more cultivated and refined, it was simply a species of pantheism; to the multitude, it was what one has called “the worship of deified abundance, under a splendid and sensuous ceremonial”; or, as Maurice has put it, “The worship of Baal was the worship of power as distinguished from righteousness.” But we are less concerned with what Baal stood for to the Israelites than with what “the God of this world” means to ourselves. 1. The God of this world. The God of this world takes various forms. (1) Here is one form. We do not cast him into the form of a graven, or a molten, image; we may not set him up in the “plains of Dura, in the province of Babylon,” but we set him up in London, at the Stock Exchange. We have little images of him in our own houses, and we worship him with the “sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, and all kinds of music,” and we call him Money! We are great at the worship of Mammon. People never seem tired of burning incense to wealth. To-day, a man may be so despicable a creature that we would not demean ourselves by touching him with the extreme tip of our little finger. He suddenly becomes heir to ten thousand a year, and to-morrow we are only too glad to get into our carriage and call upon him. What has made the difference? He has become a successful “worshipper of the golden image,” and we, as other high priests of this idolatry, are bound to fraternize with this excellent person! Who is he? “The God of this World.” The Baal of our day! (2) Here is another “God of this world”; we set him up on a lofty tower of ivory, or we put him into one of our superb equipages, and roll him through the street, with a four-in-hand, and we call him Rank! And everybody bows down and worships this God, as he passes along. Look at him there, as he goes along in all his splendour, and the votaries of this world bow down with profound obeisance, and do him honour! (3) Here is another “God of this world”! We deck him with all kinds of silks, satins, and load him with jewellery, and we call him Fashion. We put him in our drawing-rooms; our roués are skilful in his worship, and women are specially devoted to him. If he makes us ridiculous it is no matter. Any kind of eccentricity is pardoned, even though our own tastes condemn us for the form our worship assumes, though our own reason may rise up against it, and we may sometimes say, as we look into our glass, “What a ridiculous, empty-headed, wax doll I have made of myself!” Yet in the very same moment we none the less eagerly offer our incense to the worship of the God that we have made. (4) Here is another God. We beat drums, and we blow trumpets; we deck him in scarlet regimentals; and we write the name Ambition upon his brow, and fall down and worship him. What deity so great as this God? We honour him supremely; we are never tired of speaking about him; poets write of him; and philosophers go out of their way to make themselves ridiculous about him; even ministers of the gospel of peace can become eloquent in sounding forth the praises of what they are pleased to call “glory.” (5) Or it may be we call him Pleasure. He puts on the fool’s mask, and wherever he goes eager crowd? of admirers follow him. “There goes the God of this world.” “Have you heard So-and-so? Go and hear him: why, you would die of laughing!” As though it were worthy of the dignity of humanity to lay itself out for levity; as though we were not frivolous enough by nature, but must needs pay our fellow-travellers on the broad road to make us more frivolous than we were before!1 [Note: Canon Hay Aitken.] Very powerfully has Watts embodied his idea of Mammon as the god of this world, in that telling picture which exhibits him to us as a king, sitting on a scarlet throne ornamented at the top with two skulls. His head, Midas-like, is encircled with a crown fashioned of a broad band of gold—with round golden coins standing up from it in imitation of the balls or strawberry leaves of a coronet. There is something indescribably mean and repulsive in his face, with square massive jaws—sordid, selfish mouth—flat nose, and bleared dead-blue eyes, full of cunning and deceit and all hardness, rising above a neck that wrinkles into gross folds like the skin of a rhinoceros. On each side above his head his hair rises up like a pair of asinine ears; and he is clothed with a gold tunic embroidered with patterns taken from the pursuits of wealth. One hand is grovelling among the money bags in his lap, and the other grasps the long tresses of a beautiful woman who has sold herself for gain, and whose green robe of freshness falls away from her. His foot, covered with blood-red hose, rests on the body of a naked youth who has been a devoted slave, and has been stamped into the mire by his bondage. In the background of the picture a crimson curtain falls down concealing the distant view, but disclosing immediately underneath it a smoking fire, emblematic of the fiery danger to which the lust of wealth exposes the soul that cherishes it. The commercial world is only too full of illustrations of the destructive flame which this spark of inward fire kindles, for no one can be covetous at heart without his covetousness finding outward expression in his life.1 [Note: Hugh Macmillan, George Frederick Watts, 194. 2. Our choice is between the God of this world and Him who is called “the God and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” Why should we choose the latter? (1) He is one.—Suppose that we worshipped a plurality of gods, as the heathen nations do and ever have done; then we have at once a divided duty: one man chooses this god as his patron and makes his vows and prayers to him, and another man chooses that god, according to the fancy or caprice of the worshipper. In the midst of a multitude of gods, as here supposed, a person would be situated almost as he is amongst his fellow-men; he owes a duty to this man, and a duty to that; there is every kind and degree of human duty, there is that of son to father and father to son, of husband to wife and wife to husband, of servant to master and master to servant; and besides all such definite duties, there is the universal duty of love and benevolence, which binds each member of the human family to all the rest; but there is no one person amongst men, of whom we can assert that we owe to him a duty or allegiance paramount to all other considerations. God is but one, and because He is one, duty to Him is different from all other duties; and in reminding the Israelites of their duty towards God, Moses took in reality the deepest and most philosophical ground when he used these words, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” The Sin of all Sins, or the Heresy of all Heresies, is a Worldly Spirit. We are apt to consider this Temper only as an Infirmity, or pardonable Failure; but it is indeed the great Apostasy from God and the Divine Life. It is not a Single Sin, but the whole Nature of all Sin. Every Sin, be it of what kind it will, is only a Branch of the worldly Spirit that lives in us. “There is but one that is good,” saith our Lord, “and that is God.” In the same Strictness of Expression it must be said, that there is but one Life that is good, and that is the Life of God and Heaven. Depart in the least Degree from the Goodness of God, and you depart into Evil; because nothing is good but His goodness.1 [Note: William Law.] (2) He is a support in time of trouble.—What do we expect in a God? We expect that our God should be one who, in consequence of the relation of amity established between ourselves and Him, will be ready to stand up for us, to take hold of our hand, and lead us along the way of life, to support us in our trouble, animate us with hope in the dark passages of our experience, give us courage when foes are pressing on our heart, and comfort when the scalding tear is trickling down the cheek! Is not that what we would expect of a God? Do we not naturally look for something of this kind in a God? Can we believe in a God who is of no practical use, or help—who has no real sympathy with those who worship Him? He doth give His joy to all: He becomes an infant small, He becomes a man of woe, He doth feel the sorrow too. Think not thou canst sigh a sigh, And thy Maker is not by: Think not thou canst weep a tear, And thy Maker is not near. Oh, He gives to us His joy, That our grief He may destroy: Till our grief is fled and gone He doth sit by us and moan.1 [Note: William Blake.] (3) He is an uplift to moral character.—Again, what do we expect in a God? We expect that all the intercourse that we have with Him shall have a tendency to elevate our moral character. We expect that the more we know of Him, the more we shall become like His own glorious nature. We expect that there will be roused within us such an enthusiasm towards Him, that, drawn on as by an irresistible attraction, and following wherever He leads, enduring any hardship He may appoint, we shall wake up in His likeness, and gain that glorious ideal of moral perfectness, after which He has Himself bidden us to aspire. Is not that what we expect in a God? Can we expect less? Baal or Jehovah—it is often the choice between purity and sensuality. It was the sensual pollutions of Baal that awoke the most terrible denunciations of the Hebrew prophets, and sensuality is one of the first results of a life which has lost righteousness of thought. Do not mistake me. I do not say that impurity is the certain or inevitable result of loss of faith; but I do say that the man who loses righteousness of thought at least challenges the demon of sensuality to enter in and possess him. Shall I draw a modern sketch of what this aspect of Baalism means? It is a task I would thankfully evade, but it is a duty from which the minister of Christ dare not be recreant. It is a story with which every student of modern life is only too familiar, and it is written on a thousand broken hearts and miserable lives. Here is a youth reared in the ordered quiet of some country home, familiar with its domestic sanctities, its household affections and pieties. At length he leaves the home where the fragrance of prayer and love has sweetened daily life, and enters the great city; and then the spell of Baal begins to fall on him. He hears in the office, the warehouse, stories at which he blushes, but which he will soon learn eagerly to devour without blushing. The moral sensitiveness becomes deadened, and the influence of comradeship begins to tell. Through the ear-gate the enemy enters in, and soon the citadel is captured. One by one his small habitual pieties disappear; the Testament his mother gave him lies unused; the habit of prayer is dropped, for perhaps he shares a room with one who does not pray; and how difficult it is to pray then I know full well, for I have had to do it. In a few weeks the work is done; the boy’s pure imagination is polluted, the boy’s blood begins to riot with unholy impulses, and on the inward ear there falls more clearly and resistlessly every hour the delirious whispers and suggestions of impure seduction. He begins to think it manly to be cynical, and clever to talk of women in such a way that if his mother heard him she might wish that she had never borne him. And if the evil goes no further, can any say how great the havoc that is wrought?1 [Note: W. J. Dawson.] You have heard the story of Frankenstein: how a great chemist strives to make a man, and builds the physical frame up bone by bone, and sinew by sinew, and at last finds some occult means whereby he breathes into him the spirit of life, and the monster moves and lives. He is its creator; and from that hour the thing which he has made haunts him, dogs him, will not let him rest, is a walking terror he cannot evade, a hideous presence from which he cannot flee. So he who raises the devil of impure delight raises a devil very difficult to lay. It enters in, and brings with it seven other devils worse than itself. It quenches conscience, it masters the will, it destroys too often intellectual pleasures, it robs the mind of peace, and visits the body with loathsome suffering, till of a man made in God’s image it leaves something worse than a beast: and it makes the body, which should be the temple of the Holy Ghost, the mere agent and minister of infamous delights. Purity: it is embodied in an Elijah whose thoughts are full of God, whose Strength is as the strength of ten, Because his heart is pure. Sensuality: it is embodied in a Jezebel who has given her name to all bad women, and an Ahab who forgets the duties of kingship in her guilty fascinations.2 [Note: Ibid.] (4) He is a Redeemer from sin.—With those who know the new relation in which the human family stands to its Creator through the redemption wrought for us by Jesus Christ, the argument for entire homage and obedience, which depends upon the fact of our being a redeemed people, is perhaps the strongest that can be brought. He who knows that God so loved him that He sent His Son into the world that men might live and not die, and who does not acknowledge that on this ground alone he is bound to consider himself as not his own but bought with a price, and under obligation to yield up all his powers to Him who redeemed him, cannot very easily be persuaded by any other argument, that he is bound to love and fear God with all his heart and mind and soul and strength. ii. The Difficulty of the Decision What makes the decision difficult? 1. It does not seem so easy now as in some former times, to discern what is the good and what is the evil cause. For Homer’s hero the one true omen, the one Divine direction, was to fight for the fatherland. To the Athenian, the cause of his city was the cause of his god; and it was not till the time of Socrates that the thought of some wider conflicting duty dawned upon him. And so for Deborah and Elijah, the God of Israel was the Lord of Hosts, and neither the one nor the other had the slightest hesitation in dooming the Syrian General, Sisera, or the priests of Baal, to death. One clear but narrow rule seemed to point out the path of right; and he who fell short of it, who “came not to the help of the Lord against the mighty,” could not pretend that he was actuated by any motive but unwillingness to do his duty. And when Saul spared even the cattle of the Amalekites, and pled that he spared them to make a greater sacrifice to God, he met at once the stern reproof of the prophet Samuel: “Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.” 2. The general widening of our moral and intellectual horizon has made this simple way of opposing good and evil impossible to us. Christianity itself has taught us to sympathize with men of all classes and nations, to see the same humanity manifesting itself in them all; and this sympathy and insight will not let us regard our national foes as essentially the servants of an evil principle. We cannot echo the blessing pronounced by Deborah on the treacherous act of Jael, or regard the slaughter of Baal’s priests as a just measure for the propagation of true religion. We have learned to recognize in all religions at least a partial expression of that reverence for a Divine Power which concentrates human life, and binds men together in families and nations. Modern ideas of evolution have taught us to regard the great controversies and wars which have taken place in the past between different parties, different races, different religions, as rarely, if ever, a pure conflict between good and evil, but rather, in many cases, as issues in which important interests of humanity were maintained on both sides; so that it would have been a calamity if either side had been absolutely victorious over the other. And the more we discover this in regard to the past, the more we are led to ask ourselves whether it is not also the case with many of the issues most hotly contested in the present day. Such thoughts are, so to speak, in the air, and even those who are not directly conscious of them, are indirectly influenced by them, and are led to regard the exclusive spirit which sees good only in one cause or object, as bigoted and irrational. 3. But there is a dark side to all this: for just those wider views of things which produce tolerance are apt to produce also a sceptical spirit, which weakens the springs of manly energy. We are not able to split life in two with a hatchet as our fathers did, or to see all white on one side, and all black on the other; and therefore we are apt to lose the consciousness that there is a real battle between good and evil going on in the world, and find it hard to realize that we are called to take up arms on one side or the other. The complexity of life, the difficulty of seeing our way clearly, the constant discussion which tends to awaken doubt as to every course that can be taken, and the fact that good men are ranged on both sides in almost every controversy—all these things seem to offer excuses to the man who shrinks from the decisive choice that would make him the servant of any one cause or principle, and who prefers, in the old phrase, “to cultivate his garden,” that is, to devote his main energies to looking after his own interests, and in other things to drift with the current that is strongest. When you find it difficult to come to a decision, said he, take a sheet of white paper and divide it into two columns. Write in one of these columns all the reasons you have for acting and in the other all the reasons you have for abstaining. As in algebra we cancel similar quantities, strike out the reasons that balance one another, and decide according to the reasons that remain. This method is not suited to Serenus, and he never employs it. Serenus would exhaust all the papyrus and all the waxen tablets in the world, he would use up all the reeds of the Nile, and his steel stylus as well, before he would have exhausted the reasons that his subtle intellect would suggest to him, and, finally, he would not decide that any one of them was better or worse than the other. Is it necessary then to act? Beyond question it is.1 [Note: Anatole France, On Life and Letters, 12. When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome. Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good.2 [Note: William James.] If I lay waste, and wither up with doubt The blessed fields of Heaven where once my faith Possessed itself serenely safe from death; If I deny the things past finding out; Or if I orphan my own soul of One That seemed a Father, and make void the place Within me where He dwelt in power and grace, What do I gain by that I have undone?3 [Note: William Dean Howells.] 4. There is, further, the moral difficulty of taking the unpopular side. The God of this world is custom, and has therefore the majority with him; the followers of the true God are a remnant. In every age there is a remnant, a holy seed, who defy the custom of the world, and cleave to God. It is the remnant, the ten righteous men, the aristocracy of virtue, who save a nation and redeem a time; and they do so in defiance of the many, who cheerfully go to their damnation and refuse to be saved. It is here, again, that this subject is so intensely modern, and teaches eternal truths. The priests of Baal are four hundred; they have spread their toils so carefully that the people do not want to be redeemed; the force of habit, the dignity of royal sanction, the spells of passion, all are with them; and when that great voice cries, “I, even I only, am left a prophet of the Lord,” the people answer not a word. Is not this true still? Elijah was a man who felt keenly his solitariness in conflict. He felt this specially on Carmel: “I, even I only, am left a prophet of the Lord; but Baal’s prophets are four hundred and fifty men.” Even in that terrible reaction which he experienced when under the juniper tree he emphasized the same conviction—a mistake, doubtless; but the mistake of a conscientious man who had already been made to realize keenly his loneliness in the conflict on Carmel. On this occasion we see how the man stands practically alone, for any voice that is lifted up in his defence; and few can realize how keenly he felt it. The men whom God raises up to stand alone are not men who do not feel it greatly. They are men of delicate touch; men who readily respond to sympathy, who feel acutely the sting of reproof. Elijah the prophet was one of these; a man who felt the burden of solitariness and the pain of having no human companion who shared his convictions and feelings.1 [Note: D. Davies.] Yet to do anything because others do it, and not because the thing is good, or kind, or honest in its own right, is to resign all moral control and captaincy upon yourself, and go post-haste to the devil with the greater number. The respectable are not led so much by any desire of applause as by a positive need for countenance. The weaker and the tamer the man, the more will he require this support; and any positive quality relieves him, by just so much, of this dependence.2 [Note: R. L. Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books.] 5. But there is also the last and most potent reason of all—moral indecision. There are those who plead honest doubt. But this is rarely sincere. An honest doubter is not contented until he has moved heaven and earth to resolve his doubt. It is related of Zaid, the sage of Mecca, who had broken with the national religion, that he stood with his back to the temple crying, “If I knew thee I would worship thee; but alas, I know thee not.” Thus day after day he prostrated himself and moistened the ground with his tears. Next to wilful sin, indecision is the most pitiable state of man. To hang in doubt between time and eternity, the world and God, a sin and a crown of life, is, we may believe, if possible, more incensing to the Divine jealousy than open disobedience. It implies so much light and so much sense of what is good, that doubt has no plea of ignorance. The irresolution is not in the understanding or in the conscience, but in the will. The fault is in the heart. It convicts one of want of love, gratitude, and all high desires after God; it reveals the stupor and earthliness which is still upon the soul. It proves the absence of faith; of a living consciousness of things unseen, and an active power of realizing what one believes, without which faith is dead. There is upon one a spiritual insensibility, a kind of moral apathy, a listless inattention to any thing which does not make itself felt by forcing its presence upon the senses of the body. And this at last deadens the perceptions of the soul. It always seems to me in reading this passage that it was not intellectual doubt that Elijah referred to, but rather a habit of moral indecision. I do not find any reason for concluding that these Israelites were in great intellectual doubt or difficulty with respect to the actual problem that lay before them. They could hardly have forgotten all the wonders God had wrought, for their national existence was a proof of His power. At that very moment there stood before them the man who was God’s representative, and who exerted such miraculous power that he only bent the knee to Jehovah in prayer, and for three long dreary years the heavens had been shut. Standing there face to face with Elijah, the Israelites can hardly have entertained any very serious doubts as to whether “Baal” or “God” was really God. If you will look at the margin of your Bibles you will find the word “thoughts” suggested, instead of “opinions.” “How long halt ye between two thoughts?” It is a more general word than “opinion.” “Opinion” seems to lead us up into an intellectual region; “thought” in such a connection may be employed with a moral significance. It is not so much that they had really any intellectual difficulty, as to whether “Jehovah” or “Baal” was God, as that they were in a state of moral indecision as to which of the two they should recognize. This was in the prophet’s mind at the moment when he expostulated with them.1 [Note: Canon Hay Aitken.] Warn’t we gittin’ on prime with our hot an’ cold blowin’, Acondemnin’ the war wilst we kep’ it agoin’? We’d assumed with gret skill a commandin’ position, On this side or thet, no one couldn’t tell wich one, So, wutever side wipped, we’d a chance at the plunder An’ could sue fer infringin’ our paytented thunder; We were ready to vote fer whoever wuz eligible, Ef on all pints at issoo he’d stay unintelligible. Wal, sposin’ we hed to gulp down our perfessions, We were ready to come out next mornin’ with fresh ones; Besides, ef we did, ’twas our business alone, Fer couldn’t we du wut we would with our own? An’ ef a man can, wen pervisions hev riz so, Eat up his own words, it’s a marcy it is Song of Solomon 1 [Note: James Russell Lowell, The Biglow Papers, No. IV.] To the strong and unhesitating spirit that sees the right on the one side as if it were written in letters of fire, and absolute wrong on the other, nothing is so incomprehensible as the lukewarm temper that will not be kindled either to love or to hatred, and seeks rather to avoid any decisive choice. So it was with the great poet Dante, who, in his Divine Comedy, describes for us a special region, outside of the Inferno of agony, a kind of Inferno of contempt, which is prepared for those who have lived “without blame, and without praise.” There Dante places the angels who “neither were rebellious nor were faithful to God, but were only for themselves”; and also the shade of him who made the great renunciation, the Pope Celestine, who in his weak piety withdrew into a monastery, rather than face the task of contending with the evils of the world. “Forthwith,” says the poet, “I understood and felt that this was the crew of caitiffs, hateful to God, and to God’s enemies.” “Mercy and justice alike disdain them; let us not speak of them, but look and pass them by.” Dante’s high strong spirit can comprehend energy and purpose, even when exerted in the cause of evil; he has keen sympathy even for some of those whom he regards as for great sins righteously doomed to everlasting punishment. What he cannot comprehend is the man who does not rise to a great opportunity, who hesitates between two opinions, who seeks to withdraw from the conflict, who shirks responsibility.2 [Note: Edward Caird.] Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction—where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping: not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.] Literature Aitken (W. H. M. H.), Mission Sermons, i. 185. Banks (L. A.), Thirty-One Revival Sermons, 60. Brooke (S. A.), The Old Testament and Modern Life, 269. Brown (C.), in Great Texts of the Old Testament, 135. Burrell (D. J.), The Gospel of Gladness, 80. Caird (E.), Lay Sermons and Addresses, 178. Clegg (A.), The Throne and the Voice, 62. Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, iv. 584. Dawson (W. J.), The Threshold of Manhood, 1. Doney (C. G.), The Throne-Room of the Soul, 179. Goodwin (H.), Parish Sermons, iv. 63. Kemble (C.), Memorials of a Closed Ministry, i. 167. Lees (H. C.), in The Keswick Week, 1908, 162. Macaskill (M.), A Highland Pulpit, 137. Manning (H. E.), Sermons, iii. 54. Mills (B. R. V.), The Marks of the Church, 136. Minifie (W. C.), The Mask Torn Off, 102. Moody-Stuart (K.), Light from the Holy Hills, 89. Pusey (E. B.), Parochial and Cathedral Sermons, 369. Robertson (F. W.), The Human Race, 87. Selby (T. G.), The God of the Patriarchs, 273. Senior (W.), A Faithful Ministry, 69. Taylor (W. M.), Elijah the Prophet, 96. Tholuck (A.), Hours of Christian Devotion, 234. Twigg (R.), Sermons, 136. Whiton (J. M.), New Points to Old Texts, 131. Worden (J. D. W.), Whether of the Twain? 53. Christian World Pulpit, xiv. 309 (Anderson); xxviii. 41 (Rogers). Churchman’s Pulpit: Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, xi. 282 (Senior), 283 (Bush). A Still Small Voice And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.—1 Kings 19:11-12. 1. This is, perhaps, the most forcible example of moral and spiritual teaching in a dramatic form in the whole range of Holy Scripture. And when it is regarded in the light of the mental condition of the prophet to whom it was granted, its force is still more evident. Elijah—the prophet of fire—a man of highly-strung emotional nature, a man who sometimes rose very high, but, like all such men, sometimes sank very low, had been marvellously elated by the great scene on Carmel. He imagined that by that one decisive stroke the idolatry of Baal had been completely overthrown, and that Jehovah would now reign supreme in the hearts of the people. His spirits had risen as high as the great mountain on which that memorable decision had been effected. But the excitement wore away, and he saw, as so many besides him have seen, that no great spiritual reformation is wrought by one stroke, however decisive. He saw, that the people still lusted after Baal, that the powers of the nation were still upon the side of idolatry, so that he seemed alone and solitary—the prophet of the Lord. Thus he fell from the clear and bracing air of the mountain to the enervating atmosphere of the valley below. The reaction which follows excitement came, and the prophet who, in solitary grandeur, could stand confident and fearless before the thousand priests of Baal, before the fierce oath of a vindictive woman fled to the desert, where his only wish was to die, because he was no better than his fathers. With nerves unstrung by excitement, with the reaction producing despondency in his heart, with a sense of loneliness which made life seem a burden, and death a happy door of release, he plunged still farther into the desert, and came even to Horeb, the Mount of God. 2. Perhaps no spot on earth is more associated with the manifested presence of God than that sacred mount. There the bush burned with fire; there the Law was given; there Moses spent forty days and nights alone with God. It was a natural instinct that led the prophet thither, and all the world could not have furnished a more appropriate school. Natural scenery and holy associations lent all their powers to impress and elevate the soul. We know the scenery. Beneath Elijah’s eyes, as he stood at the entrance of the cave, lay the vast desert, a rough and stony plain, with dry and infrequent herbage. Infinite silence, infinite awe, as of the presence of an eternal God, encompassed him. Near at hand were the great mountain walls of red granite, deep-hewn valleys below splintered gorges; and above, the naked peaks piercing the heaven, in which the stars burned in depths even more vocal of infinitude than the desert. Tradition still points out, as tradition chose, the small and lonely valley, the upland level under the summit, where Elijah rested. One cypress tree stands now in its midst, and a well and tank are open near the ruined chapel which covers the rock in which the cave was set. It is one of the most silent places in the world, as hidden as it is silent. The granite cliffs lap it round on all sides but one, that side where Elijah stood, when, in the dawn, he came forth to hear the voice of God. 3. Elijah is in great despondency. It is amazing through what apparently inconsistent moods the same man can pass in a very short time. We go back but a little way to his experience upon Carmel, when the same Elijah moved about in majestic confidence, inspired by unclouded hope. He seemed to realize the immediateness of the Almighty, and he revelled in the fulness of his resources. And now all this bounding assurance passes away; the heavens appear to be emptied; the earth is deserted; and the prophet is languishing in this melancholy recital, “I, even I only, am left!” The once triumphant spokesman of the Lord has temporarily lost his exuberant faith, and is sunk in dark despair. There is something in human nature which makes us feel more akin to men who occasionally suffer defeat. If Elijah’s pilgrimage along the way of life had been a series of unfailing triumphs, and if the cloud of uncertainty had never gathered about his heart, he might have seemed like a man of an alien race, having little or no kinship with the sons and daughters of despondency and grief. When the Apostle Peter is very bold, daring even death in the presence of the great ones of the earth, he appears very remote to the child of hesitancy and doubt; but in the hour of Peter’s weakness, when he shrinks from the foes that beset him, he becomes one of the common crowd. His impulsiveness makes even his martyrdom human. St. Paul’s feelings of wretchedness lend humanness even to his ecstasies, and his unspeakable revelations do not lie in lands too remote. But, in spite of all this, the pity of the prophet’s defeat! He knew the strength of his God, he had experienced the softened light of His guidance, he had had proofs innumerable of His providential care, he had “tasted that the Lord is gracious,” and yet here he is, in a season of peculiar crisis, throwing up his ministry, and lying down with a desire to die! 4. What is the secret of his despondency? He has been counting heads. He has become the victim of the apparent. “They have thrown down thine altars, slain thy prophets!” The antagonisms are overwhelming! “I, even I only, am left!” The enemy, who flaunted his greatness, seemed the greatest power on the field. Has there never been a time in our experience when we have grown baffled and weary with the greatness of our tasks and the smallness of our success with them? Have we never felt that we craved something besides the feeling that what we were doing was worth doing and that we would prevail in the end? Have we never had our hours of deep discouragement—yes, and our seasons of defeat—in which we questioned with ourselves whether what we were doing was worth doing after all? Like Elijah, perhaps, we played the man, and did it well. We confounded King Ahab in the full consciousness of rectitude and sincerity of purpose. We even had our Mount Carmel, our dramatic stand for righteousness, and our hard-won, stormy triumph. We fixed our eye upon a certain goal and got there. We gained our point in some fiercely contested conflict of interests in which we managed to see justice done. We unmasked some piece of cruel humbug or put to silence some clamorous evil. We put our whole soul into the cause, whatever it was, which we felt to be ours, and our very intensity and self-forgetful zeal gained us a temporary victory. Then followed the hour of disillusionment. No sooner did we drive an evil out by one door than it returned by another. The victory we thought was going to do everything turned out to have done nothing; things were no better than they were before—worse, perhaps. If things are so with us we are just in Elijah’s position, and God’s message to His prophet these hundreds of years ago is just as really His message to us to-day. Like Elijah we look too much to externals, dwell too much upon the circumference and too little at the centre of things. In proportion to our eagerness and self-devotion is our tendency to exaggerate our own importance to the cause of God and to waste time in looking for visible results of our activity. We have lost our true perspective by over-absorption in the immediate and the near outside the soul. We have, in fact, lost God. How shall we find Him again? The text tells us how God revealed Himself to Elijah. I Where God is not “A great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire.” i. God does not always reveal Himself in Nature The first point we would make is that God did not manifest Himself to Elijah at this time in the forces of Nature. 1. A fierce storm burst upon that wild spot, a fearful hurricane swept across the sky. As the black clouds of tempest rolled up from the sea, “a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord.” The prophet stood amid all the horrors and wild disorder of a tropical storm. What could it mean? As the fierce tempest raged about the granite rocks and mountain peaks of that savage desert, and the massive fragments of stone were hurled down the heights to the plain below, and all nature seemed turbulent amid the rush and fury of the storm, how the heart of Elijah would burn with exultation to find his own wild spirit reflected in that tumultuous scene. The violent commotion and the passion of that whirlwind were a true image of himself. Could it be that God had mantled Himself in this form of terror? Was it indeed true that the vehemence of the Lord confirmed and crowned the vehemence of the man? Did the turbulence and passion of the human spirit find their counterpart in Him? The prophet’s heart beat wildly at the very thought—O that God were such a one as he himself? “But the Lord was not in the wind.” No! although it was a speaking symbol of the resistless power which he always delighted to associate with God, and had seen manifested in more than one memorable episode of his life. “And after the wind an earthquake.” The whole earth appeared convulsed as in terror. Solid mountains shook, and great rocks were split and sundered by the fierce upheaval. Deep chasms were opened where before had been nought but massive stone. “Sinai itself was moved at the presence of God, the God of Israel.” Once more the prophet saw an image of himself, saw his own convulsive nature mirrored in that scene of tumult and agitation. Would God reveal Himself now? Was it possible that God could be imaged in that wild disturbance? The prophet waited with anxious heart to know. He looked, and looked again, but saw not in the convulsion the presence of God. That was simply an image of himself. “But the Lord,” he was again conscious, “was not in the earthquake,” though it pictured vividly the tremendous upheaval by which he longed to cast down the altars of Baal and to destroy his priests, possible (he well knew) to the might of Jehovah, who again and again had overwhelmed His enemies in Israel’s past. “And after the earthquake a fire.” Suddenly that wilderness of granite peaks was lighted up with the blinding glare of tropic lightning. So swift and fierce were the streams of fire that flashed across the sky that the whole earth appeared bathed in glorious light, and the heavens one mass of flame. Was this the symbol of God’s glory? The prophet felt perhaps that here was the reflection of his truest self. Surely at last God was about to make Himself known. But no. Once more it was borne in upon him that “the Lord was not in the fire,” though to the stern eye of the prophet it was eloquent of the fierce vengeance which he had again and again in his despair invoked from heaven upon the sins of Jezebel and her godless court. 2. Does the writer of this story deny that, to those who had the prophetic gift of interpreting nature, there were special messages from heaven in the storm and the earthquake? By no means. At another time Jehovah might have spoken to Elijah, as He spoke to Job out of the tempest; but upon this occasion the prophet was to be shown that the highest revelations were to be expected, not in the extraordinary, but in the ordinary, not in the most awful, but in the gentlest and most familiar, manifestations of God in nature. With kindlier mien, one said, “Go forth unto the fields, For there, and in the woods, are balms that Nature freely yields; Let Nature take thee to her heart! she hath a bounteous breast That yearns o’er all her sorrowing sons, and she will give thee rest.” But Nature on the spirit-sick as on the spirit-free Smiled, like a fair unloving face too bright for sympathy; Sweet, ever sweet, are whispering leaves, are waters in their flow, But never on them breathed a tone to comfort human woe! Small solace for the deer that hath the arrow in its side,— And only seeks the woods to die,—that o’er his dappled hide Spread purple blooms of bedded heath, and ferny branchings tall— A deadly hurt must have strong cure, or it hath none at all; And the old warfare from within that had gone on so long, The wasting of the inner strife, the sting of outward wrong, Went with me o’er the breezy hill, went with me up the glade— I found not God among the trees, and yet I was afraid! I mused, and fire that smouldered long within my breast brake free, I said, “O God, Thy works are good, and yet they are not Thee; Still greater to the sense is that which breathes through every part, Still sweeter to the heart than all is He who made the heart! I will seek Thee, not Thine, O Lord! for (now I mind me) still Thou sendest us for soothing not to fountain, nor to hill; Yet is there comfort in the fields if we walk in them with Thee, Who saidest, ‘Come, ye burdened ones, ye weary, unto Me.’ ”1 [Note: Dora Greenwell.] 3. God ignored the old means of manifestation because of the present needs of His prophet. Elijah had read into the Divine character the swift impatience of his own angry heart. He was not one of those who find it easy to live quietly. Born a Gileadite, he retained to the end much of the restlessness of the Bedouin. Headlong, impetuous, and swift to strike where it seemed that a blow was the shortest way to attain his purpose, he could confront a whole college of idolatrous priests and enjoy the combat. There is a kind of stern joy in the truculent irony of his taunts on Carmel which shows how much to his liking was the contest in which he was engaged. As the storm raged over Horeb his fierce nature would recognize a brother in the wild wind; the shocks of earthquake found an echo in the depths of his tumultuous spirit; the flashing lightning reflected the swift movements of his own fiery passions. He would be quick to see the hand of God in a national catastrophe; but not until it had been specially shown to him could he find the evidence of higher working when things had settled down into common channels. He would always choose the short cut to success, and he thought God must do so too. Like the Baptist in the dungeon of Machaerus, when the immediate developments that he expected did not follow, he found himself in anguish of soul, doubting whether he was not altogether mistaken, and for the time being he was crushed under a burden which he could not sustain. Men of this type make splendid reformers, and they are the born pioneers of any new movement for God and righteousness. But they are generally too summary in their verdicts to be good judges of the Divine dealings with men as a whole. Sooner or later they fall into the mistake that things are not moving fast enough. Savonarola, whose burning utterances from the pulpit of the Duomo flashed like the sword of God of which he spoke into the guilty heart of fifteenth-century Florence, went far beyond the guidance of the Spirit within him, when he assumed to know that only through a storm of vengeance would the Church be purged of its abuses, and the clergy be restored from licentiousness and formalism to the spirituality which he felt was their supreme need. The needed renewal came to Europe; but it came rather through the spiritual awakening of the Reformation than through any vast temporal judgments upon the Papacy, and the brave monk died in no small measure a martyr to his own mistakes. The tempestuous spirit of Luther needed to be balanced by the saner and more sympathetic insight of Melanchthon. In the work of the Apostles the strenuous energy of St. Peter had to be tempered by the spirituality of St. John 1 [Note: F. B. Macnutt.] ii. God does not reveal Himself in Nature finally The second point we would make is that God does not manifest Himself to us finally or in His fulness in Nature, or in the forces which in our text are mirrored by Nature. The world cannot be exhausted by physical explanations: and so the savage who worships the forces of nature, and the scientist who declares them to be the ultimate source of all things, are equally and very similarly in the wrong. God is not in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire. These are only the fringe of His garment, the shadow of His inner glory. God is a Spirit, and is known through the vocal silence of spiritual fellowship. How often in the midst of the sublimities of nature, a spectator, gazing upon some high mountain-range, has been fain to cry out, “What an aid to devotion! what a ladder up to Heaven!” Who has not exclaimed, when the thunder-cloud has rolled its awful peal, “Surely this is the voice of God!” And yet it is to be questioned whether any man was ever drawn to God by the contemplation of the glory of creation alone: or, whether any man ever received, indeed, his call to grace, in the summons of the storm. Men have lived their threescore years and ten in all the intimacy of nature’s most eloquent works, and from the cradle to the grave, they have not found God, for He is not in the wind; and He is not in the earthquake; and He is not in the fire; but He is in the still small voice. 1. “The Lord was not in the wind.” Strong religious impulse may be more than half physical,—a matter of temperament, of constitution. Earthly passion, in some natures, may take this form; the language, the intended and professed objects, may be of heaven, and the spirit of earth. Even though mountains of opposition are rent by it, and rocks of prejudice are broken in pieces, and changes are brought about which fill the thoughts of men and live in history, it may yet be that the agency which effects all this is itself destitute of anything properly Divine; “the Lord was not in the wind.” 2. “The Lord was not in the earthquake.” Spasmodic terror may be only terror. The thought, or sight, or immediate apprehension of death, may convulse, to its very depths, the human soul. But mere agitation may be only desperate; “the fear of the Lord,” as distinct from the fear of anything else, “is the beginning of wisdom.” Whether the Lord is or is not in the great earthquakes of the soul depends, generally speaking, upon the soul’s previous relations with Him. 3. “The Lord was not in the fire.” He was in the burning bush; He was in the fiery tongues of Pentecost; but He was not in the fire which played around Elijah on Horeb. Religious passion carried to the highest pitch of enthusiasm is a great agency in human life; but it may be too inconsiderate, too truculent, too entirely lacking in tenderness and charity, to be in any sense Divine. Christendom has been the scene of the most Divine enthusiasm of which the soul of man has ever had experience; but it has also been ablaze with fires (and they are not altogether extinct in our day and country) of which it may certainly be said that the Lord is not in them. In our religious experience we are too apt to rely upon carnal force and energy. We are hopeful if we can make a noise, and create excitement, stir, and agitation. The heaving of the masses under newly invented excitements we are too apt to identify with the power of God. “At least we must have an eloquent preacher,” we say,—“one who can plead with choice picked words, a master of the art of oratory.” Yet God does not always choose this form of power, for still He will not have our faith to stand in the wisdom of words, but He will have us to learn this lesson, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.” Crash after crash the orator’s passages succeed each other. What a tremendous passage! The hearers must surely be impressed. Wind! And the Lord is not in it. And now everything seems to shake, while, like a second John the Baptist, the minister proclaims woe and terror, and pronounces the curse of God upon a generation of vipers! Will not this break hard hearts? No. Nothing is accomplished. It is an earthquake; but the Lord is not in the earthquake. Another form of force remains. Here comes one who pleads with vehemence; all on fire, he flashes and flames. Look at the coruscations of his sensational metaphors and anecdotes. Yes, fire (might we not say fireworks?); and yet the Lord does not work by such fire. The Lord is not in the fire. The furious energy of unbridled fanaticism the Lord does not use. God is not there. The hallowed mind—the prayerful frame—the Spirit—they are all absent there. There was the wind, but “the Lord was not in the wind”; there was the earthquake, but “the Lord was not in the earthquake”; there was the fire, but “the Lord was not in the fire.” “The still small voice” did not speak. Souls go away admiring—excited—agitated; but there has been no intercourse with God. Some great and overwhelming catastrophe has occurred, some judgment has broken over our heads, the sudden stroke of death has made its awful appeal; and one with whom we have long been familiar has been hurried, in a moment, to his grave; and the wisdom of man begins to argue—“Surely, now, there will be a revival. The Lord will be recognized here. Surely, in so loud a sign, hearts that never prayed before, will hear their Maker’s bidding, and will lift up to Him a repentant cry.” While we look for it, the solemn event passes by, and it is all forgotten. “The still small voice” has not been heard. The wind and the earthquake and the fire have been only like a pageant when it is past. iii. Nature is often a Preparation for the Voice of God The Lord was not in the hurricane; the Lord was not in the earthquake, the Lord was not in the fire: but the wind, the earthquake, the fire went before the Lord. And so our third point is that the wind, the earthquake, and the fire may be a preparation for the still small voice. 1. It very often pleases God to make use of external displays of His power to make way for the working of His grace; only, we say, He is jealous to show that these external circumstances are never themselves the grace. Let us not despise them. The most earnest sermon that was ever preached, cannot convert; but, if God pleases, it can awaken the slumbering feelings in a man’s heart. The grandeur of the most awful scenery can never declare the Gospel to the beholder; but it may humble him into a deep sense of his own insignificance. We would not underrate the wild prelude that ushers in the harmony. God delights to write out His love in the background of His terrors. 2. We see this clearly in the case of Israel at this time. Before Elijah left the land of Israel manifestations of God’s power had been given fitted to awe the minds of men, but these were the mere forerunners of His kingdom of grace, and of its great power—the word of life; and because they had not done what the word of God alone can do, Elijah fled. Elijah, to whom the word of the Lord was committed, fled, instead of carrying that word forth among the people. And not only had he overlooked the power of God’s word, but he had overlooked also the favourable circumstances which had occurred for its going forth in might. The Lord is not in the wind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the devouring fire; yet these may and do prepare the way for His still small voice. These awe men’s minds and make them attentive to the voice of God. It was thus God had roused the attention of Israel in that very wilderness to which Elijah had fled. He first impressed the minds of the people with a deep sense of His majesty, and then He spake to them. He made the earth to tremble, and the mountain to quake, and the thunder to roll, and then He spake to the awestruck tribes the words of His law. It was thus He had dealt with His servant Job. Provoked by the miserable comforters who had gathered round him, Job had spoken unadvisedly with his lips, and had been ready to justify himself, when suddenly the sky darkened and the lightnings began to flash from cloud to cloud, and the tempest came sweeping around them; and out of the whirlwind God called to Job and spake to him, and reproved him for darkening counsel by words without knowledge; and “Job answered the Lord, and said, Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” Thus humbled he waited for the voice of God, the still small voice. It came, and he was enlightened and comforted. It was thus God dealt with Isaiah. He saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up, and he cried, “Woe is me! for I am undone; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts”; and then he heard the voice of the Lord, the still small voice, and gave ear to it. It was thus the Lord dealt with Saul of Tarsus. On his way to Damascus he was overwhelmed by the glory which shone around him, and fell to the earth, and then a voice spake to him—the still small voice of the Lord of glory. All these had a manifestation of the power and majesty of the Lord preparatory to the coming of the still small voice; and when their minds were awed and they were attentive to hear, the word of the Lord came. Now, before Elijah fled from the land of Israel, God had been rousing the nation and impressing their minds. The prophets of Baal had been confounded and then cut off; the land had been afflicted, grievously afflicted, and then delivered; and surely the minds of many must have been opened to conviction; but the means of conviction did not come to them, for the prophet fled. The still small voice came not. 3. We know it in our own experience. There are times when we need, as Elijah needed, the rebuke of the storm, the terror of the earthquake, the purification of the fire, that, by having implanted within us the hardy virtues that outbrave the tempest, we may be fitted for the still small voice of God. Robertson puts it thus: “The storm struggle must precede the still small voice. There are hearts which must be broken with disappointment before they can rise into hope. Blessed is the man who, when the tempest has spent its fury, recognizes his Father’s voice in its undertone, and bares his head and bows his knee, as Elijah did.” To such spirits it seems as if God had said, In the still sunshine and ordinary ways of life you cannot meet Me; but, like Job in the desolation of the tempest, you shall see My form and hear My voice, and know that your Redeemer liveth. ’Tis not the whirlwind, o’er our fair fields sweeping That speaks God’s present wrath: This is but nature’s course, for all men keeping One indiscriminate path. Nor yet the earthquake, firm foundations shaking Of houses long since built: This is but fortune’s chance, its havoc making, Without affixing guilt. Nor yet the fire, whate’er is near confounding In blind remorseless flame: This is but man’s fierce ire, which all surrounding Treats, good or bad, the same. It is the still small voice within which speaketh, When guilt’s fierce gust is done, That tells the doom God’s righteous anger wreaketh, Yet tells, that we may shun. O gentle Lord, who like a friend reprovest, Tender not less than true; Thou our hard hearts by whispered warnings movest, Their erring ways to rue. Thou, whose pure eye like lightning might consume him, On man with pity look’st; Thou who to fire, storm, earthquake, well might’st doom him, With still small voice rebuk’James 1 [Note: Lord Kinloch.] II Where God is “And after the fire a still small voice.” The terrible vision of the storm has passed. The blast of the tempest is stilled. To the convulsions of the earthquake succeeds the calm, to the terrifying glare of the lightning the pure and fresh brightness of day. Heaven reappears—the heaven of the East, with its transparent and deep azure; nature seems born again more beautiful and serene, and from the valleys there rises to the top of Horeb, and the cave where Elijah had sheltered himself, a sweet and gentle sound—the harmonious voice of nature opened up afresh under the breath of God. Elijah goes forth from his retreat. An inexpressible emotion seizes his soul, which the terror had thrown into confusion; an ineffable feeling of peace, of freshness, and of joy penetrates it. Neither the voice of the tempest nor the convulsions of nature had roused him to that point. In that sweet and gentle sound he recognizes the presence of God, and, covering his head with his mantle, he bows himself and adores. Elijah had shared in the outward manifestations of Divine favour which appear to mark the Old Dispensation—the fire on Carmel, the storm from the Mediterranean, the avenging sword on the banks of the Kishon. These signs had failed; and he was now told that in these signs, in the highest sense, God was not; not in these, but in the still small gentle whisper of conscience and solitude was the surest token that God was near to him. Not in his own mission, grand and gigantic as it was, would after-ages so clearly discern the Divine inspiration, as in the still small voice of justice and truth that breathed through the writings of the later Prophets, for whom he only prepared the way—Hosea, Amos, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah. Not in the vengeance which through Hazael and Jehu was to sweep away the house of Omri, so much as in the discerning Love which was to spare the seven thousand; not in the strong east wind that parted the Red Sea, or the fire that swept the top of Sinai, or the earthquake that shook down the walls of Jericho, would God be brought so near to man, as in the still small voice of the child of Bethlehem, as in the ministrations of Him whose cry was not heard in the streets, in the awful stillness of the Cross, in the never-failing order of Providence, in the silent insensible influence of the good deeds and good words of God and of man. Elijah, the furthest removed of all the prophets from the evangelical spirit and character, has yet enshrined in the heart of his story the most forcible of protests against the hardness of Judaism, the noblest anticipation of the breadth and depth of Christianity.1 [Note: A. P. Stanley.] However the rendering may be altered—into “a gentle murmuring sound” or, as in the R.V. margin, “a sound of gentle stillness”—no expression is more full of the awe and mystery of the original than the phrase “a still small voice.” It was God’s whisper to Elijah’s soul. Was it articulate or not? Was it accompanied by an outward rustling, as Cheyne thinks? We do not know. All that is of consequence is that in it Elijah recognized the presence of God and came forth to worship. Why seek ye for Jehovah ’Mid Sinai’s awful smoke? The burning bush now shelters A sparrow’s humble folk; The curve of God’s sweet heaven Is the curve of the leaf of oak; The Voice that stilled the tempest To the little children spoke,— The bread of life eternal Is the bread He blessed and broke. “A still small voice.” That was how God manifested Himself to Elijah and how He delights to manifest Himself to us. Looking at the words more closely we see— i. That God is most really in the gentlest things—in that which is still. ii. That God is not in the agencies that seem the mightiest—He prefers to manifest Himself in that which is small. iii. That God manifests Himself as a Voice. i. Stillness It is difficult to realize that in the hush which followed the fire, the earthquake, the wind, God really was. But if there is any meaning in this story, it is that the silence was more really Divine than the noise, the flash, and the trembling which went before. And one of the hardest lessons we have to learn is that God is in the quiet, the gentle influences which are ever around us, working upon us as the atmosphere does, without any visible or audible token of its presence. We must seek to discern God in the quiet and the gentle. It is perhaps because we fail to discern Him there that He comes sometimes in the tempest. We do not find Him in health, and so He comes in sickness. We do not find Him in prosperity, and so He comes in adversity. We do not find Him in the stillness, and so He is compelled to come in the storm. But He would rather take the gentle way. Are there not, then, two musics unto men?— One loud and bold and coarse, And overpowering still perforce All tone and tune beside; Yet in despite its pride Only of fumes of foolish fancy bred, And sounding solely in the sounding head; The other soft and low, Stealing whence we do not know, Painfully heard, and easily forgot, With pauses oft and many a silence strange (And silent oft it seems, when silent it is not), Revivals too of unexpected change: Haply thou think’st ’twill never be begun, Or that ’t has come, and been, and past away: Yet turn to other none,— Turn not, oh, turn not thou! But listen, listen, listen,—if haply be heard it may; Listen, listen, listen,—is it not sounding now?1 [Note: Clough.] 1. In quietness there is power.—This is a truth which in these days we are very apt to forget. We have fallen upon a generation of fuss, and bustle, and trumpet-blowing, and advertising. It would almost seem as if many of us believed that we were to take the world by storm. We get up excitements in mass-meetings, and pass resolutions, and listen to eloquent orators, and make thundering plaudits, as if these alone were to win the day. We have more faith in the whirlwind and the earthquake than in the still small voice; and we mistake a momentary out-flashing of enthusiasm for the celebration of a final triumph. The sensational is everywhere in the ascendant. We see it in the extravagance of dress that seeks to call attention to itself; we see it in the domain of literature, in the highly coloured and hotly seasoned romances; we see it in feverish speculations. Surely there is something in this vision for our sensation-loving life. It were well that we had less faith in noise, and more in that which is the most God-like thing on earth, namely, a character moulded after the example of Christ, and created and sustained by the agency of the Holy Ghost. It were well that the voices among us were less loud, and the deeds were more pronounced. Life is more potent than words; and character, though quiet, is more influential in the long-run than any immediate sensation that flares up and crackles like a blaze of thorns. God’s greatest works are carried on in silence. All noiselessly the planets move in their orbits; “there is no speech nor language; their voice cannot be heard” as they sweep on through their appointed paths in space. No sound attends the crystallization of the dewdrops on the myriad blades of grass in the summer evenings; and while the crops are growing in the fields, so profound sometimes is the stillness that all nature seems asleep. What greater revolution can there be than that which recurs at every morning’s dawn when night quits her “ebon throne” and resigns her empire to the king of day? Yet how quietly it is accomplished! There is first a streak of light along the edge of the eastern horizon, so faint that you wonder whether it has not shot out from that brilliant star; then a few stray gleams of glory, as if the northern aurora had flitted to another quarter of the heavens; then a flush of ruddy beauty before which the stars begin to pale; and as we watch how one by one these faithful sentinels put out their lamps, the sun himself appears, and becomes the undisputed monarch of the heavens. But it is all so silent that the sleeper is not awakened on his couch, and the pale, sick one who has been longing for the morning knows not it is there until through the shadowed casement it looks in upon him with its benignant smile.1 [Note: W. M. Taylor.] I look upon my study walls and see Munkacsy’s great picture, “Christ before Pilate.” There is a vast, howling mob, the very incarnation of brutal and irresistible force. It seems as though the violent crowd can carry all before it. Standing before the surging, shouting throng is the meek figure of the Master! It seems as though one hand out of the violent mob could crush Him like a moth! And yet we now know that in that silent figure there dwelt the secret of Almightiness, and the Lord was not in the mob.2 [Note: J. H. Jowett.] The quietest room in a Lancashire cotton mill is the engine-room. It is significantly called “the power-room” of the mill. But from that quietest room emerges all the force which speeds the busy looms in their process of production. Let the engine be neglected, let countless looms be added without proportional increase of power, and the mill breaks down. We have been neglecting our quietest room, our power-room; we have been adding to the strain without multiplying the force, and the effects are seen in weariness, joylessness, and ineffectiveness. We must not work less, but we must pray more. We cannot minimize our activities; but we must sustain them with those more adequate supplies of grace that come in answer to common prayer.1 [Note: Charles A. Berry, Life, 266. 2. In the quietest force—love—there is most power.—You have heard of the old fable which tells how the sun and the wind strove with each other, which of them should first make the traveller divest himself of his cloak. The more fiercely the wind blew, the more firmly the wayfaring man gathered his outer garment about him. But when the sun shone warmly upon him he speedily threw the weighty covering from his shoulders. So antagonism creates antagonism. If you attempt to drag me by force, it is in my nature to resist you, and I will pull against you with all my might; but if you try to attract me by kindness, it is equally in my nature to yield to its influence, and I will follow you of my own free will. What the hammer will not weld together without fiery heat and prolonged labour, the magnet will bring together and hold together in a moment. So in dealing with men, the mightiest influence is love. I was a lad of fifteen years at the time, an unindentured apprentice on board a large sailing ship which was homeward bound with a cargo of grain from Tacoma, Puget Sound. Not far south of San Francisco we encountered a violent storm which continued without abatement for nearly forty-eight hours. The severe buffeting to which the ship was subjected by the great seas caused the cargo to shift, and the vessel lay with her starboard rail completely submerged. To make matters worse, a spare spar had burst from its fastenings, and to the roar of the elements was added at frequent intervals the thud, thud, of this spar as the sea dashed it like a battering ram against the deck. Our situation was one of extreme peril, and little hope was entertained by captain or crew that the vessel would weather the storm. In the midst of the storm I felt the awe which the play of destructive forces can inspire. As I considered our danger, these same forces stirred my heart with fear. Loud and terrible, however, as were the voices which spoke to me, their message did not go deep enough to abide. The impression made on me by this dread experience, though it seemed at the time to be very great, proved to be altogether transient. In a comparatively few hours the storm was by God’s mercy stilled, and the ship steered a course for San Francisco. The sense of danger then began to yield to a feeling of security, and my own conduct, as that of the crew generally, was characterized by levity itself. Before the anchor was cast in the beautiful harbour of San Francisco, the storm and danger were only a memory. The solemn experience had left no other sign. Very different in its effect was the experience of my first hours at home, where I arrived about seven months later. I had deserted my vessel in Frisco, and my relatives did not know where I was or how I had been conducting myself. When I stood before them empty-handed, their fears that all had not been right were quickened; yet only words of welcome were spoken. Their looks, however, and their voices, had something in them that appealed powerfully to all that was best in me. Their entire attitude had the permanently arresting quality of the “still, small voice.” It was love patiently and, as far as possible, cheerfully shouldering the burden of my folly. That experience is more than a memory. The impression it made was deep and abiding. It has long been my conviction that that was the turning-point in my spiritual history. Then was begun in me a work of whose significance I was at the time unconscious; a work which is largely the cause of my being a Christian minister to-day; a work which, by God’s grace, shall not stop, even for death.1 [Note: John M‘Neil (Airdrie).] Dear Lord and Father of mankind, Forgive our foolish ways! Reclothe us in our rightful mind, In purer lives Thy service find, In deeper reverence, praise. O Sabbath rest by Galilee! O calm of hills above, Where Jesus knelt to share with thee The silence of eternity Interpreted by love! With that deep hush subduing all Our words and works that drown The tender whisper of Thy call, As noiseless let Thy blessing fall, As fell Thy manna down. Drop Thy still dews of quietness, Till all our strivings cease; Take from our souls the strain and stress, And let our ordered lives confess The beauty of Thy peace. Breathe through the heats of our desire Thy coolness and Thy balm; Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire; Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire, O still, small voice of calm!1 [Note: J. G. Whittier.] ii. Smallness The significance of the symbolism portrayed before the despondent prophet was surely that, while comparative impotence may roar in the guise of tempest and fire, Almightiness may move in whispers. Feebleness hides in the apparently overwhelming; Almightiness hides in apparent impotence. God was in the weak thing! Elijah left the mount with his conceptions entirely changed. 1. And so we see that we must look for God in the everyday occurrences. We should all like to be spoken to by a prodigy. But the Lord does not often do that. He is too great to do that. It belongs to everything that is really great to act simply. The infinite God does all His works in the simplest manner possible. And the Lord does everything in a way to show His own power. If the machinery were great, the mover might be little. There is in many minds something which makes them crave for proofs of the presence and power of God in remarkable interruptions of nature and providence rather than in their orderly course. It is a perversion of the truth. If a miracle is sublime, how much more sublime is the unity and greatness of the order which it seems, on some singular occasion, to interrupt. The mind which has learned to see God in the daily course of nature and providence comes nearer to the happy truth than that to which this order is meaningless, and which cries out to Him to raise up His power and come and declare His presence by miraculous wonders. Is it not better for us to learn that God is near in the daily exhibitions of His goodness than to look for Him only in those rare events in which we try to persuade ourselves that He has worked a miracle in answer to our cry? For one miraculous we enjoy a thousand customary gifts of grace and kindness. Happy are we if in our deep hearts we consent that this is so, and that this is best.1 [Note: G. R. Wynne.] 2. We must not undervalue agencies because they seem to be insignificant. It was said of the Lord Himself, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” and the first apostles were despised as “unlearned and ignorant men.” Yet though God used only “the weak things of the world,” He did confound with them “the things which are mighty.” The big trees in California have sprung from seeds each of which is no larger than a grain of wheat; and the river which at its source is a tiny tinkling rill over which a child may stride, is at its mouth broad enough and deep enough to bear a navy on its bosom. It used to be thought that the upheaval of the continents and the rearing of the great mountains was due to cataclysms and conflagrations and vast explosions of volcanic force. It has long been known that they are due, on the contrary, to the inconceivably slow modifications produced by the most insignificant causes. It is the age-long accumulation of mica-flakes that has built up the mighty bastions of the Alps. It is the toil of the ephemeral coral insect that has reared whole leagues of the American Continent and filled the Pacific Ocean with those unnumbered isles Which, like to rich and various gems, inlay The unadorned bosom of the deep. It is the slow silting up of the rivers that has created vast deltas for the home of man. It has required the calcareous deposit of millions of animalculæ to produce even one inch of the white cliffs along the shores.2 [Note: F. W. Farrar.] Some time ago I was in Stirling Castle, and the guide pointed out to me the field of Bannockburn, and revelled in his description of the bloody fray. I turned from the contemplation of material strife and I saw John Knox’s pulpit! I allowed the two symbols to confront each other, and they enshrined for me the teaching given to Elijah in the days of old. The ghostly power suggested by the pulpit was of infinitely greater import than the carnal power suggested by the battlefield. I remember one day passing along the road, by the far-stretching works of Messrs. Armstrong, that vast manufactory of destructive armaments. I was almost awed by the massiveness of the equipment and by the terrific issues of their work. Near by I saw a little Methodist Chapel; it could have been put in a small corner of Armstrong’s works, but it became to me the symbol of the enduring and the eternal. The ghostly breathing was in the plain little edifice, and the creations of its ministries will be found when the bristling armaments have crumbled into dust.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.] III A Voice All through the ages God has manifested Himself as a Voice, as the voice of conscience in the hearts of men. He has left no man utterly without guidance. Often, however, the voice is almost silent, because dulled by its faulty medium, man. But to-day we are not dependent on the voice of conscience alone. 1. There is the voice of the human Jesus. Was not Jesus God’s “still small voice” when in His human garb He walked the plains of Galilee, and declared His Father’s glory and His Father’s will? The bruised reed He never broke; the smoking flax He never quenched. He did not strive, nor cry, nor lift up His voice in the street. Despised in His littleness, that “voice” was, nevertheless, the great power of Jehovah; and, calm as were those loving lips, they uttered the mandates that all worlds obeyed. Evil spirits cowered at His presence; sickness, and sorrow, and death fled before Him. Against the dark background of the penal law, He declared the Gospel’s peace. And when, on the Mount of Beatitudes, that “voice,” long silent, began, in its own gentleness, “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” Sinai’s trumpet grew silent! And when He stood, and called so lovingly, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”—who remembered, then, any more, the blackness, and the darkness, and the tempest? And when, at last, His dying lips spoke those words of Godhead, “It is finished,” did not every adoring angel, as he stooped to the sound, confess that all the displays that had been made of God, in His own universe, were in magnificence as nought to that one “still small voice” of Calvary? If we ask what gives us assurance of the truth and justice of God, the answer is, the life and death of Christ, who is the Son of God, and the Revelation of God. We know what He Himself has told us of God, and we cannot conceive perfect goodness separate from perfect truth; nay, this goodness itself is the only conception we can form of God, if we confess what the mere immensity of the material world tends to suggest—that the Almighty is not a natural or even a supernatural power, but a Being of whom the reason and conscience of man have a truer conception than imagination in its highest flights. He is not in the storm, nor in the thunder, nor in the earthquake, but “in the still small voice.” And this image of God as He reveals Himself in the heart of man is “Christ in us, the hope of glory”; Christ as He once was upon earth in His sufferings rather than His miracles—the image of goodness and truth and peace and love.1 [Note: B. Jowett.] 2. There is the voice of the risen Lord. (1) This voice draws. Other religions have books: Muhammadanism has a book, and a grand old book it is, called the Koran. Some of its stories are almost equal in beauty to the stories of the Book of Genesis. But Muhammadanism has no voice. Muhammad is dead, and his voice is silent in the tomb. Hinduism has books, and interesting books they are, called the Veda and Shaster. They are full of hymns and precepts. Some of them are almost equal in purity and spirituality to some of the Old Testament Psalms and Proverbs. But Hinduism has no voice. The great prophets of Hinduism who thought out the books are dead, and their voices are heard no more. Christianity also has a book. It is more beautiful than the Veda or Shaster. But the book of Christianity is also a voice. The Prophet of Christianity is not dead. Christ is alive, and fills all the words of the Bible with a living voice. He speaks again, through His Spirit, the very words which He spoke when on earth. Herein is the great difference between the Bible and every other book. Other books contain the thoughts of their authors at a particular period in their life, but they may have changed their opinions after writing them, or they may have died. Their voices cannot speak the very words they have written. We read Shakespeare and Milton, but we do not hear them. We hear Christ; His opinions are unchangeable, and He is ever living. He speaks the sweet words of mercy to every generation. When I have seen an idol arrayed in traditionary terrors, and magnificently paraded through the streets of a large native town, and in the night too; and when ten thousand human beings have pressed near to worship amid the gleaming of innumerable torches of coloured light, and rockets and candles of every device shooting up into the air; and when the priests have sung in solemn cadence, and the multitudes have shouted their acclamations, I have caught the prevailing awe. With all my better knowledge I could not resist the terror and beauty of the spectacle. But the Lord was not there. The multitudes returned to their homes with an intoxicated sense and a fevered imagination; yet with no silent voice to instruct and win them to God. But I have taken one of those Hindus whom the wind and the earthquake and the fire had dazzled, but not changed; I have drawn him away from the three signs and invited him to wait with me for the fourth; and while we listened, a still small voice spoke in our hearts; and when he heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle, and cried, “What must I do to be saved?” And the effect of that voice was a new heart and a new life. It was the silent winning of Calvary, and not the fiery testimony of Carmel: it was not Moses or Elijah thundering forth the Law upon the senses, but Jesus breathing truth and grace into the soul.1 [Note: E. E. Jenkins.] (2) It is a voice which guides. There was and still is in the soul of every man who has not by long-continued sin succeeded in stifling it that which the early Friends called the “Light Within,” or the “Divine Seed”; that which we in our generation, by a mode of expression which comes more naturally to us, call the Voice of the Lord speaking to the soul of man. “Do you mean the conscience?” is a question which is often asked when we plead for the continued existence of this Divine gift. Yes, the conscience, which has certainly had a mighty part to play in the drama of the re-making of man; but also something much more than the conscience; the existence in man of a hearing ear, which has often enabled him to distinguish which of two modes of action, neither in itself wrong, it is his Lord’s will that he should choose; in short, that which our forefathers so often spoke of as “the perceptible guidance of the Holy Spirit.”2 [Note: T. Hodgkin, Human Progress and the Inward Light, 28. I hear it often in the dark, I hear it in the light,— Where is the voice that comes to me With such a quiet might? It seems but echo to my thought, And yet beyond the stars! It seems a heart-beat in a hush, And yet the planet jars! Oh, may it be that far within My inmost soul there lies A spirit-sky, that opens with Those voices of surprise. Thy heaven is mine—my very soul! Thy words are sweet and strong; They fill my inward silences With music and with song. They send me challenges to right, And loud rebuke my ill; They ring my bells of victory; They breathe my “Peace, be still!” They ever seem to say: “My child, Why seek me so all day? Now journey inward to thyself, And listen by the way.”1 [Note: W. C. Gannett.] That individual and immediate guidance, in which we recognize that “the finger of God is come unto us” seems to come in, as it were, to complete and perfect the work rough-hewn by morality and conscience. We may liken the laws of our country to the cliffs of our island, over which we rarely feel ourselves in any danger of falling; the moral standard of our social circle to the beaten highway road which we can hardly miss. Our own conscience would then be represented by a fence, by which some parts of the country are enclosed for each one, the road itself at times being barred or narrowed. And that Divine guidance of which I am speaking could be typified only by the pressure of a hand upon ours, leading us gently to step to the right or the left, in a manner intended for and understood by ourselves alone.2 [Note: Caroline Stephen, Quaker Strongholds.] When we have crossed to the other side of the gulf that separates the seen from the unseen we shall find that nothing has ever mattered except faithfulness to that voice. Place does not matter—one might gain all the glory of the world and yet be a stranger to one’s own soul; fame and station count for nothing in that mysterious beyond towards which we are all hastening; the only possession we can carry there is what we are. Can we not live now as though our hearts were set only upon eternal values? Can we not do with our lives now what we would do if we knew for certain that nothing shall live but love? Can we not gaze calmly at the destructive effect of earthquake, wind, and fire, when we know that the still, small voice is whispering, “Well done, good and faithful servant”? Above all, we shall not be tempted to think that success or failure depends in the least upon what the world can see.1 [Note: R. J. Campbell.] Loud mockers in the roaring street Say Christ is crucified again: Twice pierced His gospel-bearing feet, Twice broken His great heart in vain. I hear, and to myself I smile, For Christ talks with me all the while. No more unto the stubborn heart With gentle knocking shall He plead, No more the mystic pity start, For Christ twice dead is dead indeed. So in the street I hear men say, Yet Christ is with me all the day. Literature Banks (L. A.), Thirty-One Revival Sermons, 87. Bersier (E.), Sermons, 2nd Ser., 244. Bersier (E.), in The Foreign Protestant Pulpit, 1st Ser., 285. Blackwood (A.), Conference Memories, 179. Brooke (S. A.), The Old Testament and Modern Life, 285. Butler (H. M.), University and other Sermons, 342. Campbell (L.), The Christian Ideal, 18. Campbell (R. J.), Thursday Mornings at the City Temple, 59. Cheyne (T. K.), The Hallowing of Criticism, 123. Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, 6th Ser., 334, Davies (T.), Sermons and Homiletical Expositions, 2nd Ser., 23. Fletcher (R. J.), The Old Law and the New Age, 129. Fotheringham (D. R.), The Writing on the Sky, 108. Goodwin (H.), Parish Sermons, 1st Ser., 179. Jenkins (E. E.), Sermons, 218. Macnutt (F. B.), The Riches of Christ, 116. Moore (E. W.), The Spirit’s Seal, 146. Newman (J. H.), Sermons on Subjects of the Day, 367. Nicholson (M.), Redeeming the Time, 198. Rankin (J.), Character Studies in the Old Testament, 214. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxviii. (1882), No. 1668; lv. (1909), No. 3171. Taylor (W. M.), Contrary Winds, 107. Thomas (J.), Sermons (Myrtle Street Pulpit), ii. 192. Wise (I. M.), in American Jewish Pulpit, 127. Wright (D.), The Power of an Endless Life, 60. Wynne (G. R.), In Quietness and Confidence, 95. Christian Age, xlii. 178 (La Bach). Christian World Pulpit, ii. 122 (Macnaught); viii. 362 (Bainton); xx. 314 (Mursell); xxxii. 174 (Horder); xl. 374 (Williams). Church of England Pulpit, lxii. 445 (Fotheringham); lxiii. 124 (Cooper). Church Pulpit Year Book, ii. (1905) 223 (Vaughan). Churchman’s Pulpit: Lenten Season, v. 81 (Mackay); Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, xi. 304 (Vaughan). Clergyman’s Magazine, New Ser., i. 312 (Proctor); 3rd Ser., iv. 88 (Youard). Examiner, 30th March 1905 (Jowett). Naaman And his servants came near, and spake unto him, and said, My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean?—2 Kings 5:13. 1. The history of Naaman, though it fills only one chapter of the Bible, has much that makes it peculiarly attractive. He possessed nearly every requisite to worldly success and the full gratification of the highest ambition. He had the genius of a great commander; under his leadership the armies of Syria had won great victories. Besides this gift of leadership, he had the personal courage and the heroic daring of a popular hero admired and extolled as “a mighty man of valour.” Because of his great services to the State he enjoyed to an unusual degree the favour and confidence of his king, who lavished upon him the rich gifts and great offices which monarchs confer upon their favourites. Tradition says that it was Naaman whose hand shot the arrow that smote between the joints of Ahab’s armour, so that he fell down dead in his chariot. Such a man as sometimes comes to the front in the desperate needs of a nation—daring, wise, splendid in heroism, seeing the thing to be done and doing it swiftly and well: his name an inspiration to his forces, and a terror to his foes—how much can such a one do, carrying in his hands the destinies of nations. Here is greatness: great in himself, great in his position, great in his possessions, great in his achievements, great in his authority: no element of greatness is lacking.1 [Note: M. G. Pearse.] 2. But Naaman was a leper. We can scarcely imagine the greatness of this calamity,—the anguish that overwhelmed his proud spirit, the sorrow that pervaded his house. “The basest slave in Syria,” says Bishop Hall, “would not change skins with him, if he might have his honour to boot. Thus hath the wise God thought wise to sauce the valour, dignity, renown, victories of the famous general of the Syrians.” No wonder that the little slave girl who attended upon his wife was touched with pity, and, remembering the miraculous power of the great prophet of her country, said to her mistress, “Would God my lord were with the prophet that is in Samaria!” Leprosy was feared and fled from in Israel as the stroke of God. Leprosy was the most fearful and the most hateful disease known to man. Leprosy was so loathsome, and so utterly incurable and deadly, that it was not looked on as an ordinary disease at all, but rather as a special creation in His anger, and a direct curse of God, both to punish sin, and, at the same time, to teach His people something of what an accursed thing sin really is; till the whole nature of leprosy and all the laws laid down for its treatment, and the miraculous nature of its so seldom cure, all combined to work into the imagination, and into the conscience, and into the heart, and into the ritual, and into the literature of Israel, some of her deepest lessons about the terrible nature and the only proper treatment of sin.1 [Note: A. Whyte.] 3. At this distance we may pass lightly over his misfortune and think of his character, which still lives before us in that page, so fiery and generous, so proudly sensitive, and yet so responsive to the voice of reason, till, as we dwell on this, we feel a touching appropriateness in the blessing which he receives, when his flesh comes again like the flesh of a little child. And have we not also felt the impressive contrast of worldly and spiritual grandeur, of that which fills the imagination and that which commands the soul, when the great captain comes with his chariot and his horses and stands before the door of a plain man’s dwelling, and the prophet without moving from his seat sends forth his message by another? It was then that Naaman learned a lesson which many an ingenuous heart like his has learned through suffering, though some pass through life without learning it—that the truest blessings, the truest gifts, are often those which we are tempted to despise as common. It is a lesson which only experience can teach to those who need it, and yet it is not in vain to repeat it often in a time when it is much forgotten, and when the marvellous, the exciting, the new and striking, are taking the place of the wise and just and true. Men have been saved from ruin by a grasp of the hand, a kind word, a generous deed. A bunch of flowers in a dingy and dirty tenement has started thoughts and memories that have meant the resurrection of a soul. A tear, a smile, have done for some spirits in the prisons of sorrow or sin what all the wealth of the Indies could never do. So possible is it to pack untold wealth into such small bulk. A ray of sunshine from some bright life will work a rainbow upon the tears of some forlorn sufferer. The best gifts are, after all, the easiest given.1 [Note: C. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/greattexts/