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THE CURSING OF THE CHILDREN.

[Serm.

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

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

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RIGHT WAY OF TREATING DIFFICULTIES.

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

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

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FALSE WAY OF IMITATING PROPHETS.

[Serm. do not know that there is another in which I perceive the same difficulty. And for that very reason, instead of passing it over, or offering some solution of it, or on the other hand pronouncing it an interpolation, when I have no proof to offer that it is one, I think it is a plain duty to profess that I do not understand it, though better persons may. And I do so the more readily because there are some who, it seems to me, interpret this passage with great readiness and decision, but utterly fail of explaining the rest of Elisha's life, or the life of any other man of God whom the Bible speaks of. The right of a prophet in the old time to curse grown men or children, the right of preachers and priests in this day to imitate him, they perfectly apprehend. It is only when the prophet comes forth as a healer, a restorer, a life-giver, that he seems to be fulfilling a function uncongenial to their taste, and which should be limited to his own time. When he appears to be asserting the dignity of his own person, or at all events of his own office, by a malediction, their spirits are in harmony with his; they can recognize his stern justice. When he bears witness against idolatry and wrong doing in the kings or priests, his glory seems to depart; those who chose him for their model before, prefer then to copy the men whom he threatened with the divine retribution.

That retribution is the main subject of the Scripture narrative. Elijah had told Ahab that the blood of Naboth would be required of his house. His humiliation delayed the sentence. His enemy who had found him out, seems thenceforth to have left him alone. Perhaps the great prophet passed the remainder of his own days in peace. But there were other prophets to torment Ahab, and a still greater number, freshly brought perhaps by Jezebel from

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THE PUNISHMENT OF AHAB'S HOUSE.

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her own land, to deceive him. The lying spirit in their mouths drove him to Ramoth Gilead, and Israel was left, as Micah had foretold, without a shepherd. His son Joram finds Elisha almost as terrible as his master had been to Ahab. Yet their relations were different. Joram is less of a Baal worshipper than his father. He consults Elisha; is asked by him why he does not go to the prophets of his father and mother; still is promised deliverance and victory in a war which he has undertaken with the Moabites, and is saved not once or twice by the prophet's knowledge from the Syrians. These enemies of Israel look upon the prophet with especial dread. Once he is surrounded by them; but his servant is permitted to see invisible hosts which are on his side. These visions, Elisha's acts of power, his words of wisdom, the ruin which threatened the land from the Syrians, its unexpected rescue, are all signs that the God who had made a covenant with their fathers, was with the king and the people then. Trust was then as always what the prophets demanded of them. They could not trust too boldly or unreservedly. To trust would have been to repent of the calf worship, to rise out of the brutal habits which it had engendered, to begin a new life as men. But the custom of idolatry had destroyed trust in their hearts. They could only worship and tremble. The sin of the father descended upon the son with the weakness and cowardice, which were the fruits of it, increased tenfold. At the appointed day and hour, the vengeance came, by just such an instrument as would seem likeliest to carry it out.

Jehu the son of Nimshi had been declared to Elijah as the joint successor with Elisha in the work that he had left unperformed. No two men in Israel could have been more unlike. One cried to have a double portion of his master's

150

JEHU THE SON OF NIMSHI.

[Serm. spirit; the other was known only as the man who drove furiously. Yet Jehu had the kind of faith which might be expected in a soldier, somewhat reckless, but with his sense of right not quenched by religious falsehood. He had heard the burden which Elijah had pronounced on Ahab as he sat with him in his chariot when they entered the plot of ground that had been Naboth's. He felt that there was an everlasting truth in the sentence and that it must come to pass. Who should execute it he did not know then. When the anointing oil of Elisha's messenger had been poured on his head, and his comrades had cried, "Jehu is king," all the savage impulses of the soldier became quickened and elevated by the feeling that he was commissioned to punish evil-doers and assert justice. Esteeming himself a scourge of God, and rejoicing in the office, he gives full play to all his bloody instincts. He murders two kings, commands Jezebel to be thrown out of a window, treads her under foot, then eats and drinks. He looks with delight at the heads of the seventy royal children who were slain at his bidding by the elders of Jezreel; he puts forty-two men to death whom he meets coming into Samaria; he leaves not one living of the house of Ahab. Finally he lays a plot for the worshippers of Baal, calls them to hold a feast to their god, and commands that none shall leave the house in which he has shut them up alive.

It causes great scandal to many amiable and worthy people that the Scripture does not stop to comment on these atrocities of Jehu, but appears to commend his zeal and to rejoice that what he began he accomplished. I believe, brethren, that a true portrait can never be a mischievous one, and that this is essentially true. Nothing is said to gloss over the ferocity of Jehu; it is exhibited broadly, nakedly ;