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EARLY PUPILS
OF THE SPIRIT:
THE ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE
PROPHETS OF ISRAEL;
AND
WHAT OF SAMUEL?

BT
JAMES MOEEIS WHITON, Ph.D.,
Author of "Beyond the Shadow," "New Points to Old Texts,'
"Gloria Potri," &c

"JLontnm-
JAMES CLABKE &, CO.. 13 & 14. FLEET STKEET.
1896.

EARLY PUPILS OF THE SPIRIT.

NOTE TO TEE SECOND EDITION OF
"EARLY PUPILS OF THE SPIRIT."

This brief Essay was written for plain Bible-
readers about twelve years ago. Its aim is to
show the reality of a Divine revelation in the
Old Testament, and how to recognize it, while
frankly admitting that many an utterance of
"the book is by no means the word of God which
it has been fancied to be. Christian thought
has of late begun to move steadily in this
direction, and to many these pages will there
fore not seem so revolutionary as when first
printed. But the number of religious journals,
especially in America, that still adhere to the
old theory of massacre by Divine command, is
proof that for some time to come it will be
needful to inculcate ideas of the Old Testament
that tend less to scepticism and more to a
rational faith. Apparently, therefore, there is
as much need as ever of such an argument as

6

NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

the present, presenting the essential points of
the question in small compass and easily
readable form. In the present reprint but few
changes, and these merely verbal, have been
made from the first edition.
J. M. W.
September, 1896.

EARLY PUPILS OF THE SPIRIT.

Since Paul said that his countrymen did not
understand the prophets, who were read every
Sabbath in the synagogue, the same reproach
has lain, and still lies, against very many who
agree in regarding these prophets as divinely
inspired. "The whole subject of prophecy,"
said Professor Bruce, in his noteworthy lectures
on The Chief End of Revelation, ""needs recon
sideration, in order to rescue it, at once from
the sacrilegious hands of Unbelief, and from
the irrational treatment which it has often
received at the hands of Faith."
The period of the prophets is specially worth
attention, because a careful study of it gives, at
once the key to the principal difficulties in the
way of seeing a Divine revelation in the Old
Testament, and the strongest evidence, both
for the fact of such a revelation, and for the
nature of that prophetic inspiration through 1

8 THE PERIOD OP PEOPHETISM.
which it came. It is also specially attractive,
because, within a comparatively brief period of
the sacred history, it presents an epitome of
that protracted moral development which took
place, under a unique influence, in the elect
stock whose records form "the booh of the
generation of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the
Son of Abraham." The apostle Peter calls
attention to the significance of the period of
prophetism, when he says, that " all the prophets
from Samuel" have testified of the days of
Christ. There were prophets before Samuel.
Especially conspicuous is the colossal name of
Moses, in whom appears by anticipation the
type of the true prophetic character, which,
after the lapse of apparently stationary cen
turies, was to be progressively developed from
Samuel onwards. With Samuel begins the
period of the prophets' continuous activity for
a period of about five hundred years. It is
noteworthy that Peter reckons the period of
the prophets not from Moses but from Samuel.
In this period, the careful reader of the English
Bible can trace, without embarrassment by the
difficult points of criticism, the most remark
able moral development which history records.
From a semi-heathenish condition, but little, if

A PEEIOD OP DEVELOPMENT. 9
any, above that of idolatrous tribes surround
ing, there is in Israel an upward movement to
a condition in which, at least, a few choice
spirits appear possessed of the moral ideals of
Christianity, and recognisable as the germ of
the future Church of Christ.
The period of this development in Israel is
also a period of development in the prophets
themselves, who carried it forward. Nothing
is more manifest, when attention has been
directed to the facts. At the same time, no
Biblical facts have been more generally over
looked. Christ and His apostles quote certain
prophets frequently, and with honour, as
inspired to proclaim the principles of the
¦Gospel and to herald His coming. Christian
thought has idealised accordingly the cha
racter of all the prophets, placing them all
upon a level equally high. But, to recognise
a great disparity between some and others of
them, it is enough to compare two characters
like Elisha and Isaiah. The former is a seer,
with wonderful foresight of events, a worker
of mighty wonders, but, in a corrupt time,
uttering no recorded protest against iniquity,
no cry for reformation. The other is a preacher
of repentance, and pf judgment and salvation,

10 DISCRIMINATION REQUIRED.
with wonderful insight into the eternal princi
ples on which God deals with men as " a just
God and a Saviour." Evidently, even among
the men of God, there were prophets and
prophets, greater lights and less, higher spirits
and lower, men of clearer knowledge of God
and dimmer, men of more and less worth and
efficiency, as educators of the elect nation, and
nursing-fathers of the Church of the future.
Fresh attention needs to be given to certain
facts on the face of the record as data for a
revised estimate of the prophets themselves,
and for a true account of that spiritual develop
ment within the prophetic order itself, which
was instrumental to its regenerating ministry
in Israel.
I. The first is the gradual emergence and
clearance of Sacred Prophecy, with its clear
insight and calm utterance of ethical princir
pies, from that lower sort of prophesying, in
ecstatic and often irrational excitement by
uncontrollable impulse, which gave rise to the
proverb, "Is Saul also among the prophets?"
Samuel appears as leader of the troop of
prophets, whose exercises of prophesying
spread contagiously to Saul's messengers, and
then to Saul himself, prophesying naked and

EARLIER TRAITS AND LATER. 11
lying on the ground a day and night, in the
-Seeming frenzy which the Gentiles, down to
Plato and Vergil, reckoned as an effect of
Divine inspiration. In Samuel, at the same
time, appears also that clear intuition of truth,
which signalises the moral character of the
inspiration of the prophets whom the New
Testament quotes as the spokesmen of Divine
revelation; and a few sayings of his are
recorded which are characteristically Christian
truths ; as, for instance, that obedienee is the
best sacrifice to God.
The two sorts of prophesying, the Gentile
and the Israelite, which appear blended in him,
ultimately separated. In Hosea, the higher
clears itself from the lower with a stinging
rebuke: "The prophet is a fool, the spiritiial
man is mad." Yet, as late as Elisha's time,
his confidential emissary to Jehu is charac
terised as a " mod fellow " ; and another
person, called a prophet, goes about saying,
"In the word of the Lord, smite me, I pray
thee." All this fell off, like the first leaves
of a growing plant, in the development of
prophetism into, its later and mature form.
The passive subjection observable in the
earUer prophets, under the excitation of

12 THE NON-ETHICAL AND THE ETHICAL.
minstrelsy, to other influences than their own
reason and will, gives place, in the later
prophets, to the full activity of conscience,
intelligently speaking out of moral insight
into the character and ways of God. Both
kinds of prophets say, " Thus saith the Lord.'*
But the difference between the men, the
evident moral advance of the one beyond the
other, creates for us an evident difference in
the authoritativeness of that phrase according
to the difference in the speakers.
IE. The next phenomenon in the develop
ment of prophetism is its advance from non-
ethical to ethical prediction.
From Samuel to Elisha we find the prophets
conspicuous as seers ; subsequent prophets are,
as conspicuously, preachers rather than seers.
People were accustomed to resort to the
earlier prophets, as Saul went to Samuel, in
the same way that some now go to clair
voyants. Samuel told Saul where his lost
asses were. Gad, by his oracles, directed
David's flight from Saul. Ahijah was applied
to by King Jeroboam's wife, to know how her
child's sickness would turn, and he discerned
her and her errand before she came in sight.
Elisha was sent to for similar information by

PORETELLERS AND PORTH-TELLERS. IS
the King of Syria, and had in Syria the
repute of being able to tell the King of Israel
what the King of Syria said in his chamber.
In such cases, the applicant carried to the
seer a fee. The function of the seer in these
. affairs was exactly the same as that of the
Gentile soothsayers. By his clairvoyant power,
as a scientific man would now say, not by
any supernatural gift of knowledge, Elisha
materially aided in a campaign against Syria,
giving his king the same sort of information
which the Gentile kings sought from their
diviners. But, after Elisha, we find very little of this
among the prophets. Not that seers and
soothsayers ceased to exist. On the contrary,
they were powerful abettors of the corruptions
which the later prophets denounced, and get
stern rebuke for it, as from Micah, as hirelings
that " divine for money," and as from Ezekiel,
as "prophets that divine lies." On the other
hand, the prophets whom Christ and the
apostles quote ascend to an altogether higher
kind of prediction than the seers' prognostica
tions. Just as the emotional prophesying of
Samuel's troop, under contagious religious
excitement, gave place to the didactic

14 ETHICAL PREDICTION.
preaching of sacred prophecy, out of moral
illumination and reflection, so there was a
displacement of non-ethical predictions by
ethical* Prophetism advanced from a fore
telling of human events to a forth-telling of
Divine principles, with prediction of the issues
of men's choice between right and wrong.
This is ethical prediction, inspired by the same
moral insight into eternal principles which
characterizes the didactic part of sacred
prophecy. Into this sort of foretelling such
forth-telling naturally runs, as a knowledge of
Causes naturally leads to knowledge of effects.
This ethical prediction of the preacher-
prophets carried a regenerative power, which
the prognostications^ of the seer-prophets did
not. It puts moral principles before men as
energies, which, in the nature of things, must
work out good to the obedient and evil to the
disobedient. The New Testament formula of
this ethical prediction, " Whatsoever a man
soweth, that shall he also reap," is adopted first
by Hosea, and repeated by Isaiah: "It shall
be well with . the righteous ; they shall eat the
fruit of their doings : It shall be ill with the
wicked j the reward of his hands shall be given
him." This principle underlies the doom of

THE SIGN OP INSPIRATION. 15
the corrupt nations, with which the prophets
are burdened. This principle underlies also
the Messianic hope, with which the prophets
encourage faith in the depths of evil times.
Eternal righteousness and mercy must be
triumphantly vindicated, in the judgment of
sinners and the salvation of those that walk
in the way of God. Because the world is
God's, and His mercy is everlasting, the world
must ultimately be filled with His glory, as
'• a just. God and a Saviour." The moral
advance is magnificent, from the seer, who
tells his king what his enemy is saying in his
chamber, to the prophet, who tells his circle of
pious disciples of that world-wide spread of
the purified faith of Israel in the Eternal
Goodness, which is now becoming history
through the diffusion of Christianity. Each
of these two men may say, "Thus saith the
Lord," but in the mouth of the one that phrase
carries stronger evidence of Divine inspiration
than in the other.
III. Equally clear is a third indication of
the moral development which took place in
the prophetic succession.
All the prophets, from Samuel onwards, were
distinguished by their zeal for Jehovah, as the

16 . EARLIER IDEAS OP GOD.
God of Israel. But this zeal became in the
course of time more enlightened, discrimina
ting, and pure.
This progress was two-fold ; first, ritual and
theological; then, ethical.
1. In Samuel's time, and subsequently, the
use of images was not thought inconsistent
with Jehovah-worship. Gideon had made a
golden image, called an " ephod," and placed
it in a sanctuary. David's priest, Abiathar,
had an image of this kind and name, as the
Septuagint version shows, and used it as a,
medium for obtaining Divine oracles. David
had also the images called " teraphim " in his
house, the same things which Eachel's father
called his " gods," and one of them was put
into David's bed as a dummy, to conceal his
flight. King Jeroboam set up, as Aaron had
done, golden calves at Jehovah's altar. He is
denounced by an unnamed prophet, but whether
as an idolater, or merely as a schismatic, it
does not appear. Neither Elijah nor Elisha
rebukes this use of the calf-symbol as an im
purity in worship. Hosea is the first of the
prophets to denounce it, and thenceforward
images are proscribed in a way that marks a
purer ritualism.

EARLIER IDEAS OP GOD. 17
Theologically, also, there is a plain advance
upon the conception of God which prevailed in
the earlier part of the period of prophetisnu
In David's time, Jehovah's supremacy was-
thought of as territorial, but not over all
nations as within " Sis inheritance " — His.
people Israel. Just as Naomi advised David's
great-grandmother, Euth, to return to her
country and to her god, David thinks that his;
exile from his own country is tantamount to-
being banished to "serve other gods." This.
recognition of extra-Israelite deities underlay
that policy of Solomon, which Ahab imitated,.
in building in his capital shrines to the deities
of allied nations. How persistent this idea,
was in the popular thought, appears in the
persistence of these Solomonic shrines to the
gods of his allies, even under the reigns of
pious kings, like Jehoshaphat, till they were-
destroyed by Josiah. Solomon must have re
garded such concessions as we regard the act
of President Arthur, when, at the close of the
centennial celebration of the surrender of
Torktown, he ordered the British flag to be
hoisted and saluted by the American fleet.
They no way seemed to him to compromise
Jehovah's supreme honour in Israel.

18 THEOLOGICAL PROGRESS.
As true puritans, however, Samuel and
Ahijah are on record in rebuke of any allow
ance of foreign deities within the limits of
Jehovah's inheritance. But it is not until
Elijah that the truth is put forward, that the
difference between Jehovah and other deities is
not that between greater and less, but that
between all and nothing. Samuel had called
the foreign gods " vain and. profitless things."
Elijah regards their very existence as a fiction,
as his scoffs at Baal show.* He holds, that
there can be but one God; so that, even though
that one were Baal, he only must be worshipped.
Whether Elijah's doctrine be viewed as the
revival of an old and lapsed truth, or the reve
lation of a new truth, it was undoubtedly an
advance upon the theology of David, whom the
-New Testament accounts as a prophet, and an
advance upon the theology which afterward
allowed Elisha to sanction Naaman's bowing
himself in the temple of Eimmon. It laid in
Israel the basis of Isaiah's consoling faith, that
even the mighty Assyrian conqueror was but
an axe or a saw in the hands of Jehovah, and
* More bitingly in the original. The English. " he is
pursuing," should be rendered. " lie is attending to a call of
¦nature."

THEOLOGICAL PROGRESS. 19
of the second Isaiah's thought of the Divine
Omnipresence : " Heaven is My throne, and the-
earth is My footstool. Where is the house that ye
build ivnto Me, and where is the place of My
rest ?" From this, also, unfolded the prophet's
Messianic faith, that the Maker of all must
ultimately make Himself known to all. From
this, also, in EzeMel's saying, " Behold all souls
are Mine ; as the soul of the father, so also the
soul of the son is Mine," was developed, as the
latest fruit of sacred prophecy, the Gospel
principle of a personal responsibility involved
in a persona] relation of every spirit to its
Creator. 2. An ethical advance in prophetism was
involved in this theological advance, and before
long it became strikingly manifest.
The earlier prophets, from Samuel to Elijah,
teach that Jehovah is forsaken, if His altar is
neglected. Their typical exhortation is in
Samuel's words: "Put away the strange gods
and the Ashtaroth from among you." The later
prophets teach that Jehovah is forsaken,
although His altars are not neglected, when
His ways of justice and mercy are forsaken.
Their typical exhortation is in the words of
Isaiah : "Bring no more vain oblations; mcense

20 THE HISTORIANS AND THE PROPHETS.
is an abomination unto Me. Cease to do evil;
learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the
oppressed ; defend the fatherless ; plead for the
¦widow." The historical books of Samuel and the
Kings, as well as those of Joshua, Judges, and
Euth, were classed by the Jews under the name
of " the earlier prophets," in distinction from
*" the later prophets," which included the dis
courses and writings of the preacher-prophets
from Amos onward. That part of the period
of prophetism which these cover is coin
cident with the period covered by the second
book of the Kings. But there is a wide differ
ence in the view of things taken by the histori
cal and by the strictly prophetical books. The
former place the sin of Israel in idolatry ; the
latter, while reproving idolatry, reprove much
more the immorality, of which the former have
little to say. Indeed, it is not from the his
torical books that we get an inside view of the
times. They are occupied, like most histories,
with the superficial aspect of things, the dynas
ties and revolutions, the acts of sovereigns, the
political events. They write this history, indeed,
from a religious point of view, and note the
course of things as prosperous or adverse

AN ETHICAL CONTRAST. 21
-according to the varying fidelity of the nation
to the worship of Jehovah. But this is not a
radically different view from that which was
commonly taken among the Gentiles. In all
nations of that time infidelity to the national
deities was regarded as a cause of national
calamity. On the other hand, a far profounder view is
taken in the books of the prophets. From them
alone we obtain an account of the interior
condition of Israel, of the social, moral, and
"religious life, corrupted, as it was, to the core.
The simple, agricultural life of Samuel's time
had been transformed by the commerce, which
had been first opened by David with the
Phoenician seaboard. Cities, palaces, villas had
sprung up; wealth had been concentrated,
luxuries imported ; houses were adorned with
Indian ivory, but the rich had been transformed
from patrons and protectors into oppressors of
the poor. The incident of Naboth's judicial
murder, to secure his vineyard for a pleasure-
garden adjacent to the palace, shows how the
primitive chieftains of a free people had been
transformed, like the noblesse of France before
the Eevolution, into the supple tools of tyranny.
The prophets all agree in their picture of the

22 AN ETHICAL CONTRAST.
venality of judges, the distress of poor debtors
reduced to slavery, the swindling of merchants,
the debauchery of princes, the intoxication of
the priests themselves with the universal greed,
and a class of hireling prophets and seers abet
ting it all with lying divinations, crying^
" Peace, peace, when there is no peace." Hosea
sums up the dreadful indictment : " Jehovah hath
a controversy with the inhabitants of the land,
because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor know-,
ledge of God in the land. By swearing, and lying,
and killing, and stealing, and committing adul
tery, they break out, and blood touches blood."
For all this "the earlier prophets," i.e., the
historical books, seem to have no eye. They
portray the sin of the people as their repudia
tion of God's altar. But " the later prophets "
say, that it is their repudiation of God's
righteousness, and that even at His altar. For
lack of that, their very sacrifices have become
abominable. Of course, this had not come to pass
explosively, but gradually. But the sudden
unmasking of the evil is a significant fact. From,
Elisha and his fellow prophets, under the dynas-»
ties of Ahab and Jehu, we hear nothing of it*
But from the first that we hear from Hosea and

RISE OP THE PREACHER-PROPHETS. 23
Amos, a very few years after Elisha, it seems to
be as bad as it can be. It is noticeable that
Hosea especially denounces judgment upon the
sanguinary and treacherous policy of Jehu,
which Elisha seems to have condoned out of
regard to his political services. But all at once,
after an oppressive silence, in which there is no
recorded reproof of vices that were growing ripe
for judgment, no pleading of the cause of the
suffering poor as the cause that is dear to God,
there is a great revival of the pure prophetic
spirit, which had slumbered since its brief
flaming up in Elijah. The preacher-prophets
enter with Amos, and have come to stay.
Their appearance marks the dawn of a fresh
revelation, the access of an inspiration higher
than that of the wonder-working seers, the
"dumb dogs, that cannot bark." A long step-
forward in the moral advance is taken. Hence
forth, in the spirit of Jesus' teachings, Eeligion
and Morality, divorced by men, are proclaimed
as inseparably joined by God. Henceforth, a
clearer intuition of what God is leads to clearer
perceptions of what God requires, and Micah
says : " What doth the Lord require of thee, but to-
do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with
thy God ? " It is this superior ethical illumina- 2

24 THEIR ADVANCED THEOLOGY.
tion, which marks the later prophets as men of
a higher spirit than the earlier, and signalises
the Divine inspiration, out of which they spoke
as forerunners of the latest and greatest of
prophets; who took up their teaching where
they left it, who gathered all its rays into the
focus of His matchless personality, from which
they shine intensified in saving power by His
life and death and resurrection.
3. In addition to this, it is not to be overlooked
that this ethical advance of the preacher-
prophets upon the seers involved, through the
teaching of the Spirit of God, a theological
advance equally remarkable. From the earlier
conceptions of God, as Lord and King and
Judge, the later prophets ascended to the
thought of God as a Saviour and a Father. In
one point alone has the theology of Jesus
advanced upon this. The prophets conceived
of Jehovah as Father of the nation. Jesus
teaches that God is the Father of each and
every man.
But for this higher revelation of the Divine
•character, the prophets, in their ethical illumi
nation, could only have trembled for their
country in remembering that God is just.
Jt was their Cassandra-destiny to proclaim

INSPIRATION MANIFEST. 25
the doom of iniquity to disbelieving ears.
Bat while pointing to the approaching
judgment-fire in which all national hopes
seemed shrivelled, they kindled over against
it, as no other ancient prophets did, the
light of hope in the Eternal Goodness : " Thou,
0 Lord, art our Father, our Redeemer." Jeru
salem shall rise from her ashes. The fire is for
the chaff alone. A holy seed shall replenish
the earth, and make all nations know the mercy
that endureth for ever. Surely, the men who,
in that decaying world of superstitious priests,
and tyrannous lords, and groaning serfs, thus
anticipated that redeeming truth of the Divine
Fatherhood, which so long after dawned upon
the hopeless in the face of the Saviour of the
world, spake, as none before them spake, by
inspiration of the Holy Ghost ?
The transcendent elevation to which, in their
illumination by the Spirit, the later prophets
advanced above all their predecessors, is
apparent from this; — that out of the depths
of unparalleled and desperate evils, amid social
decay and political ruin, they rose to proclaim,
not merely the judgments, but the grace of
God, in prophecy which the Eedeemer of men
has verified in history. When we listen to

26 INSPIRATION MANIFEST.
their impassioned rebuke of the wrong and the
wrong-doer, their eloquent urging of a right
eous reformation, their tender pleading with
besotted rulers and corrupted people, to forsake
the way of ruin for the way of recovery, we do
not catch that which is most Divine in their
spirit or their speech. It is rather when they
turn from the obduracy which braves its doom
to the mercy that is everlasting, and take
refuge in their impregnable hope, that when
the seven-fold judgment thunders shall have
rolled away, the retreating clouds of wrath
will be found spanned with the bow of pro
mise, and the eternal heavens bright with
the reviving and healing light of the Fatherhood
of God.
This strain of Sacred Prophecy transcends
the materialistic visions of a golden age, which
Vergil borrows from the Cumsean Sibyl, as the
noonday sun transcends the nocturnal aurora.
It carried with it the spiritual power which
wrought effectively to fulfil it. But not that
mere optimistic hopefulness, as some allege,
gave birth to it, which is one of the sustaining
elements of human nature everywhere. In
that case, such prophecy would have flourished
in other distressed nations, as it did in Israel.

THE KING-MAKERS. 27
Its development in Israel alone is a unique
effect from a cause correspondingly unique, the
same cause which gave birth in Israel to that
unique flower of humanity, in whom we recog
nise the moral image of God; in Whom and-
through whom the unparalleled " hope of Israel "
has found its unparalleled fulfilment.
IV. Another phenomenon of the prophetic
development we are tracing is an element in
that ethical progress which we have just
reviewed, but deserves some recognition by
itself. It appears in the political interferences,
which the earlier prophets indulged in, and
away from which the later prophets turned to
a higher and more, salutary kind of leadership.
In the earlier part of the period of prophet-
ism, we find the prophets active in the political
business of making and unmaking kings.
Samuel, wisely recognising the stringency of
a national crisis, sets up Saul. When he is
dissatisfied with him, he hastily sets him aside
for David at the risk, and with the actual result,
of a Philistine reconquest and an intestine war.
Long before David came to the throne the pro
phetic fraternity, of which he had been a
member, actively promoted his cause by the
circulation of oracles predicting his glorious

28 THE KING-MAKERS.
destiny.* The succession of David's sceptre
was determined by Nathan to Solomon, in pre
ference to his elder brother, Adonijah. The
revolt of the Ten Tribes from Solomon's son was
promoted by Ahijah's stirring up of Jeroboam.
The same prophet, in turn, promoted the down
fall of Jeroboam's dynasty by oracles which
fulfilled themselves in Baasha's conspiracy
against Nadab. Similarly, the prophet Jehu,
son of Hanani, initiated the next revolution,
which pulled down Baasha, and, after a short
anarchy, ended in setting up Omri, the founder
of Samaria. Last in the series of the king-
making prophets comes Elisha, inciting the
revolt which overthrew the dynasty of Omri,
and put Jehu, the son of Nimshi, on the
throne. Elisha's message to Jehu by his
emissary-prophet, " Thus saith the Lord, I have
anointed thee king over Israel," is followed by a
sudden explosion of revolutionary wrath, of
which the only vindication can be found in the
intolerableness of evils, against which Elisha,
unlike the later prophets, had uttered no ade
quate, certainly no recorded, rebuke; while
* See 1 Samuel xix. 18-20; 2 Samuel iii. 9, 18; v. 2;
echoes of these oracles are in such passages as 1 Samuel
xxiii. 17; xxv. 30.

THE KING-MAKERS CURBED. 29
indications appear in the record that he was
disaffected to the court, and had quietly formed
an opposition party.*
These politician-prophets, who preferred the
blood-letting of revolution to the teaching of
the Ten Commandments as the panacea for
social evils, made the same mistake as the
preachers, who, in our own time, in America,
instead of faithfully treating the moral canker
of slavery, preferred to promote the secession
which they might have prevented, and plunged
their churches into the gulf of civil war.
What has been already referred to, in speak
ing- of the development of wealth, tended to
check the political power of the prophets. As
the wealthy class, interested in maintaining
political quiet, grew, and gained experience of
the evils of revolution, the power of the throne
acquired a stability beyond the power of the
prophets to unsettle. Before the political
interferences of the prophets ceased altogether,
they took on a milder type, reminding. us of the
lowered tone of the Eoman Pontiff, who excom
municates the King of Italy, while his pre
decessor of the sixteenth century pronounced
* See "Elisha, Seer and Politician," in the writer's
" New Points to Old Texts."

30 THE king-makers' decline.
the deposition of the Queen of England, and
committed the execution of his sentence to the
King of Spain. Subsequently to Elisha, but
earlier than Amos, we find the seers stoutly
denouncing the foreign policy of good kings ;
Hanani threatening Jehoshaphat with "wrath
from the Lord" for giving military aid to his
ungodly neighbour Ahab ; Eliezer threatening
wreck to the merchant fleet, which Jehoshaphat
had joined the son of Ahab in fitting out.
Such interferences, reminding us of the extreme
puritanism with which Eoger Williams de
nounced the Church of England as Antichrist,
and refused fellowship to all who would not
profess repentance for communion with that
church, show, in the prophetic development,
the expiring flicker of that spirit in which
Samuel had denounced the sparing of a
captive's life as rebellion against Jehovah.
King Amaziah learned to his cost the unwisdom
of implicit trust to political dictation in the
name of the Lord, when his Samarian allies,
whom the man of God hatTBade\him send home
as heretics, took bloody revenge for the affront
upon his defenceless people.
But the kings grew more and more able to
coerce the refractpry prophets. Asa, described

THE MORE EXCELLENT WAT. 31
as generally a good king, put the seer Hanani
in prison, and, more unjustly, Joash put to
death his benefactor's son, the prophet
Zechariah. Finally overmatched, and, having their eyes
opened to see how little good had been accom
plished by their political efforts, the later pro
phets rose into the higher way of endeavour for
moral reformation. They had found out that
politics cannot purify morals, and henceforth
try to make morals purify politics. This new
way of reform is conspicuously contrasted with
the old in Isaiah's course towards Ahaz. Ahaz
was a worse king than the Jeroboam whom
Ahijah had threatened. But Isaiah, while
energetically protesting against the corrup
tion of the court and the government, aids
Ahaz with the most encouraging political
advice. When repulsed, he confines himself
to preaching repentance and hope, circulates
his writings as tracts for the times, and
patiently waits with his disciples for the issue
of events.
Here again it becomes plain that the rise- of
the preacher-prophets is the sign of a new
revelation to the prophets. This new revelation
they describe by saying, " The Lord hath opened

32 PREACHERS OP RIGHTEOUSNESS.
mine ear." What the Divine voice tells them
is, that not unrighteous potentates, but an un
righteous people have wrought folly in Israel.
An evil more radical than royal policy is revealed
to them in the popular corruption, which issues
from the depths of the national heart through
the crater of the throne. To replace an old
crater by a new one avails little, so long as the
fires of ruin rage below. Eeform must be
sought in the members of the body, as well as
in its head. Therefore they henceforward de
vote themselves, as never before, to the preach
ing of the Ten Commandments to the people,
as the main thing in order to a reformed and
stable commonwealth.
This development of the prophets from poli
tical seers into preachers of righteousness
marks a long step forward in the moral advance
from a lower to a higher spirit, and the rise of
a new light within their consciences. We hear
the political and the preaching prophets each
proclaiming, " Thus saith the Lord," but the
Divine sanction thus asserted must be held
to vary with the moral illumination of the
speaker. V. The last phenomenon in the moral de
velopment we are surveying is the appearance, in

heathenish oracles. 33
the earlier part of the prophetic period, of a class
of oracles repugnant to Christian principles, and
the disappearance of these, in the later part of
the period, coincidently with the rise of a class
of oracles conformable to the spirit of Christ,
and illustrative of the New Testament law, that
" the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of pro
phecy." 1. For instance, Samuel, with a " Thus saith
the Lord," orders a war of extermination* upon
the neighbouring tribe of Amalek, not even
sparing the lives of their cattle, upon whom,
however, the book of Jonah represents God as
having compassion to the extent of spacing
Nineveh partly for their sake. Tradition has
sustained the claim of a Divine sanction for
such edicts of massacre by the theory, that the
foes of Israel were felons worthy of death, and
Israel the warranted executioner. But this does
not at all square with the Biblical record of this
case, which describes it as a revengeful reprisal
* The ban laid by Samuel upon Amalek, like that laid
by Joshua upon Jericho, was analogous to the heathen
custom of devoting an enemy to utter destruction as a
sacrifice to the gods of the nether world. Violation of the
ban was accounted as an act of sacrilege against those gods,
and, as such, required to be inexorably expiated by the
death of the offender.

34 SAMUEL AND SAUL.
for a war, in which Amalek was the invaded
party four hundred years before.*
2. When Saul has failed to carry out the
letter of the edict of massacre, after making
what seemed to him sufficient havoc, Samuel
again tells him, in God's name, that he has
rebelled against the Lord, and is therefore
adjudged to lose his kingdom to a neighbour,
who is a better man. Here, also, tradition
stands for the reality of the Divine sanction
claimed by Samuel, partly on the ground that
the doom was fulfilled, partly on the ground
that the doom was reiterated from the
world of the dead by the apparition of
Samuel to Saul in the house of the woman
of En-dor. But the doom was of that kind
which in the very nature of things tends to fulfil
itself. By awakening Saul's jealousy of
David as his competitor, David is exiled, and
the king, weakened by the loss of his ablest
man, falls before his foes. While, on the other
hand, the record does not sustain the claim of
a miraculous reiteration of the doom from the
world of spirits. For the scene in the house at
En-dor shows to a rigid scrutiny no real
* See Exodus xvii. 8, describing an attack in resentment
of the intrusion of the Israelites into their territory.

MURDER OF INNOCENTS. 35
Samuel, but only a personated Samuel, and
nothing takes place there of a sort which does
not take place to-day in the interview of a
" medium " with an applicant for information
from the dead.*
3. In David's reign occurs the darkest scene
in the whole prophetic period. A famine is
interpreted by an oracle as a punishment for a
breach of faith by Saul, a generation previous,
toward a subject heathen tribe, and God is
" entreated for the land" by an outrage, in
which king, priests and prophets acquiesced, —
the crucifixion, at a sanctuary of Jehovah in
Gibeah, of seven descendants of Saul, of whom
no one had probably the least share of guilt in
the offence. The only bright side to the tale
of horror is, as pointed out by Dean Stanley,
in a lesson connected with it, that a covenant
must be sacredly kept, though made with
heretics. But the moral insensibility to the
principles of Divine justice, in which Eoman
hierarchs have justified their Saul-like acts of
perfidy toward heretics, lingers in the Pro
testant commentator, whose idolatry of the
phrase, " The Lord answered," leads him to
* For a full discussion of this point see the writer's
What of Samuel?"

36
justify this heathenish attempt at expiation as
divinely required and accepted. Says Lange's
Commentary, " The sacred number seven is
determined by the significance of this punish
ment as work in the service of God, whereby
God's wrath was to be appeased. They were
to be hung up to the Lord to appease His
anger." It would seem that such a misrepresentation
of the Divine justice by a Christian man^ in
this year of grace, ought to be " hung up to
the Lord, in God's honour, to appease His
anger," — high enough to be out of sight, and
fast enough never to be taken down and
exhibited as a Christian belief. To such
expositors one may well quote the saying of
TJlrich, Bishop of Augsburg : " Press not the
breasts of Holy Writ too hard, lest they yield
blood rather than milk."
This act of atonement, in crucifying the
children for their father's sin, was David's
act, as shown by his inquiry of the Gibeonites,
" Wherewith shall I make the atonement ? " As
performed by them, it had the characteristics
of that human sacrifice, which had been prac
tised by the aboriginal inhabitants of Palestine
from whom they descended. The dim vision of

BLIND BIBLIOLATRY. 37
the prophets of that day is palpably evident
from their sanction of such a tragedy, and
from the interpretation given to the cessation
of the drought and famine as a sign of Divine
satisfaction with the horrible ''•'atonement."
But where on earth can there be found to-day a
dimmer vision, and an idolatry more absurd,
than the Bibliolatry which is persuaded by the
ipse dixit of such oracles to bow the moral
reason to a judicial murder, done to pacify God
and produce rain, and to regard it as ordered
by a Divine revelation ?
4. From the same period one more of these
evanescent oracles remains to be cited, which
illustrates the prophetic spirit as still partly
meshed in the semi-heathenish conditions out
of which, in Samuel's time, it is seen emerg
ing. Were it not that in Christian churches
and Sunday-schools these fantasies of early
seers are still held up as true illustrations
of the ways of God to men, it would be less
important to mark how, even in that early
time, they were soon corrected by a clearer
vision. David, notwithstanding a strong popular
prejudice, most strongly represented by his
general Joab, who in most things was a tho-

38 CENSUS AND PESTILENCE.
roughly unscrupulous man, takes a census.
This done, he is informed by Gad, his seer,
that the Divine wrath is to follow, and is given
his choice of the mode of punishment. He
chooses of three proposed alternatives a pesti
lence, and accordingly it breaks out. Seventy
thousand perish; but an atoning sacrifice is
offered, the wrath is appeased, and the plague
is stayed.
Tradition still sustains this as a true account
of cause and effect, partly by reading between
the lines what is not there, partly by urging
the principle of solidarity, which brings woe on
nations through the wickedness of rulers. But
there was no commandment against a census.
On the contrary, in the first chapter of Num
bers, a census is recorded as taken under Divine
command to Moses. But it is alleged that
David's heart was puffed up with ungodly
pride, and that this was his sin, like that for
which Nebuchadnezzar, in the book of Daniel,
was punished. Still, it was not David but his
people who were punished, and this for what,
at the most, was a sin that had not passed
beyond the limits of his private thoughts. It
is a monstrous confusion of thought to find
here an instance of that solidarity of interests

CENSUS AND PESTILENCE. 39
by which a nation is involved in the conse
quences of the public acts of its rulers.
The key to the difficulty in which the tradi
tional theory of the case is involved is given by
what seems, at first view, the clincher, namely,
that the " sinner " is invited by God to choose
in what way he will be punished, whether by
famine, war, or pestilence. A thoughtful mind
will reflect that the transformation of an inci
dent in the narration of it accounts for many a
puzzle. The speaking of Balaam's ass in a
dumb way is magnified by some reporter or
hearer of it into speech with articulate voice,
and so the momentary mistake of ignorance
becomes the standing miracle of credulity. So
what David may have said to Gad, that, if he
had had the choice of his punishment, he would
have chosen it as it fell out, has been changed
in the report of their conversation into the
story that he had his choice.
Acquiescing, under the terror of the moment,
in the popular superstition, which viewed a
filth-disease, common enough in Eastern cities,
as caused by the census, to which the popular
prejudice had so violently objected, David
accepts this explanation of it from his seer.
He piously congratulates himself that his

40 HEATHENISM OUTGROWN.
punishment has taken that form, and that he
has fallen, not into the hands of his enemies,
but " into the hand of the Lord, whose mercies
are great." This is the divinely - inspired
temper of trustful resignation, which lights up
the shadow of the ignorant superstition, out
of which God's Davids were ere long to grow.
But we hear no more of oracles like this,
which represents God in the character of the
Gentile Nemesis, avenging the ruler's pride by
the destruction of his people. Nothing is a
more conspicuous sign of the advancing moral
illumination, which appears in Israel alone
among the ancient nations, than the dis
appearance of such oracles in Israel alone.
Could the seers, who gave them, revisit earth,
nothing would more surprise them than to find
Christian men exalting such oracles to the
same authority as the teachings of Christ,
displaying the cast-off rags of heathenish
superstition as part of the sacred vesture of
Truth, and regarding the fantasies of that
dim-sighted time as a part of that Divine
revelation, which guided Israel out of darkness
into the light of the Gospel. Such oracles
belong to the Divine revelation, which came to
Israel, as the fog-clouds of early morning

EARLIER AND LATER PROPHECY CONTRASTED. 41
belong to the sun which gradually burns them
away, or as the mudhole belongs to the road
which it temporarily breaks.
The criticism here interwoven with the
account of these oracles is subsidiary to a
judgment which must be given on the broad
ground of a striking contrast in this, as in
other respects, between the earlier and the
later prophets. The earlier prophets, in such
oracles, make the ways of God to men
suspiciously like the ways of the heathen
deities, and like the ways of the men of those
raw times to one another. The later prophets
rise to Christian ideals and principles.
Instead of Israel exterminating the heathen,
Israel is to be " a light to the Gentiles, a
salvation to the ends of the earth," "to cause
many nations to rejoice," to make " a house of
prayer for all nations." Thus the spirit of
later prophecy anticipates the command of
Jesus, " make disciples of all. the nations." In
place of the earlier oracle, which sanctioned
the punishment of children for a father's sin,
the later prophets develop the Gospel principle
of personal responsibility : " the soul that
sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear
the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father

42 THE SPIRIT OF SACRED PROPHECY.
bear the iniquity of the son." From the pagan
notion of a Divine Nemesis the spirit of Sacred
Prophecy ascends to the Christian truth of a
Divine Father. Instead of Gad giving out
that the king's pride (if pride it was) produces,
and the king's burnt offering arrests, an
epidemic among his people, Hosea insists, as
Christ did, that God "desires mercy and not
sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than
burnt offerings " ; and Jeremiah says : " Thus
saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his
wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory m his
might, let not the rich man glory in his riches :
But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he
understandeth and knoweth Me, that I am the
Lord which exercise lovingkindness, judgment,
¦and righteousness, in the earth : for in these
things I delight, saith the Lord." The butterfly
is not more an advance upon the caterpillar,
than this ethical view of God by the later
prophets is upon some non-ethical and contra-
ethical ideas of their forerunners.
The foregoing considerations bind us in all
candour to this conclusion : the elements
which the spirit of prophecy eliminates and
extrudes in its development are foreign to it,
evanescent phenomena belonging to a lower

THE SIGN >®P THE WORD OF GOD. 43
thing. The principle, stated both in the Old
Testament and the New, that "the Word of
•God abideth for ever," is a sure criterion that
^alleged words of God are not actually such,
if we see them discarded by learners of God in
their advancing knowledge. The reality and
the sign of the Word of God that came to
Israel are found in the historical demonstration
of its illuminating and regenerating power ;
«in its progressive riddance from error and
clearing of truth ; in the decay of superstition,
and the growth of moral intelligence; in its
energy for the accomplishment of moral
progress, and the invigoration of forlorn
hopes against giant evils; in its development
in Israel of an unparalleled expectation for
centuries, which was fulfilled in the advent of
a, Character equally unparalleled; and, coin-
cidently with all this, in its education of a race
of teachers, who, perfected by the teaching of
the Prophet of prophets, are still demonstrating
the Word of God by its everlasting power to
do the work of God, in the uplifting of races,
the regeneration of communities, the purifica
tion of consciences, and the salvation of men.
This ethical development of the prophets of

44 THE ETHICAL. DEVELOPMENT!.
Israel, — from prophesying under a contagious-
impulse from without to- prophesying under a
moral conviction from within,, from, predictions.
of physical occurrences to' predictions! of the
issues of ethical principles, from insistence on.
ritual observances and theological orthodoxy
to insistence on clean hands and" pure hearts,
from leadership in political revolutions to
leadership in moral reformations, fromi oracles
tinged with the superstitions of paganism, to
oracles imbued with the truths of Christianity
— still waits for due recognition. This is the-
only key which will let the orthodox pedant
out of the cell into which he shuts himself to,
grind his traditional grist for the mockery of
the sceptical Philistine. In this ethical de
velopment the reality of a Divine revelation is
manifest, and so is the nature of the inspiration
through which it came,, as a moral influence
effective for illumination and progress, in the
knowledge of God and His ways of judgment
and of grace.
The traditional notion is, that a prophet is a
prognosticator of events, that his foresight of
events is the fruit of a special Divine inspira
tion. This sinks the difference between the
clairvoyancy, or shrewdness, of the Gentile

TRADITIONAL FALLACIES. 45
sseers, and the ethical inspiration of the
Israelite prophets, between the inspiration of a
man like Balaam, and that of a man like
Isaiah. The specific characteristic of Sacred
Prophecy is not in prognostication, but in
preaching. The traditional notion, even of Christian
writers on " the evidences," is, that the inspira
tion of the prophets is proved by the fulfilment
of their predictions. This again cancels the
difference between the prophets of Israel and
those of other nations, ancient and modern, for
whom fulfilments as remarkable can be cited.
It is irreconcilable with the fact, which
Christian apologists generally overlook, of a
considerable percentage of frustrated and
inaccurate forecasts, even by prophets like
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.*
The traditional notion is, that Christ's
endorsement of the Messianic prophets is
extensible to all the prophets, and gives the
order of Samuel for a war of revenge an
authoritativeness as unquestionable as that of

* For a specimen, compare Ezekiel xxvi. 7-14, with xxix.
17-20. The prophet's candour in acknowledging failure
¦contrasts with the disingenuousness of Christian writers
who •deny it.

46 TRADITIONAL FALLACIES,
the Beatitudes. This stretching of particulars
into universals is as fallacious as to take the
statement that " Americans are ingenious," as
a ground for believing that all Americans are
ingenious. The traditional notion of the past two cen
turies respecting the Bible is among Protestants
like what transubstantiation is among Eoman-
ists. What the Eomanist does, in thinking of
the wafer of the Eucharist as changed into
the body of Christ, the Protestant does, who
changes the fact that the Word of God is in
the Bible into the fiction that the Word of God
is the Bible. Legends like that of Lot and his
daughters, stories like those of Euth and
Esther, love-songs like the Canticles, curses
upon enemies, as in some of the Psalms, are by
this statement transformed into a thing of
higher nature, as though the pot which holds
a plant were identified with the plant. This
sinking of the distinction between development
and environment, between seed and husk,
between a process and its instruments, between
the raw pupils and the Perfect Teacher, is the
Protestant revival of the Eomanist superstition,
which transforms a fact into a fiction. Like all
violence to facts, however intended as a service

REVIEW OP THE HISTORY. 47
to Piety, it operates as a scandal to Eeason, and
too often degrades the nutriment of Faith into
the fuel of Scepticism.
It should be noted, however, that the extrava
gant claims of theological expositors have gone
far beyond the majority of the creeds, which, in
fact, are content with moderate language upon
the subject of Eevelation and Inspiration, say
ing, with the Anglican, that the Scripture "con-
taineth all things necessary to salvation," or,
with the Presbyterian, that it is "given by
inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and
life." Within these lines is a Gibraltar-rock,
which ought never to have been forsaken to
build brick forts against rifled guns.
The history of the development of Israelite
prophetism is the history of a long and
chequered campaign, toward a victory which
was consummated by Christ, and is enjoyed by
us. In the review of this, as of any successful
war, two courses are open to every thinker.
One is a thick-and-thin glorification of every
incident of the struggle, vindicating the con
summate wisdom of every order issued by any
officer bearing the commission of the com
mander-in-chief. This is the course which
4

48 PROOF OF THE REVELATION.
Christian thought upon the career of the
prophets has commonly taken. It is the losing
way of trying to prove too much.
The other is in pointing to the steady
progress made, despite all misjudging and,
mishandling by subordinates, the continuous
onward movement of the overcoming force, the
genius that created conquerors out of awkward
squads, that trained as well as used its agents,
that infused enthusiasm into laggards and
dullards, turned even the errors of under
lings to good purpose, and in spite of all
apathy and blundering, advanced invincibly
to the ultimate realisations of admirable
designs. Such is the demonstration of a Word of God
in Israel as in no other ancient nation, by a
work of God in Israel as in no other, according
to Isaiah's definition of the Word of God, as a
word that is not void of power. Such is the
evidence of a Divine inspiration peculiar to the
prophets of Israel, as a moral energy efficacious
for a moral development from rawness into
ripeness. The grand proof of such a revelation,
such an inspiration in Israel, is seen in its
rising tide, gradually covering the unsightly and
noisome flats, and carrying into the stagnant

ITS ONWARD MOVEMENT. 49
pools a purifying current from the deep sea of
Divine Truth.
The moral development, seen in Israel alone
in that ancient world, lifted its prophets out of
sensuous ecstasy into ethical illumination, from'
clairvoyant foresight of events to moral insight
into the eternal principles of God's character
and of the moral order of the world which is
grounded therein, from zeal for God's altars to
zeal for God's righteousness and mercy, from
politicians to preachers, from superstitions like
those of the heathen to ideals like those of
Christ, — ideals which, amid social decay and
political wreck, gave birth to a ehurch of
believers in the world-wide triumph of the
Eternal Goodness. This continuous onward
movement through all straits of outward
change to the consummation of the unique
" hope of Israel " in the advent of the Divinest
of Prophets, and in the spread, under the seal
of His Eesurrection, of the purified faith of
Israel among all nations, refers the thinker to
a cause as unique as the effect, to a root as
Divine as the fruit.
Churchmen have no reason to complain of
the scepticism, which they create and challenge
by descending from this impregnable ground to

50 CAUSE AND CURE OF SCEPTICISM.
assert a Divine word and a Divine work in
Elisha's curse of the street-boys as seconded
by the bears. The devices of theological lore
for saving the claims of Samuel, Gad and
Elisha to a Divine sanction for things that
affront intelligence and Christian conscience,
have only- kept the dead flies in the apothe
cary's ointment with a malodorous result. It
is time to take them out, that the seer's loss of
credit here and there may be a gain to truth,
by our refusal to regard his delusions as in
spired. To argue, as is still done by men who,
in their way, are doubtless as zealous for God
as St. Paul was before his conversion, that
conduct which to the moral sense of en
lightened men seems atrocious was not really
atrocious, because God specially commanded it,
can result only in driving men to say with
Euripides, "If the gods do anything out
rageous, they are not gods." Thus the Church
manufactures infidels by her unreason. In
proportion as those who believe in a Divine
revelation learn how to recognise it and demon
strate it, the scepticism which is the invincible
protest of abused intelligence will show its
better side, as faith in eternal truth and
reason.

WHAT OF SAMUEL?

CONTENTS.

PAGE
I. — The Father of the Prophets . . 1
II. — The Kino-Maker  19
III. — The Politician and. the Prophet . 43
IV. — The Prophet Counterfeited . . .67

I.
THE FATHER OF THE PROPHETS.

THE FATHER OF THE PROPHETS.
Theee is hardly to be found in the Old
Testament another character of so many-sided
an interest as Samuel, whether personal, po
litical, or religious. We see him both as the
ingenuous child and the revered prophet, the
nursling of domestic piety and the spiritual
lather of a nation, their fearless leader and
upright judge. In his life-time an old order
of things is seen merging into a new ; a period
of darkness ends in the rising of a light which
has brightened from then till now.
He is conspicuous ' especially as founder of
the two institutions — the monarchy and the
order of the prophets — which shaped both the
history of his country and the religion which
ripened into Christianity. In every character
from youth to age he shines as the steady and
central light of his dark and troubled time.

4 THE FATHER OF THE PROPHETS. [i.
It is no wonder that his illustrious character
and eminent services have caused him to be
idealised in the thought of later times, so that
even his defects and errors have been divinised,
as proceeding from celestial inspirations rather
than from the human frailty and ignorance
from which not even inspired prophets, men
of like passions and infirmities with ourselves,
were free. But much of the scepticism of our
times has no better foundation than the delu
sion, for which Christian men are responsible,
of charging to the Holy Spirit the blunders of
his raw pupils in the early times. And no
better service can be rendered to Christian
truth to-day than to use the light which
Christ has given to distinguish what was really
of God, and what was of human ignorance or
error, in the ministry of the holy men who
spoke as they saw in the dimness of the early
dawn. It is on such a service that our study
of Samuel is intent.
It is remarkable that in so active and varied
a life as that of Samuel we find only two well
defined points, and these separated by the
long interval between the child and the old
man. The history is quite minute in its detail,

I.] THE FATHER OF THE PROPHETS. 5
both of the young child's introduction into
the service of Jehovah, and of the old man's
agency in the inauguration of the monarchy.
The period between has the briefest record :
" Samuel judged Israel forty years." The
reason of this silence is doubtless in the char
acter of the time, a time of calamity under
ferocious oppression, a time of fighting rather
than writing.
The sanctuary in which the young Samuel
had ministered as assistant to the venerable
Eli had been swept away by Philistine in
vaders, and the spirit of Israel had been
broken by pitiless massacre.* Never had the
candle of national hope burned so low. In
this wintry period Samuel was, . as it were, the
root in which the life of Israel waited for the
spring-time of revival. There was nothing
brilliant to be done, no heroic stroke was
possible, only patient waiting and good teach
ing, with incorruptible virtue winning the
general confidence, till the hour of deliverance
came. The record of those long, dark years,
the greater part of his active life, is thus con
densed by the old man himself : t " And
now, behold, the king walketh before you:
* Psalm lxxvui. 60-64. t 1 Sam. xii. 2-4.

6 THE FATHER OF THE PROPHETS. [i.
and I am old and grayheaded ; and, behold,
my sons are with you; and I have walked
before you from my youth unto this day.
Here I am : witness against me before the
Lord, and before His anointed : whose ox
have I taken? or whose ass have I taken?
or whom have I defrauded ? whom have I
oppressed ? or of whose hand have I taken a
ransom to blind mine eyes therewith ? and I
will restore it you. And they said, Thou hast
not defrauded us, nor oppressed us, neither hast
thou taken aught of any man's hand." For
this long patience, biding its time, in slow,
persistent accumulation of resources and repu
tation and influence, the highest type of char
acter is requisite. This we recognise in
Samuel. Especially, and as the energising
power in such a character, we recognise the
persistency of an early purpose. The well-
spring was formed in the heart of the child.
He was consecrated to Jehovah by his pious
mother. His youth was devoted to sacred
ministries. His destiny to stand amid the
wreck of the old order of things as the nucleus
of the new demanded a prelude thus peculiar.
The reverence and influence to which he grew
are eloquent of the power of cradle-lessons,

I.] THE FATHER OF THE PROPHETS. 7
and of the influence of the mother's spirit and
of the early home.
A glance at the condition of things in
the beginning of Samuel's career makes it
evident that a far simpler order of religion
existed than that which subsequently arose.
What is recorded of Samuel shows that
the ceremonial ordinances prescribed in the
books attributed to Moses had not then
become established. These prescribe a pecu
liar dress for the priests. Samuel, not
of the priestly tribe, wears the priestly
dress, the ephod on the shoulders, and
the robe, made for him every year by
his mother. These ordinances also forbid
access to the place of the ark to all but the
high priest. But Samuel, whose station was
that of doorkeeper to the sanctuary, regularly
slept in the place where the ark of God was ;
which seemed so strange to the English
translators that they have violated the Hebrew
original in their translation.* The Levitical
ordinances require burnt offerings to be made
* See 1 Sam. iii. 3 : " And ere the lamp of God went out,
in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was, and
Samuel was laid down to sleep" (A.V.). It should read,
as in the E.V. : " Was laid down, to sleep in the temple nf
the Lord, where the ark of God was."

8 THE FATHEE OF THE PEOPHETS. [*•
by the legitimate priests at the one sanctuary
of the tabernacle. But Samuel goes about
from place to place to offer sacrifice in a
variety of local sanctuaries. If the Levitical
ritual had then been in existence, Samuel
must have known of it. In his character as
chief reformer he must have endeavoured to
secure conformity to it ; but he evidently
acted as if it were not.*
The explanation is, that in Samuel's time
there was still going on that struggle of
Jehovah-worship against idol-worship, which
in later times, under the teaching of the
Spirit from the lessons of long and dis
astrous experience, the stringent ritual of
Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy was
devised to bring to a victorious issue. It is
the spirit rather than the authorship of these
books, their germinal principles rather than
their writer's hand, which entitles them to
be called Mosaic. The countrymen of Samuel
indeed worshipped Jehovah as God, but not
Him only.
Samuel was the prophet of a monotheism to
which they as yet were strangers. They had
* See W. E. Smith's lectures on " The Old Testament in
the Jewish Church."

I.] THE FATHEE OF THE PEOPHETS. 9
come with their Jehovah -worship from the
desert into the Canaanite land, where vener
able sanctuaries already existed, and where
other gods were worshipped. They did not
give up their Jehovah-worship, but they added
to it the worship of the local gods of the new
land. For centuries there went on a struggle
between Israel and the Canaanites for suprem
acy, and the occasional defeats of Israel are
described in the sacred record as a judgment
upon their worship of the Canaanite gods.
The historical fact is, that the victories of
Israel were won by the inspiration of religious
zeal, such as that by which the followers of
Mohammed performed their military exploits,
such as that by which Cromwell's "Iron
sides," drilled in prayer-meetings, became
more than a match for England's noblemen,
drilled in knightly chivalry. When this zeal
flagged, the sword-arm weakened. The foe
was physically stronger. Only by the religious
ardour of a holy war for the honour of Jehovah
could the smaller combatant overmatch the
heavier weight opposed.
Doubtless it was often fanaticism, not piety
— such fanaticism as that of the Mohamme
dans, who beat outnumbering hosts under the

10 THE FATHEE OF THE PROPHETS. [i.
spur of the promise of paradise to him who
fell in combat with infidels. But as the mire
of the swamp evolves the purity and fragrance
of the lily, so in Israel a dark and often cruel
fanaticism formed the ground and enclosure of
a clear-eyed religious faith that grew out of it.
Samuel himself seems to embody both the
swamp and the lily — on one hand fanatically
hewing the captive King Agag in pieces as a
sacrifice to the Lord in Gilgal, and on the
other thoughtfully proclaiming that truth so
far beyond his times : " To obey is better than
sacrifice." The fact to seize upon in a history
so blended of low and high, of dark and light,
is not the darkness and grossness at which the
sceptic takes hasty offence, but the Divine
Spirit, the presence of Whose moral life in the
chaotic mixture is attested by the historical
evolution from these incongruous elements of
the light and order of moral truth. In such
a state of things there rose, under Samuel's
care, the most important of all religious in
stitutions then or now existing, from which all
progress in religious thought and practice, and
all the permanent gains of religious develop
ment have proceeded. This institution was
the order of prophets, which in Samuel's time

I.J THE FATHEE OF THE PROPHETS. 11
assumed permanent form, and is perpetuated
to-day in the preachers of the Gospel.
It has just been said, that whatever con
quests Israel had made, and whatever re
trievals of the political disasters experienced
in their collisions with stronger nations, had
been achieved by the rekindling of that re
ligious zeal for their national God, Jehovah,
which gave them, for the time, an irresist
ible momentum against outnumbering foes.
Especially was this the case in Samuel's time.
From the depths of a pitiless oppression, in
which the spirit of Israel lay broken for many
years under the Philistine yoke, a revival of
zeal for Jehovah proved adequate in a com
paratively short time to lift the nation to
victory and unity under the monarchy of
David. How Samuel preached up the holy
war, and with what result, the record states :
" And Samuel spake unto all the house of
Israel, saying, If ye do return unto the Lord
with all your heart, then put away the strange
gods and the Ashtaroth from among you, and
prepare your hearts unto the Lord, and serve
Him only : and He will deliver you out of the
hand of the Philistines. . . . So the Philistines
were subdued, and they came no more within

12 THE FATHER OF THE PEOPHETS. [i.
the border of Israel : and the hand of the Lord
was against the Philistines all the days of
Samuel."* But here it must especially be observed
what auxiliaries he employed, and what pro
vision he made that the sacred fire should not,
as in former times, expire when the immediate
emergency had been met. Here is found the
most eventful work of Samuel's life, the fruit
of those long years between his childhood and
his old age of which there is so scanty record.
Its grand result in determining the whole after
development of religion testifies that the most
potent influence any life can exert is wielded
in devoting life to build and shape an institu
tion which lives on when we are gone.
In the most calamitous and cruel periods of
the middle ages, we read of a sort of religious
epidemic seizing upon multitudes of people
who went about in processions, carrying the
crucifix, singing penitential psalms, and in
a strange excitement lashing themselves
with whips till the blood flowed. In the
dark time of the Philistine tyranny a like
impulse seems to have seized upon numbers
of Samuel's countrymen, who went about in
* 1 Sam. vii. 3, 13.

I.] THE FATHEE OF THE PROPHETS. 13
processions, visiting the local sanctuaries, and
singing to musical instruments the patriotic
and devotional hymns of Israel, expressive of
their faith in Jehovah, and their hope of
deliverance from distress. An echo of these
songs of hope out of the depths survives in
the song of Hannah, Samuel's mother :
" There is none holy as the Lord ; for there
is none beside Thee : neither is there any rock
like our God. The bows of the mighty men are
broken, and they that stumbled are girded with
strength. The Lord killeth, and maketh alive ;
He bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth
up. He will keep the feet of His holy ones,
but the wicked shall be put to silence in dark
ness ; for by strength shall no man prevail."*
Sometimes their enthusiasm ran into physical
excitement, so contagious that King Saul,
coming among them, caught the frenzy, and
stripping off his clothes lay for a day and
night naked and prostrate on the ground
uttering wild cries.! By such an agency was
the spirit of Israel roused to an enthusiasm
capable of daring to measure itself again with
the Philistine power in a struggle for inde
pendence. The director of the movement
* 1 Sam. ii. 2, 4, 6, 9. +1 Sam. xix. 24.

14 THE FATHEE OF THE PEOPHETS. [l-
was Samuel. We have a single glimpse of an
assemblage of these enthusiasts with Samuel
standing over them as president.* We find
a congregation of them dwelling in bough
huts ["Naioth"] near Samuel's house in
Eamah. From Samuel's time, these com
panies, or guilds, of prophets became an
institution in Israel, a permanent depository
of the sacred fire which - dwelt in the Hebrew
heart, like the flame in the heart of Moses'
burning bush — a fire destined, when purified
of its early fanaticism, to spread with the
ages from heart to heart and from land to
land. Under their hands the beginnings of
the literature of religion were made, in written
biographies and hymns, by Samuel and his
immediate successors, Nathan and Gad, David
and Heman.
At its first appeal ance, and for some time
after, the form of this prophetic order was
raw and motley. Samuel is not always on
the high plane of a spokesman for God in
proclaiming moral truth. He also acts as a
professional clairvoyant, receiving fees from
the country folk for giving oracles to them
in such questions as where their lost animals
* 1 Sam. xix. 20.

L] THE FATHEE OF THE PEOPHETS. 15
may be found. The record itself calls our
attention to this evolution of the preaching
prophet of the later period from the clair
voyant prophet of the earlier time : " Before-
time in Israel, when a man went to enquire
of God, thus he spake, Come, and let us go to
the Seer : for he that is now called a Prophet
[" spokesman " or preacher] was beforetime
called a Seer."* Physical excitement and
moral conviction, sensuous ecstasy and
spiritual illumination, seem in the religious
ferment of Samuel's time almost chaotically
blended. But out of this mixture the
historical evolution brought forth these peer
less moral reformers and religious teachers,
Isaiah and the later prophets, whose spirit
and principles passed on to the Apostles of
Christ and the preachers of His Gospel.
We shall not rightly estimate the moral and
religious life that lay at the core of the pro
phetic institution of Samuel, as the seed of
ampler developments in the later history,
without taking notice here of its earliest
fruit in the generation after Samuel. In
Nathan, contemporary with David, the true
prophetic spirit suddenly rays forth in a
* 1 Sam. ix. 9.

16 THE FATHER OF THE PEOPHETS. [i.
purity and grandeur to which we find no
equal for the next two centuries. We see
this not so much in his prediction of the per
petual permanence of a kingdom in David's
family — signal as that utterance was — the first
strain of that long series of prophecies of an
everlasting Davidic kingdom, which have come
to their fulfilment in the spiritual sovereignty
of the great Son of David, Jesus Christ.* We
see it rather in that memorable scene and
immortal discourse, in which the prophet, in
the name of God, rebukes the despotic king
for the crimes of adultery and murder — crimes
to which other royal courts of that time could
furnish parallels enough, but a rebuke which
that ancient and barbarous world nowhere
records outside the land of Israel. Well-
deserving, even then, was it to be called the
Holy Land, though polluted by the most
flagitious crime, yet sanctified by the triumph
ant assertion of the moral law, constraining
even the crown to condemn itself and cleanse
away its stains in the bitter waters of repent
ance. Where in literature is there a more touching
parable than that of the poor man's lamb?
* 2 Sam. .vii. 13.

I.] THE FATHEE OF THE PEOPHETS. 17
Where in the sacred pages a more masterly
appeal to conscience, a more scathing rebuke
of selfishness, a loftier vindication of violated
right ? *
Here we find first in the sacred pages what
Paul describes to the Corinthianst as the
special power of true prophecy — the out-
bringing of the hidden testimony of the soul,
the making manifest of the secrets of the
heart — not so much in foretelling events as
in forthtelling those moral principles to
which the awakened conscience in penitence
responds. It is Nathan who enables us to estimate
the real worth of Samuel's work as the founder
of the order of the prophets, who were after
wards to play so great a part in the history
of Israel, and in the development in the
world of ethical religion, or piety insphered
in morality. As a man, Nathan contrasts
strongly with Samuel, and favourably too.
He has all of Samuel's personal incorrupti
bility and high courage. But where Samuel
is intense and impetuous, Nathan is deep and
calm in his moral force ; where Samuel is
stern and inexorable in his ban upon trans-
* 2 Sam. xii. f 1 Cor. xiv. 24, 25. 2

18 THE FATHEE OF THE PROPHETS. [i.
gression, Nathan blends severity of rebuke with
mercifulness towards repentance. Samuel is
hot against Saul's violation of technical ortho
doxy, Nathan's indignation burns against
David's profanation of justice and moral right.
Samuel is sometimes self-willed, Nathan is
always self-controlled. Samuel sometimes
darkens into fanaticism, Nathan glows with
a clear moral insight. The elder prophet
belonged to a ruder time that was passing
away ; the younger, to the more settled and
civilised time that was coming in, the golden
age of Israel. The one was the instructor,
the other the pupil, advancing beyond his
teacher. Our estimate of Nathan, as the first
and early ripe fruit of Samuel's work, discloses
the hope for Israel and the world which lay
in that work — the divine life of the seed un
derneath the husk, the divine source, in the
Spirit of Eevelation, of that Power which out
of all the transitory grossness of its primitive
environment was to develop the world's ever
lasting Gospel of truth and grace.

II.
THE KING -MAKER.

II.
THE KING- MAKER.
In that part of the history of Samuel which
has thus far passed under review, the most
important fact is his institution of the order
of the prophets — that unique glory of Israel —
whose spirit and moral teachings have been
inherited and expanded by Christianity. For
Israel, and for the world, which has inherited
the purified faith of Israel, this was the grand
life-work of Samuel.
Subordinate, and yet essential, to this was
the further work which the record relates
with full detail, his constitution of the nation
as a monarchy under its first king. The
kingdom formed the necessary platform, on
which the prophets, as the apostles of moral
and religious progress, played their grand
part. Experience had shown that Israel could
not resist the encroachments of surrounding

22 THE KING-MAKER. [H.
nations without a stronger form of govern
ment than they possessed in their loose con
federation of independent tribes. A central
sovereignty acknowledged by the whole nation
was necessary for an effective forth-putting of
the national power. But to Samuel the
popular demand for this seemed like dis
trusting Providence, just as in modern times
men of intense faith and unreflecting minds
have thought it a distrust of Providence to
resort to life insurance or to use lightning
rods. And yet, the course of events had
imperatively dictated the establishment of
monarchy as the cure of anarchy, and the
preservation of the tribes from absorption by
stronger nations. Samuel himself came to
think so, as he reflected. The divine voice
within him reconciled his judgment to the
political necessity, while it rebuked the irre
ligious spirit with which the people called
for it.
The record plainly reflects the alternate
condemnation and approval with which he
viewed the project. " But the thing displeased
Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to
judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the
Lord. And the Lord said unto Samuel,

II.] THE KING-MAKER. 23
Hearken unto the voice of the people in
all that they say unto thee, for they have
not rejected thee, but they have rejected
Me, that I should not be king over them."*
" Now the Lord had revealed unto Samuel a
day before Saul came, saying, To-morrow
about this time I will send thee a man out
of the land of Benjamin, and thou shalt anoint
him to be prince over My people Israel, and
he shall save My people out of the hand of
the Philistines : for I have looked upon My
people, because their cry is come unto Me." t
Here we see in Samuel a type of the true
conservative, combining reverence for old forms
with intelligent admission of the advantage of
the new.
But it is a surprise when we find Samuel,
only two years after making Saul king,t
changing his mind as to the wisdom of the
choice, and proceeding to unmake him. The
choice of Saul is represented as divinely
directed, and yet so soon proving unsatis
factory. This apparent inconsistency, and
Samuel's political conduct in general, must
* 1 Sam. viii. 6, 7. t 1 Sam. ix. 15, 16.
J Two independent accounts of this seem to be fused
together in the record. See chapters x. and xi.

24 THE KING-MAKER. [H.
be estimated in view of a fact that deserves
more notice than readers of the Bible have
given it. This fact is, that the earlier pro
phets, for the two centuries from Samuel
to Elisha, played a part which the prophets
after Elisha's time discontinued — the part
of king-makers.
The earlier prophets are repeatedly found
instigating revolutions, while the later pro
phets wholly abstain from such practices.
Why this change of political conduct ? Some
of the later kings were as bad as any of
their predecessors, whom the earlier prophets
pulled down. But where Samuel and Elisha
undertake to change the sovereign by revo
lutions, Hosea and Isaiah try only to change
his ways by reform. That is, where the
earlier prophets employed political methods,
the later prophets employed moral methods.
This change of the prophets' methods shows
a change in the prophets' minds. This sub
stitution of the moral methods of reform for
the political methods of revolution is a clear
sign of the moral development that took place
in the prophets themselves, lifting them to
discernment of a higher way to promote the
progress of religion and virtue. We hear both

II. J THE K1NG-MAKEE. 25
the political prophets and the preacher pro
phets saying, " Thus saith the Lord." But in
view of their respective methods of working,
the one by external revolutions, the other by
internal reforms, that solemn phrase comes to
us with more conviction of its truth from the
latter than the former.
This glimpse of the historical development
conduces to a better estimate of Samuel's
doings as a king-maker.
The election of Saul is described as invested
with the supreme sanction of a choice spe
cially determined by God. In the course of
two years this solemn and deliberate act is
represented as suddenly set aside for a reason
that seems to us of a trivial nature — not
trivial in Samuel's view, but trivial in the
nature of the cause assigned. Yet this setting
aside of the king is represented as of the same
divine authority as his election. Upon the
grounds assigned in the record this is hard
to believe. It is more easy to believe that
there was some mistake.
Saul's actual achievements as king attest
his election as a wise and salutary thing.
" Now when Saul had taken the kingdom
over Israel, he fought against all his enemies

26 THE KING-MAKEE. [il.
on every side, against Moab, and against the
children of Ammon, and against Edom, and
against the kings of Zobah, and against the
Philistines : and whithersoever he turned him
self, he vexed them. And he did valiantly,
and smote the Amalekites, and delivered Israel
out of the hands of them that spoiled them." *
Thus he accomplished the purpose of his
enthronement, as expressed in the divine
design which Samuel had discerned : " That
he may save My people out of the hand of the
Philistines." In view of such a career, the cause assigned
for setting him aside appears to possess no
higher authority than the intolerant mind of
the prophet, in an excess of zeal for his office.
There were real and valid grounds on
which Saul deserved to be set aside for
David. What these were will soon appear.
We have first to look at the record. f
There had happened a calamitous invasion
by the Philistines. The Israelites scattered
panic-struck in all directions. Saul himself
was left with a small body of followers in
front of the hostile host. In this emergency
he is said to have waited as long as he dared
* 1 Sam. xiv. 47, 48. f See chapters xiii. and xv.

II.] THE KING-MAKER. 27
for Samuel to come and officiate at the
altar; and then, without further waiting, to
have offered sacrifice himself, by way of
commending his cause to the God of battles,
as modern army chaplains officiate on the
eve of an engagement. As king, he had the
same right to lead in such a religious service
for his people as David, Solomon, and after
kings, who did the same freely and as of
right. But Samuel will not accept Saul's
apology for not waiting for him to officiate
in such a crisis, and tells him he has thereby
forfeited his crown. " And Samuel said,
What has thou done ? And Saul said,
Because I saw that the people were scattered
from me, and that thou earnest not within the
days appointed, and that the Philistines
assembled themselves together at Michmash ;
therefore said I, Now will the Philistines come
down upon me to Gilgal, and I have not
entreated the favour of the Lord : I forced
myself therefore, and offered the burnt offering.
And Samuel said to Saul, Thou hast done
foolishly : thou hast not kept the command
ment of the Lord thy God, which He commanded
thee : for now would the Lord have established
thy kingdom upon Israel for ever. But now

28 THE KING-MAKEE. [li-
thy kingdom shall not continue."* This is most
surprising. Saul's offering sacrifice under
what he thought a military necessity violated
no ritual precept that is on record. It will not
do to say that the record has omitted to state
some fact, which, if known to us, would show
Saul wrong and Samuel right. In dealing
with history we must go by what is written.
We find nothing written which justifies this
sharp dealing with a crowned king in a
military crisis. The only explanation is,
that Samuel was jealous of Saul's taking a
rehgious service into his own hands ; jealous,
like the Popes in the middle ages, of the
spirit of independency on the part of the
throne, and determined to assert his preroga
tive as the director of affairs, t
Samuel undoubtedly had a stern and
* 1 Sam. xiii. 11 — 14.
t Dr. John Todd thus remarks upon the quarrel of the
Northampton Church ¦with their minister, Jonathan
Edwards : " Of all unsafe places for truth to live and
breathe, the excitement of good men is one of the most
unsafe. When worldly men become excited and maddened,
they have the good sense to know that it is all will ; but
when good men get excited, they are the most unreasonable
of all men ; and for the plain reason that they can't tell
their will from their conscience." — Address at the Edwards'
Memorial (p. 128).

II.] THE KING-MAKEE. 29
imperious way that made him a formidable
person to deal with. When once he made a
sudden visit to Bethlehem, " the elders of the
town trembled at his coming, and said, Comest
thou peaceably ? " One of the best men of his
time was he, undoubtedly, yet not more per
fect than other good men in Bible history.
The record reveals an implacable strain in
his noble character. He doubtless thought
himself speaking by divine authority. But
the growth of religion is a growth of power
to distinguish between what we may think
or assert to be divine and what is really so.
The greatest of the prophets were, as the New
Testament says, "of like passions with our
selves," and subject both to the weaknesses
of humanity and the ideas of their times.
We honour truth by the candour which
admits this, more than by the adulation of
great saints, which denies it.
The other ground on which Saul's forfeiture
of his kingdom is put seems equally insuf
ficient. A tribe of roving banditti, Amalek by name,
infested the southern frontier. Military neces
sity seemed to require their extermination for
the security of the kingdom. Samuel orders a

30 THE KING-MAKEE. [li.
crusade against them. He proclaims it as a
holy war, by' the phrase, " Thus saith the
Lord." Even children and cattle were in
cluded in the decree of extermination. The
like has been done in our times, when frontier
settlers have determined that the only way to
secure their families from the Indian scalping-
knife is to sweep the neighbouring savages
clean off the earth, women, children, and all,
as so many wolves. Thus necessary was the
wholesale slaughter deemed to be. Con
science justified it. All that seemed best and
wisest called for it. So much and no more we
must find in the phrase with which Samuel
commanded it : " Thus saith the Lord."
Those who are scandalised at the idea of
God saying any so sanguinary thing as Samuel
represents, must bear in mind that Samuel
simply uses the set and solemn phrase which
in that day men commonly used when the
highest convictions of duty were to be ex
pressed. Somewhat later, we meet withfa case which
still more plainly intimates that the phrase,
" Thus saith the Lord," is not to be taken too
literally. David, fleeing from his son Absalom,
was assaulted and insulted by a fellow who

II.] THE KING-MAKER. 31
flung stones and curses at him. One of
David's men proposed to kill the fellow on
the spot. But David forbade : " The Lord
hath said unto him, Curse David." Strange
words in such a connection. Impossible to
believe them literally. The truth which
David's situation impressed on him was that
he had deserved it, that even the cursing was
somehow in consequence of his faults. Now
adays one might say, " I deserve to be cursed."
But all our deserts befall us under the working
of divine laws. This is the truth so rudely
expressed in David's phrase : " The Lord hath
said unto him, Curse David." The phrase,
" Thus saith the Lord," so differently used
then and now, certainly does not bind us to
believe that God took on Himself any responsi
bility for a massacre. The connection of the
story and the letter of the record make this
quite clear.
Four hundred years before, Amalek had
attacked the Israelites on their march from
Egypt. The Israelites had invaded their
country without permission, and in conse
quence were attacked. We can imagine what
we should do if a foreign army were to march
across our country without first getting leave.

32 THE KING-MAKER. [H.
Samuel refers to this as something to be
revenged. " Thus saith the Lord, I remember
that which Amalek did to Israel. Now there
fore go and smite Amalek, and spare them
not." It is not said that Amalek was wicked
and abominable, and therefore deserving to be
destroyed. Only that an old score four hun
dred years old was to be settled in blood. He
who believes that God actually took on Him
self the responsibility of a war of revenge, and
appealed to national hatred to set the war on
foot, has not learned to read the Old Testa
ment intelligently.
Saul, however, did not execute the ban of
destruction upon Amalek to Samuel's satisfac
tion. He spared the best of the cattle, at the
desire of his army, or, as the record states,
under some compulsion by them, for the pur
pose of a grand sacrificial feast in thanksgiving
for their victory, and he spared the king,
Agag, to grace the triumph. In this Saul
violated the creed of the rude orthodoxy of
the time. This held, that whatever was
devoted to destruction in a holy war must be
inflexibly destroyed. Any failure subjected
the offender himself to destruction. So, in
Joshua's time, Achan and his whole family

II.] TEE KING-MAKEE. 33
had been destroyed for violating the ban on
Jericho. David was afterward let off with a
lighter punishment for adultery and murder
than Saul is now doomed to for his violation
of the orthodox law of the ban. " Then came
¦the word of the Lord unto Samuel, saying, It
repenteth Me that I have set up Saul to be
king : for he is turned back from following Me,
¦and hath not performed My commandments.
And Samuel was wroth ; and he cried unto the
Lord all night." * The words, " it grieved
Samuel," of the A.V. are rightly changed in
the E.V. into " Samuel was wroth," he was
indignant or angry at Saul. This is not the
only instance in the history of rehgion in
which a strong but narrow religious spirit has
ascribed the dictate of a too austere, and vin
dictive conscience to the direction of the
Divine Spirit. But, unhappily, it is not only
in that rude time that violations of orthodoxy
have been less easily condoned than violations
of morality.
Saul humbles himself and begs pardon in
vain. Samuel is inexorable. " Because thou
hast rejected the commandment of the Lord,
the Lord hath rejected thee from being king."
1 Sam. xv. 10, 11. 3

34 THE KING-MAKER. [il-
Here again the story shows the wondrous
mixture of moral insight with rude fanaticism
characteristic of that early stage of the
religious evolution. On that occasion Samuel
utters one of the most spiritual truths : " Hath
the Lord as great pleasure in burnt offerings
and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the
Lord ? " Then with his own hand he
executes the savage ban upon the person of
the captive king, and presents his blood as
an acceptable offering to the God of Israel.
" Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the
Lord." Samuel might well think himself, as the
one religious reformer of his time, responsible
for the sacred cause of God in Israel. But
he is no exception to the world's experience
of the worthiest reformers, men like Luther
and Calvin,* which shows them exposed to
the besetting sin of an intolerance and a
bigotry which they mistake as the pure
service of religion. And unless we are
determined to stand on our guard lest reason
fall a prey to superstition, we cannot permit
a prophet's assertion, " Thus saith the Lord,"
* Compare Luther's treatment of Zwingli, and Calvin's
treatment of Servetus.

II.] THE KING-MAKES. 35
to debar us from judging for ourselves,
whether the saying is really divine according
to the character of God as portrayed by
Christ, or whether it is only of the prophet's
erring thought. In the case before us, where
a military necessity and a passion for revenge
are put under the sanction of that august
phrase, according to the manner of the times,
candid reason cannot help recognising,
between the act contemplated and the Divine
Source of power to think and act, the dis
torting medium of a mind liable to error, and
human motives less than wholly pure.
The recorded grounds of Saul's forfeiture
of the kingdom are therefore such, that if we
judge with eyes undazzled by the great name
of Samuel, Saul does not seem to rest under
so black a shadow as church tradition has
thrown upon him.
Judged by common standards, and com
pared with his successors, Saul seems to have
made a very good king. But for the hostile
course which Samuel took, he might have
made even a better one. He justified popular
expectations by victories in every direction.
He became a favourite with his subjects.
The larger part of the nation long showed

36 THE KING-MAKER. [H.
loyalty to his son and heir, engaging in a
seven years' civil war on his behalf. David
in a beautiful elegy celebrates him as a
generous and beloved hero, and summons
the nation to lament his fall. " Saul and
Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their
lives, and in their death they were not divided :
they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger
than lions. Ye daughters of Israel, weep over
Saul, who clothed you in scarlet delicately, who
put ornaments of gold upon your apparel."*
Moreover he kept clear of idolatry, and
showed his zeal for Jehovah by banishing
the heathen sorcerers. And yet, despite
these merits, despite the insufficiency of the
recorded grounds of his being set aside,
there were valid grounds, both political and
religious, if they had only been declared,
on which Saul might have been judged
inadequate to the task proposed to the
occupant of the throne. That task, the
consolidation of the loosely confederated,
jealous and independent tribes into a well
knit state, required something more than
Saul's gigantic stature and physical prowess.
Politically, Saul had not the state-craft
* 2 Sam. i. 23, 24.

II.] THE KING-MAKER. 37
required for that work. The record hints
that he was unduly partial to his own little
tribe of Benjamin, giving them the chief
places in his court. When he had banished
David, he " said unto his servants that stood
about him, Hear now, ye Benjamites ; will
the son of Jesse give every one of you fields
and vineyards, will he make you all captains
of thousands, and captains of hundreds."*
As a natural consequence of this impolitic
favouritism in the distribution of gifts
and offices, we find the neighbouring and
stronger tribe of Judah unfriendly to Saul's
dynasty, and at his death electing to the
throne their tribesman David. Saul shone
on the battlefield, but of the policy by which
statesmen conciliate clashing interests he was
no such master as David.
Eeligiously, too, he was unfit. The record
preserves in chapter xiv. a trait of his char
acter in which the same dark fanaticism
appears as in Jephthah, the judge who sacri
ficed to God his only daughter. So Saul is
only prevented by a popular uprising from
putting his son Jonathan to death, on account
of a curse he had uttered against the eating of
* 1 Sam. xxii. 7.

38 THE KING-MAKER. [il.
food on a critical day. Such a hand was no
fit builder of the institutions which Israel
needed, and which David as a master-builder
created. Although, then, we cannot justify the re
corded grounds on which the prophet turned
against the king, we judge -that, as things
turned out, neither the election nor the rejec
tion of Saul was a mistake. Events justified
both. The gigantic warrior was the man for
the emergency of the life-and-death struggle
in which Israel was grappling with foes. Saul
turned the tide of ruin and saved his country.
But the saved country had a destiny which
Saul was unfit to achieve. He had done his
part. He must give way to one fitter than he
to do the higher part of political and religious
organisation. He was a mere soldier, but now
a man was necessary who added to the soldier
the statesman and the churchman.
The ostensible ground on which Saul was
set aside appears in the record of Samuel's
dealing with him. The real and Providential
ground appears in the deficiencies of the
monarch's character as compared with the
requirements of his royal station. Insufficient
as the recorded ground appears, the validity

II.] THE KING-MAKEE. • 39
of the real ground, as disclosed by the Provi
dential results, is unquestionable. For aught
that appears, Saul's inclinations were as good
as David's. But it was a question of capacity
for a task. In such a view of the actual situa
tion the conclusion is inevitable. The right
thing was accomplished by the substitution of
David for Saul. The revolutionary method
by which it was accomplished was not right.
Nor is it the only case, either in the sacred
history or in more modern times, in which the
Divine purpose has been fulfilled, not pnly
in spite of, but even by means of the mistakes
— the intolerance, the passion, the ignorance,
of conscientious but erring men.
This study of Samuel the king-maker en
forces caution against those notions of the
inspiration of the Bible which confound the
word of God with the words of human
superstition and passion. Christian reason
is charged with a responsibility of judging
whether any professed word of God is actually
in accordance with God's character, as re
vealed to us by Christ. The test of what is
of God in the Bible is the same as the test
of what is of God in ourselves — the Divine
standard of goodness personally exhibited in

40 THE KING-MAKER. [il-
Christ. The proof of a divine authority and
agency in the Old Testament is not to be
suspended on any man's assertion of " Thus
saith the Lord." That proof is not required
to justify the acts or words of any man who
assumes to be a representative of God. The
demonstration that God was directing the
advance of all these dimly-lighted, heroic
souls, among whom Samuel is pre-eminent^
appears at the goal of the movement of the
centuries. It is not this or that wave, but the
set of the tide which we have here to look at.
It is not a single skirmish in battle, but the
progress of the war, that shows the really
victorious power. The question of a Divine
Ecvelation is not to be decided by the utter
ances of a single prophet, but by the grand
outcome of the centuries of the prophets. Out
of the early mixture of truth and error, of
faith and fanaticism, at which sceptics incon
siderately take offence, there is at length un
folded the fulness of spiritual manhood, as
perfected in the greatest of the prophets — the
Christ of God. In the development of the lily
from the swamp there is one life, in the bloom
as in the root, whose outcome is from mire
into fragrant beauty. This gradual clearance

IL] THE KING-MAKER. 41
of truth from error is assuredly a divine pro
cess. For demonstration of the divine life
that throbbed in the raw and embryonic faith
of Israel, the ethical advance which prophets
like Isaiah and Jeremiah made upon Samuel
is enough. But the conclusive proof is
reached in those teachings of Jesus which
exhibit the adult, purified, and perfected stage
of the faith of Samuel.

III.
THE POLITICIAN AND THE PROPHET.

III.
THE POLITICIAN AND THE PROPHET.
In Samuel's anointing David to be king
while Saul was the legal occupant of the
throne, those who reflect on what they read
will recognise a political act so revolutionary
as to demand the fullest justification. It is
alleged to have been divinely authorised.
But the pretext of offering a sacrifice,* which
veiled the transaction, so resembles the
stratagem of a political plotter that we
cannot be quickly satisfied by Samuel's
saying that the subterfuge was divinely sug
gested. It rather seems to us of a piece
with what we have already found, in his
assertion of a divine command for a war of
revenge to be carried on by extermination of
its victims.
The record states two facts as the ground
on which Samuel cast off allegiance to King
* 1 Sam xvi. 2.

46 THE POLITICIAN AND THE PROPHET, [ill..
Saul. These, so far as they have been scruti
nised, appear insufficient. One was, that.
Saul in a military crisis had exercised the
royal . right of offering sacrifice in Samuel's.
absence. In so doing Saul had transgressed
no recorded law, and had only set the example
which was freely followed by David and his.
successors. The other was, that Saul had
failed to execute the ban of massacre on a.
tribe of robbers, and according to the ortho
dox belief of the times had made himself
liable to punishment.
The history expressly recognises the further
fact that Saul, as a military deliverer of his
country from a foreign yoke, had well accom
plished the object primarily aimed at in his.
elevation to the throne. But when it gives.
the ostensible causes for which he was set
aside, no higher reason is apparent than that.
of an imperious and intolerant temper, which
Samuel, like more modern prophets, mis
takenly regarded as the dictate of the divine-
will. Further grounds for accepting this.
conclusion will presently appear. Valid
reasons indeed existed why Saul should be
succeeded on the throne by a fitter man..
But the recorded grounds for attempting the=

III.] THE POLITICIAN AND THE PEOPHET. 47
change show, on Samuel's part, only a pope
like jealousy of Saul's assuming an indepen
dent right to officiate at the altar, and a
fanaticism which regarded the sparing of
captives as treason to God.
In any secular history we should so judge.
We are to estimate the moral character of
actions in sacred history by the same prin
ciples that we use elsewhere. To apply
different moral standards to sacred and to
secular history breeds only moral confusion
and rehgious scepticism. Better far that
discredit should sometimes rest on the asser
tion of a prophet than on the character- of
God, to whom the prophet has mistakenly
attributed his own error or passion.
In dealing with history we must also judge
of actions according to what is written.
Whatever tradition may hold, we must hold
to the record, unless it can be plausibly
impeached. Thus we are bound by the
Scripture itself to the unfavourable judg
ment which we have to pass on Samuel's
discarding his allegiance to his king.
It may have been, however, that Samuel
saw deeper into the unfitness of Saul for the
throne than the record states. It can hardly

48 THE POLITICIAN AND THE PEOPHET. [ill.
be questioned that Saul, nobly as he had
done in battle, freeing his country from the
Philistine tyranny, was neither politically
nor religiously the man for, the throne.
Policy and statesmanship, of which he
had little, were required to weld the
jealous tribes together. Moreover, some
churchmanship was also requisite to be in
good accord with the fraternity of prophets,
now the oracles of Israel's duty and destiny..
But Saul was neither a statesman nor a
churchman, only a rude and mighty fighter.
Nevertheless, the kingly power had been put
in his hands. To take it out and transfer
it to another, especially in a time of peril
and war, was a hazardous venture. Such a
change of control in the midst of a war
was characteristically described by President
Lincoln as " swapping horses while crossing
a stream." Nevertheless, this was the
hazardous move that Samuel undertook upon
the slight grounds that appear in the history.
Whatever better ground he may have had,
it has not gone upon the record to modify
our judgment of his action.
After his final break with Saul on account
of his failure to execute fully the prophet's

III.] THE POLITICIAN AND THE PEOPHET. 49
ban of extermination upon the robber tribe
of Amalek, it is plain that the fraternity of
prophets, under Samuel's inspiration, began
to talk of David as the coming king. Eefer-
ences to various prophecies of David's glory
as Saul's successor are found here and there.*
Even Abner, Saul's general, as well as the
¦elders of the people, speaks of these unrecorded
prophecies. These hints betray much that
is unwritten of the activity of Samuel's
school of prophets as missionaries of revolu
tion, quietly working to supplant the dynasty
of Saul. Amid all this talk of a better king,
and after the bitter warning which Samuel
had given Saul of his impending removal, it
is no wonder to find Saul's naturally moody
disposition settling into a suspicious and
angry jealousy, which made David, however
blameless in conduct, a fugitive for his life.
It is a fair question whether the cloud
that settles over Saul during his latter days
is due wholly to his own misconduct or
incompetency ; whether it is not, in part at
least, the consequence of misconduct on the
part of influential subjects — the party of the
prophets with Samuel at their head — conduct
* 1 Sam. xxv. 30. 2 Sam. iii. 17, 18 j v. 2. 4

50 THE POLITICIAN AND THE PROPHET, [ill.
that would in modern times be accounted
insubordinate, disloyal, and treasonable.
It is essentially an immoral procedure to
carry into our study of the sacred history the
assumption that whatever a prophet does
must be right, because he is a prophet. It is
both an immoral and irreligious assumption,.
that whenever a prophet says, " Thus saith
the Lord," we must hold God responsible-
for whatever the prophet says.*
Nothing can be good in Him,
Which evil is in me.
And yet Church tradition, under the strain
of a vicious theory of inspiration, has charged
many such evil things to God, and has thereby
made many men infidels. Moral interests
imperatively bid us to take Christ for our
judge of what is actually from God, rather
than the naked assertion of even so good a
man as Samuel was in times so raw and dark-
It is often easier to form a wise practical.
conclusion than to state wise reasons for it.
Samuel was more correct in his general
judgment that Saul was not the best man for
the throne, than he was in the reasons he
* See 1 Kings xx. 35 — 37.

III.] THE POLITICIAN AND THE PEOPHET. 51
alleged. The problem before him was how
to better the situation.
One way was to await providential events.
This was the course that David took under
extreme provocation, when Saul was for a
moment defenceless and at his mercy. " Then
said Abishai to David, God hath delivered up
thine enemy into thine hand this day : now
therefore let me smite him, I pray thee, with
the spear to the earth at one stroke, and I will
not smite him the second time. And David
said to Abishai, Destroy him not: for who
can put forth his hand against the Lord's
anointed, and be guiltless ? And David
said, As the Lord liveth, the Lord shall
smite him; or his day shall come to
die ; or he shall go down into battle, and
perish. The Lord forbid that I should
put forth mine hand against the Lord's
anointed." * This was certainly the safer
course. It exposed the feeble kingdom to no
risk of civil discord.
Another course was to proceed at once
to gather an opposition party around a
designated successor to the crown. This was
the course that Samuel took. In the end
* 1 Sam. xxvi. 8 — 11,

52 THE POLITICIAN AND THE PROPHET, [ill.
it succeeded, though at heavy costs. The
ultimate success was so great, the fitness of
David for the throne so conspicuous, the
glory of Israel in his days so illustrious, that
the end was held to have justified the means.
The record, written afterward, ascribes the
means, as well as the end, to divine direction.
We may well hesitate to accept this view of
the Hebrew historian writing, as it were, in
David's palace. Under the teaching of the
Divine Master, who bids us " Render to
Caesar the things that are Ccesar's," it is safer,
for all moral interests, to believe that God
did not say to Samuel all that Samuel may
have thought He said ; that even Samuel may
sometimes have mistaken his own self-will
for the will of God, than it is to believe that
God commanded him to expose his country
to the chances of civil war by committing any
act of disloyalty to his constituted sovereign.
The end never — by itself alone — can justify
the means.
Queen Elizabeth was the most glorious
Sovereign that ruled England for centuries.
But England owes that illustrious, and, on the
whole, beneficent reign, to what most his
torians describe as a flagitious passion of her1

in.] THE POLITICIAN AND THE PEOPHET. 53
father for Anne Boleyn while Catharine of
Aragon was his lawful wife. Samuel was a
far better man than Henry VIII. But to
make David's glory a cover for Samuel's fault
would be of a piece with making the glory of
Elizabeth a cover for the guilt of her father.
The sacred history, as well as secular, is
full of instances in which the beneficent
designs of God have been fulfilled partly in
spite of, partly by means of the mistakes of
His often ignorant and wilful servants.
When, therefore, we see Samuel proceeding,
in the lifetime of a king who was doing by his
country as well as Saul, to set up a rival to the
sovereign by secretly anointing David, and to
kindle the disastrous flame of civil strife in
the kingdom menaced by foreign enemies, we
cannot .but regard it otherwise than an act of
treason. And here again we note, as characteristic
both of the man and the time, that strange
blending of blind fanaticism with the moral
insight that finally outgrew it, which the
evolution of religion often shows. "When
David's stalwart brother, Eliab, stood before
Samuel as a candidate for the throne of Saul,
the inward divine voice blended a word of the

54 THE POLITICIAN AND THE PEOPHET. [in.
highest truth with the prophet's fear that the
young giant might prove another intractable
Saul : " The Lord said unto Samuel, Look not
on his countenance, nor on the height of his
stature, because I have rejected him, for the
Lord seeth not as man seeth ; for man looketh
on the outward appearance, but the Lord
looketh on the heart." *
There is some strangeness in the story of
Samuel's designation of David to be king by
the formal ceremony of anointing. Samuel
himself regarded his act as dangerous. "If
Saul hear of it he will kill me," said he. Such
was his fear of the consequences that he in
vented a plausible excuse for his errand, and
this also, insincere as it was, he ascribed to
divine direction : " The Lord said, Take an
heifer with thee, and say, I am come to sacrifice
to the Lord." t On the other hand, neither
David nor his family seem to regard anything
as having happened that would compromise
them. Perhaps, at the time, they did not
comprehend its political significance. At any
rate, they never refer to it, and nobody seems
to have known of it. It seems to have been
kept as a strict secret among the fraternity of
* 1 Sam. xvi. 7; f xvi. 2.

III.] THE POLITICIAN AND THE PEOPHET. 55
prophets until a proper time for making it
known. The only recognisable effect of it
seems to have been the binding of the order
of the prophets, through Samuel's influence,
to the fortunes of David. This was probably
the main object of the mysteriously secret
anointing. So far as it secured to him these
all-important auxiliaries, it was a means
sagaciously adapted to the end. That it
amounted to at least no more than this is
shown by the fact that, when David finally
reached the throne, he received the royal
anointing in due form.*
And so David is anointed to the kingdom
while his sovereign still wears the crown.
But so far as the act was dictated by Samuel's
zeal for what he may have deemed the in
terests of religion, it was the same mis
direction as that which led the Eoman
pontiff and the Catholic priests in England
to set up Mary Stuart as a claimant to the
crown of Elizabeth. If we judge it by its
immediate political results, it was a move so
impolitic that it seems much more the product
of human folly than of divine wisdom. It not
only cost Saul his crown and life, but it cost
* See 2 Sam..ii. 4, v. 3.

56 THE POLITICIAN AND THE PROPHET. [HI.
the country its best blood and years of misery.
In consequence of the prophet's curse a
suspicious melancholy settled upon the king,
souring and darkening his mind for the rest of
his life, and driving out of the country his
most faithful and able lieutenant, David.
Weakened by the loss of David's party, Saul
perished in a disastrous battle with the Philis
tines. Thereafter, for a time, the kingdom
was rent in twain. David reigned over his
own tribe of Judah, which he had conciliated
by rich presents of spoil from his forays,*
while the heir of Saul reigned over the rest of
the tribes, and civil war went on for seven
years. Such was the cost of Samuel's policy.
David's ultimate triumph, and the lustre of his
famous reign, has blinded men's eyes and the
Church's judgment to the fault of Samuel.
The same fault, through the same mingling of
religious fanaticism with political ambition,
appears in Samuel, as in the heads of the
Church in the middle ages. Pontiffs blameless
as was Samuel in private life, and professing
themselves, as he did, guided by the Spirit
of God, repeatedly plunged the European
nations into civil war by setting up rival
* 1 Sam. xxx. 26—31.

ITI.] THE POLITICIAN AND THE PEOPHET. 57
claimants to the throne of heretical or intract
able princes.
But it would be a prodigious mistake to
imagine that our historical criticism of so great
a prophet as Samuel discredits the presence
and the power of the Spirit of Bevelation in
him and his work. That Spirit cannot be
made manifest to men's consciences by
representing God as having authorised the
barbarities, the intolerance, the treason, which
good men have committed in His name. We
are not retained as attorneys for the prophets,
nor are we to create doubts in men's minds
about God by charging to His account the
errors, of His servants. The Spirit of Beve
lation appears in the carrying up of these
raw and mixed beginnings into their ripe
and clear consummation. We cannot take
any stage of the historical process by itself,
and say that men are bound to see in that
by itself the work of God. It is rather
when the later stages appear in the clearer
vision and higher utterance of the later
prophets — it is especially when the goal of
the long development is reached in Jesus
Christ, the last and greatest of the prophets,
that it is made clear what is the work of

58 THE POLITICIAN AND THE PEOPHET. [ill.
God, and what the test of truth in the pre
paratory ages. Only in the outcome of the
often confused processes is the divine power
disclosed, which wrought through all the
error and passion of men to bring out the
eternal verities in their perfected form, when
Judaism blossomed into Christianity. Thus
it is only the sunrise which reveals the cause
of the increasing glow that had lighted the
eastern sky.
After the revolutionary- act of anointing
David, Samuel finally quitted the political
arena into which he had introduced confusion.
Through years of which no record lives he
probably devoted himself to his more con
genial and successful work as president of
the companies of the prophets. Amid the
clouds of faction that now dimmed the glory
and threatened the life of the infant kingdom,
he closed his days revered and mourned, and
mourning himself with more or less of sincere
regret for Saul.*
Samuel's political career, which occupies so
* In such statements as " Samuel mourned for Saul "
(1 Sam. xv. 35) the Hebrew properly means to show one's
self a mourner, to display the signs of mourning, as in out
ward conduct. So long as Saul was in power, this was at
least politic to do.

III.] THE POLITICIAN AND THE PROPHET. 59
large a place in the record of his life, had
ended in disappointment. The secluded work
of what we may, by a remote analogy, call
his theological seminary, of which but here
and there only a hint survives in the record,
proved, in God's providence, his most influ
ential and illustrious work. It is chiefly the
far-reaching consequences of this that secure
him his conspicuous place in the history of
the progress of religion, as " the Father of
the prophets," the peerless apostles of moral
and religious progress in Israel, who in Israel
alone carried forward that spiritual develop
ment which culminated in the Great Prophet
of Nazareth, who declares that the work of
the prophets is what He Himself " came to
fulfil." As a politician, Samuel makes but a sorry
figure. The experience of so illustrious a
character in the arena of statesmanship is
enough to make all who devote themselves to
religious activity and moral reforms distrust
their ability to engage with credit or useful
ness in direct political management. There
have been great churchmen, like Cardinals
Bichelieu, of France, and Wolsey, of England,
who have been eminently successful as

60 THE POLITICIAN AND THE PROPHET, [ill.
politicians. There is much in common
between the mere churchman and the
politician. Between the politician and the
prophet there is nothing in common. The
politician is the man of expedients ; the
prophet, such as those whom Christ quotes,
is the man of principles. Neither of these
two can shine except in his own appropriate
career. The lesson of history is, that those
who stand to-day in the prophets' place as
moral leaders should limit themselves to the
prophet's work of proclaiming the eternal
principles which statesmen and parties must
respect. Not for such is the statesman's work
of shaping the practical measures in which
these principles are to be applied. This does
not mean that the prophet should preach a
merely theoretic righteousness apart from
practical applications. Not that he should
abstain from denouncing specific abuses, or
urging specific reforms, as all the preacher-
prophets did. Bather, that he should let
statesmen do the proper work of statesmen,
while he, in the interest of the eternal law,
confines himself to the work of mentor and
critic. When great moral questions are at
issue, preachers of the Gospel must often

III.] THE POLITICIAN AND THE PROPHET. 61
become standard-bearers in political conflicts.
But we have seen none mix the characters
of preacher and politician without marring
either the one or the other like Samuel. It
is only in his appropriate calling that Samuel,
as men in general, appears to advantage,
under his historical title, as " Samuel the
prophet." Among all the lessons of his life
this deserves to be emphasised in proportion
as it has been overlooked, that he is most
admirable when most restricted to his proper
line of things.
His voice it is, in that crude age, when the
germs of spiritual religion were struggling to
extricate themselves from grosser elements,
which strikes the key-note of the moral order,
as exemplified in his own personal character,
that God is to be worshipped by righteousness.
He it is who gives the fundamental maxim,
which all later teaching only expands, that
God can be served only by an undivided
heart. It is his high and uncompromising
faith in God, unconquerable though not
unstained, which marked out, both for himself
and for all earnest, though erring and faulty,
seekers after God, the path through undis-
-couraged struggle from dark to light. "And

62 THE POLITICIAN AND THE PROPHET, [ill.
Samuel said unto the people, Fear not : ye
have indeed done all this evil : yet turn not
aside from following the Lord, but serve the
Lord with all your heart; . . For the Lord will
not forsake His people for His great name's
sake : because it hath pleased the Lord to make
you a people unto Himself." * These few but
forceful principles are at the basis of spiritual
religion. As moral certainties in Samuel's
conscience, these constituted him a prophet to
proclaim them. It was his mission not only
to proclaim them himself, but by founding an
order of men to proclaim them, to secure that
they should be evermore proclaimed, and to
obtain for them undying permanence in the
growing faith of Israel. And when Peter
says in preaching Christ, " Yea, and all the
prophets from Samuel and them that followed
after, as many as have spoken, they also'
told of these days,"} he points us to
Samuel as the historical starting-point of a
stream of testimony and influence which is
still potent in the faith of Christendom.
In concluding this study of Samuel, the
Father of the Hebrew prophets, one should
mark, first, what is significant in the history
* 1 Sam. xii. 20, 22. f Acts iii. 24.

III.] THE POLITICIAN AND THE PROPHET. 63
of religion, and next, what is of consequence
in personal life.
There are still found in the East religious
devotees known as dervishes, with peculiar
extravagances of shrieking or whirling in a
sort of frenzy. In these we may still recog
nise some peculiarities of those companies
of prophets which Samuel instituted in the
religious revival which he began. In those
wild gyrations, and in those piercing cries*
in which Samuel's voice took part, in that
religious frenzy in which we see Saul also, as
one of the prophets, lying prostrate, naked
and howling, a day and night, we see no
work of reason, nor any perception of religion
as a moral and spiritual converse with God.
Yet from this turbid pool of enthusiasm ran a
stream, which gradually cleared into the pure
current of zeal for humanity and justice, truth
and goodness, as exemplified in the later
prophets. Mr. J. S. Mill has observed that elsewhere
religion has become petrified in adherence to
an established order as a barrier to further
improvement, but that in Israel alone the
order of the prophets secured the identifica^
*1 Sam. vii. 8, 9 j xv. 11.

64 THE POLITICIAN AND THE PROPHET, [ill.
tion of religion with liberty and real progress.
However rude and unenlightened, the prophet
was always in advance of his times, as far
behind our times as he may have have been.
"Spokesman," as his name implied, for God,
he was ever insisting that forms were little, and
righteousness everything, protesting against
the divorce of religion from morality, and
standing for Jesus' cardinal truth, that the
acceptable service of God is an obedient spirit
and consecrated life. Whatever is free and
pure and humane and strong in religion to-day
may be traced back to the Hebrew prophet
who, amid the shadows that obscured his
vision, waited for God's whisper to his soul
with the simple loyalty of Samuel's childish
response, " Speak, Lord, for Thy servant
heareth." Thus, looking for the historical root
of that puritan spirit which to-day works all
real reform, and guides all true progress, by
putting truth, principle, and conscience in the
foremost place, we find ..it in Samuel and his
companies of dervish-like prophets.
In this connection of cause and effect the
contrast is striking between the raw beginning
and the ripe result. More impressive to a
reflective mind is the Power which has educed

III.] THB POLITICIAN AND THE PEOPHET. 65
the result, the evident presence of the Spirit
of Bevelation, using the physical as a basis for
the spiritual, and clarifying the fanaticism of
the dervish into the moral purity of the true
prophet. As regards what is of consequence in the
personal life, Dean Stanley, in a passage of
profound insight and rare beauty, has availed
himself of the example of Samuel to contrast
the religion created by convulsion with the
religion developed by growth. Of this last
Samuel is the standing type. There is many
an abrupt transition from a life of self-indul
gence to a life of self-consecration, in which a
great chasm breaks in between the years
before and after the sudden conversion. Well
for those who, in looking back on wasted
years, can see such a chasm in the ever-
memorable crisis of repentance separating
the sinful past from the regenerated life,
But better for those who can look back, like
Samuel, on an unbroken growth from child
hood up in the way of God, in a life which
carries no consciousness of stains and weak
ness and doubts inherited from years mis
guided and misspent. In any case, the
spiritual life, like the physical, must have
5

66 THE POLITICIAN AND THE PEOPHET. [ill.
its birth, its awakening to consciousness, its
development from infant weakness to adult
vigour. But happy they in whom, as in
Samuel, this awakening is not retarded
and rendered doubtful by wilful suppression
through years of disobedience to the divine
call and the inward voice. Happy they to
whom the divine voice comes in the conflicts
of later years with the assurance born of
obeying it from childhood's choice, and who,
on the verge of the final shadows, receive
its whisper of immortal hope in the trustful
ness learned through lifelong repetition of the
confession of their childhood's faith, "Speak,
Lord, for Thy servant heareth."

IV.
THE PROPHET COUNTERFEITED.

IV.
THE PROPHET COUNTERFEITED.
It is characteristic of the crude and super
stitious religionism out of which sacred
prophecy took its rise, as a hly from a
swamp, and from which, in the course of
its development, it gradually cleared itself,
that the great founder of the order of the
prophets is represented as after death re
visiting the world at dead of night, and at
the bidding of an enchantress, to foretell a
tragic doom. It is the only case in the
Bible in which the dead are represented as
accessible to communications sought by the
living. The exceptional nature of such a narrative
puts us on our guard. The strange unique
ness of this Biblical story is not in the mere
apparition of a spirit, nor in the communica
tion from such an apparition. It is rather
in the procuring of this by the services of a

70 THE PROPHET COUNTERFEITED. [iV.
professional go-between, or medium, to whose
call the spirit of the dead is represented as
responding when wanted. Such a thing is
not unknown in our day as the pretension
of a class of persons who profess to be in
commerce with departed spirits, and to have
power to summon them at will. Christian
believers, as well as most other people, have
generally scouted such pretensions. It is both
exceptional and remarkable that such pre
tensions, in the case of the woman who is
said to have brought dead Samuel up to
converse with Saul, should have been received
among Christian people with implicit con
fidence. It indicates the spell with which
ancient beliefs blind the judgment. It is
a specimen of the uncritical rashness with
which believers have manufactured difficulties
for unbelievers by the unintelligent and
credulous interpretations which they have
put upon the Bible narratives.
A great strain is put upon our intelligence
by the view currently taken of the perform
ance of the woman of Endor with Samuel,
that it was really miraculous, a wonder
wrought through such a person by the
special act of God. On the contrary, the

IV.] THE PROPHET COUNTERFEITED. 71
story itself, when carefully analysed, will be.
seen to record nothing but a successful
imposture, such as is wrought by many a
charlatan to day. The prolix and learned
commentaries which labour to prove it some
thing divine are a monument of nothing else
than devout stupidity.
In showing this, and in exhibiting the true
nature of the event as not more than a
cunning piece of trickery, we must first call
to mind the antecedent events. Saul, -by
failing to execute Samuel's ban upon the
Amalekites in a complete massacre, had
brought upon himself Samuel's curse, in
volving his deposition from the throne. This
had operated -to fulfil itself by inflaming the
suspicions of Saul against David, ras his
possible rival, with the effect of driving
David into exile. Upon the king, thus
weakened by the loss of his ablest lieutenant,
the Philistines made war in threatening force,
so that Saul " was afraid and his heart
trembled greatly." Under these apprehen
sions of disaster, stimulated, no doubt, by
mindfulness of the curse of Samuel, and
failing to obtain any favourable auguries, he
resorts for encouragement to a woman who

72 THE PEOPHET COUNTERFEITED. [iV.
professed power to evoke the dead, " a woman
that hath a familiar spirit," or literally "a
spirit oiob." "Ob" signifies a bag, or some
thing that is hollow, like a cavern or a grave.
"A spirit of ob " denotes a hollow-speaking
spirit, The phrase originated from the
hollow tones used by such necromancers,
when speaking as the professed mediums of
spirits, according to the notion of a sepulchral,
ghostly voice, issuing as from the tomb. This
conception of it is illustrated by a passage
in Isaiah (xxix. 4) 5 " Thy voice shall be as
of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the
ground." The celebrated scene which ensued in the
house of that ancient spiritist has been
variously interpreted. The early church-
fathers mostly regarded it as a case of a real
apparition of a departed spirit produced by
demonic power. Modern orthodox com
mentators generally take the same view of
the reality of the apparition, but ascribe it
to a miraculous act of God, confirming the
divine authority of that edict of massacre,
for failing to execute which Saul had fallen
under the prophet's curse. The only view
which is consistent with the record itself is,

IV.] THE PEOPHET COUNTEEFEITED. 73
that it was no apparition at all, nor essentially
different from transactions which occur to-day
in the practices of some spiritist mediums.
To see this clearly one has only to scrutinise
the record carefully.
The woman had received Saul incognito,
He " disguised himself," as the only means
of obtaining the services of one whose class
he had treated with the rigour of the pro
hibitory law, recorded in Leviticus (xx. 27)":
"A man also or a woman that hath a familiar
spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be
put to death." He desired her to " bring up
Samuel. And when the woman saw Samuel,
she cried with a loud voice." She instantly
turns upon Saul with the question, " Why
hast thou deceived me ? for thou art Saul."
Having gone, like women of her class to-day,
into the usual trance-state, in which she " saw
Samuel," or professed to see him, it flashes
upon her mind that the mysterious stranger,
who wishes to speak with so great a shade,
can be no other than the king, so terrible
to her tribe, who has thus set a trap for
her destruction. Hence her cry of alarm.
The king therefore reassures her. " Be not
afraid : for what seest thou ? "

74 THE PEOPHET COUNTEEFEITED. [iV.
This question shows that Saul's eyes
saw nothing. There could have been
nothing, therefore, that she saw with her
eyes. There was nothing for any eyes to
see. It was not sense-perception,, but mental
perception, by which she " saw Samuel."
The name of the prophet had simply called up
in the medium's mind a vision of the person
age so familiar to every inhabitant of the land.
To this question, " What seest thou?" the
woman answers, " I see a god (i. e., a mighty
form) coming up out of the earth." Here
again, it is plain from the words, " out of
ihe earth," that it is her own mind which
constructs all that she represents as some
thing visible to her, according to her own
and the popular notion, that the spirits of
the dead dwelt in an underworld.
But it is evident that there is still nothing
that she can see with her eyes, for there is
nothing that Saul can see with his eyes. So
he questions further: " What form is he of?
And she said, An old man cometh up, and he
is covered with a robe." From childhood,
when his mother year by year had been
wont to make him a little robe,* up to his old
* 1 Sam. ii. 19.

IV.] THE PEOPHET COUNTEEFEITED. 75
age, this robe had been Samuel's peculiar
costume, and in this, as might be expected,
he now appears to her mental vision.
Upon her announcement that she " saw "
such a figure, "Saul perceived that it was
Samuel," or, as the Septuagint Greek version
translates it, " Saul knew that it was Samuel."
He sees no more than before, but he recog
nises who it is that the woman describes.
Then begins a colloquy, as between Samuel
and Saul. That Samuel's part in the col
loquy is not borne by Samuel himself, but
by the woman speaking as his medium, and
after the fashion of a ventriloquist, is quite
clear from several considerations.
1. Whatever Samuel there was to see was
in the medium's mind. So whatever Samuel
there was to hear must likewise have been
in her mind, and no external object of sense-
perception. 2. The woman's professional title, " a woman
that hath a hollow-speaking spirit," is exactly
descriptive of a ventriloquist, who simulates
by a sepulchral tone the voice which is
fancied to be that of a dweller in the under
world. 3. Close scrutiny of what this merely per-

76 THE PEOPHET COUNTEEFEITED. [iV,
sonated and counterfeit Samuel said to Saul
reveals, on the one hand, nothing more than
the contents of Saul's own mind at the time,
and on the other hand, nothing more than
such a woman might be able to say without
the slightest aid from an unearthly source.
By her shrewd question in Samuel's name,
" Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me
up ? " she has obtained from Saul a confes
sion of his distress and despair. And Saul
answered, I am sore distressed : for the Philis
tines make war against me, and God is
departed from me, and answereth me no more,
neither by prophets, nor by. dreams : therefore
I have called thee, that thou mayest make
known unto me what I shall do." *
The breach and opposition between the
prophet and the king had long been a matter
of notoriety. Of the prophet's curse upon
the king she could hardly have lacked
the knowledge. In Saul's actual straits,
and in the humiliation to which he had
forced himself, in coming for relief to her,
his enemy, both her shrewdness and her
superstition might well recognise that
impending fulfilment of the curse which
* 1 Sam. xxviii. 15.

TV.] THE PROPHET COUNTERFEITED. 77
she now affirmed to him. She also had, no
doubt, some share of that sympathetic, mind-
reading power, which is met with in persons
of her profession. Evidently, she possesses
all the materials requisite for the response,
which she proceeds to deliver in her hollow,
ventriloquial tones, as from the spirit of the
dead prophet. "And Samuel said, Wherefore
then dost thou ask of me, seeing the Lord is
departed from thee, and is become thine
adversary ? And the Lord hath wrought for
Himself, as He spake by me : and the Lord
hath rent the kingdom out of thine hand,
and given it to thy neighbour, even to
David. Because thou obeyedst not the voice
of the Lord, and didst not execute His fierce
wrath upon Amalek, therefore hath the Lord
done this thing unto thee this day."* In all
this, the medium, speaking for Samuel, simply
repeats the substance of what Samuel had
said in public long before. In view of all
the actual circumstances both in Saul's con
dition and in her knowledge of it,
hemmed in as he now was by superior
enemies, the prediction, in her closing words,
of Saul's death in the impending battle
* 1 Sam. xxviii. 16—18.

78 THE PROPHET COUNTERFEITED. [iV.
belongs to that class of things which " it
needs no ghost to tell us of."
In this affair, therefore, there is not a par
ticle of evidence that the spirit of Samuel
either reappeared or spoke. There is evidence,
both abundant and clear, of a remarkably
successful imposture — so successful that many
good people to this day look upon that shrewd
performance of a spiritist medium as a miracle
wrought by God. To expose the imposture
no more is requisite than the record itself, and
a judicial mind.
The record exposes the credulity, not of Saul
only, but of the modern commentator also.
God, he affirms, must really, as alleged
in the fifteenth chapter, have commanded
Saul to butcher the entire tribe of Amalek,
because God only could have sent Samuel
back from the world of the dead, to tell
Saul that he was doomed for not doing that
deed of blood. This second delusion, in which
massacre is imagined thus to be sanctioned
by miracle, is of a piece, in point of moral
absurdity, with the first, in which the asser
tion of Samuel that God had ordered a
remorseless slaughter of men and women,
children and cattle, is to-day accepted by

rv.] THE. PROPHET COUNTERFEITED. 79
many Christians as infallible truth. The
two, taken together, well exhibit the respon
sibility which Ues at the door of the Church
for the stumbling-blocks to faith that many
men find in the Bible as interpreted by
some Christian teachers.
In the present case church-teachers gene
rally read the story of this seance at Endor
with the most childlike unconsciousness that
they, in common with King Saul, are made
the dupes of a trick which, old as it is, is
not worn out to-day. So do people, as Mr.
Barnum said, " love to be humbugged." It
would not matter much if they who are
thus fooled did not solemnly treat the impos
ture as a miracle, and exhibit it as an awful
work of God. But it matters everything, in
point of damage to the interests of a reason
able Christian faith, that such jugglery should
be represented as part of the Divine Revela
tion. Our interest and duty is so to exhibit
the facts as to redeem Christian faith from
that scandal of ascribing to God things most
unworthy of His character, to which so much
of modern scepticism is due. Evidently,
Christian people should read their Bibles
more thoughtfully, and not trust blindly to

80 THE PROPHET COUNTERFEITED. [iV.
commentators and their traditions. Evidently f
also, the sceptically inclined reader, who is
swift to reject whatever appears to him
incredible, should be cautious in taking up
with a rash belief that has no better basis
than his own mistake. The Bible, like
a violin, gives forth harmony or discord,
according to the hand that plays.
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text ?
According to the spirit and the insight of
the reader, the Holy Book may be made to
yield him either the fallacies and superstitions
of erring men, or the pure oracles of the
Eternal Beason.

W. Spewight Si Sons, Printers, Fetter Lane, London.