150 FALSE WAY OF IMITATING PROPHETS. SERM.

not. A man who takes this course is, I believe, in an infinitely safer moral condition, and shows far more reverence for the Bible, than one who takes the whole book nominally upon trust or upon evidence, and does not care what the contents of it are, does not strive to bring them into connection with himself, does not desire to understand from them what God is.

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

IX.

THE PUNISHMENT OF AHAB'S HOUSE. 151

him for their model before, prefer then to copy the men whom he threatened with the divine retribution.

That retribution is the main subject of the Scripture narrative. Elijah had told Ahab that the blood of Naboth would be required of his house. His humiliation delayed the sentence. His enemy who had found him out, seems thenceforth to have left him alone. Perhaps the great prophet passed the remainder of his own days in peace. But there were other prophets to torment Ahab, and a still greater number, freshly brought perhaps by Jezebel from her own land, to deceive him. The lying spirit in their mouths drove him to Ramoth Gilead, and Israel was left, as Micah had foretold, without a shepherd. His son Joram finds Elisha almost as terrible as his master had been to Ahab. Yet their relations were different. Joram is less of a Baal worshipper than his father. He consults Elisha; is asked by him why he does not go to the prophets of his father and mother; still is promised deliverance and victory in a war which he has undertaken with the Moabites, and is saved, not once or twice, by the prophet's knowledge, from the Syrians. These enemies of Israel look upon the prophet with especial dread. Once he is surrounded by them; but his servant is permitted to see invisible hosts which are on his side. These visions, Elisha's acts of power, his words of wisdom, the ruin which threatened the land from the Syrians, its unexpected rescue, are all signs that the God who had made a covenant with their fathers, was with the king and the people then. Trust was then as always what the prophets demanded of them. They could not trust too boldly or unreservedly. To trust would have been to repent of the calf-worship, to rise out of the

152

JEHU THE SON OF NIMSHI.

SERM.

brutal habits which it had engendered, to begin a new life as men. But the custom of idolatry had destroyed trust in their hearts. They could only worship and tremble. The sin of the father descended upon the son with the weakness and cowardice, which were the fruits of it, increased tenfold. At the appointed day and hour the vengeance came, by just such an instrument as would seem likeliest to carry it out.

Jehu the son of Nimshi had been declared to Elijah as the joint successor with Elisha in the work that he had left unperformed. No two men in Israel could have been more unlike. One cried to have a double portion of his master's spirit; the other was known only as the man who drove furiously. Yet Jehu had the kind of faith which might be expected in a soldier, somewhat reckless, but with his sense of right not quenched by religious falsehood. He had heard the burden which Elijah had pronounced on Ahab, as he sat with him in his chariot, when they entered the plot of ground that had been Naboth's. He felt that there was an everlasting truth in the sentence, and that it must come to pass. Who should execute it he did not know then, When the anointing oil of Elisha's messenger had been poured on his head, and his comrades had cried, “Jehu is king," all the savage impulses of the soldier became quickened and elevated by the feeling that he was commissioned to punish evil-doers and assert justice. Esteeming himself a scourge of God, and rejoicing in the office, he gives full play to all his bloody instincts. He murders two kings, commands Jezebel to be thrown out of a window, treads her under foot, then eats and drinks. He looks with delight at the heads of the seventy royal children who were slain at his bidding by

IX.

THE GOOD SIDE OF HIS CHARACTER.

153

the elders of Jezreel; he puts forty-two men to death

Samaria; he leaves not one

Finally he lays a plot for

whom he meets coming into living of the house of Ahab. the worshippers of Baal, calls them to hold a feast to their god, and commands that none shall leave the house in which he has shut them up alive.

It causes great scandal to many amiable and worthy people that the Scripture does not stop to comment on these atrocities of Jehu, but appears to commend his zeal and to rejoice that what he began he accomplished. I believe, brethren, that a true portrait can never be a mischievous one, and that this is essentially true. Nothing is said to gloss over the ferocity of Jehu; it is exhibited broadly, nakedly; you do not want words to tell you that you must hate it; your impulse, and it is a right one, is to do so. But there may be in the most ruffianly and brutal characters, not merely strength, not merely a clear distinct purpose and a steadiness in following it out,-qualities worthy of all admiration, wheresoever and in whomsoever they are found, but along with these an intense hatred of hypocrisy, a determination to put it down, not for selfish ends, but because it is hateful; which determination is good and inspired by God. The Scripture teaches us to confess this, and by so doing, clears, not confuses, all our ethical conceptions and judgments. We do meet with these characters in the world,—characters with something devilish lying close beside something which is really divine. And though the devilish is the obtrusive, and may become the pervading, part of the man's soul, you cannot help feeling that the other is in the very depth of it, and marks out what he is meant to be and can be.

154

THE VICTORY OF THE EVIL SIDE. SERM.

Honour it; confess that it is not of earthly origin; that it does not spring from any dark root in the selfish nature. Say boldly, "That honesty, that zeal is from above; it has the sign of a celestial parentage; just so far as that governs him he will be a servant of his kind; after times will bless him." But it is also true that the grovelling elements of his character, if they are not destroyed by this nobler fire, will only glare the more fiercely for the light which it sheds. upon them, and that soon, when the fire begins to burn low, you will see instead of that glare, nothing but dull smouldering ashes.

"Jehu," says the Scripture, " took no heed to walk in the law of the Lord." It is in the quiet time that a man is tested. Then we find out not only what he can do; but what he is, whether his zeal for righteousness means that he will obey it; whether his hatred for what is false implies an adherence to the true. The test in this case failed. Jehu had destroyed Baal-worship, for that was foreign. He clave to the calf-worship, for that was the tradition of his fathers. people went on in the downward swept away the house of Ahab. that house had hold of their vitals. evil powers; they could not trust God.

And therefore the course. They had But the disease of

They sought after

Elisha the son of Shaphat and Jehu the son of Nimshi did then carry out together the words of the prophet. For those words depended upon no mortal agency; they were the expressions of an eternal law which in some way or other would fulfil itself. This is the great lesson which the Bible teaches in every page. The righteous Will moves on steadily and irresistibly towards its own end; the unrighteous will struggles with it; seems to