I.]

THE HEREDITARY PRIESTHOOD.

3

created no atmosphere about itself. In a deeper sense than the most literal and obvious one, the lamp was waxing dim in the ark of the Lord. No one was keeping the flame of it alive. The people felt as if it were all but quenched already. The boy Samuel was raised up to tell them that it would soon be more evidently extinct than it was then, but that it would be found to be fed from a hidden source, to be kept alive by another than Eli or his sons. The preservation of the ark and the sacrifices, of the most inward substance of the Jewish commonwealth, would be seen to depend, not upon a succession in the family of Aaron, but upon Him who had ordered the succession, upon Him who was, and is, and is to come.

Thus Samuel, because he had been called to be a prophet, and was proved to be one by signs, which all men from Dan to Beersheba could recognize, was a witness that an hereditary priesthood derives all its worth from a divine presence which is not shut up in it or limited by it; and that without that presence it means nothing and is nothing, nay becomes worse than nothing, a plague and cancer in the society, poisoning its very heart, spreading disease and death through it. His message was first to the priest himself; then to the nation concerning the priest. For the priest was as yet the hereditary functionary in the commonwealth. He was the only person who could turn duties into mere routine, who could make his authority and his reputation a plea for setting up the worship of false gods instead of the worship of the living and true God, vile orgies instead of the services of the holy place wherein the Most High was dwelling. The judge had no power to do this kind of mischief. He appeared when an emergency demanded his presence. He might do a number of irregular, turbulent,

4

THE OFFICE OF THE JUDGE.

[Serm.

anarchical acts; he might pass from a deliverer and defender of boundaries into a tyrant. But his power died with him. There were several attempts to perpetuate it, as for instance, in the family of Gideon. An illegitimate child of that family tried to make himself a king; but the conscience of the better Israelites was against the experiment. The disorders and jealousies of their tribes were equally against it. It was as unnatural and impossible for them all to confess one permanent head, or to allow him to transmit his powers to others, as it was natural for them to receive and follow a great champion when he proved that he could subdue their enemies and govern them. These champions judged them, made them understand that there was a law over them which they must obey, reclaimed them for a little while from their wild and reckless habits, their slavish and brutal idolatries. Then the settled order of the priesthood gave them some feeling of unity as a nation, reminded them that an unseen God had called them to be His people. Presently the old factions appeared again. Some Levite went off with a particular family, became its priest, introduced or ratified some domestic idolatry. There would be new tribe wars, fresh attacks from their neighbours round about them, more of feebleness and more of slavery.

The signal downfall of the nation which took place in Samuel's day, when the ark, the symbol of the people's unity, was captured by the Philistines, prepared the way for a great change in all these respects. Samuel became a judge in a different sense from his predecessors. He was not a mere warrior or hero raised up to put down a particular foe. He was the restorer of the whole land, one who brought the different parts of it into connexion with each other, who made them feel the blessings of a common

I.]

CIVIL GOVERNMENT.

5

organization, the necessity and the happiness of being subject to government, the misery of a condition of things in which each man did that which was right in his own eyes. It would appear that the Jews had never, since they came into the promised land, experienced so orderly and righteous a civil government as during the time in which Samuel ruled them. I say civil government, for such it evidently was. Samuel was in the strictest sense a Judge. Whatever other functions he had, this was one by which he was chiefly and most distinctively recognized. It is clear from the story of his dedication by Hannah that he was a priest, and that circumstance is of considerable importance in some of his relations with Saul; but the comparative sinking of that part of his character, the incidental manner in which it is brought out, make us aware how much more prominent the other side of the commonwealth at this time was, how much the legal, judicial, governing element was for the present overshadowing the purely sacrificial. But if it should be supposed for a moment that Samuel was a less devout man because his acts were more of a civil than of a sacerdotal kind, every word in the history will refute the notion. The ark of God had never been so precious to any earlier Israelite as it was to him who lived when it was captured and brought back again. God as a living ruler his thoughts and acts.

and king, was present to him in all He existed only to bring home His righteous rule to the minds and hearts of his countrymen. We must understand how much this was the absorbing purpose of his mind, if we would trace what passed in it when the Elders of Israel came to him with the request "Make us a king."

Such a request I said just now could scarcely have been made, or at least could not have been the expression of the

6

THE CRAVING FOR A KING.

[Serm. mind of any great body of the people, in the previous age. But Samuel's reformation had awakened in them a sense of order to which they had been strangers before. The words "Elders of Israel" themselves show how much had been done to revive the institutions of Moses, to call out the family and tribe sympathies which were at the root of those institutions and to make them ministers of union, not, as they had been, of division. So strongly had this family feeling been awakened, that Samuel's sons, it seems from the next passage, had, without any formal election or designation, performed some of the functions of their father. A tendency to hereditary succession was unfolding itself in the mind of the people, and was connecting itself directly with the civil, as it had before been connected with the ecclesiastical, forms of the commonwealth. But Samuel's sons did not walk in his ways. They were self-seekers; they were suspected of taking bribes. The effect of this distrust was just that which proceeds in all ages from the same cause—dissatisfaction, a cry for change, a feeling that the fault of the person who administers implies some evil or defect in that which he has to administer. But the change which these elders craved for was not a greater independence of authority. They had a sense of wanting authority. The degeneracy of Samuel's sons did not, as we might have fancied, make them suspicious of a ruler who should establish a family. It only made them long for a different sort of rule, for one which should be less irregular and fluctuating. They were not like the nations round about; they seemed to be at a manifest disadvantage when they fought with them; they had no regular leader of their armies, no one who could set them in array and go forth at the head of them. It is evident from another pas

I.]

SAMUEL'S DISPLEASURE.

7

sage, in which it is said that they desired a king because Nahash the king of Ammon was coming out against them, that this was their uppermost thought. A king signified to them little more than a general. There was something else in their minds than this; something at least was implied in this which was deeper than the rude craving for a man in a target of brass and with a spear like a weaver's beam. The discipline and the coherency of an army have a charm which the inmost spirit recognizes, and which could not exist if it was without a directing head.

But the thing displeased Samuel and he cried unto the Lord. Why did it displease him? Men who think themselves very clever have answered, "Of course, because he was seeking to aggrandise his own family. He had a cunning plan of advancing his sons which this new proposition would defeat." It is not necessary to confute such a notion by proclaiming that the characters in Scripture are different from other characters. It is quite enough to say that if such a character as Samuel's were met with in any history whatever, this would be a low, paltry, vulgar way of accounting for his acts. He had all his life been possessed with one great conviction, that the righteous God was King of the land. In His name and in His strength, he had been putting down wrong and asserting right. He had taken no man's ass and had handled no bribes, had sought for truth in his inward parts, and had striven to speak and act the truth outwardly. To suppose that he had been plotting all his days for those miserable objects which have made Popes execrable and have overthrown the kingdoms of modern dynasts, is to confound all distinctions, to make the records of humanity merely the records of the pettinesses and crimes which have destroyed it. If Samuel was con