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 <£lJittl)urgT) : 
 MACLAREN AND MACNIVEN. 
 
ISRAEL'S IRON AGE, 
 
ISRAEL'S IRON AGE: 
 
 ^kztt\)z^ from t^e 
 PERIOD OF THE JUDGES 
 
 MARCUS DODS, D.D, 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON, 
 
 PATERNOSTER ROW. 
 
 1874. . 
 
UNWIN BROTHERS, PRINTERS BY WATER POWER. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Joshua 
 
 . ... I 
 
 Gideon 
 
 . ... 29 
 
 JOTHAM 
 
 . ... 59 
 
 Jephthah 
 
 . ... 89 
 
 Samson 
 
 . ... 117 
 
 Eli . 
 
 147 
 
 The Blessings of the Tribes 
 
 171 
 
JOSHUA. 
 
" Of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God 
 doth give thee for an inJieritance, thou shalt save alive 
 nothing that breatheth: but thou shalt utterly desti'oy 
 them J . . . that they teach you not to do after all their 
 abominations^ — Deut. xx. 16. 
 
 " But ye have not obeyed viy voice : why have ye done 
 this ? Wherefore I also said, I will not drive them out 
 from before you J but they shall be as thorns in your sides, 
 and their gods shall be a snare utito youT- — Judges ii. 2, 3. 
 
 " Exectiting thy judgments 7ipon them by little and little, 
 thou gavest them place of repenta7ice, not beitig ignora7it 
 that they were a naughty generation, and that their jnalice 
 was bred i7i them, and that their cogitation would never 
 be changed. For it was a cursed seed from the beginning; 
 7teither didst thou for fear of any man give the?7i pardo7i 
 for those thi7igs wherei7i they sinned. For who shall say, 
 What hast thou do7ie ? or who shall withsta7id thy judg- 
 77ie7it ? or who shall accuse thee for the 7iatio7is that perish, 
 who7)i thou hast 77iade ? or who shall co77ie to stand 
 agai)ist thee, to be 7'eve7iged for the u7irig]iteous 7710/1 ? 
 For 7ieither is there a7iy God but thou that carcth for all, 
 to who77i thou 77iightest show that thy judgment is 7wt 
 unrighti" — Wisd. xii. 10-13. 
 
31055 f)ua. 
 
 JUDGES I. AND 11. 
 
 -T^HE character of Moses' successor, under 
 ^ whose leadership Israel entered the land of 
 promise, is, like that of many soldiers, simple 
 and easily understood. He was strong and 
 of a good courage ; a man fit not only for 
 battle, but for tedious campaigning ; full of 
 resources, and able to keep up the heart of a 
 whole people by his hopeful bearing. That he 
 should have been able to fill the place vacated 
 by so great a man as Moses, gives us the 
 highest idea of his calibre. That Moses was 
 missed there can be little doubt ; yet not Moses 
 himself could have led the people more skil- 
 fully and successfully from victory to victory, 
 nor have in the full tide of conquest held them 
 more thoroughly in hand, and settled them 
 2 "'•' 
 
4 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 more quietly in the land. It was one of the 
 most difficult of tasks which was entrusted 
 to Joshua. He was to lead the people through 
 a series of the most brilliant and exciting 
 military successes, and then to turn them to 
 the most peaceful pursuits. He was to teach 
 them to shed blood pitilessly, to harden them 
 to such sights as the sacking of towns, and 
 then to enforce laws which in many points 
 were singularly humane. It has been said of 
 the Romans that they conquered like savages 
 and ruled like philosophic statesmen. The 
 same transition had to be accomplished by 
 Israel, and into the strong hand of Joshua was 
 this delicate task committed. 
 
 But the work he did needs justification. 
 Many persons have been staggered, and many 
 more have professed to be staggered, by the 
 slaughter of the Canaanites. In order to 
 make room for Israel, tribes which had long 
 inhabited Palestine were exterminated. And 
 in the sacred narrative this ruthless massacre, 
 so far from being condemned as a sin, or 
 
JOSHUA. 5 
 
 reproved as barbaric cruelty, is attributed to 
 the express command of God: "Thou shalt 
 save alive nothing that breatheth, but thou 
 shalt utterly destroy them." No doubt the 
 Canaanites were idolaters; but is this not to 
 propagate religion by the sword ? Is not this 
 fierce irruption into Canaan with fire and 
 sword precisely similar to the wave of Mahom- 
 medan conquest ? Is it any way different from 
 the most pitiless of heathen invasions ? How 
 can we justify such an acquisition of territory 
 as this, whilst we are, at least in theory, so 
 scrupulous about adding one acre of unjustly 
 acquired land to our dominions, and cannot 
 let one drop of blood be shed, even in a 
 conquered race, without inquiry ? 
 
 The key to this difficulty was given in the 
 very first confirmation of the grant made to 
 Abraham. When the land of Canaan was 
 made over to him and his descendants, he was 
 told that they could not at once enter on pos- 
 session, because, the iniquity of the Amorites was 
 not full. The transference of territory was thus 
 
6 ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 from the first viewed and treated as a judicial 
 transaction. God reserves to Himself the right 
 which all sovereigns must and do reserve — the 
 right of removing offenders from the earth, and 
 of confiscating their goods. And the strict and 
 quiet procedure of His justice is rendered con- 
 spicuous by the four hundred years of delay to 
 which His own people were subjected. He 
 knew that the Canaanites would not improve; 
 He knew that from the time of Abraham their 
 fate was sealed ; and yet He did not anticipate 
 the most deliberate justice, but added a long 
 term to their national life, till they filled up their 
 iniquity to that measure which made extermi- 
 nation their desert and a necessity. Their 
 iniquity was now such that even the surround- 
 ing heathen complained of them. The Phoeni- 
 cians, who belonged to the Canaanitish stock, 
 were well known among ancient nations for 
 enterprise, vigour, dexterity in the arts and 
 in letters, and a certain style of civilisation, 
 wdiich was then peculiar to the East. But they 
 were as well known for the most abominable 
 
JOSHUA. 7 
 
 idolatries, and the coarsest and cruellest prac- 
 tices. A heathen remarking upon their con- 
 dition, even in later and purer times, says that 
 avowed Atheism was preferable to so detest- 
 able a religion. And if we are to judge of the 
 moral condition of the Canaanites from the 
 hints thrown out in the i8th chapter of Le- 
 viticus, it must be admitted that the land could 
 not but " spue out " inhabitants so loathsome 
 and foul. 
 
 Essentially, therefore, this was a judicial in- 
 fliction, and manifestly a just one. And Israel's 
 understanding that they were the executioners 
 of an awful sentence pronounced by God upon 
 the Canaanites, was that which preserved them 
 from any brutalizing effect which the invasion 
 might otherwise have had upon them.* In 
 
 '■'- That the Israehtes were themselves deeply impressed 
 with this view of the matter, is proved by the remarkable 
 passage in the apocryphal book of Wisdom xii. 3-27 : 
 " It was thy will to destroy by the hands of our fathers 
 both those old inhabitants of thy holy land, whom thou 
 hatedst for doing most odious works of witchcrafts and 
 wicked sacrifices, and also those merciless murderers of 
 children, and devourers of man's flesh, and the feasts of 
 
8 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 other respects this invasion finds a parallel in 
 almost every century of history, and in every 
 part of the world. It is, in point of fact, by 
 conquest that civilisation has spread and is 
 spreading upon earth, and in the career of pro- 
 gress the nations whose iniquities are full — that 
 is to say, which have fallen too low for national 
 redemption — have been swept away by the purer 
 and stronger races. In this, therefore, there is 
 no difference between the conduct of Israel and 
 the conduct of other great nations. The differ- 
 ence consists in this : that while other nations 
 have pushed their conquests for love of gain or 
 glory, or through pride in their leader or mere 
 lust of adventure, Israel entered Canaan as 
 God's servant, again and again warned that 
 they were merely God's sword of justice, and 
 that if they forgot this, and began to think it 
 was their own might that had emptied the 
 
 blood, with their priests out of the midst of their idolatrous 
 crew, and the parents that killed with their own hands 
 souls destitute of help : that the land, which thou 
 esteemedst above all other, might receive a w^orthy 
 colony of God's children." 
 
JOSHUA. 9 
 
 land for them, they should themselves suffer 
 the like extermination. Between this and 
 many other outwardly similar conquests there 
 was, in short, all the difference which there is 
 between a righteous execution which rejoices 
 the hearts of all good men, and a murder which 
 makes us ashamed of our nature.* 
 
 ■' This is ver}^ well put by Maurice {Patriarchs ana 
 Lawgivej's, 261) : "The difference between the Jews and 
 other people is precisely this, — All the great nations that 
 we read of have effected extensive and, on the whole, 
 salutary conquests. Their triumphs have been the means 
 of spreading law, government, civilisation, where they 
 would otherwise not have reached. They have swept 
 away feeble, corrupt, sensualized people, who had become 
 animal-worshippers or devil-worshippers, and had lost all 
 sense of their human dignity. But we feel that the nations 
 who have done these works have done them in great part 
 for their own glory, for the increase of their territory, at 
 the instigation and for the gratification of particular 
 leaders. All higher and more blessed results of their 
 success, which it is impossible not to recognise, have 
 been stained and corrupted by the ignoble and selfish 
 tendencies which have mixed with them, and been the 
 motives to them ; so that we are continually perplexed 
 with the question, what judgment we shall form of them, 
 or what different causes we can find for such opposite 
 effects. There is ojie nation which is taught from the 
 very first that it is fiot to go out to win any prizes for 
 itself, to bring home the silver or gold, the sheep or the 
 
1 o ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 The Canaanites probably belonged to that 
 race which inherited the curse of Ham,* and 
 which, all the world over, has been pushed out 
 by the two superior races. Their destiny has 
 been singular and melancholy. It has been 
 described in the following terms : " They 
 founded mighty states, but their cities arc a 
 desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness. They 
 instituted and extended commerce and manu- 
 factures, but a spoil has been made of their riches, 
 and a prey of their merchandise. They invented 
 letters, and had a written language of their own, 
 
 oxen, the men-servants or the women-servants ; that it is 
 to be simply the instrument of the righteous Lord against 
 those who were polluting His earth, and making it unfit 
 for human habitation." 
 
 ■''- Kuenen {Religion of Israel, i. 227, translation) denies 
 this, and maintains that the fact of the similarity between 
 the language of Canaan and that of Israel is sufficient 
 to prove that the two races were closely related. This, 
 however, is only a specimen of the easy way in which 
 Kuenen's school disposes of problems about which scien- 
 tific men differ. There are other criteria of race besides 
 language, and if the Phenicians were Semites, then, as 
 Farrar says {Families of Speech, 135), "they were almost 
 everything which the other Semites were not, and scarcely 
 anything that the other Semites were." 
 
JOSHUA. II 
 
 but no page of their literature and no legible 
 record of their deeds remains : their memo- 
 rials have perished with them. Their power 
 and prosperity were linked to moral qualities of 
 the lowest description and religion of the most 
 degrading character : cruelty and lust were the 
 text of their ritual. No moral considerations 
 guided or restrained their earthly career, which 
 was essentially worldly and materialistic. ^De- 
 lenda Carthago ' was a pagan echo of the Divine 
 decree that the Canaanite should be extermi- 
 nated by their Hebrew invaders." * 
 
 In the destruction of the Canaanites, God 
 has written in legible characters this truth, 
 that it is "better the wicked be destroyed a 
 hundred times over, than that they should 
 tempt those who are yet innocent to join their 
 company." Certain it is, that had they not 
 been destroyed, Israel could not have been 
 saved from the universal idolatry. Their sal- 
 vation would have been the world's destruction. 
 Even as it was, the remnants of them that were 
 ■^ McCausland's Builders of Bade I, p. 113. 
 
1 2 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 left led Israel astray, and time after time the 
 salvation of the earth hung on the slender 
 thread of a few pious families who held to the 
 knowledge of the one true God. The taint of 
 idolatry seemed to infect the very air of the 
 defiled land ; contamination breathed from the 
 trees of the groves, which were still stained 
 with the blood of human sacrifices, and about 
 which still hung the odour of their intoxicating 
 incense. If God were desirous of letting the 
 whole human race drift away from Him into 
 hopeless darkness, if He wished to stultify all 
 His promises, and for ever sever His creatures 
 from Himself, then no surer plan for effecting 
 these ends could have been adopted than that 
 of sparing the Canaanites. Let us therefore 
 learn the value of purity, and of the knowledge 
 of God. This was not too great a price to pay 
 for it. A greater price than this was yet to be 
 paid. Do we value it so ? Who would say, 
 from our careful guarding of purity of character, 
 who could reckon, from our jealous watchfulness 
 against false and weakening views of God, that 
 
JOSHUA. 13 
 
 we held in such high esteem what has thus 
 been purchased for us ? Not even facts will 
 teach us. Not even such a destruction as this 
 will convince us that God values holiness and 
 godliness in men, and at any price will have 
 these. One would suppose that after such a 
 lesson the Israelites would have considered 
 themselves precious in God's sight, and would 
 have done what they could to carry out His pur- 
 pose of preserving them uncorrupted. And one 
 would suppose that when we have been taught 
 by the sacrifice of Christ the value God sets 
 upon holiness in us, we should be found living 
 in fear of contagion from the evil of the world, 
 and counting ourselves of some value. But 
 is it so ? Have we some disinfectant in our 
 persons which makes it safe for us to expose 
 ourselves to sinful example which would have 
 been death to Israel ? Have we, in making up 
 our minds as to our intercourse with the world, 
 brought this element into consideration — that 
 our purity is a thing of exceeding value in God's 
 sight, for which He has made great sacrifices ? 
 
1 4 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 There are Gibeonitish alliances with the world 
 which we must retain : there are connections 
 formed in ignorance of their real nature, and 
 which we cannot now break, and there are 
 connections of an earthly kind which we cannot 
 dispense with; but even these a highly spiritual 
 mind submits to reluctantly : they hew wood 
 and draw water for him : he will keep the world 
 his servant, and not get entangled in such 
 alliance with it as really makes it his master. 
 The new leader of Israel received a name, 
 which, by identifying his leadership with God's, 
 gave constant promise of victory. Originally 
 called Hoshea, or Salvation, this name was 
 changed, when he led the spies, to Jehoshua, 
 or The Lord is salvation. And it has never 
 ceased to seem significant to the Christian that 
 this name of Joshua should have been that by 
 which our Lord was called. In its Greek form, 
 "Jesus," it was given to Him because he was 
 to save His people from their sins. By His 
 distinctive name among men he was linked to 
 Joshua, and in the salvation He accomplishes 
 
JOSHUA, 15 
 
 for His people we are therefore led to expect 
 the same leading characteristics as distin- 
 guished the salvation of Israel by Joshua. 
 
 We are, in the first place, reminded by this 
 parallel that the help afforded to us in Christ 
 is God's help, and this in a fuller sense than 
 was true in Israel's case. For though the 
 angel of the Lord appeared to Joshua, as the 
 gods of other nations were fabled to descend at 
 the hour of need into the fight and scare the 
 enemy, yet the angel of the Lord was one per- 
 son and Joshua another. But in the person of 
 Christ Jesus these two are one — the human 
 Leader and divine Saviour. In Him the name 
 can receive its most literal rendering, and when 
 we speak of Jesus we name " The Lord our 
 Salvation." In Him we are introduced to God, 
 and meet Him in the form of a Saviour. In 
 order to be saved, we have not to fight against 
 God ; we have not to change His mind, or 
 escape from Him ; He is already on our side, 
 fighting for us. It is as our Saviour He has 
 revealed Himself in the Son ; and He being 
 
1 6 ISRAEL'S IR ON A GE. 
 
 our Saviour, there is hope for us whatever we 
 are. He is wise, and does not undertake the 
 salvation of those who are past redemption. 
 He is almight}^ and does not break down in the 
 execution of His purposes. He is sovereign, 
 and none can dispute His right to save us. 
 " It is God that justifieth ; who is he that con- 
 demneth ? " " Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and 
 speakest, O Israel, \ly way is hid from the 
 Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my 
 God ? " — as if such a contingency as that w^ere 
 possible. 
 
 Again, we are reminded by this parallel, that as 
 in the conquest of the land by Joshua, so in our 
 salvation, is there a somewhat perplexing mix- 
 ture of miracle and hard fighting. Sometimes 
 the rivers that flow deep before us, and seem 
 even to overflow their banks and to become more 
 impassable to us than to others, open at our 
 approach, and we pass over dryshod. At other 
 times we are allowed to fall into ambuscades, 
 or we are entangled among the scythe-chariots 
 that sweep over the field and leave us crippled, 
 
JOSHUA. 17 
 
 if not slain outright. And just as the Israelites, 
 when they found the Jordan open before them 
 and the walls of Jericho fall down, supposed 
 that the conquest of the land was to be com- 
 pleted without their drawing their swords, and 
 were in consequence defeated before Ai, so are 
 the great mass of those who enter the Christian 
 life presuming that God will give them the 
 land of uprightness, purity of heart, and holi- 
 ness of life, with scarcely an effort on their 
 part. And therefore, though there was mi- 
 racle on the side of Israel, yet this rule was 
 distinctly laid down as the rule by which the 
 territory was allotted to the tribes, that each 
 was to have what each could take, and hold 
 against the enemy. We find recorded the 
 gallant petition of Caleb, now an old man, but 
 dauntless as when he fought against Amalek 
 forty years before, — how he said to Joshua, 
 *'The Lord hath kept me alive, as he said, these 
 forty and five years ; . . . and now, lo, I am 
 this day fourscore and five years old. As yet I 
 am as strong this day as I was in the day 
 
 3 
 
i8 ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 that Moses sent me to spy out the land : as 
 my strength was then, even so is my strength 
 now, for war, both to go out, and to come in. 
 Now therefore give me this mountain " (observe 
 the reason) ; "for thou heardest in that day how 
 the Anakim.s were there, and that the cities 
 were great and fenced : if so be the Lord will be 
 with me, then I shall be able to drive them out." 
 And Joshua blessed him, and gave him the in- 
 heritance he was thus prepared to fight for. 
 
 This is the law of our acquisitions also. 
 What becomes really ours is what we fight for 
 inch by inch, killing as we go ; slaughtering 
 the obstinate foe on his own soil, so that the 
 property be left to us uncontested. God's grant 
 is useless to us, quite useless, if we will not draw 
 the sword and conquer it, if we will not wield 
 the axe and clear it. These two united form 
 the strongest of titles, God's grant and our 
 own conquest. What a man wins by his own 
 faith, fortitude, and persistence, by his own 
 nerve, vigour, and hardihood ; fighting as a 
 soldier commissioned by God to do battle 
 
JOSHUA. 19 
 
 against evil — that, and nothing else, he has as 
 his very own. No other person can make a 
 man pure ; he must, with God's grace, make 
 himself pure. No other person can harden 
 your soul against sin, no other person can go 
 through the thousand efforts and resistances to 
 sin you must make if ever you are to be 
 righteous. Knowledge cannot be acquired for 
 you by the reading of another person : you 
 cannot grow strong by the exercise which a 
 friend takes ; so neither can you acquire holi- 
 ness except by your own steady application to 
 the pursuit of holiness and gradual attainment 
 therein. The purity and ripeness of character 
 which your ow-n heart approves and thirsts for, 
 and which your own will bends itself to attain., 
 and your own self-denial and painful endurance 
 enable you to attain, that remains your acqui- 
 sition and possession for ever. 
 
 A second law which followed upon this as 
 a consequence, was that the aboriginal in- 
 habitants whom the Israelites were too care- 
 less or too cowardly to subdue, were used by 
 
20 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 God as their scourges, and left as thorns in 
 their sides. God announced the important 
 principle, that He will not drive out what 
 we do not drive out. "I will not drive them 
 out from before you, but they shall be as 
 thorns in your sides " (Numbers xxxiii. 55, 
 and Joshua xxiii. 13). And so it came to pass 
 that there were spotted all over the land, in 
 every place of vantage, strong bands of ma- 
 rauding foes, that swept time after time over 
 the land like locusts, and left no green thing 
 behind them. The Israelites had not pushed 
 their conquest back into the .fortresses and 
 fastnesses of the hills, and in these there 
 were continually growing up and training fresh 
 troops of young warriors ; so that for genera- 
 tions the people sowed their grain heartlessly, 
 knowing that they were but preparing nourish- 
 ment for their foes ; and they became craven- 
 hearted, slinking along the by-paths, and not 
 daring to claim their own. This came of 
 their contentedness to league with those whom 
 God had told them to destroy. 
 
JOSHUA. 21 
 
 And every one can trace in his own life 
 how one unconquered sin becomes a thorn in 
 the side. For ours also is commonly but a 
 half-completed conquest. We have not made 
 war upon our sin in its fastnesses and breed- 
 ing-places, in the lurking-places of thought 
 and of our habitual tone. We did not believe 
 that happy was he who dashed the little ones 
 against the stones ; we did not grapple and 
 put an end to the young things that grow 
 up to be strong and subduing sins. We were 
 not remorseless, did not rouse ourselves to 
 take stern and extreme measures. But it is 
 not enough to let sin alone, so long as it 
 does not violently molest us. If we know our 
 own hearts at all, we know that sin may be 
 lodging in them, and gathering strength, with- 
 out making incursions that visibly devastate 
 the life. And so it has come true in our ex- 
 perience that God has not driven out what 
 we would not rouse ourselves to drive out, 
 and our sin has become a thorn in our side. 
 Again and again that thing we would not 
 
2 2 ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 slay makes us cry out before God that life is 
 not worth having if it is to be life with this 
 sin. We may learn to wear the thorn under 
 our garment, and go about smiling, as if there 
 were not terrible havoc being made of our 
 peace with God ; we may wear it as the as- 
 cetic wears his spiked girdle under his frock ; 
 but it is there, reminding us, by pain and 
 misery and weakness, of our slackness in 
 cleansing our life. One sin thus excepted and 
 overlooked, cleaves to us and makes itself felt 
 in all our life : not a day passes but some- 
 thing occurs to give it occasion ; it is a thorn 
 in our flesh,* carried with us into all com- 
 panies, cleaving to us at all times ; our one 
 inseparable ; exasperating, saddening, heart- 
 breaking in its pertinacity. Like a fierce and 
 cruel foe, it has spoiled or swept off our best 
 harvests. As often as we have continued in 
 
 ■-■• May it not reasonably be supposed that Paul speaks 
 of his "thorn in the flesh" with a reference to the Old 
 Testament phraseology in which his mind was so steeped, 
 and that his thorn was some sin he had been too long in 
 attending to, or some weakness resulting from such sin ? 
 
JOSHUA. 23 
 
 godly effort and earnest prayer for a time, 
 and seem to be about to bear some fruit and 
 be fit for some service, the old sin comes in 
 to cheat us of the fruit of long- continued 
 exertion, and puts us back to the very same 
 point in the spiritual life. The whole weary 
 work has to be begun afresh : as a land ex- 
 posed to perpetual invasion, our life is left 
 fruitless, and we have to go through the same 
 weary and now hopeless routine of ploughing 
 and sowing. Days of dull gnawing remorse 
 and despondency, shame at verifying the un- 
 belief of the worldly in a godly life, heart- 
 lessness in the whole work of cleansing our 
 souls from sin, perplexity about the way in 
 which God means to save us, and distrust of 
 Him, — these are the piercing pains which 
 these thorns in our sides produce. 
 
 Oh, the regret, the struggle, and the faihng ! 
 
 Oh, the days desolate and useless years ! 
 Vows in the night so fierce and unavailing ! 
 
 Stings of my shame and passion of my tears ! 
 
 Our whole life remains, not like a peace- 
 ful, God-protected land, but like a wild dis- 
 
2 4 ISRAEL'S IR ON A GE. 
 
 traded country, in which there may be an 
 occasional deed of valour, but which for the 
 most part moans with oppression. ^ 
 
 But, finally, we see in this conquest to which 
 Israel was led by Joshua in what sense, and to 
 what extent, we should look for present victory 
 over sin. Joshua did not deal only in promises. 
 He said. There are your foes, let us slay them. 
 He would have been hooted out of his com- 
 mand had he not given actual victory. Pro- 
 mises would have been counted mere evasions. 
 And no one who is in earnest about sin will be 
 put off with mere expectations of deliverance. 
 Sin is as much sin now as ever it can be in the 
 future. If it is wrong to sin in the world to 
 come it is wrong to sin now. Sin, if hateful 
 to God, must be as hateful now as ever it can- 
 be. If God is in earnest about delivering me 
 from sin. He will deliver me now; and if I am 
 in earnest about being delivered, no expectation 
 of future deliverance can compensate for the 
 misery of present bondage. The Saviour I 
 need is one who can help me to-day, one who 
 
JOSHUA. 25 
 
 counts my present enemies His enemies, and 
 who can communicate to me such real strength 
 as shall make the difference between my being 
 defeated and my conquering them. If He merely 
 promises to take me out from among my foes, 
 if He merely says I shall be rid of them when 
 I die, is that to be called victory ? Certainly 
 not; and it is not such victory Christ offers. 
 But many perhaps may say, I would it were 
 so ; that Christ gave present victory, that His 
 saving from sin meant my being saved from those 
 sins I am in bondage to, those only sins it con- 
 cerns me to be saved from. I would it were so. 
 This were a salvation to be prized, by which I 
 myself could now become a better, holier, more 
 useful man. But I have sought such salvation 
 long; I may not be much in earnest about any- 
 thing, but I have spent more earnestness in 
 seeking such salvation than in any other pur- 
 suit ; and I cannot see that I have found it. 
 Theoretically, nothing seems grander and more 
 satisfactory than this salvation by Christ. 
 Practically, it fails me at every point. 
 
26 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 It is useless to give the lie to experience ; 
 and it were untrue to say that 3'Ours is a sin- 
 gular case, or that you ought to expect greater 
 things. For when conquest of present sins is 
 promised, you are not to expect immediate 
 victory. You will not have any victory if you 
 do not engage in immediate warfare. But read 
 the history of Israel, and what do you find ? 
 That they held their land at immense cost of 
 life and treasure ; that no bloodier battles are 
 on record than those in which they had to 
 engage with their old foes. They were success- 
 ful, they did hold their land, but never found 
 it much easier than at the first. So when you 
 fall into sin that makes you doubt whether 
 Christ is a present Saviour, there is really 
 nothing else to say than this : You must win 
 back again the ground you have lost. Of 
 course it is weary work, lieart-breaking, hum- 
 bling, tormenting work, — a trial to faith so 
 dreadful that many a soul has broken down 
 under it ; yet what is to be done ? Are you to 
 yield to sin ? are you to live on contentedly 
 
JOSHUA. 27 
 
 with that in you which you know is working 
 death ? are you to disbeheve Jesus Christ and 
 live at a distance from God, unable to bring 
 your state of heart into the light of His coun- 
 tenance? Rather than this, will you not endure 
 all things, making each relapse into sin the 
 occasion of doing something more to guard 
 against its recurrence, and of praying to God 
 more and not less earnestly ? You know that 
 you mxi^t make way if you do so. Your sins 
 may be so strongly rooted in your nature that 
 you see before you a lifetime of struggle ; but 
 so is it with many. Even when you lie stiff and 
 unconscious on the field of battle, you may be 
 of the winning party. As he who died in the 
 moment of victory, his eye already dim so that 
 he could not see whether it was the ranks of 
 friend or foe that were breaking, so do most 
 Christians die, sword in hand, not having had 
 much time to erect trophies and sing hymns of 
 victory, and see all the fruit of their warfare, 
 but not the less certainly having obtained 
 eternal victory over the sins they knew and 
 fought against in this present life. 
 
II. 
 GIDEON. 
 
'■^ And the Loj-d looked upon him, and said, Coin this 
 thy might, and thou shalt save Is7'ael from the hand of 
 the Midianites : have not I sent thee f '■ — Judges vi. 14. 
 
 " TJion hast broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff 
 of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of 
 Midland — Isa. ix. 4 ; conip. Isa. x. 26. 
 
JUDGES VI. VII. VIII. 
 
 ^n^HE writer of the Book of Judges has pre- 
 -^ served scarcely any information regarding 
 the life of Gideon, except that which belongs to 
 one very brief period of it — the period of a few 
 days during w^hich he gathered an army, at- 
 tacked the Midianites, and drove them out of 
 the land. And he seems to have selected from 
 this period mainly those incidents which illus- 
 trate the various attitudes men take up towards 
 the work of God. 
 
 The first figure which the historian sets 
 before us is that of Gideon himself. He draws 
 aside the curtain, and shows us a man- in the 
 flower of life, dressed as an agricultural labourer, 
 busily occupied with his flail, threshing out his 
 wheat ; not in the usual place — not in the field 
 
3 2 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 where it had grown — but in the wine-press, for 
 fear of the Midianites discovering him at w^ork 
 and robbing him of his harvest. As 3'ou look 
 at the man's face you see that his thoughts are 
 not in his work : there is something more than 
 the energy required for his task causing him to 
 compress his lips and knit his brow. The 
 vehemence of his strokes suggests that he is 
 thinking of these invaders that swarm on the 
 plain below, and wishing he only had them 
 under his flail, as well as the bounding corn.* 
 As we watch him at his work a stranger ap- 
 proaches, pauses, and gives him the usual 
 greeting, " The Lord be with thee," adding, 
 with apparently a reference to his vehement 
 strokes and his thoughts about the Midianites, 
 "thou mighty man of valour; " but Gideon is 
 in no mood to hear wath patience even the 
 ordinary courtesies of life. As you have some- 
 times unwittingly fired a person's indignation 
 
 '•'• This first appearance of Gideon is in striking accord- 
 ance with his name, which means " one who hews down 
 or breaks," hke Martel or Maccabasus. 
 
GIDEON. 2>i 
 
 by the most ordinary remarks, or as you your- 
 self may have been in such a mood as made 
 the most ordinary remark or kindly wish seem 
 a mockery to you, and as you have impatiently 
 dashed aside the usual conventional speeches 
 men make, because there was some bitter thing 
 making you earnest and exasperating you, so 
 Gideon could not listen with patience even to 
 this salutation, but broke out, " If the Lord be 
 with us, why then is all this befallen us ? " 
 Gideon was not going to accept a mere religious 
 phrase instead of a divine fact : he was not a 
 man that could comfortably blind himself with 
 a common-place of religious talk, and cease to 
 look for any practical results of religious truth. 
 He knew it was all nonsense talking about 
 God's presence, if the work of God could not 
 be measured by any practical test. He had 
 too profound a conviction of God's power to 
 believe Ke could be present without interfering 
 to suppress unrighteousness. It provoked him, 
 therefore, to hear men using the common talk 
 about God's presence while the Midianites were 
 
 4 
 
3 4 ISRAEL'S IR ON A G£. 
 
 swarming over God's land, and almost within 
 earshot. This it was which was ever in his 
 thoughts : " If the Lord be with us, why then 
 is all this befallen us ? Am I to believe that 
 Jehovah, who wrought miracles for our fathers, 
 has become like the mere gods of wood and 
 stone, blind and helpless ? " 
 
 Even in these first words of Gideon, then, 
 we find the key to his character. He was 
 a man who felt deeply the degradation of his 
 people. He could not enjoy his own harvest 
 while the Midianites were robbing all around ; 
 he had the patriot's wide sympathy. He was 
 a man, also, of the strongest common sense, 
 accustomed to look through words to things, 
 and to look the facts of life fair in the face. 
 And, above all, he was a man of abundant per- 
 sonal valour, but yet unwilling to move a step 
 until he was sure God was with him ; bold to 
 risk anything, once he was convinced God would 
 stand by him, but fearful to hazard a single life 
 without this conviction. This was brought out, 
 you will remember, by the singular test which 
 
GIDEON. 35 
 
 Gideon audaciously proposed to God, laying 
 
 out a fleece, and asking God to show His 
 
 presence and His power by causing the fleece 
 
 to be soaked with dew while the ground was 
 
 dry, and dry when the ground was wet. This 
 
 he did, not from cowardice, but because it was 
 
 not his nature to risk anything; he was a 
 
 thoughtful man, who had difficulties other men 
 
 had not. 
 
 But we cannot fully understand Gideon's 
 
 attitude towards the work of God, without 
 
 taking into account the fact that the first thing 
 
 he was commanded to do was to hew down the 
 
 altar of Baal which had been erected in his 
 
 father's grounds. No doubt he was expecting 
 
 to be summoned to draw the sword against 
 
 Midian; instead of that, he must begin by 
 
 wielding the axe against the idolatry of his 
 
 own household.* This was a rebuke to 
 
 - It seems mere perversity which leads Ewald to affirm 
 in his absolute way : " Everything leads to the conclusion 
 that not until after his victories over the foes without, did 
 he acquire power to subdue also those within " (vol. ii. 
 p. 381). Surely every thorough reformation, individual or 
 social, proceeds in the reverse order, from within outwards. 
 4- 
 
3 6 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 Gideon. Gideon, filled with a sense of his 
 people's wrongs, had been impatient that God 
 did not manifest Himself in some striking 
 deliverance ; but how could God come to a 
 people who were unprepared to receive Him ? 
 His path was choked with the people's idolatry. 
 Gideon was waiting for God to work, and be- 
 ginning to speak somewhat bitterly of God's 
 indifference, whereas the delay was altogether 
 caused by Gideon's own household. God was 
 waiting for him to work. God could not come 
 among them while they were all turned aw^ay 
 from Him to Baal. No sooner had Gideon 
 hewed down the altar of Baal than he received 
 his commission against ]\Iidian.* 
 
 You will observe, then, Gideon's precise 
 attitude : you will observe that he was right 
 in refusing to believe God was present if things 
 
 " The clever defence of Gideon by his father Joash (vi. 
 31), full as it is of the pecuharly Israehtish satire, reminds 
 one of the saying of Tiberius, in reference to the charge 
 brought against Falanius of having put up to auction a 
 statue of Augustus : " Deorum injurias Diis curae," Let 
 the gods avenge their own indignities. (Tac. Ann. i. 73.) 
 
GIDEON. 37 
 
 went on just as if He were not present, but he 
 was wrong in not seeing what it was that pre- 
 vented God from being present. He was right in 
 arguing, What God was. He is; why then does 
 He not do for us what He did for our fathers ? 
 He was right in debating with himself, and 
 asking: Is this what it means to be God's 
 people ? What is the use of living at this 
 price ? But he was wrong in thinking that the 
 fault lay with God, and not with himself; wrong 
 in not seeing his very obvious duty, which, 
 until he performed, God could not be expected 
 to work for Israel. Just so we are right in 
 refusing to accept a religion which makes no 
 practical difference upon us ; right in im- 
 patiently throwing aside the mere traditional 
 assurances whereby men soothe sinners and 
 promise them deliverance ; right in looking 
 straight at the facts of our own experience, and 
 testing religion by its power on ourselves; but 
 we often add to this the mistake of Gideon, 
 and fall out with God for not interfering more 
 powerfully in our behalf, when it is we our- 
 
SS ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 selves who are preventing Him from so inter- 
 fering. You wait for God to do j^omething, 
 while He is waiting for you. If you are not 
 able to use God's strength, if you might as well 
 be heathen for all the moral help you get from 
 God, then depend upon it there is something 
 wrong in your conduct towards God, some plain 
 duty you are neglecting. 
 
 We should all of us be hoping, like Gideon, 
 to work some deliverance in the earth be- 
 fore we leave it. We should all of us be 
 impatient that this earth is so little like the 
 field of the operation of the holy, good God. 
 There is no lack of evil that needs abolishing, 
 of good that needs doing, and it is to accom- 
 plish this we are called by Christ. And, pro- 
 bably, all of us are desirous of accomplishing 
 something ; there is some good work that we 
 see needs to be done, and we should like to 
 do it. It is quite possible to make this life a 
 life worth living, quite possible to effect some 
 real good in the world. Life need not be all a 
 failure, and a pretence, and a vanity. And the 
 
GIDEON. 39 
 
 secret of success now is just what it was in 
 Gideon's day, that God be with us. And if 
 God be not with us, if we are not succeeding in 
 the work we have undertaken, if we are not 
 doing any good, if we cannot see that God 
 helps us at all, then certainly there is some- 
 thing in our life hindering God from coming to 
 us with power. We need not wonder we are 
 not receiving God's blessing in work undertaken 
 for others, if our own lives are stained with 
 glaring sins. We need not wonder we are 
 getting little of God's help in any way, if we 
 are allowing some plain and obvious duty to 
 stand undone. 
 
 2. Gideon's attitude, then, towards God's 
 work, though not satisfactory, v/as due not so 
 much to a flaw in his spirit as to a mental 
 blindness to duty. This could be, and was, 
 easily amended. But the narrator goes on to 
 show that there are other attitudes which men 
 assume, and which unfit them for doing any- 
 thing for God in the world. When Gideon 
 had gathered 32,000 volunteers to attack 
 
40 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 Midian, God saw how much untrustworthy 
 material existed in this army. Two devices 
 were used to weed it of its elements of weak- 
 ness, to reject from it all whom God counted 
 unfit to fight His battles. The first was the 
 usual and wise proclamation, issued as soon as 
 they came in sight of the enemy, that who- 
 soever was faint-hearted should leave the ranks 
 and quit the field, that their fear might not 
 create a panic as soon as the battle began.* 
 No fewer than two-thirds of the whole army 
 took advantage of this proclamation — a striking 
 evidence of the different estimate men make 
 of danger and hard work at a distance and at 
 hand. The large numbers of the Christian 
 army are similarly made up — are made up by 
 those who are bold in intention, brave at home 
 but cowards in the field ; they answer, or seem 
 to answer, God's summons at first, but take the 
 earliest opportunity of backing out of their 
 engagements. 
 
 Many persons, when you speak to them of 
 -:= Deut. XX. 8. 
 
GIDEON. 41 
 
 this and that useful undertaking, seem quite to 
 enjoy the prospect of engaging in it, promise 
 their services, and actually appear at the ren- 
 dezvous; but the actual sight of the destitution, 
 the disease, the ignorance, the incivility, the 
 lying and fraudulent selfishness, with which 
 they must cope, quite frightens them, and they 
 avail themselves of the first plausible opening 
 to escape. And it is better they should do 
 so, for by remaining, their faintheartedness 
 would be contagious, and unnerve their com- 
 rades. Every one knows how easy it is to 
 work alongside of a cheery, bright, hopeful 
 spirit ; how difficult to bear up against the 
 continual complaint, and fear, and wretched- 
 ness of the cowardly. Such, therefore, God 
 rejects from His army. 
 
 3. But the 10,000 men who were left after 
 this elimination of the cowards were still too 
 many to defeat the 135,000 Alidianites. There 
 might be a large number remaining in the ranks 
 merely from shame, though they had no great 
 heart for the business. There might be some 
 
42 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 cold-blooded men who were no cowards, but 
 who were just as little eager patriots. There 
 might be some who had sufficient courage to 
 enter the battle, without sufficient endurance 
 to fight it out. Of all these the army must 
 be thinned. But obviously this requires a 
 much more delicate process than the first 
 reduction. Accordingly the very singular and 
 memorable device which w^e have now read of 
 was adopted. The men were led down to the 
 water, and all those who lay down to drink, put- 
 ting their mouths to the water, were rejected; 
 while ail those w4io merely stooped and scooped 
 up water in their hands were selected. These 
 latter were the true soldiers — men who could 
 not make a leisurely business of drinking while 
 the enemy was in sight ; but who, if thirsty, 
 could at the most snatch a mouthful of water 
 as they passed the stream. The simple device 
 showed a real difference of temperament in the 
 men, and set them off into two well-defined 
 classes ; the men who were so eager for the 
 fight, and so full of the presence of the enemy. 
 
GIDEON. 43 
 
 that they could not have patience even to 
 settle themselves to slake their thirst ; and 
 the men who were not sorry for any little 
 delay in meeting the enemy, and who desired, 
 if they were to fight, at least to be comfort- 
 able themselves. 
 
 The former class alone, then, is judged by 
 God to be in a right attitude towards His 
 work. They who lap like dogs are retained, 
 in the last analysis of God's army, as the 
 efficient force that is to do His work. You 
 have seen a dog running along the bank of 
 a water, or in the shallow of a stream, or 
 in a ditch, and, without stopping, snatching 
 mouthfuls or tonguefuls of water, too intent 
 on his pursuit to take a leisurely drink, never 
 even while slaking his thirst turning aside or 
 pausing from the chase. So the man who is 
 eager to destroy the common enemy, the man 
 who is carried away with enthusiasm in a 
 good cause, the man whose blood is roused 
 by God's call, will rarely pay enough atten- 
 tion to his own health or business, or to any 
 
44 ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 of those objects men count most necessary. 
 The common rank and file of Christians are 
 ready enough to waste time over them, are 
 not sorry for excuse for lingering and hanging 
 back from duty, where one may get more blows 
 than comforts. As the majority of these 
 soldiers sought out dry and soft places for 
 their knees, took off their helmets, and slack- 
 ened their belts before they lay down to drink, 
 so the majority even of good Christian people 
 not only take the necessary water, not only 
 engage in the necessary duties, but do so in 
 such a deliberate, leisurely manner, as to show 
 that we have no higher aim for which we are 
 trying to save time, and which draws us 
 eagerly on through all our occupations. We 
 have to eat and drink : yes, but we need not 
 prolong our meals and linger over them. We 
 must engage in the business of this life — no 
 doubt ; at the same time it is amusing to stand 
 by and observe what men count the necessities 
 of business — necessities which would be re- 
 duced to a very small proportion if men became 
 
GIDEON. 45 
 
 enamoured of any great aim or pursuit, either 
 for this world or that which is to come. We 
 do not say that men who are so steeped in their 
 own worldly objects shall not have even a 
 narrow entrance into God's kingdom. But 
 what this narrative assures us of is, that such 
 are not the men whom God will use for His 
 work. These 10,000 who were brought to the 
 water were all fair soldiers — not cowards, not 
 altogether ignorant nor indifferent to the emer- 
 genc}^ to the need of striking a blow for God 
 and His people — but only 300 of them had 
 that eagerness for the work that kept them 
 from paying undue regard to other things. 
 And so, bring a number of men who are all 
 alike good, sound - hearted Christians, bring 
 them into the ordinary circumstances that are 
 testing us day by day, and what do you find ? 
 That only a very small proportion count their 
 own ends merely things by the way, and hurry 
 as fast as possible past them. These men did 
 not know Gideon's purpose in leading them to 
 the water : so it may be, and it is, the most 
 
46 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 ordinary matter that is showing whether we 
 are dogs that lap, whether we are fitted for 
 God's service by a sense of the urgency of the 
 case and a desire to do good so genuine as to 
 carry us past our own selfish aims and com- 
 forts, and even necessities. 
 
 4. Yet a fourth attitude which men take up 
 towards the work of God in the world is de- 
 picted by the historian here. When Midian 
 was in full flight before the gallant 300, 
 Gideon sent a messenger to the tribe of Eph- 
 raim to seize the fords of Jordan, so as to cut 
 off the common foe, and prevent even a rem- 
 nant from escaping. Ephraim did so ; but on 
 returning from this service called Gideon to 
 task for not inviting them to join him earlier : 
 " Why hast thou served us thus, that thou 
 calledst us not when thou wentest to fight with 
 the Midianites ? " Ephraim's attitude is not 
 quite easy to determine. They may have been 
 in either of two states of mind — either really 
 high-spirited and vexed that they had not been 
 invited to help in overthrowing the Midianites, 
 
GIDEON. 47 
 
 or only wishing now that they had had a share 
 in this glory, and wishing to make it appear 
 that they would have gladly joined Gideon ; 
 although possibly had they been asked to do so 
 when the event was still uncertain they might 
 have been more backward. Certainly there are 
 both these classes still — persons who feel really 
 hurt if they are not asked to help in every 
 good work, who are offended if they are not 
 asked for subscriptions, and if they are not 
 counted on for assistance in any undertaking 
 that calls for wisdom, perseverance, and grace. 
 These are the most useful men in the Christian 
 Church and in the world, and we are willing to 
 suppose that Ephraim was of this spirit. But 
 there are others who, when a good work is in 
 its infancy, and has not got over its first diffi- 
 culties, make no movement to assist it ; but no 
 sooner does it begin to grow and be talked of 
 and become popular, than they come forward 
 and loudly complain that they were never asked 
 to join, though very probably they have been 
 throughout aware that such a work was going 
 
48 ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 on, and that it needed all the help it could get. 
 You will have noticed that such persons com- 
 plain all the more loudl}^ now because their 
 conscience accuses them of lukewarmness be- 
 fore, and because they would fain persuade 
 themselves and others that they have been 
 waiting anxiously to be invited to join this 
 good work. 
 
 In passing, we may notice the admirable self- 
 command and tact displayed in Gideon's 
 answer to Ephraim. He is flushed with victory 
 when Ephraim ventures to chide him thus, he 
 has at his back his three hundred invincibles, 
 he knows himself God's chosen chief: w^hat 
 would most men have done if sharply repri- 
 manded in such circumstances ? Probably not 
 made the exquisitely skilful answer of this most 
 sagacious of commanders : " What have I done 
 now in comparison of you ? Is not the glean- 
 ing of the grapes of Ephraim better than the 
 vintage of Abi-ezer?" My household has no 
 doubt cut the first-fruits, but what is our har- 
 vest in comparison with these rich clusters, the 
 
GIDEON. 49 
 
 heads of Oreb and Zeeb, the princes of Midian, 
 which you have gleaned ? " Then their anger was 
 abated toward him, when he had said that. 
 
 So let us answer any who may find fault 
 with our way of managing God's work : let us 
 answer in good temper and self-command ; let 
 us give those who find fault their due, and 
 point them to the rich gleanings that remain 
 to be gathered ; let us, like Gideon, beware of 
 allowing some good work we are engaged in 
 to become the occasion of introducing wrang- 
 ling, envy, and unseemly discord among God's 
 people, who ought to be bound together against 
 the common foe. 
 
 5. A fifth and last attitude which men fre- 
 quently assume towards God's work is repre- 
 sented in the men of Succoth and Penuel. 
 These two towns, when Gideon led his troops, 
 now spent with hunger and weariness, past 
 them, refused to give them even a little bread ; 
 and not only so, but when Gideon reminded 
 them that it was no private enterprise he was 
 engaged in, but that he was pursuing the host 
 
 5 
 
5 o ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 of Midian, the townsmen laughed at him, and 
 asked him if Zebah and Zalmunna were ah'eady 
 in his hands, that they should reward him 
 wdth bread for his army. There can be no 
 doubt at all about the spirit of these men. 
 Gideon had no doubt about it, and vowed that 
 when he returned from the pursuit he would 
 teach the men of Succoth, and slay the men 
 of Penuel ; which vow he kept. He acted here 
 very differently from his manner with Ephraim. 
 These men were blind to the glory of the com- 
 mon cause — selfish, poor-spirited creatures, that 
 shut themselves up in their fenced cities, and 
 were satisfied to let God's soldiers starve, and 
 God's work come to an end for want of support, 
 so long only as they had bread enough to satisfy 
 their own hunger. This was a state of mind 
 not to be corrected by a mere civil speech or 
 explanation. Gideon taught them, not by 
 expostulation, but by the sword and with the 
 briers of the wilderness. 
 
 Can we say that there are none now who 
 merit the same punishment ? none who resist 
 
GIDEON. 51 
 
 every appeal to assist those who are faint by 
 pursuing God's work? There are still men 
 who have no eye for spiritual importance, but 
 measure all things by their outward appearance 
 and by their relation to their own comfort; 
 men who fortify themselves in their ungenerous 
 selfishness by asking, as these men of Succoth 
 did, " What have you made of this pursuit in 
 which you want us to assist you ? what great 
 good have you done, that we should help you ? 
 Are Zebah and Zalmunna already in your 
 hands, that we should acknowledge you as use- 
 ful men, and give you what you ask to help you 
 on in your pursuit? " For such persons, who 
 despise the day of small things, who cannot 
 recognise God if He takes on Him the form 
 of a little child, nor His Church when it exists 
 as a grain of mustard seed, there remains the 
 doom of seeing the whole work of God in the 
 world finished without their aid, and of hear- 
 ing the voice of God Himself in rebuke, "Behold, 
 ye despisers, and wonder and perish ! " 
 
 In closing, let us remark the incident which 
 
 * 
 
5 2 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 in some respects is the most interesting in 
 Gideon's career. It is, indeed, not directly in 
 that line of thought we have endeavoured to 
 follow, but it bears its own very useful lesson. 
 When Gideon was lying undaunted with his 
 three hundred men, watching an opportunity to 
 attack, God gave him an encouraging sign, by 
 Vv'hich he might be at once rewarded for, and 
 confirmed in, his courageous trust in God. 
 Such encouragement God frequently gives to 
 those who undertake difficult work through 
 a sense of duty, and in faith. Gideon was 
 directed to go down and reconnoitre the 
 Midianite camp, and on doing so he heard 
 the dream which we have read.* In this dream 
 the imagination of the Midianite had repre- 
 sented the host of these dwellers in tents as 
 a large tent, securely pegged, its cords tight, 
 and apparently as safe as any house ; while 
 the little band of half-starved Israelites ap- 
 peared to him like a thin barley-cake. t But 
 
 ■'= Judges vii. 13. 
 
 t " Barley bread is only eaten by the poor and the 
 unfortunate. . . . And if the Midianites were accustomed 
 
GIDEON. 53 
 
 this light and thin cake was blown along by 
 the wind of God, and came rolling and bound- 
 ing on till it struck the tent and overthrew it. 
 His companion no sooner heard the dream than 
 his own fear interpreted it, '' This is the sword 
 of Gideon." It did not require so sagacious a 
 scout as Gideon to gather from this that already 
 there was the beginning of a panic in the 
 Midianite host. 
 
 But what is chiefly to be observed is, that 
 probably Gideon never saw his own relation to 
 God so distinctly as when it was thus pour- 
 trayed by the Midianite. Gideon felt that he 
 was but the thin, weak, limp cake ; that there 
 was a ludicrous disproportion between the 
 means at his command and the work he was 
 to accomplish. But then, behind him was 
 the unseen but mighty wind of God's Spirit, 
 that swept him on irresistibly and made him 
 
 in their extemporaneous songs to call Gideon and his 
 band eaters of barley-bread, as their successors, those 
 haughty Bedawin, often do, to ridicule their enemies, the 
 application would be all the more natural." — Thomson's 
 Land and Book, 449. 
 
54 ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 invincible. This was Gideon's encouragement, 
 and this must be the encouragement of each of 
 us in all duty. That man must have low aims 
 indeed who never finds himself confronted by 
 duty that he feels to be impossible ; who does 
 not feel again and again that the conquest of 
 sin in himself is impossible ; who is not again 
 and again perplexed by the difficult circum- 
 stances he is silently swept into ; who does not 
 feel helpless before the profound, rooted misery, 
 the masses of distress and crime in the world. 
 What can one do ? We can do nothing of 
 ourselves : God does not expect that we should. 
 But there is nothing we may not do, if the 
 almighty inspiration of God takes us and car- 
 ries us forward as its instrument. But how, 
 you will say, are we to secure that inspiration ? 
 how are we to get into the current of God's 
 Spirit, so as to be carried along by it ? How, 
 we may ask in reply, do sailors get to their 
 destination ? They cannot themselves drag 
 their ship along — they are helpless in this 
 respect ; neither can they raise winds for them- 
 
GIDEON. 55 
 
 selves. They cannot supply their own motive 
 power, and yet they can do all that is necessary. 
 They know where and when certain winds blow, 
 and getting into the current of these, they guide 
 their vessel to its port. You also know the 
 directions in which God's Spirit blows ; you 
 know the objects towards which God is willing 
 to help you ; you know what God Himself 
 aims at and wishes done ; and though you can- 
 not reach those objects by your own strength, 
 yet if you set your face towards them, if you 
 keep your soul in their direction, if you make 
 them your real aim, God's Spirit cannot miss 
 you — you will be caught and carried along in 
 His powerful inspiration. 
 
 No doubt you may often feel spent and ex- 
 hausted, like Gideon's men. Indeed, the words 
 in which he reported the condition of his troops 
 have become one of the favourite mottoes of 
 the Christian life, " Faint, yet pursuing." The 
 motive, the impelling power seems to have died 
 down, and to have left you becalmed. The 
 good works you have engaged in become utterly 
 
56 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 distasteful. The high tone you have been . 
 endeavouring to maintain in your spirits, you 
 sink from with weariness and loathing. You 
 ask, Why am I to be always fighting other 
 people's battles ? '' putting right the numberless 
 things wrong among them, supplying their 
 deficiencies and necessities, doing for them 
 what they ought to do for themselves, and appa- 
 rentl}" little good resulting after all ? " It is so 
 weary to go through, day after day, the same 
 resolutions, the same efforts, the same failures, 
 the same repentances. Faint we all of us must 
 often be who are striving with an}^ earnestness 
 against sin, and who are concerned for the 
 numberless varieties of distress exhibited by our 
 fellow-men. Faintness is the lot of all who 
 undertake laborious and difiicult tasks. But 
 while we experience the one sensation of 
 Gideon's men, let us endeavour to imitate them 
 in the other part of their experience. Faint, 
 let us still be pursuing; keeping the enemy in 
 sight ; not yielding to our natural love of ease, 
 nor wearying of the perpetual labour ; but re- 
 
GIDEON. 57 
 
 membering our duty, that these wearisome con- 
 flicts and efforts ought to be gone through, and 
 must be gone through, if we are to be and do 
 what we ought; remembering how our Lord 
 endured the contradiction of sinners, and 
 resisted unto blood, striving against sin ; and 
 remembering the promises of God, which assure 
 us that in due time we shall reap, if we faint 
 not — that every effort, every sincere renewal of 
 our labour, is seed sown, which may for the 
 time seem to have gone for nothing, but which 
 is certainly not lost, but only hidden, to spring 
 up and reward us with the only harvest worthy 
 of a human life. 
 
III. 
 JOTHAM'S FABLE. 
 
" The ti-ees went forth on a time to anoint a king ove7- 
 them; and they said unto the olive tree, Rei^7i thou over 
 us. But the olive tree said unto them, Should I leave my 
 fatfiess, wherewith by me they honour God and man, a?id 
 go to be proinoted over the tj'ees? And the t7'ees said to 
 the Jig tree, Come thou, and reign over us. But the Jig 
 t?-ee said unto them, Should I Jorsake my sweetness, and 
 my good Jruit, and go to be promoted over the trees ? 
 Then said the trees unto the vine. Come thou a?id reign 
 over us. A7id the vine said tmto them, Should I leave 
 7?iy wi7ie, which cheereth God a7td 77ia7i, a7id go to be pro- 
 77ioted over the trees ? The7i said all the trees unto the 
 bra77ible, Co77ie thou, a7id reig7i over us. A7id the bra77ible 
 said unto the trees, IJ in truth ye a7ioi7it 77ie ki7ig over 
 you, the7i co77ie a7id put your trust i7i 77iy shadow ; a7id ij 
 7iot, let j7-e co77ze out oj the bra77ible, and devour the cedars 
 of Lebanon^' — Judges ix. 8-15. 
 
3[otf)am's Jfable, 
 
 T ^ IE are frequently pointed to ancient Rome 
 ^ ^ for examples of the most successful at- 
 tempts to meet special political emergencies, and 
 for the wisest and strongest forms of rule. And 
 in Rome there was an office very similar to that 
 of the Israelitish judge. In times when the 
 ordinary government seemed insufficient, from 
 the unwieldiness of official movements or from 
 the incapacity of those in office, to meet the 
 special emergency, it was customary to devolve 
 the whole executive power upon a single man, 
 who for a certain time or till a certain task was 
 accomplished became absolute Dictator''' — his 
 
 * Aristotle {Politics III. xiv. 9) observes that in ancient 
 Greece there were "elective tyrannies," to which individuals 
 were appointed "for some definite time named, or for 
 some specified objects." 
 
62 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 judgment and will dictating without appeal 
 what was to be done. The advantages of having 
 a government so elastic as to be able to carry 
 on the yearly routine of political business and 
 to face an emergency with all the concentrated 
 vigour of a single will and a single arm, are 
 obvious. It was a happy combination of the 
 presumed fairness and wisdom of a republic and 
 the rapidity of movement of an absolute mon- 
 archy. The danger lay in the temptation there 
 always was to make the exceptional and occa- 
 sional office of judge a permanent one. It was 
 natural that when the people saw that for every 
 great movement a leader was required, and that 
 no council or assembly could act so vigorously 
 as one man, they should begin to wish that 
 their affairs should be permanently in the hands 
 of one man — a very great mistake, but a mis- 
 take into which both the Romans and the 
 Israelites fell after the lapse of two or three 
 hundred years. It is to the credit of Gideon 
 that he saw this danger, and warned the Israel- 
 ites against it. After his own successes the 
 
JOTHAM'S FABLE. 63 
 
 people came to him and pressed him to accept 
 a permanent headship over them, and from a 
 judge to become a king, saying " Rule thou 
 over us, both thou, and thy son, and thy son's 
 son also." Gideon said unto them, " I will not 
 rule over you, neither shall my son rule over 
 you ; the Lord shall rule over you." 
 
 In these words of Gideon we see to the very 
 heart of the history of this period. The signi- 
 ficance of the long interval of three hundred 
 years between Moses and Samuel is exhibited 
 in the attitude Gideon assumes towards the 
 request of the people that he should become 
 their king. During these years Israel was 
 finding that the theocracy, however good in 
 itself, was not in their case working out any 
 good result. It has always been found a diffi- 
 cult thing to keep a nation together and in such 
 a healthy state as alike to resist foreign inva- 
 sion and internal decay. And it has been too 
 little considered that forms of government 
 which are good for one community are not good 
 for others in different circumstances. Get a 
 
64 ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 people of faith and simplicity enough to live 
 up to it, and theocracy is the best government. 
 It needs no proof that if it is possible for a 
 nation to have and to obey God as their king, 
 the prosperity of that people is secured in the 
 highest degree. But unfortunately magistrates 
 and officials who are amenable only to an un- 
 seen ruler become lax and corruptible. A popu- 
 lation which is not held together by a firm 
 centralization forgets the common interests in 
 what is local or special. The popular conscience 
 requires the aid of outward and awe-inspiring 
 appearances of law and judgment to quicken it 
 to obedience. Perhaps no nation for any long 
 period ever had so much of the Spirit of God, 
 so much remembrance of the Unseen, so much 
 fidelity to the common cause, so much desire to 
 pursue righteousness, as to fit it to live under a 
 theocracy. Certainly Israel did not rise to the 
 occasion. Symptoms of disunion and selfish- 
 ness began to appear among the tribes. The 
 entire government of the country seems to have 
 been disorganised and feeble. Extraordinary 
 
JOTHAM'S FABLE. 65 
 
 abuses, both in religious and civil matters, 
 made their appearance. And this growing 
 corruption, which threatened the nation with 
 extinction, was in after times, if not then, re- 
 ferred chiefly to their want of a visible, earthly 
 monarch. '' In those days there was no king 
 in Israel, but every man did that which was 
 right in his own eyes." And here, in Gideon's 
 kinglike* presence, this smouldering conscious- 
 ness that the theocracy was too ethereal, too 
 spiritual for them, found vent for the first time 
 in the request that he would become their 
 visible king. But just in proportion as he was 
 fit to be their king, did he also shrink from 
 the office. It was as God's servant he had 
 felt courage and power to defeat Midian, and 
 he dared not already deny his and Israel's 
 Sovereign. 
 
 And it is this which characterises the whole 
 period of the judges. It was the period during 
 which the theocracy was tried. Gradually it 
 became more and more evident that Israel 
 
 ■'• Judges viii. 18. 
 6 
 
66 ISJ^AErS IRON AGE. 
 
 could not continue to exist without an earthly 
 governor. The very efficiency of these tem- 
 porar}" and occasional rulers made the people 
 long for a regular and hereditary monarchy. 
 The better men in the nation always resisted 
 this craving, and yet evidently the current of 
 popular opinion and action was strongly setting 
 towards it.* It was shown in the days of Moses 
 and Samuel what the theocracy might be in the 
 hands of wise and faithful men. And it was 
 owing to the self-abnegation and fidelity of the 
 judges, first and last, that the future kings of 
 Israel were taught how to reconcile their own 
 government with the theocracy — a lesson cer- 
 tainly which few of them made use of. 
 
 But what the father thus nobly declined, 
 
 *"As it became evident that the nation could not 
 permanently dispense with an earthly governor, it was 
 forced to consent, if it would not utterly perish, to rally 
 round some powerful human leader, and to obey, next to 
 Jahveh, a king chosen from among themselves." — Ewald, 
 Hist, oj Israel, ii. 359. But Ewald, in his profound and 
 suggestive remarks on this period, ascribes its anarchy 
 and confusion too directly to the theocracy itself, and not 
 to the people's unfitness. 
 
JOTHAM'S FABLE. 67 
 
 became the object of the son's ambition. Abi- 
 melech, who inherited his father's daring energy 
 without his magnanimity, resolved to avail 
 himself of this desire on the part of the people 
 to have a king. His mother was a woman of 
 Shechem, and to that city, therefore, where his 
 influence was naturally greatest, he repaired. 
 Shechem being an important town in the most 
 prominent and ambitious tribe, the tribe of 
 Ephraim, Abimelech saw that could he succeed 
 in being nominated king of Shechem he might 
 very easily come to be king of Israel. He per- 
 suaded his mother's house to advocate his 
 cause, and in order to insure his seat on the 
 throne, he adopted the cruel and unnatural 
 device commonly resorted to in the East, of 
 slaughtering or otherwise disposing of all other 
 possible rivals and claimants to the throne. 
 Greater contrast could not well be than between 
 Gideon and Abimelech : the father declining 
 even those honours to which his merits entitled 
 him, the son thirsting for honours to which he 
 had no claim ; the father having at heart solely 
 6 ^^= 
 
68 ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 the good of his country and people, the son 
 intensely self-seeking and ambitious. The 
 youngest son of Gideon, Jotham, seems to have 
 inherited the hereditary wit of the family, so 
 conspicuous in Gideon and his father — a wit 
 which first enabled Jotham to escape the san- 
 guinary end of his brothers, and then to lash 
 w^ith biting satire the foolish Shechemites and 
 their new king. He must also have inherited 
 the daring and cool courage of his father, a 
 courage which enabled him to collect his 
 thoughts in the midst of imminent danger, and 
 to utter them in circumstances which would 
 have caused the voice of most men to tremble. 
 It is to the fable into which Jotham compressed 
 his views of the transaction that our attention 
 is now to be directed.* 
 
 The fable requires little explanation. It was 
 
 '■'- " It is easy to comprehend how Jotham could stand 
 above Shechem, and deUver his allegory in the hearing 
 of the people, and then ' run away ' before they could 
 take him. Several lofty precipices of Gerizim literally 
 overhang the city, any one of which would answer his 
 purpose." — Thomson's Land and Book, p. 473. 
 
JOTHAAI'S FABLE, 69 
 
 meant to be, and it is, self-interpreting. The 
 trees, says Jotham, wished a king. They went 
 first to the serviceable trees, whose rule would 
 have been an honour to them ; but those trees 
 which really merited to be set in the first place 
 declined empty honour, and preferred to remain 
 in their own humbler but more useful sphere. 
 The trees accordingly were driven in their ex- 
 tremity to the bramble, to the unsightly, useless 
 thorn, for they were resolved rather to have 
 the poorest pretence of a king than none at all. 
 The bramble, with a ludicrous assumption, bids 
 them put trust in his shadow ; and at the same 
 time adds a menace which predicts what his 
 reign shall be — one of fierce tyranny and de- 
 struction. 
 
 The application of the fable is obvious. The 
 people had gone first to the useful man of 
 merit — to Gideon — and besought him to rule 
 over them; but he had declined. To him 
 honour was nothing compared with usefulness. 
 He recognised what he was fit for, and was con- 
 tent with that, foreseeing that if he undertook 
 
70 ISRABLS IRON AGE. 
 
 duties of another and more showy kind he 
 would be out of his element, and fail to be of 
 service to any one. Abimelech, however, could 
 have no such scruples : he, like the bramble, 
 had no sweet and good fruits, no useful employ- 
 ments to abandon, but could accept the office 
 and honours of the kingship just because he 
 was an inferior man, less occupied, less satisfied 
 with his position, more selfish and ambitious. 
 Accordingly the Shechemites found that in 
 choosing Abimelech they had chosen a bramble, 
 a king who really had neither fruit nor shadow 
 for them, a mere thorny stick that could scourge 
 and tear them, and that was for ever kindling 
 into fire against them and consuming them ; 
 and so three years saw them as eager to get 
 rid of their king as they had been to crown 
 him. 
 
 Were the application of this fable confined to 
 the era of Abimelech, we should have less in- 
 terest in it, but we see that it is a felicitous 
 condensation of the principle which regulates 
 the acceptance of many of the high honours 
 
yOTHAM'S FABLE. 71 
 
 and rewards of life. There are manifestly high 
 and honourable ofhces which must be occupied, 
 and there is a series of offices and situations 
 leading on to these high rewards, through 
 which a man may reasonably desire to be pro- 
 moted. There are men who are in their right 
 place at the bottom of the social scale, and in 
 very insignificant positions ; there are others 
 who only find their place at the top, and who 
 are never so useful as when at last they occupy 
 the position of highest influence. Some men 
 must sacrifice private comfort, the sweetness of 
 life, pleasant hours of domestic happiness and 
 leisure, for the sake of the public. It will not 
 do for every one to say with the fig tree. Should 
 I forsake my sweetness and my good fruit, and 
 go to be promoted over the trees ? For there 
 is a great deal of public work that can only be 
 done by men who are found willing to forsake 
 this sweetness. But things are so interlaced in 
 this world, good and evil are so mixed together, 
 and it is so impossible to find any circumstances 
 in which there is nothing but good, that it be- 
 
7 2 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 comes extremely difficult for a thoughtful man 
 to determine when he ought to accept and when 
 he ought to decline offered honours. It is im- 
 portant, therefore, to recognise, on the one 
 hand, that we cannot decline all honour, and 
 ought not to shrink from advancement in this 
 life, because almost every enlargement of our 
 usefulness brings honour with it, and comes in 
 the shape of a reward for what we have been 
 doing in a smaller sphere; and, on the other 
 hand, we must recognise that it may be humility, 
 but it may also be selfish love of ease, which 
 prompts us to say. Should I leave my fatness 
 and my sweetness, and go to be promoted over 
 the trees ? 
 
 The question, therefore, which men have to 
 answer wdien invited to some better position in 
 life, or some honourable office, is not, " Am I 
 not more comfortable as I am? " but, '*Is this 
 honour a mere honour, a mere title or matter of 
 display ? would it bring nothing with it but the 
 greater admiration of my neighbours, or is it an 
 honour because it is a high and useful position ? 
 
JOTHAM'S FABLE. 73 
 
 and will it put into my hands a real and suit- 
 able instrument for doing good ?" It is very 
 well known that many offices in our own 
 country, as well as in Israel, are allowed to 
 go a-begging, and that being refused by men 
 of parts and character, who ought to occupy 
 them, they devolve upon mere brambles, men 
 who grasp at them to serve their own purposes 
 and gratify their own petty ambition. And 
 thus a great part of the public business of 
 the land, and of the various cities and districts 
 in the land, is done by the men who are the 
 least competent to do it ; while the men who 
 ought to be doing it are either pursuing their 
 own private interests, or are at the best occu- 
 pying much less useful positions. As it was in 
 the days of Jotham so it is now : the men who 
 have energetically and successfully filled a cer- 
 tain position, become too much attached to it to 
 forsake it for any other, even though that other 
 be really better suited to them ; whereas the 
 men who have failed, or made very little of 
 their original position, are ready to accept any 
 
7 4 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 other that is offered, for by some perverse and 
 mysterious natural law, incompetency and am- 
 bition are very often combined in one character. 
 The fact of a man's being eager to occupy a 
 higher position is not always a sign that he 
 feels himself qualified for it, but is quite as often 
 only a proof that he is ignorant of his own 
 quality and led by a silly ambition, and is in- 
 competent for any higher duties. 
 
 But a still wider application of the fable will 
 occur to any one who carefully reads it. For 
 what strikes the reader most is perhaps the 
 sagacious contentment of the olive, the fig, and 
 the vine — a contentment and dread of change, 
 which reproach us for our restlessness and 
 craving to be always bettering ourselves. One 
 feels quite an admiration for the quiet and 
 almost sarcastic caution with which these trees 
 recognise the special good, each of its own 
 position ; and it cannot but occur to every one 
 that each of the good trees did recognise the 
 danger of change, and the satisfactoriness of 
 things as they were, while it was the worthless 
 
JOTHAM'S FABLE. 75 
 
 tree that was glad to abandon its natural 
 position and accept the appearance of honour. 
 What special advantages of life, what particu- 
 lar forms of usefulness and comfort Jotham had 
 in view, if he had any, in choosing these par- 
 ticular trees, it is not easy to say. He puts 
 different words into the mouth of each, as if to 
 indicate some diversity of gift between the fat- 
 ness of the olive, the sweetness of the fig, the 
 cheering properties of the vine. His lan- 
 guage is bold and imaginative, and might even 
 scandalize those people who will take things 
 literally, and might be offended by the assertion 
 that God is cheered by wine. But it is obvious 
 that he meant in a general way to point out 
 that there are two or three functions, or em- 
 ployments, or ways of spending life, so much 
 worth a man's while continuing, that he is 
 wise in refusing to abandon them for the sake 
 of what may seem a better position. It is very 
 desirable that men should see the advantages 
 of their own position, for nothing is more 
 enervating than a craving after change, and 
 
7 6 ISRAEL'S IR ON A GE. 
 
 nothing more delusive than the fancy that 
 almost any other position would be better than 
 our own. Nothing gets men into greater diffi- 
 culties than discontent, for in such a state of 
 mind they will grasp at. almost anything that 
 promises change, and so commit themselves to 
 the most unsuitable and harassing positions. 
 And nothing conduces more to peace of mind 
 than that capacity which some men have by 
 nature, and which all may have by cultivating 
 it, of making the most of the circumstances they 
 are in, without weakly fixing their thoughts on 
 everything that is dark and discouraging. 
 
 The '' fatness" which the olive was not dis- 
 posed to forsake in exchange for high position, 
 may very naturally be supposed to symbolize 
 the usefulness which belongs to many obscure 
 positions in life. By the very nature of the 
 case, few men can be distinguished — distinctions 
 are distinctions because they are exceptional — 
 the mass of men must find their lot and happi- 
 ness in something else, and usefulness is happily 
 that which is open to all, and which is calcu- 
 
yO THAM'S I' ABLE. 7 7 
 
 lated to satisfy all. To do a little portion of 
 the work needed to keep the world a-going, to 
 belong to any trade, craft, business, or profes- 
 sion, that is needed for the sustenance or com- 
 fort of men, and to do the work of it carefully, 
 conscientiously, and so as to satisfy one's own 
 idea of how things can best be done, this is the 
 common door by which all of us must enter into 
 contentment. To be useful in the mere me- 
 chanical and material parts of life always wins 
 the respect of men; and one who does his work 
 thoroughly well deserves to be contented, even 
 though the work be of no very important kind. 
 If we are filling a place that somebody must 
 fill, if we are doing work which some one must 
 do, then we should be cautious how we seek 
 change. Moreover, in the life of most of us, 
 the usefulness of our daily occupation is by no 
 means the whole measure of our usefulness. 
 We are mixed up in life with persons who are 
 entangled in difficulties, who are full of faults, 
 who are needing help : wherever we go, in 
 whatever occupation we spend our time, we find 
 
7 8 ISRAErS IR ON A GE. 
 
 this to be the case; and he is a happy man who 
 can disentangle the sinner from the meshes of 
 his sin and pluck his feet out of the net, who 
 can let some tempted person have the strength- 
 ening influence of his society, who can give 
 advice that saves from misery or loss. If men 
 would only recognise the purposes God has in 
 view when He sets them in this place or that, 
 and would endeavour to discover what service 
 they can render to the people about them, they 
 would come to receive as coldly as the olive 
 tree any proposals to leave their fatness. There 
 is in the world a kind of recognised course or 
 progress through which a man should advance, 
 a model life, through the various parts of which 
 every person is expected to pass; and persons 
 W'ho are prevented from living such a life, and 
 from attaining the recognised settlements and 
 advantages of it, are apt to feel as if their life 
 w^ere a lost one, whereas they are preserved 
 from the usual routine just in order that they 
 may be more useful in other and more excep- 
 tional ways. Surely it is after all a weak 
 
yOTHAM'S FABLE. 79 
 
 ambition to be like other men. Are we not 
 more likely to do good and be helpful to other 
 men if we pass through a singular experience, 
 and if we do not find fault with the estate in 
 which God calls us ; if, unencumbered by what 
 the world thinks honours and blessings, we be 
 left to bring forth our own good fruits in a 
 shady, unnoticed, peaceful corner ? 
 
 Again, many lives are soured and rendered 
 wretched to all connected with them, because 
 it is not recognised that sweetness is that to 
 which they are specially called. The fig tree 
 did not think it was a necessary of life ; it 
 did not flatter itself men could not live with- 
 out figs ; but it w^as modestly and reasonably 
 conscious that by bearing figs year after year, 
 it did add an element of a most desirable kind 
 to the life of man. And surely there are m^any 
 persons discontented, soured, and unhappy, ill 
 at ease themselves, and fretting those they live 
 with, simply because they fancy their position 
 is somehow not so pleasant or useful as it 
 might be, and who overlook altogether this 
 
8o ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 circumstance, that it is to sweeten the lives of 
 others they are called. They may not be ab- 
 solutely required in the household to which 
 they belong. Things would go on quite as 
 well without them. But if so, they should 
 recognise that over and above absolute neces- 
 saries of life, there is a great deal that may 
 be done to brighten and cheer the lives of 
 those we live with. You may not be able 
 quite to bear the burden under which some 
 one near you is bending, but you are able to 
 be loving, and cheerful, and patient, from day 
 to day. You can at least hide your own 
 burden, and by a pious fraud seem unencum- 
 bered by care and sorrow. Taking the mere 
 word of the fable, the " sweetness " of the fig, 
 every one knows what a blessing in a house- 
 hold is even one sweet temper, one disposition 
 that is not ruffled, that does not take offence 
 that does not think every one else in the 
 wrong, that does not vaunt itself, but is quiet, 
 reasonable, patient, meek. For some among 
 us, both young and old, there does seem to be 
 
JOTHAM'S FABLE. 8i 
 
 little, if anything else to do, than to live a 
 loving and bright life — to be as cheerful as 
 we can, not to depress those we live with by 
 looks of gloom and indifference ; but to put 
 aside our own sorrows, if we have them, and 
 cheer others by our own cheerfulness. It may 
 seem a small thing to do, but;^ in truth, "he 
 that ruleth his spirit is greater than he that 
 taketh a city ;" and it is not the man or woman 
 who has hidden his own pain and grief, and 
 tried to live cheerfully, so as to sweeten the 
 life of another, who will say it is a small 
 thing to do. At all events, whether small or 
 great, it is this which the fable before us shows 
 to be quite worth living for. And therefore it 
 becomes those who sit with gloomy looks and 
 folded hands to consider whether there is no 
 life which they might and ought to sweeten. 
 It is sad to see how often persons, who might 
 quicken one another in every good thing, and 
 might provoke one another to love, do only 
 irritate and vex one another's spirit, and this 
 very much because they do not recognise the 
 7 
 
8 2 ISRAEL'S IR ON A GE. 
 
 cheerfulness and brightness they might impart 
 to one another, and that one main end to which 
 they are called is to do this very thing. And 
 this is true not only of those who never think 
 what their duty to others is, but of those also 
 who seek to know and to do it, and yet, by 
 some unhappy twist in their own temper, con- 
 tinually do harm where they wish to do good. 
 So few seem to understand the power of sweet- 
 ness in persuading men, or, if they understand 
 it, cannot control or humble themselves to use 
 it. But '' the wrath of man worketh not the 
 righteousness of God," neither does the posi- 
 tiveness or overbearingness of man accomplish 
 w^hat God righteously intends. And men who 
 would do good must bring themselves to use 
 the instrument which is fit for the end they 
 have in view. The bugle, which is most suit- 
 able for giving orders in the roar of a battle 
 and the rattle of musketry, is notperhaps the 
 best instrument for bidding a child to sleep. 
 Peremptoriness is not always equivalent to 
 efficiency. Any one who has tried to catch 
 
JOTHAM'S FABLE. 83 
 
 an unbridled horse in a field knows how little 
 persuasive power there is in violent language. 
 The assumption of a tone of authority or in- 
 fallibility defeats the ends of persuasion quite 
 as certainly as the admission of a tone of en- 
 treaty destroys the authority of one who should 
 rightfully command. 
 
 But a third lesson for individuals in private 
 life, which we gather from this fable, is how 
 contemptible a thing is display and worldly 
 honour, and what is called style. These trees 
 were wise enough to see through it, and to 
 despise it ; but how many people have equal 
 wisdom ? These trees did not think it so very 
 desirable a thing to be looked up to as occu- 
 pying a high position, and certainly would not 
 sacrifice either use or comfort to mere display. 
 Now, surely, if there is one vice manifest on 
 the face of society at the present day, it is 
 the craving for show, for making a figure in 
 the eyes of the world. People will not be 
 content to live comfortably, to be moderate in 
 their expenses, quiet in their ways ; but must 
 
 7* 
 
84 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 be doing as other people do, must commit the 
 same extravagancies, even though they have 
 really no taste for them ; must deny themselves 
 the enjoyments they prefer, that they may 
 seem to enjoy themselves like their neigh- 
 bours ; bind themselves religiously to do many 
 troublesome things, for no other reason what- 
 ever than that it is expected of them. How 
 few persons do you find who are bold enough 
 to live according to their own tastes and judg- 
 ment ; how few who do not cramp their own 
 enjoyment, and even do violence to their own 
 conscience, by considering what will look well 
 in the eyes that are watching them. So we 
 add to our life a number of things that go by 
 the name of luxuries, but which are in reality 
 fetters and burdens, and impose on ourselves 
 countless observances which we hate, but 
 which, for the sake of appearances, we must 
 accept. The consequence is that the spirit 
 becomes false, and the life is worn out by 
 useless forms and meaningless labour; the 
 useful services which might be rendered 
 
JOTHAM'S FABLE. 85 
 
 are neglected, and time cannot be found for 
 them. 
 
 In conclusion, Jotham shall not have spoken 
 this parable in vain for us if we carry away 
 from its perusal the settled conviction that in 
 life there is something better than mere show 
 or the mere attainment of the rewards accorded 
 by the world to its successful men. The real 
 value of human life does not lie on the surface, 
 lies indeed so deep that very many people 
 never see it at all. And they who fancy that 
 its value lies in high position or success, are apt 
 to think, when they find how little satisfaction 
 there is in these, that there is nothing at all 
 in life, and that it matters very little on what 
 a man spends himself. But our Lord would 
 not have come from heaven to enable us to do 
 what was not worth doing : the fact that He 
 thought human life, a life in this very world 
 that we have to live through, worth living, and 
 not only so, but the most capable life possible 
 for spending a Divine fulness of wisdom and 
 goodness in, shows us that there are objects on 
 
86 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 which we may liberally spend ourselves, in the 
 persuasion that they will not disappoint us. 
 What these objects are we have already seen, 
 and it is for each of us to find them in his own 
 life, and not to live on without taking thought, 
 or without assuming any guidance of his own 
 ways, and so as to secure that he be of some 
 service to his fellows. Very often, indeed, a 
 man's life is .taken out of his own hands, and 
 his course shaped by things beyond his own 
 will : he cannot choose for himself the position 
 in which he would work nor the means he 
 would use in serving God and his neighbour; 
 but if a man will only humbly accept what 
 comes to him, "and will submit himself to Pro- 
 vidence, to its restrictions, to the changes or 
 the want of change it imposes, and will only 
 strive to do good as he has opportunity, he will 
 not lack the blessing of God, but will be like 
 the vine that cheereth God and man. There 
 are circumstances so afflicting and straitened, 
 so very tormenting and hampering, that we are 
 apt to think we do well if only we do not cry 
 
JOTHAM'S FABLE. 87 
 
 out and let all the world know how we suffer ; 
 but there is a better thing to do always, and 
 that is, to set ourselves with patience and 
 humble self-crucifixion to think of others and do 
 our best for them. In the worst circumstances, 
 in circumstances so perplexing we know not 
 how to act, there always remains some duty 
 we are aware of, some kind and loving thing we 
 can do, and by doing which other duties become 
 clearer. In circumstances so troublous to our- 
 selves that we feel as if the curse of God were 
 resting on us, there remains a something to be 
 done which we could in no other circumstances 
 do, a good fruit to be borne which needs these 
 grievous circumstances as its soil, and which, 
 when it is borne, will be more sweet to our 
 taste eternally than all the happiness which 
 success and pleasure in this world can give. 
 
IV. 
 
 JEPHTHAH. 
 
" And JephtJiah came to Mizpah unto his house, and, 
 behold, his daughter came out to ineet him with timbrels 
 and with dances : and she was his only child; beside her 
 he had neither son nor daughter. And it came to pass, 
 when he saw her, that he rejit his clothes, aitd said, Alas, 
 my daughter ! thou hast brought me very low, a fid thou 
 art one of them that trouble me : for I have opened my 
 motith u7ito the Lord, and I cannot go back. And she said 
 unto him, My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto 
 the Lord, do to ?Jte according to that which hath pi'o- 
 ceeded out of thy mouthr — Judges xi. 34-36. 
 
JUDGES X. 6-XII. 7. 
 
 /^^UR estimate of the general character of 
 ^-^^ any period of history must to a great extent 
 regulate our estimate of its leading men and of 
 their actions. One of the difficulties which the 
 student of any historical character has to over- 
 come, is the difficulty of ascertaining the exact 
 stage of physical and moral development to 
 which that character belonged. To test the 
 antique virtues by a modern standard would be 
 as fallacious as to test the prowess of a mailed 
 warrior by exposing him to the fire of modern 
 artillery instead of to the clothyard shafts of 
 his own times. A man may have been service- 
 able and admirable in his own day, although 
 by the side of Paul he would seem incongruous, 
 formed on another model, and useless. The 
 
92 ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 vigorous physique and martial qualities, the 
 muscular strength that could break bows of 
 steel in pieces, the crafty wiles of semi-civilized 
 warriors, were no longer the subject of exulting 
 songs of triumph, when the w^ork given to 
 God's servants was to bring all men to the 
 meek and lowly spirit of Christ. And one 
 great purpose which is served by the long 
 course of Bible history is to widen our minds 
 and invite us to see God's purpose growing to- 
 wards accomplishment through every genera- 
 tion, however apparently rude and unfit for so 
 high a work, and by means of men most unlike 
 one another. 
 
 But no period is more unlike our own times, 
 and therefore further from our sympathies and 
 understanding, than the period of the judges 
 of Israel. As our conception of what we do 
 not perfectly understand is materially aided by 
 comparing it to something we are already ac- 
 quainted with, this period may perhaps best be 
 apprehended by comparing it to that of the 
 Homeric heroes, or to the lawless and disturbed 
 
JEPHTHAH. 93 
 
 times in our own country when robber chief- 
 tains could hold a large district under subjec- 
 tion. Though many of the practices were 
 barbarous, it would be a mistake to think of 
 the Israelites of the period as mere savages ; 
 for some of the actions which most shock a 
 modern reader of the narrative, such as the 
 cutting up of the Levite's concubine, and dis- 
 tributing the pieces among the tribes of Israel, 
 as well as the horrible outrage which led to 
 this, seem equally to have shocked the Israelites 
 themselves.* And we must also bear in mind 
 that although there was no literature by which 
 the people might be educated, yet there was 
 stirring among them all that gives promise of a 
 literature — love of song and of terse and witty 
 sayings, a knowledge of the art of writing, as 
 well as of those arts in which the mechanical 
 
 * "It would be extremely perverse to conclude, from 
 these single outbreaks of savage licentiousness (related 
 in Judges xix.), that such was the condition of all the 
 cities and tribes — the more so since we have seen them 
 followed up by immediate punishment through a powerful 
 movement on the part of the whole people." — Ewald, ii. 
 354. 
 
94 ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 and artistic faculties are both employed. Still 
 we do not rightly apprehend the period, nor 
 what was required to be done in it, unless we 
 give full weight to its roughness and fierceness. 
 They were times in which a woman could wile 
 a man to sleep under her roof, and, while he 
 slept, drive a tent - pin through his temples. 
 Like the North-American Indians, the warriors 
 with whom the Israelites engaged called them- 
 selves after the lower animals, as the wolf and 
 the raven, that the qualities which fitted them 
 for battle might be recognised. And that the 
 Israelites were not on a much higher level of 
 civilisation themselves, may be gathered from 
 their treatment of Adoni-bezek, whose thumbs 
 and toes they cut off.* They were times when 
 it was possible for a man to maintain himself 
 by heading a band of freebooters ; times, as the 
 
 * It is true, as Ewald remarks, that Cassar, who was 
 certainly no barbarbian, was guilty of similar atrocities ; 
 but Caesar felt that apology or excuse was needed, and 
 his contemporary, Cicero, absolutely condemned every 
 such practice, asserting the great principle, Jtihil quod 
 cncdele utile est. 
 
JEPHTHAH. 95 
 
 narrative before us shows, when human sacri- 
 fices were not yet impossible. 
 
 It was on men capable of such deeds, men 
 who, like the barons who founded the liberties 
 of our own country, could not read nor sign 
 their own names ; men whose hands one day 
 held the plough or the pruning knife, and the 
 next day the sword ; it was on such men as 
 these, we read, that the Spirit of God came, 
 impelling them to rise and do battle for Israel. 
 And it strikes every reader of this book that 
 while in it, more than in any other book of the 
 Old Testament, reference is made to the Spirit 
 of God as instigating and empowering men, the 
 deeds to which He impels them are anything 
 but what we are accustomed to call spiritual. 
 They were deeds for the most part of martial 
 prowess. Still, it was deeds of this kind which 
 were then needed to forward God's purpose with 
 the world. And to do these deeds the Spirit 
 enabled those who were chosen for the work ; 
 not supernaturally investing them with a refine- 
 ment of character or sanctity of disposition 
 
96 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 which would have been incongruous with the 
 times in which they lived. The judges went 
 to their work in the strength of Jehovah, be- 
 lieving in Him as more powerful than all that 
 could be against them, and believing also that 
 it was His will to free His people from all op- 
 pression. They had, that is to say, faith in 
 God ; and what they did, as we are told in the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews, they did by faith. It 
 was this belief that gave them courage and 
 success. But faith is the property of children 
 as well as, or indeed much more than, of men 
 of mature understanding; and how little under- 
 standing the Israelites yet had of the God who 
 had adopted them is sufficiently shown by the 
 story of Jephthah.* God does not supersede 
 nature in the development of the character 
 either of individuals or of nations. He takes 
 men as he finds them, and through the blunders 
 and vices of their present stage leads them on 
 
 "' Kuenen, after the usual display of critical acumen 
 in sifting the truth from the error in the narrative, reaches 
 substantially the same results which the ordinary reader 
 of the book of Judges arrives at. 
 
JEPHTHAH. 97 
 
 to something higher and better. He is the 
 ever-watchful husbandman, but the vine is not 
 by His care or Spirit made independent of the 
 great laws on which He has ordained that all 
 growth shall proceed. 
 
 As is frequently the case, the chief interest 
 and instructiveness of Jephthah's career gather 
 round that event in his life which to himself 
 and his contemporaries might seem to mar its 
 symmetry and destroy its usefulness. It is 
 the great blunder of his life, his unfortunate 
 vow, which unceasingly draws back men's 
 attention to him. He knew enough of war 
 to understand that this undertaking he had 
 entered into against the Ammonites would 
 either make or mar him. It was the golden 
 opportunity that comes once in a man's life. 
 Through all his nature he was moved in pro- 
 spect of the approaching battle. It made him 
 thoughtful, concentrated, grave. He felt more 
 than usually thrown back upon God's help ; he 
 wished to feel sure of God, and so, according to 
 his light, vowed a vow, and said, ''' If thou shalt 
 8 
 
98 ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 without fail deliver the children of Ammon into 
 mine hands, then it shall be that whatsoever * 
 cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet 
 me, when I return in peace, shall surely be the 
 Lord's, and I will offer it for a burnt-offering." 
 Was it right of Jephthah to make a vow ? 
 We know he was wrong in the terms of it, but 
 was he wrong in making any vow in the cir- 
 cumstances ? It is open to any one to say that 
 he had a merely heathen idea of God, as a 
 Being to be bribed, to be secured by gifts and 
 promises. It was very common with heathen 
 generals to record such a vow before engaging ; 
 and it is common still to see men who wish 
 to acknowledge God in some way, but don't 
 know how to do it. They wish to be religious, 
 think it a good and right thing, but neither 
 knowing nor loving God, they are pitiably awk- 
 ward in their demonstrations of religious feel- 
 ing. Perhaps it has been your lot to hear the 
 grossly selfish promises some sick men make, 
 
 - It should be observed that the Septuagint fearlessly, 
 and in accordance with the view adopted below, translate 
 this " whosoever." 
 
JEPHTHAH. 99 
 
 fancying this to be religion ; their greedy lust of 
 the world and of life prompts them to promise 
 God anything if only they get well, and they 
 think this a good state of spirit. And there 
 are more subtle and disguised ways in which 
 the same superstitious vowing goes on. Have 
 you never found yourself seeking success in 
 something, and endeavouring to get God on 
 your side to secure it, by the unvvorded tacit 
 promise to live better ? You feel encouraged to 
 hope for God's help, because you will conform 
 3^our life more to His will — as if you could live 
 better without getting God's help for this also 
 — as if everything with which you propose to 
 coax or bribe God into aiding you must not 
 itself be taken from God's own treasury. 
 
 But as we have no distinct evidence regard- 
 ing Jephthah's state of mind in making this 
 vow, it is the part of charity to believe that 
 though he was incomprehensibly rash in the 
 terms of his vow, yet he was justified in vowing 
 to make some offering to God should He deliver 
 the Ammonites into his hand. 
 8 - 
 
loo ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 But there remains the more important ques- 
 tion : Supposing him to have been right in 
 making the vow, was he right in keeping it ? 
 Might he or might he not have broken his 
 promise to God when he saw what it had in- 
 volved him in ? Some persons seem to con- 
 found a promise m.ade to God and a promise to 
 man, and to apply to the one the same rule as 
 to the other. They argue that as you cannot 
 break a promise to man, even though you find 
 you have sworn to your own hurt, so neither 
 can you break a vow made to God. Luther, 
 e.g., has been freely blamed on this ground for 
 breaking his monastic vow, and marrying. But 
 the distinction between a promise to man and a 
 vow to God is sufficiently obvious.* When you 
 
 * The distinction is made by Paley in his Moral Philo- 
 sophy., and is admirably expanded by a writer in the 
 Spectator iox 29th Dec., 1866, from which we extract the 
 following :— " To keep a vow to God merely as we would 
 keep a human contract, even though we regret it and 
 reproach ourselves with making it ; to deal with Him as 
 Jephthah did when he promised to sacrifice the first living 
 thing that met him on his return home ; to treat Him as a 
 Being who expects us to keep our bargains iterally, even 
 
JEPHTHAH. loi 
 
 have made a promise or entered into an engage- 
 ment or contract with a man, and it turns out 
 to be to your disadvantage to keep it, it may 
 still be to the other party's advantage, and you 
 are not entitled to defraud him of his interest 
 in the transaction. However much you dislike 
 fulfilling the agreement, you cannot break faith 
 with him, unless it is positively sinful to fulfil 
 it. But the case often happens that both 
 parties to a contract eventually see it to be 
 wise to fall from it ; and where both parties 
 honestly and heartily wish it cancelled, to fulfil 
 it ceases to be a duty. Two men are very 
 foolish or stubborn who fulfil an agreement 
 which they both see to be disadvantageous, 
 and wish to fall away from. No duty whatever 
 compels them to fulfil it, and if they do so they 
 are justly the laughing-stock of their acquaint- 
 when we recognize that such bargains were rash and evil ; 
 is to think of God as a heathen deity, who hves outside 
 us, and neither knows nor cares what judgment we pass 
 upon ourselves for having made such a bargain; whereas 
 He is really at the very centre of the thought which con- 
 demns the bargain, and it is His spirit, not our own, which 
 tells us it was rash and wrong." 
 
102 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 ances. Now, this is precisely the case in which 
 a man finds himself who has vowed to God 
 what turns out to be sinful, for God can never 
 wish him to fulfil a contract which, he now 
 sees, involves sin. A man swears to do a 
 certain thing because he thinks it will be pleas- 
 ing to God, but if he discovers that, instead of 
 being pleasing, it will be hateful to God, to per- 
 form his vow, and do that vowed but hateful 
 thing, is to insult God. By the very discovery 
 of the sinfulness of a vow, the maker of it is 
 absolved from performing it. God shrinks 
 much more than he can do from the perpetra- 
 tion of sin. .Both parties fall from the agree- 
 ment. 
 
 But it has, as you must be aware, often been 
 urged that Jephthah did not keep his vow, but 
 compromised the matter by causing her to take 
 a vow of virginity — to become a nun, in fact. 
 In a question thus debated one can, of course, 
 only give his own opinion, but this supposition 
 does seem to me to sacrifice the plain and 
 obvious interpretation of the narrative. It is 
 
JEPHTHAH. 103 
 
 distinctly said that Jephthah's vow ran in these 
 terms: '' Whatsoever cometh forth of the doors 
 of my house to meet me shall surely be the 
 Lord's, and / will offer it up for a himit-offering.'" 
 In verse 39 we are as plainly informed that 
 her father did with her according to the vow 
 which he had vowed. If he did not offer her 
 as a burnt-offering, then he did not do with her 
 according to the vow. Moreover, why all this 
 wailing and anguish if, after all, all that was 
 going to happen to her is what happens to 
 thousands who seem to stand in little need of 
 compassion ? Then, again, why did she ask for 
 the one favour of a respite of two months to 
 bewail her virginity, if she was to have thirty 
 or forty years with leisure for that purpose ? 
 And, lastly, if the mere fact of her remaining 
 unmarried fulfilled even that part of the vow 
 which specified that she was to be the Lord's, 
 then what objection can we make to other 
 young women giving themselves to the Lord 
 in the same way? If Jephthah's daughter 
 became a nun, and if this was judged a fulfil- 
 
1 04 ISRAEL'S IR ON A GE. 
 
 ment of his vow, if by being a virgin she was 
 somehow more the Lord's than by being a 
 married woman, a stronger foundation need not 
 be sought for the establishment of nunneries.* 
 
 It is, indeed, no wonder that men of any 
 sensibiHty should have turned every stone to 
 find a reason for escaping the conclusion that 
 Jephthah, like a second Abraham, but guided 
 by a different spirit, should have led his 
 daughter to the altar, and have thought he 
 was doing God service. It is true, human 
 sacrifice was no uncommon thing in those 
 days, and there is reason to fear that the 
 Israelites did not keep themselves pure from 
 the unnatural worship of Moloch ; but the 
 sacrifice of a full-grown maiden by her own 
 father finds only one or two parallels in history, 
 and these have always lived in men's memories 
 as among the most piteous and tragic of events. 
 There is a tenderness of affection which sub- 
 
 * It will be understood that the foregoing paragraph is 
 written with the utmost respect for those who hold the 
 opposite view, that Jephthah did not slay his daughter. 
 
JEPHTHAH. 105 
 
 sists between father and daughter which is 
 altogether peculiar and of its own kind. The 
 relation of father and son has its own beauty 
 and interest, but of all the various relationships 
 wherewith God enlarges our hearts and beau- 
 tifies our life, there is none more tender and 
 graceful than that which subsists between 
 father and daughter — between the rough, 
 active man, who has seen the passions and 
 vices of men, war and the world, and the 
 cherished daughter of his home, who gives 
 him as much strength, by her dependence on 
 him and by her innocence, as he gives her 
 by his protection. It was this that caused 
 Jephthah to rend his clothes in dismay, and 
 exclaim, "Alas, my daughter! thou hast brought 
 me very low." 
 
 Jephthah's daughter is plainly one of the 
 highest maidenly characters you anywhere, 
 either in sacred or profane history, or in actual 
 life, meet with. You cannot fail to be struck 
 with her promptitude in accepting, without 
 any murmur, without hesitation, without sur- 
 
io6 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 prise even, the fearful doom which was brought 
 upon her by her father's rashness — the beau- 
 tiful and exquisitely delicate tenderness with 
 which she sees his difficulty, and hastens, at 
 the cost of all her own hopes and life, to 
 relieve him ; her piety, filial and godly ; her 
 self-sacrifice ; her maidenly ambition and her 
 maidenly modesty ; everything about her so 
 pure, so dutiful, so self-ignoring, so wise in 
 love, and all sacrificed to the superstition of 
 a hot-headed warrior. Better certainly that, 
 if the sacrifice were to be, it should be ren- 
 dered in such a spirit by the victim ; better 
 that she should die collected, resolute, willing 
 and pure, than that she should be carried 
 screaming to the altar, or imprecating curses 
 on her unhappy father. We can scarcely 
 help thinking that if the sacrifice itself was 
 horrible, her spirit, the spirit of the sacrifice, 
 was acceptable to God, and that while what 
 she did in ignorance was pardoned, what she 
 did through reverence and dutiful submission 
 to her father was accepted. 
 
JEPHTHAH. 107 
 
 Still, one cannot but join with her in be- 
 wailing the abrupt and terrible close of her 
 precious young life — cannot but lament that 
 so much nobleness and purity of character 
 should have been lost, and needlessly lost, to 
 Israel ; for the hope of any community very 
 much lies in its young women. But it is 
 this wail of Jephthah's daughter that rises 
 from every generation of this world's history. 
 What we are all of us called upon to see 
 with our own eyes, and judge with our own 
 hearts, is a similar, or much more grievous 
 waste of all that is good in human nature, 
 of devotedness to country and family, of fine 
 feeling, of the best intellect. Again and 
 again, in our owm society, we see the most 
 splendid mental abilities squandered in the 
 quest of what can never be discovered, the 
 truest eloquence and highest moral feeling 
 consecrated to a cause that is not worth 
 lifting a finger to defend. Who has not seen 
 the most precious human feelings wasted, you 
 would say, on worthless people, while they 
 
1 08 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 might have fertilised and enriched responsive 
 natures — the noblest devotedness sacrificed 
 to a mere lie, or deception, or mockery ? 
 Two months was not too long to weep over 
 the dreadful misguidedness of human actions, 
 and the consequent waste or outward un- 
 profitableness of what is best in human 
 nature. 
 
 Still, there is a compensating element even 
 here. These companions who sympathised 
 with their friend, and at last decked her as if 
 for her bridal, and* gave her into her father's 
 hands, must no doubt have felt to the close of 
 life that a world in which anything so tragic 
 could happen was a blighted, melancholy world. 
 
 * The often cited lines of the Atitigoiie of Sophocles 
 may once again be referred to, as ilkistrating the ancient 
 feehng regarding a virgin's death : — 
 
 " Alone he leads me, who has room for all, 
 Hades, the lord of death, 
 To Acheron's dark shore. 
 With neither part nor lot in marriage rites. 
 No marriage hymn resounding in my ears. 
 But Acheron shall claim me as his bride." 
 
 Line S09. Comp. also li?ie 915. 
 
JEPHTHAH. 109 
 
 Still, as they themselves passed through the 
 various womanly duties that fell to them, and 
 felt still the hold that event had taken ; as they 
 told the story of the noble maiden to their own 
 children, and found how it moved and con- 
 trolled them, and how many, through that 
 example, were urged to more self-sacrificing 
 deeds, and to higher thoughts about what is 
 beautiful and good in life ; must not these wo- 
 men sometimes have thought that possibly the 
 real children of Jephthah's daughter, those who 
 had truly succeeded to her nature, were more 
 and better than could have been hers, had she 
 lived ? If then by family circumstances, or in 
 any other way, wx are called upon to sacrifice 
 our own will to what seems a very needless, 
 provoking, and rash plan, what we have to do 
 is to seek to have something of the spirit of 
 Jephthah's daughter, and accept our position 
 without a murmur; knowing that, though we 
 do not see how^ any more than she did, this 
 may, and will, by God's blessing, result in 
 such development of our own character, and 
 
1 1 o ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 such enlargement of our usefulness, as could 
 not otherwise be attained. 
 
 In conclusion, notice the last scene in con- 
 nection with this expedition of Jephthah 
 against the Ammonites. The Ephraimites 
 came to him with precisely the complaint 
 they had made to Gideon. Their pride was 
 hurt that they had not been invited to join 
 the expedition. Possibly, in the first instance, 
 they had really been hurt at the neglect; 
 probably they now only wished to share the 
 spoil on a false plea. They knew what had 
 been going on, but did not wish to aid Jeph- 
 thah. So quickly, often, and so certainly does 
 mere pretence take the place of real good 
 feeling ; so speedily does right action, if it 
 has been successful, degenerate into the mere 
 imitation of right action, into a spurious and 
 fictitious manner of conduct. Jephthah tells 
 them plainly they are deceivers, and that if 
 they are disposed to quarrel with him, they 
 are welcome to do so. Accordingly, a battle 
 is fought, Ephraim is put to flight, and Jeph- 
 
JEPHTHAH. Ill 
 
 thah's Gileadites take the fords of Jordan, to 
 cut off their enemy from escape. But how are 
 they to distinguish friend from foe as they 
 hurry in one undistinguishable mass to the 
 river ? Some quick-witted man among them 
 proposes an easy mode of effectually discrimi- 
 nating friend from foe. There was a slight 
 difference of pronunciation in the land of Eph- 
 raim. The men born there had a difficulty 
 in pronouncing s, A, — as each of our own 
 counties has its own peculiar dialect, which 
 most of us who have any ear can readily 
 enough distinguish. It is proposed, therefore, 
 to seize each man as he is plunging into the 
 stream, and put him to the test by asking him 
 to name the Hebrew word for stream. If he 
 could say, Shibboleth, he was allowed to go 
 his way ; but if he said Sibboleth, it was the 
 last word he was allowed to utter. 
 
 It is worth our while then to notice the per- 
 fect efficiency of this test. It was a very slight 
 thing, a thing which perhaps many of the 
 Ephraimites had never noticed as a peculiarity 
 
1 1 2 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 of their own ; but this dropping of a letter, or 
 scarcely a letter, but only an aspirate, was 
 their death-warrant. And with perfect justice, 
 because that slight peculiarity infallibly showed 
 to what tribe they belonged, and under whose 
 standard they had been fighting. It is often 
 just such a slight peculiarity which identifies 
 men as belonging to a certain district or 
 family. You know whose son a man is by 
 some motion of his hands or by his walk, 
 by the fall of a lock of hair or the way 
 he lifts his eye : so also some very slight 
 peculiarity in our conduct or conversation is a 
 sufficient index to our whole state. In our 
 Lord's account of the last judgment He de- 
 scribes all men as expressing astonishment that 
 they should be so summarily dealt wath, should 
 be allotted to their irrevocable destinies on 
 grounds apparently so trivial. Is it fair that 
 a man should lose eternity, should be banished 
 from life and hope without appeal, simply be- 
 cause on some occasion he had neglected to 
 give a beggar boy a penny, or omitted to visit 
 
JEPHTHAH. 113 
 
 a sick person ? Is it really reasonable that for 
 some trifle of this kind a man should be ever- 
 lastingly damned, irretrievably and once for all 
 cast in judgment ? You will think that it is 
 quite reasonable if, in the light of this incident, 
 you consider that the little things a man does 
 or neglects to do are infallible symptoms of his 
 character. These Ephraimites were not slain 
 because the Gileadites thought it a heinous 
 crime to drop the h ; but their blood dyed the 
 Jordan because it was Ephraimite blood, and 
 this was manifested by their little peculiarity. 
 And so in a thousand ways that God ob- 
 serves, and that even men of any spiritual 
 insight or keenness of observation notice, we 
 are in little things revealing our character, and 
 in the final judgment one of these little things 
 will be sufficient to condemn us. To be a little 
 vain, or somewhat niggardly to the poor ; to 
 indulge now and then in worldly pleasure, and 
 get entangled in its gaieties ; to drop an occa- 
 sional oath, or, when hard pushed, to have re- 
 course to a lie or deceit ; such things as these, 
 9 
 
1 1 4 ISRAEL'S IRON A GE. 
 
 you think, cannot doom you to everlasting 
 misery. We would not wish, you maintain, to 
 serve a God who could stand on such trivial 
 matters ; we despise a government that would 
 take notice of such petty offences. No doubt; 
 but what if these little things are the dropping 
 of the h, that shows to which tribe you belong ? 
 What if they are the certain indications of a 
 character that is, at the core, in separation from 
 God and hateful to Him ? 
 
 And if you doubt whether these trivial things, 
 in which you find you are not quite in harmony 
 with God's word, are really indications of your 
 true character, or only faults unnatural to you, 
 but which you fall into through strong temp- 
 tation, there is a very ready test by which you 
 may satisfy yourself. Try and put away these 
 little faults : if you succeed, then you are safe. 
 But the faults of your character, the little 
 actions that truly express what is in you, you 
 cannot so easily put off. There often arise 
 circumstances even in this life in which a more 
 holy and decided character than we possess 
 
JEPHTHAH, 115 
 
 were most desirable : we could pass through 
 what has come upon us in a vastly more 
 satisfactory way if only we were other kind of 
 men than we are ; but this is impossible. 
 These Ephraimites could not for the nonce 
 become Gileadites ; not for their life could 
 they make that little change in their mode of 
 speech. And so we cannot, on the sudden, 
 change ourselves. If certain little things about 
 you make you suspect you belong to the wrong 
 tribe ; if there are little flaws in your conduct 
 which you find extremely hard to remove, and 
 which hint to you that perhaps or probably the 
 very roots of your character are wrong ; then 
 go quickly to God, for you have but this one 
 resource and way of escape, and offer to forsake 
 your old tribe, to be born again, and beseech 
 His grace to effect in you a thorough and real 
 change of heart, such as He has effected in 
 many. 
 
 9* 
 
V. 
 
 SAMSON. 
 
" A7id she made him sleep upon her knees j and she 
 called for a man, and she caused Jiim to shave off the seven 
 locks of his head J and she began to afflict him, and his 
 strength went from him. And she said, The Philistines 
 be upon thee, Sainson. And he awoke out of his sleep, 
 and said, I will go out as at other times before, ajid shake 
 myself And he wist not that the Lord was departed from 
 him. But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, 
 and brought him dow7i to Gaza, a7id bound him witli fetters 
 of brass ; and he did grijid in the prison house. Howbeit 
 the hair of his head began to grow again after he was 
 shaveji." — Judges xvi. 19-22. 
 
damson. 
 
 JUDGES XIII -XVL 
 
 TN analyzing any Old Testament nariative 
 that we may find in it what is true for 
 all time, we must first of all get hold of some 
 rational principle of interpretation. We must 
 not give ourselves up to the leading of mere 
 fancy. If you merely wish to find analogies 
 and figures for New Testament truth, that is 
 very easy and very profitless work. It is 
 easy to allegorize the whole life of Samson — ■ 
 easy, for example, to find in his falling in love 
 with a selfish and faithless Philistine woman 
 a type of our Lord's loving the Church, alien 
 as she was, and unloving and apt to betray 
 Him ; in Samson's slaying the lion that met 
 him on his way to his bride at Timnath, 
 and finding honey in the carcase when he 
 
120 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 returned, you may, if you please, see a picture 
 of Christ fighting His way to His bride through 
 many dangers, and of His bringing meat and 
 refreshment out of the most roaring and for- 
 midable and ravenous of His foes, even out of 
 death itself. In the thirty Philistines vaunt- 
 ing their solution of Samson's riddle after they 
 had coaxed and threatened it out of his bride, 
 3'ou may think you see a very apt and sig- 
 nificant and not too sarcastic a representation 
 of the men of science and philosophers of the 
 present day who vaunt their knowledge of all 
 the mysteries of nature, human and Divine, 
 while they forget that this their enlighten- 
 ment is at bottom due to the discovery Christ 
 has made to His Church of the deepest prob- 
 lems of existence ; that they could never have 
 made these discoveries any more than the 
 Greeks and Romans but for the impulse which 
 Christianity has given to all knowledge, and 
 for the actual disclosures made by Christ on 
 earth for the sake of His Church. You may 
 thus give the rein to fancy, and you may 
 
SAMSON. 12 1 
 
 possibly thus find in the narrative figures, or 
 substantial forms, for some edifying truth; but 
 this is not to interpret Scripture. If we wish 
 honestly to make out what God did and taught 
 through Samson, we must ask ourselves not 
 what any fanciful mind can now, in the light 
 of the New Testament, bring out of the narra- 
 tive, but what good did the contemporaries of 
 Samson receive from him, and what impressions 
 were produced in their minds by his career? 
 These old heroes were sent, not for the mere 
 sake of being types of Christ so that now we 
 can look back upon them and see a reflection 
 of Christ, but they were sent that in the first 
 place they might be deliverers to their own 
 generation, and as such we must study them. 
 
 First, then, we must find an answer to this 
 question. What principles, regarding the way 
 in which God works deliverances for man, were 
 taught by Samson ? And obviously the first 
 principle impressed on the minds of his con- 
 temporaries must have been that '' in a state of 
 universal depression all must ultimately depend 
 
122 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 on the indomitable strength which is aroused 
 in individuals."* God loves to deliver His 
 people from the multitudes of their enemies 
 by single champions. This was never brought 
 so prominently out as in the life of Samson. 
 The other judges were backed by the people: 
 the movement for freedom began with them 
 individually, but the mass of the people rose 
 at their call. But Samson, throughout, fought 
 the Philistines single-handed. He despised 
 their whole collected armies, went down alone 
 into their strongest cities, and, when they would 
 shut him in, carried away gates and bars in the 
 grim satiric mood that was his fighting humour; 
 and that was the nearest approach to serious- 
 ness the presence of armed enemies could in- 
 duce. Samson w^as qualified by his natural 
 gifts thus to stand alone and to hearten the 
 people, and give them more courageous and 
 hopeful thoughts. It was not more his great 
 physical strength than the blythe and daring 
 
 * Ewald, Hist. ii. 399. See also Stanley's Jewish 
 Churchy i. 364. 
 
SAMSON. 123 
 
 manner in which he used it that impressed 
 the people and solaced the weaker men who 
 could not imitate him. His name, Samson, 
 refers not to his strength, but to his temper. 
 It means "Sunny."* This was what the 
 people saw in him — an inexhaustible joyous- 
 ness of disposition that buoyed him up in 
 danger and difficulty, and made him seem to 
 the down-trodden people, whose future was 
 clouded and gloomy, as the sun rising upon 
 and cheering them. This joyousness comes 
 out in the lightheartedness with which he 
 fights against countless odds ; in his taste for 
 witty sayings and riddles ; and in the gigantic 
 practical jokes he perpetrated in carrying off 
 the gates of Gaza, and in tying the foxes tail to 
 tail, and sending them through the standing 
 corn with burning brands, t Nothing could 
 have been better calculated to reanimate Israel, 
 
 * So Milton, in the magnificent passage in \\\q Reason 
 of CJmrch Govern??ient^ in which he compares a king 
 to Samson, speaks of "his illustrious and sunny locks 
 waving and curling about his godlike shoulders." 
 
 f See Stanley, as above. 
 
1 2 4 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 when oppressed by the Philistines, than a spirit 
 like this which could treat them with such con- 
 tempt. And in sending this jud^e to Israel 
 God meant the people to admire and catch his 
 spirit ; He meant them to see that He expects 
 His people to be " sunny," to overflow with 
 health and vivacity even under protracted mis- 
 fortune and strife. And this God produced in 
 them not by giving His Spirit, as a spirit of 
 joy and vigour, to all, but to one man only. 
 
 This therefore must be our first practical 
 lesson — viz., how much can be done by indi- 
 viduals. The temper of all of us is indolent 
 in things spiritual : we shrink from everything 
 heroic, from everything that goes beyond the 
 actions of our neighbours. We need, therefore, 
 to be reminded that grievances in society will 
 not reform themselves, nor will be reformed by 
 the whole community awaking to them, but 
 that some individual must take each grievance 
 in hand until it is mastered. How often does 
 it happen, if we are living with our eyes open, 
 that we see evil being done, some hurtful in- 
 
SAMSON. 12 s 
 
 fluence spreading, and we are filled with shame 
 that we cannot strike in and put a stop to it. 
 This thing and that should be altered and 
 reformed, yet we shrink from undertaking it. 
 We have not public spirit enough ; have not 
 the unselfishness of the men who fix upon 
 some definite evil and give their life to its 
 eradication ; have not the gallantry of Samson, 
 who picked quarrels with the Philistines as 
 often as he could, that he might rid his country 
 of oppression. In this certainly this judge was 
 a type of Christ, who, single-handed, en- 
 countered and overcame those essential evils 
 which keep us back from God, who did battle 
 for us and by His single strength delivered us 
 from every bondage, who " trod the wine-press 
 alone." 
 
 A second principle illustrated by the life 
 of Samson is that God has often to deliver 
 His people in spite of themselves. This was 
 impressed on the minds of all observant per- 
 sons by the fact that the Israelites, instead of 
 flocking to Samson's standard and seconding 
 
126 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 his effort to throw off the Philistian yoke, 
 bound him and gave him into the hands of the 
 Philistines, complaining bitterly that he had 
 brought them into trouble with their masters, 
 and willing to buy peace at the price of 
 Samson's life. Just as the Pharisees said of 
 our Lord : If we let Him thus alone the Romans 
 will come and take away our place and nation ; 
 and subsequently gave Him up bound to the 
 Romans. They would not strike a blow in 
 defence of their own liberty, still less in defence 
 of their champion. These 3,000 men of Judah, 
 armed and equipped, stood by as idle spectators 
 whilst Samson burst the bonds they had bound 
 upon him, and, snatching up the only weapon 
 he could see, the jawbone of an ass, fell upon 
 the common enemy, and slaughtered as many 
 as did not flee. Put yourself into the position 
 of these abject and cowardly men of Judah, and 
 you will see that they must have been deeply 
 ashamed of their pusillanimity and treachery 
 to themselves in delivering up Samson ; and 
 must have seen that God meant to deliver them, 
 
SAMSON. 127 
 
 and had delivered them, in spite of them- 
 selves. 
 
 Every one who has endeavoured anything 
 for the good of others, knows how common a 
 spirit is that of the men of Judah. People for 
 the most part don't wish to be elevated, en- 
 lightened, purified ; if advancement gives them 
 the least trouble, they prefer to remain as they 
 are, and turn angrily upon those who stir them 
 up to higher things. They need to be helped 
 in spite of themselves. That man will not prove 
 a very efficient social reformer who refuses 
 to help any but those wdio help themselves, 
 who is dismayed when he finds his intentions 
 are misunderstood, who cannot, like Samson, 
 patiently submit to abuse from those whose 
 best friend he is, and have them undoing his 
 work for them almost as fast as he does it. 
 Instead of being vexed beyond consolation at 
 such treachery, let us ask if we are not our- 
 selves among those who think it better to sit 
 down under a grievance than make a bold push 
 for its extirpation. We must, I fear, all plead 
 
128 ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 guilty to a similar treachery to our own best 
 interests, and acknowledge that if saved it 
 must be in great part in spite of ourselves. 
 Like these men of Judah wx prefer respectable 
 and comfortable subjection to sin, to hard-won 
 freedom : we become reconciled to the dominion 
 of foolish and hurtful lusts. Some sins don't 
 ^eem to do us much harm : they do not brand 
 us as slaves, nor bind us with fetters that 
 audibly clank ; their bondage is like that of 
 the Philistines, mixed with some advantages 
 and comforts : whereas, to rid ourselves of 
 them is a painful and difficult and humiliating 
 work — a w'ork that throws us out of com- 
 fortable, easy-going relations with the world, 
 and makes life a more dangerous and toilsome 
 thing ; and, therefore, we do not second our 
 Redeemer when He would deliver us from such 
 sins. And would that we felt the shame of 
 this treachery as the men of Judah felt it ; for 
 is it not true that indolence, love of ease, fear 
 of putting ourselves into unusual and difficult 
 circumstances are thwarting the Saviour's work 
 
SAMSON. 129 
 
 in many of us, and if we are to be saved at 
 all, it will be with bitter shame and regret, 
 that while we laid heavy burdens and grie- 
 vous to be borne on our Redeemer, we our- 
 selves would not touch them with one of our 
 fingers. 
 
 But a third principle about God's deliver- 
 ances was lodged in the minds of the people 
 by Samson's career — viz., that the greatest 
 deliverances are wrought by self-sacrifice, or, 
 as they themselves expressed it, "the dead 
 which Samson slew at his death were more 
 than they which he slew in his life." Through 
 mere love of fighting, and in the joy of 
 battle, which is a selfish gratification to a 
 strong man, he had slain many : in the mere 
 overflow of physical vigour and exuberance of 
 his own spirits, he had borne down the enemies 
 of God ; but his greatest victory, the most 
 overwhelming and appalling blow he struck, 
 was when he himself was humbled to the dust, 
 when life had lost its charm, when no joy 
 for himself was thought of, and when his only 
 
 TO 
 
I30 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 motive was to assert the might of Jehovah 
 against the boastful worshippers of Dagon. 
 It cost him his own life, but his life could not 
 have been better spent. Those former victories, 
 in which he sustained no hurt, displayed no 
 devotion, no character, scarcely any daring — for 
 he trusted in his talisman of hair, and knew he 
 could overpower all opposition. But in his death 
 his heroism first appears ; and we understand 
 how he should be enrolled among the glorious 
 names of history ; we forget all his faults in 
 his noble disregard of his own life, in his mag- 
 nanimous scorn of those Philistines and their 
 god. In this one moment, as he bows his 
 mighty frame between the two pillars, a new light 
 shines upon him, and we see that he is indeed 
 a saviour worthy of Israel and worthy of God. 
 Would not every one go with his brethren and 
 gather out the mangled remains of the hero, 
 and tenderly separate them from the carcases 
 of his enemies, and carr}- them up to the 
 burial-place of his fathers, in pledge that his 
 spirit too had been gathered to the assembly 
 
SAMSON. 131 
 
 of the faithful, who "loved not their lives 
 unto the death, but laid them down for the 
 brethren"? 
 
 We need not pause to show how this principle 
 was displayed in the great salvation : how the 
 death of Christ accomplished more than His 
 life — rather let us reflect that whatever we do 
 for our fellows and for God, it is not always our 
 greatest activity that is most truly successful. 
 You cannot measure the good a man does by 
 the length of time he is about it, or the dili- 
 gence he shows in it. One moment of true 
 devotion effects more than a lifetime of labour. 
 This is what is needed if we are to do good. 
 In the family, in society, anywhere or anyhow, 
 it is all the same ; this is the one requisite for 
 the highest kind of efficiency, a heart going out 
 more to others than resting in self; a spirit of 
 genuine devotion to a great cause, or to the 
 people round about you — that is what all men 
 acknowledge to be a real blessing and gift of 
 God in their midst. But seldom do we see it, 
 save in men whose experience has been some- 
 10* 
 
132 ISRAErS IRON AGE, 
 
 thing like Samson's, who have sat in darkness 
 and the shadow of death, the light of whose 
 life has been extinguished, and their hearts 
 brought down with affliction and labour. 
 
 These, then, are the three principles which the 
 life of Samson sets vividly before us, that the 
 good which is done on earth is mostly done by 
 individuals ; that it has often to be done in 
 spite of the indifference or opposition of those 
 for whom it is undertaken ; and that to accom- 
 plish the highest and greatest good, men must 
 devote themselves. But an equally important 
 inquiry remains : for those of you who really 
 wish to understand how God means you to 
 serve Him, must be asking : What was it that 
 constituted Samson's strength ? And in answer 
 to this, Samson's life says : First of all, his 
 strength was not the natural physical strength 
 that accompanies a powerful frame and well- 
 developed muscle. It was not this, because it 
 vanished when his hair was cut off, and grew 
 again with his hair. That his strength was, 
 strictly speaking, supernatural, you would con- 
 
SAMSON. 133 
 
 elude also from the manifestations of it, which 
 were not merely extraordinary, but superhuman. 
 But the fact that it disappeared when he lost 
 his hair, which has no such natural connection 
 with a man's strength that in other cases 
 a similar result follows, this is the final proof 
 that his strength was supernatural. Probably 
 he had a powerful frame by nature, just as a 
 powerful engine needs a substantial frame, 
 but this frame was not his strength. 
 
 Then, secondly, neither did his strength or 
 success consist in his skill in the use of his 
 weapons, or choice of the most effective wea- 
 pons. On the contrary, the greatest slaughter 
 he ever made with a weapon was when he 
 flew upon the well-armed Philistines with the 
 jawbone of an ass he had hastily picked 
 up. This struck Samson himself so much, 
 that he called the scene of the achievement 
 * Lehi,' or the Jawbone^ and composed a witty 
 epigram on the subject, the point of which, 
 however, is lost in our translation. And as it 
 gave him thoughts, and revealed to him the 
 
134 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 secret of his success, and encouraged him, so it 
 may well give encouraging thoughts to us all. 
 When God has work for you to do, a conquest 
 for you to make, a deliverance of others for you 
 to effect. He will not leave you without a 
 weapon ; it may not always be a very 
 promising one, but still a weapon. Samson 
 might, no doubt, have slain more with a sword 
 if he had had one ; and so it is well that in 
 all you do for God you provide yourself with 
 as likely weapons as you can possibly get. 
 But sometimes you find yourself, like Samson, 
 in circumst-ances where you must act quickly, 
 and where 3^ou cannot provide yourself with 
 what you might think the best weapon, but 
 must take the first that comes to hand. You 
 are, e.g.^ suddenly prompted by your conscience 
 to say a word of rebuke to some profane or 
 wicked person, or a word of w^arning to some 
 one who is, as you know, casting off even 
 ordinary restraints, and giving way to evil 
 passions ; but you feel your want of wisdom 
 and fluency ; you know you can never say a 
 
SAMSON. 135 
 
 thing as it ought to be said — you wish you could, 
 you wish you were well enough equipped for 
 this, which you feel to be really a desirable 
 duty. Now in such circumstances it is more 
 than half the battle to attempt the duty with 
 such weapon as we have, in the faith that God 
 will help us. A rude weapon, wielded by a 
 vigorous arm, and by one confident in God, did 
 more than the fine swords of these men of 
 Judah, who had no spirit in them ; and in ver}^ 
 much of the good that we are all called upon to 
 do to one another in this world, it is the spirit 
 in which we do it that tells far more than the 
 outward thing we do. And it is a good thing 
 to be reduced to reliance, not on the weapon 
 you use, but on the Spirit who uses you. Sam- 
 son found it so, and gave a name to that period 
 of his history where he learned this; and so does 
 every one look back gratefully to the time when 
 he distinctly became aware that efficiency in 
 duty depends on God's taking us and using us 
 as His weapons. 
 
 But, thirdly, in that same encounter, Sam- 
 
136 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 son learned another thing about his strength, 
 viz., that it must be sustained by the ordinary 
 means of life. He was faint with thirst after 
 the slaughter of the Philistines, so spent and 
 exhausted that he seemed about to die. And 
 God opened a spring in the earth to refresh 
 him — did not infuse new energy into him by 
 some unseen and supernatural agency, but 
 gave him water. Could anything more clearly 
 teach us that our spiritual life, though depen- 
 dent on God's Spirit dwelling in us, must also 
 be nourished by the means of grace that are 
 within our own reach ? It is a most idle fancy 
 that because we are dependent on the Spirit 
 for all spiritual strength, therefore we need 
 not trouble ourselves with efforts of our own — 
 an obviously idle fancy, and yet how many of 
 us it is ensnaring. We do nothing that we can 
 seriously think is sufficient to maintain spiritual 
 energy, and then, forsooth, we wonder that we 
 are unfit for duty, and failures as Christians. 
 Samson was as dependent on water as other 
 men ; and unless we put forth the same 
 
SAMSON. 137 
 
 efforts that men would put forth who did not 
 believe in the Spirit, and were yet resolved to 
 master sin and do their duty, we shall fail. 
 Nothing that the Spirit does supersedes our 
 own efforts. Unless you avail yourself of every 
 means you think likely to maintain a healthy 
 tone in you, you will sink exhausted. And if 
 you really seek means of grace you will find all 
 the earth round about you bursting up with 
 wells of life ; everything you engage in will 
 become nourishment to your spirit ; you will 
 be chastened, encouraged, strengthened by the 
 most unlikely means. 
 
 Fourthly. But while all these are truths 
 about Samson's strength which are profitable 
 for us to remember, the grand idea of Samson's 
 life is that his strength abode with him so long 
 as he w^as faithful to his Nazarite vow, and de- 
 parted as soon as, for the sake of a fleshly lust, 
 he tampered with that vow, and put himself 
 into the power of Delilah and the enemies of 
 the God of Israel. Before his birth he was 
 consecrated to God : his parents dedicated him 
 
1 3 8 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 to the work God meant him to do upon earth, 
 and he himself accepted the vows they had 
 made for him. With some right feehng of the 
 sanctity of the call of God he had listened to 
 it, and allowed his hair to grow as the visible 
 pledge that he was under vow to God. When 
 a Nazarite cut his hair it was understood that 
 his vow was at an end, and that he no longer 
 was God's servant. This Samson would never 
 have done with his own hand ; but, overcome 
 by sensual indulgence, and giving way to the 
 solicitation of a harlot, whom he knew to be also 
 in league with his enemies, and a traitress, he 
 recklessly put himself into her hands. Had 
 she cut off his hair without any connivance of 
 his own, this would, of course, have wrought no 
 alteration in his spiritual state, nor any dimi- 
 nution of his strength. But the loss of his 
 hair being due to his own recklessness, to his 
 almost deliberate sale of God's favour for this 
 harlot's endearments, to his want of zeal or 
 even of ordinary prudence in guarding the 
 Divine gift — for he knew he was in danger, 
 
SAMSOM 139 
 
 and at first scrupled to tell her his secret — the 
 loss of his hair, thus representing a loss of spi- 
 ritual life, a loss of a fit apprehension of the 
 sacredness of his person as one vowed to God, 
 \Yas immediately followed by loss of strength. 
 It was a simple struggle of flesh and spirit, 
 and flesh won, and the spirit left the field to 
 the conqueror. 
 
 There is no picture in the Bible, or perhaps 
 in all history, more pathetic than that of Sam- 
 son after his fall : the mighty, sunny Samson, 
 the flash of whose eye had unnerved his 
 enemies, fettered now in the Philistine dun- 
 geon, deprived of the light of day, set to grind 
 like a woman, and dragged out to be the jest 
 and scorn of his insolent conquerors. Jere- 
 miah's lamentation might have been uttered 
 over him : '' Her Nazarites were purer than 
 snow, they were whiter than milk, they were 
 more ruddy in body than rubies, their polishing 
 was of sapphire. Their visage is blacker than 
 a coal, they are not known in the streets, their 
 skin cleaveth to their bones; it is withered, it 
 
r 40 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 is become like a stick." Were circumstances 
 ever calculated to inflict a keener, more over- 
 whelming shame than when this mighty cham- 
 pion, who had never encountered resistance and 
 had never conceived the possibility of defeat, 
 who had borne everything before him in one un- 
 interrupted tide of victory, suddenly found him- 
 self hopelessly in the hands of his enemies, his 
 eyes put out, his strength all gone from him, and 
 with it all token of the favour of God ? Was 
 ever a dungeon inhabited by gloomier thoughts, 
 was ever a more pitiable humiliation than that of 
 this forlorn captive, far from his friends, far from 
 his God, for ever shut out from the light, and, 
 he feared, from the light of God's presence, pur- 
 sued by the thought of his own mad folly, and 
 low lust, and reckless forsaking of God that had 
 brought all this upon him ? 
 
 Especially touching is it to read that when 
 he awoke on Delilah's lap he said, '' I will go 
 out, as at other times, and shake myself. And 
 he wist not that the Lord was departed from 
 him." The Spirit had been wont to come 
 
SAMSON. 141 
 
 upon him in gusts, impelling him as in a kind 
 of frenzy, and he thought he could now be 
 the same — thought he could shake off this 
 unwonted lassitude he felt, and imitate the 
 mighty inspiration of the Spirit of God. In 
 every previous case, when occasion had pre- 
 sented itself to attack the Philistines, and when 
 his own spirit urged him to battle, it was be- 
 cause " the spirit of the Lord had come mightily 
 upon him." He expected the same backing now. 
 He did not know the extent of the damage ; 
 he wist not that the Lord was departed from 
 him. Some of you may have had an experience 
 which puts you into sympathy with, and enables 
 you to interpret easily, this part of Samson's 
 history. You may at one time have had grace, 
 you may have been equal to duty, you may have 
 found it easy to pray, easy to engage in religious 
 conversation, easy to do service among your 
 fellows that not every one can do ; but through 
 carelessness, through want of considerate prizing 
 of this as God's grace bestowed in trust upon 
 you, through sensual indulgence, you have 
 
142 ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 quenched the Spirit, and now you in vain seek 
 to stir up the grace of God that was once in 
 3^ou; you imitate the influence of the Spirit, you 
 try to exert and move yourself, but it will not 
 do. You say, "I will go out, as at other times, 
 and shake myself; " but the Lord has departed 
 from you. You throw yourself into a devout 
 frame, you make a desperate effort to be moved, 
 you imitate the movements of spirit, the feel- 
 ings, the aspirations to which once the Spirit 
 of God moved you ; but it is mere imitation, 
 not the reality; your efforts consequently are 
 thwarted, you find that your spiritual strength 
 is gone, that there is now hollowness, feeble- 
 ness, and a blank where once was the Al- 
 mighty Spirit. He that has vowed his strength 
 to God, he that has received some grace from 
 God, some godliness of feeling and aim, and 
 yet yields to a wretched lust, fancying that 
 afterwards he will shake himself as at other 
 times and be as fit for duty as ever, will find 
 himself most disastrously deceived. He will 
 find that the whole power has gone out of his 
 
SAMSOJV. 143 
 
 life, and that he is left helpless, ashamed, 
 miserable. Are there none of us who should 
 take Samson's humiliation to heart, none of us 
 who are as reckless as he in the use we 
 make of the gifts God has given us ? We also 
 were, like him, vowed to God before we had 
 consciousness of our own, and we have received 
 some grace or gift with which to serve Him ; 
 but how many barter these gifts for the most 
 contemptible indulgence of the flesh, or for the 
 gratification of a small ambition, or for a little 
 portion of the world's goods ! 
 
 But, in conclusion, observe how God re- 
 turned to Samson, and gave him back his 
 strength. There is no better instance of the 
 use God can make of the w-reck of an ill-spent 
 life. He had ruined himself beyond repair 
 for this life ; he could never be the man he 
 was ; but in those lonely days in the Philistine 
 prison-house, when his blindness cut him off 
 from converse with outward things, his own 
 humbling, remorseful thoughts were his com- 
 
1 44 ISRAELS IR ON A GE, 
 
 pany, his own past life his only view. He 
 saw the ruinous folly he had been guilty of, 
 saw his betrayal of the trust God had reposed 
 in him, saw that out of the best material for a 
 life of glory that any man of that period had re- 
 ceived he had wrought for himself a life of 
 shame and a degrading end. His heart was 
 broken; the strong man was crushed, and had, 
 like the weakest sinner, to cry to God, to seek 
 that last comfort that abides when all others 
 are gone, and that more than makes up for the 
 loss of all others — to seek that light, the light 
 of God's own presence, that restores brightness 
 to the most darkened life, and that does not re- 
 fuse to shine on the most benighted soul. And 
 what he sought, he found. Slowly his hair 
 grew, and with it slowly returned his strength : 
 as health comes slowly back to the man that 
 has been shattered by disease or accident — as 
 spiritual vigour slowly returns to him who by 
 one rash act has let his soul be trodden in the 
 dust. If you have fallen into sin, you must not 
 
SA A/SON. 145 
 
 expect your soul to recover its tone quickly; it 
 is like the growth of hair, you cannot hasten it, 
 can only let repentance slowly work its perfect 
 work, thankful that even thus you may get 
 back to God. 
 
 II 
 
VI. 
 
 ELI. 
 
" Wherefore the Lord God of Israel saith, I said indeed 
 that thy house, and the house of thy father^ should walk 
 before me for ever : but noiu the Lord saith, Be it far 
 front me J for them that honour me I will honour, and 
 they that despise me shall be lightly estee7ned. ... Aiid 
 I will raise me up a faithful p?'iest, that shall do accord- 
 ing to that which is in mine heart and in my mind : and 
 I will build hi7n a su7'e house j and he shall walk before 
 mine anointed for ever.'^ — i Sam. ii. 30, 35. 
 
€lt. 
 
 JUDGES XXI. l6-2j, AND I SAM. I.-IV. 
 
 'nr^HE book of Judges does not, as we see, 
 -^ contain the history of all the judges. 
 But as with Samuel a new state of things 
 begins, and as the life of Eli is so bound up 
 with that of Samuel that the two cannot be 
 separately told, the book of Samuel commences 
 with an account of that retribution which 'fell 
 on Eli and his house, and closed the epoch 'C^ 
 the judges. For in the person of Eli thi-s 
 mode of governing by judges received its last 
 trial, and though Samuel also was a judge, 
 and the most efficient of the whole line, the 
 office had been condemned in Eli. Eli had 
 every advantage to make it admirable and 
 adequate. How he became a judge originally, 
 by what deeds of personal valour or victory 
 
1 5 o ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 over Israel's foes we do not know — but having 
 become a judge by his own merit, he was also 
 a priest by birth, and if ever the office had a 
 chance of fitting itself to the Theocracy, and 
 becoming the permanent form by which the 
 Theocracy was to be worked, it was now, 
 when the civil and ecclesiastical power met 
 in one man, and when personal merit and 
 hereditary standing, sanctity of character and 
 political vigour were all combined in the single 
 person of Eli. But with all his virtues and 
 natural advantages he had one great fault. He 
 was for his own part attentive to his duties and 
 interested in the people, taking his seat where 
 he could see and be seen, speak and be spoken 
 to by the worshippers. His one exclamation 
 when the terrible message was delivered by 
 Samuel, " It is the Lord, let him do what 
 seemeth him good," reveals an enviable state 
 of mind, a submissiveness which could not be 
 picked up on a sudden, but must have been 
 wrought in him by a long thoughtfulness about 
 God's ways, and a real godliness of disposition. 
 
ELL 151 
 
 He was a man of extraordinary magnanimity, 
 never resenting that God should speak to him, 
 the aged priest, through a prattHng child that 
 did not know God's voice when he heard it. 
 He was a man not only mild and kindly when 
 it cost him nothing to be so, as in the case of 
 Hannah, but able to cherish one who was des- 
 tined to supplant his own family, and who, to a 
 smaller man than Eli was, must have seemed 
 like the evil genius of his house. 
 
 The mixture of social festivity and the most 
 solemn worship of God which we in modern 
 times have only some few remaining traces of, 
 is strikingly exhibited in the scene depicted 
 here. Coming up to Shiloh only once a year, 
 and meeting there friends from all parts of the 
 country with whom there were few other 
 means or opportunities of communicating, it 
 was natural that the social entertaining, the 
 mirthful eating and drinking, which is noted 
 here, if it did not predominate, should at least 
 form a very considerable element in the annual 
 gathering. Shiloh would seem to have been at 
 
1 5 2 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 all times addicted to amusements : situated 
 among gentle slopes covered with vineyards, 
 the population naturally indulged in those 
 demonstrations of joy and cheerfulness which 
 usually accompany the vintage. This season 
 of festivity seems to have coincided with the 
 annual religious gathering, and every evening 
 the gardens round Shiloh were thronged with 
 gay companies of girls, dancing and merry- 
 making. It was thus they proved so easy a 
 prey to the Benjamites when their tribe was 
 so reduced that they had to come and carry off 
 by force some of these dancers to be wives to 
 them — as many of you will remember that the 
 Romans did in a similar emergency. And it 
 was therefore not so unreasonable in Eli as at 
 first sight it would appear, to apprehend that a 
 woman coming from one of those somewhat 
 riotous entertainments, or, as the narrative 
 expressly says, " after they had eaten and 
 drunk," might not be in a state to worship : 
 that her red eyes and somewhat wild or dis- 
 turbed expression of face, and her unconscious 
 
ELL 153 
 
 gestures and the voiceless movement of her 
 lips were symptomatic of anything but devout- 
 ness. Yes, as we read further on in the narra- 
 tive, women in a worse plight than he supposed 
 Hannah to be in found their way into this 
 house of God, and thought they did God ser- 
 vice by offering to Him through His priests 
 that which was dearer to them than life itself. 
 There was need certainly that Eli should be 
 suspicious of the worshippers while the priests 
 themselves, his own sons, the men washed and 
 purified with all ceremonial inventions, and the 
 models of sanctity to the people, turned the 
 license of the season and the fanaticism of the 
 worshippers to their own licentious purposes, 
 and polluted God's worship with the most 
 shameful iniquities. 
 
 This was the blot on Eli's life which brought 
 so terrible a doom — a doom which made both 
 the ears tingle of whomsoever heard it. He 
 was a good man of the easy type ; the kind of 
 man who makes an admirable servant, who 
 does his duty to perfection so long as his duty 
 
1 5 4 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 merely troubles himself, but who has not force 
 of character to interfere with others ; to com- 
 mand, to regulate the conduct of others, to 
 incur the ill-will of others. He had no wicked 
 intentions, no godless practices like his sons ; 
 he was a pure-minded, amiable, sincere, gentle, 
 well-disposed man ; but it was his misfortune 
 to be in a position which required other quali- 
 ties besides these, and which he had not. He 
 could control himself, but not others. He would 
 grieve over his sons, but not correct them. He 
 could speak seriously to them, but could not 
 enforce his words. He recognised the abuses 
 which were being introduced into God's wor- 
 ship, but he continued day by day to delay 
 cleansing the house of God, trusting to circum- 
 stances, or time, or chance, or anything, to do 
 what he himself could not find nerve to do. 
 An amiable indolence overspread his whole 
 nature ; he would be a delightful man to talk 
 with, but most disappointing to have to do with : 
 a man ever ready to do pleasant things, but 
 never able to do disagreeable things. He was 
 
ELL 155 
 
 one of the men who have great faith in the 
 power of things to right themselves, in the 
 virtue of leaving things alone, of letting nature 
 take its course. Accordingly he let his own 
 life and fortunes drift and become entangled 
 with the wreck of other men's misdeeds, and 
 so came to the end he did. 
 
 This then is an ins.ance in which we may 
 read the calamitous result of a merely passive 
 life, of refusing to arrest or mend the evil prac- 
 tices around us, of conniving at sin which it is 
 our business to put an end to ; of contenting 
 ourselves with keeping our own hands clean. 
 For the fact is that not interfering when we 
 ought to interfere is the surest way to be en- 
 tangled with the results of those very sins, and 
 the fate of those very sinners from whom we 
 wish to keep separate — a lesson which our own 
 country is now learning from its past treatment 
 of Ireland. By many natural ties men are 
 bound to us, and while we take the benefit 
 of their service, or the pleasure of their affec- 
 tion, or any advantage their society brings, it is 
 
1 5 6 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 cowardly and unjust, and besides impossible, to 
 shake off any responsibility regarding their 
 conduct. Parents who, like Eli, are afraid to 
 lose the affection of their children, and who 
 pretend not to see their growing faults, must 
 know that this can only end badly. Eli did not 
 see his life written out, a completed story ; after 
 the retribution fell, he had no time to revise 
 and remodel it — as God said, " When I begin, 
 I will also make an end." We also are living 
 out our lives day by day, and each day are 
 coming nearer to that sudden retribution which 
 will finish all, and reveal the completeness and 
 at once show the value of our life. It will show 
 the pitiful and utter incompetence of all mere 
 resolutions of amendment, the barrenness of 
 mere good intentions and amiable dispositions ; 
 it will show how diametrically different are the 
 veritable things we do, have done, and go on 
 doing, from all that we have merely thought of 
 doing and known to be right to do. 
 
 The character of Eli is far from uncommon, 
 and a far larger amount of disaster is produced 
 
ELL 157 
 
 in the world by such softness than by deliberate 
 wickedness. There can be no more fatal guide 
 to a man setting out in life than the instinct 
 which chooses what is agreeable, and avoids 
 everything that is harsh and difficult. Many 
 a graceful, amiable, and well-intentioned youth 
 has thus reached an end of infamy. The cha- 
 racter which shrinks from all collision with 
 other men, which cannot face obloquy, which 
 shrinks from inflicting pain, not because it hurts 
 other people so much as because it shakes their 
 own nerves, which does all in its power to pre- i 
 serve the belief that this life is before all else 
 for comfort and pleasure— this character is one 
 of the most dangerous that wanders over this 
 earth — dangerous for itself and dangerous for 
 others also. Its apparent gentleness and good- 
 ness in the beginning, arise mainly from the 
 gaiety and good spirits of youth, and from the 
 desire to stand well with everybody, which very 
 desire will ultimately entangle him with sin, and 
 devastate his life. There are times in most lives 
 when the current of circumstances sets strongly 
 
1 5 8 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 towards sin, and when a man will certainly sin 
 if his rule of life has been to avoid all that is 
 painful, and to choose what will for the time 
 give him security and ease. The life of such a 
 man, however promising it seems in youth, 
 becomes weighted and entangled by a con- 
 stantly accumulating burden of difficulties and 
 sorrowful remembrances, and unavailing regrets, 
 until at last he is, like Eli, almost glad to hear 
 that what he has so long seen must be a losing 
 game is over, and that his doom is imminent. 
 Times have been given him when, by a little' 
 effort, and by some self-denial, he might have 
 recovered himself and started afresh, w^ith 
 possibly a sullied fame among men, but with a, 
 conscience cleansed from offence, and with the 
 strength which comes from the consciousness 
 of having for once acted nobly and with energy: 
 but these times are all gone by, and he now 
 merely awaits the end, heartless and without 
 hope. 
 
 The vices which Eli suffered in his sons did 
 not terminate in themselves, but had the effect 
 
ELL 159 
 
 of making the worship of God abhorrent and 
 despicable in the country. This may be done 
 not only by the sensuality and greed of the 
 clergy, but in other ways as well. These sins 
 are very apparent, and the world is very quick 
 to detect and resent in the clergy the grasping 
 spirit and keen eye to worldly interests which 
 it counts meritorious, or at least very pardon- 
 able, in other men. But other sins work more 
 unobservedly, but not less certainly, to the 
 same end of deadening the spirit of worship, 
 and bringing God's service into contempt. The 
 carelessness about truth, which merely preaches 
 traditionary opinions, does so : the indolent 
 formality which accepts stereotyped phrases of 
 devotion or of sentiment, and puts no meaning 
 or spirit into them ; the wrangling and hasti- 
 ness in discussion which show that love of 
 party is stronger than love of truth ; the preach- 
 ing of doctrine which lowers men's ideas of 
 God and of righteousness — these and many 
 such things make the worship of God contempt- 
 ible. It is of course a weakness to judge of the 
 
i6o ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 service of God by those who by profession con- 
 duct His worship, but it is a w^eakness into 
 which men continually fall. In this age those 
 w^ho serve in God's house are not allowed to be 
 ignorant of their shortcomings and peculiar 
 vices ; the weakness, the narrowness, the igno- 
 rance, the obstructiveness, the worldliness of 
 the clergy are much dwelt upon by our public 
 censors : unfortunately many of those who do 
 si dwell upon clerical infirmities and vices, are 
 thus excusing themselves from taking any 
 zealous part in religious worship and work. 
 But this is perhaps the greatest responsibility 
 the clergy of any country have to bear, that 
 they are taken as samples of what the religion 
 they profess is worth — and it is perhaps the 
 greatest difficulty which we in our own time 
 have to solve, viz. : how to live a really un- 
 worldly life in an age and society wdiich will 
 not suffer any marked external separation from 
 the world, which hates and very justly hates all 
 those old modes of separation by celibacy, 
 monasticism, priestly separation from social 
 
ELL i6i 
 
 intercourse. It is an age which says to its 
 clergy, You must do all that we do, and yet be 
 quite different from us, you must move about 
 in society, buy and sell, marry and bring up 
 families just like the rest of us, but you must 
 be throughout superior to the w^orld, and to all 
 the temptations these connections with the 
 world bring. This age, I say, sets this task to 
 its clergy, and then stands by and notes, not 
 without triumph, how they fall short of it. 
 
 In God's message to Eli, He traces the 
 sins of the priesthood to their root. " I chose 
 you to be priests, to serve me, and ye have 
 made yourselves fat with the offerings of my 
 people." To be truly servants of God, this is 
 the difficulty; to put aside as illegitimate every- 
 thing which merely forwards our own interests ; 
 to abstain from cherishing purely personal 
 hopes ; to sink our own cause, and prospects, 
 and will in the cause of God ; to be truly in 
 God's hand to be used as He wills; to come 
 back day by day and wait for orders from Him ; 
 to acquire thus the understanding of what He 
 
 12 
 
1 6 2 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 seeks to do in the world, and gradually to 
 abjure every other thought than how to accom- 
 plish this; to be consecrated and to be faithful, 
 this is what God requires of us all ; this is what 
 no man who knows God will rest without doing ; 
 but this is what needs the discipline of a life to 
 accomplish. How far, my friends, are you 
 accomplishing this ? How far are you making it 
 your aim — for you are called to be priests to 
 God — you are called to identify your interests 
 with His cause, to know no other way or will 
 but His — and to this God will bring you, so that 
 the hopes and plans of merely selfish advance- 
 ment are just so much affliction and sorrow 
 sown for you; the eager ambitions that burn in 
 your hearts and stimulate you to work are but 
 driving you off your road, and from them all 
 you must return to the simplicity of God's 
 servants who care only to please Him. It is 
 when we have no aim but this, that we find 
 rest. It is when this is the guiding star that 
 leads us to select this or that path in life, that 
 we are filled with confidence, and know our- 
 
ELL 163 
 
 selves God's children. It matters little in what 
 forms of life our self-seeking shows itself, 
 whether in the gross vices of Hophni and Phi- 
 nehas, or in the elegant triflings of a modern 
 priesthood, or in the respectabilities and chari- 
 ties of a life which, for our own character's sake, 
 we wish to keep pure and high; it matters very 
 little what we are on the surface, if at bottom 
 we are self-seeking — and he who has not tried 
 to rid himself of this first and last root of sin, 
 knows not how deep it has struck, and what 
 myriad forms it can put on. It is the starting 
 from self which is wrong, no matter whether 
 selfish consideration leads us to do a right 
 or a wrong thing. Year after year we go on 
 trying to improve our character, to become 
 bigger, stronger, higher men, and we find our 
 efforts are mostly in vain, and gradually it 
 dawns upon us that the reason why they are in 
 vain is that we are striving to love God for our 
 own sake, striving to do God's will not simply 
 because it is God's wull, but because we know 
 we shall be worthier persons if we do it ; striving 
 12 " 
 
1 64 ISRAELS IRON A GE. 
 
 in short to live a new life with an old heart. 
 Everything doubles back upon self; self is our 
 centre and our object, and all is wrong with us 
 till God is our object, till we truly, simply, and 
 directly love Him, so that we are drawn by that 
 love to all that is good. 
 
 The final catastrophe to which the guilty 
 career of these priests led was the taking of the 
 ark of God by the Philistines. The taking of 
 the ark into the battle was an act of supersti- 
 tion — it showed that the Israelites had, as a 
 people, sunk to the level of the heathen who 
 believed in images and fetishes. The sin of 
 taking the ark into battle, consisted in the ig- 
 norance of God it displayed, the unbelief that 
 could not believe God was present with them 
 anywhere except where the ark was — an un- 
 belief which, like Micah's, cut at the roots of 
 all spiritual religion, and the proper corrective 
 of which was to let the ark itself be taken by 
 the Philistines, although this might seem to be 
 the departure of God Himself from among 
 them, and was in truth the outward symbol of 
 
ELI. 165 
 
 one of the saddest periods in the history of 
 Israel — for Israel without its God was nothing; 
 other nations might hope to win their own with- 
 out God, but in Israel all hope was quenched 
 when their King thus showed His displeasure. 
 But while God punishes the existing priest- 
 hood, He adds a promise which must have kept 
 the people hopeful through this dark time of 
 desertion : "I will raise me up a faithful 
 priest, that shall do according to that which is 
 in mine heart." God showed the people that 
 they would not always be misled and corrupted 
 — that God was concerned in His worship as 
 w^ell as themselves, and that for His own honour 
 He would cleanse His house and appoint an 
 efficient priest who would bless His people with 
 all that He intended for them. This promise 
 w^as fulfilled, first of all in Samuel, who, though 
 not of the priestly line, did serve in the house 
 of God and offered sacrifice by an exceptional 
 and special consecration. And though the 
 priesthood was afterwards restored to the he- 
 reditary line, this period must have taught 
 
1 66 ISRAELS IRON A GE. 
 
 thoughtful Israehtes that the greatest blessings 
 must come through a natural priesthood, 
 through men who were by their disposition, 
 though not by birth, fitted for the office, and 
 must thus have given them some preparation of 
 mind to understand the great Priest of an un- 
 priestly line when He came. 
 
 The special importance then of this part of 
 the narrative lies in the light it throws on the 
 reason and principles of the inauguration of 
 a new era. It is to Samuel, and his preparation 
 for his future work, that the reader's attention 
 naturally turns — partly, no doubt, because of 
 the relief one feels in turning from the gross 
 godless men to the innocent little child in 
 his clean white dress and miniature ephod, 
 running after Eli through the house of God, 
 and imitating all his priestly actions. Eli 
 seems to have taken to him at once ; as 
 often one sees an old man clinging to a child. 
 Even before his birth it was his blessing that 
 gave Hannah hope of a child, and from the 
 first, Eli, by an unconscious fascination, which 
 
ELI. 167 
 
 you sometimes see linking two lives together, 
 was drawn to the little boy, and probably 
 lived greatly in these sad days in his company, 
 finding oblivion of his sons' wickedness in 
 his innocent prattle, and gradually transferring 
 to him all the hope which once had centred 
 in his own children. There may have been 
 in Eli's mind some premonition of the future 
 greatness of Samuel ; a something about the 
 child which taught him that God meant to 
 do great things by him ; so that while to us 
 the terror of the message seems to be in- 
 creased by the unconscious child being made 
 the bearer of it, to Eli it may have softened 
 the blow. In the fresh innocent child, he 
 sees the symbol of a new unsullied hopeful 
 epoch. As his mind dwelt on the manner in 
 which this child had been brought into the 
 world, how he was the answer to the prayer 
 of one woman whose life had been made 
 bitter by the taunts of the prosperous, but 
 who, through her sorrows, had learned to 
 trust in the Lord, as he heard the thanks- 
 
1 6 S ISRAEL'S IR OX A GE. 
 
 giving of Hannah and saw how she reasoned 
 from her own experience to the great princi- 
 ples on which God ever acts, how not her 
 misery only, but the miseries of each and all 
 of His people, is ever before Him ; and as he 
 saw Samuel grow up, a root out of a dry 
 ground, as if God Himself had given him, as 
 he marked his incorruptible ways, his right- 
 mindedness even as a child, he saw that amidst 
 all the feebleness and corruption of the best 
 of men there was still hope, and that even 
 when God's own ordinances seemed to be 
 worse than useless, God's grace could create 
 channels for itself. In Samuel, the asked of 
 God, there is a type of the readiness with 
 which God can provide men for His service ; 
 men different from and unaffected by the 
 times in which they live ; men who can grow 
 up pure amidst corruption, who can shake 
 off the ignorance of their teachers and rise 
 above all their contemporaries — men for whom 
 you cannot account on ordinary principles, 
 whom you cannot trace to ordinary causes, 
 
ELL 169 
 
 who are as truly sent by God as if they were 
 sons of a Virgin or of a Hannah. And in 
 this fact is our hope for our country, for the 
 world, and for the Church ; we may very 
 much doubt whether there are at work any 
 natural laws which make it quite certain 
 that to the end men strong enough for every 
 emergency will arise. Continually you hear 
 lamentations over the decay of intellect and 
 power among those who manage our affairs, 
 and it is not evident to those who look most 
 narrowly into these things that there are 
 causes at work which will to the end, and in- 
 evitably, produce a series of God-fearing, right- 
 minded, self-dedicating men. But He who 
 in the time of Israel's disobedience said : " I 
 will raise up a priest for myself, who will do 
 all that is in mine heart," has in these last 
 times, in the sending of His Son, given us 
 such a fulfilment of this promise that in it 
 we see a pledge of His constant remembrance 
 of His people, and of His sufficiency for all 
 their need. If any of you are not finding in 
 
1 7 o ISRAEL'S IR ON A GE. 
 
 religion all you could expect, if the God 
 revealed is not great enough to command 
 your worship, if there is not proceeding from 
 Him to you such influences as truly strengthen 
 and elevate your spirit, and if because of the 
 little that finds its way from God to yourself 
 you are thinking that the world is left very 
 much to itself, and may suffer a decay of all 
 righteousness and mercy, then it should be 
 your business to revise your belief in presence 
 of this promise, and to make up your mind 
 whether it has really been fulfilled, whether, 
 in Christ, God has not given you a Priest 
 through whom, if only you will yield to Him, 
 He will utter the whole fulness of Divine 
 wisdom and love, and through whom He will 
 do for you and for all who can be brought 
 under His influence, all that is in His heart. 
 
• VII. 
 
 THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES. 
 
'''' All these are the twelve tj'ibes of Israel : and this is 
 it that their father spake tinto them, and blessed them j 
 every one according to his blessing he blessed them.^''- — ■ 
 Gen. xlix. 28. 
 
 " When the Most High divided to the 7iatio7is their in- 
 heritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set 
 the bounds of the people according to the number of the 
 children of Israel. For the Lord^s portion is Ids people ; 
 Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.''^ — Deut. xxxii. 8, 9. 
 
C6e T6le.50mg:0 of tfie Cribe^, 
 
 GEN. XL VI II. XLIX. DEUT. XXXIII. AND JUDGES V. 
 
 JACOB'S blessing of his sons* marks the 
 close of the patriarchal dispensation. Hence- 
 forth the channel of God's blessing to man does 
 not consist of one person only, but of a people 
 or nation. It is still one seed, as Paul reminds 
 us, a unit that God will bless, but this unit is 
 now no longer a single person — as Abraham, 
 Isaac, or Jacob — but one people, composed of 
 several parts, and yet one whole ; equally repre- 
 sentative of Christ, as the patriarchs were, and 
 of equal effect every way in receiving God's 
 
 '-- This lecture, which attempts to characterise the tribes 
 and show their relation to one another in accordance with 
 the prophetic utterance of Jacob, seems to find a suitable 
 place in connection with the period of the judges, in 
 which they setded down in their own places, and in which, 
 as is manifest from Deborah's song, they still showed very 
 distinctive characteristics. 
 
1 7 4 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 blessing and handing it down until Christ 
 came. The Old Testament Church, quite as 
 truly as the New, formed one whole with Christ. 
 Apart from Him it had no meaning, and would 
 have had no existence. It was the promised 
 seed, always growing more and more to its 
 perfect development in Christ. As the promise 
 was kept to Abraham when Isaac was born, and 
 as Isaac was truly the promised seed — in so far 
 as he w'as a part of the series that led on to 
 Christ, and w^as given in fulfilment of the pro- 
 mise that promised Christ to the world — so all 
 through the history of Israel we must bear in 
 mind that in them God is fulfilling this same 
 promise, and that they are the promised seed 
 in so far as they are one with Christ. And this 
 interprets to us all those passages of the pro- 
 phets regarding which men have disputed 
 whether they are to be applied to Israel cr to 
 Christ : passages in which God addresses Israel 
 in such words as, " Behold my servant," '' mine 
 elect," and so forth, and in the interpretation 
 of which it has been thought sufficient proof 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES. 175 
 
 that they do not apply to Christ, to prove that 
 they do apply to Israel ; whereas, on the prin- 
 ciple just laid down, it might much more safely 
 be argued that because they apply to Israel, 
 therefore they apply to Christ. And it is at this 
 point — where Israel distributes among his sons 
 the blessing which heretofore had all lodged in 
 himself— that we see the first multiplication of 
 Christ's representatives; the mediation going 
 on no longer through individuals, but through a 
 nation ; and where individuals are still chosen 
 by God, as commonly they are, for the convey- 
 ance of God's communications to earth, these 
 individuals, whether priests or prophets, are 
 themselves but the official representatives of 
 the nation. 
 
 As the patriarchal dispensation ceases, it 
 secures to the tribes all the blessing it has itself 
 contained. Every father desires to leave to 
 his sons whatever he has himself found help- 
 ful, but as they gather round his dying bed, or 
 as he sits setting his house in order, and con- 
 sidering what portion is appropriate for each, 
 
1 7 6 ISRAEL'S IR ON A GE. 
 
 he recognises that to some of them it is 
 quite useless to bequeath the most valuable 
 parts of his property, while in others he 
 discerns a capacity which promises the im- 
 provement of all that is entrusted to it. And 
 from the earliest times the various characters 
 of the tribes were destined to modify the 
 blessing conveyed to them by their father. 
 The blessing of Israel is now distributed, 
 and each receives what each can take ; and 
 while in some of the individual tribes there 
 may seem to be very little of blessing at all, 
 yet, taken together, they form a picture of the 
 common outstanding features of human nature, 
 and of that nature as acted upon by God's 
 blessing, and forming together one body or 
 Church. A peculiar interest attaches to the 
 history of some nations,''' and is not altogether 
 absent from our own, from the precision with 
 which we can trace the character of families, 
 descending often with the same unmistakable 
 lineaments from father to son for many genera- 
 ^' Meri vale's Romans wider the Empire ^ vi. 261. 
 
THE BLESSINGS OE THE TRIBES. 177 
 
 tions. One knows at once to what families to 
 look for restless and turbulent spirits, ready for 
 conspiracy and revolution ; and one knows also 
 where to seek steady and faithful loyalty, public 
 spiritedness, or native ability. And in Israel's 
 national character there was room for the great 
 distinguishing features of the tribes, and to 
 show the richness and variety with which the 
 promise of God could fulfil itself wherever it 
 was received. The distinguishing features 
 which Jacob depicts in the blessings of his 
 sons, are necessarily veiled under the poetic 
 figures of prophecy, and spoken of as they 
 would reveal themselves in worldly matters ; 
 but these features were found in all the genera- 
 tions of the tribes, and displayed themselves in 
 things spiritual also. For a man has not two 
 characters, but one ; and what he is in the world, 
 that he is in his religion. You see this in our 
 own country, how the forms of worship, and 
 even the doctrines believed, and certainly the 
 modes of religious thought and feeling,. depend 
 on the natural character, and the natural 
 
1 7 8 ISRAEL'S IR ON A GE. 
 
 character on the local situation of the respective 
 sections of the community. No doubt in a 
 country like ours, where men so constanth' 
 migrate from place to place, and where one 
 common literature tends to mould us all to the 
 same v/ay of thinking, you do get men of all 
 kinds in every place ; yet even among ourselves 
 the character of a place is generally still visible, 
 and predominates over all that mingles with it. 
 Much more must this character have been re- 
 tained in a country where each man could 
 trace his ancestry up to the father of the tribe, 
 and cultivated with pride the family character- 
 istics, and had but little intercourse, either 
 literary or personal, with other minds and other 
 manners. As we know by dialect and by the 
 manners of the people when we pass into a new 
 country, so must the Israelite have known by 
 the eye and ear when he had crossed the county 
 frontier, when he was conversing with a Ben- 
 jamite, and when with a descendant of Judah. 
 We are not therefore to suppose that any of 
 these utterances of Jacob are mere geographical 
 
THE BLESSINGS OE THE TRIBES. 179 
 
 predictions, or that they depict characteristics 
 which might appear in civil life, but not in 
 religion and the Church, or that they would die 
 out with the first generation. 
 
 In these blessings, therefore, we have the 
 history of the Church in its most interesting 
 form. In these sons gathered round him, the 
 patriarch sees his own nature reflected piece by 
 piece, and he sees also the general outline of 
 all that must be produced by such natures as 
 these men have. The whole destiny of Israel 
 is here in germ, and the spirit of prophecy in 
 Jacob sees and declares it. It has often been 
 remarked * that as a man draws near to death, 
 he seems to see many things in a much clearer 
 light, and especially gets glimpses into the 
 future, which are hidden from others. 
 
 " The soul's dark cottage battered and decayed. 
 Lets in new light through chinks that time hath made." 
 
 Being nearer to eternity, he instinctively 
 
 measures things by its standard, and thus 
 
 comes nearer a just valuation of all things be- 
 
 " Plato, Repub. i. 5, &c. 
 
1 8o ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 fore his mind, and can better distinguish reality 
 from appearance. Jacob has studied these sons 
 of his for fift}' years, and has had his acute per- 
 ception of character painfully enough called to 
 exercise itself on them. He has all his life 
 long had a liking for analyzing men's inner 
 life, knowing that when he understands that, he 
 can better use them for his own ends; and 
 these sons of his own have cost him thought 
 enough over and above that sometimes pene- 
 trating interest which a father will take in the 
 growth of a son's character; and now he knows 
 them thoroughly, understands their temptations, 
 their weaknesses, their capabilities, and as a 
 wise head of a house, can, with delicate and 
 unnoticed skill, balance the one against the 
 other, ward off awkward collisions, and prevent 
 the evil from destroying the good. This know- 
 ledge of Jacob prepares him for being the 
 intelligent agent by whom God predicts in out- 
 line the future of His Church. 
 
 One cannot but admire, too, the faith which 
 enables Jacob to apportion to his sons the 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES i8i 
 
 blessings of a land which had not been much 
 of a resting-place to himself, and regarding the 
 occupation of which his sons might have put 
 to him some very difficult questions. And we 
 admire this dignified faith the more, on reflect- 
 ing that it has often been very grievously lacking 
 in our own case — that we have felt almost 
 ashamed of having so little of a present 
 tangible kind to offer, and of being obliged tc 
 speak only of invisible and future blessings ; 
 to set a spiritual consolation over against a 
 worldly grief ; to point a man whose fortunes 
 are ruined to an eternal inheritance ; or to 
 speak to one who knows himself quite in the 
 power of sin of a remedy which has often 
 seemed illusory to ourselves. Some of us have 
 got so little comfort or strength from religion 
 ourselves, that we have no heart to offer it to 
 others ; and most of us have a feeling that we 
 should seem to trifle were we to offer invisible 
 aid against very visible calamity. At least we 
 feel that we are doing a daring thing in making 
 such an offer, and can scarce get over the desire 
 
1 82 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 that we had something to speak of which sight 
 could appreciate, and which did not require the 
 exercise of faith. Again and again the wish 
 rises within us that to the sick man we could 
 bring health as well as the promise of forgive- 
 ness, and that to the poor we could grant an 
 earthly, while we make known a heavenly, in- 
 heritance. One who has experienced these 
 scruples, and known how hard it is to get rid of 
 them, will know also how to honour the faith 
 of Jacob, by which he assumes the right to bless 
 Pharaoh — though he is himself a mere sojourner 
 by sufferance in Pharaoh's land, and living on 
 his bounty — and by which he gathers his 
 children round him and portions out to them 
 a land which seemed to have been most barren 
 to himself, and which now seemed quite beyond 
 his reach. The enjoyments of it, which he 
 himself had not very deeply tasted, he yet 
 knew were real ; and if there were a look of 
 scepticism, or of scorn, on the face of any one 
 of his sons ; if the unbelief of any received the 
 prophetic utterances as the ravings of delirium, 
 
THE BLESSINGS OE THE TRIBES. 183 
 
 or the fancies of an imbecile and worn-out mind 
 going back to the scenes of its youth, in Jacob 
 himself there was so simple and unsuspecting a 
 faith in God's promise, that he dealt with the 
 land as if it were the only portion worth be- 
 queathing to his sons, as if every Canaanite 
 were already cast out of it, and as if he knew 
 his sons could never be tempted by the wealth 
 of Egypt to turn with contempt from the land 
 of promise. And if we would attain to this 
 boldness of his, and be able to speak of 
 spiritual and future blessings as very sub- 
 stantial and valuable, we must ourselves learn 
 to make much of God's promise, and leave no 
 taint of unbelief in our reception of it. 
 
 And often we are rebuked by finding that when 
 we do offer things spiritual, even those who are 
 wrapped in earthly comforts appreciate and 
 accept the better gifts. So it was in Joseph's 
 case. No doubt the highest posts in Egypt 
 were open to his sons ; they might have been 
 naturalized, as he himself had been, and, throw- 
 ing in their lot with the land of their adoption, 
 
i84 ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 might have turned to their advantage the rank 
 their father held, and the reputation he had 
 earned. But Joseph turns from this attractive 
 prospect, brings them to his father, and hands 
 them over to the despised shepherd-Hfe of 
 Israel. One need scarcely point out how great 
 a sacrifice this was on Joseph's part. So uni- 
 versally acknowledged and legitimate a desire 
 is it to pass to one's children the honour 
 achieved by a life of exertion, that states have 
 no higher rewards to confer on their most use- 
 ful servants than a title which their descendants 
 may wear. But Joseph would not suffer his 
 children to risk the loss of their share in God's 
 pecuhar blessing, not for the most promising 
 openings in life, or the highest civil honours. 
 II the thoroughly open identification of them 
 with the shepherds, and their profession of a 
 belief in a distant inheritance, which must have 
 made them appear madmen in the eyes of the 
 Egyptians, if this was to cut them off from 
 worldly advancement, Joseph was not careful of 
 this, for resolved he was that, at any cost, they 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES. 185 
 
 should be among God's people. And his faith 
 received its reward ; the two tribes that sprang 
 from him received about as large a portion of 
 the promised land as fell to the lot of all the 
 other tribes put together. 
 
 You will observe that Ephraim and Manasseh 
 were adopted as sons of Jacob. Jacob tells 
 Joseph "they shall be mine," not my grand- 
 sons, but as Reuben and Simeon. No other 
 sons whom Joseph might have were to be re- 
 ceived into this honour, but these two were to 
 take their place on a level with their uncles as 
 heads of tribes, so that Joseph is represented 
 through the whole history by the two populous 
 and powerful tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. 
 No greater honour could have been put on 
 Joseph, nor any more distinct and lasting 
 recognition made of the indebtedness of his 
 family to him, and of how he had been as a 
 father bringing new life to his brethren, than 
 this, that his sons should be raised to the rank 
 of heads of tribes, on a level with the immediate 
 sons of Jacob. And no higher honour could 
 
1 86 ISRAEL'S IR ON A GE. 
 
 have been put on the two lads themselves than 
 that they should thus be treated as if they were 
 their father Joseph — as if they had his worth 
 and his rank. He is merged in them, and all 
 that he has earned is, throughout the history, 
 to be found, not in his own name, but in theirs. 
 It all proceeds from him; but his enjoyment 
 is found in their enjoyment, his worth acknow- 
 ledged in their fruitfulness. Thus did God 
 familiarize the Jewish mind through its whole 
 history with the idea, if they chose to think 
 and have ideas, of adoption, and of an adoption 
 of a peculiar kind, of an adoption where al- 
 ready there was an heir who, by this adoption, 
 has his name and worth merged in the persons 
 now received into his place. Ephraim and 
 Manasseh were not received alongside of Joseph, 
 but each received what Joseph himself might 
 have had, and Joseph's name as a tribe was 
 henceforth only to be found in these two. This 
 idea was fixed in such a way, that for centuries 
 it was steeping into the minds of men, so that 
 they might not be astonished if God should in 
 
THE BLESSINGS OE THE TRIBES. 187 
 
 some other case, say the case of His own Son, 
 adopt men into the same rank as He, and let 
 His estimate of the worth of His Son, and 
 the honour He puts upon Him, be seen in the 
 adopted. This being so, we need not be 
 alarmed if men tell us that imputation is a 
 mere legal fiction, or human invention ; a 
 legal fiction it may be, but in the case be- 
 fore us it was the never-disputed foundation 
 of very substantial blessings to Ephraim and 
 Manasseh ; and we plead for nothing more 
 than that God would act with us as here He 
 did act with these two, that He would make 
 us His direct heirs, make us His own sons, and 
 give us what He who presents us to Him to 
 receive His blessing did earn, and merits at the 
 Father's hand. 
 
 We meet with these crossed hands of bles- 
 sing frequently in Scripture; the younger son 
 blessed above the elder — as was needful, lest 
 grace should become confounded with nature, 
 and the belief gradually grow up in men's minds 
 that natural effects could never be overcome by 
 
1 88 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 grace, and that in every respect grace waited 
 upon nature. And these crossed hands we 
 meet still; for how often does God quite reverse 
 ouY order, and bless most that about which we 
 had less concern, and seem to put a slight on 
 that which has engrossed our best affection. 
 It is so, often in precisely the way in wdiich 
 Joseph found it so ; the son whose youth is most 
 anxiously cared for, to whom the interests of the 
 younger members of the family are sacrificed, 
 and who is commended to God continually 
 to receive His right-hand blessing, this son 
 seems neither to receive nor to dispense much 
 blessing ; but the younger, less thought of, left 
 to work his own way, is favoured by God, and 
 becomes the comfort and support of his parents 
 when the elder has failed of his duty. And in 
 the case of much that we hold dear, the same 
 rule is seen ; a pursuit we wish to be successful 
 in we can make little of, and are thrown back 
 from continually, while something else into 
 which we have thrown ourselves almost acci- 
 dentally, prospers in our hand and blesses us. 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES. 189 
 
 Again and again, for years together, we put 
 forward some cherished desire to God's right 
 hand, and are displeased, like Joseph, that still 
 the hand of greater blessing should pass to 
 some other thing. Does God not know what is 
 oldest with us, what has been longest at our 
 hearts, and is dearest to us ? Certainly he does : 
 " I know it, my son, I know it," He answers 
 to all our expostulations. It is not because 
 He does not understand or regard your predi- 
 lections, yournatural and excusable preferences, 
 that He sometimes refuses to gratify your whole 
 desire, and pours upon you blessings of a kind 
 somewhat different from those you most earn- 
 estly covet. He will give you the whole that 
 Christ hath merited; but for the application and 
 distribution of that grace and blessing you 
 must be content to trust Him. You may be at 
 a loss to know why He does no more to deliver 
 you from some sin, or why He does not make 
 you more successful in your efforts to aid others, 
 or why, while He so liberally prospers you in 
 one part of your condition, you get so much 
 
I90 ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. 
 
 less in another that is far nearer your heart ; 
 but God does what He will with His own, and 
 if you do not find in one point the whole bless- 
 ing and prosperity you think should flow from 
 such a mediator as you have, you may only 
 conclude that what is lacking there, will else- 
 where be found more wisely bestowed. And is 
 it not a perpetual encouragement to us that 
 God does not merely crown what nature has 
 successfully begun, that it is not the likely and 
 the naturally good that are most blessed, but 
 that God hath chosen the foolish things of the 
 world to confound the wise, and the weak things 
 of the world to confound the things that are 
 mighty ; and base things of the world and 
 things which are despised hath God chosen, 
 yea, and things which are not, to bring to 
 nought things that are ? 
 ^ In Reuben, the first-born, conscience must 
 have been sadly at war with hope, as he looked 
 at the blind, but expressive, face of his father. 
 He may have hoped that his sin had not been 
 severely thought of by his father, or that the 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES. 191 
 
 father's pride in his first-born would prompt 
 him to hide, though it could not make him 
 forget it. Probably the gross offence had not 
 been made known to the family. At least, the 
 words " he went up," may be understood as 
 addressed in explanation to the brethren. It 
 may indeed have been that the blind old man 
 forcibly recalling the long past transgression, 
 is here uttering a mournful, regretful soliloquy, 
 rather than addressing any one. It may be 
 that these words were uttered to himself as he 
 w^ent back upon the one deed that had disclosed 
 to him his son's real character, and rudely 
 hurled to the ground all the hopes he had built 
 up for his first-born. Yet there is no reason to 
 suppose, on the other hand, that the sin had 
 been previously known or alluded to in the 
 family. Reuben's hasty, passionate nature 
 could not understand that if Jacob had felt that 
 sin of his deeply, he should not have shown his 
 resentment ; he had stunned his father with the 
 heavy blow, and because he did not cry out and 
 strike him in return, he thouo:ht him little hurt. 
 
1 9 2 ISRAEL'S IR ON A GE. 
 
 So do shallow natures tremble for a night after 
 their sin, and when they find that the sun rises 
 and men greet them as cordially as before, and 
 that no hand lays hold on them from the past, 
 they think little more of their sin — do not 
 understand that fatal calm that precedes the 
 storm. Had the memory of Reuben's sin sur- 
 vived in Jacob's mind all the sad events that 
 had since happened, and all the stirring in- 
 cidents of the emigration and the new life in 
 Egypt ? Could his father at the last hour, and 
 after so many thronged years, and before his 
 brethren, recall the old sin ? He is relieved 
 and confirmed in his confidence by the first 
 words of Jacob, words ascribing to him his 
 natural position, a certain conspicuous dignity 
 too, and power such as one may often see 
 produced in men by occupying positions of 
 authority, though in their own character there 
 be weakness. But all the excellence that Jacob 
 ascribes to Reuben, serves only to embitter the 
 doom pronounced upon him. Men seem often 
 to expect that a future can be given to them 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES. 193 
 
 irrespective of what they themselves are, that a 
 series of blessings and events might be prepared 
 for them, and made over to them ; whereas every 
 man's future must be made by himself, and is 
 already in great part formed by the past. It 
 v/as a vain expectation of Reuben to expect 
 that he, the impetuous, unstable, superficial son, 
 could have the future of a deep, and earnest, and 
 dutiful nature, or that his children should derive 
 no taint from their parent, but be as the chil- 
 dren of Joseph. No man's future need be alto- 
 gether a doom to him, for God may bless to 
 him the evil fruit his life has borne ; but cer- 
 tainly no man need look for a future which has 
 no relation to his own character. His future 
 will always be made up of hk deeds, his feelings, 
 and the circumstances which lih desires have 
 brought him into. 
 
 The future of Reuben was of a negative, blank 
 kind — "Thou shalt not excel;" his unstable 
 character must empty it of all great success. 
 And to many a heart since have these words 
 struck a chill, for to many they are as a mirror 
 14 
 
194 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 suddenly held up before them. They see them- 
 selves, when they look on the tossing sea, rising 
 and pointing to the heavens with much noise, 
 but only to sink back again to the same ever- 
 lasting level. Men of brilliant parts and great 
 capacity are continually seen to be lost to 
 society by instability of purpose. Would they 
 only pursue one direction, and concentrate their 
 energies on one subject, they might become true 
 heirs of promise, blessed and blessing ; but they 
 seem to lose relish for every pursuit on the first 
 taste of success — all their energ}^ seems to have 
 boiled over and evaporated in the first glow, 
 and sinks as the water that has just been 
 noisily boiling, when the fire is withdrawn from 
 under it. No impression made upon them is 
 permanent : like water, they are plastic, easily 
 impressible, but utterly incapable of retaining 
 an impression ; and therefore, like water, they 
 have a downward tendency, or at the best are 
 but retained in their place by pressure from 
 without, and have no internal power of growth. 
 And the miserv of this character is often in- 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES 195 
 
 creased by the desire to excel which commonly 
 accompanies instability. It is generally this 
 very desire which prompts a man to hurry from 
 one aim to another, to give up one path to 
 excellence when he sees that other men are 
 making way upon another: having no internal 
 convictions of his own, he is guided m.ostly by 
 the successes of other men, the most dangerous 
 of all guides. So that such a man has all the 
 bitterness of an eager desire doomed never to 
 be satisfied. Conscious to himself of capacity 
 for something, feeling in him the excellency of 
 power, and having that ''excellency of dignity," 
 or graceful and princely refinement, which the 
 knowledge of many things, and intercourse with 
 many kinds of people, have imparted to him, 
 he feels all the more that pervading weakness, 
 that greedy, lustful craving for all kinds of 
 priority, and for enjoying all the various ad- 
 vantages which other men severally enjoy, 
 which will not let him finally choose and 
 adhere to his own line of things, but distracts 
 
1 96 ISRAELS IRON A GE. 
 
 him by a thousand purposes which ever defeat 
 one another.* 
 
 The sin of the next oldest sons was also 
 remembered against them, and remembered 
 apparently for the same reason — because the 
 character was expressed in it. The massacre 
 of the Shechemites was not an accidental out- 
 rage that any other of the sons of Jacob might 
 equally have perpetrated, but the most glaring 
 of a number of expressions of a fierce and cruel 
 disposition in these two men. In Jacob's pre- 
 diction of their future, he seems to shrink with 
 horror from his own progeny — like her who 
 dreamt she would give birth to a firebrand. He 
 sees the possibility of the direst results flowing 
 from such a temper, and, under God, provides 
 against these by scattering the tribes, and thus 
 weakening their power for evil. They had been 
 banded together so as the more easil}^ and 
 securely to accomplish their murderous pur- 
 
 " The subsequent history of the tribe shows that the 
 character of its father was transmitted. " No judge, no 
 prophet, not one of the tribe of Reuben, is mentioned." 
 {Vide Smith's Dictionary, Reuben.) 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES 197 
 
 poses. "Simeon and Levi are brethren " — show- 
 in,^ a close affinity, and seeking one another's 
 society and aid, but it is for bad purposes ; and 
 therefore they must be divided in Jacob and 
 scattered in Israel. This was accomplished by ^ 
 the tribe of Levi being distributed over all the 
 other tribes as the ministers of religion. The 
 fiery zeal, the bold independence, and the pride 
 of being a distinct people, which had been dis- 
 played in the slaughter of the 'Shechemites, 
 might be toned down and turned to good 
 account when the sword was taken out of 
 their hand. Qualities such as these, which 
 produce the most disastrous results when fit 
 instruments can be found, and when men of 
 like disposition are suffered to band them- 
 selves together, may, when found in the indi- 
 vidual and kept in check by circumstances and 
 dissimilar dispositions, be highly beneficial. 
 
 In the sin, Levi seems to have been the mov- 
 ing spirit, Simeon the abetting tool, and in the 
 punishment, it is the more dangerous tribe that 
 is scattered, so that the other is left com- 
 
198 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 panionless. In the blessings of !Moses, the 
 tribe of Simeon is passed over in silence ; and 
 that the tribe of Levi should have been so 
 used for God's immediate service, stands as 
 evidence that punishments, however severe 
 and desolating, even threatening something 
 bordering on extinction, may yet become bless- 
 ings to God's people. The sword of murder 
 was displaced in Levi's hand by the knife of 
 sacrifice ; their fierce revenge against sinners 
 was converted into hostility against sin ; their 
 apparent zeal for the forms of their religion 
 was consecrated to the service of the taber- 
 nacle and temple ; their fanatical pride, which 
 prompted them to treat all other people as the 
 offscouring of the earth, was informed by a better 
 spirit, and used for the upbuilding and instruc- 
 tion of the people of Israel. In order to under- 
 stand why this tribe, of all others, should have 
 been chosen for the service of the sanctuary 
 and for the instruction of the people, we must 
 not only recognise how their being scattered 
 in punishment of their sin over all the land 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES. 199 
 
 fitted them to be the educators of the nation 
 and the representatives of all the tribes, but 
 also we must consider that the sin itself which 
 Levi had committed, broke the one command 
 which men had up till this time received from 
 the mouth of God ; no law had as yet been 
 published, but that which had been given to 
 Noah and his sons regarding bloodshed, and 
 which was given in circumstances so appalling, 
 and with sanctions so emphatic, that it might 
 ever have rung in men's ears, and stayed the 
 hand of the murderer. In saying, ''At the hand 
 of every man's brother will I require the life of 
 man," God had shown that human life was to 
 be counted sacred. He Himself had swept the 
 race from the face of the earth, but adding 
 this command immediately after, He showed 
 all the more forcibly that punishment was His 
 own prerogative, and that none but those ap- 
 pointed by Him might shed blood — " Vengeance 
 is mine," saith the Lord. To take private re- 
 venge, as Levi did, was to take the sword out of 
 God's hand, and was to say that God was not 
 
200 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 careful enough of justice, and but a poor guar- 
 dian of right and wrong in the world ; and to 
 destroy human life in the wanton and cruel 
 manner in which Levi had destroyed the 
 Shechemites, and to do it under colour and 
 by the aid of religious zeal, was to God the 
 most hateful of sins. But none can know the 
 hatefulness of a sin so distinctly as he who has 
 fallen into it, and is enduring the punishment of 
 it penitently and graciously, and therefore Levi 
 was of all others the best fitted to be entrusted 
 with those sacrificial symbols which set forth the 
 value of all human life, and especially of the 
 life of God's own Son. Very humbling must 
 it have been for the Levite who remembered 
 the history of his tribe, to be used by God 
 as the hand of His justice on the victims that 
 were brought in substitution for that which was 
 so precious in the sight of God. 
 
 The blessing of Judah is at once the most 
 important and the most difficult to interpret in 
 the series. There is enough in the history of 
 Judah himself, and there is enough in the sub- 
 
THE BLESSINGS OE THE TRIBES. 201 
 
 sequent history of the tribe, to justify the ascrip- 
 tion to him of all lion-like qualities — a kingly 
 fearlessness, confidence, power, and success ; 
 in action a rapidity of movement and might 
 that make him irresistible, and in repose a 
 majestic dignity of bearing. As the serpent 
 is the cognizance of Dan, the wolf of Benja- 
 min, the hind of Naphtali, so is the lion of 
 the tribe of Judah. He scorns to gain his 
 end by a serpentine craft, and is himself easily 
 taken in ; he does not ravin like a wolf, 
 merely plundering for the sake of booty, but 
 gives freely and generously, even to the sacri- 
 fice of his own person ; nor has he the mere 
 graceful and ineffective swiftness of the hind, 
 but the rushing onset of the lion — a character 
 which, more than any other, men reverence and 
 admire — " Judah, tlioii art he whom thy brethren 
 shall praise" — and a character which, more 
 any other, fits a man to take the lead and rule. 
 If there were to be kings in Israel, there could 
 be little doubt from which tribe they could best 
 be chosen ; a wolf of the tribe of Benjamin, 
 
2 o 2 ISRAEL'S IR ON A GE. 
 
 like Saul, not only hung on the rear of retreat- 
 ing Philistines and spoiled them, but made a 
 prey of his own people, and it is in David we 
 find the true king, the man who more than any 
 other satisfies men's ideal of the prince to 
 whom they will pay homage ; — falling indeed 
 into grievous error and sin, like his forefather, 
 but like him also right at heart, so generous 
 and self-sacrificing that men served him with 
 the most devoted loyalty, and were willing 
 rather to dwell in caves with him than in 
 palaces with any other. 
 
 This kingly supremacy of Judah was here 
 spoken of in words which have been the subject 
 of as prolonged and violent contention as any 
 others in the Word of God. " The sceptre shall 
 not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from 
 between his feet, until Shiloh come." These 
 words are very generally understood to mean 
 that Judah's supremacy would continue until 
 it culminated or flowered into the personal 
 reign of Shiloh ; in other words, that Judah's 
 sovereignty was to be perpetuated in the person 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES. 203 
 
 of Jesus Christ. So that this prediction is but 
 the first whisper of that which was afterwards 
 so distinctly declared, that David's seed should 
 sit on the throne for ever and ever. It was not 
 accomplished in the letter, any more than the 
 promise to David was ; the tribe of Judah can- 
 not in any intelligible sense be said to have had 
 rulers of her own up to the coming of Christ, 
 or for some centuries previous to that date. 
 For those who would quickly judge God and 
 His promise by what they can see in their own 
 day, there was enough to provoke them to 
 challenge God for forgetting His promise. 
 But in due time the King of men. He to 
 whom all nations have gathered, did spring 
 from this tribe ; and need it be said that the 
 very fact of His appearance proved that the 
 supremacy had not departed from Judah? This 
 prediction, then, partook of the character of 
 very many of the Old Testament prophecies ; 
 there was sufficient fulfilment in the letter to 
 seal, as it were, the promise, and give men a 
 token that it was being accomplished, and yet 
 
2 04 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 so m^'sterious a falling short, as to cause men 
 to look beyond the literal fulfilment on which 
 alone their hopes had at first rested, to some 
 far higher and more perfect spiritual fulfilment. 
 But not only has it been objected that the 
 sceptre departed from Judah long before Christ 
 came, and that therefore the word Shiloh can- 
 not refer to Him, but also it has been truly said 
 that wherever else the word occurs it is the 
 name of a town — that town, viz., where the ark 
 for a long time was stationed, and from which 
 the allotment of territory was made to the 
 various tribes ; and the prediction has been 
 supposed to mean that Judah should be the 
 leading tribe till the land was entered. Many 
 objections to this naturally occur, and need not 
 be stated. But it comes to be an inquiry of 
 some interest. How much information regard- 
 ing a personal Messiah did the brethren receive 
 from this prophecy ? A question very difficult 
 indeed to answer. The word Shiloh means 
 " peace-making," and if they understood this 
 as a proper name, they must have thought of a 
 
THE BLESSINGS OE THE TRIBES 205 
 
 person such as Isaiah designates as the Prince 
 of Peace — a name, it was, similar to that where- 
 with David called his son Solomon, in the 
 expectation that the results of his own lifetime 
 of disorder and battle would be reaped by his 
 successor in a peaceful and prosperous reign. 
 It can scarcely be thought likely, indeed, that 
 this single term " Shiloh," which might be 
 applied to many things besides a person, should 
 give to the sons of Jacob any distinct idea of a 
 personal Deliverer ; but it might be sufficient to 
 keep before their eyes, and specially before the 
 tribe of Judah, that the aim and consummation 
 of all lawgiving and ruling was peace. And 
 there was certainly contained in this blessing 
 an assurance that the purpose of Judah would 
 not be accomplished, and therefore that the 
 existence of Judah as a tribe would not termi- 
 nate, until peace had been through its means 
 brought into the world : thus was the assurance 
 given, that the productive power of Judah should 
 not fail until out of that tribe there had sprung 
 that which should give peace. 
 
2o6 ISRAELS IRON' AGE. 
 
 But to us who have seen the prediction 
 accomplished, it plainly enough points to the 
 Lion of the tribe of Judah, who in His own per- 
 son combined all kingly qualities. In Him we 
 are taught by this prediction to discover once 
 more the single Person who stands out on the 
 page of this world's history as satisfying men's 
 ideal of what their King should be, and of how 
 the race should be represented ; — the One who 
 without any rival stands in the mind's eye as 
 that for which the best hopes of men were 
 waiting, still feeling that the race could do 
 more than it had done, and never satisfied but 
 in Him. 
 
 Zebulun, the sixth and last of Leah's sons, 
 was so called, because said Leah, *' Now will 
 my husband dwell with me " (such being the 
 meaning of the name), " for I have borne him 
 six sons." All that is predicted regarding this 
 tribe is that his dwelling should be by the sea, 
 and near the Phoenician city Zidon. This is 
 not to be taken as a strict geographical defini- 
 tion of the tract of country occupied by Zebu- 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES. 207 
 
 lun, as you will see if you compare it with the 
 lot assigned to it and marked out in the book 
 of Joshua ; but though the border of the tribe 
 did not reach to Zidon, and though it can only 
 have been a mere tongue of land belonging to 
 it that ran down to the Mediterranean shore, 
 yet the situation ascribed to it is true to its 
 character as a tribe that had commercial rela- 
 tions with the Phoenicians, and was of a de- 
 cidedly mercantile turn. We find this same 
 feature indicated in the blessing of Moses : 
 " Rejoice, Zebulun, in thy going out, and Issa- 
 char in thy tents " — Zebulun having the enter- 
 prise of a seafaring community, and Issachar 
 the quiet bucolic contentment of an agricultural 
 or pastoral population : Zebulun always rest- 
 lessly eager for emigration or commerce, for 
 going out of one kind or other ; Issachar 
 satisfied to live and die in his own tents. It 
 is still, therefore, character rather than geo- 
 graphical position that is here spoken of — 
 though it is a trait of character that we all 
 know to be singularly dependent on geographi- 
 
2 o8 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 cal position : we, c.g.^ because islanders, having 
 become the maritime power and the merchants 
 of the world ; not being shut off from other 
 nations by the encompassing sea, but finding 
 paths by it equally in all directions ready 
 provided for every kind of traffic. 
 
 Zebulun, then, was to represent the com- 
 merce of Israel, its outgoing tendency; was to 
 supply a means of communication and bond of 
 connection with the world outside, so that 
 through it might be conveyed to the nations 
 what was saving in Israel, and that what Israel 
 needed from other lands might also find en- 
 trance. In the Church also, this is a needful 
 quality : for our well-being there must ever 
 exist among us those who are not afraid to 
 launch on the wide and pathless sea of opinion ; 
 those in whose ears its waves have from their 
 childhood sounded with a fascinating invitation, 
 and who at last, as if possessed by some spirit 
 of unrest, loose from the firm earth, and go in 
 quest of lands not yet discovered, or are im- 
 pelled to see for themselves what till now they 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES. 209 
 
 have believed on the testimony of others. It is 
 not for all men to quit the shore, and risk 
 themselves in the miseries and disasters of so 
 comfortless and hazardous a life ; but happy 
 the people which possesses from one generation 
 to another, men who must see with their own 
 eyes, and to whose restless nature the dis- 
 comforts and dangers of an unsettled life have 
 a charm. It is not the instability of Reuben 
 that we have in these men, but the irrepressible 
 longing of the born seaman, who must lift the 
 misty veil of the horizon and penetrate its 
 mystery. And we are not to condemn, even 
 when we know we should not imitate, men 
 who cannot rest satisfied with the ground on 
 which we stand, but venture into regions of 
 speculation, of religious thought which we 
 have never trodden, and may deem hazard- 
 ous. The nourishment we receive is not all 
 native-grown ; there are views of truth which 
 may very profitably be imported from strange 
 and distant lands ; and there is no land, no 
 province of thought, from which we may not 
 
 15 
 
2 1 o ISRAEL'S IR ON A GE. 
 
 derive what may advantageously be mixed 
 with our own ideas; no direction in which a 
 speculative mind can go in which it may not 
 find something which may give a fresh zest to 
 what we already use, or be a real addition to 
 our knowledge. No doubt men who refuse to 
 confine themselves to one way of viewing truth — 
 men who venture to go close to persons of very 
 different opinions from our own, who determine 
 for themselves to prove all things, who have no 
 very special love for what they were native to 
 and originally taught, who show rather a taste 
 for strange and new opinions — these persons live 
 a life of great hazard, and in the end are gene- 
 rally, like men who have been much at sea, 
 unsettled ; they have not fixed opinions, and 
 are in themselves, as individual men, unsatis- 
 factory and unsatisfied ; but still they have done 
 good to the community, by bringing to us ideas 
 and knowledge which otherwise we could not 
 have obtained. Such men God gives us to 
 widen our views ; to prevent us from thinking 
 that we have the best of everything ; to bring 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES. 211 
 
 us to acknowledge that others, who perhaps in 
 the main are not so favoured as ourselves, are 
 yet possessed of some things we ourselves 
 would be the better of. And though these 
 men must themselves necessarily hang loosely, 
 scarcely attached very firmly to any part of the 
 Church, like a seafaring population, and often 
 even with a border running very close to 
 heathenism, yet let us own that the Church 
 has need of such — that without them the differ- 
 ent sections of the Church would know too 
 little of one another, and too little of the facts 
 of this world's life. And as the seafaring popu- 
 lation of a country might be expected to show 
 less interest in the soil of their native land than 
 others, and yet we know that in point of fact 
 w^e are dependent on no class of our population 
 so much for leal patriotism, and for the de- 
 fence of our country : so one has observed that 
 the Church also must make similar use of her 
 Zebuluns — of men who, by their very habit of 
 restlessly considering all views of truth which 
 are alien to our own ways of thinking, have 
 
2 1 2 ISRAEL'S IR ON A GE. 
 
 become familiar with, and better able to defend 
 us against, the error that mingles with these 
 views. 
 
 Issachar receives from his father a character 
 which few would be proud of or would envy, 
 but which many are very content to bear. As 
 the strong ass that has its stall and its proven- 
 der provided can afford to let the free beasts of 
 the forest vaunt their liberty, so there is a very 
 numerous class of men who have no care to 
 assert their dignity as human beings, or to 
 agitate regarding their rights as citizens, so 
 long as their obscurity and servitude provide 
 them with physical comforts, and leave them 
 
 V 
 
 1 . /free of heavy responsibilities. They prefer a 
 ■JX \ ' 
 ^^^ life of ease and plenty, to a life of hardship 
 
 and glory. They are not lazy nor idle, but 
 are quite willing to use their strength so long 
 as they are not overdriven out of their sleek- 
 ness. They have neither ambition nor enter- 
 prise, and willingly bow their shoulders to bear, 
 and become the servants of those who will 
 free them from the anxiety of planning and 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES. 213 
 
 managing, and give them a fair and regular 
 remuneration for their labour. This is not a 
 noble nature, but in a world in which ambition 
 so frequently runs through a thorny and diffi- 
 cult path to a disappointing and shameful end, 
 this disposition has much to say in its own 
 defence. It will often accredit itself with un- 
 challengeable common sense, and will maintain 
 that it alone enjoys life and gets the good 
 of it. They will tell you they are the only true 
 utilitarians, that to be one's own master only 
 brings cares, and that the degradation of ser- 
 vitude is only an idea ; that really servants are 
 quite as well off as masters. Look at them : the 
 one is as a strong, powerful, well-cared for 
 animal, his work but a pleasant exercise to 
 him, and when it is over never following him 
 into his rest ; he eats the good of the land, 
 and has what all seem to be in vain striving 
 for, rest and contentment : the other, the 
 master, has indeed his position, but that only 
 multiplies his duties ; he has wealth, but that 
 proverbially only increases his cares and the 
 
2 1 4 ISRAELS IRON A GE. 
 
 mouths that are to consume it ; it is he who 
 has the air of a bondsman, and never, meet him 
 when you may, seems wholly at ease and free 
 from care. 
 
 Yet, after all that can be said in favour of the 
 bargain an Issachar makes, and however he 
 maybe satisfied to rest, and in a quiet, peaceful 
 way enjoy life, men feel that at the best there 
 is something despicable about such a character. 
 He gives his labour and is fed, he pays his 
 tribute and is protected ; but men feel that 
 they ought to meet the dangers, responsibilities, 
 and difficulties of life in their own persons, and 
 at first hand, and not buy themselves off so from 
 the burden of individual self-control and re- 
 sponsibility. The animal enjoyment of this life 
 and its physical comforts may be a very good 
 ingredient in a national character : it might be 
 well for Israel to have this patient, docile mass 
 of strength in its midst : it may be well for our 
 country that there are among us not only men 
 eager for the highest honours and posts, but a 
 great multitude of men perhaps equally service- 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES. 215 
 
 able and capable, but whose desires never 
 rise beyond the ordinary social comforts ; the 
 contentedness of such, even though reprehen- 
 sible, tempers or balances the ambition of the 
 others, and when it comes into personal con- 
 tact rebukes its feverishness. They, as well as 
 the other parts of society, have amidst their 
 error a truth — the truth that the ideal world in 
 which ambition, and hope, and imagination live 
 is not everything ; that the miaterial has also a 
 reality, and that though hope does bless man- 
 kind, yet attainment is also something, even 
 though it be a little. Yet this truth is not the 
 whole truth, and is only useful as an ingredient, 
 as a part, not as the whole ; and when we fall 
 from any high ideal of human life which we 
 have formed, and begin to find comfort and rest 
 in the mere physical good things of this world, 
 we may well despise ourselves. There is a 
 pleasantness still in the land that appeals to 
 us all ; a luxury in observing the risks and 
 struggles of others while ourselves secure and 
 at rest ; a desire to make life easy, and to shirk 
 
2 1 6 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 the responsibility and toil that public-spirited- 
 ness entails. Yet of what tribe has the Church 
 more cause to complain than of those persons 
 who seem to imagine that they have done 
 enough when they have joined the Church and 
 received their own inheritance to enjoy ; who 
 are alive to no emergency, nor awake to the 
 need of others ; who have no idea at all of their 
 being a part of the community for which, as 
 well as for themselves, there are duties to dis- 
 charge ; who couch, like the ass of Issachar, in 
 their comfort without one generous impulse to 
 make common cause against the common evils 
 and foes of the Church, and are unvisited by a 
 single compunction that while they lie there, 
 submitting to whatever fate sends, there are 
 kindred tribes of their own being oppressed and 
 spoiled ? 
 
 There seems to have been an improvement 
 in this tribe ; an infusion of some new life into 
 it. In the time of Deborah, indeed, it is with 
 a note of surprise that, while celebrating the 
 victory of Israel, she names even Issachar as 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES. 217 
 
 havin^^ been roused to action, and as having 
 helped in the common cause — "the princes of 
 Issachar were with Deborah, even Issachar;" 
 but we find them again in the days of David, 
 wiping out their reproach, and standing by him 
 manfully. And there an apparently new charac- 
 ter is given to them — " the children of Issachar, 
 which were men that had understanding of the 
 times, to know what Israel ought to do." This 
 quite accords, however, with the kind of prac- 
 tical philosophy which we have seen to be im- 
 bedded in Issachar's character. Men, they 
 were, not distracted by high thoughts and 
 ambitions, but who judged things according 
 to their substantial value to themselves; and 
 who were, therefore, in a position to give 
 much good advice on practical matters — ad- 
 vice which would always have a tendency to 
 trend too much towards mere utilitarianism 
 and worldliness, and to partake rather of crafty 
 politic diplomacy than of far-seeing statesman- 
 ship, yet trustworthy for a certain class of sub- 
 jects. And here, too, they represent the same 
 
2 1 8 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 class in the Church, ah'eady alluded to ; for one 
 often finds that men who will not interrupt 
 their own comfort, and who have a kind of 
 stolid indifference as to what comes of the 
 good of the Church, have yet also much shrewd 
 practical wisdom ; and were these men, instead 
 of spending their sagacity in cynical denuncia- 
 tion of what the Church does, to throw them- 
 selves into the cause of the Church, and 
 heartily advise her what she ought to do, and 
 help in the doing of it, their observation of 
 human affairs, and political understanding of 
 the times, would be turned to good account, 
 instead of being a reproach. 
 
 Next came the eldest son of Rachel's hand- 
 maid, and the eldest son of Leah's handmaid, 
 Dan and Gad. Dan's name, meaning "judge," 
 is the starting point of the prediction — " Dan 
 shall judge his people." This word "judge" 
 we are perhaps somewhat apt to misapprehend ; 
 it means rather to defend than to sit in judg- 
 ment on ; it refers to a judgment passed be- 
 tween one's own people and their foes, and an 
 
THE BLESSINGS OE THE TRIBES. 219 
 
 execution of such judgment in the deliverance 
 of the people and the destruction of the foe. 
 You are familiar with this meaning of the word 
 by the constant reference in the Old Testament 
 to God's judging His people ; this being always 
 a cause of joy as their sure deliverance from 
 their enemies. So also it is used of those 
 men who, when Israel had no king, rose from 
 time to time as the champions of the people, 
 to lead them against the foe, and who are 
 therefore familiarly called " The Judges." 
 From the tribe of Dan the most conspicu- 
 ous of these arose, Samson, namely, and it 
 is probably mainly with reference to this 
 fact that Jacob so emphatically predicts of 
 this tribe, " Dan shall judge his people." 
 And notice the appended clause (as reflecting 
 shame on the sluggish Issachar), " as one of 
 the tribes of Israel," recognising always that 
 his strength was not for himself alone, but for 
 his country ; that he was not an isolated people 
 who had to concern himself only with his own 
 affairs, but one of the tribes of Israel. The 
 
220 ISRAELS IRON AGE. 
 
 manner, too, in which Dan was to do this was 
 singularly descriptive of the facts subsequently 
 evolved. Dan was a very small and insignifi- 
 cant tribe, whose lot originally lay close to the 
 Philistines on the southern border of the land. 
 It might seem to be no obstacle whatever to the 
 invading Philistines as they passed to the 
 richer portion of Judah, but this little tribe, 
 through Samson, smote these terrors of the 
 Israelites with so sore and alarming a destruc- 
 tion as to cripple them for years and make 
 them harmless. You see, therefore, how aptly 
 Jacob compares them to the venomous snake 
 that lurks in the road and bites the horses 
 heels ; the dust-coloured adder that a man 
 treads on before he is aware, and whose poison- 
 ous stroke is more deadly than the foe he is 
 looking for in front. And specially significant 
 did the imagery appear to the Jews, with whom 
 this poisonous adder was indigenous, but to 
 whom the horse was the symbol of foreign 
 armament and invasion. The whole tribe of 
 Dan, too, seems to have partaken of that 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES 221 
 
 " grim humour " with which Samson saw his 
 foes walk time after time into the traps he set 
 for them, and give themselves an easy prey to 
 him — a humour which comes out with singular 
 piquancy in the narrative given in the book of 
 Judges of one of the forays of this tribe, in which 
 they carried off Micah's priest and even his gods. 
 But why, in the full flow of his eloquent de- 
 scription of the varied virtues of his sons, does 
 the patriarch suddenly check himself, lie back 
 on his pillows, and quietly say, " I have waited 
 for thy salvation, O God ? " Does he feel his 
 strength leave him so that he cannot go on to 
 bless the rest of his sons, and has but time to 
 yield his own spirit to God ? Are w^e here to 
 interpolate one of those scenes we are all fated 
 to witness when some eagerly watched breath 
 seems altogether to fail before the last words 
 have been uttered, when those who have been 
 standing apart through sorrow and reverence, 
 quickly gather round the bed to catch the last 
 look, and when the dying man again collects 
 himself and finishes his work ? Probably Jacob, 
 
2 2 2 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 having, as it were, projected himself forward 
 into those stirring and warlike times he has 
 been speaking of, so realizes the danger of his 
 people, and the futility even of such help as 
 Dan's when God does not help, that as if from 
 the midst of doubtful war he cries, as with a 
 battle cr}', '' I have waited for thy salvation, O 
 God." His longing for victory and blessing 
 to his sons far overshot the deliverance from 
 Philistines accomplished by Samson. That de- 
 liverance he thankfully accepts and joyfully 
 predicts, but in the spirit of an Israelite in- 
 deed, and a genuine child of the promise, he 
 remains unsatisfied, and sees in all such deliver- 
 ance only the pledge of God's coming nearer 
 and nearer to His people, bringing with Him 
 Hh eternal salvation. In Dan, therefore, we 
 have not the catholic spirit of Zebulun, nor the 
 practical, though sluggish, temper of Issachar ; 
 but we are guided rather to the disposition 
 which ought to be maintained through all 
 Christian life, and which, with special care, 
 needs to be cherished in Church-life — a dis- 
 
THE BLESSINGS OE THE TRIBES. 223 
 
 position to accept with gratitude all success 
 and triumph, but still to aim through all at 
 that highest victory which God alone can ac- 
 complish for His people. It is to be the battle- 
 cry with which every Christian and every 
 Church is to preserve itself, not merely against 
 external foes, but against the far more dis- 
 astrous influence of self-confidence, pride, and 
 glorying in man — " For thy salvation, God, 
 do we wait." 
 
 Gad also is a tribe whose history is to be 
 warlike, his very name signifying a marauding, 
 guerilla-troop ; and his history was to illus- 
 trate the victories which God's people gain by 
 tenacious, watchful, ever-renewed warfare. The 
 Church has often prospered by her Dan-like 
 insignificance ; the world not troubling itself 
 to make war upon her. But oftener Gad is a 
 better representative of the mode in which 
 her successes are gained. We find that the 
 men of Gad were among the most valuable 
 of David's warriors, when his necessity evoked 
 all the various skill and energy of Israel. " Of 
 
2 2 4 ISRAELS IR ON A GE. 
 
 the Gadites," we read, " there separated them- 
 selves unto David into the hold of the wilder- 
 ness men of might, and men of war fit for the 
 battle, that could handle shield and buckler, 
 whose faces were like the faces of lions, and 
 were as swift as the roes upon the mountains : 
 one of the least of them was better than an 
 hundred, and the greatest mightier than a 
 thousand.'' And there is something particularly 
 inspiriting to the individual Christian in finding 
 this pronounced as part of the blessing of God's 
 people — "a troop shall overcome him, but he 
 shall overcome at the last." It is this that 
 enables us to persevere — that we have God's 
 assurance that present discomfiture does not 
 doom us to final defeat. If you be among the 
 children of promise, among those that gather 
 round God to catch His blessing, you shall 
 overcome at the last. You may now feel as if 
 assaulted by treacherous, murderous foes, irregu- 
 lar troops, that betake themselves to every cruel 
 deceit, and are ruthless in spoiling you ; you 
 may be assailed by so many and strange tempta- 
 
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES. 225 
 
 tions that you are bewildered and cannot lift a 
 hand to resist, scarce seeing where your danger 
 comes from ; you may be buffeted by messen- 
 gers of Satan, distracted by a sudden and 
 tumultuous incursion of a crowd of cares so 
 that you are moved away from the old habits of 
 your life amid which you seem to stand safely ; 
 your heart may seem to be the rendezvous of 
 all ungodly and wicked thoughts, you may feel 
 trodden under foot and overrun by sin, but, with 
 the blessing of God, you shall overcome at the 
 last. Only cultivate that dogged pertinacity of 
 Gad, which has no thought of ultimate defeat, 
 but rallies cheerfully and resolutely after every 
 discomfiture. 
 
 UNWIN BROTHERS, PRINTERS BY WATER POWER, CHILWORTH, SURREY. 
 
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 Israel's iron age: or, Sketches from 
 
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