To obey such a mandate showed the strength of his faith. It is

clear that even before the menace of the thought he had been known,

and unfavourably known, to Ahab. The king saw in him a prophet who

fearlessly opposed all the idolatrous tendencies into which he had

led his easy and faithless people. How terribly must Ahab's hatred

have been now intensified! We see from all the books of the prophets

that they were personally identified with their predictions; that

they were held responsible for them, were even regarded in popular

apprehension as having actually brought about the things which they

predicted. "See," says Jehovah to the timid boy Jeremiah, "I have

this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms to root

out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build,

and to plant." The Prophet is addressed as though he personally

effected the ruin he denounced. Elijah, then, would be regarded by

Ahab as in one sense the author of the three years' famine. It would

be held--not indeed with perfect accuracy, yet with a not unnatural

confusion--that it was _he_ who had shut up the windows of heaven and

caused the misery and starvation of the suffering multitudes. With

what wrath would a great and powerful king like Ahab look on this

bold intruder, this skin-clad alien of Gilead, who had frustrated his

policy, defied his power, and stamped his reign with so overwhelming

a disaster. Yet he is bidden, "Go, show thyself unto Ahab"; and

perhaps his immediate safety was only secured by the additional

message, "and I will send rain upon the earth."

Things had, indeed, come to their worst. The "sore famine" in Samaria

had reached a point which, if it had not been alleviated, would have

led to the utter ruin of the miserable kingdom.

In this crisis Ahab did all that a king could do. Most of the cattle

had perished, but it was essential to save if possible some of the

horses and mules. No grass was left on the scorched plains and bare

brown hills except where there were fountains and brooks which had

not entirely vanished under that copper sky. To these places it

was necessary to drive such a remnant of the cattle as it might be

still possible to preserve alive. But who could be trusted to rise

entirely superior to individual selfishness in such a search? Ahab

thought it best to trust no one but himself and his vizier Obadiah.

The very name of this high official, Obadjahu, like the common

Mohammedan names Abdallah, Abderrahnan, and others, implied that he

was "a servant of Jehovah." His conduct answered to his name, for

on Jezebel's persecuting attempt to exterminate Jehovah's prophets

in their schools or communities, he, "the Sebastian of the Jewish

Diocletian," had, at the peril of his own life, taken a hundred

of them, concealed them in two of the great limestone caves of

Palestine--perhaps in the recesses of Mount Carmel,[632] and fed them

with bread and water. It is to Ahab's credit that he retained such a

man in office, though the touch of timidity which we trace in Obadiah

may have concealed the full faithfulness of his personal allegiance

to the old worship. Yet that such a man should still hold the post of

chamberlain (_al-hab-baith_) furnishes a fresh proof that Ahab was

not himself a worshipper of Baal.

The king and his vizier went in opposite directions, each of them

unaccompanied, and Obadiah was on his way when he was startled by

the sudden appearance of Elijah. He had not previously seen him,

but recognising him by his shaggy locks, his robe of skin, and the

awful sternness of his swarthy countenance, he was almost abjectly

terrified. Apart from the awe-inspiring aspect and manner of the

Prophet, this seemed no mere man who stood before him, but the

representative of the Eternal, and the wielder of His power. To his

contemporaries he appeared like the incarnate vengeance of Jehovah

against guilty times, a flash as it were of God's consuming fire. To

the Moslim of to-day he is still _El Khudr_, "the eternal wanderer."

Springing from his chariot, Obadiah fell flat on his face and cried,

"Is it thou, my lord Elijah?" "It is I," answered the Prophet, not

wasting words over his terror and astonishment. "Go, tell thy lord,

Behold, Elijah is here."

The message enhanced the vizier's alarm. Why had not Elijah showed

himself at once to Ahab? Did some terrible vindictive purpose lurk

behind his message? Did Elijah confuse the aims and deeds of the

minister with those of the king? Why did he despatch him on an errand

which might move Ahab to kill him? Was not Elijah aware, he asks,

with Eastern hyperbole, that Ahab had sent "to every nation and

kingdom" to ask if Elijah was there, and when told that he was not

there he made them confirm the statement by an oath?[633] What would

come of such a message if Obadiah conveyed it? No sooner would it

be delivered than the wind of the Lord would sweep Elijah away into

some new and unknown solitude,[634] and Ahab, thinking that he had

only been befooled, would in his angry disappointment, put Obadiah

to death. Had he deserved such a fate? Had not Elijah heard of his

reverence for Jehovah from his youth, and of his saving the hundred

prophets at the peril of his life? Why then send him on so dangerous

a mission? To these agitated appeals Elijah answered by his customary

oath, "As Jehovah of hosts liveth, before whom I stand,[635] I will

show myself unto him to-day." Then Obadiah went and told Ahab, and

Ahab with impetuous haste hastened to meet Elijah, knowing that on

him depended the fate of his kingdom.

Yet when they met he could not check the burst of anger which sprang

to his lips.

"Is it thou, thou troubler of Israel?" he fiercely exclaimed.[636]

Elijah was not the man to quail before the _vultus instantis tyranni_.

"I have not troubled Israel," was the undaunted answer, "but thou

and thy father's house." The cause of the drought was not the menace

of Elijah, but the apostasy to Baalim. It was time that the fatal

controversy should be decided. There must be an appeal to the people.

Elijah was in a position to dictate, and he did dictate. "Let all

Israel," he said, "be summoned to Mount Carmel;" and there he would

singly meet in their presence the four hundred and fifty prophets of

Baal, and the four hundred prophets of the Asherah, all of whom ate

at Jezebel's table.[637] Then and there a great challenge should take

place, and the question should be settled for ever, whether Baal or

Jehovah was to be the national god of Israel. What challenge could be

fairer, seeing that Baal was the Sun-god, the god of fire?

FOOTNOTES:

[632] Amos ix. 3: "And though they hide themselves in the top of

Carmel, I will search and take them out thence." The phrase shows the

security and seclusion of these caves and thickets, the haunt once of

lions and bears, and still of leopards and hyænas.

[633] The LXX. adds that he inflicted vengeance because Elijah was

not found: "Καὶ ἐνέπρησε τὴν βασιλείαν καὶ τὰς χωρὰς αὐτῆς ὅτι οὐχ

εὔρηκέ σε" (1 Kings xviii. 10).

[634] Obadiah seems to have believed in miraculous transference of

the Prophet from place to place. Comp. Ezek. iii. 12-14 (where "the

spirit" may be rendered "a spirit," or "a wind"), viii. 3; 2 Kings

ii. 16; Acts viii. 39; and the Ebionite Gospel of St. Matthew. "My

mother, the Holy Ghost, took me by a hair of the head, and carried me

to Mount Tabor" (Orig. _in Joann._, ii., § 6; and Jer. _in Mic._ vii.

6). So in Bel and the Dragon 33-36 (Abarbanel, _Comm. in Habakkuk_)

the prophet Habakkuk is said to have been taken invisibly to supply

food to Daniel in the den of lions. "Then the angel of the Lord took

him by the crown and bare him by the hair of his head, and through

the vehemency of his spirit" (_Midr. Robshik Rabba, "in the might of

the Holy Ghost"_) "set him in Babylon."

[635] 1 Kings xviii. 15, LXX., "The Lord God of Israel" has now

become to him more prominently "the Lord God of Hosts."

[636] The phrase had already been applied to Achan (Josh. vii. 25).

[637] _I.e._, were maintained at Jezebel's expense. The subsequent

narration is silent as to the presence of the prophets of the Asherah,

and Wellhausen thinks that the words here are an interpolation.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

_ELIJAH ON MOUNT CARMEL._

1 KINGS xviii. 20-40.

"O for a sculptor's hand,

That thou might'st take thy stand,

Thy wild hair floating in the eastern breeze!"

KEBLE.

It never occurred to Ahab to refuse the challenge, or to arrest the

hated messenger. The hermit and the dervish are sacrosanct; they

stand before kings and are not ashamed. Having nothing to desire,

they have nothing to fear. So Antony stalked into the streets of

Alexandria to denounce its prefect; so Athanasius fearlessly seized

the bridle of Constantine in his new city; so a ragged and dwarfish

old man--Macedonius the Barley-eater--descended from his mountain

cave at Antioch to stop the horses of the avenging commissioners

of Thedosius, and bade them go back and rebuke the fury of their

Emperor,--and so far from punishing him they alighted, and fell on

their knees, and begged his blessing.

The vast assembly was gathered by royal proclamation. There could

have been no scene in the land of Israel more strikingly suitable for

the purpose than Mount Carmel. It is a ridge of upper oolite, or Jura

limestone, which at the eastern extremity rises more than sixteen

hundred feet above the sea, sinking down to six hundred feet at the

western extremity. The "excellency of Carmel" of which the prophet

speaks[638] consists in the fruitfulness which to this day makes it

rich in flowers of all hues, and clothes it with the impenetrable

foliage of oak, pine, walnut, olive, laurel, dense brushwood, and

evergreen shrubberies thicker than in any other part in Central

Palestine. The name means "Garden of God," and travellers, delighted

with the rocky dells and blossoming glades, describe Carmel as "still

the fragrant lovely mountain that it was of old."[639] It "forms the

southern extremity of the Gulf of Khaifa, and separates the great

western plain of Philistia from the plain of Esdraelon, and the plain

of Phœnicia." "It is difficult," says Sir G. Grove, "to find another

site in which every particular is so minutely fulfilled as in this."

The whole mountain is now called _Mar Elias_ from the Prophet's name.

The actual spot of the range near which took place this most memorable

event in the history of Israel was almost undoubtedly a little below

the eastern summit of the ridge. It is "a terrace of natural rock,"

which commands a fine view of the plains and lakes and the hills of

Galilee, and the windings of the Kishon, with Jezreel glimmering in

the far distance under the heights of Gilboa. The remains of an old

and massive square structure are here visible, called _El-Muhrakkah_,

"the burning," or "the sacrifice," perhaps the site of Elijah's altar.

Under the ancient olives still remains the round well of perennial

water from which, even in the drought, the Prophet could fill the

barrels which he poured over his sacrifice. Elijah's grotto is pointed

out in the Church of the Convent, and another near the sea. In the

region known as "the garden of Elijah" are found the _geodes_ and

_septaria_--stones and fossils which assume the aspect, sometimes

of loaves of bread, sometimes of water-melons and olives, and are

still known as "Elijah's fruits." The whole mountain murmurs with his

name.[640] He became in local legend the oracular god Carmelus, whose

"altar and devotion" drew visitors no less illustrious than Pythagoras

and Vespasian to visit the sacred hill.[641]

Here, then, at early dawn the Prophet of Jehovah, in his solitary

grandeur, met the four hundred and fifty idolatrous priests and their

rabble of attendant fanatics in the presence of the half-curious

king and the half-apostate people. He presented the oft-repeated

type of God's servant alone against the world.[642] Most rarely is

it otherwise. They who speak smooth things and prophesy deceits

may always live at ease in amicable compromise with the world, the

flesh, and the devil. But the Prophet has ever to set his face as a

flint against tyrants, and mobs and false prophets, and intriguing

priests, and all who daub tottering walls with untempered mortar,

and all who, in days smooth and perilous, softly murmur, "Peace,

peace, when there is no peace." So it was with Noah in the days of

the deluge; so with Amos and Hosea and the later Zechariah; so with

Micaiah, the son of Imlah; so with Isaiah, mocked as a babbler by the

priests at Jerusalem, and at last sawn asunder; so with Jeremiah,

struck in the face by the priest Pashur, and thrust into the miry

dungeon, and at last murdered in exile; so with Zechariah, the son

of Jehoiada, whom they slew between the porch and the altar. Nor has

it been less so since the earliest dawn of the New Dispensation. Of

John the Baptist the priests and Pharisees said, "He has a devil,"

and Herod slew him in prison. All, perhaps, of the twelve Apostles

were martyred. Paul, like the rest, was intrigued against, thwarted,

hated, mobbed, imprisoned, hunted from place to place by the world,

the Jews, and the false Christians. Treated as the offscouring of all

things, he was at last contemptuously beheaded in utter obscurity.

Similar fates befell many of the best and greatest of the Fathers.

Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin, were slain by wild beasts and by fire.

Origen's life was one long martyrdom, mostly at the hands of his

fellow-Christians. Did not Athanasius stand against the world? What

needs it to summon from the prison or the stake the mighty shades

of Savonarola, of Huss, of Jerome of Prague, of the Albigenses

and Waldenses, of the myriad victims of the Inquisition, of those

who were burnt at Smithfield and Oxford, of Luther, of Whitfield?

Did Christ mean nothing when he said, among His first beatitudes,

"Blessed are ye when all men shall revile you, and persecute you,

and say all manner of evil against you falsely for My sake and the

gospel's"? Was it mere accident and metaphor when He said, "Ye are

of the world, and therefore the world cannot hate you; but Me it

hateth"; and, "If they have called the Master of the house Beelzebub,

much more them of His household"? Which of His best and purest sons,

from the first Good Friday down to this day, has ever passed through

life unpersecuted of slanderous tongues? Has the nominal Church ever

shown any more mercy to saints than the sneering and furious world?

What has sustained Christ's hated ones? What but that confidence

towards God which lives among those whose heart condemns them not?

What but the fact that "they could turn from the storm without to the

approving sunshine within"? "See," it has been said, "he who builds

on the general esteem of the world builds, not on the sand, but,

which is worse, upon the wind, and writes the title-deeds of his hope

upon the face of a river." But when a man knows that "one with God

is always in a majority," then his loneliness is changed into the

confidence that all the ten thousand times ten thousand of Heaven

are with him. "His banishment becomes his preferment, his rags his

trophies, his nakedness his ornament; and, so long as his innocence

is his repast, he feasts and banquets upon bread and water."

And so,

"Among the faithless, faithful only he;

Among innumerable false, unmoved,

Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,"

Elijah fearlessly stood alone, while all the world confronted him with

frowning menace. The coward sympathies of the neutrals who face both

ways may have been with him, but the multitude of such Laodiceans

wink at wrong, and from love of their own ease do not, and dare not,

speak. God only was the protector of Elijah, and in himself alone was

all his state, as in his garment of hair he approached the people and

confronted the idolatrous priests in all the gorgeousness of Baal's

vestry. He, like his great predecessor Moses, was the champion of moral

purity, of the national faith, of religious freedom and simplicity,

of the immediate access of man to God; they were the champions of

fanatical and unhallowed religionism, of usurping priestcraft, of

unnatural self-abasements, of persecuting despotism, of licentious and

cruel rites. Elijah was the deliverer of his people from a hideous

and polluted apostasy which, had he not prevailed that day, would

have obliterated their name and their memory from the annals of the

nations. That he was a genuine historic character--a prophet of Divine

commission and marvellous power--cannot for a moment be doubted,

however impossible it may now be in every incident to disentangle the

literal historic facts from the poetic and legendary emblazonment which

those facts not unnaturally received in the ordinary recollection of

the prophetic schools. Throughout the great scene which followed, his

spirit was that of the Psalmist: "Though an host of men should encamp

against me, yet will not my heart be afraid"; that of the "servant of

the Lord" in Isaiah: "He hath made my mouth like a sharp sword, and in

His quiver hath He hid me."[643]

His first challenge was to the people. "How long," he asked, "do ye

totter between two opinions?[644] If Jehovah be God, follow Him; but

if Baal, follow him."

Awestruck and ashamed the multitude kept unbroken silence. Doubtless

it was, in part, the silence of guilt. They knew that they had

followed Jezebel into the cruelties of Baal-worship, and the

forbidden lusts which polluted the temples of the Asherah. Puritanism

simplicity, spirituality of worship involves a strain too great and

too lofty for the multitude. Like all Orientals, like the negroes of

America, like most weak minds, they loved to rely on a pompous ritual

and a sensuous worship. It is so easy to let these stand for the

deeper requirements which lie in the truth that "God is a Spirit, and

they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth."

Receiving no answer to his stern question, Elijah laid down the

conditions of the contest. "The prophets of Baal," he said, "are

four hundred and fifty: I stand alone as a prophet of Jehovah. Let

two bullocks be provided for us; they shall slay and dress one,

and lay it on wood, but--for there shall be no priestly trickeries

to-day--they shall put no fire under. I, though I be no priest, will

slay and dress the other, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under.

Then let all of you, Baal-priests and people if you will, cry to your

idols; I will call on the name of Jehovah. The god that answereth by

fire let _him_ be God."

No challenge could be fairer, for Baal was the Sun-god; and what god

could be more likely to answer by fire from that blazing sky? The deep

murmur of the people expressed their assent. The Baal priests were

caught as in a snare. Their hearts must have sunk within them; his did

not. Perhaps some of them believed sufficiently in their idol to hope

that, were he demon or deity, he might save himself and his votaries

from humiliation and defeat; but most of them must have been seized

with terrible misgiving, as they saw the assembled people prepared to

wait with Oriental patience, seated on their abbas on the sides of that

natural amphitheatre, till the descending flame should prove that Baal

had heard the weird invocation of his worshippers. But, since they

could not escape the proposed ordeal, they chose, and slew, and dressed

their victim. From morning till noon--many of them with wildly waving

arms, others with their foreheads in the dust--they upraised the wild

chant of their monotonous invocation, "Baal, hear us! Baal, hear us!"

In vain the cry rose and fell, now uttered in soft appealing murmurs,

now rising into passionate entreaties. All was silent. There lay the

dead bullock putrescing under the burning orb which was at once their

deity and the visible sign of his presence. No consuming lightning

fell, even when the sun flamed in the zenith of that cloudless sky.

There was no voice nor any that answered.

Then they tried still more potent incantations. They began to circle

round the altar they had made in one of their solemn dances to the

shrill strains of pipe and flute. The rhythmic movements ended in

giddy whirls and orgiastic leapings which were a common feature of

sensuous heathen worship; dances in which, like modern dervishes,

they bounded and yelled and spun round and round till they fell

foaming and senseless to the ground.[645] The people looked on

expectant, but it was all in vain.

Hitherto the Prophet had remained silent, but now when noon came, and

still no fire descended, he mocked them. Now, surely, if ever, was

their time! They had been crying for six long hours in their vain

repetitions and incantations. Surely they had not shouted loud enough!

Baal was a god; some strange accident must have prevented him from

hearing the prayer of his miserable priests. Perhaps he was in deep

meditation, so that he did not notice those frantic appeals; perhaps

he was too busy talking to some one else,[646] or was on a journey

somewhere; or was asleep and must be awaked; or, he added with yet

more mordant sarcasm, and in a gibe which would have sounded coarse to

modern ears, perhaps he has gone aside for a private purpose. He must

be called, he must be aroused; he must be made to hear.[647]

Such taunts, addressed to this multitude of priests in the hearing of

the people, whom they desired to dupe or to convince, drove them to

fiercer frenzy. Already the westering sun began to warn them that

their hour was past, and failure imminent. They would not succumb

without trying the darker sorceries of blood and self-mutilation,

which were only resorted to at the most dread extremities. With

renewed and redoubled yells they offered on their altar the blood

of human sacrifice, stabbing and gashing themselves with swords and

lances, till they presented a horrid spectacle. Their vestments and

their naked bodies were besmeared with gore[648] as they whirled

round and round with shriller and more frenzied screams.[649]

They raved in vain. The shadows began to lengthen. The hour for

the evening _Minchah_, the evening meal-offering, and oblation

of flour and meal, salt and frankincense, drew near.[650] It was

already "between the two evenings." They had continued their weird

invocations all through the burning day, but there was not any that

regarded. There lay the dead bullock on the still fireless altar; and

now their Tyrian Sun-god, like the fabled "Hercules," was but burning

himself to death on the flaming pyre of sunset amid the unavailing

agony of his worshippers.

Then Elijah bade the sullen and baffled fanatics to stand aside,

and summoned the people to throng round him. There was nothing

tumultuous or orgiastic in his proceedings. In striking contrast with

the four hundred and fifty frantic sun-worshippers, he proceeded in

the calmest and most deliberate way. First, in the name of Jehovah,

he repaired the old _bamah_--the mountain-altar, which probably

Jezebel had broken down. This he did with twelve stones, one for

each of the tribes of Israel. Then he dug a broad trench.[651] Then,

when he had prepared his bullock, in order to show the people the

impossibility of any deception, such as are common among priests, he

bade them drench it three times over with four barrels of water,[652]

from the still-existent spring, and, not content with that, he filled

the trench also with water.[653] Lastly at the time of the evening

oblation he briefly offered up one prayer that Jehovah would make

it known this day to His backsliding people that He, not Baal, was

the Elohim of Israel. He used no "much speaking"; he did not adopt

the dervish yells and dances and gashings which were abhorrent to

God, though they appealed so powerfully to the sensuous imaginations

of the multitude. He only raised his eyes to heaven,[654] and cried

aloud in the hush of expectant stillness:--

"Jehovah, God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Israel,

Let it be known this day that Thou art God in Israel,

And that I am Thy servant,

And that I have done all these things at Thy word.

Hear me, Jehovah, hear me.

That this people may know that Thou, Jehovah, art God,

And that Thou hast turned their heart back again."

The prayer, with its triple invocation of Jehovah's name, and its

seven rhythmic lines, was no sooner ended than down streamed the

lightning, and consumed the bullock and the wood, and shattered

the stones, and burnt up the dust, and licked up the water in

the trenches;[655] and, with one terror-stricken impulse, the

people all prostrated themselves on their faces with the cry,

"_Yahweh--hoo--ha--Elohim, Yahweh--hoo--ha--Elohim!_" "The Lord, He

is God; the Lord, He is God!"--a cry which was almost identical with

the name of the victorious prophet Elijahu--"Yah, He is my God."[656]

The magnificent narrative in which the interest has been wound up to

so high a pitch, and expressed in so lofty a strain of imaginative

and dramatic force, ends in a deed of blood. According to Josephus,

the people, by a spontaneous movement, "seized and slew the prophets

of Baal, Elijah exhorting them to do so." According to the earlier

narrative, Elijah said to the people: "Take the prophets of Baal; let

not one of them escape. And they took them: and Elijah brought them

down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there with the sword."[657]

It is not necessarily meant that he slew them with his own hand,

though indeed he may have done so, as Phinehas sacrificed Jephthah's

daughter, and Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord. His moral

responsibility was precisely the same in either case. We are not told

that he had any commission from Jehovah to do this, or was bidden

thereto by any voice of the Lord. Yet in those wild days--days of

ungovernable passions and imperfect laws, days of ignorance which

God winked at--it is not only perfectly probable that Elijah would

have acted thus, but most unlikely that his conscience reproached

him for doing so, or that it otherwise than approved the sanguinary

vengeance. It was the frightful _lex talionis_, which was spoken

"to them of old time," and which inflicted on the defeated what

they would certainly have inflicted on Elijah had he not been the

conqueror. The prophets of Baal indirectly, if not directly, had

been the cause of Jezebel's persecution of the prophets of the

Lord. The thought of pity would not occur to Elijah any more than

it did to the writer, or writers, of Deuteronomy, perhaps, long

afterwards, who commanded the stoning of idolaters, whether men or

women (Deut. xiii. 6-9, xvii. 2-4). The massacre of the priests

accorded with the whole spirit of those half-anarchic times. It

accords with that Elijah-spirit of orthodox fanaticism, which, as

Christ Himself had to teach to the sons of thunder, is not His

spirit, but utterly alien from it. If, perhaps two centuries later,

the savage deed could be recorded, and recorded with approval,

by this narrator from the School of the Prophets in these superb

eulogies of his hero; if so many centuries later the disciple whom

Jesus loved, and the first martyr-apostle could deem it an exemplary

deed; if, centuries later, it could be appealed to as a precedent

by Inquisitors with hearts made hard as the nether millstone by

bigoted and hateful superstition; if even Puritans could be animated

by the same false hallowing of ferocity; how can we judge Elijah

if, in dark, unilluminated early days, he had not learnt to rise

to a purer standpoint? To this day the names about Carmel shudder,

as it were, with reminiscence of this religious massacre. There is

_El-Muhrakkah_, "the place of burning"; there is _Tel-el-Kusis_,

"the hill of the priests"; and that ancient river, the river Kishon,

which had once been choked with the corpses of the host of Sisera,

and has since then been incarnadined by the slain of many a battle,

is--perhaps in memory of this bloodshed most of all--still known as

the _Nahr-el-Mokatta_, or "the stream of slaughter." What wonder that

the Eastern Christians in their pictures of Elijah still surround

him with the decapitated heads of these his enemies? To this day the

Moslim regard him as one who terrifies and slays.[658]

But though the deed of vengeance stands recorded, and recorded with no

censure, in the sacred history, we must--without condemning Elijah, and

without measuring his days by the meting-rod of Christian mercy--still

unhesitatingly hold fast the sound principle of early and as yet

uncontaminated Christianity, and say, as said the early Fathers, Βία

ἐχθρὸν Θεῷ. Violence is a thing hateful to the God of love.

Even Christians, and that down to our own day, have abused the

example of Elijah, and asked, "Did not Elijah slaughter the

priests of Baal?" as a proof that it is always the duty of States

to suppress false religion by violence. Stahl asked that question

when he preached before the Prussian court at the Evangelical

Conference at Berlin in 1855, adding the dreadful misrepresentation

that "Christianity is the religion of intolerance, and its kernel

is exclusiveness." Did these hard spirits never consider Christ's

own warning? Did they wholly forget the prophecy that "He shall not

strive nor cry, neither shall His voice be heard in the streets.

A bruised reed shall He not break, and smoking flax shall He not

quench, till He send forth judgment unto victory, and in His name

shall the Gentiles hope"?[659] Calvin reproved Réné, Duchess of

Ferrara, for not approving of the spirit of the imprecatory psalms.

He said that this was "to set ourselves up as superior to Christ

in sweetness and humility"; and that "David even in his hatreds

is an example and type of Christ." When Cartwright argued for the

execution of the heretics he said: "If this be thought savage and

intolerant, I am content to be so with the Holy Ghost." Far wiser is

the humble minister in _Old Mortality_, when he withstood Balfour of

Burleigh, in the decision to put to the sword all the inhabitants

of Tillietudlem Castle. "By what law," asks Henry Morton, "would you

justify the atrocity you would commit?" "If thou art ignorant of it,"

said Balfour, "thy companion is well aware of the law which gave

the men of Jericho to the sword of Joshua, the son of Nun." "Yes,"

answered the divine, "but we live under a better dispensation, which

instructeth us to return good for evil, and to pray for those who

despitefully use us and persecute us."

FOOTNOTES:

[638] Isa. xxxiii. 9, xxxv. 2; Micah vii. 14. Its beauty and

fruitfulness are alluded to in Jer. xlvi. 18, l. 19; Amos i. 2, ix.

3; Nahum i. 4; Cant. vii. 5.

[639] Sir George Grove, to whose excellent article in Smith's

_Dict. of Bible_ (i. 279) I am indebted, quotes Martineau (i. 317),

Porter's _Handbook_, Van de Velde, etc. See, too, Stanley, _Sinai and

Palestine_, pp. 353-56.

[640] On these _Lapides judaici_, see my _Life of Christ_, i. 129.

Illustrations are given in the illustrated edition.

[641] Jambl., _Vit. Pythag._, iii.; Suet., _Vesp._, 5; Tac., _Hist._,

ii. 78; Reland, _Palest._, pp. 327-30.

[642] Megiddo lies in the plain below, and this scene of conflict

between good and the powers of evil was an anticipated Armageddon.

[643] Isa. xlix. 2; Cheyne, p. 16.

[644] LXX., 1 Kings xviii. 21, ἕως πότε ὑμεῖς χωλανεῖτε ἐπ'

ἀμφοτέραις ταῖς ἰγνύαις. Vulg., _usquequo claudicatis in duas

partes?_ Cheyne renders it: "How long will ye go lame upon tottering

knees?" In Psalm cxix. 113, סֵעֲפִים are "the double-minded." In

Ezek. xxxi. 6, סְעַפּוֹת, "diverging branches." In Isa. ii. 21,

סְעִפֵי, "clefts of rocks" (Bähr).

[645] Herodian (_Hist._, v. 3) describes the dance of Heliogabalus

round the altar of the Emesene Sun-god, and Apuleius describes

at length the fanatic leapings and gashings of the execrable

_Galli_--the eunuch-mendicant priests of the Syrian goddess. From

these sources and from allusions in Seneca, Lucian, Statius,

Arnobius, etc., Movers (_Phöniz._, i. 682) derives his description

(quoted by Keil, _ad loc._, E.T., p. 281): "A discordant howling

opens the scene. Now they fly wildly through one another, with the

head sunk down to the ground, but turning round in circles, so that

the loose flowing hair drags through the mire. Thereupon they first

bite themselves on the arm, and at last cut themselves with two-edged

swords, which they are wont to carry. Then begins a new scene. One of

them who surpasses all the rest in frenzy, begins to prophesy with

sighs and groans, openly accuses himself of past sins, which he now

wishes to punish by the mortifying of the flesh, takes the knotted

whip which the Galli are wont to bear, lashes his back, cuts himself

with swords, till the blood trickles down from his mangled body."

[646] Verse 27. Others render it "meditating" (De Wette Thenius) or

"peevish" (Bähr). Comp. Hom., _Il._, i. 423; _Od._, i. 22, etc.

[647] This instance of "grim sarcastic humour" is almost unique in

Scripture. It was made more mordant by the paronomasia כִּי־שִׂיחַ

לֹּו וְכִי־שִׂיג (2 Sam. i. 22).

[648] Plutarch (_De Superstit._, p. 170) says: "The priests of

Bellona offered their own blood, which was deemed powerful to move

their gods." Comp. Herod., ii. 61; Lucian, _De Dea Syra_, 50; Apul.,

_Metam._, viii. 28.

[649] הַמִּנחָה לַעֲלוֹת עַד, "till towards (Numb. xxviii. 4) the

offering of the Minchah." LXX., θυσία; Vulg., _sacrificium_ and

_holocaustum_. In verse 39 it is omitted in the LXX. "There is a

great concurrence of evidence that the evening sacrifice of the first

Temple was not a holocaust, but a cereal oblation" (Robertson Smith,

p. 143, quoting 1 Kings xviii. 34; 2 Kings xvi. 15; Ezek. ix. 4, Heb).

[650] Heb., וַיִתְנַבְּאוּ; LXX., διέτρεχον; Vulg., _transiliebant_.

Literally, they acted like frantic prophets (1 Sam. xviii. 10; Jer.

xxix. 26).

[651] LXX., θαλάσσαν, or "sea"--the name given to Solomon's molten

laver; but the description, "as great as would contain two _seahs_ of

seed," is curious, for a seah was only the third of an ephah.

[652] Blunt (_Undesigned Coincidences_, II. xxxii.) thinks that as

the drought had been so intense the water must have been sea-water.

But Josephus says it was drawn ἀπὸ τῆς κρήνης (_Antt._, VIII. xiii.

5); and the well still exists.

[653] Priests, both pagan and mediæval, have been adepts at

deception. At the Reformation the mechanism of winking Madonnas,

etc., was exposed to the people. At Pompeii may still be seen the

secret staircase behind the altar, and the pipes let into the head

of Isis from behind, through which the priests spoke her pretended

oracles. St. Chrysostom (_Orat. in. Petr. et Eliam_, which is of

uncertain genuineness) tells us that he had himself seen (θεάτης

αὐτὸς γενομένος) altars with concealed hollows in the middle, into

which the unsuspected operator crept, and blew up a fire which

the people were assured was self-kindled (see Keil, p. 282). One

legend says that on this occasion a man was suffocated, who had been

concealed by the Baal priests inside their altar.

[654] 1 Kings xviii. 36.

[655] Comp. Lev. ix. 24. Analogous stories existed among pagans

(Hom., _Il._, ii. 305; _Od._, ii. 143; Verg., _Ecl._, viii. 105).

Pliny says that annals recorded the eliciting of lightning by prayers

and incantations (_H. N._, ii. 54; Winer, _Realwörterb._ 371).

[656] It is after Elijah's time, and probably from his influence, that

from this time proper names compounded with Jehovah become almost the

rule--as in Ahaziah, Jehoram, Jehu, Jehoahaz, Joash, Pekahiah, etc.

[657] 1 Kings xix. 1, בְּחָרֶב; LXX., ἐν ῥομφάιᾳ.

[658] Renan, _Vie de Jésus_, 100.

[659] Matt. xii. 19, 20; Isa. xlii. 2, 3; Ezek. xxxiv. 16.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

_THE RAIN._

1 KINGS xviii. 41-46.

"Are there any of the vanities of the nations that can cause

rain?"--JER. xiv. 22.

But the terrible excitement of the day was not yet over, nor was the

victory completely won. The fire had flashed from heaven, but the

long-desired rain on which depended the salvation of land and people

still showed no signs of falling. And Elijah was pledged to this

result. Not until the drought ended could he reach the culmination of

his victory over the Sun-god of Jezebel's worship.

But his faith did not fail him. "Get thee up," he said to Ahab, "eat

and drink, for there is a sound of the feet of the rain-storm."[660]

Doubtless through all that day of feverish anxiety, neither king,

nor people, nor prophet had eaten. As for the Prophet, but little

sufficed him at any time, and the slaughter of the defeated priests

would not prevent either king or people from breaking their long

fast. Doubtless the king's tent was pitched on one of the slopes

over the plain. But Elijah did not join him. He heard, indeed,

with prophetic ear the rush of the coming rain, but he had still to

wrestle in prayer with Jehovah for the fulfilment of His promise. So

he ascended towards the summit of the promontory where the purple

peak of Carmel--still called Jebel Mar Elias ("the hill of Lord

Elijah")--overlooks the sea, and there he crouched low on the ground

in intense prayer, putting his face between his knees. After his

first intensity of supplication had spent itself, he said to his boy

attendant,[661] traditionally believed to have been the son of the

widow of Zarephath whom he had plucked from death:--

"Go up now, look towards the sea."

The youth went up, and gazed out long and intently, for he well

knew that if rain came it would sweep inland from the waters of the

Mediterranean, and to an experienced eye the signals of coming storm

are patent long before they are noticed by others. But all was as it

had been for so many weary and dreadful months. The sea a sheet of

unruffled gold glared under the setting sun, which still sank through

an unclouded sky. Can we not imagine the accent of misgiving and

disappointment with which he brought back the one word:--

"Nothing."

Once more the Prophet bowed his face between his knees in prayer, and

sent the youth; and again, and yet again, seven times. And each time

had come to him the chilling answer, "Nothing." But the seventh time

he called out from the mountain summit his joyous cry: "Behold, there

ariseth a cloud out of the sea, as small as a man's hand."

And now, indeed, Elijah knew that his triumph was completed. He bade

his servant fly with winged speed to Ahab, and tell him to make ready

his chariot at once, lest the burst of the coming rain should flood

the river and the road, and prevent him from getting over the rough

ground which lay between him and his palace at Jezreel.

Then the blessed storm burst on the parched soil with a sense of

infinite refreshfulness which only an Eastern in a thirsty land can

fully comprehend. And Ahab mounted his chariot. He had not driven

far before the heaven, which had for so long been like brass over

an iron globe, was one black mass of clouds driven by the wind, and

the drenching rain poured down in sheets. And through the storm

the chariot swept, and Elijah girded up his loins, and, filled

with a Divine impulse of exultation, ran before it, keeping pace

with the king's steeds for all those fifteen miles, even after the

overwhelming strain of all he had gone through, apparently without

food, that day. And as through the rifts of rain the king saw his

wild dark figure outrunning his swift steeds, and seeming "to dilate

and conspire" with the rushing storm, can we wonder that the tears of

remorse and gratitude streamed down his face?[662]

The chariot reached Jezreel, and at the city gate Elijah stopped.

Like his antitype, the great forerunner, Elijah was a voice in the

wilderness; like his Lord that was to be, he loved not cities. The

instinct of the Bedawin kept him far from the abodes of men, and his

home was never among them. He needed no roof to shelter him, nor

change of raiment. The hollows of Mount Gilboa were his sufficient

resting-place, and he could find a sleeping-place in the caves near

its abundant Eastern spring. Nor was he secure of safety. He knew, in

spite of his superhuman victory, that a dark hour awaited Ahab when he

would have to tell Jezebel that the people had repudiated her idol,

and that Elijah had slain her four hundred and fifty priests. He knew

"that axe-like edge unturnable" which always smote and feared not. Ahab

was but as plastic clay in the strong hands of his queen, and for her

there existed neither mystery nor miracle except in the worship of the

insulted Baal. Was not Baal, she said, the real sender of the rain, on

whose priests this fanatic from rude Gilead had wrought his dreadful

sacrifice? Oh that she could have been for one hour on Carmel in the

place of her vacillating and easily daunted husband! For was she not

convinced, and did not the pagan historian afterwards relate, that the

ending of the drought was due to the prayers and sacrifices, not of

Elijah, but of her own father who was Baal's priest and king?[663] Yet,

for all her spirit of defiance, we can hardly doubt that the feelings

of Jezebel towards Elijah had much of dread mingled with her hatred.

She must have felt towards him much as Mary Queen of Scots felt towards

John Knox--of whom she said that she feared his prayers more than an

army of one hundred thousand men.[664]

"May we really venture," asks Canon Cheyne, "to _look_ out for answer

to prayer? Did not Elijah live in the _heroic_ ages of faith? No;

God still works miracles. Take an instance from the early history of

Christian Europe. You know the terror excited by the Huns, who in the

sixth century after Christ penetrated into the very heart of Christian

France. Already they had occupied the suburbs of Orleans, and the

people who were incapable of bearing arms lay prostrate in prayer. The

governor sent a message to observe from the ramparts. Twice he looked

in vain, but the third time he reported a small cloud on the horizon.

'It is the aid of God,' cried the Bishop of Orleans. It was the dust

raised by the advancing squadrons of Christian troops."[665]

A much nearer parallel, and that a very remarkable one, may be

quoted.[666] It records--and the fact itself, explain it how men will,

seems to be unquestionable--how a storm of rain came to answer the

prayer of a good leader of the Evangelical Revival--Grimshaw, rector

of Haworth. Distressed at the horrible immoralities introduced among

his parishioners by some local races, and wholly failing to get them

stopped, he went to the racecourse, and, flinging himself on his knees

in an agony of supplication, entreated God to interpose and save his

people from their moral danger. He had scarcely ceased his prayer when

down rushed a storm of rain so violent as to turn the racecourse into a

swamp, and render the projected races a matter of impossibility.

FOOTNOTES:

[660] LXX., ὅτι φωνὴ τῶν ποδῶν τοῦ ὑετοῦ. Perhaps, with reference to

this reading, Josephus afterwards describes "the little cloud" as "no

bigger than a human footstep" (οὐ πλέον ἴχνους ἀνθρωπίνου).

[661] LXX., τῷ παιδαρίῳ αὐτοῦ.

[662] LXX., 1 Kings xviii. 45, Καὶ ἔκλαιε καὶ ἐπορεύετο Ἀχαὰβ ἕως

Ιεζράελ.

[663] Menander of Ephesus (Josephus, _Antt._, VIII. xiii. 2).

[664] Eisenlohr, _Das Volk Israel_, p. 162.

[665] He refers to Gibbon, iv. 232.

[666] See Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte Brönte_.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

_ELIJAH'S FLIGHT._

1 KINGS xix. 1-4.

"A still small voice comes through the wild,

Like a father consoling his fretful child,

Which banisheth bitterness, wrath and fear,

Saying, 'Man is distant, but God is near.'"

TEMPLE.

The misgiving which, joined to his ascetic dislike of cities, made

Elijah stop his swift race at the entrance of Jezreel was more

than justified. Ahab's narrative of the splendid contest at Carmel

produced no effect upon Jezebel whatever, and we can imagine the

bitter objurgations which she poured upon her cowering husband for

having stood quietly by while _her_ prophets and Baal's prophets were

being massacred by this dark fanatic, aided by a rebellious people.

Had _she_ been there all should have been otherwise! In contemptuous

defiance of Ahab's fears or wishes, she then and there--and it

must now have been after nightfall--despatched a messenger to find

Elijah, wherever he might be hiding himself, and say to him in her

name: "As sure as thou art Elijah, and I am Jezebel,[667] may my

gods avenge it upon me if on the morrow by this time I have not made

thy life like the life of one of my own murdered priests." In the

furious impetuosity of the message we see the determination of the

sorceress-queen. In her way she was as much in deadly earnest as

Elijah was. Whether Baal had been defeated or not, _she_ was not

defeated, and Elijah should not escape her vengeance. The oath shows

the intensity of her rage, like that of the forty Jews who bound

themselves by the _cherem_ that they would not eat or drink till

they had slain Paul; and the fixity of her purpose as when Richard

III. declared that he would not dine till the head of Buckingham

had fallen on the block. We cannot but notice the insignificance

to which she reduced her husband, and the contempt with which she

treated the voice of her people. She presents the spectacle, so often

reproduced in history and reflected in literature, of a strong fierce

woman--a Clytemnestra, a Brunhault, a Lady Macbeth, an Isabella

of France, a Margaret of Anjou, a Joan of Naples, a Catherine de

Medicis--completely dominating a feebler consort.

The burst of rage which led her to send the message defeated her own

object. The awfulness which invested Elijah, and the supernatural

powers on which he relied, when he was engaged in the battles of the

Lord, belonged to him only in his public and prophetic capacity.

As a man he was but a poor, feeble, lonely subject, whose blood

might be shed at any moment. He knew that God works no miracles for

the supersession of ordinary human precautions. It was no part of

his duty to throw away his life, and give a counter triumph to the

Baal-worshippers whom he had so signally humiliated. He fled, and

went for his life.

Swift flight was easy to that hardy frame and that trained endurance,

even after the fearful day on Carmel and the wild race of fifteen

miles from Carmel to Jezreel. It was still night, and cool, and

the haunts and byways of the land were known to the solitary and

hunted wanderer. "He feared, and he rose, and he went for his life,"

ninety-five miles to Beersheba, once a town of Simeon, now the

southern limit of the kingdom of Judah, thirty-one miles south of

Hebron.[668] But in the tumult of his feelings and the peril of his

position he could not stay in any town. At Beersheba he left his

servant--perhaps, as legend says, the boy of Zarephath, who became

the prophet Jonah--but, in any case, not so much a servant as a youth

in training for the prophetic office. It was necessary for him to

spend his dark hour alone; for, if there are hours in which human

sympathy is all but indispensable, there are also hours in which the

soul can tolerate no communion save that with God.[669] So, leaving

all civilisation behind him, he plunged a day's journey into that

great and terrible wilderness of Paran, where he too was alone with

the wild beasts. And then, utterly worn out, he flung himself down

under the woody stem of a solitary rhotem plant.[670] The plant is

the wild broom with "its cloud of pink blossoms" which often afford

the only shadow under the glaring sun in the waste and weary land,

and beneath the slight but grateful shade of which the Arab to this

day is glad to pitch his tent. And there the pent-up emotions of his

spirit, which had gone through so tremendous a strain, broke up as in

one terrible sob, when the strong man, like a tired child, "requested

for himself that he might die."[671]

Of what use was life any longer? He had fought for Jehovah, and

won, and after all been humiliatingly defeated. He had prophesied

the drought, and it had withered and scorched up the erring,

afflicted land. He had prayed for the rain, and it had come in a

rush of blessing on the reviving fields. In the Wady Cherith, in

the house of the Phœnician widow, he had been divinely supported

and sheltered from hot pursuit. He had snatched her boy from death.

He had stood before kings, and not been ashamed. He had stretched

forth his hands to a disobedient and gainsaying people, and not in

vain. He had confounded the rich-vested and royally maintained band

of Baal's priests, and in spite of their orgiastic leapings and

self-mutilations had put to shame their Sun-god under his own burning

sun. He had kept pace with Ahab's chariot-steeds as he conducted

him, as it were in triumph, through the streaming downpour of that

sweeping storm, to his summer capital. Of what use was it all? Was it

anything but a splendid and deplorable failure? And he said: "It is

enough; now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better than my

fathers." He could have cried with the poet:--

"Let the heavens burst, and drown with deluging rain

The feeble vassals of lust, and anger, and wine,

The little hearts that know not how to forgive;

Arise, O God, and strike, for we count Thee just,--

We are not worthy to live."

Who does not know something of this feeling of utter overwhelming

despondency, of bitter disillusionment concerning life and our

fellow-men? Some great writer has said, with truth, "that there is

probably no man with a soul above that of the brutes that perish,

to whom a time has not come in his life, when, were you to tell him

that he would not wake to see another day, he would receive the

message with something like gladness." There are some whose lives

have been so saddened by some special calamity that for long years

together they have not valued them. F. W. Robertson, troubled by

various sorrows, and worried (as the best men are sure to be) by the

petty ecclesiastical persecutions of priests and formalists, wrote

in a letter on a friend's death: "How often have I thought of the

evening when he left Tours, when, in our boyish friendship, we set

our little silver watches exactly together, and made a compact to

look at the moon exactly at the same moment that night and think

of each other. _I do not remember a single hour in life since then

which I would have arrested, and said, 'Let this stay.'_" Melancholy

so deep as this is morbid and unnatural, and he himself wrote in a

brighter mood: "Positively I will not walk with any one in these

tenebrous avenues of cypress and yew. I like sunny rooms and sunny

truth. When I had more of spring and warmth I could afford to be

prodigal of happiness; but now I want sunlight and sunshine. I desire

to enter into those regions where cheerfulness and truth and health

of heart and mind reside." Life has its real happiness for those who

have deserved, and taken the right method to attain it; but it can

never escape its hours of impenetrable gloom, and they sometimes

seem to be darkest for the noblest souls. Petty souls are irritated

by little annoyances, and the purely selfish disappointments which

avenge the exaggerated claims of our "shivering egotism." But while

little mean spirits are tormented by the insect-swarm of little mean

worries, great souls are liable to be beaten down by the waves and

storms of immense calamities--the calamities which affect nations and

churches, the "desperate currents" of whose sins and miseries seem

to be sometimes driven through the channels of their single hearts.

Only such a man as an Elijah can measure the colossal despondency of

an Elijah's heart. In the apparently absolute failure, the seemingly

final frustration of such men as these there is something nobler than

in the highest personal exaltations of ignobler souls.

"_Now, O Lord, take away my life!_" The prayer, however natural,

however excusable, is never right. It is a sign of insufficient

faith, of human imperfection; but it is breathed by different persons

in a spirit so different that in some it almost rises to nobleness,

as in others it sinks quite beneath contempt.

Scripture gives us several specimens of both moods. If Jonah was,

indeed, the servant-pupil of Elijah, the legendary story of that

meanest-minded of all the prophets--the meanest-minded and paltriest,

not perhaps as he was in reality--for of him, historically, we know

scarcely anything--but as he is represented in the profound and noble

allegory which bears his name--might almost seem to have been written

in tacit antithesis to the story of Elijah. Elijah flies only when he

has done the mighty work of God, and only when the life is in deadly

peril which he would fain save for future emergencies of service; Jonah

flies that he may escape, out of timid selfishness, the work of God.

Elijah wishes himself dead because he thinks that the glorious purpose

of his life has been thwarted, and that the effort undertaken for

the deliverance of his people has failed; Jonah wishes himself dead,

first, because he repines at God's mercy, and would prefer that his

personal credit should be saved and his personal importance secured

than that God should spare the mighty city of Nineveh with its one

hundred and twenty thousand little children; and then because the poor

little castor-oil plant has withered, which gave him shelter from the

noon. Considering the traditional connexion between them, it seems to

me impossible to overlook an allusive contrast between the noble and

mighty Elijah under his solitary rhotem plant in the wilderness wishing

for death in the anguish of a heart "which nobly loathing strongly

broke," and the selfish splenetic Jonah wishing himself dead in pettish

vexation under his _palma Christi_ because Nineveh is forgiven and the

sun is hot.

There are indeed times when humanity is tried beyond its capacity,

when the cry for restful death is wrung from souls crushed under

accumulations of quite intolerable anguish and calamity. In the

fret of long-continued sleeplessness, in sick and desolate and

half-starved age, in attacks of disease incurable, long-continued,

and full of torture, God will surely look with pardoning tenderness

on those whose faith is unequal to so terrible a strain. It was

pardonable surely of Job to curse the day of his birth when--smitten

with elephantiasis, a horror, a hissing, an astonishment, bereaved of

all his children, and vexed by the obtrusive orthodoxies of his petty

Pharisaic friends; unconscious, too, that it was God's hand which

was all the while leading him through the valley of the shadow into

the land of righteousness--he cried: "Wherefore is light given to

him that is in misery, and life to the bitter in soul?" In those who

have no hope and are without God in the world, this mood--not when

expressed in passing passion as by the saintly man of Uz, but when

brooded on and indulged--leads to suicide, and in the one instance

recorded in each Testament, an Ahithophel and a Judas, the despairing

souls of the guilty:--

"Into the presence of their God

Rushed in with insult rude."

But Elijah's mood, little as it was justifiable in this its extreme

form, was but the last infirmity of a noble mind. It has often

recurred among those grandest of the servants of God who may sink

into the deepest dejection from contrast with the spiritual altitudes

to which they have soared. It is with them as with the lark which

floods the blue air with its passion of almost delirious rapture,

yet suddenly, as though exhausted, drops down silent into its lowly

nest in the brown furrows. There is but one man in the Old Testament

who, as a prophet, stands on the same level as Elijah,--he who

stood with Elijah on the snowy heights of Hermon when their Lord

was transfigured into celestial brightness, and they spake together

of His decease at Jerusalem. And Moses had passed through the same

dark hour as that through which Elijah was passing now, when he saw

the tears, and heard the murmurs of the greedy, selfish, ungrateful

people, who hated their heavenly manna, and lusted for the leeks and

fleshpots of their Egyptian bondage. Revolted by this obtrusion upon

him of human nature in its lowest meanness, he cried to God under

his intolerable burden: "Have I conceived all this people?... I am

not able to bear all this people alone.... And if Thou deal thus

with me, kill me, I pray Thee, out of hand; and let me not see my

wretchedness." In Moses, as doubtless in Elijah, so far from being

the clamour of whining selfishness, his anguish was part of the

same mood which made him offer his life for the redemption of the

people; which made St. Paul ready to wish himself anathema from Jesus

Christ if thereby he could save his brethren after the flesh. Danton

rose into heroism when he exclaimed, "_Que mon nom soit flétri,

pourvu que la France soit libre_"; and Whitefield, when he cried,

"Perish George Whitefield, so God's work be done"; and the Duke of

Wellington when--remonstrated with for joining in the last charge at

Waterloo, with the shot whistling round his head--he said, "Never

mind; the victory is won, and now my life is of no consequence." In

great souls the thought of others, completely dominating the base

man's concentration in self, may create a despondency which makes

them ready to give up their life, not because it is a burden to

themselves, but because it seems to them as if their work was over,

and it was beyond their power to do more for others.

Tender natures as well as strong natures are liable to this inrush of

hopelessness; and if it sometimes kills them by its violence, this is

only a part of God's training of them into perfection.

"So unaffected, so composed a mind,

So firm, yet soft, so strong, yet so refined,

Heaven, as its purest gold, by tortures tried:--

The saint sustained it, but the woman died."![672]

The cherubim of the sanctuary had to be made of the gold of Uphaz,

the finest and purest gold. It was only the purest gold which could

be tortured by workmanship into forms of exquisite beauty. The

mind of Jeremiah was as unlike that of Elijah's as can possibly

be conceived. He was a man of shrinking and delicate temperament,

and his life is the most pathetic tragedy among the biographies of

Scripture. The mind of Elijah, like those of Dante or Luther or

Milton, was all ardour and battle brunt; the mind of Jeremiah, like

that of Melancthon, was timid as that of a gentle boy. A man like

Dante or Milton, when he stands alone, hated by princes and priests

and people, retorts scorn for scorn, and refuses to change his voice

to hoarse or mute. Yet even Dante died of a broken heart, and in

Milton's mighty autobiographical wail of Samson Agonistes, amid all

its trumpet-blast of stern defiance, we read the sad notes:--

"Nor am I in the list of them that hope;

Hopeless all my evils, all remediless;

This one prayer yet remains, might I be heard,

No long petition, speedy death,

The close of all my miseries, and the balm."

When the insolent priest Pashur smote Jeremiah in the face, and put him

for a night and a day in the common stocks, the prophet--after telling

Pashur that, for this awful insult to God's messenger, his name, which

meant "joy far and wide," should be changed into Magormissa-bib,

"terror on every side"--utterly broke down, and passionately cursed

the day of his birth.[673] And yet his trials were very far from ended

then. Homeless, wifeless, childless, slandered, intrigued against,

undermined--protesting apparently in vain against the hollow shams of

a self-vaunting reformation--the object of special hatred to all the

self-satisfied religionists of his day, the lonely persecuted servant

of the Lord ended only in exile and martyrdom the long trouble of his

eternally blessed but seemingly unfruitful life.

I dwell on this incident in the life of Elijah because it is full

of instructiveness. Scripture is not all on a dead level. There are

many pages of it which belong indeed to the connected history, and

therefore carry on the general lessons of the history, but which

are, in themselves, almost empty of any spiritual profit. Only a

fantastic and artificial method of sermonising can extract from them,

taken alone, any Divine lessons. In these Books of Kings many of the

records are simply historical, and in themselves, apart from their

place in the whole, have no more religious significance than any

other historic facts; but because these annals are the annals of a

chosen people, and because these books are written for our learning,

we find in them again and again, and particularly in their more

connected and elevated narratives, facts and incidents which place

Scripture incomparably above all secular literature, and are rich in

eternal truth for all time, and for a life beyond life.

It is with such an experience that we are dealing here, and therefore

it is worth while, if we can, to see something of its meaning. We may,

therefore, be permitted to linger for a brief space over the causes of

Elijah's despair, and the method in which God dealt with it.

FOOTNOTES:

[667] LXX., 1 Kings xix. 2.

[668] The touch "which belongeth to Judah" shows that the

Elijah-narrative emanated from some prophet in the northern schools.

In later days it was much visited by pilgrims from the Northern

Kingdom (Amos v. 5, viii. 14).

[669] Matt. xxvi. 36.

[670] 1 Kings xix. 4, 5, אֵחָת רֹתֶם; Vulg., _subter unam juniperum_.

The plant is the _Genista monosperma_, with papilionaceous flowers.

Not "juniper," as in Luther (_Wachholder_) and the A.V. LXX., ῥαθμὲν

φύτον. See Robinson, _Researches_, i. 203, 205. It gave its name to the

station Rithmah (Numb. xxxiii. 18) and the Wadies Retemît and Retâmah.

[671] Comp. Moses (Numb. xi. 15), Jonah (Jonah iv. 3).

[672] Pope's epitaph on Mrs. Elizabeth Corbet, in St. Margaret's

Westminster.

[673] Jer. xx. 1-18.

CHAPTER XL.

_ELIJAH'S DESPAIR._

1 KINGS xix. 4-8.

"So much I feel my genial spirits droop,

My hopes all flat, nature within me seems

In all her functions weary of herself,

My race of glory run, and race of shame,

And I shall shortly be with them that rest."

_Samson Agonistes._

What are the causes which may drive even a saint of God into a mood

of momentary despair as he is forced to face the semblance of final

failure?

1. Even the lowest element of such despair has its instructiveness. It

was due in part, doubtless, to mere physical exhaustion. Elijah had

just gone through the most tremendous conflict of his life. During

all that long and most exhausting day at Carmel he had had little or

no food, and at the close of it he had run across all the plain with

the king's chariot. In the dead of that night, with his life in his

hand, he had fled towards Beersheba, and now he had wandered for a

whole day in the glare of the famishing wilderness. It does not do to

despise the body. If we _are_ spirits, yet we _have_ bodies; and the

body wreaks a stern and humiliating vengeance on those who neglect or

despise it. The body reacts upon the mind. "If you rumple the jerkin,

you rumple the jerkin's lining." If we weaken the body too much, we do

not make it the slave of the spirit, but rather make the spirit its

slave. Even moderate fasting, as a simple physiological fact--if it be

_fasting_ at all, as distinguished from healthful moderation and wise

temperance--tends to increase, and not by any means to decrease, the

temptations which come to us from the appetites of the body. Extreme

self-maceration--as all ascetics have found from the days of St. Jerome

to those of Cardinal Newman--only adds new fury to the lusts of the

flesh. Many a hermit and stylite and fasting monk, many half-dazed,

hysterical, high-wrought men have found, sometimes without knowing the

reason of it, that by wilful and artificial devices of self-chosen

saintliness, they have made the path of purity and holiness not easier,

but more hard. The body is a temple, not a tomb. It is not permitted

us to think ourselves wiser than God who made it, nor to fancy that

we can mend His purposes by torturing and crushing it. By violating

the laws of physical righteousness we only make moral and spiritual

righteousness more difficult to attain.

2. Elijah's dejection was also due to forced inactivity. "What

_doest_ thou here, Elijah?" said the voice of God to him in the

heart of man. Alas! he was doing nothing: there was nothing left for

him to do! It was different when he hid by the brook Cherith, or in

Zarephath, or in the glades of Carmel. Then a glorious endeavour lay

before him, and there was hope. But

"Life without hope draws nectar in a sieve,

And hope without an object cannot live."

The mighty vindication of Jehovah in which all the struggle of his

life culminated, had been crowned with triumph, and had failed.

It had blazed up like fire, and had sunk back into ashes. To such

a spirit as his nothing is so fatal as to have nothing to do and

nothing to hope for. "What did the Maréchal die of?" asked a

distinguished Frenchman of one of his comrades. "He died of having

nothing to do." "Ah!" was the reply; "that is enough to kill the best

General of us all."

3. Again, Elijah was suffering from mental reaction. The bow had been

bent too long, and was somewhat strained; the tense string needed to

have been relaxed before. It is a common experience that some great

duty or mastering emotion uplifts us for a time above ourselves,

makes us even forget the body and its needs. We remember Jeremy

Taylor's description of what he had noticed in the Civil Wars,--that

a wounded soldier, amid the heat and fury of the fight, was wholly

unconscious of his wounds, and only began to feel the smart of them

when the battle had ended and its fierce passion was entirely spent.

Men, even strong men, after hours of terrible excitement, have been

known to break down and weep like children. Macaulay, in describing

the emotions which succeeded the announcement that the Reform Bill

had passed, says that not a few, after the first outburst of wild

enthusiasm, were bathed in tears.

And any one who has seen some great orator after a supreme effort of

eloquence, when his strength seems drained away, and the passion is

exhausted, and the flame has sunk down into its embers, is aware how

painful a reaction often follows, and how differently the man looks and

feels if you see him when he has passed into his retirement, pale and

weak, and often very sad. After a time the mind can do no more.

4. Further, Elijah felt his loneliness. At that moment indeed he could

not bear the presence of any one, but none the less his sense that none

sympathised with him, that all hated him, that no voice was raised to

cheer him, that no finger was uplifted to help him, weighed like lead

upon his spirit. "I only am left." There was awful desolation in that

thought. He was alone among an apostatising people. It is the same

kind of cry which we hear so often in the life of God's saints. It is

the Psalmist crying: "I am become like a pelican in the wilderness,

and like an owl that is in the desert. Mine enemies reproach me all

the day long, and they that are mad upon me are sworn together against

me";[674] or, "My lovers and my neighbours did stand looking upon my

trouble, and my kinsmen stood afar off. They also that sought after

my life laid snares for me."[675] It is Job so smitten and afflicted

that he is half tempted for the moment to curse God and die. It is

Isaiah saying of the hopeless wickedness of his people, "The whole

head is sick, and the whole heart faint." It is Jeremiah complaining,

"The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their

means; and my people love to have it so: and what will ye do in the end

thereof?"[676] It is St. Paul wailing so sadly, "All they of Asia have

turned from me. Only Luke is with me." It is the pathos of desolation

which breathes through the sad sentence of the Gospels, "Then all the

disciples forsook Him, and fled." The anticipation of desertion had

wrung from the Lord Jesus the sad prophesy, "Behold, the hour cometh,

yea, is now come, when ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and

shall leave Me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is

with Me."[677] And this heart-anguish of loneliness is, to this day, a

common experience of the best men. Any man whose duty has ever called

him to strike out against the stream of popular opinion, to rebuke

the pleasant vices of the world, to plead for causes too righteous to

be popular, to deny the existence of vested interests in the causes

of human ruin, to tell a corrupt society that it is corrupt, and a

lying Church that it lies;--any man who has had to defy mere plausible

conventions of veiled wrong-doing, to give bold utterance to forgotten

truths, to awake sodden and slumbering consciences, to annul agreements

with death and covenants with hell; every man who rises above the

trimmers and the facing-both-ways, and those who try to serve two

masters--they who swept away the rotting superstitions of a tyrannous

ecclesiasticism, they who purified prisons, they who struck the fetters

off the slave--every saint, reformer, philanthropist, and faithful

preacher in the past, and those now living saints, who, walking in

the shining steps of these, endeavour to rescue the miserable out of

the gutter, and to preach the gospel to the poor, know the anguish of

isolation, when, because they have been benefactors, they are cursed

as though they were felons, and when, for the efforts of their noble

self-sacrifice, the contempt of the world, and its pedantry, and its

malice can find for them no words too contemptuous or too bitterly

false.

5. But there was even a deeper sorrow than these which made Elijah

long for death. It was the sense of utter and seemingly irretrievable

failure. It happens often to the worldling as well as to the saint.

Many a man, weary of life's inexorable emptiness, has exclaimed in

different ways:--

"Know that whatever thou hast been,

'Tis something better not to be."

That sentiment is not in the least peculiar to Byron. We find it

again and again in the Greek tragedians. We find it alike in the

legendary revelation of the god Pan, and in the Book of Ecclesiastes,

and in Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann. No true Christian, no believer

in the mercy and justice of God, can share that sentiment, but will

to the last thank God for His creation and preservation and all

the blessings of this life, as well as for the inestimable gift of

His redemption, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.

Nevertheless, it is part of God's discipline that He often requires

His saints as well as His sinners to face what looks like hopeless

discomfiture, and to perish, as it were,

"In the lost battle

Borne down by the flying,

Where mingles war's rattle

With groans of the dying."

Such was the fate of all the Prophets. They were tortured; they had

trials of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and

imprisonment; they were stoned, were sawn asunder, were tempted, were

slain with the sword; they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins,

they hid in caves and dens of the earth, being destitute, afflicted,

tormented, though of them the world was not worthy. Such, too, was

the fate of all the Apostles--set forth last of all as men doomed to

death; made a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. They were

hungry, thirsty, naked, buffeted; they had no certain dwelling-place;

they were treated as fools and weak, were dishonoured, defamed, treated

as the filth of the world and the offscouring of all things. Such

was conspicuously the case of St. Paul in that death, so lonely and

forsaken, that the French sceptic thinks he must have awakened with

infinite regret from the disillusionment of a futile life. Nay, it was

the earthly lot of Him who was the prototype, and consolation, known

or unknown, of all these:--it was the lot of Him who, from that which

seemed the infinite collapse and immeasurable abandonment of His cross

of shame, cried out: "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" He

warned His true followers that they, too, would have to face the same

finality of earthly catastrophes, to die without the knowledge, without

even the probable hope, that they have accomplished anything, in utter

forsakenment, in a monotony of execration, often in dejection and

apparent hiding of God's countenance. The olden saints who prepared

the way for Christ, and those who since His coming have followed His

footsteps, have had to learn that true life involves a bearing of the

cross.

Take but one or two out of countless instances. Look at that humble

brown figure, kneeling drowned with tears to think of the disorders

which had already begun to creep into the holy order which he had

designed. It is sweet St. Francis of Assisi, to whom God said in

visions: "Poor little man: thinkest thou that I, who rule the

universe, cannot direct in My own way thy little order?" Look at that

monk in his friars' dress, racked, tortured, gibbeted in fetters

over the flaming pyre in the great square at Florence, stripped by

guilty priests of his priestly robe, degraded from a guilty Church

by its guilty representatives, pelted by wanton boys, dying amid

a roar of execration from the brutal and fickle multitude whose

hearts he once had moved. It is Savonarola, the prophet of Florence.

Look at that poor preacher dragged from his dungeon to the stake

at Basle, wearing the yellow cap and sanbenito painted with flames

and devils. It is John Huss, the preacher of Bohemia. Look at the

lion-hearted reformer feeling how much he had striven, not knowing

as yet how much he had achieved, appealing to God to govern His

world, saying that he was but a powerless man, and would be "the

veriest ass alive" if he thought that he could meddle with the

intricacies of Divine Providence. It is Luther. Look at the youth,

starving in an ink-stained garret, hunted through the streets by an

infuriated mob, thrust into the city prison as the only way to save

his life from those who hated his exposure of their iniquities. It is

William Lloyd Garrison. Look at that missionary, deserted, starving,

fever-stricken, in the midst of savages, dying on his knees, in daily

sufferings, amid frustrated hopes. It is David Livingstone, the

pioneer of Africa. They, and thousands like them, have borne squalors

and shames and tragedies, while they looked not at the things that

are seen, but at the things that are not seen; for the things that

are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.

Might not they all have said with the disappointed Apostles, "Master,

we have toiled all the night and have taken nothing"? Might not their

lives and deaths--the lives which fools thought madness, and their

end to be without honour--be described as one poet has described

that of his disenchanted king:--

"He walked with dreams and darkness, and he found

A doom that ever poised itself to fall,

An ever-moaning battle in the mist,

Death in all life, and lying in all love,

The meanest having power upon the highest,

And the high purpose broken by the worm."

"Yes; the smelter of Israel had now to go down himself into the

crucible."[678]

FOOTNOTES:

[674] Psalm cii. 6, 8.

[675] Psalm xxxviii. 11, 12.

[676] Jer. v. 31, xxix. 9.

[677] John xvi. 32.

[678] Krummacher.

CHAPTER XLI.

_HOW GOD DEALS WITH DESPONDENCY._

1 KINGS xix. 5-8.

"Why art thou so vexed, O my soul? and why art thou so disquieted

within me? O put thy trust in God; for I will yet praise Him who

is the health of my countenance, and my God."--PSALM xlii. 11.

"It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better

than my fathers."

The despondency was deeper than personal. It was despair of the

world; despair of the fate of the true worship; despair about the

future of faith and righteousness; despair of everything. Elijah, in

his condition of pitiable weariness, felt himself reduced to entire

uncertainty about all God's dealings with him and with mankind. "I

am not better than my fathers": _they_ failed one by one, and died,

and entered the darkness; and I have failed likewise. To what end did

Moses lead this people through the wilderness? Why did the Judges

fight and deliver them? Of what use was the wise guidance of Samuel?

What has come of David's harp, and Solomon's temple and magnificence,

and Jeroboam's heaven-directed rebellion? It ends, and my work ends,

in the despotism of Jezebel, and a nation of apostates!

God pitied His poor suffering servant, and gently led him back to

hope and happiness, and restored him to his true self, and to the

natural elasticity of his free spirit.

1. First, he gave His beloved sleep. Elijah lay down and slept.

Perhaps this was what he needed most of all. When we lose that dear

oblivion of "nature's soft nurse, and sweet restorer, balmy sleep,"

then nerve and brain give way. So God sent him

"The innocent sleep,

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,

Chief nourisher in life's feast."

And doubtless, while he slept, "his sleeping mind," as the Greek

tragedian says, "was bright with eyes," and He, who had thus "steeped

his senses in forgetfulness," spoke peace to his troubled heart,

or breathed into it the rest over which hope might brood with her

halcyon wings.

2. Next, God provided him with food. When he awoke he saw that at

his head, under the rhotem-plant, God had spread him a table in the

wilderness. It was a provision, simple indeed, but for his moderate

wants more than sufficient--a cake baked on the coals[679] and a

cruse of water. A _Maleakh_--a "messenger"--"some one," as the

Septuagint and as Josephus both render it,[680] some one who was, to

him at any rate, an angel of God--touched him, and said, "Arise and

eat." He ate and drank, and thus refreshed lay down again to make

up, perhaps, for long arrears of unrest. And again God's messenger,

human or angelic, touched him, and bade him rise and eat once more,

or his strength would fail in the journey which lay before him. For

he meant to plunge yet farther into the wilderness. In the language

of the narrator, "He arose, and did eat and drink, and went in the

strength of that food forty days and forty nights."

3. Next God sent him on a hallowed pilgrimage to bathe his weary

spirit in the memories of a brighter past.

It does not require forty days and forty nights, nor anything like

so long a period, to get from one day's journey in the wilderness to

Horeb, the Mount of God, which was Elijah's destination. The distance

does not exceed one hundred and eighty miles even from Beersheba.

But, as in the case of Moses and of our Lord, "forty days"--a

number connected by many associations with the idea of penance

and temptation--symbolises the period of Elijah's retirement and

wanderings. No doubt, too, the number has an allusive significance,

pointing back to the forty years' wanderings of Israel in the

wilderness. The Septuagint omits the words "of God," but there can

be little doubt that Sinai was selected for the goal of Elijah's

pilgrimage with reference to the awful scenes connected with the

promulgation of the law. It is well known that the Mount of the

Commandments is as a rule called Sinai in Exodus, Leviticus, and

Numbers, though the name Horeb occurs in Exod. iii. 1, xxxiii. 6. To

account for the double usage there have been, since the Middle Ages,

two theories: (1) that Horeb is the name of the range, and Sinai of

the mountain; (2) that Horeb properly means the northern part of the

range, and Sinai the southern, especially Jebel Mousa. Horeb is the

prevalent name for the mountain in Deuteronomy; Sinai is the ordinary

name, and occurs thirty-one times in the Old Testament.

After his wanderings Elijah reached Mount Sinai, and came to "the

cave," and took shelter there. The use of the article shows that a

particular cave is meant, and there can be little reason to discredit

the almost immemorial tradition that it is the hollow still pointed

out to hundreds of pilgrims as the scene of the theophany which was

here granted to Elijah. Perhaps in the same cave the vision had been

granted to Moses, in the scene to which this narrative looks back.

It is not so much a cave as, what it is called in Exodus, a "cleft

of the rock."[681] From the foot of the mountain, the level space on

which now stands the monastery of Saint Katherine, a steep and narrow

pathway through the rocks leads up to Jebel Mousa, the southernmost

peak of Sinai, which is seven thousand feet high. Half-way up this

mountain is a little secluded plain in the inmost heart of the

granite precipice, in which is an enclosed garden, and a solitary

cypress, and a spring and pool of water, and a little chapel. Inside

the chapel is shown a hole, barely large enough to contain the body

of a man. "It is," says Dr. Allon, "a temple not made with hands,

into which, through a stupendous granite screen, which shuts out even

the Bedouin world, God's priests may enter to commune with Him."[682]

* * * * *

If, indeed, Elijah had heard by tradition the vision of Moses of which

this was the scene, he must have been filled with awful thoughts as he

rested in the same narrow fissure, and recalled what had been handed

down respecting the manifestation of Jehovah to his mighty predecessor.

4. And as God had pointed out to him the way to restore his bodily

strength by sleep and food, so now He opened before the Prophet the

remedy of renewed activity. The question of the Lord came to him--it

was re-echoed by the voice of his own conscience--"What doest thou

here, Elijah?"

"What doest thou?" He was doing nothing! He had, indeed, fled for his

life; but was all the rest of his life to be so different from its

beginning? Was there, indeed, no more work to be done in Israel or in

Judah, and was he tamely to allow Jezebel to be the final mistress of

the situation? Was one alien and idolatrous woman to overawe God's

people Israel, and to snatch from God's prophet all the fruits of

his righteous labours? "What doest _thou_ here, Elijah?" Is not the

very significance of thy name "Jehovah, He is my God"? Is He to be

the God but of one fugitive? "What doest thou _here_?" This is the

wilderness. There are no idolaters or murderers, or breakers of God's

commandments here; but are there not multitudes in the crowded cities

where Baal's temple towers over Samaria, and his sun-pillars cast

their offensive shadows? Are there not multitudes in Jezreel, where

the queen's Asherah-shrine amid its guilt-shrouding trees flings

its dark protection over unhallowed orgies committed in the name of

religion? Should there not have been inspiration as well as reproof

in the mere question? Should it not mean to him, "Why art thou cast

down, O my soul? and why art thou so disquieted within me? Put thy

trust in God, for I will yet praise Him, who is the health of my

countenance, and my God"?

5. The question stirred the heart of Elijah, but did not yet dispel

his sense of hopelessness and frustration, nor did it restore his

confidence that God would govern the world aright. As yet it only

called forth the heavy murmur of his grief. "I have been very jealous

for Jehovah the God of Hosts": I, alone among my people; "for the

children of Israel"--not the wicked queen only, with her abominations

and witchcrafts, but the renegade people with her--"have forsaken

Thy covenant," which forbids them to have any God but Thee, and

have "thrown down Thine altars,[683] and slain Thy prophets with

the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to

take it away." It was as it were an appeal to Jehovah before whom he

stood, if not almost a reproach to Him. It was as though he said,

"I have done my utmost; I have failed: wilt not Thou put forth Thy

power and reign? I am but one poor hunted prophet alone against the

world. There is no prophet more: not one is there among them that

understandeth any more. I can do no more. Of what use is my life?

Carest Thou not that Thy people have revolted from Thee? Behold they

perish; they perish, they all perish! Of what use is my life? My work

has failed: let me die!"

6. God dealt with this mood as He has done in all ages, as He had

done before to Jacob, as He did afterwards to David and to Hezekiah,

and to Isaiah and Jeremiah; and as the Son of God did to the antitype

of Elijah--the great forerunner--when his faith failed him. He let

the conviction steal into his mind that the ways of God are wider

than men, and His thoughts greater than men's. He unteaches His

prophet the delusion that everything depends on _him_. He shows him

that though He works for men by men, and though

"God cannot make best man's best

Without best men to help Him,"

still no living man is necessary, nor can any man, however great,

either hasten or understand the purposes of God.

Elijah had need to be taught that man is nothing--that God is all in

all. Instead of answering his complaint, the voice said to him: "Go

forth to-morrow, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. Behold,

the Lord is passing by."[684]

FOOTNOTES:

[679] The _coals_ (_reshaphim_) for the cake (LXX., ἔγκρυφίας

ὀλυρίτης; Vulg., _subcinericius panis_) were the dry twigs of the

broom plant, still sold for that purpose in the markets of Cairo.

Comp. Psalm cxx. 4; "_coals of juniper_."

[680] 1 Kings xix. 5. מַלְאָךְ means "a messenger," and in verse 2 is

used of the messenger of Jezebel.

[681] Exod. xxxiii. 22.

[682] _Bible Educator_, iii. 135.

[683] The use of the plural, and the absence of any objections to

an uncentralised worship, are proofs of the northern origin of the

Elijah-episode.

[684] LXX., αὔριον; Josephus, _Antt._, VIII. xiii. 7; Comp. Exod.

xxxiv. 2. It is hardly likely that the stupendous vision would follow

instantly and without a moment's preparation.

CHAPTER XLII.

_THE THEOPHANY AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE._

1 KINGS xix. 9-15.

"Who heardest the rebuke of the Lord in Sinai, and in Horeb the

judgment of vengeance."--ECCLUS. xlviii. 7.

Throughout the Scriptures infinite care is taken to preclude every

notion that the Most High God can be represented in visible form. He

manifested Himself at Sinai to the children of Israel, but though the

mount burned with fire, and there were clouds and thick darkness,

and the voice of a trumpet speaking long and loud, the people were

reminded with the utmost solemnity that "they saw no manner of

similitude."[685] Indeed, in later times, when there was a keener

jealousy of every anthropomorphic expression, the giving of the law

is rather represented as a part of the ministry of angels. The word

_Makom_, or "Place," is substituted for Jehovah, so that Moses and

the elders and the Israelites do not see God but only His _Makom_,

the space which He fills;[686] the delivery of the law is ascribed

to angelic ministers. At times the angels are almost identified with

the careering flames and rushing winds which a modern theologian

describes to us as being "the skirts of their garments, the waving of

their robes"; for is it not written, "He that maketh the winds His

angels and the flaming fires His ministers"?[687] And in the daring

description of Jehovah's visible manifestation of Himself to Moses,

when He hid him in that fissure of the rock with the hollow of His

hand, Moses only observes as it were the fringe and evanishment of

His glory, "dark with excessive light."

It was natural that Jehovah should reveal Himself to Elijah under

the aspect of those awful elemental forces with which his solitary

life had made him familiar. No spot in the world is more suitable

for those powers in all their fire and magnificence than the knot of

mountains which crowd the Sinaitic peninsula with their entangled

cliffs. Travellers have borne witness to the overwhelming violence

and majesty of the storms which rush and reverberate through

the granite gorges of those everlasting hills. It was in such

surroundings that Jehovah spoke to the heart of his servant.

First "a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in

pieces the rocks, before the Lord."[688] The winds of God, which

blow where they list, and we know not whence they come nor whither

they go, have in them so awful and irresistible a strength, that man

and the works of man, are reduced to impotence before them. And when

they rush and roar through the gullies of innumerable hills in tropic

lands where the intense heat has rarefied the air, the sound of them

is beyond all comparison weird and terrific. We cannot wonder that

this roar of the hurricane was regarded as the trump of the archangel

and the voice of God at Sinai; or that the Lord answered Job out of

the whirlwind;[689] and appeared to Ezekiel in a great cloud and a

whirlwind out of the north;[690] or that Jeremiah compared His anger

to a whirling and sweeping storm;[691] or that the Psalmist describes

Him as bowing the heavens and coming down and casting darkness under

His feet, and flying upon a cherub, and walking upon the wings of

the wind;[692] or that Nahum says, "The Lord hath His way in the

whirlwind and the storm, and the clouds are the dust of His feet, ...

and the mountains quake at Him."[693]

And Elijah felt the terror of the scene, as the storm dislodged huge

masses of the mountain granite, and sent them rolling and crashing

down the hills. But it did not speak to his inmost heart: for

"The Lord was not in the wind."

And after the wind an earthquake shook the solid bases of the

Sinaitic range. The mountain saw God and trembled. The Lord, in

the language of the Psalmist, shook the wilderness of Kadesh,

the mountains skipped like rams and the little hills like young

sheep.[694] And man never feels so abjectly helpless, he is never

reduced to such absolute insignificance, as when the solid earth

beneath him, the very emblem of stability, trembles as with a palsy,

and cleaves beneath his feet; and shakes his towers to the earth, and

swallows up his cities. Once more the soul of Elijah shuddered at the

terrific impression of this sign of Jehovah's power. But it had no

message for his inmost heart: for

"The Lord was not in the earthquake."

And after the earthquake a fire. Jehovah overwhelmed the Prophet's

senses with the dread magnificence of one of those lurid

thunderstorms of which the terrors are never so tremendous as in such

mountain scenes, where travellers tell us that the burning air seems

transfused into sheets of flame. In that awful muttering and roar of

the lurid clouds, that millionfold reverberation of what the Psalmist

calls "the voice of the Lord," when the lightnings "light the world,

and run along the ground," and, in the language of Habakkuk, "God

sends abroad His arrows, and the light of His glittering spear, and

burning coals go forth under His feet, the lips of man quiver at

the voice, and his heart sinks, and he trembles where he stands."

And this, too, Elijah must have felt as "the hiding-place of God's

power:"[695] and yet it did not speak to his inmost heart; for

"The Lord was not in the fire."

"And after the fire a still small voice."

However the rendering may be altered into "a gentle murmuring

sound," or, as in the Revised Version, "a sound of gentle stillness,"

no expression is more full of the awe and mystery of the original

than the phrase "a still small voice."[696] It was the shock of awful

stillness which succeeded the sudden cessation of the earthquake and

hurricane and thunderstorm, and instantly, in it appalling hush and

gentleness, Elijah felt that God was there; and he no sooner heard

that voiceful silence speaking within him than he was filled with

fear and self-abasement. He wrapped his face in his mantle, even

as Moses "was afraid to look upon God." He came from the hollow of

the rock which had sheltered him amidst that turbulence of material

forces, and stood in the entering in of the cave.

At once the silence became articulate to his conscience, and repeated

to him the reproachful question, "What doest thou here, Elijah?"

Amazed and overwhelmed as he is, he has not yet grasped the meaning

of the vision. Something of it perhaps he saw and felt. It breathed

something of peace into the despair and tumult of his heart, but he

still can only answer as before:--

"I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts: because the

children of Israel have forsaken Thy covenant, thrown down Thine

altars, and slain Thy prophets with the sword; and I, I only, am

left; and they seek my life, to take it away."

Whatever that theophany had taught him, it had not yet fully removed

his perplexity. But now God, in tender forbearance, unfolds at any

rate the practical issue of the vision. Elijah is to be inactive no

longer. He is to find in faithfulness and work the removal of all

doubts, and is to learn that man may not abandon his duties, even

when they are irksome, even when they seem hopeless, even when they

have become intolerable and full of peril. He has to learn that it

is only when men have finished their day's work that God sends them

sleep, and that his own day's work was as yet unfinished. He is no

longer to linger in the wilderness apart from the ways of guilty and

suffering men. He is one with them: he may not separate his destiny

from theirs; he has to feel that God has no favourites and is no

respecter of persons, but that all men are His children, and that

each child of His must work for all. "Go," the Lord said unto him,

"return on thy way by the wilderness to Damascus." Did the return

involve unknown dangers? Still he must commit his way unto the Lord,

and simply be doing good, regardless of all consequences. The saints

of the Old Dispensation no less than of the New had to go forth

bearing their cross, and on their way to Golgotha.

Three missions still awaited him.

First, he is to supersede the old dynasty of Benhadad, King of Syria,

founded by Solomon's enemy, and to anoint Hazael to be king over Syria.

Next, he is to abolish the dynasty of Omri, and to anoint Jehu, the

son of Nimshi, to be king over Israel.[697]

Thirdly--and there was deep significance in this behest, and one

which must have humiliated to the dust the risings of pride and

the half-reproach, so to speak, for inadequate support which had

underlain his appeal to Jehovah--he is to anoint Elisha, the son of

Shaphat, of Abel-meholah, to be prophet in his room.

Elijah had thought himself necessary--an indispensable agent for the

task of delivering Israel from the guilty and demoralising apostasy

of Baal-worship. God teaches him that there is no such thing as a

necessary man; that man at his best estate is altogether vanity; that

God is all in all; that "God buries His workmen, but continues His

work."

And something of the meaning of these tasks is explained to him. The

people of Israel are not yet converted. They still needed the hand

of chastisement. The three years' drought had been ineffectual to

wean them from their backslidings, and turn their hearts again to

the Lord. On the royal house and on the worshippers of Baal should

fall the remorseless sword of Jehu. On the whole nation the ruthless

invasions of Hazael should press with terrible penalty. And him that

escaped from their avenging missions should Elisha slay. The last

clause is enigmatical. Elisha can hardly be said directly to have

slain any. He lived, on the whole, in friendship with the kings both

of Israel and of Aram, and in peace and honour in the cities. But

the general idea seems to be that he would carry on the mission of

Elijah alike for the guidance and the heaven-directed punishments

of kings and nations, and that the famines, raids, and humiliations

which rendered his nation miserable under the sons of Ahab should be

elements of his sacred mission.[698]

One more revelation remained to lift the Prophet above his lower

self. His cry had been, again and again: "I, I only, am left; and

they seek my life, to take it away." He must not indulge the mistaken

fancy that the worship of the true God would die with him, or that

God needed his advice, or that God was slack concerning His promise

as some men count slackness. He was not the only faithful person

left, nor would truth perish when he was called away. Nor is he to

judge only by outward appearances, nor to suppose that the arm of God

can be measured by the finger of man. A new prophet is soon to take

his place, but God has not been so neglectful as he supposes,--"Yet,"

in spite of all thy murmurings of failure and a frustrated

purpose--"yet will I leave Me"--not _thee, thee only_--"but _seven

thousand_ in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal,

and every mouth which has not kissed him."[699]

It has been regarded as a difficulty that Elijah fulfilled but one

of the three behests. But Scripture does not narrate events with the

finical and pragmatic accuracy of modern annals. Elisha, directly

or indirectly, caused both Jehu to be anointed and Hazael to ascend

the throne of Syria, and we are left to infer that in these deeds he

carried out the instructions of his Master.

It is a more serious question, What was the exact meaning of the

theophany granted to Elijah on the Mount of God?

Here, too, we are left to large and liberal applications. The

greatest utterances of men, the loftiest works of human genius, often

admit of manifold interpretations, and lend themselves to "springing

and germinal developments." Far more is this the case in the

revelations of God to the spirit of man. We can see the main truths

which were involved in that mighty scene, even if the narrator of it

leaves unexplained its central significance.

It is usually interpreted as a reproof to the spirit which led Elijah

to regard the tempestuous manifestations of wrath and vengeance as

the normal methods of the interposition of God. He was fresh from

the stern challenge of Carmel; his hands were yet red with the blood

of those four hundred and fifty priests. It was perhaps needful for

him to learn that God's gentler agencies are more effectual and more

expressive of His inmost nature, and that God is Love even though He

can by no means clear the guilty. Something of this lesson has been

at all times learnt from the narrative.[700]

"The raging fire, the roaring wind,

Thy boundless power display;

But in the gentler breeze we find

Thy Spirit's viewless way.

"The dew of heaven is like Thy grace,

It steals in silence down;

But where it lights, the favoured place

By richest fruits is known."

Quite naturally men have always seen in the storm, the earthquake,

and the fire, the presence of God as manifested in His wrath. "Then

the earth shook and trembled," says the Psalmist; "the foundations

also of the hills moved and were shaken, because He was wroth. There

went up a smoke in His nostrils, and fire out of His mouth devoured:

coals burnt forth from it. He bowed the heavens also, and came

down: and darkness was under His feet. And He rode upon a cherub,

and swooped down: yea, He did fly upon the wings of the wind."[701]

"I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her

place, at the wrath of the Lord."[702] "Thou shalt be visited," says

Isaiah, "of the Lord of Hosts with thunder, and with earthquake,

and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring

fire."[703] On the other hand, in His mercy God "maketh the storm a

calm." When He reveals Himself in a vision of the night to Eliphaz

the Temanite "a wind passed before my face, so that the hair of my

head stood up, and there was silence, and I heard a voice saying,

Shall mortal man be great before God? shall a man be pure before his

Maker?" These passages in no small measure explain the symbolism of

Elijah's vision, and point to its essential significance. Who can

measure (asks Mr. Ruskin) the total effect produced upon the minds of

men by the phenomenon of a single thunderstorm?--"the questioning of

the forest leaves together in their terrified stillness which way the

wind shall come--the murmuring together of the Angels of Destruction

as they draw in the distance their swords of flame--the rattling of

the dome of heaven under the chariot wheels of death?" Yet it is not

the thunderstorms nor the hurricanes that have been most powerful in

altering the face or moulding the structure of the world, but rather

the long continuance of Nature's most gentle influences.

Viewing the vision thus, we may say that it pointed forward to that

transcendently greater than Elijah who did not strive, nor cry, nor was

His voice heard in the streets. "There is already a gospel of Elijah.

He, the farthest removed of all the Prophets from the evangelical

spirit and character, had yet enshrined in the heart of his story the

most forcible of all protests against the hardness of Judaism, the

noblest anticipation of the breadth and depth of Christianity." This

view of the passage is taken, with slight modifications, by many, from

Irenæus down to Grotius and Calvin, and modern commentators.

Similarly it is a universal law of history that, while some mighty

and tumultuous energy may be needed to initiate the first movement

or upheaval, the greatest work is done by gentler agencies. As in

the old fable, the quiet shining of the sun effects more than the

bluster of the storm. Love is stronger than force, and persuasion

than compulsion. Mr. J. S. Mill treats it not only as a platitude but

as a falsity to assert that truth cannot be suppressed by violence.

He says that (for instance) the truths brought into prominence by

the Reformation had been again and again suppressed by the brutal

tyrannies of the Papacy. But in all these instances has not the truth

ultimately prevailed? Is it not a fact of experience that

"Truth, pressed to earth shall rise again,

The eternal years of God are hers;

But error, wounded, writhes in pain

And dies among her worshippers"?

The truth prevails and the error dies under the slow light of

knowledge and by the long results of time.

Nor is it any answer to this view of the revelation to Elijah on the

Mount of God that there is not the slightest proof of his having

learnt any such lesson, or of such a lesson having been deduced

from it by the narrator himself. Neither Elijah, it has been said,

nor the writer of the Book of Kings, felt the smallest regret for

the avenging deed of Carmel. Their consciences approved of it.

They looked on it with pride, not with compunction. This is shown

by the subsequently recorded story of Elijah's calling down fire

from heaven on the unfortunate captains and soldiers of Ahaziah, in

whatever light we regard that story which was evidently current in

the Schools of the Prophets. If the massacre of the priests cannot

be regarded as morally excusable, the destruction of these royal

emissaries by consuming fire was certainly much less so. The vision

may have had a deeper significance than Elijah or the Schools of the

Prophets understood, just as the words of Jesus often had a deeper

significance than was dreamt of even by the Apostles when they heard

them. The foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of

God is stronger than men. Neither Elijah nor the sacred historian

may have grasped all that was meant by the wind, and earthquake, and

fire, and still small voice.

"As little children sleep and dream of heaven,

So thoughts beyond their thoughts to those high bards were

given."

It is scarcely more than another aspect of the many-sided truth

that love is more potent and more Divine than violence, if we also

see in this incident a foreshadowing of the truth, so necessary for

the impatient souls of men that God neither hasteth nor resteth;

that He is patient because Eternal; that a thousand years in His

sight are but as yesterday, seeing that it is past as a dream in the

night. Something of this we learn from the study of nature. It used

to be thought that the upheaval of the continents and the rearing

of the great mountains was due to cataclysms and conflagrations and

vast explosions of volcanic force. It has long been known that they

are due, on the contrary, to the inconceivably slow modifications

produced by the most insignificant causes. It is the age-long

accumulation of mica-flakes which has built up the mighty bastions

of the Alps. It is the toil of the ephemeral coral insect which has

reared whole leagues of the American Continent and filled the Pacific

Ocean with those unnumbered isles

"Which, like to rich and various gems, inlay

The unadorned bosom of the deep."

It is the slow silting up of the rivers which has created vast

deltas for the home of man. It has required the calcareous deposit

of millions of animalculæ to produce even one inch of the height

of the white cliffs along the shores. Even so the thoughts of

man have been made more merciful in the slow course of ages, and

quiet, incommensurable influences have caused all those advances

in civilisation and humanity which elevate our race. The "bright

invisible air" has produced effects incomparably more stupendous than

the wild tornadoes. "That air, so gentle, so imperceptible, is more

powerful, not only than all the creatures that breathe and live by

it, not only than all the oaks of the forest which it rears in an age

and shatters in a moment, not only than the monsters of the sea, but

than the sea itself, which it tosses up with foam and breaks upon

every rock in its vast circumference; for it carries in its bosom all

perfect calm, and compresses the incontrollable ocean and the peopled

earth, like an atom of a feather."[704]

"Thus regarded," says Professor Van Oort, "the picture of Elijah

at Mount Horeb is full of consolation to all lovers of the truth.

Sometimes they cry, All is lost! and are ready to despair. But God

answers, Never lose heart. Storms in which God is not, in which the

power of darkness seems to sweep unbridled and unconquered o'er the

earth, come before the whispering of the cooling breeze, but the

kingdom of peace and blessedness is ever drawing nigh. Let all who

love God truly, work for its 'approach.'"