ELIJAH.

LECTURE I.

CHERITH.

ST. JAMES, v., 17.

Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months.

It was about sixty years after the secession of the ten tribes, that Ahab ascended the throne of Israel. Inaugurated as the kingdom of Israel had been by the establishment of a worship which, though not avowedly opposed to the worship of Jehovah, really stood to it in a relation at once thoroughly schismatical and grossly corrupt, it was the

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natural sequel to such a beginning that religious and moral degeneracy should proceed with the utmost rapidity. In Omri, the father of Ahab, a fourth dynasty was called to rule over the distracted realm; and quick as was the succession of monarchs, it was quite kept pace with by the advancing strides of iniquity and idolatry. The king

"who made Israel to sin" is the distinctive designation of him who stands at the head of the royal catalogue as the rebellious founder of the separate monarchy. Nadab, his son Baasha, his son Elah, and Zimri, each succeed to a like preeminence in wickedness as well as in power. The record of Omri, who followed Zimri, is, that "he wrought evil in the eyes of the Lord, and did worse than all who were before him:" and his son Ahab's improves upon his again, for of him, too, it is written that "he did evil in the sight of the Lord above all

that were before him. And it came to pass, as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, that he took to wife Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Zidonians, and went and served Baal and worshipped him. And he reared up an altar for Baal, in the house of Baal which he had built in Samaria. And. Ahab made a grove; and Ahab did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger, than all the kings of Israel that were before him.”

It is among the many proofs which the Old Testament history supplies of the forbearance and long-suffering of God, that a people which, so far as they were represented by their king, bad thus cast off their allegiance to Him, should nevertheless have continued to engage His fatherly care. Their deliberate act in renouncing their fealty to the house of His servant David, and cutting them

selves off from the communion of His Church; their impious degradation of Him into "the similitude of a calf that eateth hay;" the contempt with which the priestly office was treated amongst them by its being supplied from "the lowest of the people;" His own gradual displacement, even in the form of calf worship, before Baal and Ashtoreth, the gods of the neighbouring heathen; and the crowning guilt of their king in forming a heathen alliance, and $O strengthening the cause of those false deities-even these accumulated provocations could not drive the Lord God to forget that they were the posterity of His servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or blind Him, so to say, to the fact that, in the midst of this deep and wide-spread corruption, there were some knees that would not bow to Baal, and some eyes that would not look at the golden idols in Bethel and in Dan in

any other light than as indignities offered to the Most High. Severe as is the treatment with which the Lord God visits the national sins, it is treatment in which we can trace a purpose of mercy; it is chastisement designed, not for vengeance, but to awaken and amend.

On the eastern side of Jordan, between

Bashan on the north, and Moab and Ammon on the south, and running eastward into the Arabian table-land, lay a wild, but far from barren, mountain region, which took its name of "Gilead" from the rocky heights which terminate its rich, undulating pastures, or look down upon its well-wooded ravines. The luxuriant herbage of its downs, the shade supplied by its central forests, and the unfailing waters of its streams, drew to this region the two chief cattlefeeding tribes of the chosen raceReuben and Gad-who, having it as