use of him for His own righteous purposes of vengeance, it must only be distinctly as an instrument in God's hands, and not in the exercise of his own discretion, or in. obedience to the impulses of his own heart, that he must venture to wield the weapons of destruction. Whilst he was required by God to be, on His behalf, the executant of the spirit of the law, recollections of Zarephath would preach to him, and keep alive in him, the milder temper of the Gospel. They would teach him a lesson he must have much needed the lesson that when left to himself, controlled by no superhuman influence, and directed by no Divine communication, love must be ever the guiding star of his course as a minister of heavenly truth; that if he saw it necessary to wound, it must always be with the healing wound of the surgeon's knife; and that though God, the Judge of all, might bid him (and he must do it) smite to destroy, he himself, in the interpretation of his commission, must chastise, if at all, only in such wise as was calculated to amend and to save. LECTURE III. CARMEL. ST. JAMES, v., 18. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain....... ...... DURING the time that Elijah lay concealed in the torrent-bed of the Cherith and in Zarephath, Ahab's search for him had been unremitting. Far and wide he had prosecuted it, and with increasing energy, as the terrible visitation, of year after year of drought, pressed upon the land with increasing severity. He had gone so far as even to send ambassadors to distant countries, calling upon their kings to have their territory explored for the fugitive, and if he was not found, at any rate, to return the most solemn assurances that they had done their utmost to discover him. Roused to fury by the repeated failure of these attempts, and at the same time hoping, perhaps, to draw him forth from his hiding-place and bring him to terms, Jezebel had set on foot a relentless persecution against the whole body of the prophets of Jehovah. They had been slain, not one here and there, but in large numbers; and a hundred of them-fifty during one massacre and fifty during another-had escaped only by a God-fearing man, Obadiah, the confidential steward of the king's household, concealing them in a cave, and supplying them with the means of sustaining life until they could flee out of reach of the exasperated queen. All, however, was in vain. It was God's will that Elijah should not be discovered; and from the elevation on which Zarephath was built, he may have watched the sails that bore, from or to the port of Tyre or of Sidon, the messengers whom Ahab sent across the sea in search of him. And now the effects of the drought had reached that extremity, that the king could not procure fodder for his own stables. Mistrusting the representations made to him of the total destruction of all herbage, he divides the land into two districts, of which he takes one for himself, and assigns the other to Obadiah, with a view to their visiting, between them, every fountain and stream-it being near to these, if anywhere, that grass would be found. They set out from Jezreel (Ahab's summer residence) in different directions, and Obadiah had gone, it would seem, but a short distance when he was met in his road by an object which was, probably, the very last he would have expected to encounter. The same tall, athletic figure as, three years and a half |
