such an assembly. But we can hardly suppose him not to have remonstrated with the insane wickedness of such a proposal, and especially with his sons. They, however, and all the rest by their example, had long, in the unbridled strength of presumption, domineered over the feebleness of his old age, and scorned his advice, and disregarded his authority. So God gave them all up to a reprobate mind, so that seeing they should not see, and hearing they should not understand. He left them to their own devices, by them to work out his judgments upon themselves. Considering, however, the dimness of Eli's sight, they might have taken away the ark before he was aware, and it had become too late to interfere either with advice or authority.

The ark, therefore, was taken into the camp, and surely it must have been a sight to inflame into a madness of enthusiasm the minds of the soldiers. Borne amid a long and solemn procession of Priests, the pillar of glory resting upon it, and shining from afar, this symbol of the covenant and the presence of their almighty and irresistible chief, of Jehovah mighty in battle, their victorious leader for 400 years, advanced into the camp. The whole host immediately raised a shout, so that the earth rang again. Proportional was the depression of the spirit of the Philistines. The ark had never come into the field since the miraculous capture of Jericho, whose walls fell down at its presence. The effect, however, was in the result exactly opposite to what Israel hoped. The Philistines were driven to the madness of despair. So animated on each side the Israelites were defeated with

armies met.

The

the terrible slaughter of thirty thousand men, the ark was taken, and the two sons of Eli were among the slain. God's ways were not their ways. He would not go forth with their hosts. His ark proved to them an empty chest, whose treasure was gone. And he inflicted on them the sin and shame of minishing his glory, and making his name a by-word among the heathen.

Meanwhile Eli remained at Shiloh, trembling for the fate of the ark of God. The godly man felt and knew but too well the extent of the daring presumption with which they had provoked him. Never had he been so tempted of Israel since the days of the wilderness. And as they had fallen there, so may they fall now. He was sitting down, anxiously on the watch, by the way-side, when he heard a great cry in the city. A runaway had brought to Shiloh the dreadful news of the event of the battle. He immediately appeared before Eli with his clothes rent and dust upon his head. He told him of the loss of the battle, and of the death of his two sons, and thus far Eli heard him with patience. For all that he was prepared. But when he added to this the loss of the ark of God, quite overcome he fell back, and breaking his neck (for he was heavy and old) expired.

Doubtless he had been revolving in his mind, the desperate state into which his own weakness and irresolution had brought Israel. His uncorrected sons had spread their corruption far and wide, and rash and godless counsels had prevailed. The thought of the loss of the ark must have occurred to him, and although instantly rejected as something too dreadful for possibility, would recur again and again, and reproach

him as the author of so unspeakable a calamity. What an accumulation then of self-accusation must have come upon him at the moment when the reality was announced, and felled him as by a blow, to the ground. The ark of God was gone from Israel. The visible presence of God had departed from Israel. The Church of God was removed from Israel: yea, from the whole earth. Where was now the covenant with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and Moses? Where was now the promised Redeemer? The golden link of redemption was broken short asunder. God in anger had deserted his people, and for their sins annulled his covenant with his people. Why should he not? It was as conditional as that made to Phinehas, by the annulling of which he himself was now High Priest. Israel was no longer a people of God. He was forsaken by God, and the triumphant idolator was wagging his head in mockery, and asking him, "Where is now thy God?" Of all this inexpressible ruin, spiritual and temporal, to Israel and to the world, he himself was author. He the supreme ruler under God, had winked at unruly godlessness. He the minister of holiness had borne with unholiHe the guardian of God's honour on earth, had brought it into ridicule before the Gentiles. He the High Priest of God had destroyed the Church of God. The agony of such thoughts, momentary though it was, could not be borne by human heart. It choked him, and he fell. He died at the advanced age of ninety-eight.

ness.

There remains an appendage to the account of Eli, an anecdote of striking beauty, brief as it

is. The wife of Phinehas, who was close on the time of her labour, when she heard the dreadful news was suddenly seized with the pangs of childbirth. She lived just long enough to give the child the melancholy name of Ichabod, or, Where-is-the-glory, alluding to the glory of God having departed by the capture of the ark. She too, like her father-in-law, recked little of other loss compared with this. A husband and a brother slain, and a father dead, and all the destitution hence arising, were as dust in the balance when weighed with this. Is the Church of God equally precious now? Will men think temporal losses as nothing compared with this? Will loss of father, and brother, and house, and home, be considered quite subordinate to the overwhelming mag'nitude of this? And now too, when that Church no longer feeds us with scanty food and coarse fare, no longer amuses us with distant shadows, typified hopes, a promised Redeemer, but when it fills us, beyond the most lively imagination of craving want, with sumptuous unfailing spiritual feasts, and makes us to feel living realities, hopes in substance, a Redeemer given. How many Christians can be thus compared with these Jews? It is to be hoped many, however public carelessness and infidelity may seem to deny the fact. In a wicked and adulterous generation such persons appear not in the foreground: they come not into view until room has been made for them by the conflict and thrusting of the wicked, which involve in their iniquitous contests for wealth and power, the welfare of the visible Church of God, and carry his ark into their battle.

The history of Eli has ever been held out as a

tremendous warning to indulgent parents, and headstrong children. It denounces sorrow, and shame, and ruin both on one and the other, and above all it shows how the glory of the presence of God may depart from a family, and their temporal ruin be but the humble companion to their spiritual. A pious godly father may, like Eli, forget that he is set in a watch-tower over his house, to espy and eject in time every unmeet intruder. He may overlook or but slightly rebuke, through too fond indulgence, the outbursts of passion which proclaim that a wolf has entered into the fold, that one sheep at least has been bitten, and call urgently upon him to lose not a moment in expelling the enemy. He may become, like Eli, the subject and not the ruler of his children: and then the fate of Eli's house will be the fate of his. He will hear Christ and his holy company crying aloud, amid his chambers, "Let us depart hence," he will see that departure, and expire in grief and shame: the last penitent survivor of his house shall exclaim, "where is the glory," and die brokenhearted in the speech; and the pitiless unbelieving world around, freed from the reproof of their former godliness, shall clap their hands and exclaim, "where is now their God?"

And is no warning conveyed to rulers and governors, to whose hands Christ, the great Apostle, has committed the charge of his people? May not their indifference to the moral and spiritual state of subjects which he hath entrusted to them as children to a father, bring down ruin on themselves and the whole nation, and extinguish the light of the Gospel, the presence of Christ's Church among them? Has it