SCRIPTURE CHARACTERS
HANNAH
THE MATRON.
ON entering a Roman Catholic church in many of the large
cities of France or Italy, there is much to impress the mind of a spectator not
accustomed to such imposing scenes. There is the vastness and magnificence of
the edifice, with its "dim religious light ;" the gorgeous dresses of the
priests, and highly dramatic character of the services ; the clouds of fragrant
incense ; altars illuminated with candles, and blazing with gold and jewels;
the apparent devoutness of the worshippers, all on their knees with heads bent
reverently to the ground, or eyes intently fixed on one who, with many a
strange mysterious sign, is changing - as they believe - bread into the flesh,
and the blood of the grape into the blood of an incarnate God; and there is the
grandeur of the music that swells and rolls till it seems to shake the walls of
the mighty fabric, amid whose lofty arches it is heard dying away, like the
echo of angels songs.
But when he has recovered from his first surprise,
and begins to look atound him with calm composure, there is nothing there which
strikes an intelligent and thoughtful Protestant more than the remarkable
disproportion between the men and women among the worshippers. For one man
telling his beads in front of a shrine, or kneeling before an image, or
muttering his confession in the ear of a priest, or adoring the host, or
thrusting out his tongue to receive the wafer, or engaged in any other
ceremonial, there are at least twenty women. It is not that the proportion of
women is twenty, or ten times larger in these countries than in our own; nor
that the men there have not sins to be pardoned and souls to be saved, and know
it too. It is not that the men are all atheists, and say, "There is no God ;"
nor even all confirmed sceptics, who, corrupted by Voltaire and others, have
made up their minds to reject Christianity, and regard the Bible as "a
cunningly devised fable." The striking preponderance of the one sex over the
other in these Popish, as compared with our Protestant, churches is to be
sought in other causes. It is mainly due to the pretensions of a church which,
arrogantly claiming not only to be the mistress of the empires of the world,
but of its mind, has everywhere proved itself the tool of tyrants, and an enemy
to the liberties of mankind - to the monstrous frauds she practises on the
credulity of her devotees - to the childish mummeries of her worship - to the
pride and ambition, to the avarice, the rapacity, the sensuality, and the vices
which once characterised, and, where opportunity permits, in many instances
still charactense, her clergy. How gross their lives and habits were is a
matter of history; nor did Luther, or Knox, or any of the Reformers ever draw a
darker picture of them than some found, not in the pages merely of Roman
Catholic historians, but in the records of their own Ecclesiastical Councils.
For example, the sixty-eight canons enacted at a General Provincial Council
which met at Edinburgh, church of the Blackfriars, on the 27th Nov., 1549,
eleven years before the era of the Reformation in Scotland - and which, under
the presidency of Archbishop Hamilton, of St. Andrews, was attended by many
prelates and distinguished members of the Church, are prefaced by a confession
that the troubles and heresies which afflicted the Church were due to the
corruption, the profane lewdness, and the gross ignorance of churchmen of
almost all ranks.
The clergy, therefore, were enjoined to put away their
concubines under pain of deprivation of their benefices; to dismiss from their
houses the children born to them in concubinage; not to promote such children
to benefices, nor to enrich them, the daughters with dowries, the sons with
baronies, from the patrimony of the Church. Prelates were admonished not to
keep in their households manifest drunkards, gamblers, whoremongers, brawlers,
night-walkers, buffoons, blasphemers, profane swearers; and the clergy in
general were exhorted to amend their lives and manners. Such were the fruits of
Popery where it had room and freedom to develop itself; and in these days, when
short-sighted statesmen are proposing to reestablish and endow it, it is well
to remember how the crimes of its clergy and the nature of its claims have made
religion in many countries an object of indifference or of contempt to educated
men; to almost all who make any pretensions to intelligence, or to freedom and
independence of thought.
What has happened in these lands on a great scale
has happened in our own on a small one. With us infidels have taken occasion
from the crimes into which its ministers and followers have fallen to disparage
religion, and sneer at piety. They have not scrupled to ransack the pages of
the Bible to find matter for casting doubts on its Divine authority; seeking in
the sins of Noah, of Abraham, and of Jacob, of David, and other saintly but
fallible men, weapons wherewith to stab Christianity, and make hers the unhappy
fate of the eagle which fell pierced by an arrow feathered from her own wing.
This is unfair. For what good cause, as well as religion, not been betrayed by
some, and dishonoured by others? To raise an argument or a sneer against our
holy faith on the crimes either of its professors ministers were not so, if,
like Hindooism or other forms of paganism, it either lent these crimes its
sanctoin, or had any tendency to produce them. but its tendency is the very
opposite. The Bible, instead of sanctioning, strongly condemns the very sins it
records - condemns them in all, but especially in the professors of religion.
It is therefore impossible to conceive anything more unfair and illogical than
to make the crimes of Christians a reason for doubting, or denying the truth of
their faith.
But the carnal mind being enmity against God, however
unreasonable, it is not unnatural for men thus to abuse the apophthegm, "The
tree is known by its fruit." And how careful, therefore, should the ministers
of religion, and indeed all God's people, be of their walk and conversation, of
their life and manners! how should they take heed lest their sins, even their
failings and inconsistencies, afford occasion to the enemies of the Lord to
blaspheme, or cast a stumbling-block in the way of Christ's weakest followers!
"Whosoever," He has said, "shall offend one of these little ones which believe
in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and
that he were drowned in the depths of the sea."
These reflections are
suggested by the low condition to which the crimes of the priesthood had
brought religion in Israel at the time when Hannah first appears upon the
stage. The mother of a distinguished man who was to introduce better days, her
own lot had fallen on evil ones - in that darkest hour which precedes the dawn.
The aged Eli, whose pitiful and tragic fate is one of the most touching
incidents in the Bible, was then both the high priest and judge, or civil
ruler, of Israel. Presenting in his family one of the moat melancholy examples
of the truth that, though talents often are, grace is not hereditary, this good
man had, in Hophni and Phinehas, two remarkably depraved sons. They were his
colleagues and assistants in the priestly office. Taking advantage of their
position to gratify passions which a too-indulgent father had allowed to grow
up unchecked, they were guilty of the most atrocious crimes. They tyrannised
over the people, trampling them under foot. Ministers of religion, none
violated precepts so flagrantly as they. No crime was too great for them to
commit, nor place too sacred for them to profane. Neither man's property nor
woman's virtue was safe in their hands. The Scribes and Pharisees, those
hypocrites on whose heads John the Baptist and our Lord launched their loudest
thunders, were not so guilty as they. Christ charged them with turning his
Father's house into "a den of thieves;" but Eli's sons turned it to a fouler
purpose. Regardless even of appearances, they took no trouble to whiten the
sepulchre, but committed within the sacred precincts of the temple such
outrages on morality as are without a parallel, unless in the darkest days of
Popery - that age of immoral popes, and priests, and monks, and nuns, which
preceded and did much to produce the Reformation. The time was one for judgment
to begin at the house of God, for an Ezekiel to rise up and cry aloud, saying,
"Thus saith the Lord God unto the shepherds, Woe be to the shepherds of Israel,
that do feed themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flocks? Ye eat the
fat, and ye clothe you with the wool: ye kill them that are fed, but ye feed
not the flock. The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed
that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither
have ye brought again that which was drawn away, neither have ye sought that
which was lost: but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled over them; and
they were scattered because there was no shepherd; and they became meat to
rail. the beasts of the field where they were scattered; and none did search or
seek after them. Behold I am against the shepherds, and I will require my flock
at their hands."
Such were they who served the altar in Hannah s time; and
the result was the same as the world has seen in after times, Outraged and
disgraced by the crimes of its ministers, religion sank into public contempt,
and, almost mortally "wounded in the house of its friends," seemed ready to
expire. With the interests of virtue betrayed by their appointed guardians;
with those who should have set the best, setting the worst example; with
consecrated priests taking advantage of their position to grow rich by
sacrilege, and debauch the wives and daughters of the community; what else was
to expected than such results as may be seen Italy, in France, and in other
popish countries At first indignant, and in the end demoralised, the people
deserted the house of God, and the profession of a religion which the its
priests had made to stink in their nostrils. Wherefore," alluding to Hophni and
Phinesid, "Wherefore the sin of the young men was great before the Lord, for
men abhorred the offering of the Lord."
But even in those days God
did not leave himself without a witness. There were some who felt that his,
like other good causes, has never more need of support than when it is
betrayed, or disgraced by its supporters. To the cry, "Another man to bear the
colours!" it is a brave thing to step forward, and, plucking them from a dead
hand, to raise them up and bear them on; but it is a still nobler and braver
thing to join the broken band who, refusing to flee, rally around the standard
that traitors or cowards have abandoned. Such an act closed the life of Colonel
Gardiner, the grand old Christian soldier, who, deserted by his own regiment on
the fatal field of Prestonpans, and seeing a handful of men without an officer
bravely maintaining the fight, spurred his horse through a shower of bullets to
place himself at their head, and fall a sacrifice to truth and loyalty. Such an
act also was the women's who openly followed our Lord with tears when no
disciple had the courage to show his face, in the streets - when they by their
desertion had covered Christ's cause with shame, and his enemies, in cruel
mockery, had crowned his head with thorns.
We cannot perhaps apply to the
father of Samuel and husband of Hannah the saying, "Faithful among the
faithless only he ;" yet to Elkanah certainly belongs the honour of resisting
the current of popular opinion, and, in an age of all but universal defection,
clinging to the cause and the house of God. When its ministers had brought
dishonour on the service of God, and their crimes had made the people abhor it,
he felt that there was the more need for him to stand by it. He was not the man
to desert the ship. Resolved, to use the words of a brave seaman, to stick by
her so long as two planks held together, and perish rather than survive her
loss, he clung bravely to the wreck. Praying, cxpecting, waiting for better
times, this devout and devoted man maintained the practice of religion; and,
with few to keep him in countenance, repaired year by year, according to the
statutes the Lord, to His house in Shiloh. In this, acting a part as consonant
to sound reason as to the precepts of religion, he sets an example which no
Christian can fail to admire - such as no one who falls on evil times or
happens to be thrown into evil company, should fail to imitate.
Standing on
the shore of an estuary, one sees a boat riding in the tideway, when sea-weed
and other things float by, over the self-same spot; and whether the tide ebbs
or flows, whether it steals quietly in or comes on with the rush and roar of
foaming billows, the boat always boldly shows its face to it; and turning its
head to the current receives on its bows, to split them, the shock of waves.
This, which to a child would seem strange, is due to the anchor that lies below
the waters, and,grasping the solid ground with its iron arms, holds fast the
boat. It seems no less wonderful to see a tree - no sturdy oak, but slender
birch, or trembling aspen - standing erect away up on a mountain brow; where,
exposed to the sweep of every storm, it has gallantly maintained its ground
against the ternpests that have laid in the dust the stateliest ornaments of
the plain. But our wonder ceases so soon as we climb the height, and see
wherein its great strength lies; how it has struck its roots down into the
mountain, and wrapped them With many a strong twist and turn round and round
the rock. Such an anchor, and rock, and stay, Elkanah had in God. To divine
grace, his steadfastness to duty against the popular influence and amid almost
universal defection was mainly due. Yet I cannot doubt, nor, knowing what in
trying times husbands have owed to brave and pious wives, would I doubt though
I could, that in the bold and faithful part he acted, Elkanah owed much to her
whose name gives a title to our chapter.
Both before and since the days
when they ministered to our Lord, and, following him to Calvary with their
tears, were the last at the cross and the first at the sepulchre, the Church
has exhibited many instances of high and holy heroism on the part of women.
However deserving of the name in ordinary circumstances, where martyrs fires
were fiercely burning, and scaffolds flowed with blood, and prisons overflowed
with captives, women have not showed themselves to be the "weaker sex. On the
contrary, when adherence to principle involved painful sacrifices, men have
found such support in gentle women as I have seen the green and pliant ivy lend
the wall it clothed and clung to, that, undermined or shaken, was ready to
fall. Daughters of Eve, but no tools of the tempter to seduce, with a babe at
their breast and others at their knee, they have encouraged man to withstand
temptation, and boldly face the storm, counting rank, home, living, and all
things else, but loss for Christ. Such was the spirit of Hannah.
Some good
men have been sorely tried by godless wives. Of Solomon, who presents a signal
illustration of the saying of an old Scotch judge, "That you can never
determine a man's sanity either by the wife he marries or by the religion he
adopts," it is said "his wives turned away his heart after other gods." Happier
than Solomon and many else, Elkanah was not one of whom it could be said, "A
man's enemies shall be those of his own house." At least, so far as concerned
Hannah, his was not a house divided against itself. Entering with sympathy into
all his plans and works of piety, inflaming his zeal, and confirming him in his
resolution, though he should stand alone, to stand by the cause of God, she was
worthy the name of "helpmeet." Blessed woman, and "mother in Israel," we would
set her forth as a model for wives, and mothers, and all, to imitate.
HER PATIENCE.
"There is a skeleton
in every house !" This, though a trite, is a true saying, and trite because it
is true. The grim monitor that stands in every house to teach us that unmingled
pleasures are to be sought in heaven, Hannah found in hers. Happier than some
that have been unequally yoked unbelievers, she had a worthy and pious husband.
Never was wife more prized and more loved than she. In what esteem Elkanah held
her, how fondly he cherished her, how dear she was to him, how kind he was to
her, appears in the very loving and tender terms with which he essays to soothe
her grief, saying, "Why weepest thou? and eatest thou not? and why is thy heart
grieved? am not I better to thee than ten sons?
As is indicated, by that
question, her great trial was to be childless - a disappointment which, though
is natural for all wives to wish to be mothers, either from every Jewish woman
hoping to be the the Messiah, or for some other reason, painfully felt by them
than it would be by other women. But her trial, like a wound into which cruel
hands rub salt, or some other smarting thing, turning ordinary pain into
intolerable torture, was greatly aggravated and embittered by the happier
fortune and insolent reproaches of a rival.
We may be astonished to hear
that Hannah had a rival; and that a man whom we have seen standing up so
bravely for the cause of God, and setting his breast like a rock against the
tide of irreligion that swept over the land, should have conformed to one of
the worst customs of the world. Yet such is man! There are spots in the very
sun - such defects in the brightest Christians as to remind us of the words, "I
have seen an end of all perfection." Elkanah was a polygamist. To his own
misfortune, not less than to Hannah s, he had another wife besides her. A
violation of that law of.nature which introduces about an equal number of both
sexes into the world, and a breach also of that revealed will whereby we are
taught that at the first it was not so - one woman only being given to the man
- this practice, though winked at, was punished in Elkanah's case - as it was
punished in Jacob's, in David's, in Solomon's, and is still punished wherever
polygamy prevails. Homes that might be the abodes of peace are disturbed
through polygamy by intestine broils; ever and anon swept by storms of domestic
discord. There envy reigns, furious jealousies, and hatred. There rage the
worst passions that a sense of injury and a false position can rouse in woman's
breast.
In some kind and gentle women Hannah's mis fortune would have
excited feelings of sympathy. But the other wife, who had children - a rude,
coarse, proud, and vulgar woman - turned it into an occasion for triumphing
over her, and embittering all the, springs of her life. Elkanah loved Hannah
more than her. Peninnah saw that; and to be avenged of a wrong that rankled in
her bosom, and she could neither forgive nor forget, she poured the the vials
of her wrath on the head of her innocent but unhappy rival. "Her adversary," it
is said "also provoked her sore for to make her fret, because the Lord had shut
up her womb."
In these circumstances - circumstances to which the old adage,
so generally true, applies with peculiar force "Speech is silver, but silence
is golden " - teaches us how to bear our trials, whatever their nature be; and
how to seek, and where to find relief. Weep she must - if haply her heart
overcharged with sorrow, like a dark cloud that dissolves itself in showers,
may find relief in tears. These flow from her eyes, but no word of reproach
passes her lips. Reviled, she reviled not again. She feels as it is in nature,
but acts as it is only in grace to do. The woman is not lost in the saint, nor,
as is apt to happen, is the saint lost in the woman. Where others, roused to
fury, would have retaliated, Hannah silently submits; where others would have
given themselves up to repinings and hopeless grief, Hannah prays. Her patience
could not conquer Peninnah; but her prayers might achieve a greater conquest.
By them she might prevail with God. In her trouble she sought the Lord - by and
by to turn the tables on her adversary; by and by, in that temple where
Peninnah's reproaches had wrung her heart with grief and filled her eyes with
tears, to stand with a boy at her side - an offering to the Lord of her
grateful heart, and lift up her voice over her enemy, as God's people at last
shall over all theirs, singing this magnificent ode
"My heart ,rejoiceth
in the Lord, mine horn is exalted in the. Lord, my mouth is enlarged over mine
enemies; because I rejoice in thy salvation. There is none holy as the Lord:
for there is none beside thee: neither is there any rock like our God. Talk no
more so exceeding proudly; let not arrogancy come out of your mouth; for the
Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed. The bows of the
mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength. They
that were full have hired out themselves for bread; and they that were hungry
ceased; so that the barren hath born seven; and she that hath many children has
waxed feeble. The Lord killeth, and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the
grave, and bringeth up. The Lord maketh poor, and maketh rich: he bringeth low,
and lifteth up. He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the
beggar from dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the
throne of glory: for the pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and he hath set
the world upon them. He will keep the feet of his saints and the wicked shall
be silent in darkness; for by strength shall no man prevail. The adversaries of
the Lord shall be broken to pieces; out of heaven shall he thunder upon
them: the Lord shall judge the ends of the earth; and he shall give strength
unto his king, and exalt the horn of his anointed."
HER MEEKNESS.
A singular phenomenon has
sometimes been noticed at sea. In a gale, when the storm, increasing in
violence, has at length risen into a hurricane, the force of the wind has been
observed to actually beat down the waves, producing a temporary and
cornparative calm; and similar is the effect occasionally produced by awful and
overwhelming trials - these, by their very power and pressure on the heart,
abating both the violence, and the expression of its feelings. But what is
equally remarkable and still more observable in trials is, that we can more
easily bear a heavy blow from God's hand than a light one from man's. Conscious
of sin, we feel that He has a right to afflict, where man has none. Job, for
example, sat on the ruins of his fortune and the grave of all his children to
kiss the rod that had smitten him, and say, as he put his hand on the mouth of
a mother who was raging like a bear bereaved of her whelps, "Shall we receive
good at the hands of the Lord, and not receive evil also? The Lord giveth and
the Lord taketh away, and blessed be the name of the Lord " Yet when his
friends - his "miserable comforters," as he called them - but rudely touched
the wounds God's hand had made, he winced. Their injurious speeches broke him
down; and losing the magnanimous patience with which he had seen his family and
fortune buried in one day, in a common grave, he now exclaims, "Oh that God
would grant my request: that God would grant me the thing I long for; that it
would please God to destroy me; that he would loose his hand and cut me off My
soul strangling and death rather than my life.Therefore hast thou brought me
forth out of the womb? 0 that I had given up the ghost and no had seen me !"
It has been also observed that it is much more difficult to meekly bear
wrongs by friends - by such as we revere, respect, or than by the hands of
enemies. Hence the of those complaints which in respect of the wrongs our Lord
suffered, and suffers still, from the sins of His people, not only from such
treachery as Iscariot's, but such denials as Peter's, and such desertion as the
other disciples , we may ascribe to him, "Mine own familiar friend hath lifted
up the heel against me;" "These are the wounds with which I was wounded in the
house of my friends!" Now under such a wrong how admirable the meekness, how
sanctified the temper, of Hannah!
Smarting under the cruel reproaches of
her rival, overwhelmed with grief, to use the very words of Scripture, "in
bitterness of soul," she lingers in the temple behind the rest, and there
alone, as she supposed, pours out her tears and prayers before the Lord.
Resting after the work of the day - heavy on an aged man - but unseen by her,
Eli sits by a post of the temple. Her sobs and sighs, perhaps, calling his
attention, he turns - to see a woman there. Tears stream down her cheeks. Hers
is a sorrow with which no stranger could intermeddle, and God, who hears in
secret, alone could cure. So while calling on Him, and vowing that if He will
give her a man-child, he shall be the Lord's all the days of his life, Hannah
prays in silence. But though no sound was heard, her lips moved; while
probably her body, sympathising with the agitation of. her spirit, as it often
does under violent grief, kept rocking all the while. His eyes dim as well as
his head grey with years, Eli - too much accustomed in these evil times to see
abandoned women - thought she was drunk! And more ready, like other weak,
indulgent fathers, to discover and reprove sin in others than in his own sons,
he addresses her sharply, saying, "How long wilt thou be drunken ? - put away
thy wine from thee." A grave and very offensive accusation! Under such a
charge, and in the rapid alternation with which the mind passes from one
passion to another, who would have been astonished had her grief suddenly
changed to anger? We dare not have blamed this highly virtuous as well as
broken-hearted woman, had she repelled with indignation so foul a charge. It
was hard enough to suffer Peninnah's scoffs; but it is harder to have insult
added to injury, and her bleeding wounds, as now, torn wider by the hands that
should have closed them. The meekness. of Moses have become a proverb ; and
justly so. But did he, did any man or woman, ever show a milder, gentler,
lovelier Spirit, a more magnanimous example of how to suffer wrong, than Hannah
when, without one angry look or tone, she replied, "No, my lord, I am a woman
of a sorrowful spirit; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have
poured out my soul before the Lord. Count not thine handmaid for a daughter of
Belial: for out of the abundance of my complaint and grief have I spoken
hitherto."
No wonder that Eli, perceiving the wrong he had done, should
have turned his reproaches on himself; and touched with Hannah's grief,
answered and said, "Go in peace: and the God of Israel grant thee thy petition
that thou hast asked of him."
HER
FAITH.
I know an island that stands crowned by its ancient
fortalice in the middle of a lake, some good bow-shots from the shore. With the
walls of the old ruin mantled in ivy, and its tower rising grim and grey above
the foliage of hoary elms, it serves no purpose now but to recall old times and
ornament a lovely landscape. But once that island and its stronghold were the
refuge and life of those whose ordinary residence was the castle that, with
gates, and bulwarks, and many a tower, and floating banner rose in baronial
pride on the shore. When in the troublous times of old that fort was
beleaguered and its defenders could hold it out no longer against the force and
fury of the siege, they sought their boats, and, escaping by the postern gate
over waters too deep to wade and too broad to swim, threw themselves on the
island - within the walls of the stout old keep to enjoy peace in the midst of
war, and safe beyond the shot of crosshow, to laugh their enemies to scorn. In
their hardest plight, and against the greatest numbers, this refuge never
failed them.
Such a refuge and relief his people find in God. the
confidence and bold language of the "Truly my soul waiteth upon God; from him
cometh my salvation. He only is my and my salvation; he is my defence: I shall
be greatly moved. In God is my salvation, my glory; the rock of my strength,
and my refuge is in God. Trust in him at all times: ye people, pour out your
heart before him: God is a refuge for us." Hence, also, in allusion to the
security such strongholds offered in the East, as well as here, in olden times,
the Bible says, "The name of the Lord is a strong tower, into which the
righteous runneth, and is safe." And thus, as prayer is our way of access to
God, and the means by which we place ourselves under his protection, it is a
resource that never fails. There is no evil from which it does not offer
escape; no sin of which it may not, through the application of Christ's blood,
procure the pardon; nor any temptation over which, calling in the aids of the
Holy Spirit, it may not achieve a victory. There is no burden too heavy for the
back of prayer to carry, nor wound too deep for its balm to heal. It provides
comfort in all the sorrows, relief amid all the troubles, and a cure for all
the ills of life.
When her rival vexed, and her husband tried in vain to
comfort her, teaching us what to do and where to go, Hannah sought her comfort
in prayer. That door remained open when all others were shut; that spring
filled the fountain to its lip when all other streams were dry. She found in
God the comfort that she sought. She longed to have a man-child; and had such
faith in God as to believe that, though - it might seem a miracle, He was able
to grant her request, and, in the words of the psalm, "make the barren woman to
keep house, and be a joyful mother of children." And He who helped Hannah to
conceive such faith, helped her to conceive a son. Let her case teach us that
the way to get anything is first to get faith - " all things are possible to
him that believeth."
There are people, who claim to be philosophers, that
laugh such hopes to scorn. Amid evidences of a divine wisdom, power, and
goodness, visible and bright as the sun at noonday, they cannot say, what "the
fool saith in his heart, There is no God ;" their God is not our God, nor is
"their rock unto our Rock." According to them God all events to the operation
of what they call ordinary laws of nature," without guiding, rolling,
overruling, or interfering with them in way whatever. No wonder that with such
the Divine Being is to them neither an object of reverential worship nor of
filial affection. How fear, or love God? Their God is a Sovereign, who, parting
with his sceptre though he retains his crown, is denuded of all authority - a
Father who, careless of their fate, casts his children out on the world, like
the poor babe a guilty mother exposes, which, though it may perchance be pitied
and protected by others, is cruelly forsaken by the author of its being. How
dark and dreary such a philosophy! All nature, and every religion, Pagan as
well as Christian, revolts against it. And I cannot but regard them as the
greatest enemies of mankind who, denying the efficacy, would silence the, voice
of prayer; and sweep away the last refuge of.wretchedness; and quench the one
hope that shines to many over life's troubled waters; and plunge our world into
the darkness of a perpetual eclipse - into the sorrows and miseries of a home
where wife and children stand helpless around the bed on which their guide, and
guardian, and protector, and bread-winner, lies deaf, and mute, and cold, in
death.
Some one has said of prayer, It moves the hand that moves the world.
A grand truth! to a poor conscience-stricken sinner, to an alarmed soul, to an
anxious, weary, trembling spirit, a truth more precious than all science and
philosophy. Hannah believed it. Nor - encouraging us to cast ourselves in faith
on the promises of God in Jesus Christ, on the ample bosom of his love, and
into the almighty arms of his providence - did Hannah believe in vain. She left
the temple, and went home, a changed and happy woman. "She went her
way," it is said, "and did eat, and her countenance was no more sad
;" and came back betimes to say to Eli, as leading Samuel by the hand she
presented him to the aged priest, "0 my lord, as thy soul liveth, my lord, I
am the woman that stood by thee here, praying unto the Lord: for this child I
prayed; and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of him: therefore
also I have lent him to the Lord: as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the
Lord."
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