he takes no direct part. Against the continuance of the worship of Baal and Ashtaroth, or the revival of the Golden Calves, there is no recorded word of protest. There is no express teaching handed down. Even in his oracular answers there is something uncertain and hesitating. He needs the minstrel's harp to call forth his peculiar powers, as though he had not them completely within his own control. His deeds were not of wild terror, but of gracious, soothing, homely beneficence, bound up with the ordinary tenor of human life. When he smites with blindness, it is that he may remove it again; when he predicts, it is the prediction of plenty, and not of famine. The leprosy of Gehazi is but as the condition of the deliverance of Naaman. One only trait, and that on the very threshold of his career, belongs entirely to that fierce spirit of Elijah which called down Our Lord's rebuke-when he cursed the children of Bethel for their mockery. The act itself, and its dreadful sequel, are as exceptional in the life of Elisha as they are contrary to the spirit of the Gospel. At his house by Jericho the bitter spring is sweetened; for the widow of one of the prophets (traditionally of Elijah's friend) the oil is increased; even the workmen at the prophets' huts are not to lose the axehead which has fallen through the thickets of the Jordan into the eddying stream; the young prophets, at their common meal, are saved from the deadly herbs which had been poured from the blanket of one of them into the cauldron; and enjoy the multiplied provision of corn. At his home in Carmel he is the oracle and support of the neighbourhood; and the child of his benefactress is 1 2 Kings iii. 15. 2 Ibid. vi. 18-20, vii. 1. Ibid. ii. 23, 24. See the contrast drawn between the cruelty of Elisha and the mercy of S. James of Nisibis in Theodoret (Philotheus, iii. 1111). 5 The Jewish tradition identifies the woman of 1 Kings iv. 1-7 with the widow of Obadiah (see Targum on the passage, and Josephus, Ant. ix. 4, §2). 2 Kings vi. 5-7. raised to life, with an intense energy of sympathy that gives to the whole scene a grace as of the tender domestic life of modern times.' And when, at last, his end comes, in a great old age, he is not rapt away like Elijah, but buried with a splendid' funeral; a sumptuous tomb was shown in after ages over his grave, in the royal city of Samaria; and funeral dances were celebrated round his honoured resting-place.3 Alone of all the graves of the saints of the Old Testament, there were wonders wrought at it, which seemed to continue after death the grace of his long and gentle life. It was believed that by the mere touch of his bones a dead corpse was re-animated. In this, as in so much beside, his life and miracles are not Jewish but Christian. His works stand alone in the Bible in their likeness to the acts of mediæval saints. There alone in the Sacred History the gulf between Biblical and Ecclesiastical miracles almost disappears." The exception proves the general rule; still it is but just to notice the exception. Such was Elisha, greater yet less, less yet greater, than Elijah. He is less. For character is the real Prophetic gift. The man, the will, the personal grandeur of the Prophet are greater than any amount of Prophetic acts, or any extent of Prophetic success. We cannot dispense with the mighty past, even when we have shot far beyond it. Nations, churches, individuals, must all be content to feel as dwarfs in comparison with the giants of old time, with the Reformers, the Martyrs, the Heroes of their early youthful reverence. Those who follow cannot be as those who went before. A Prophet like Elijah comes once, and does not return. Elisha, both to his countrymen and to us, is but 12 Kings iv. 27-37. Josephus, Ant. ix. 8, §6. Jerome, Comm. on Obad. i. 1; Epitaph. Paule, § 13. 2 Kings xiii. 21. Compare especially those of S. Benedict and S. Bernard, which are the same in character, only far more numerous. the successor, the faint reflection of his predecessor. When he appeared before the three suppliant kings, his chief honour was that he was 'Elisha the son of Shaphat, who 'poured water on the hands of Elijah.'1 Less, yet greater. For the work of the great ones of this earth is carried on by far inferior instruments but on a far wider scale, and, it may be, in a far higher spirit. The life of an Elijah is never spent in vain. Even his death has not taken him from us. He struggles, single-handed as it would seem, and without effect; and in the very crisis of the nation's history is suddenly and mysteriously removed. But his work continues; his mantle falls; his teaching spreads; his enemies perish. The Prophet preaches and teaches, the martyr dies and passes away; but other men enter into his labours. By that one impulse of Elijah, Elisha and Elisha's successors, Prophets and sons of Prophets, are raised up by fifties and by hundreds. They must work in their own way. They must not try to retain the spirit of Elijah by repeating his words, or by clothing themselves in his rough mantle, or by living his strange life. What was begun in fire and storm, in solitude and awful visions, must be carried on through winning arts, and healing acts, and gentle words of peaceful and social intercourse; not in the desert of Horeb, or on the top of Carmel, but in the crowded thoroughfares of Samaria, in the gardens of Damascus, by the rushing waters of Jordan. Elisha himself may be as nothing compared with Elijah; his wonders may be forgotten. He dies by the long decay of years; no chariots of fire are there to lighten his last moments, or bear away his soul to heaven. Yet he knows that, though unseen, they are always around him. Once in the city of Dothan, in the ancient pass, where the caravans of the Midianites and the troops of the Syrians stream through into Central Palestine,-when he is com 12 Kings iii. 11. passed about with the chariots and horses of the hostile armies, and his servant cries out for fear, Elisha said, Fear not for they that be with us are more than they that 'be with them. . . . And, behold, the mountain was full ' of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.'1 It is a vision of which the meaning acquires double force from its connection with the actual history; as if to show, by the very same figure, that the hope which bore Elijah to his triumphal end was equally present with Elisha. Elijah, and those who are like Elijah, are needed, in critical and momentous occasions, to prepare the way for the Lord.' His likeness is John the Baptist: and of those that were born of women before the times of Christendom none were greater 'than they.' But Elisha, and those who are like Elisha, have a humbler, and yet a wider, and therefore a holier sphere for their works are not the works of the Baptist, but are the deeds, if not of Christ Himself, at any rate of the 'least in His kingdom,'-the gentle, beneficent, holy man 'of God, who passeth by us continually.' 2 : 330 LECTURE XXXII. THE HOUSE OF OMRI.-JEHU. Gehazi. The call of 1 2 As Elisha had succeeded Elijah, so it would seem There was another successor, not less unequal and unlike, already designated by Elijah himself. With Elisha and Hazael, in the vision at Horeb, had been named Jehu, the son or grandson of Nimshi. Years had rolled away since his meeting with Elijah in the vineyard of Naboth. He was now high in the favour of Ahab's son, as captain of the host in the Syrian war. In that war of chariots and horses, he had acquired an art little practised by the infantry of the 1 2 Kings iv. 12, 29. The word is Ibid. iv. 12, 15. See Ewald on 2 Kings v. 26. 1 Kings xix. 16. His full pedi gree is given in 2 Kings ix. 2. |