We'll trim our broad sail as before, And stand by the rudder that governs the bark,
Nor ask how we look from the shore ! ^
II.
The Time of the Call.
1. "Samuel was laid down to sleep, and the Lord called ^ Samuel." God calls men at unlikely times. The child is gone to * Oliver Wendell Holmes.
256 THE CALL OF SAMUEL
rest, to forget in sleep the weariness of the day, and when he goes into the quietness of his own retreat, thinking that the day's work is all over, God calls him. There is no night with God ; He shines through the everlasting day. He has no set times, and formal periods, and prescribed seasons in which to speak to men. When we may say, " Let us be quiet now, the child has gone to rest ; let nothing disturb the young slumberer," God comes along the pathway of the darkness, and speaks to the child.
^ If we had an ear to hear we should not be slow to perceive that God speaks to us at unlikely times. You say, now this is a likely morning in which God will speak to us. We are gathered from many quarters into His house of prayer, and we are here waiting to know what God the Lord will say; and yet it is quite possible we may go away from this chosen place without hearing anything. And sometimes, when we think God a long way off, and we have our own little circle of thought and speculation — when we are apparently given up to ourselves — God will come unexpectedly to us, and call us and talk to us, and strike through our souls mysteries and counsels that make us tremble, and wonder, and pray.^
^ Here is a man who is saying to himself, fit auditor, indeed — " This will I do ; I will pull down my barns, and build greater, and I will say to my soul, ' Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry'"; and just as he has concluded his monologue, a voice, terrible as the hand that Belshazzar saw, says to him from a hidden place, " Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee " — an unlikely time.
. / 2- The call came when the Tabernacle was hushed, when the lamp went out, and Samuel was laid down to sleep. In solitude and silence, when the voices of the day's disturbance are at rest, God is heard speaking in the heart. So it has ever been. The soul opens its doors to listen when the sounds which attack the senses are not heard. The Invisible One is felt in our consciousness in the lonely places of the earth. There are strange whispers which beset us when the heart is wearied of the world, when work seems vanity, when pleasure is removed, when life passes before us like a dream. We seem to know then what we really are, and wait for a revelation. Then the
1 Joseph Parker.
I SAMUEL III. lo 257
everlasting Father calls His son, and calls him by his name : " Samuel, Samuel, know me ; remember me, love me. I stretch out my hands to thee. I am thy Father, hear my voice ; come, my child, learn of me righteousness and love, duty and the power of redeeming." It is a personal cry. He who calls, we know then, is akin to us, a living One who lives for us, with love to answer our love.
Not every soul may hear,
Yet to the listening ear
God's lips are ever near.
III.
The Manner of the Call.
1. When God speaks He does not always accompany the message with such visible signs as would make acceptance an outward necessity rather than an act of willing obedience. God spoke to Samuel, and there was no outward glory seen. No vision of light accompanied the voice ; no form was revealed to assist the ear in the recognition of the Speaker. Neither was the voice audible to any but the child; so that there was no correlative testimony of others to assist him in distinguishing from whom it came, as its solemn accents thrilled upon the silence of the night. Nor does it appear that there was anything in the nature of the voice itself which would prove it to be Divine, or else why did Samuel twice run to Eli, thinking that the old man had called him ? It needed the experience of the aged priest to instruct the boy as to the Divinity of the Speaker. " Eli perceived that the Lord had called the child."
^ They who are living religiously have from time to time truths they did not know before, or had no need to consider, brought before them forcibly; truths which involve duties, which are in fact percepts, and claim obedience. In this and such-like ways Christ calls us now. There is nothing miraculous or extraordinary in His dealings with us. He works through our natural faculties and circumstances of life. Still, what happens to us in providence is in all essential respects what His voice ^was to those whom He addressed when on earth. Whether 'He commands by a visible presence, or by a voice, or by