1 L. A. Banks.
2 KINGS VI. 17 491
falls. This is one lesson conveyed in the words of Christ when the Pharisees told Him that Herod desired to kill Him. He knew that Herod could not kill Him till He had done His Father's will and finished His work, " Go ye," He said, " and tell that fox. Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected. Nevertheless I must walk to-day, and to-morrow, and the day following."
^ India was still heaving with the ground-swell of the terrible mutiny of 1857 when the wife of Sir John Lawrence was called home to her children in England, and had to leave her husband, who would not quit his post, surrounded by the smouldering embers which might at any moment rekindle into flame, and worn to exhaustion with the anxiety and labour which did so much for the preservation of the Indian empire. She thus writes, "When the last morning of separation, 6th January 1858, arrived, we had our usual Bible reading, and I can never think of the 27th Psalm, which was the portion we then read together, without recalling that sad time " . . . " The Lord is my light and my salvation ; whom shall I fear ? . . . For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion." ^
(2) But had all this been otherwise — had the child of God perished, as has been the common lot of God's prophets and heroes — he would not therefore have felt himself mocked by these exceeding great and precious promises. The chariots and horses of fire are still there, and are there to work a deliverance still greater and more eternal. Their office is not to deliver the perishing body, but to carry into God's glory the immortal soul. This is indicated in the death-scene of Elijah. This was the vision of the dying Stephen. This was what Christian legend meant when it embellished with beautiful incidents such scenes as the death of Polycarp. This was what led Bunyan to write, when he described the death of Christian, that " all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side."
The ship may sink,
And I may drink A hasty death in the bitter sea;
But all that I leave
In the ocean-grave Can be slipped and spared, and no loss to me. ^ Archibald Alexander.
492 THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE
What care I,
Though falls the sky, And the shrivelling earth to a cinder turn ?
No fires of doom
Can ever consume What never was made nor meant to burn.
Let go the breath
There is no death To the living soul, nor loss, nor harm.
Not of the clod
Is the life of God; Let it mount, as it will, from form to form.^ * Charles Gordon Ames.
Knowledge and Service.
49^
LITERATURE.
Bosanquet (C), The Man after God's Own Heart, 434.
Burrows (H. W.), Lenten and other Sermons, 60.
Hasell (E, J.), Bible Pwrtings, 202.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions : 2 Kings-Nehemiah, 101.
Eowland (A.), in The Ladder of Life, 135.
Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 251.
Church Pulpit Year Boole, viL (1910) 152.
Clergyman's Magazine, 3rd Ser., ii. 36 (Youard).
Plain Sermons by Contributors to " Tracts for the Times," x. 285.
49#
Knowledge and Service.
And thou, Solomon my son, know thou the God of thy father, and serve him with a perfect heart and with a willing mind. — i Chron. xxviii. 9.
1. It was at the very end of his life that David uttered these words. Dark clouds had gathered round him from the time of his great sin. "War, famine, and pestilence diminished the numbers, and laid waste the homes, of his subjects; rebellions in his own family, and the death of son after son, afflicted his soul. Yet through all these sorrows the penitent king held fast to God's promises, and found comfort in thinking, " Although my house be not so with God ; yet he hath made with me an ever- lasting covenant, ordered in all things, and sure : for this is all my salvation, and all my desire " (2 Sam. xxiii. 5).
2. Solomon was the first link in the great chain which God's faithful promise had established between David, sin-stained and suffering, and that stainless Sufferer whom the helpless would invoke as the Son of David, and whose distant advent appeared " as the light of the morning when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds ; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain." It was Solomon whom God had chosen to escape the curse which seemed to brood over David's other children, and to build that temple which his father had longed to erect to the glory of God, but which he was not suffered to behold except in vision and devout anticipation. And, accord- ingly, it is in David's solemn farewell charge to Solomon in the presence of assembled Israel that we see the stormy rain-clouds that obscured his latter days disperse, and his setting sun shine out bright and warm for a few moments, before it sinks beneath our ken. Adonijah's rebellion has been put down. Solomon has