r<'sorl to this mat.erinl emblem as a means of inspiriting the dishee.rtened troop~. The bat!lc·field of Aphek, close to the scene of happier auspices, Deth-horon, a.ncl itself the scene of a nctory a few years later (1 Sam. vii. 12), was to decicle whether the Philistines should be the slaves of the Hebrews, oc the Hebrews of the Philistines. " On the success of this wager of battle the priestly rulers of the nation Jrn,d staked the most sacred pledge of theil' religion." Staked and lost both it n.nr1 the sauctua~·y, and their own miserable lives also. The Philistines, believing that they were contending against te1Tific odds, and that the God of the Hebrews was in the ranks of their opponents, fought with the cournge of despair. We read of the capture of the. ark and of the death of Eli ; but of what must lrnve followed soon n.ft.er, the Yiolent overthrow or rapid decay of the sanctuary of Shiloh, we are not told. But its desolation passed into a proverb as a monument of Divine jnclgment. " Go ye now unto My place which was in Shiloh, where I set My n:une at the first, and. see '\\·hat I did to it, for the wicked.Dess of My people Israel" (,Jer. Yii. 121. "Then will I make this house like Shiloh, and will make this city a curse to all the nations of the earth." "This house shall be like Shiloh, and this city shall be desolate without an inhabitant" (Jer. xxvi. 6, 9). Still more striking, because so incidental, is the notice of it at the end of the Book of Judges. "Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan." "Shiloh, which is in the north side of Dethel, on the east side of the highway that goeth up from Bethel to Shechem, and on the south of Lebonah" (eh. :xxi. 12, 19). At the time when this was written the very site of Shiloh was so little known that it needed to be thus minutely described ; .a,nd this ex.act description enabled Dr. Robinson in 1838 to discover the site. Ho found the name still surnnng among the shepherds of the neighbourhood as Seilun. Each of the three great epochs in the history of the J ewe ends with the destruc- tion of the visible sanctuary. The fa.et may teach us, as Ewald points out, that the history of Israel is the history of a religion rather than of a nation. " They are not all Israel whieh are of Israel;" - and "he is not a Jew which is one outwardly" (Rom. iL 6; ii. 28). The Theocracy ended with the downfall of the sanctuary at Shiloh, directly or ind.irectly through the spoliation by the Philistine~. The monarchy end.ad with the destruction of the.first temple of Jerusalem by the armies of Babylon. The period after the Captivity ended with the destruction of the last temple of Jerusalem by the armies of Titus. Each overthrow was worse than the prenous one, and each might have warned the Jews that along with their sanctuary a period of probation had passed away. The desti11ction by the Chaldeans prepared the deathbed, the destruction by the Romans prepared the funeral, of the Jewish religion. The glory of it departed with the one, tho very possibility of life was extinguished by the other. Since the ruin wrought by Titus the keeping of the law has been a physical impossibility. But the overtluow of the first sanctuary was a juclgment that was turned into a blessing. It inspired a yea.ruing and ]Jrepared the way for something higher - for a more glorious sanctuary on a nobler ~ite, where a renovated pries~hood should minister to a chastened and purified ptople.
THE LAST OF THE JUDGER, SAMUEL.
Samuel, like the Baptist, closes one great era and inangµrates a new one; like the Baptist also, he nominates a successor greater than himself. Doth men, grand in themselves, the one at the beginning, the other at the end of " the goodly fellow- ship of the prophets," derirn their chief importance from that which they inaugurate JOSHUA TO NEHEMIAH. xix