never wanting for high service both at court and throughout the land. Other rern!Ls followed of which the whole world reaps the benefit. The gifb of e. series of inspired men would have been impossible had Israel continued in the state of barbarous ignorance into which it had sunk in the time of the Judges. Brave :fighting men there might have been plenty; occasionally e. mo.n of witty jest and proverb like Samson; an Isaiah never. He and his compeers were eclucated men, speaking to an educated people, and themselves foremost in the rank of teachers. When inspired prophecy ceased, gradually the scribes took the prophets' place ; so much so that in the Chaldee Targum "prophet" is often translated " scribe ; " and however inferior their w~rk, yet they kept learning alive. The Old Testament was the fruit of Samuel's schools, and so also was the New. The noble tree which he had planted was still vigorous when our Lord traversed the land of Israel; for none but an educated people could have understood his teaching, and retained it in their memories, and taught it to mankind. If St. Paul added to the teaching of Game.liel the intellectual train- ing of a Greek university, it was in order. that he might give to Christian -teaching that many-sidedness which was necessary for its reception by Greek •and barbarian as well as by Jew. But side by side with him in equal perfect- ness stands the Jewish St. John. Who will say w}:iich of the two shall carry off the palm 7 .And it was Samuel who laid the broad foundations of that culture which, carried on first by prophets and then by scribes, made the Jews capable of writing the Bible, of translating the Old Testament into Greek, of teaching its principles in most of the cities of Greece, and :finally of going forth .as missionaries, carrying with them the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. The other great labour of Samuel was concerned with the establishment of -the kingdom, as an external necessity for Israel's orderly development. .And here again we find a man far in advance of his .age ; for his great aim and purpose was to found a limited, or, as we might even call it, a constitutional, monarchy. To a certain extent he was an unwilling agent; for he saw tha.t'the times were not ripe. .A limited monarchy is only possible among an educated people, and Samuel's Book of the Kingdom (1 Sam. x. 26) could have ho.d but little influence upon a Saul, who could neither read nor write. Perhaps anarchy is inevitably followed by despotism, and certainly Saul became too like what Samuel feared the king would be. It was only after he had trained David that there was a J ewieh .Alfred ready to sit upon the throne; and when we read so emphatically that he was a king after God's own heart, we must bear in mind that, with all his private faults, David never attempted to set himself above God's law, or even to pervert it to hie own use. He strictly con.fined himself within the limits of a theocratic king, and his crimes were personal, and u such repented of, and the punishment humbly borne. But the term theocracy is ambiguous, or at leaBt has two sides according to the nature of its administration. As administered by the high priest it was a failure. The appeal to Jehovah by Urim and Thummim was seldom made, and 'l'HE BOOK8 OF SAMUEL. vii
then only under exceptional circumstances, and there was no orderly method of carrying out its commands. Those commands themselves were of the most general kind, confined apparently to a simple affirmative or negative. It we.a thus irregular, fitful, in abeyance in all calm end peaceful epochs, and when called into dXercise was liable to terrible abuse, which it even seemed to sanction. When Israel set itself to exterminate the tribe of Benjamin, the people may have supposed that they had a sort of religious approval of their extreme measures in the fact that the oracle had encouraged them to make the third attack (Judg. xx. 28). Really the ferocity was their own, and the priest who had given an affirmative answer to their question may and ought to have been horrified at the cruelty which followed upon the victory, and which he Wall absolutely powerless to prevent. A theocracy has been tried again in the Papacy, with much the same result, of being actually one of the worst possible forms of government; and, like the theocracy of the time of the Judges,. it mllllt necessarily be a snare to the conscience, as claiming or appearing to give a religious sanction to deeds that offend the moral sense. The theocracy which Samuel endeavoured to establish was that of kingly power in the hands of a layman, but acting in obedience to the written law of God, or to his will as declared from time to time by the living voice of prophecy. It was a monarchy limited by the priest and the prophet, the former taking his stand upon the Mosaic law, the latter with a more free and active force giving a direct command in God's name, appealing to the king's moral sense, and usually representing also the popular feeling. To the old theocracy there had practically been no check, and, what was almost as bad, no person responsible for carrying out its commands. .· But it seems soon to have fallen into abeyance, and the judges were men raised up irregularly under the pressure of some extreme peril. Usually they did well, chiefly in expelling invaders from the land, but the priest with the ephod took in their exploits little or no share. Under so irregular a form of government there was small chance for the orderly development of the powers that lay dormant within Israel, and which were to make it a blessing to all the nations of the ·earth. Samuel's object was to found a monarchy active and powerful for the main- tenance at all times of order, but controlled by such checks as would prevent it from becoming a despotism. And here we have the key to his struggle with Saul. Samuel had a hearty detestation of mere arbitrary power, as we know from his own words to the elders (1 Sam. viii. 11-18); but Saul with his body-guard of 3000 men had both the will and the means of making himself absolute. Perhaps all minds of great military ability have a natural tendency to arbitrariness. Unqualified obedience is a soldier's duty, and a general knows that in discipline lies his strength. It is otherwise with a king. He is the best ruler who trains his people to habits of self-reliance, and to do what is right not because he orders it, but because they choose it. A nation drilled to obedience, a Church made orthodox by having its creed forced upon it, loses thereby all moml viii INTRODUCTION TO