at Mizpah : There shall not any of us give his daughter unto Benjamin for wife.' The difficulty was, however, met by another oath sworn at Mizpah, to the effect that any of the tribes not attending the meeting there should be put to death. The inhabitants of Jabeshgilead, a city on the east of the Jordan, were convicted of this offence, and forthwith murdered, with all the married women and children, by twelve thousand most valiant men! Four hundred virgins were, however, secured as wives for the Benjamites, and the necessary number completed by forcible abduction of two hundred daughters of Shiloh. This narrative concludes with the remark: In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.' And yet Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, was in communication with Jehovah as the temporal Ruler of the nation.

From these sanguinary episodes in the annals of Judah we infer that many of the calamities of the nation resulted from superstitious reliance on the oracles of Urim and Thummim; and that the cruelty of the Hebrews towards alien nations indicates, not divine vengeance, but native barbarism, as ruthless in conflict with Benjamites as with Philistines.

Passing over the idyl of Ruth,' with its unwonted picture of rural tranquillity among the Hebrews, and unusual recognition of virtue in a daughter of Moab, we next hear of the pontificate of Eli,1 a venerable priest and judge, whose character stands out prominently in admirable contrast with his sanguinary predecessors, as he is accused of nothing worse than

11 Sam. i.-iv.

being a too indulgent parent.

Even in modern times

the offspring of eminent bishops are not always exempt from the ancestral vices developed through heredity, as was the case with Hophni and Phinehas, the dissolute sons of Eli, who, as members of the priesthood, were not content to dine on the prescribed shoulder of peace-offerings, but insisted on more appetising food and varied cookery. They were also guilty of other improprieties, for which Eli rebuked them sternly: but they hearkened not to the voice of their father, because Jehovah would slay them:' and Eli adopted no more vigorous measures-practically impossible to nonagenarian senility.

An anonymous man of God, accordingly, appears upon the scene, and insults the venerable prelate with insolent denunciation-heard with a patience superior to that of Job, for he utters no word of remonstrance, and, even when cursed through the lips of a child, he thus anticipates the gospel: 'It is the Lord; let him do what seemeth him good.' In fact, Eli was sufficiently in advance of his age to have been a Galilean Apostle.

The children of Israel were obviously irresponsible for the actions of theocratic priests, in whose appointment they had no voice; and yet, for the sins of Eli's sons, the Philistines slew thirty-four thousand of them, and even captured the sacred coffer of Jehovah, which, passing from place to place as an iconoclastic and plague-producing talisman, was at length restored by the enemy to the men of Beth-Shemesh, fifty thousand of whom were slain by Jehovah for examining its contents. Meantime the venerable Eli, having heard of the

rout of the Israelites, the death of his two sons, and the capture of the ark, fell down and broke his neck; for, as the sacred annalist tells us, he was an old man, and heavy, and he had judged Israel forty years.' These appalling events are apparently traceable to the refusal of Hophni and Phinehas to conform to Mosaic restrictions on diet, so that individual neglect of ceremonial observances, under a Theocracy, may result in great national calamities.

79

CHAPTER VII.

THE PROPHETS.

A Theocracy administered by priests and judges, in the name of Jehovah, having thus resulted in calamitous failure, the occasion had arisen for the intervention of the prophets. And henceforth, professors of the superstition which controls human reason by alleged revelation, assumed the divine right of interference with the functions of government, and, by discrediting the judgment and paralysing the action of the responsible rulers of the nation, inaugurated conditions of social and political anarchy which doomed the Hebrew race to eventual subjugation by nations more amenable to the practical sagacity of their rulers than to the fanciful divination of their prophets.

The records of antiquity depict mankind practising various arts of divination, through which they hoped to read futurity and interpret the purpose of the gods. This popular illusion created a demand for augurs, soothsayers, astrologists, and prophets, who credulously or fraudulently ministered to the superstition of their age by arts of divination, ranging from the humblest efforts of sorcery to the most ambitious flights of astrological forecast.

We might trace in the pages of Herodotus and Plutarch the calamitous results of individual and

national action inspired by soothsayers or controlled by oracles, but may more promptly detect the evils of tampering with futurity by ideally introducing the augurs, diviners, and prophets of antiquity into the practical life of modern times, and depicting the chaos into which our civilisation would be resolved, if our designs were fashioned by omens, and our actions determined by oracles-conditions of perplexity and confusion which we should, however, probably end by emulating the moral courage of the Roman commander who set divination at defiance by throwing the sacred chickens overboard.

The ancient Hebrews followed the example of other nations. Joseph had learned in Egypt to divine with a cup; and Moses established the oracle of Urim and Thummim, the secret or virtues of which seem to have been finally lost about the time of David. But Samuel had previously introduced musical conjuration into Judaism by which the divine afflatus was evoked, as in the mysteries of Isis and the revels of the Corybantes.

We have not far to seek the source from which Samuel borrowed the institution of the prophets. The legend of Balaam depicts a professional vendor of benedictions and anathemas, who, although an alien soothsayer, was in communication with the Hebrew Deity.1 To him came elders of Moab and Midian with the rewards of divination, to purchase curses against the children of Israel,' impossible to Balaam, divinely instructed to bless. It is almost incredible that modern Piety accepts the prophetic affinity of Balaam with Jehovah, for how could he then have won his reputa

1 Numbers xxii.