rose into his truest and highest self. heart, and he became a new man.

God gave him another Yet what was his after

life but a long rebellion against the God who had thus exalted him, until the Spirit of the Lord departed from him, and an evil spirit troubled him? How low must he have fallen, how far from all righteousness, who, after having known Samuel, the grave and reverend founder of the schools of the prophets, and after having himself received inspirations from on high which quickened him to ecstasy, stooped to the meanest, the most venal and impostureridden, form of divination-a form so base and mercenary that he himself had forbidden it on pain of death-and consulted the witch of Endor, a poor wretch who fooled and plundered rustics by her spells and incantations, her mock apparitions, her ventriloquial illusions! Yet, who that reads David's "Song of the Bow," his elegy over the fallen king, can doubt the original greatness of the man, or pronounce him a wholly unworthy organ of the Divine Spirit? But if Saul were a prophet, why not Balaam?

2. A second anomaly in the character of Balaam by which we are staggered and perplexed is, that he should be at once a good man and a bad; "a man of God who, in the face of all threatening and allurement, professed that he could not go beyond the word of the Lord his God, to do a small thing or a great, and who, in the teeth of his own most clamorous interests and desires did consistently speak the words that God put into his mouth, and yet a man of God who was disobedient to the word of the Lord," who sought to evade the duty with which he was charged, and, while faithful to the letter of the Divine command, was unfaithful to its intention and spirit.s And yet the very words in which I have stated this anomaly reminds us of the unnamed Hebrew prophet who, in the days of Jeroboam, 3 See Vol. I. page 1.

1 1 Sam. ix. 1-13.

4

2 Ibid. xvi. 14.

4 1 Kings xiii. Any one who reads this Chapter attentively will find many

cried out against the altar at Bethel: for he too delivered the message which God had put into his mouth with the most splendid fidelity, risking his very life, and yet could not be true to the charge, Eat "no bread (in Bethel), nor drink water," and lost his life, not by his fidelity to the Divine command, but by his infidelity to it. It is he, and not Balaam, who was originally described as "a man of God who was disobedient to the word of the Lord."

And if Balaam is to be condemned as a sinner above all men because, though he saw visions and heard words from God, he nevertheless wanted to curse the people he was bound to bless, and studied how he might evade the spirit of the injunction he had received from the Most High, what are we to say to Jonah who first tried to flee from the presence of the Lord rather than deliver the warning to Nineveh with which he was charged, and then was "very angry" with God because he did not destroy "that great city in which were more than six score thousand little children and also much cattle," and who seems to have thought less of the destruction of that vast multitude of living men than of that of the quick-springing gourd which sheltered his head from the heat of the sun? Was not this a prophet of like passions with the other, as mean and selfish, but not as great, although the son of Amittai was a Hebrew, and lived in the light of a period nearly a thousand years subsequent to that of Balaam?

Nay, more: are Balaam and Jonah the only two men, or even the only two good men, who, while seeing and approving the better course, have taken the worse; who have

points of close similarity between the history of this Prophet and that of Balaam, in his bearing before the hostile king, in the predictions he uttered, in the very terms in which he refused the reward offered him by Jeroboam, in his temptation and fall; while in the contemptible old prophet who lied unto his "brother," and betrayed him to his death, he will recognize a far worse man than the son of Beor. Such a reader will do well to peruse also the sequel of this strange story in 2 Kings xxiii. 15–20.

left the path of righteousness to fall into the pit of transgression? Do none of us ever attempt to evade the pressure of unwelcome duties and commands, and seek how to take our own way and to gratify our own desires without altogether breaking with God and his law? Is even that special device of keeping a command in the letter, yet violating it in the spirit, wholly unknown in what we justly call "the religious world," since its denizens are at least as worldly as they are religious, and may be equally sincere both in their worldliness and their religion? We have only to recall men whom we ourselves have known to find many parallels to that combination of good with evil qualities which we have observed in Balaam; we have only to examine our own hearts to find a key to the anomaly which perplexes us in him.

3. But let us pass from these general considerations, and take up the two specific sins with which Balaam is charged, the two special anomalies which have made him an enigma to us; and see, here again, whether we cannot classify him, whether we cannot match him with other prophets as favoured and yet as faulty as himself; whether even we cannot find in ourselves the very complexities which puzzle us in him.

One of the sins brought home to him with extraordinary force and bitterness in the New Testament Scriptures is his venality. And it is impossible to study his career, and to note his ardent love and admiration of righteousness, yet not be struck with surprise and shame at discovering that he loved the wages of unrighteousness, and was capable of prostituting his rare and eminent gifts for hire. Still do we not find this same strange and pitiful combination of piety and covetousness in Jacob, who was surnamed Israel, "the Prince with God," and from whom the whole seed of Abraham have derived their name, and perhaps something more than their name? No candid student of

his history can deny that even from the first Jacob shewed a singular appreciation of spiritual things, a singular ambition for spiritual primacy and honour. Nor can any man who accepts the Bible record of him doubt that dreams and visions of the most ravishing beauty, pregnant with the most profound spiritual intention and promise, were vouchsafed him; or that, at least when he blessed his sons from his dying bed, his eyes were opened to behold things that were to befall them and their children years and centuries after he himself had been gathered to his fathers. Even the oracles of Balaam do not surpass the long series of dooms and benedictions which Jacob was then moved to utter. Yet what was his whole life but, on the one side, a constant endeavour to enrich or secure himself at the cost of others, by superior craft or superior force; and, on the other side, a Divine discipline by which that worldly and grasping spirit was chastened out of him, in order that his genius for religion might have free play?

And, again, who can deny that this love of money, this covetousness which is idolatry, this selfish and grasping spirit, is of all sins that which always has been, and is, most common and prevalent in the Church, and even among sincerely religious men? It clothes itself with respectability as with a garment, and walks often unrebuked, often flattered even and admired, in almost every assembly of the saints. How many of us are there who, if we love righteousness, also hanker after the wages of unrighteousness, after the opulence, the gratifications, the success which can only come to us through a selfish and worldly, i.e. a sinful life! No transgression is more common than this among spiritual men, though none is more fatal to the spiritual life, since none renders a man more impervious to the rebukes of conscience or the warnings of the Word and Spirit of God.

1 Genesis xlix.

Or take that other and grosser crime which we have seen brought home to Balaam, the sensuality that made the foul device by which the early innocence of Israel was debauched, familiar, or at best not impossible to him. Is it difficult to find a parallel to that? It would not be fair, though many would think it fair, to cite the example of David's well-known sin; for no sin was ever more deeply repented than his, as few have been more terribly avenged. But think of Solomon; think of the beauty and promise of his youth. Recall his choice of a wise and understanding heart above all the luxuries of wealth and all the flatteries of power. Read his wonderful prayer when he dedicated himself and all the resources of his kingdom to the service of Jehovah, and invoked a blessing on all who at any time and from any place should turn to the Temple and call on the name of the Lord. And then remember that this most religious king, this great prophet who "spake three thousand proverbs and whose psalms were a thousand and five," to whose heart God gave a largeness like that of the sea, sank into the very sin of sensual idolatry with which Balaam betrayed Israel, suffering his wives and concubines to turn away his heart from the Lord his God, till at last he fell from his harem into his grave, an unloved tyrant, a jaded voluptuary, and probably a believer whose faith was shot through and through with a pessimistic scepticism.

Nor is this craving for sensual indulgence one of those defunct sins against which we need no longer strive. After covetousness, in its more or less pronounced forms, no sin is more common than this even in the Church; though this, not being a respectable sin, cannot be carried to such lengths or be so openly pursued.3

3 It is curious to note that even in the first uninspired homily of which we have any record, the so-called "Second Epistle of Clement," the church of