Our forefathers of antiquity, no matter to what nation they belonged, dressed every important event with a halo of mystery—fable, myth, and miracle. They knew no better.

The mind, the brain, the senses, had reached a stage of development that might well be called childish, with sensuality and selfishness predominating. Fighting, cruelty, and lust were the leading actions prompted. And as in the case of children, ghosts and hobgoblins scared them, shadows and darkness frightened them, unusual sights and noises surprised and alarmed them. And in their calmer moments they wondered. And any natural phenomenon was interpreted as miraculous if it aided any undertaking, and resulted favorably to them.

Wealth and women were considered the capital prizes in those days. (That was three thousand years ago; how is it with us?) They were men in physique, but children in the development of their mental faculties.

It was then as it is now—every man talks about that which is uppermost in his mind; he makes his comparisons with those things he is most familiar with; his illustrations are drawn from those objects he sees most frequently; his language never extends beyond the number of words at his command; his memory is only equal to the number of things he has stored away; his mind is made up or composed of those ideas that he has gathered from the experience of his senses; his ideas from the number of objects he has come in contact with; his knowledge consists of that which he has learned; his thoughts and reflections extend to that which he knows and never beyond; his understanding depends on all these; and comparatively speaking, few men are in advance of the age in which they live.

Ideas, like other things terrestrial, have their birth, growth, development, maturity, and decline, and finally they partially or wholly disappear.

The birth of the idea of God, without the various objective representations, had its origin in the mind of man; Abraham being the first, or supposed to be the first, man who conceived the notion that these images, idols, were not the proper thing. He doubted the quality of the gods, and the principal objection to these idols was that they had ears that did not hear, eyes that could not see, etc., etc., but the new God, the later Jehova, could. The strangest of all inconsistencies lies in the fact that while they endowed him with the human faculties, passions, emotions, desires, and feelings, there is nothing tangible about his body.

Nothing was accomplished with this God during several centuries in Egypt. Moses brought his Jehova out—as a stern reality. He skillfully manipulated the idea. His own intellect and experience, his force and character, were concentrated in this Jehova. His masterly organization, his discipline, his impressive sternness, imperative and imperial, his stupendous will power, left a lasting impress upon this people during the four centuries. This idea was nursed, nourished, and sustained by the Levites, and when they found their influence was waning they established a concentrated form of government by selecting a sanhedrin or council of seventy and electing the most eligible person they could find on the recommendation of Samuel as their king. This king was Saul, whose reign, fortunately or unfortunately, did not last very long.

Competition and struggle with other nations had, if anything, an educational tendency. As they grew numerically stronger, jealousies arose. Ambitious men were grasping for power, and contending faction naturally was the result.

The story about the lost asses is like that about another ass we have heard of, that saw the angel and talked—we have many such, even at the present day. These stories are excellent fabrications to entertain juveniles with. And people must be precious asses to believe this nonsense, that God would be such an ass as to interfere with these asses.

But something occurred which was perfectly human, and shows the character of the man. It happened to be one of those critical moments in a nation’s existence. Nahash the Ammonite had made war against Israel, and encamped against Jabest-Gilead. Saul hearing of it, he did as follows (1 Sam. xi, 7): “And he took a yoke of oxen, and hewed them in pieces, and sent them throughout all the coast of Israel by the hands of messengers, saying, Whosoever cometh not forth after Saul and after Samuel, so shall it be done unto his oxen. And the fear of the Lord fell upon the people, and they came out with one consent.” Thus Saul collected an army of three hundred thousand men. That is what may be termed practical politics. He was victorious over the Ammonites. As to the prisoners of war, whether captured or having given themselves up, he caused their right eyes to be put out. He plucked their right eyes out, making them useless for war in the future.

When he went to war against the Philistines, his army observed how numerous the enemy were. God’s army was scared and hid in caves. So he sent to Samuel to consult the oracle, like any other respectable heathen.

He also made a conquest of the Amalekites, whom he utterly destroyed. The Hebrews and these people had a grudge of several centuries’ standing, because when the Jews went out of Egypt they requested permission to pass through the Amalekites’ country, which was refused them (Ex. xvii, et seq.).

But Saul offended God by saving Agag, the king of the Amalekites, so said Samuel (1 Sam. xv, 32, 33). “Then Samuel said, Bring ye hither to me Agag, the king of the Amalekites. And Agag came to him delicately. And Agag said, Surely the bitterness of death is passed. And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.”

Saul’s tenderness and mercy towards Agag displeased the stern, cruel priest and soldier. His, Agag’s, life had to pay the penalty of death, by the hand of the priest himself, for an offense his forefathers were presumed to have been guilty of, several centuries before. All barbarities, cruelties, and slaughter were done in Jehovah’s, God’s, the Lord’s, name. The same pious crimes were repeated centuries later, under the pretext of doing some imaginary brutal God a great favor.

For this transgression Saul is rejected by this priestly Warwick. For this human action this wily priest denounces him, and Saul’s act of kindness is interpreted by this domineering priest as a crime against his God. To carry out his political scheme, Samuel went to Beth-lehem. “And the elders of the town trembled at his coming” (1 Sam. xvi, 4). The revengeful priest, with a nerve of iron and a will of steel, was not going to stand any nonsense. Saul had not obeyed him to the letter—it is, Off with your head!

Samuel with all the church palaver, priest discipline, and pious hypocrisy, selects a successor, without compunction, without ceremony, and David is anointed to reign instead of Saul. From this time forth to the end of his life Saul is constantly in hot water. He slinks to his home at Gibeah (1 Sam. xv, 34) like a whipped cur, rejected and excommunicated by the priest. Full of apprehension and fear, he blunders at every step he takes. The priestly influence is gone, and God has departed from him and is now with David. The crafty Samuel uses the expression, when others question the propriety of his action: “Men do not see as God seeth.” No! Men must have no will except the priest’s will. Harassed and maddened by priestly cunning, jealous and angered at David’s success in acts of heroism, Saul loses courage, as well as prestige with the people, to such an extent that David finds it not a difficult task to organize a small army of his own, carrying on a sort of desultory war on his own account.

Samuel dies, having governed his people twelve years himself, and jointly with Saul eighteen years. He was the greatest man, priest, and general since the times of Moses, a man of singular sagacity and courage, no doubt right royal and honest in his intentions and to his nation. Samuel did more to solidify the nation, and terrify neighboring nations, to infuse courage in his people and inspire them to acts of heroism, than any other of the judges, or any other man, during this period.

A curious incident is related of the manner in which Samuel came into the world. It is the first one of its kind in the Bible. Hannah, the wife of Elkanah, had no children, or as the Bible phrase has it, “The Lord had shut up her womb” (1 Sam. i, 5, 6). So she continued praying before the Lord, and Eli the priest marked her mouth (verse 12). She conceived and bore a son, and she named him Samuel. And Eli the priest adopted Samuel. “And the child did minister unto the Lord before Eli the priest” (ii, 12). What the relations were between Hannah and Eli is not known, but that his own sons were not very righteous is testified to by the following passage (1 Sam. ii, 20): “Now Eli was very old, and heard all that his sons did unto all Israel; and how they lay with the women that assembled at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation.”

It was not an unusual thing, in the temples of the heathens, for women to accommodate the gods whenever they felt piously inclined; and also the priests lost no opportunity to gratify their saintly passions, or permit others to gratify theirs so long as it was to benefit the church.

Samuel’s father, or rather reputed father, did not belong to the priestly tribe. He was an Ephrathite. Eli his adopted father belonged to the priestly caste. I simply cite this story to show how completely human these holy Jehovaists were. Many crimes and disreputable acts were committed under the very shadow of the Lord. Yet Jehova was pleased with anything these priests delighted in.

Eli was a heavy man (iv, 18). Fat, which I suppose they meant, shows he was a good liver. He broke his neck by falling off his seat on hearing the ark was taken by the Philistines and Israel beaten.

When Samuel took the reins of government he was still young. He subdued the Philistines, regained the ark, and reorganized and consolidated the nation. He made Saul king and general, and a stream of prosperity followed; the choice was a good one, and Saul served his nation well so long as he was obedient to Samuel’s commands. Saul’s humanity got the better of him, he offended this stern, dictatorial priest, and lost his favor. David, his rival, was already chosen and in the field, on whom all Samuel’s influence and priestly glory was shed. Now God deserted Saul and his cause. Henceforth the Lord was with David.

Samuel was the first and only kingmaker; Saul and David were his handiwork. He was a priest, a soldier and a statesman of more than ordinary capacity and qualities, far superior to any of the judges that governed Israel during the last four centuries. He was stern and severe, but without blemish otherwise. He was, as far as we can learn from history, a relentless and cruel man towards his enemies. He was of immense will-power, resolute and energetic. He was honored to an extraordinary degree by the people for whom he accomplished so much. He left the nation at his death more firmly united than it had ever been—with an organized army, a stable government, and a well-filled treasury. It was Samuel that really raised the nation to the utmost hight that it ever attained, for he laid the foundation for Solomon’s glory, the zenith of Hebrew nationality.

It is he that closes the second period of national life, the people having attained under him its maximum standing as a nation, and the greatness which culminated in Solomon, and the only political unity as a nation that the Hebrews ever had.

A parallel may be drawn between the two periods. The Egyptian period: Four centuries or so pass without anything being done, until a man rises possessing the necessary qualifications to mold these people into a nation. The second period consists of a struggle with other nations, almost continuously, to exist. Necessities arise; men present themselves who seize the opportunity to fill up the want for the time being, until the coming of Samuel, the right man, at the right time, for the right place. He closes the second act of the Hebrews’ struggle for nationality by giving them a centralized form of government, and placing a king at their head to rule them.

All the transactions of his life were human, natural. His conduct was perfectly in harmony with the age he lived in. The nation as a whole had become a little more civilized, and had reached as high a point of intelligence as it ever attained—that is, as a nation.

Thus far we have not seen anything in their history that other nations had not to contend with. To attribute their acts, individually or as a nation, to any supernatural power, to God, Jehova, or the Lord, is preposterous. In their dealings, their fightings, their cruelty, their brutality, their superstition, and their ignorance, they were in no sense superior to any of the contemporaneous nations. They were no better in their conduct than their neighbors. The strongest had always the best of it; the conquered had to submit to slavery or be killed, women are captured and used, and the plunder is divided.

Notwithstanding the priestly rule of the Levites, the Hebrews are constantly relapsing into idolatry, brought back to the fold, and relapsing again.

The church was at this time used for all sorts of corrupt purposes. The Jehova that had been brought into the theological world with such an immense boom by Moses had expended a good deal of its original force.

The remembrance of that stupendous crisis of the Hebrew national existence was kept alive and the flames were fanned by priestly interest. The God after Moses, the Jehova, had shrunk into the Lord, and the ark was the representative of God. “The ark of God was taken,” … “when she heard tidings of the ark of God” (1 Sam. iv, etc.). And the success or failure of the Hebrews depended on the man who led them. With a weak man as general or leader they were beaten, with a strong man they won.

Other nations meanwhile had sprung into life, and become powerful, without Jehova—without the God of the Hebrews. They had, however, idols and images, which seemed to behave with far greater propriety than the God of Israel. So well did these mythological deities manage their affairs, that they almost swallowed up the whole Hebrew race.

Samuel, having established a kingdom, and crowned two kings, Saul and David, dies, leaving these two competitors in the field.