Think you that your children are not taking notice of you—seeing how you bear your temptations, difficulties and anxieties?
Think you not that your eldest boy is kept away from the table of the Lord because you are as atheistic in sorrow as ever Voltaire was?
Do you know that your daughter hates the church because her pious father is only pious in the three Summer months of the year? He curls under the cold and biting wind as much as any Atheist ever did. Therefore, the girl says: “He is a sham and a hypocrite—my father in the flesh, but no relative of mine in the spirit.”
You have your readers. The little Bible of your life is read in your kitchen, in your parlor, in your shop and in your warehouse; and if you do not bear your trials, anxieties and difficulties with a Christian chivalry and heroism, what is there but mockery on Earth and gloating in hell?
May God give us grace to bear chastisement nobly and serenely; bless us with the peace which passeth understanding—with the quietness kindred to the calm of God; help us when death is in the house, when poverty is on the hearth-stone.
When there is a storm blinding the only poor little window we have, let us say: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him. If I perish I will pray, and perish only here.” That is Christianity—not some clever chatter and able controversy about metaphysical points; but noble temper, high behavior, faultless constancy and an invincible fortitude in the hour of trial and in the agony of pain.
MICAIAH.
Micaiah was the son of Imlah, a prophet of Samaria, who, in the last year of the reign of Ahab, king of Israel, predicted his defeat and death, B. C. 897. This was three years after the great battle with Ben-hadad, king of Syria, in which the extraordinary number of 100,000 Syrian soldiers is said to have been slain, without reckoning the 27,000 who, it is asserted, were killed by the falling of the wall at Aphek.
Ahab had proposed to Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, that they should jointly go up to battle against Ramoth-gilead, which Ben-hadad was bound by treaty to restore to Ahab.
Jehoshaphat assented in cordial words to the proposal, but he suggested that they should first “inquire at the word of Jehovah.” Accordingly, Ahab assembled four hundred prophets, while in an open space at the gate of the city of Samaria he and Jehoshaphat sat in royal robes to meet and consult them.