rent change of circumstances, a command so recently imposed, so solemnly expressed, should be suddenly superseded? I will go further, and maintain that, even in the prophet's own view of the case, he was bound to abstain from food, whether the reason of that abstinence was or was not communicated to him? If it was communicated to him, no right of dispensing with the Divine command can be supposed to arise from his eventual disapprobation of that reason. If it was not communicated, the obligation to obey that command remained precisely the same; for it rested, according to the prophet's own plain confession, and his own correspondent practice, upon the sacred authority of God himself, and upon the clear conviction of the prophet that the command actually proceeded from God. In whatsoever point of view, then, you consider his conduct, it is utterly indefensible. His knowledge of the reason could not be the ground of his obedience; his ignorance of the reason could not be a plea for his disobedience. The command itself was intelligible, and therefore could not be misrepresented; it was peremptory, and therefore ought not to have been transgressed.

But you will say, was not the direction to abstain from bread unimportant in itself, or at least unworthy of being followed up by so tremendous a train of consequences? Surely, my brethren, you will not be in haste to suppose, that any injunction issued from the deity can be really trivial, or can, even for a moment, appear to be such, in the mind of him to whom it was conveyed, not by the usual

channels of information, but by the medium of inspiration. If the language were intelligible, if the conditions were practicable, would you not acquiesce in every appearance, however unfavourable— would you not suspect every contrary appearance, however specious-and would you not suppose the same Deity, who had already chosen the end, most able to proportion and to regulate the means? Such ought to be your general way of arguing, on the supposition that the reason of any command were unknown to you.

The

But let us apply this reasoning to the particular case of the prophet, assuming as one foundation of the prohibition to eat bread, the suspicion of avarice, to which, as I told you lately, the prophetic character was exposed. The king, you see, desired the prophet to return, not only in order to take refreshment, but to receive a reward. prophet answers, not simply that he wants no bread, but that he would not be prevailed upon to go back even by the offer of half the king's house. The spirit of the prohibition excluded the greatest reward; the letter of it was confined to the smallest and surely, as on the one hand it is probable that he who accepts the smallest would not decline the greatest, so, on the other, his virtue must derive a greater security from the severity of the interdict, which forbad him to yield even to the first and slightest degree of temptation. Thus may we account for the strictness of the command, and in that mode of interpretation we have the concurrence of the prophet himself. But, further, it will be allowed.

me, I suppose, that local and temporary circumstances considerably affect both the motives and consequences of our behaviour, the qualities of action, and also the magnitude of the consequences which flow from them; and that in many cases they determine the responsibility of moral agents, and even constitute the very essence of some actions, to which, in the absence of these circumstances, no rules of morality could be with propriety applied.

Now, in considering the injunction given to the prophet, attention should be paid to the manners of eastern countries, where to eat bread and drink water frequently implied something more than a mere compliance with the rules of hospitality, and led to the observance of religious ceremonies, which to partake was in some measure to approve. Among the Greeks also, we find an association between the acts of eating together and sacrificing together so very close and so very familiar, that it passed into a proverb. In accepting, therefore, the offer of Jeroboam, the prophet might have appeared, in the estimation of idolators, to give some sort of countenance to idolatry itself. But in order to exclude every thing of this indecorous aspect and dangerous tendency in his deportment, the prophet was forbidden to share in any convivial enjoyments with those persons whom he could not without impiety join in their religious worship.

True, will you say, we withdraw the first part of the objection, and acknowledge that the command was very properly designed to prevent the prophet from eating with idolators; but did his going back to eat

with a prophet amount to a violation of that command? From this question a consequence will arise, which is little expected by those who urge it, and cannot be easily answered by them. For, if the question itself be pertinent, it follows that your exactness and sagacity in the interpretation of the Divine prohibition far exceeded the sagacity and exactness of both the prophets themselves, who were most deeply interested. The prophet from Judah, when he heard the second invitation, pleaded the same original interdict, in the same precise words, and did not attempt to make any distinction between going back to eat with Jeroboam, and to eat with the man of God. The prophet of Beth-el does not set up the distinction to enforce his own request, but has recourse to a pretended revelation. If then there was really the difference contended for, the scruples of the one prophet, and the falsehood of the other, were altogether unnecessary. If there was no difference, because none is stated in the command itself, and of course the prophet considered himself bound to eat no bread whatsoever at Beth-el, he, by eating it, deservedly incurred the penalty annexed to his disobedience.

Now, from these circumstances, and others that may be quite unknown to us, the disobedience of the prophet of Judah was highly degrading to the dignity of the prophetic character, and highly dishonourable to the religion of the one true God, in the sight of the ten apostate and idolatrous tribes. At all events, the terms on which the command were expressed, were unambiguous, whatever might

be the reasons on which it was founded, and whether those reasons were concealed from the prophet or imparted to him. It was the voice of God himself. It was the voice of God speaking to a man of God, in the cause of God, and the spirit which presumed to trifle with that voice and that cause, whether directly or indirectly-the spirit which strove to evade what it shuddered to violate openly-the spirit which snatched the first opportunity of escaping an unwelcome service, would have been a spirit of rashness and insincerity in any circumstances; but in those of the prophet it deserves a severer appellation. If, indeed, we take upon ourselves to separate in any moral duty, or in any religious injunction, what we think frivolous from what we know to be indispensible — if, where it is easy to obey, we are therefore prone to disobey, and venture to eat bread even where we should not venture to take a greater reward — if, disregarding the authority of the lawgiver, we hold sternly back our compliance till we are acquainted with all the reasons and all the uses of the law itself - if we would steal away from the sanctions of general rules, and hastily assume, that we are ourselves acting in circumstances that constitute a particular exception -if we measure the obligatory force of a Divine command by the consequences, which, according to our own contracted views, may or may not in single instances attend the transgression of it, we act a most unbecoming and a most dangerous part.

Through the fascinating blindness of self-love, such excuses may satisfy ourselves to ourselves.