THE

SECTION V.

SUMMONING THE HOSTS.

HE die was cast. By demolishing the altar of Baal, and by publicly offering sacrifice to Jehovah, Gideon had proclaimed himself a servant of God, and had assumed a public position. His courage and self-denial received an immediate reward. In accordance with the words of our Saviour, "To him that hath shall more be given," he was blessed with a more plentiful effusion of the spirit of faith and power. In his own home and in his own city he had "endured as seeing Him who is invisible, not fearing the wrath of" his father or of Baal. He was

now to be qualified for action in a wider sphere.

"The spirit of the Lord clothed Gideon," says the history; "and he blew a trumpet, and Abi-ezer was gathered after him." Not that he was invested, like the high-priest, with robes of office; nor did any mantle of a predecessor fall outwardly upon him, as when the mantle of Elijah fell upon Elisha. Elisha. Apparel

* Jud. vi. 34, marginal reading: compare 1 Chron. xii. 18, and 2 Chron. xxiv. 20, where the same word is used, and in the margin is rendered "clothed."

is for protection, for convenience, for ornament; but when a man is clothed with the Spirit, something more than any outward protection or adornment is bestowed. It is not an outward but an inward investiture. For it is not the corporeal man, it is the inner man, the true self, which alone can hold communion with God. It was not Gideon's bodily person which the Spirit clothed; the Spirit of God pervaded, interpenetrated, quickened, and energised his whole being. It is in this way that we speak of being "baptized" with the Spirit. Baptism, as an outward ordinance, is an application of water to the surface of the body; but the influences of the blessed Spirit are not superficial; they are pervasive and permanent; they enter into our inmost being, vivifying and cleansing and recreating the whole. It was thus that "the Spirit of the Lord came upon Gideon."

The time had now arrived for him to enter upon a wider sphere of action. With the call of the trumpet, he summoned the men of Manasseh, and even the men of distant tribes, to rally round his standard. The Midianites were collecting their hosts, as if for some decisive and crowning engagement. No longer spread over the country in wandering parties, they "were gathered together and pitched in the valley of Jezreel." Gideon summoned the men of Israel to assemble also. He blew a trumpet, and Abi-ezer was gathered after him: and he sent messengers throughout all Manasseh who also was gathered to him: and he sent messengers unto Asher, and unto

M

Zebulun, and unto Naphtali, and they came up to meet them." *

Mighty are the memories connected with the sound of the trumpet. In every age it has been associated with the clang of arms, the evolutions of troops, the "pomp and circumstance of war." Again and again has its shrill and piercing blast, re-echoing from hoary crag or castellated tower, kindled heroic enthusiasm, shamed the timorous into boldness, and awakened the torpid to activity. The call of the trumpet has aroused the slumbering energies of patriotism; it has rallied the courage of those who have conducted the attack, and it has animated the resolution of those who have stood on the defence. Its heart-piercing language has been understood alike on the walls of Troy, at the gates of Rome, among the hosts of the Crusaders, and on the fields of Waterloo and Inkermann; and stolid and passionless indeed must be the man, who, especially in times of public danger, can view the gallant rider all equipped for the fight, and hear the shrill trumpet resounding through the air, without feeling his heart to throb more vehemently, and a thrill of patriotic emotion to quiver through his frame.

To an Israelite the sound of the trumpet was associated not more with war than with religion. When the fathers were journeying through the wilderness, the sound of the silver trumpets blown by the priests,

* Jud. vi. 33-35.

was the signal for their marches and for their convocations. The advent of the new year was celebrated by "the feast of trumpets," and in every religious ceremony it had been a familiar sound: "In the day of your gladness," said Moses, "and in your solemn days, and in the beginnings of your months, ye shall blow with the trumpets over your burnt offerings, and over the sacrifices of your peace offerings, that they may be to you for a memorial before the Lord your God." The majesty of the law given on Sinai was attested by "the voice of the trumpet which sounded long, and waxed louder and louder;" the walls of Jericho fell flat, when on the seventh day the trumpets of ram's horn were blown by the priests; and the Midianites themselves, when, two centuries before, they had troubled Israel, had been dispersed at the sound of the trumpet, when Moses detached for the fight a thousand men from each tribe, and sent "Phinehas the priest," to accompany them, " with the holy instruments, and with the trumpets to blow in his hand."*

We cannot doubt that these instances were in the mind of Gideon; and while the blast of his trumpet called his countrymen to war, it declared at the same time his own faith in the Divine calling of the chosen nation, and reminded them of the worship which they had wickedly forsaken. For years the trumpet had been silent in Israel. God's ordinances and His

* Num. x. 2-10; Exod. xix. 16; Josh. vi. 20; Num. xxxi. 6.

SECTION IV.

HOME REFORMATION.

the eventful day succeeded an equally event

ful night. The sacred narrative relates that after the Lord had vanished, Gideon built an altar to Him "there"-beside the winepress, upon the rock out of which the mystic fire had ascended and consumed the offering. In form, this altar may have resembled the altar of burnt sacrifice in the tabernacle at Shiloh-a square erection of planks of wood, five cubits in length, the same in breadth, and three cubits high, the top levelled for placing the sacrifice, and the hollow interior filled up with earth.* The altar thus hastily erected remained for ages afterwards: "unto this day," says the author of the Book of Judges, "it is yet in Ophrah of the Abi-ezrites."

The circumstances under which it was built are related in the verses which follow; and in the brief narrative we obtain such a glimpse of the religious condition of the Israelitish people, as enables us

* Exod. xxvii. The erection of altars elsewhere than in the tabernacle was forbidden (Lev. xvii. 8; Deut. xii. 13), but the prohibition was not in every case strictly enforced, as in the case of Samuel (1 Sam. vii. 9, 10); David (2 Sam. xxiv. 25); and Solomon (1 Kings iii. 4).