on the altar.  The priests of Baal select their bullock, cut it in pieces, put it on the wood, and invoke their supreme deity to send fire to consume the sacrifice.  With all their arts and incantations and magical sorceries, the fire does not descend.  They then perform their wild and fantastic dances, screaming aloud, from early morn to noon, “O Baal, hear us!” We do not read whether Ahab was present or not, but if he were he must have quaked with blended sentiments of curiosity and fear.  His anxiety must have been terrible.  Elijah alone is calm; but he is also stern.  He mocks them with provoking irony, and ridicules their want of success.  His grim sarcasms become more and more bitter.  “Cry with a loud voice!” said he, “yea, louder and yet louder! for ye cry to a god; either he is talking, or he is hunting, or he is on a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth and must be awakened.”  And they cried aloud, and cut themselves, after their manner, with knives and spears, till the blood gushed out upon them.

Then Elijah, when midday was past, and the priests continued to call unto their god until the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, and there was neither voice nor answer, assembled the people around him, as he stood alone by the ruins of an ancient altar.  With his own hands he gathered twelve stones, piled them together to represent the twelve tribes, cut a bullock in pieces, laid it on the wood, made a trench around the rude altar, which he filled with water from an adjacent well, and then offered up this prayer to the God of his fathers:  “O Jehovah, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, hear me! and let all the people know that thou art the God of Israel, and that I am thy servant, and that I have done all these things at thy word.  Hear me, Jehovah, hear me! that this people may know that thou, Jehovah, art God, and that thou hast turned their hearts back again.”  Then immediately the fire of Jehovah fell and consumed the bullock and the wood, even melted the very stones, and licked up the water in the trench.  And when the people saw it, they fell on their faces, and cried aloud, “Jehovah, he is the God!  Jehovah, he is the God!”

Elijah then commanded to take the prophets of Baal, all of them, so that not even one of them should escape.  And they took them, by the direction of Elijah, down the mountain side to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.  His triumph was complete.  He had asserted the majesty and proved the power of Jehovah.

The prophet then turned to the king, who seems to have been completely subjected by this tremendous proof of the prophetic authority, and said:  “Get thee up, eat and drink, for there is the sound of abundance of rain.”  And Ahab ascended the hill, to eat and drink with his nobles at the sacrificial feast,—­a venerable symbol by which, from the most primitive antiquity to our own day, by so universal an impulse that it would seem to be divinely imparted, every form of religion known to man has sought to typify the human desire to commune with Deity.