Cranmer when he wished to marry Anne Boleyn.  They told her that if it could be proved that any one, however high his rank, had blasphemed God and the king, he could legally be executed, and that his property would revert to the Crown.  So she suborned false witnesses, who swore at the trial of Naboth, already seized for high treason, that he had blasphemed God and the king.  Sentence, according to law, was passed upon the innocent man, and according to law he was stoned to death, and the vineyard according to law became the property of the Crown.  Jezebel, who had managed the whole affair, did not undertake the prosecution in her own name; as a woman, she had not the legal power.  So she stole the king’s ring, and sealed the indictment with the royal seal.

Thus by force and fraud under skilful technicalities, and by usurpation of the royal authority, the crime was consummated, and had the sanction of the law.  Oh, what crimes have been perpetrated in every age and country under cover of the law!  The Holy Inquisition was according to law; the early Christian persecutions were according to law; usurpers and murderers have reigned according to law; the Quakers were put in prison, and witches were burned according to law.  Slavery was sustained by legal enactments; the rum shops are all under the protection of the law.  There is scarcely a public scandal and wrong in any civilized country which the law does not somehow countenance or sustain.  All public robbers appeal to legal technicalities.  How could city officials steal princely revenues, how could lawyers collect exorbitant fees, if it were not for the law?  Neither Ahab nor Jezebel would have ventured to seize Naboth’s vineyard except under legal pretences; false witnesses swore to a lie, and the law condemned the accused.  Ahab in this instance was not as bad as his wife.  He may not even have known by what diabolical craft the vineyard became his.

But such crimes, striking at the root of justice, cry to heaven for vengeance.  On Ahab as king rested the responsibility, and he as well as his more guilty partner was made to pay the penalty.  God in his providence avenged the death of Naboth.  The whole affair was widely known.  As Naboth’s reputed offence was unusual, and the gravest known to the Jewish laws, there was so great a sensation that a fast was proclaimed.  The false trial and murderous execution were accomplished “before all the people.”  But this very ostentation of legal form made the outrage notorious.  It reached the ears of Elijah.  The prophet’s keen sense of right detected such an outrageous combination of hypocrisy, covetousness, fraud, usurpation, cruelty, robbery, and murder, that he once more heard the Divine voice which summoned him from his retirement and sent him to the court with an awful message.  Suddenly, unannounced and unexpected, the man of God appeared before the king in his newly acquired possession, surrounded by his gardeners and artificers, and accompanied