justice, like the judges of England on their circuits; but, unlike them, on his own supreme authority,—­not with power delegated by a king, but acknowledging no superior except God himself, from whom he received his commission.  We know not at what time and whom he married; but his two sons, who in his old age shared power with him, did not discharge their delegated functions more honorably than the sons of Eli, who had been a disgrace to their office, to their father, and to the nation.  One of the greatest mysteries of human life is the seeming inability of pious fathers to check the vices of their children, who often go astray under an apparently irresistible impulse or innate depravity, in spite of parental precept and example,—­thus seeming to show that neither virtue nor vice can be surely transmitted, and that every human being stands on his individual responsibility, with peculiar temptations to combat, and peculiar circumstances to influence him.  The son of a saint becomes mysteriously a drunkard or a fraud, and the son of a sensualist becomes an ascetic.  This does not uniformly occur:  in fact, the sons of good men are more likely to be an honor to their families than the sons of the wicked; but why are exceptions so common as to be proverbial?

It was no light work which was imposed on the shoulders of Samuel,—­to establish law and order among the demoralized tribes of the Jews, and to prepare them for political independence; and it was a still greater labor to effect a moral reformation and reintroduce the worship of Jehovah.  Both of these objects he seems to have accomplished; and his success places him in the list of great reformers, like Mohammed and Luther,—­but greater and better than either, since he did not attempt, like the former, to bring about a good end by bad means; nor was he stained by personal defects, like the latter.  “It was his object to re-enkindle the national life of the nation, so as to combat successfully its enemies in the field, which could be attained by rousing a common religious feeling;” for he saw that there could be no true enthusiasm without a sense of dependence on the God of battles, and that heroism could be stimulated only by exalted sentiments, both of patriotism and religion.

But how was Samuel to rekindle a fervent religious life among the degenerate Israelites in such unsettled times?  Only by rousing the people by his teachings and his eloquence.  He was a preacher of righteousness, and in all probability went from city to city and village to village,—­as Saint Bernard did when he preached a crusade against the infidels, as John the Baptist did when he preached repentance, as Whitefield did when he sought to kindle religious enthusiasm in England.  So he set himself to educate his countrymen in the great truths which appealed to the inner life,—­to the heart and conscience.  This he did, first, by rousing the slumbering spirits of the elders of tribes when they sought his counsel as a prophet,