As soon as the victory was achieved, and while he was yet in pursuit, the men of Ephraim turned upon him and abused him because he had not taken them with him to fight the battle against the Midianites, but never had they lifted a finger to save themselves before Gideon appeared.  When, however, he had caught and destroyed Zebah and Zalmunna, the two Midianitish kings, and had chastised Succoth and beaten down the tower of Penuel, Israel came to him and asked him to rule over them, but he would not.  He cared not to be king.  He remembered with what difficulty he had believed the angel and the promise, the sickly faintness which had overcome him on that night before the Midianitish overthrow.  Whatever he had done had not been his doing, but the Lord’s; and how did he know that the Lord’s help would continue?  The thought of being king, and of having a set office, perhaps without the Lord’s assistance, was too much for him.  He was right in his refusal.  He was one of those men who can do much if left to themselves, and if they are supported by the Most High, but who shrink and tremble when something is expected from them.  “The Lord shall be your King,” he said.  He trusted that God would speak to the nation as He had spoken to him, and without any leader would guide them aright.  That is not the Lord’s way.  But though Gideon would not be king, he desired some honour, and he asked that he might have the ear-rings of the Midianites who had fallen.  Therewith he made an image, a thing forbidden.  It stood in his house, a record of what the Lord had done for him; and yet this very record became a snare, and Israel fell to worshipping it, and Jehovah was displaced by the testimony of His own love for us.

Your grandfather is now dead.  Abimelech reigns in his place, and has slain all the children of Gideon save myself.  Israel has returned to Baal; its strength has departed; before long we shall be subdued under the Philistines.  Excepting in our own house, there are none that have not gone a-whoring after Baal; the memory of the battle by the hill Moreh is clean forgotten; and soon the memory of my father will also disappear, and it will be as if he had never lived.  To think that the vision of the angel in Ophrah and the night in the valley of Jezreel should end in nothing!

* * * * * *

That night Jotham died.

Fourteen Hundred Tears Later.

“The time would fail me to tell of Gideon, . . . who through faith . . . out of weakness was made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.”—­Epistle to the Hebrews.

Three Thousand Years Later.

“‘The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon,’ answered Balfour as he parried and returned the blow.”—­Old Mortality.

SAMUEL.

Samuel immediately before his death spoke thus at Bamah:—­