ivided into princes and people. Hence the nation
consisted of innumerable self-constituted and self-sustained kingdoms,
formed whenever some chieftain elevated himself whom individuals or the
body of citizens in a town were willing to serve. Gaal, son of Zobah,
entered Shechem with troops raised by himself, just like a condottiere
in Italy in the Middle Ages. As it became evident that the nation could
not permanently dispense with an earthly government, it was forced to
rally round some powerful leader; and as the Theocracy was still
acknowledged by the best of the nation, these leaders, who owed their
power to circumstances, could not easily be transformed into regular
kings, but to exceptional dictators the State offered no strong
resistance."

And yet these rulers arose not solely by force of individual prowess,
but were expressly raised up by God as deliverers of the nation in times
of peculiar peril. And further, the spirit of Jehovah came upon them,
as it did upon Deborah the prophetess, and as it did still more
remarkably upon Moses himself.

The last and greatest of these extemporized leaders called Judges, was
Samuel. In him the people learned to put their trust; and the national
assembly which he summoned was completely guided by him. No one of the
Judges, it would seem, had his seat of government in any central city,
but where he happened to live. So the residence of Samuel was at his
native town of Ramah, where he married. It would seem that he travelled
from city to city to administer 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 cir