and righteous horror of all meanness rises strong in you, then Christ is speaking to you.  Whenever your heart burns within you with admiration of some noble action, then Christ is speaking to you.  Whenever a chance word in sermons or in books touches your conscience, and reproves you, then Christ is speaking to you.  Oh turn not a deaf ear to those instincts.  They may be the very turning-points of your lives.  One such godly motion, one such pure inspiration of the Spirit of God listened to humbly, and obeyed heartily, may be the means of putting you into the right path thenceforward, that you may go on and grow in strength and wisdom, and favour with God and man; till you become again, in the world to come, what you were when you were carried home from the baptismal font, a little child, pure from all spot of sin.

SERMON IX.  OBADIAH

1 Kings, xviii. 3, 4.  And Ahab called Obadiah, which was the governor of his house. (Now Obadiah feared the Lord greatly:  for it was so, when Jezebel cut off the prophets of the Lord, that Obadiah took an hundred prophets, and hid them by fifty in a cave, and fed them with bread and water.)

This is the first and last time throughout the Bible, that we find this Obadiah mentioned.  We find the same name elsewhere, but not the same person.  It is a common Jewish name, Obadiah, and means, I believe, the servant of the Lord.

All we know of the man is contained in this chapter.  We do not read what became of him afterwards.  He vanishes out of the story as quickly as he came into it, and, as we go on through the chapter and read of that grand judgment at Carmel between Elijah and the priests of Baal, and the fire of God which came down from heaven, to shew that the Lord was God, we forget Obadiah, and care to hear of him no more.

And yet Obadiah was a great man in his day.  He was, it seems, King Ahab’s vizier, or prime minister; the second man in the country after the king; and a prime minister in those eastern kingdoms had, and has now, far greater power than he has in a free country like this.  Yes, Obadiah was a great man in his day, I doubt not; and people bowed before him when he went out, and looked up to him, in that lawless country, for life or death, for ruin or prosperity.  Their money, and their land, their very lives might depend on his taking a liking toward them, or a spite against them.  And he had wealth, no doubt, and his fair and great house there among the beautiful hills of Samaria, ceiled with cedar and painted with vermilion, with its olive groves and vineyards, and rich gardens full of gay flowers and sweet spices, figs and peaches, and pomegranates, and all the lovely vegetation which makes those Eastern gardens like Paradise itself.  And he had his great household of slaves, men-servants and maidservants, guards and footmen, singing men and singing women—­perhaps a hundred souls and more eating and drinking in his house day by day for many a year.  A great man; full of wealth, and pomp, and power.  We know that it must have been so, because we know well in what luxury those great men in the East lived.  But where is it now?