In after years many a Hebrew mother told her baby, eager for a story, of Moses their great leader; his appearance, deep-set eyes, long beard, majestic mien, yet infinite tenderness and gentleness, the softness of strength; his presence with God in the mount, the shining face.  And the baby would listen so quietly, and then the eyes would grow so big and the hush of spirit come as the mother would repeat softly, “but he could not come over into the land of promise because he did not obey God.”  And strong fathers reminded their growing sons.  And so it was woven into the warp and woof of the nation—­obedience, reverent obedience to God.  And one can well understand Moses looking down from above with grateful heart that he had been denied for their sakes.  The unselfishness and wisdom of later years would not have made the prayer. The prayer of a man was denied that a nation might be taught obedience.

That More Might be Given and Gotten.

Now let us look a bit at the second of these, the portrait of Hannah the Hebrew woman.  First the broader lines for perspective.  This peculiar Hebrew nation had two deep dips down morally between Egypt and Babylon; between the first making, and the final breaking.  The national tide ebbed very low twice, before it finally ran out in the Euphrates Valley.  Elijah stemmed the tide the second time, and saved the day for a later night.  The Hannah story belongs in the first of these ebb-tides; the first bad sag; the first deep gap.

The giant lawgiver is long gone.  His successor, only a less giant than himself is gone too, and all that generation, and more.  The giants gave way to smaller-sized leaders.  Now they are gone also.  The mountain peaks have been lost in the foothills, and these have yielded to dunes, and levels; mostly levels; dead levels.  These mountains must have had long legs.  The foothills are so far away, and are running all to toes.  Now the toes have disappeared.

It is a leaderless people, for the true Leader as originally planned has been, first ignored, then forgot.  The people have no ideals.  They grub in the earth content.  There is a deep, hidden-away current of good.  But it needs leadership to bring it to the surface.  A leaderless people!  This is the niche of the Hannah story.

The nation was rapidly drifting down to the moral level of the lowest.  At Shiloh the formal worship was kept up, but the very priests were tainted with the worst impurity.  A sort of sleepy, slovenly anarchy prevailed.  Every man did that which was right in his own eyes, with every indication of a gutter standard.  “There was none in the land possessing power of restraint that might put them to shame in anything.”  No government; no dominant spirit.  Indeed the actual conditions of Sodom and her sister cities of the plain existed among the people.  This is the setting of the simple graphic incident of Hannah.  One must get the picture clearly in mind to understand the story.