ance from an ordinary citizen would afford her any protection against the law and the king. And yet she appears to have been perfectly satisfied with his word, and ready to proceed at his service. What further evidence do we need that in all this she was playing a game of deception with her visitor, and artfully drawing him into her power? And if she could so skillfully act the part of a dissembler and impostor at the outset, she could act it all the way through; and we are prepared to expect more of the same craft from her, as we go on.

Her next artifice is to pretend an awful pain at discovering by the mysterious power of her magic, that her visitor is no other than Saul the king! Resting in the given assurance of safety, she proceeds to ask, "Whom shall I bring up unto thee? And he said, Bring me up Samuel." At this point there is evidently a chasm in the story. We are not told what she did in the meantime; what mysteries of divination she pretended to practice; what strange rappings, what horrible peepings and mutterings were heard; what unaccountable table-movings occurred; what spells or enchantments were used to bring up the dead. The sacred writer passes over all this in profound silence, as too ridiculous and absurd to be mentioned. But the next we read is, " And when the woman saw Samuel"-— and we can hardly forbear the impression that the narrator means to be understood as relating this in a tone of significant irony-" And when the woman saw Samuel, she cried with a loud voice; and the woman spake to Saul saying, Why hast thou deceived me? for thou art Saul." This was admirably well turned, and just such a trick as we might expect a cunning sorceress to play. All on a sudden she is terror-struck with the discovery, just that moment made through the wonderful power of her wonderful art, that her visitor is none other than king Saul himself! and in a tone of surprise and consternation, she screams out at the top of her voice, as only such a witch could scream. "Why hast thou deceived me?" she gasps out to the startled, awe-smitten man before her, "for thou art Saul!"-as if she had that instant found out by the circuitous way of the invisible world, what she had all along known by the simple use of her senses! A woman who could throw dust in a man's eyes as well as that, may be presumed capable of rendering him totally blind before she has done with

him.

But what is the meaning of that loud voice' with which she cried out. Did she intend to be heard all over the house when she vociferated, "for thou art Saul?" Did she wish some person who was secreted in another room, or behind the scenes,

for the purpose of acting in collusion with her, to be distinctly and unmistakably informed who her visitor was, that when he came to play the part of Samuel, he might suit his words and actions to the person addressed for a woman who could deceive the king so far, might deceive him still farther, by pretending that to be the shade of Samuel, which, in reality, was nothing else than the living substance of some cunning person who was stationed in a convenient place to help her carry out the imposition. Is there anything incredible in the supposition that there might have been such an assistant in her secret service; or if not, that she feigned Samuel herself, by the art of ventriloquism, as has been suggested? On either supposition it is not difficult to account for all that occurred, without resorting to the idea of supernatural agency.

It should next be observed that the woman offered Saul no opportunity of seeing the pretended apparition. She was so kind as to do all the seeing herself, while she merely left him to do the hearing. For when she professed to be surprised and alarmed at discovering who Saul was, he said unto her, "Be not afraid; for what sawest thou ?"-implying that he himself saw nothing. "And the woman said unto Saul, I saw gods ascending out of the earth." This was taking a new advantage of her victim. Her reply was another cunning device for throwing an air of mystery around her craft, and deceiving the king into the idea of something marvelous. Gods ascending out of the earth! What an absurdity! But poor Saul was already too much blinded to see it. "And he said unto her, what form is he of?"-still implying that he saw nothing himself, and that his only thought was of Samuel. "And she said, An old man cometh up; and he is covered with a mantle." Probably she had many a time seen the living Samuel, and knew how to give such a description of his personal apearance and dress, as Saul would immediately recognize. "And Saul perceived"-it is not said that he saw or beheld; but he perceived or understood by the description-" that it was Samuel; and he stooped with his face to the ground, and bowed himself." In the original the reading is, "And Saul perceived that it was Samuel himself"-the latter word being omitted by our translators. Some critics have laid great stress upon this pronoun himself, as going to show that the veritable Samuel must, in some form, have been there. But we regard it as only another significant, if not ironical stroke of the writer, designed to make the delusive impression on Saul's mind appear the more preposterous; as much as to say, 'so bewildered

and demented was Saul, that he verily thought it to be the identical Samuel himself.'

This is enough to show the cunning adroitness of the woman, and that she was successfully imposing upon Saul's imagination by mere trickery.

3. We now take up the pretended apparition itself, to see how much of the veritable Samuel we can find in that; Saul, the meanwhile, be it remembered, seeing no shade or ghost of Samuel himself, but only hearing, from first to last, what he supposed to be his voice.

And we are disposed, at the outset, to question somewhat the soundness of our apparition's views respecting the state of the dead. He begins by asking Saul, "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" Bring him up from whence? Samuel was buried at Ramah, some fifty or sixty miles distant from Endor; and we should, therefore, hardly expect him to speak in this manner of being brought up bodily from his grave. This evidently was not the intended meaning of the supposed ghost; but he adopts the old pagan notion that departed spirits have their abode beneath the earth, in a certain imaginary under-world, where they rest for the present in a sort of half-conscious, lethargic state, from which Samuel is represented as being aroused at the request of Saul. If Samuel himself had actually come from the spirit-world to converse with Saul, we think he would not have made such a blunder as to talk about being disturbed in his rest or quietude, or to speak of being brought up from some imaginary shades beneath, instead of being brought down from the realms of light and glory, where such godly men as he are received to dwell with Christ. We cannot but think that our ghost shows himself none too intelligent for one who comes directly from the invisible world, and who must be supposed to know much more about it than we mortals of earth, who have nothing but our Bibles to inform us. And we are sometimes provoked to question, whether many of the professed spirits that are brought up in these days, have improved their advantages and learned as much from their intercourse with the other world as might have been expected. But the deluded Saul perceived no incongruity, or marks of pagan ignorance, in the question of the supposed Samuel; and he seriously replied to it, "I am sore distressed; for the Philistines make war with me, and God is departed from me, and answereth me no more, neither by prophets, nor by dreams; therefore I have called thee, that thou mayest make known unto me what I shall do."

We are next disposed to question the superior knowledge of

the unseen apparition concerning the condition and prospects of Saul. What did he tell him that might not have been equally well told by almost any common person, who was tolerably acquainted with the facts which must, at that time, have generally been known in Israel? What more than what might have been told by any one at this day, who is familiar with the history of Saul's reign? The pretended Samuel proceeds to say, "Wherefore then dost thou ask of me, seeing the Lord is departed from thee, and is become thine enemy? And the Lord hath done to him-done for himself-as he spake by me; for the Lord hath rent the kingdom out of thine hand, and given it to thy neighbor, even to David; because thou obeyedst not the voice of the Lord, nor executedst his fierce wrath upon Amalek, therefore hath the Lord done this thing unto thee this day." It needed no spirit from the other world to remind Saul of all this: for who in Israel did not know of his disobeying the word of the Lord in regard to Amalek, and of the rebuke and warning that Samuel gave him on the occasion, when he said, "The Lord hath rent the kingdom of Israel from thee this day, and hath given it to a neighbor of thine that is better than thou?"-and every one understood that neighbor to be David.

But now the hidden spectre ventures upon the more hazardous experiment of offering a prediction; and here we shall find him more cautious and wary in his mode of expression. "Moreover the Lord will also deliver Israel with thee into the hand of the Philistines; and to-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me; the Lord also shall deliver the host of Israel into the hand of the Philistines." Here are two events foretold which appear to have been subsequently fulfilled; one is, that the Philistines would gain the battle in the coming encounter; the other is, that Saul and his sons would be with the supposed Samuel, be this expression understood as it may.

In regard to the first, it may be said, that in the existing posture of affairs, nothing was more probable. The Philistines had already gathered together their whole army against Israel, under the conduct of Achish, the powerful king of Gath. David and his six hundred brave warriors were with them in the field, had fought victoriously in their battles, appeared to be in their interest, and as they had been outlawed and treated as enemies by Saul, it was but natural to suppose that they would now serve as allies to the Philistines in the approaching struggle, although, as the event proved, they did not. And it was also well understood that the Lord had chosen and appointed David to the kingdom, and that a crisis to that end

must be near at hand. Add to all this, that Saul himself, as his remark had just shown, was strongly apprehensive of defeat; was exceedingly depressed in spirits, feeling that God had departed from him; and that his men of war, knowing how things stood, and having their confidence in him and his cause greatly weakened on account of his scandalous treatment of David, partook of the same foreboding and disheartening frame of mind; and what was more to be expected than that the Philistines would win the day? What great risk was there in predicting such an issue? And if the Philistines triumphed, what was more probable than that Saul and his sons would be singled out for slaughter? Saul would readily be distinguished by his stature, and perhaps both he and his sons by their royal armor and commanding station.

But aside from this probability, the form of expression, 'tomorrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me,' is very ambiguous, as the responses of heathen oracles almost always, and designedly, are. For example, "when Croesus was on the point of invading the Medes, he consulted the oracle of Delphi on the success of that war, and was answered, that by passing the river Halys he would ruin a great empire. What empire, his own, or that of his enemies? He was to guess that; but whatever the event might be, the oracle could not fail of being in the right." So of the same god's answer to Pyrrhus: "Aio te, Eacida, Romanos vincere posse." Similar is the example before us. The expression might be construed to mean either this thing or that, to suit the event. In the first place, it is not clear that Saul's death did occur on the morrow, or the very next day after this prediction. In the next place, the word tomorrow is, in the Hebrew, quite ambiguous; in some passages meaning to-morrow in the common acceptation of the term, in others meaning the future indefinitely. As in Exodus we read, "It shall be when thy son asketh thee in time to come."-In the margin it stands to-morrow,' the same word that is used here. And so in Joshua, "When your children ask their fathers in time to come"-Hebrew, 'to-morrow'-"what mean ye by these stones ?" &c. And so in other instances. Had the event, therefore, made it convenient to understand the prediction to be, in time to come shalt thou and thy sons be with me,' there is nothing in the language to hinder such an interpretation. The cunning ghost does not venture even so far as to say that Saul and his sons would be slain in battle; and whether they died the next day, or a month, or a year, or ten years af terwards, the prediction, in point of time, could not turn out amiss. In like manner the phrase, "shalt be with me," might

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