Notes of a Sermon Preached by the Rev. C. E. Darwent, M.4., in Union Church, Tientsin, Sunday evening, February 19
Feat: "IT. Samuel; XVI. 14;"
Now the spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him." story as it stands, Saul had the unhappy knack of doing the wrong thing morally, as if his ideas of spiritual things and moral obligations had got lowered. That is just the summing up of his case by Dr. James, our expert. He puts it well, when he says, ''Saul lost the sense of moral value."
Although the story of this first King of, Israel is such a tragedy, he must have remained to some extent a popular character, otherwise parents would not have named their sons after him a thousand years after his death, as the father of Saul of Tarsus did. I suppose no Hebrew ever named a son after King Ahab. So Saul must have retained a great deal of his early popularity. Perhaps they had a fellow-feeling with him, that we might all fall off, as he did. The account of his case, given in the Book of Samuel, is that the spirit of the Lord left Sau, and an evil spirit, also "from. the Lord," troubled him. All that one can say about that account of the case is that the ancient Hebrews traced everything back to its source in God. Isaiah makes the Lord say: "I make peace, and I create evil." I suppose that we can interpret that by saying that undoubtedly God made us at any rate capable of evil. Without going further into this knotty point of God's relation to evil, we shall try and use the analysis of the case of Saul made by a modern psychological expert. We are in the hands of '"'experts" to-day. Neither the British nor the American government seems to admit that it knows anything at all. Each of them is continually appointing commissions of "experts." And they take the advice of their experts. So shall we. Ours is the Rev. J. G. James. He has been in. teresting himself in Saul. And he tells us that Saul's case was one of paranoia. That sounds different from the statement of the case in the Bible, but it is probably the same. We shall notice first that Dr. James does not follow the materialist school in his psychology. He is not always talking of the brain—the organ of mind. He says that "practically all lunatics have normal brains." It is well for us to remember that. So there was nothing wrong with Saul's brain. He was a fine well-set-up farmer, physically as perfect as can be. This view puts a stop to all the recent shuffling off of our sinful dispositions to the mere physical part of us. We have to shoulder the burden of our sins. In the middle ages men used to lay the blame of their goatish disposition to the fault of a star." We have lately blamed our brain. Our expert says, "No, Saul's brain was normal. Paranoia is not a physical complaint only. Dr. James says that in Saul it was "a case of perversion, wrong thoughts, feelings, desires, impulses, and generally and especially wrong and foolish choices." There indeed, is something for us to think about. The Oxford Dictionary says, paranoia is "mental derangement, especially marked by delusions of grandeur, etc. There is vanity in it and wounded vanity. It is at bottom a moral twist ina man. Then, says Dr. James, "suppose when a man is in this excited state he does a wrong, something that makes him feel that he has misgiving about; suppose he makes a false step; guilty of some dereliction of duty, then his mind begins to be disturbed. The moral balance is upset. He tries' to make himself bell that all is right, when he knows i is not. Then he feels that everything and everybody is against him, and he is moody and melancholy and fitful in his conduct. He thinks he is being persecuted. Saul has often been likened to Hamlet. "The times are out of joint," whereas it is he that is out of joint.
Tue Essence or RELiGion.
How true all this is of Saul! As the late Dr. Joseph Parker, who knew his Bible better than most men, says: "Saul had hardly begun his reign when somehow or other he got wrong. He didn't seem able to take hold of anything by the right end." That is just it There was the business of his being told to wait for Samuel at Gilgal. Saul got impatient and sacrificed. Then came Samuel. Saul made a false step through impatience, as we often do. Then there was the case of the war against Amelek. He took his own line again. The Sest of the sheep and cattle were spared, and he said it was the fault of the people, who made him do it, and, besides, they were for sacrifices, to which Samuel said. "To obey is better than sacrifice." Samuel says, the whole essence of religion is there. Then there was the matter of Jonathan eating the honey. Saul was going to kill his own son but the people rescued him. Saul is always getting wrong. He makes wrong moral choices. He goes either too far or not far enough. Then there is his vendetta against David. It is a curious mixture of appreciation, hatred and jealousy. At one time Saul has David playing his harp to him to drive away the evil spirit, at another he throws his javelin at him. You had better read the story for yourselves. It would be a well-spent Sunday afternoon.}your sense of And you will agree, that taking the' down. It is so easy to lower them,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.