7. The distinctive office successively filled by Elijah and Elisha was that of prophet to the separated kingdom of Israel, to whom they were sent to vindicate the repudiated covenant of Sinai against the apostasies and sins of that people. (1 Kings, xix, 8, 10, 14-18.) They were appointed to keep alive in Israel the knowledge and faith of the covenant God and King whose worship and ordinances at Jerusalem they had wickedly abandoned. In the extraordinary circumstances of Naaman the offerings which the cleansed leper was required to make at the temple on the eighth day after his purifying, may have been omitted. But the supposition that the rites proper to the purifying, itself, were changed without necessity or apparent motive, so that instead of being _sprinkled_ seven times, Naaman was seven times _immersed_, would imply that Elisha not only thus publicly repudiated the authority of the Levitical law, but at the same time and in so doing gave direct sanction to the conduct of Israel, in separating themselves from the temple at Jerusalem and the ordinances and worship which, by divine command, were there observed. The rites of purifying were part and parcel of the system of ordinances given to Israel and concentrated at the sanctuary,—a system, in all its parts, congruous and interdependent; each shedding mutual light on all the rest. If Naaman was sprinkled seven times, according to the Levitical order, that fact would of itself have referred him to the Word and ordinances of God, for light and information, as to the vastly important questions suggested to him by the nature and manner of his disease and cleansing. But, if he was immersed, the observance was without authority in the law; without example in the Word, then possessed or afterward given to Israel; without point of contact or principle of congruity or connection with the system therein unfolded; without explanation anywhere, and without conceivable motive or meaning, unless it was, to repudiate the authority of the Levitical law. Instead, therefore, of the ordinance being a guide line, to lead Naaman to the Word and worship of the true God, the natural effect of such a change as is supposed would have been to deter him from any such inquiries. The facts would have certified him that the God of Elisha was not the same that reigned at Jerusalem;—that the doctrine of the one, set forth in the rite of sprinkling, was manifestly different from that of the other expressed by immersion,—and that, therefore, the Word and ordinances of the God who dwelt in Zion were likely to mislead him, rather than to shed a true light upon the character of the God of Elisha, by whom he had been healed. The snare thus presented to the mind of Naaman would have been the more insidious and fatal in proportion as he should still have recognized an intimate relation, or even a kind of identity, between the God of Israel and the God of Judah. It was a general characteristic of the ancient idolatries,