Spiritual power is not only useful in one direction; it is alarming in another. When the king of Syria felt himself baffled, all his plans thrown into uncontrollable bewilderment, his heart was sorely troubled. It is the Immeasurable that frightens men. It is the Unknown Quantity that troubles all their calculations and causes them to feel that after they have completed their arithmetic their conclusion is a lie. What was in the air? Whose was this ghostly presence that was upsetting Ben-hadad’s well laid schemes? What was it, or who, that always went before him, and that made his proposals abortive and turned all his policies into mocking nothings? Had there been any man who was visible and measurable, that man could have been dealt with. There is always a quantity equal to any quantity that is known. What is wanting in one way can be made up in another--as, for example, what is wanting in number may be made up in quality. As one great leader said in ancient history, when his soldiers were saying they were too few for the battle: “How many do you count me for?” That touched the fire of the army, and inspired the soldiers with confidence. Now, the matter was revealed to the king, and he took means to remove the spectral influence. He made this arrangement: “Go and spy where he is, that I may send and fetch him.” When he knew that Elisha was in Dothan the king sent “thither horses and chariots and a great host.” What unconscious tributes bad men pay to good influences! Men do not know wholly what they are doing. Why, this was but a poor prophet, wearing a hairy robe that had descended to him; he was no king; he had no sword or horse; he was but a man of prayer. How did Ben-hadad propose to capture him? The king sent “horses and chariots and a great host” to take a man whose sword was the word of God, whose helmet was the defense of the Most High, whose breastplate was Righteousness! Here are three arms of the Syrian service--footmen, horsemen and chariots; and remember that these were all employed to bring one poor man to the king’s presence. Well might Elisha have said, before Antigonus uttered it: “How many do you count _me_ for?” Elisha might have taunted the king of Syria, saying: “Why all this ado? Would not one soldier have been enough to take one prophet? He might have come on foot; a horse was not necessary, and certainly not a sword. One soldier might surely have arrested me.” But bad men unconsciously pay tribute to good men. They say, in effect: “Elisha is only one, but a stubborn one; only one tree, but his roots seem to have spread themselves through the Earth, and to have taken hold of the entire scheme of things; he is only one, yet, what is strange, he is many in one.” And this, indeed, was the interpretation given by Elisha, for he said: “They that be with us are more than they that be with them.”