All the transactions of his life were human, natural. His conduct was perfectly in harmony with the age he lived in. The nation as a whole had become a little more civilized, and had reached as high a point of intelligence as it ever attained--that is, as a nation. Thus far we have not seen anything in their history that other nations had not to contend with. To attribute their acts, individually or as a nation, to any supernatural power, to God, Jehova, or the Lord, is preposterous. In their dealings, their fightings, their cruelty, their brutality, their superstition, and their ignorance, they were in no sense superior to any of the contemporaneous nations. They were no better in their conduct than their neighbors. The strongest had always the best of it; the conquered had to submit to slavery or be killed, women are captured and used, and the plunder is divided. Notwithstanding the priestly rule of the Levites, the Hebrews are constantly relapsing into idolatry, brought back to the fold, and relapsing again. The church was at this time used for all sorts of corrupt purposes. The Jehova that had been brought into the theological world with such an immense boom by Moses had expended a good deal of its original force. The remembrance of that stupendous crisis of the Hebrew national existence was kept alive and the flames were fanned by priestly interest. The God after Moses, the Jehova, had shrunk into the Lord, and the ark was the representative of God. "The ark of God was taken," ... "when she heard tidings of the ark of God" (1 Sam. iv, etc.). And the success or failure of the Hebrews depended on the man who led them. With a weak man as general or leader they were beaten, with a strong man they won. Other nations meanwhile had sprung into life, and become powerful, without Jehova--without the God of the Hebrews. They had, however, idols and images, which seemed to behave with far greater propriety than the God of Israel. So well did these mythological deities manage their affairs, that they almost swallowed up the whole Hebrew race. Samuel, having established a kingdom, and crowned two kings, Saul and David, dies, leaving these two competitors in the field. CHAPTER XII. GOD SAVE THE KING! That was the shout, with the commencement of the new era, when the tallest man in the nation appeared in the midst of the people that had assembled at the call of Samuel (1 Sam. x, 24). I will give a short chronology of this United Kingdom under three kings--Saul, David, and Solomon: