In the third chapter we have the only account of the man’s inner life. If it were not for that chapter with its story of his subjective struggle, Elijah would be no example for us men of this day. In all the other chapters of the story he appears absolutely undaunted, unafraid of the face of man, clearly convinced of what God would have him do, and absolutely fearless in the doing of it. But here we are shown the man in his own inward wavering, in doubt in some measure about the reality or power of his mission, afraid to carry forward that which he had set out to do with such daring spirit; and in the wilderness alone, first beneath the juniper tree and then on Mount Horeb, Elijah had to face again his life and settle himself once more in that faith in the living God which had brought him out of the desert. And God stood out and spoke to him, and Elijah rose up on his feet once more a man unafraid to resume his mission. God bade him return and anoint a new king over Syria and a new king over Israel, and to go to Abel-meholah and find his own successor, the young man Elisha, plowing behind his oxen. And the prophet went out from his hour of discouragement to find at once the young man who was to take up his work after him and to be an even mightier prophet than he. Then for a long time Elijah disappears again, only to reappear when he confronts Ahab once more, in Naboth’s vineyard, shows him how little he fears him, and pronounces upon him the judgment of Jehovah. Then he vanishes from the stage for three years at least of solitary meditation in the wilderness, vanishes so long that the common people apparently forgot him, so that when one day he met a little party of the servants of the new king Ahaziah on the highway bound to Ekron to consult Baal-zebub, they did not know who the prophet was and brought back his message to the king, able only to say of him that he was a hairy man, with a leather girdle about his loins. But the king well knew that the Tishbite had broken once more upon the stage of the nation’s life, and he bowed beneath the judgments of God that the man from Gilead denounced. Then in the concluding chapter we see Elijah and his young man coming down from Gilgal to Bethel and then to Jericho and then back to the wilderness out of which he had come, that from his own deserts where he had come to know God he might go back to God again. And there in the chariot of fire the man who was himself “the chariots of Israel, and the horsemen thereof,” went up to the Lord God of Israel, Who was alive, to meet Him before Whom he had always stood. One does not wonder that the old man impressed as he did the imagination of his people, and that when centuries later John the Baptist emerged upon the stage challenging the attention of the nation, almost the first question addressed to him was, “Art thou Elijah?”