It was a time of overshadowing and of darkness in that Eastern household. The death of her son, marvelously given in her husband's old age, had left the mother's heart a thousand times more aching, crusht, and weary than before. Instinctively that heart reaches out toward the man of God. The mother's feet are turned to Carmel. She will accept no substitute; no wand of office, no symbol of authority will satisfy the eager cravings of her love. Drawn by the cords of that great, all-constraining power, at length the prophet stands within the darkened room, and through the personal contact of the prophet with the dead, the power of God revives the corpse. So both in the distance and within the darkened room, while anxious, expectant hearts keep watch below, do Elisha's actions typify the deeds of One Who within a thousand years will walk the streets and lanes of Eastern towns, and will be known by loving hearts throughout the countryside. Humanity had died by sin throughout all the bygone ages; the symbols of authority from the Carmel of God's presence had been reached down to men upon the Fall. On human nature, wrapt in the fell sleep of sin, the wand of office had been used, but there had been no bringing back to life. Messenger after messenger had come, men who had communed with their God, as undoubtedly as Gehazi had left the presence of Elisha to go that day to Shunem; but there was neither voice nor hearing, and sorrowfully still each servant witnessed in succession to his mission: "The child is not awaked." Ah, who, my brethren, should venture to guess, still less to dogmatize, how prayer might be said to quicken the accomplishment of the counsels of the triune God? Yet had prayer no part in the plan of the Incarnation? If the love of the Shunammite mother compelled the presence of the prophet, could then one of the greatest moral forces known within the universe be purposely excluded from the great work of man's redemption by the God Who has caused it to be recorded of Himself, "Thou nearest prayer?" Could fervent prayer and mighty intercession that rolled upward from the breasts of so long a line of kings, and patriarchs, and prophets, and so many a lonely and unnoticed spot amid the hills and valleys of Judah, where Baal found seven thousand knees that were recalcitrant to his false and bloody worship, even when the great Elijah believed himself to be alone in the one worship of the true God of Israel; could the longings of the hearts that desired to behold the things that after-generations saw, could the cry of the souls from under the altar, "Oh, Lord, how long?" could, I ask, all these be fruitless and in vain? Or had each its own due place at least in hastening the coming of the kingdom, and in determining when the fulness of time had arrived?