From Hannah’s consecration of her child we may learn two excellent lessons, embodying the greatest principles that underlie the human side of the redemption of the race: First, the mother’s power; and second, the child’s ability to know God. She had so thoroughly lent Samuel to the Lord that he held true to God in the degeneracy of Eli’s judgeship and the slackness of the priesthood, as illustrated in the family of Eli. The social condition of the age was a shocking exhibition of low sensuality, licentiousness and cupidity that would disgrace even the grossest heathenism. Eli himself, while a just and holy man in his own private character, was weak and inefficient as a judge and a priest, and utterly failed to restrain his ungodly family or exercise any just administration of public affairs. The whole nation was, therefore, in a most pitiable condition, at the mercy of its foreign oppressors and so enfeebled that a few years later we find there was not a sword in Israel, and they had even to go to the grindstones of the Philistines in order to grind their plough coulters for the ordinary operations of husbandry. It was at such a time as this that God called Samuel to be at once the pattern and deliverer of his country. In the very outset, the Lord had some very unpleasant work for Samuel to do, which must have tested his obedience. While yet quite young he had a hard, sad message to deliver to his old friend and instructor, and it was no easy task to go to Eli and tell him all that God had spoken against his house. It was the hard test which often came again in his later ministry as the messenger of God to sinful man. Again and again did he have to go to those he loved and say to them the thing which nearly broke his heart. When this child of promise finally passed from under the watchful care of the devoted Hannah, we are told, “the Lord was with Samuel,” and he “let none of his words fall to the ground, and all Israel knew that Samuel was established to be a prophet of the Lord.” The life of Samuel marks a transition period in the history of Israel from the time of the Judges to the kingdom of Saul and David. His was an epoch life like Abraham’s, Joshua’s and John the Baptist’s.