1 Samuel 3:13

1 Samuel 3:13

It was at Shiloh that Eli spent his years. Tranquil and busy, and in the main, honourable years they were. Shiloh was well-fitted to be the seat of ecclesiastical rule, lying as it did well off the main highroad which ran through the country from north to south, lying among hills which fairly shut it in on all sides but one, their sides terraced with vines and olives and fig trees, while in the plain below stood the tabernacle, containing the most precious things in Israel. During the greater part of the year Shiloh was as quiet as any small country cathedral town in England. Only when at the great yearly festival devout Israelites crowded from every tribe to their central national sanctuary, was its solitude invaded. Well might it have seemed an ideal house of prayer and study, of mild authority and ripe wisdom, where piety and purity and philanthropy might be trained to high perfection for the common good. Yet Shiloh was the scene of the base avarice, the high-handed violence, the vulgar profligacy of the sons of Eli; and Shiloh was the scene of Eli's weakness, so culpable in itself, so fraught with ruin to his family and his home.

I. Eli, let us observe, was otherwise, personally, a good man.

He was resigned, humble, and in a true sense, devout. He submits to be rebuked and sentenced by his inferiors without a word of remonstrance. His personal piety is especially noticeable at the moment of his death. He might have survived the national disgrace; but that the Ark of the Sacred Presence should be taken, that he could not survive it touched the Divine honour, and Eli's devotion is to be measured by the fact that the shock of such a disgrace killed him on the spot.

II. Eli's personal excellence was accompanied by a want of moral resolution and enterprise which explains the ruin of his house. He should have removed his sons from the office which they dishonoured. Instead of that, he only talked to them. His sin was one of which only an amiable man could be guilty, but in its consequences it was fatal.

III. Two observations suggest themselves in conclusion: (1) No relationship can be more charged with responsibility than that between a parent and his children. (2) No outward circumstances can of themselves protect us against the insidious assaults of evil, or against the enfeeblement of a truant will.

H. P. Liddon, The Family Churchman,July 14th, 1886 (see also Fenny Pulpit,No. 1160).