1 Samuel 12:7

"Now therefore stand still, that I may reason with you before the Lord of all the righteous acts of the Lord, which he did to you and to your fathers." 1 Samuel 12:7 .

Samuel now enters upon a difficult part of his vocation. The minister of Christ has to exercise a variety of functions: sometimes teaching, sometimes rebuking, sometimes comforting, sometimes reasoning and expostulating in a tone that may have in it, however subtly, somewhat of rebuke and judgment. The appeal which Samuel makes is a noble one. He is not going to smite the people with thunder and lightning, but to "reason" with them, to state the case in all its historical bearings, to sum up all the providence of God and ask them to make inferences from the great historical review. The appeal which religion makes to a man is the largest appeal that can be addressed to his understanding, to his memory, and to his imagination. The Lord does not rest his case on what was done today, or yesterday; he goes back to the beginning of time, to the dawn of memory, and he asks that all the way along which he has led the people may be viewed in its entirety and seen in its suggestive shape; then the people may answer whether the purpose of the Lord has been good or evil. Nothing is to be feared from a large and complete survey of providence. All the mischief arises from taking in too little field. We think of the affliction, and forget the comfort; we think of the bereavement, and forget how our very loss became a gain; we look at the grave where the body lies, and forget the heaven where the spirit sings. Every man should take in his whole life when he would estimate the nature of the government under which he lives. How did the man's life begin, what were his early disadvantages, how were they overcome, how were they so transformed as to become actual advantages, how were gates opened for which there was no key? Let a man answer all these questions, and the whole crowd of inquiries to which they belong, and he will soon begin to see that there is a hand stronger than his own guiding the destiny of his life. A review of providence should become a great theological argument. Omit nothing from your purview; the very finest traces are needful to complete the picture; the palest tints are as necessary as the most vivid colours to effect thorough representation of the divine purpose. How many men have come to see that their losses have been the beginning of their profit! How many are able to realise that but for the tears they shed their sensibilities would have been less refined and less responsive to all the appeals of heaven! We are educated by the providence of God; not by this particular phase of it, or that transient act, which has scarcely remained long enough to be noticed, but by the totalising of the way; at the end we begin to see that God's meaning was good from the first, that no weight has been too heavy, no cloud too dense, no bereavement too painful, but that everything has been meted out to us with that measure which wisdom alone could calculate and mercy alone dispense.