If Naboth consulted strong neighbours as to necessary precautions against Ahab's plans for obtaining the vineyard, then Naboth acted as a wise man, and the only regret to-day is that the "strong neighbours" only offered Naboth assurances and words, instead of deeds.

Jehu spoke to Bidkar, his captain, and recalling the dread prophecy of Elijah, commanded the body of Ahab's son to be cast out into the dearly-bought field of Naboth.

Four hundred of Ahab's prophets were ready to tell him that a campaign which he wanted to enter upon would be successful.

Micaiah, an honest prophet of the Lord, was sent for at Jehoshaphat's request, and was urged by the messenger to prophesy to the same effect as Ahab's prophets.

And this was Ahab's fate.

It was a woman whom he sent, Jezebel, Ahab's own wife: but she was, as far as we can see, a woman of a devilish spirit, cruel, proud, profligate, and unjust, as well as a worshipper of the filthy idols of the Canaanites.

Ahab's first sin was in having married this wicked heathen woman: now his sin punished itself; she tempted him through his pride and self- conceit; she taunted him into sin: 'Dost thou now govern the kingdom of Israel?

The world, at times, seems to me to be full of them; for every one, my friends, who hushes up a cruel or a dishonest matter, because he himself is a gainer by it, he is no better than the receiver of stolen goods, and he will find in the day of the Lord, that the sin will lie at his door, as Jezebel's sin lay at Ahab's.

Mount Carmel is celebrated in Scripture history as the place where Elijah went up when he told his servant to look forth to the sea yet seven times, and the seventh time he saw a little cloud coming up from the sea "like a man's hand," when the prophet knew that the promised rain was at hand, and girded up his loins, and ran before Ahab's chariot even to the gates of Jezreel.

He was, it seems, King Ahab's vizier, or prime minister; the second man in the country after the king; and a prime minister in those eastern kingdoms had, and has now, far greater power than he has in a free country like this.

I know not.' Consider, again, his strange activity and strength, as when he goes, forty days and forty nights, far away out of Judea, over the waste wilderness, to Horeb the mount of God; or, as again, when he girds up his loins, and runs before Ahab's chariot for many miles to the entrance of Jezreel.

They liked, at heart, Ahab's and Jezebel's idolatries better than they did the worship of the true God.