shall be your King," he said. He trusted that God would speak to the
nation as He had spoken to him, and without any leader would guide them
aright. That is not the Lord's way. But though Gideon would not be
king, he desired some honour, and he asked that he might have the
ear-rings of the Midianites who had fallen. Therewith he made an
image, a thing forbidden. It stood in his house, a record of what the
Lord had done for him; and yet this very record became a snare, and
Israel fell to worshipping it, and Jehovah was displaced by the
testimony of His own love for us.

Your grandfather is now dead. Abimelech reigns in his place, and has
slain all the children of Gideon save myself. Israel has returned to
Baal; its strength has departed; before long we shall be subdued under
the Philistines. Excepting in our own house, there are none that have
not gone a-whoring after Baal; the memory of the battle by the hill
Moreh is clean forgotten; and soon the memory of my father will also
disappear, and it will be as if he had never lived. To think that the
vision of the angel in Ophrah and the night in the valley of Jezreel
should end in nothing!

* * * * * *

That night Jotham died.


_Fourteen Hundred Tears Later_.

"The time would fail me to tell of Gideon, . . . who through
faith . . . out of weakness was made strong, waxed valiant in fight,
turned to flight the armies of the aliens."--_Epistle to the Hebrews_.