I shall first consider this history, and then lay before you some remarks.

Naaman, a great military officer and a person of the first distinction under the king of Syria, was led by the fame of the prophet Elisha to apply to him for the cure of his leprosy, a most dreadful disease, especially in those Eastern countries, under which he laboured in a very high degree.

He seems to have had in him the seeds of a singular probity and generosity of mind, with a turn to serious reflection; but being withal of a warm aspiring disposition, which had been fed by great success in war, and the rank he held, he was in danger of forgetting his feeble condition of humanity, and becoming wholly corrupted by pride and ambition.

This is visible in the resentment which he shows at the prophet's not treating him as, he thought, became a man of his quality and consideration.

Ver. 9, &c. "So Naaman came with his horses and with his chariot, and stood at the door of the house of Elisha. And Elisha sent a messenger unto him, saying; Go and wash in Jordan seven times, come again unto thee,

and thy flesh shall and thou shalt be

clean.

clean. But Naaman was wroth, and went away, and said; Behold, I thought he would surely come out to me, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper. Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? may not I wash in them, and be clean? So he turned, and went away in a rage."

Vain mortals are apt to fancy themselves of as much consequence in the sight of God as they are in their own conceits. The rich and the great especially, pampered and elated by the flattery and undue respect which their wealth and stations procure them, often grow to look upon themselves as of a different species from the rest of mankind; and instead of being thankful, and the more humbled as they ought to be, for their uncommon share of the ordinary blessings of Providence, to which they could have no claim, are apt to imagine themselves entitled to the same preference above others in the distribution of any of the extraordinary favours of their Maker.

But Naaman was led to see his own unseemly vanity by what his domestics ventured to suggest to him; fortunate to have found in

that

that rank of life some that could understand, and were not backward to tell him his faults.

Ver. 13. "And his servants came near, and spake unto him, and said; My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith unto thee, wash and be clean?"

His instantaneous recovery from so loathsome a distemper, which followed from the use of the means prescribed to him by the prophet, brought him at once to sober and serious thought, and to the acknowledgement of that Being, the one only living and true God, to whose goodriess he had been indebted for his cure, and whose prophet had been the instrument of it.

Ver. 15. And he breaks out; "Behold, now I know that there is no God in all the earth, but in Israel." His pious reverence and gratitude would be the more awakened and confirmed by the disinterested behaviour of Elisha, in refusing his great gifts which he offered to him.

ན་

This would teach him, that the favour of God was not to be purchased by money; that his true servants were above its mean influence,

ence, and actuated by higher motives. Whereas among the heathens, nothing was to be obtained without rich presents to their priests; and whatever crimes they had committed, money could make their gods propitious to them. Recovered from a state of such deplorable ignorance, and deeply impressed with a sense of the power, majesty, and goodness, of the divine Being, who only was known and adored among the Israelites in all the earth, who alone could hear and help his creatures, he immediately formed a fixed resolution to worship Jehovah alone; but is desirous to lay before Elisha one part of his conduct in this respect, and to have his opinion upon it, as a prophet and interpreter of the divine will: "In this thing the Lord pardon thy servant, that when my master goeth into the house of Rimmon to worship there, and he leaneth on my hand, and I bow myself in the house of Rimmon; when I bow down myself in the house of Rimmon, the Lord pardon thy servant in this thing. And he said unto him, Go in peace.

I.

We shall first inquire how far Naaman's re

quest

quest was just and laudable, and what degree of approbation the prophet gave to it.

It is to be observed, that some scholars of great eminence and worth, have thought that Naaman's words might be understood of his begging pardon only for his past idolatry, and not to have any reference to any thing in future.

But though it is quite improbable that he should desire forgiveness for such a trifling instance of his past idolatry, amidst many more grievous that he must have committed; it serves to show the sentiments and conscientious minds of these excellent persons, that they thought the prophet could not give a sanction to Naaman's joining in the worship of the idol in the manner he requested, without incurring the chargeof encouraging prevarication and insincerity in the things of God.

It is plain that the Syrian general, by his manner of stating his difficulty, was far from thinking himself quite right in the practice he proposed, to continue in the idolatrous temple of Rimmon, in bowing to the idol and worshiping it, after he had declared himself most fully resolved to worship Jehovah alone.

For