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It ill becomes the minister of peace to mix in the clang of arms. It was an evil day for Hophni and Phinehas when they took the ark of the covenant from Shiloh, and sought to work on the fanaticism of the people by unveiling the Holiest of all. Unprepared to die, and guilty of profaning holy things, they provoked the judgment which shed their blood. It was an evil day for Zuingle when he left his chaplain's post to wear a helmet, a sword, and a battle axe covered with wounds, insulted, killed, he lay under a tree at Cappel — not yet forty-eight years of age, his body cut and burned, and his ashes driven to the winds. "He had wielded an arm that God had forbidden," says the historian; "the helmet had covered his head, and he had grasped the halberd. His more devoted friends were themselves astonished, and exclaimed, 'We knew not what to say — a bishop in arms!' The bolt had furrowed the cloud, the blow had reached the reformer, and his body was no more than a handful of dust in the palm of a soldier!" It was an evil day for Walker — that noble-hearted clergyman, who in the memorable siege of Derry attained such eminence, and did such service to his country by his patriotic and Christian discourses, for which he received the thanks of Parliament, the mitre of a bishop, and a monument in the city where his words and example kept up the courage of his famished fellow citizens for many weary days — it was an evil day for Walker when he rushed unbidden and unnecessarily to the battle of the Boyne. "He ought to have remembered that the peculiar circumstances which had justified him in becoming a combatant had ceased to exist, and that in a disciplined army, led by generals of long experience and great fame, a fighting divine was likely to give less help than scandal. The bishop-elect was determined to be wherever danger was, and the way in which he exposed himself excited the extreme disgust of the royal patron, who hated a meddler almost as much as a coward. A soldier who ran away from a battle, and a townsman who pushed himself into a battle, were the two objects which most excited William's spleen....While exhorting the colonists of Ulster to play the man, Walker was shot dead....William thought him a busybody who had been properly punished for running into danger without any call of duty, and expressed that feeling with characteristic bluntness on the field of battle. 'Sire,' said an attendant, 'the Bishop of Derry has been killed by a shot at the ford.' 'What took him there?' growled the king." Godly men may make mistakes, enter suspicious circles, and endanger their sacred calling and their influence for good; but when the wicked rush into sin, and die under the chastisement of God, the calamity involves the ruin of their immortal souls — Ichabod is then written upon their eternity.

(R. Steel.)

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KJV: And the ark of God was taken; and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were slain.

WEB: The ark of God was taken; and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were slain.