Obedience, the First Duty.
Suppose a Christian man is hired to watch at night in a large factory in a closely built village. He has agreed to be there from sundown until morning. His task is a very simple one. It is only to walk back and forth in the long rooms, and to go up and down the high stairways, keeping his eyes open, ready to put out the first show of fire, or to sound an alarm in danger. It seems to him a very insignificant work. On all sides sinners are impenitent, and souls are perishing. Oughtn't he to be up and doing in the Lord's cause? This is prayer-meeting night. He will go over and say some earnest words to his sluggish Christian brethren, to arouse them to action. He may be the means of a revival in that village. He quits the factory and goes to the prayer-meeting. His exhortation is cut short by the cry of fire. As he walks among the smoking ruins of that village the next morning, it may occur to him that he would have done better had he attempted less; that as watching was his business, he ought not to have allowed even praying or exhorting to interfere with his watching. It was because Saul, in worship, sacrificed sheep and oxen which he had been sent to destroy, that the Lord rejected him from being king of Israel. Saul thought those sheep were so fat, and the service of worship was so delightful, that surely God would be pleased to have him stop his work of slaughtering and enter on religious exercises. "And Samuel said, Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord?" (Is that the question you are asking? you ought to have known the answer.) "Behold to obey is better than to sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams." Saul did a great many evil things in his day. The one thing for which he was deposed from his kingship was the worshiping God when he had no business to worship; when he had another work to do, a work which he had no right to quit in the hope of doing something better--something more distinctively religious. The Lord is no better pleased to-day with the shirking of one's plain duty under the plea of doing religious service, than he was in the days of Saul.—S. S. Times.