have conveyed to us the general fact (being what is chiefly edifying) of
the interview between the witch and the King of Israel. They inform us
that Saul, disheartened and discouraged by the general defection of his
subjects, and the consciousness of his own unworthy and ungrateful
disobedience, despairing of obtaining an answer from the offended Deity,
who had previously communicated with him through his prophets, at length
resolved, in his desperation, to go to a divining woman, by which course
he involved himself in the crime of the person whom he thus consulted,
against whom the law denounced death--a sentence which had been often
executed by Saul himself on similar offenders. Scripture proceeds to
give us the general information that the king directed the witch to call
up the Spirit of Samuel, and that the female exclaimed that gods had
arisen out of the earth--that Saul, more particularly requiring a
description of the apparition (whom, consequently, he did not himself
see), she described it as the figure of an old man with a mantle. In
this figure the king acknowledges the resemblance of Samuel, and sinking
on his face, hears from the apparition, speaking in the character of the
prophet, the melancholy prediction of his own defeat and death.

In this description, though all is told which is necessary to convey to
us an awful moral lesson, yet we are left ignorant of the minutiæ
attending the apparition, which perhaps we ought to accept as a sure
sign that there was no utility in our being made acquainted with them.
It is impossible, for instance, to know with certainty whether Saul was
present when the woman used her conjuration, or whether he himself
personally ever saw the appearance which the Pythoness described to him.
It is left still more doubtful whether anything supernatural was
actually evoked, or whether the Pythoness and her assistant meant to
practise a mere deception, taking their chance to prophesy the defeat
and death of the broken-spirited king as an event which the