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LASTLY, the man who in the judgment of God was the first to be worthy
of the kingdom of His people Israel, because he was lacking in this "eye"
of discretion, was, as if his whole body were full of darkness, actually
cast down from the kingdom while, being deceived by the darkness of this
"light," and in error, he imagined that his own offerings were more
acceptable to God than obedience to the command of Samuel, and met with an
occasion of falling in that very matter in which he had hoped to propitiate
the Divine Majesty. And ignorance, I say, of this discretion led Ahab
the king of Israel after a triumph and splendid victory which had been
granted to him by the favour of God to fancy that mercy on his part was
better than the stem execution of the divine command, and, as it seemed to
him, a cruel rule: and moved by this consideration, while he desired to
temper a bloody victory with mercy, he was on account of his
indiscriminating clemency rendered full of darkness in his whole body, and
condemned irreversibly to death.
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