when Hilkiah found it, he seems to have had some doubt whether to venture on showing it to the king. For what a picture did it not give of the perfect rule that everyone-even in this reformed state - was contentedly transgressing; the divinely appointed order of the sanctuary disturbed, the feasts unobserved, the sacrifices forgotten, foul disorder and crime reigning everywhere, while such threats as these met them (Lev. xxvi.) :—

And if ye will not be reformed by me by these things, but will walk contrary unto me;

Then will I also walk contrary unto you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins.

And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall avenge the quarrel of my covenant: and when ye are gathered together within your cities, I will send the pestilence among you; and ye shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy.

And when I have broken the staff of your bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver you your bread again by weight and ye shall eat, and not be satisfied.

:

And if ye will not for all this hearken unto me, but walk contrary unto

me;

Then I will walk contrary unto you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins.

And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat.

And I will destroy your high places, and cast down your images, and cast your carcases upon the carcases of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you.

And I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation, and I will not smell the savour of your sweet odours.

And I will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it.

Everyone knew that punishment after punishment had come. They had still walked contrary. And Jeremiah was warning them that "treacherous Judah should not fare better than back-sliding Israel." Shaphan seems to have known Josiah better than Hilkiah, and to have been sure he would not shrink from the truth. He carried the Book-the five Books of Moses-to the palace, and read it to the king. Much of it must have been a glad hearing to Josiah, and taught him the origin and meaning of what he only imperfectly knew; but when he saw how far his best efforts fell short of what the law decreed, and heard the terrible threats on the breaking of the covenant, he was grieved to the heart. He made no excuses for himself, but rent his clothes for sorrow and repentance.

Then he sent the priest and his ministers to Huldah, a prophetess, whose husband seems to have been keeper of the sacred robes of the priests, to ask of her whether any prayer or sacrifice I would avail to turn aside the wrath that had been but too well earned. He did not say "the Ninevite power is decaying, never mind;" he stated that the real enemies of Judah were their sins. And all his hope was in repentance and prayer. But alas! Huldah was permitted to speak no comfort as to the nation. The measure of God's long suffering had been too long trifled with, and the doom must come—sin must have its wages. Only in consideration that Josiah's heart was tender, and that he had truly grieved for the sins of his fathers and of his people, he himself should be spared the sight of the misery that was coming, and the blow should not fall in his time. Alas! what tidings for a king not twenty-five years old, in the full ardour of the reformation of his people.

LESSON XCI.

JOSIAH'S REFORMATION.

B.C. 625.-2 KINGS xxiii. 1-20 (abridged).

And the king sent, and they gathered unto him all the elders of Judah and of Jerusalem.

And the king went up into the house of the LORD, and all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with him, and the priests. and the prophets, and all the people, both small and great: and he read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant which was found in the house of the LORD.

And the king stood by a pillar, and made a covenant before the LORD, to walk after the LORD, and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all their heart and all their soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. And all the people stood

*

to the covenant.

And the king commanded Hilkiah the high priest, and the priests of the second order, and the keepers of the door, to bring forth out of the temple of the LORD all the vessels that were made for Baal, and for the grove, and for all the host of heaven: and he burned them without Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron, and carried the ashes of them unto Beth-ei.

And he put down the idolatrous priests, whom the kings of Judah had

* Undertook.

ordained to burn incense in the high places in the cities of Judah, and in the places round about Jerusalem; them also that burned incense unto Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven.

Nevertheless the priests of the high places came up to the altar of the LORD in Jerusalem, but they did eat of the unleavened bread among their brethren.

And he defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the children of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech.

And he took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun, and burned the chariots of the sun with fire.

And the altars that were on the top of the upper chamber of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, and the altars which Manasseh had made in the two courts of the house of the LORD, did the king beat down, and brake them down from thence, and cast the dust of them into the brook Kidron. And the high places that were before Jerusalem, which were on the right hand of the mount of corruption, which Solomon the king of Israel had builded for Ashtoreth the abomination of the Zidonians, and for Chemosh the abomination of the Moabites, and for Milcom the abomination of the children of Ammon, did the king defile.

And he brake in pieces the images, and cut down the groves, and filled their places with the bones of men.

Moreover the altar that was at Bethel, and the high place which Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, had made, both that altar and the high place he brake down, and burned the high place, and stamped it small to powder, and burned the grove.

And as Josiah turned himself, he spied the sepulchres that were there in the mount, and sent, and took the bones out of the sepulchres, and burned them upon the altar, and polluted it, according to the word of the LORD which the man of God proclaimed, who proclaimed these words.

Then he said, What title is that that I see? And the men of the city told him, It is the sepulchre of the man of God, which came from Judah, and proclaimed these things that thou hast done against the altar of Beth-el. And he said, Let him alone; let no man move his bones. So they let his bones alone, with the bones of the prophet that came out of Samaria. And all the houses also of the high places that were in the cities of Samaria, which the kings of Israel had made to provoke the LORD to anger, Josiah took away, and did to them according to all the acts that he had done in Beth-el.

And he slew all the priests of the high places that were there upon the altars, and burned men's bones upon them, and returned to Jerusalem.

COMMENT.-We last named the terrible sentence that fell upon King Josiah in the midst of his plans of renewing and reforming his people. Did he give up because there was no hope, and the doom was certain? No; he loved God and his people too well. As far as depended upon himself, God should be purely worshipped and obeyed, and as many souls as could be saved in his own reign

should be saved. Few have ever deserved such honour as Josiah, because he acted from pure love of God and his neighbour without carthly hope to bear him up.

First he gathered all the elders—namely, the chief authorities in every city and district—and caused the law to be read to them. It ought to have been read to them at every Feast of the Tabernacles, but it had been first kept out of sight, then forgotten, ever since his great-grandfather's time, so it was new to them.

He himself stood on what our Bible translates a pillar, but was really either the same platform or one like that where Solomon and Jehoshaphat had prayed, and where little Joash had been shown, the king's place in the court. Then he himself swore to the Covenant, and made them swear to keep it, the same oath taken by Israel at Mount Sinai. Then, when all knew the cause of his doings, he began another vigorous clearance of everything idolatrous or irregular. He had already overthrown all strange altars in the Temple; now he destroyed all the vessels which had belonged to their service. Probably before he had read the close directions given to Moses for the vessels of the sanctuary, he may have thought these might be kept, but he must have been growing in the understanding of the typical teaching of the law, for obedience always makes us grow in true wisdom.

The long list of his doings shows the horrible corruption under Manasseh and Amon. The men of Judah must have tried a fragment of every form of misbelief, for there were, besides the older false deities, Baal and Ashtoreth, remains of the Assyrian adoration of sun, moon, planets, and stars; and the keeping horses and chariots in imitation of the chariot and horses to which heathen fancy supposed the sun to be beholden for his daily course, was a custom of the Median and Persian fire-worshippers, with whom as foes to Assyria the Jews would naturally be allied. The valley of Hinnom on the south of Jerusalem had first been used by Ahaz for the horrid sacrifices of Moloch, whence the more faithful Jews called it Tophet-spitting or abomination. Thus Jeremiah spoke of it :

For the children of Judah have done evil in my sight, saith the LORD: they have set their abominations in the house which is called by my name, to pollute it.

And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart.

Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that it shall no more be called Tophet, nor the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter for they shall bury in Tophet, till there be no place.

And the carcases of this people shall be meat for the fowls of the heaven, and for the beasts of the earth; and none shall fray them away.

And Isaiah had already said (chap. xxx.):

For Tophet is ordained of old; yea, for the king it is prepared; he hath made it deep and large, the pile thereof is fire and much wood: the breath of the LORD, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it.

The name “Hinnom,” or as the Greeks made it, Gehenna, came afterwards to be used for hell, and the bodies of criminals were thrown into the valley. The Mount of Corruption was the Mount of Olives, and here we find that Josiah did what even Hezekiah had not darednamely, to destroy the four shrines, which were nearly as old as the Temple itself, made by Solomon. Perhaps it had been argued that there could be no harm in them, since Solomon had made them for foreigners. But of what corruption had they not been the seed?

But the most memorable of all the purifications was that which Josiah extended to Bethel, beyond his own kingdom. He had been called by name three hundred and fifty years before by the man of God from Judah to do this very work. Where human bones have been burnt no Eastern could ever again worship, so Josiah took the bones from the rocky graves around the old calf-shrine at Bethel, to burn them on the altar and defile it. The child had been born to the house of David, Josiah by name. remarked an inscription, and asked what it was. that it marked the grave of the disobedient prophet, he bade the sepulchre be unmolested, and thus the intention of the deceitful old prophet was fulfilled-his body was undisturbed because it lay in the same tomb. So wondrously does prophecy become fulfilled. But this exact fulfilment was a pledge that the coming doom would be fulfilled.

By and by he When he learnt

Yet even now he could not make his reformation complete ; though the high places were destroyed, their priests sullenly refused to come up to the Temple, but continued to keep separate from their brethren.