grown up over the place where he used to sit, and refreshed him by its shadow, had suddenly withered, and was dead. This had been the work of God, who intended out of it to draw materials for a mild rebuke of the wayward prophet, and to set before him in the most striking light his uncharitable frame of mind. "Doest thou well to be angry? Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle ?"* So true is it that the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercy is over all his works: the little infants who have not yet attained the use of their reason, the brute animals which are endowed with none, are all cared for, and remembered for good, and weighed in the balance of his righteous judgments: he is the great Husbandman, who has laboured for them, and has made them grow; they are the plants which he has planted, and he watches over them with a care proportioned to their usefulness, and to the place which they occupy among the beings of his creation. Not even a sparrow, as his Son hath told us, falleth to the ground unheeded by him; how much more, then, must he desire the eternal life and happiness of those who are of more value than many sparrows; of those to whom he has given capacities to know and love him, and, being conformed to the image of their holy Saviour, to rise like him from the vanquished grave, and rejoice in his salvation for ever in heaven! Jonah iv. 4, 9-11. CHAP. XXXII. KINGS OF JUDAH. JOASH-AMAZIAH-UZZIAH. HAVING brought down the history of the kingdom of Israel to the death of the last sovereign of the line of Jehu, to whom, in reward for his services against the house of Ahab, it was promised that his children of the fourth generation should sit upon its throne, it becomes necessary that we should now go back to the period when those services were performed, with a view to trace downwards from thence the course of events, which, during the reigns of himself and his descendants, were going on in the kingdom of Judah. Its king Ahaziah had been put to death at the same time with Jehoram, whom he was visiting in his sickness, by the command of Jehu; who, not content with this, slew likewise as many of his kinsfolk as fell within his power. But the heaviest blow inflicted upon the royal house of Judah at this time, was by one of its own members: Athaliah, the mother of the deceased king, who appears to have inherited all the wickedness of her parents, Ahab and Jezebel, regardless of every plea of kindred, and steeling her heart against the tender feelings of womanly and motherly affection, arose with the intention of destroying every remaining individual of the seed royal, and seating herself upon the vacant throne. One infant, however, was preserved by the providence of God, acting by means of two of his faithful servants, Jehoiada the high priest, and his wife Jehosheba, and was concealed among the buildings of the temple for six years from the cruelty of Athaliah. At the end of that time, Jehoiada, having first privately arranged the method of proceeding with some of the chiefs of the Levites and of the army, whom he judged fit to be entrusted with his secret, brought forth the boy Joash into the temple, and there publicly proclaimed him king. Athaliah learning it, hastened to the place, to put down, if possible, the conspiracy: but she soon found that her usurped authority was departed from her, and that the rightful heir to the throne of Judah was joyfully accepted by the people. She reaped accordingly the just reward of her deeds, being hurried forth from the holy place, and put to a speedy death. She seems during her six years' reign to have devoted herself to the worship of Baal, and to have caused God's temple to be robbed of its most valuable possessions, to ornament and enrich the idol. This the good Jehoiada was compelled to suffer for a time, in the hope of one day obtaining a most ample reparation and now, the guardianship of Joash being naturally his duty, he laboured to instill into the mind of the young king a proper reverence for the true religion, and had the satisfaction of observing, that the good seed had been sown by him in a soil which promised to bring forth abundant fruit. Into so great a degree of supineness, however, and neglect of holy things, had the nation sunk during the prevalence of idolatry, that the king's pious design for the complete repair of the house of God, appears to have been scarcely, if at all, seconded by his people, or even by those who ought to have been the foremost in promoting so good a work, the priests and Levites. Unwillingness to go out of their way to put themselves to trouble, or to consider how much the thing to be done will tend to their eternal benefit, is the constant bar to all virtuous exertion among all classes and degrees of men. In great emergencies it is not enough that men should think rightly, they must act rightly too. Joash "was minded" 2 Chron. xxiv. 4. Ꮓ that the house of God should be repaired, and yet for three-and-twenty years nothing was done, because he did not show that zeal and activity in enforcing his wishes, which might have set his subjects to work. When at last, his patience being exhausted, he took the direction of the matter into his own hands, the necessary contributions soon came in, and the work was executed speedily and well. Though the men of Judah had shown indolence in beginning this operation, it is due to them to remark another quality which they displayed in carrying it on, and that a precious one, namely, honesty. The persons who had the charge of the money, it is said, "reckoned not with the men into whose hands they delivered it to be bestowed on workmen; for they dealt faithfully."* The many injunctions contained in the law of Moses to be true and just in all their dealings had produced their desired effect upon these Jewish builders: shall not the still higher motives of our better covenant produce a like effect on us, in every matter which we put our hands unto to do? Shall we ever take advantage of the ignorance or the inexperience of our neighbour, to obtain from him any thing which is not ours by right? Shall our rejoicing be ever other than this, the testimony of our conscience, that "with simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the world?"+ Although in repairing the Lord's house, the high priest had not altogether shown that zeal and energy which might have been expected from so eminent a person, yet certain it is, that he did good service to his nation, by regulating and controlling, so long as he lived, the mind of the king, who, we are told, "did that which was right in the sight of the Lord all the days of Jehoiada."* After his death, we are presented with a far different and most distressing picture we see Joash yielding to the treacherous persuasions of his princes, quitting the worship of the true God, and serving groves and idols; we see him, like a tyrant, resenting the freedom of Zechariah in reproving him for this, though he spoke by immediate inspiration from above, and causing him to be put to a cruel death by stoning, between the temple and the altar: thus polluting the very building he had repaired for God with the blood of his chosen servant, thus showing the blackest ingratitude towards the man who had saved him in his infancy from the murderer's sword, by sacrificing his son to the rash impulse of his unrighteous anger. 66 The Lord look upon it, and require it," were the last words of the dying martyr: the Lord did look upon it, and did require it. The Syrian army, which came up at the end of the year, and, small though it was, overcame the whole power of Judah, and laid a heavy tribute on Jerusalem, is said, by the sacred writer, in so doing, "to have executed judgment upon Joash,"§ and when they were departed from him, leaving him in great diseases, his own servants conspired against him, for the blood of the son of Jehoiada the priest, and slew him on his bed, and he died. It has been observed also, that from the time of this murder of Zechariah, the kingdom of Judah began to show symptoms of weakness, and to decline; being frequently overrun by foreign invaders, until the days arrived of its complete subjection by a people of whom as yet they had not heard. The conspiracy against Joash prevailed so far as to take his life, but not so as to prevent his son Amaziah from succeeding • 2 Chron. xxiv. 2. ↑ Ver. 22. + Ver. 18. |