JOSIAH.

CHAPTER XXII.

AFTER the disastrous reign of Manasseh we have here the opening reign of a young but truly excellent and exemplary prince: Josiah at the time he began to reign we are told was only eight years of age; an age too young for the arduous responsibilities of a throne, and yet not too young for God to select him and make him a great blessing to the realm. It is said of this young prince, that as he grew up to manhood he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord; that is, as a ruler; he also walked in all the way of David his father. He selected the good old paths trodden by the best and most illustrious of mankind; and turned not aside to the right hand nor to the left, either in obedience to interest, or to avarice, or to vain-glory, or to the popular shout, or to any influence brought to bear upon one who had chosen his path, the path that God had opened up, in which it was his duty as it was his interest to walk.

In the eighteenth year of the reign of king Josiah, when he must therefore have been six-and-twenty years of age, the king sent Shaphan the son of Azaliah, theson of Meshullam, the scribe, to the house of the Lord, saying, Go and sum up the silver which has been collected, which was to pay the tradesmen, the masons, the carpenters, and builders who were to restore God's ancient but now ruined temple, and to bring it to pass that the glory of the latter house should be greater

than the glory of the former. They did so, and found all to be perfectly correct, and received the voucher, and signed it as the auditors as a just and honest reckoning.

After this they found out the book of the law. Now mark you, God's word, supposed here to be the Pentateuch, or the five books of Moses, had become at least a forgotten and a very extensively neglected book. The copy they discovered it is understood was the original autograph of Moses himself; and that book was read before the king; and the result was, when he contrasted facts as they were with facts as they ought to be; when he read what God required and what man had returned, he was overwhelmed with grief, and saw that they had become obnoxious to the severest judgments of a just and holy God. The discovery of a neglected Bible was the commencement of the restoration of the temple and a great reformation in the days of Josiah ; and so three hundred years ago it was Martin Luther's discovery of a Bible in his convent overlaid with dust, unopened by monk, or priest, or prelate, in which he began to read out of curiosity, but discovered such a portrait of man, and such a clear definition of God's holy law, as overwhelmed him with a sense of sin and presentiment of ruin, and made him the most depressed and the most miserable of men-that awoke the Reformation. Some may recollect that in this state of deep depression and distress Luther rushed first of all to penance; hé made his confession every day; he scourged himself after the manner of the monks of these days, and of the monks professing to do the same in the present time; but still he found no peace. He then fled

to Staupitz, the Vicar-general of the diocese in which he was, and told him his whole story; what he had discovered in the Bible, what the result was upon his own heart; and asked him what he could do to get peace. Staupitz shewed that he in secret had read the Bible, though not that copy; and he alone of all the inmates of the convent seemed to know what the gospel was. He told Martin Luther that Jesus Christ died for sinners. But Luther said, I am so great a sinner, so miserable a sinner, so utterly guilty. The beautiful remark of Staupitz was, "If Martin Luther, you be merely an imaginary sinner, I can only tell you of an imaginary Saviour; but if you be in very deed literally a sinner, I have to tell you of literally a Saviour sufficient for you;" and Luther made the remark that he got peace from the simple words of Staupitz such as he had never received or felt in all the previous part of his life. Having discovered the Bible, and found the way to peace through the knowledge of it, he read it more and more; and that monk reading that Latin Bible in his convent was the greatest force at the moment in Christendom; he was about to move a lever that would uproot the gnarled and rooted heresies of ages, and to launch upon the winds words that would sound like cannon shot in the Vatican; and to awaken a knowledge of that blessed Gospel which has made England what it is, which raised Germany from the dead; which it is the effort of priests, and cardinals, and popes, and monks, and traitors within the Church and open transgressors without it to undo and to destroy; but I trust we can say of it what the great reformer Ridley said to his brother Latimer as they were con

sumed amid the flames at the stake, "Be of good cheer, brother Latimer; for we shall this day light such a candle in England as by God's grace never shall be put out."

THE ROYAL REFORMER.

CHAPTER XXIII.

LET us notice here what were the effects of a shut, or we may call it here a lost Bible in the Church and nation of Israel. You see by what Josiah destroyed, what abominations they had plunged into, what hideous idols they had set up upon every hill and consecrated in every grove; what flagrant immoralities and crimes stained both priests and people; and all, mark you, traceable as far as we can trace it to an outward and visible cause-that cause that they had lost their Bibles. It is righteousness that exalteth a nation; it is sin that is the ruin of a people.

Under some such feeling as this, this good king summoned all the priests, even the true priests, and the prophets, and the people; and though it would be denounced perhaps by some as a grossly Erastian act, yet it was a very good one, a very right one, and a very expedient one, he made all the priests and all the people meet together; and he himself, that there might be no deception, read all the words of the book of the covenant which was found in the house of the Lord;

and he stood by a pillar, and vowed to walk after the Lord; and made all the people covenant and promise to do so with him. What a noble act was that in the history of Josiah; its fruits were reaped after many days; and the blessings that an open Bible poured, like sunshine on the land, his children and their children's children witnessed for many generations. In fact, this was the great reformation in the ancient Church corresponding to the great Reformation 300 years ago in the modern or the Christian church; and the discovery of a Bible was the cause of the one, just as the discovery of a Bible in a convent by Martin Luther, was the chief moving cause of the other.

We then read what Josiah did to all the idol temples; he destroyed them; and all the images he ground to powder, desecrated, and filled their places with the bones of men. And the priests that belonged to Aaron who had been guilty of idolatry he expelled, allowed them no longer to officiate, as they had no longer any claim to do so, from their apostasy and great sins. "The altars also 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 he slew all the priests of the high places upon the altars, and burned men's bones upon them, and returned to Jerusalem." Now, so far the precedent for us ceases. This was a theocracy; God was the king of the Jewish nation; and in that day idolatry was not simply a religious offence, it was political treason; because God himself being ruler, and showing that he was so by visible miracles and evidences, to apostatize