LECTURE IV. JOASH; OR, INGRATITUDE. 2 CHRON. xxiv. 20-22. (1) And the Spirit of God came upon Zechariah the son of Jehoiada the priest, which stood above the people, and said unto them, Thus saith God, Why transgress ye the commandments of the Lord that ye cannot prosper? because ye have forsaken the Lord He hath also forsaken you. And they conspired against him, and stoned him with stones at the commandment of the king in the court of the house of the Lord. Thus Joash the king remembered not the kindness which Jehoiada his father had done to him, but slew his son. when he died, he said, The Lord look upon it and require it. And "SOME vices are such as nature smiles upon, though frowned at by divine justice: others are such, as even nature itself abhors; such is that of ingratitude, which therefore carries so much more detestation from God, as it is more odious even to them who have blotted : 1 With this Lecture the following chapters should be read :2 Kings xi. xii. ; 2 Chron. xxii. 10—12. xxiii. xxiv. out the image of God." Thus writes Bishop Hall, in his Contemplations on the Life of Joash, whose career we are to sketch to-day. If his words needed any confirmation it would be found in the following fact: In reading the life of the Patriarch Joseph, there is no circumstance in the ill-treatment which that innocent man received, which makes even the mere man of the world more indignant than this. There was a certain servant of Pharaoh, who was cheered by Joseph when in prison, and whose dreams were interpreted by Joseph for him. The diviner asked nothing in return, save that "when it should be well with him," whom he had served, "he would think of him and shew kindness to him," and "make mention of him to Pharaoh, and bring him out of the dungeon." The servant was restored to his office, "yet he did not remember Joseph, but forgat him." Now, I say, the very man of the world excuses Joseph's brethren their envy, and the wife of Potiphar her false accusation, and Potiphar himself the hasty action of his jealousy; he cannot excuse that servant of Pharaoh his unworthy forgetfulness of his benefactor. Or, to take an instance from our own national history :— He can forgive King Charles the Second his frivolity, his folly, his debauchery, his becoming a pensioner of France, and his disappointment of the hopes of the English nation; he cannot forgive him his heartless neglect of those who had shed their blood and forfeited their possessions for him, and whom he left to pine in poverty. Truly our great dramatic poet did but express the universal sentiment when he made Amiens sing, "Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, As benefits forgot: Though thou the waters warp Thy sting is not so sharp As friend remembered not." 1 But let us come more closely to our subject, which I have entitled JOASH; OR, INGRATITUDE. It will be our duty first to trace this king's biography, and then to advert to the lessons which it is peculiarly calculated to enforce. The very cradle of Joash was encompassed with bloodshed and sorrow. He was the son of Ahaziah, King of Judah, and was not merely the only one of that king's sons who escaped massacre at the hands of his usurping grandmother, Athaliah, but almost the only direct heir of David through Solomon. Jehoram, his grandfather, had killed all his own brethren as if in judicial requital, all Jehoram's sons except Ahaziah had been cut off in an invasion of the Philistines and Arabians; Ahaziah himself, and his other male relations, who are in scripture called 1 As you Like it, act ii. sc. 7. his brethren (2 Kings x. 3) or the sons of his brethren (2 Chr. xxii. 8), fell beneath the sword of Jehu. Within little more than a year, two kings had died, Jehoram by a painful disease, the divine punishment for his sins, Ahaziah, by actual violence. At this crisis a vigorous hand was required to guide the falling state. Such a hand was that of Athaliah, the wife of Jehoram, and mother of the deceased king -but it was vigorous only in wickedness, and she employed it for the destruction of her house, instead of for its sustentation. With a remorseless and unscrupulous spirit not unbecoming the daughter of Jezebel, (you will remember how that queen contrived the death of Naboth), no sooner had Athaliah heard of Ahaziah's death, than, in the words of the sacred historian," she rose and destroyed all the seed royal." With a ferocity scarcely equalled by our great tragedian's conception of the character of Lady Macbeth, she removed from the path of her ambition, so at least she believed, all her grandsons, and occupied for six long years the thus vacant throne of Judah. But God still remembered His promise to the line of David, and preserved it from utter extinction. The unwomanly one was foiled by a woman. happened (so men speak) that Jehosheba (called Jehoshabeath in Chronicles) the sister of Ahaziah was married to the priest Jehoiada, a man already of venerable age and character, and likely, if any one was, to resist the storm which had overwhelmed the It nation. Even he appears to have been powerless at the moment, so far as open action was concerned. But Jehosheba succeeded in rescuing from the general slaughter one of her young nephews, an infant scarcely a year old, and him, together with his nurse, she concealed in one of the chambers of the Temple, until happier times should come, and the king should enjoy his own again. That child was Joash. For six years, we are told, he was tended by his gentle guardians, who, doubtless, so far as he was able to learn, instructed him in the divine ways, held the little hands in prayer, and, taught the weak knees their kneeling. But in the seventh year "Jehoiada strengthened himself," and, in combination with the chiefs of the army and the mass of the Levitical tribe, brought about a successful revolution. By choosing the sabbath as the day of the movement, and retaining those of the Course whose turn it was to retire from its allotted service, he doubled the number of the official forces of the Temple. A large body of men, not of the sacred order, for whom weapons were furnished from the armoury which since David's time had been established within the sacred precincts, was stationed in the courts, and at other important positions. All things are thus in readiness for the inauguration of the youthful king. At length he is brought forth from his concealment, and is presented to his assembled subjects. None of them save the leaders of the insurrection had ever before |