who have gone before. They want to
try experiments of their own with life, and shake off the shackles of
old moral laws and religious creeds, and be free to do and think as
they please, and put the Bible away on the shelf, and shove prayer
aside as a sort of worn-out heirloom, and have a merrier and better
time than the old folks knew. That was the course which Manasseh took,
just as headstrong and irreverent youths take it now.

Then followed that time which the Jewish people never speak of without
shame--a hideous reign of idolatry, and immorality, and injustice; an
awful period of persecution for the few righteous and God-fearing
people who were left when the prophets had been sought out and slain.
Isaiah sawn asunder, Habakkuk stoned to death, the faithful driven into
dens and caves of earth. It is of this time that we read in the
Epistle to the Hebrews, in that graphic account of the martyred
faithful: "_They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted,
were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and
goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented: of whom the world was
not worthy_" (xi. 37, 38). A few years of this sufficed to pull down
the whole fabric of religion which Hezekiah had so painfully and
patiently raised. For it is so easy to destroy; so easy for folly and
irreverence to pull down what wisdom and goodness have taken years in
building; so easy for a vicious and irreligious son to bring shame and
ruin upon the house which a godly father and mother have spent a
lifetime in rearing with honour; so easy, by a few rash acts, to
destroy the character and reputation which the prayers and training of
years have sought to establish. It is the easiest thing in the world
to undo and overturn; there is no cleverness and courage required for
destroying, the cleverness and courage are called for in building it up.

Manasseh succeeded to his heart's content. People followed him
greedily, except the steadfast few. And presently the prophets were
all gone, and the worship of the true God was nowhere practised except
in secret, and the sacred names were no more mentioned, and the land
gave itself up to all the foul rites and the shameful indulgences of
the heathen world, And then God's retribution came swiftly. Where the
rotting carcase was, there the eagles gathered together. These same
Babylonians whose ways the renegade Jews had so much admired and
imitated, swept down upon them wi