elves to the frequenters of Jehovah's house.[44] Below the holy
city, King Manasseh reared the image of Moloch, and human sacrifices were
offered to placate the wrath of the Power which they ignorantly
worshipped.

Where religion was so largely a worship of the physical powers of nature,
the life of the people would of necessity show an undeveloped ethical
state. Drunkenness and debauchery continued common, the marriage bond was
very elastic in the polite society of the capital, and selfishness
haughtily overrode all considerations of _meum_ and _tuum_ in the mad
chase of wealth.

Unsatisfactory as the morals of the influential classes of society were,
there is, however, no indication of any such "ooze and thaw of wrong" as
indicated a moribund condition in the nation.

We must not make the mistake, so common concerning reformers, and regard
the evils that were justly lashed by the prophets as prevailing throughout
society. Had this been the case, where would the ethical forces of a new
and higher life have risen? Single preachers of social righteousness might
have arisen, like Savonarola in Florence, under such conditions, but no
general reform could have developed. The steady growth of the movement
initiated by the great prophets shows that it sprang from no individuals,
but from society; that they merely led the reserve forces of virtue in the
nation. The heart of the nation was doubtless sound, and growing more
vigorously virtuous. Professor Thorold Rogers reminds us that the period
when a great outcry is heard against any social evil, is not that wherein
the evil is at its height, for then there would probably be no power of
protest, but rather that in which the recuperative forces of society are
rallying to throw off the disorder from the body politic. Morality was in
advance of religion at this time in Israel, and this interprets the
movement which ensued to place religion in its proper position at the head
of the march of progress.

It was amid such a state of affairs that the great prophets appeared upon
the stage of action, calling the nation to a higher religion. They were
not so much philosophers, reasoning out a lofty intellectual conception of
God, as preachers of righteousness, vitalizing from the moral nature the
sense of the purity and justice of the Power in whom men lived and moved
and had their being They turned the light of the inward law upon God, and
revealed Him as its author. They led Virtue