oped its
latent forces. A new era opened. The abominations of religion in former
times became the exceptions rather than the rule, and gradually
disappeared from society. After Jeremiah we hear no more of impurities
hiding under the altar, or of savage superstition seeking to please
Jehovah by outraging the holiest instincts of human nature. Jehovah became
the name for a conception of Deity so spiritual, so holy, that henceforth
the student of Israel's history should substitute--God.

It is a most interesting study to place these great prophets in their
chronological order, and trace the development of this ethical religion.
As one after another they come upon the stage of action they take up the
great words of their masters and repeat them in their own way; take up the
great tasks of their predecessors and carry them on toward completion;
leading religion into an ever deepening spirituality. The prophets of the
eighth century group around Isaiah, under whose influence Hezekiah
attempted a partial reformation of the popular religion. The prophets of
the seventh century group around Jeremiah, the master-spirit in the more
thorough reformation carried out under Josiah. This second reformation
achieved an institutional organization of ethical religion, that came just
in time to create a body capable of holding the people together in loyalty
to the true God, amid the break up of the nation.

V.

_The Epoch of the Exile:_ B.C. 586-536.

The conquest of the two sister kingdoms, with the carrying away of the
influential portion of the people into exile, was a blessing in disguise.
Israel was taken out of its petty provincialisms, its race insularity, and
placed amid one of the most highly cultivated civilizations of the
ancient world. The fertile plain of Mesopotamia had been from immemorial
antiquity the seat of great enterprises. Civilization had developed there
when surrounding peoples had not emerged from semi-barbarism. Like the
Troy beneath Troy in the Ilium ruins, we find here successive
civilizations resting each upon the debris of an earlier order. The
descriptions of ancient historians, together with the explorations of late
years, make very vivid the scenes amid which the captive Israelites
walked.

Babylon was a city which might well astonish and captivate strangers. It
was of immense size, being surrounded by a wall forty, or possibly sixty,
miles in circumference. This wall was nearly three hundred