and wise adviser of his father, he would have found it difficult, in such a station and at such a period of life, to tread the path of virtue; but it is doubtful whether Isaiah survived until Manasseh began to reign. The Jews, indeed, have a tradition that he was put to death by order of the ungodly king; and many suppose the manner of his execution is alluded to in the epistle to the Hebrews, where some of the ancient martyrs are said to have been sawn asunder."

For many years the disposition to apostasy had been gaining strength in the kingdom of Judah. Partially checked by the energy and influence of Hezekiah, it burst forth with fresh force at his death. The young are apt to fall in with the current of feeling around them, and it is no wonder that Manasseh was not able or disposed to stem the ebbing tide.

The laxity of idolatry, too, is more grateful to the natural heart than the strict requisitions of the divine law. Hence the tempters of the young prince would find it an easier task to persuade him to favor its reëstablishment.

The very abundance which Hezekiah laid up, that his son might be liberal in the service of Jehovah and accomplish public objects for the benefit of the kingdom, became the means of corrupting him, and was squandered in extending the grossest idolatry. The exhausted treasury of Ahaz might

have been a greater blessing to Manasseh than the overflowing riches inherited from his father. If he had been familiar with privations in childhood, perhaps he would not in later years have been bound in fetters, and pined in the solitude of a Babylonian prison.

The young are prone to regard with envy their companions who are trained in ease and luxury. They are often dissatisfied with their own humble lot, and murmur because poverty compels them to abstain from indulgences which wealth allows to others. How much better is it, in the morning of life, to bear hardships which prepare for usefulness and success, than to grow up effeminate and useless amid splendor that will soon vanish, leaving one a burden to himself and to the world.

CHAPTER XIV.

APOSTASY OF MANASSEH.

WHEN persons whose childhood was nurtured in the bosom of a well-ordered family break away from restraint, they often become peculiarly reckless and vile. They seem to fear lest it should be thought that some remnant of former conscientiousness, and some slight respect for religion and parental counsels, still linger in their minds. Το make it evident that they have cast off all the trammels of a pious education, and that none are more hardened and daring in sin, they rush into excesses which even the profligate shudder to commit. As a just punishment, too, God sometimes gives them over to "strong delusion" and crimes of the deepest dye.

So it seems to have been in the case of Manasseh. When he built again the high places which his father had caused to be destroyed," if he had any misgivings they may have been quieted by the specious plea that the people demanded greater facilities for worshipping the God of Israel. He may have tried to believe the act would be popular without opening the way to idolatry. These high places were thrown down many years before his birth; and even while knowing that their exist

ence was forbidden by the law of Moses, he may not have been fully aware of their close connection with the service of false deities. But tampering with his conscience he had entered into the path of transgression, and we are not surprised at his progress in guilt. "He reared up altars for Baal, and made a grove, as did Ahab king of Israel, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them."

The worship of Baal was common among the nations that bordered on Palestine. Altars for his service were erected in groves and upon high places, and on the terraces of houses. Human victims were often offered at his shrine; the rites attending his worship were too obscene, and the deeds too disgusting, for description. As early as the days of the Judges, Gideon was ordered to tear down the altar of Baal on which his father had been-accustomed to offer sacrifice, and to build upon the top of the rock where it stood, an altar to the Lord. At a later period, the worship of this god was introduced into the kingdom of Israel by Ahab, who married Jezebel, a daughter of the king of Tyre. Not long after, it was introduced into Judah, in consequence of the marriage of a daughter of Ahab with the son of Jehoshaphat. Though several times suppressed in the latter kingdom, it still found advocates among the people of that corrupt

age.

Probably some were alive in Jerusalem who re

membered the "molten images of Baalim" in the days of Ahaz, and their destruction by Hezekiah. They remembered too the goodly scenes when the devout monarch went up, with his destined successor, to offer sacrifices on the altar of Jehovah. How sad the change, when this same degenerate son, as if prouder of his descent from Ahab than from David, poured contempt on his father's example and on his own early education, by bowing down before the cruel altar of Baal, and prostituting the whole regal power to encourage the licentious worship!

Not content with open apostasy from the covenant God of the nation, Manasseh "built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord." And as if even this was not enough, as if he was determined to dive to the very depths of impiety, "he set a graven image of the grove that he made, in the house of which the Lord said to David, and to Solomon his son, In this house, and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, will I put my name for ever." This "image of the grove," or, as many suppose, of the goddess Astarte, seems to have been erected in the temple itself-perhaps in the holy of holies, where God manifested his presence visibly between the cherubim, over the mercy-seat. The act, then, was like turning Jehovah out of his own house, and inducting this licentious heathen goddess into his