Tracts for the Christian Seasons.

THIRTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.

II. JOSIAH.

AMONG other indisputable evidences of

the truthfulness and impartiality of the sacred writers, one of the most remarkable is the stern simplicity of the language in which they record the sins and errors, the faults and foibles, it may be, of those who might be presumed to be their favourite characters. None of whatever rank or station are spared. No amount of commendation at one period of life is allowed to condone the blameworthy actions of another. Utterly indifferent to all inferences that may be drawn from the record to the prejudice of the most eminent of God's saints, or the disparagement of the grace that was in them, the dark blot is entered on the living page of inspiration for all time; there to

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be found in that great and terrible day of the Lord, when the subjects of these memoirs shall stand before the great white throne, and the books shall be opened, and the dead shall be judged out of those things which are written in the books according to their works. It is alike with all; with patriarchs, prophets, priests, and kings; with Moses, "the man of God;" with David, the "man after God's own heart;" with Solomon, the wisest of men. Even of those three eminent saints, Noah, Daniel, and Job, selected by God Himself as the three whose intercession was most prevailing with Him; how far, even according to our weak and partial judgment, did the first and last fall short of the standard of perfection, and what marvellous condescension to human infirmities does it shew, that God should graciously accept such defective obedience.

The study of Josiah's character is recommended to us, then, by this consideration; that he is one of the very few of the worthies of the Old Testament in whose actions we can discover nothing amiss. With the single a Rev. xx. 11, 12. Ezek. xiv. 14, 16, 18, 20.

exception of his opposition to Pharaoh Necho, on the moral aspect of which Holy Scripture pronounces no judgment, and which may therefore have been even meritorious, there is no other fact recorded of him which is even questionable. His is, indeed, one of the most engaging of all Scripture characters, and throws a warm and smiling glow of autumn sunshine over the evening of Judah's day, before it sets in the long dark night of the Babylonish captivity.

Born of an idolatrous father, who had been murdered in his own house after a short reign of two years, his succession was secured only after a faction fight, which had resulted in the death of the conspirators; and thus at the early age of eight years he was raised to a blood-stained throne already doomed to destruction, by reason of the sins of his grandfather Manasseh.

Too young as yet to have any intelligent knowledge of the Divine will, he seems to have been one of those gracious souls in whom, as in Abijah the son of Jeroboam, the Lord discerns, even in their earliest

infancy, some good thing." Possibly, too, the early training of the penitent Manasseh, on whose knees he was brought up until he was six years of age, may not have been without its effect in producing upon his impressible nature a sense of awful reverence, such as may be not unfrequently witnessed even at that early age, the hopeful harbinger of deep religious feeling in after years and it was very probably by the provident care of the aged penitent that the early years of his grandchild were guarded from the evil influences which might have been expected to surround the throne of the successor of Amon.

In any case, the brief career of that ungodly prince had not altogether obliterated the traditions of the better period of Manasseh's reign; and the long minority of the young Josiah was doubtless watched with the deepest interest and most anxious solicitude by "all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem."

Nor were their prayers in vain: "For in the eighth year of his reign, while he was 1 Kings xiv. 13.

yet young, he began to seek after the God of David his father and in the twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem from the high places, and the groves, and the carved images, and the molten images ." What a sermon does that one verse contain, how fraught with instruction to Christian boyhood just emerging into youth and manhood! There is perhaps no period in the life of man so critical as that between sixteen and twenty; none certainly which has so much to do with the formation of character, and the determination of the career for good or evil. It is the age of virtual emancipation from the control of tutors and governors,—however the law may continue that guardianship one year longer,-in which the mild constraint of home influences is being gradually weakened, and the force of the animal passions within, and the seductions of the glittering world without, are asserting their claim to dominion.

Then, there is no age to which human judgment is so indulgent, so ready with its excuses for its freaks and fancies, with

2 Chron. xxxiv. 3.