JOSIAH'S GOOD REIGN.

(2 Chron. xxxiv:1-13.)

II. The Heart of the Lesson.

The beautiful sequence in verse 3, opens to us the heart of this lesson. A young man of sixteen—for maturity comes early to kings—Josiah ''began to seek after the God of David his father; and in the twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem." The result and the cause have the inevitability of a law of nature. Whoever, king or peasant, begins to seek after God, and keeps it up for years, as Josiah did, will begin to do things. God fills the seeking soul with Himself, and the God-possessed soul cannot rest in a world packed with evil. "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," said Christ.

Josiah begins right. "In the beginning God," is the sublime opening sentence of holy writ; and in the final sifting it will be found that all great work for humanity began, not with humanity but with God.

As the young king went on seeking after the God of David his father, and as each discovery in the shoreless ocean of the Infinite One's wisdom, love and power stimulated him to yet closer, deeper seeking, he began to see that only God counts, only God matters; and that the quality of sin which makes it horrible and intolerable is that it insults and grieves God.

Josiah may well have pondered a great saying of his ancestor David in that wonderful penitential psalm, the cry of a heart broken by the revelation of its own evil; ''against Thee, Thee only have I sinned." What! had he not sinned against his good soldier Uriah and against his sister woman Bathsheba? Oh, yes—in a secondary sense, but the essence of his sin was that in corrupting Bathsheba, and in compassing the murder of Uriah, he had dared to lift his hand against a man and a woman whom God had made.

And in his four years' quest of the God of David he would inevitably come to see why idolatry is the first and greatest of sins just because it displaces God from the soul and usurps His throne in heart and life.

Our world, like Josiah's Jerusalem, is full of high places and altars of Baalim, and there is sore need that one arise with power to cast them down and break them in pieces. Covetousness is idolatry, and never was Mammon so worshipped as now, and never did the altars of Baalim in Jerusalem smoke with such sacrifices as are cast on Mammon's altars in America. The current revelations tell the awful tale. Honor, virtue, happiness, benevolence, love and life are the sacrifices freely offered to that Mammon whom Milton called, ''The least erected fiend that fell."

And many friends of humanity perceive this, and there

is much casting about for the remedy. Doubtless in Jerusalem many true lovers of God mourned the all but universal apostasy around them, and considered how Judah and Jerusalem might be purged—and all the time a young man in Jerusalem was thinking about God, and seeking God. And when God had grown so great to him that all life had significance because of its relation to God, and all human affairs were of importance because humanity is God's—then he saw the high places and the altars of Baalim and smote them down.

The Puritans, despite their curious and grotesque travesty of Christianity, had a great conception of God in His holiness and majesty, and because they were so filled with Him, the high places of evil in England went down.

The great need to-day is to seek after God.