So the vital lessons fall—on the right hand, on the left, and around about us. Shame be to us if, amid this shower of monition and encouragement and stimulus, we be deaf and dumb and blind, unfeeling, unresponsive.
Hezekiah will now go to work and prove himself to be an energetic reformer.
“He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made; for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it; and he called it Nehustan.”
He must have been a strong man. He had no colleague, no ally; no one to say to him: “Be brave, be true.” He went straight against the hardest wall that ever was built by the stubbornness and perversity of man.
It is not easy to begin life by a destructive process of reformation. Who would not rather plant a tree than throw down a wall? Who would not rather plant flowers and enjoy their beauty and fragrance than give himself the severe toil and the incessant trouble of destroying corrupt and evil institutions?
Whoever attempts this kind of destructive work, or even a constructive work which involves preliminary destructiveness, will have a hard time of it. Criticism will be very sharp, and selfishness will be developed in an extraordinary degree.
If a man be more than politician—if he be a real born statesman, looking at whole empires at once and not at mere parishes, and if in his thought and purpose he should base his whole policy upon fundamental right—he will not have an easy life of it, even in a Christian country. In proportion as he bases his whole policy on righteousness, temperance and judgment to come, he will be pelted with hard names and struck at with unfriendly hands.
This holds good in all departments of life, in all great reformations, in all assaults made upon ignorance, selfishness, tyranny and wrong of every name.
The children of Israel always seemed to live a foolish life. They were the veriest children—so, at least, we would say but for fear of branding sweet children with an evil stigma.
They were infantile, weak, treacherous to themselves, uncertain at every point—and so, having kept the brazen serpent, they burned incense to it. They liked a visible God. When the calf appealed to their religious feelings they danced around it as if at last they had found a deity.