But who can worship a spirit—invisible, impalpable, far away, near at hand, without a name, without a shape which we can verify and say: “It comes to thus much, and this is the weight and this is the value of it?”
It requires a mind of some mental strength to stand up, take hold of the brazen serpent and call it “Nehushtan”—a contemptuous term, meaning a piece of brass; dead brass, useless and worthless brass, a relic but not a God.
Let us give credit to the men who have been bold—religiously intrepid—in the midst of circumstances of a most discouraging and overbearing kind. They are the men to whom we owe our present privileges. We have the Bible in our mother tongue because they were valiant. Not a church would have been built today in which men could assemble with a sense of freedom—sweet, joyous liberty—but for the Hezekiahs and others who went forth and, at great cost and great peril, destroyed things evil and black, by the power of God’s almightiness—overthrew them, and set up a better kingdom.
What was the root of Hezekiah’s character? At present we have seen phenomena of a gracious kind; we like what we have seen of this man.
“He trusted in the Lord God of Israel; so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah nor any that were before him. For he clave to the Lord, and departed not from following Him, but kept His commandments, which the Lord commanded Moses.”
At length a man arose who said: “I will do God’s will, God helping me. I will not only read the commandments, but I will incarnate them. I will not only speak religious words, but live a religious life.”
Tender and yet emphatic are the words: “He trusted,” “he clave,” “he kept.”
He “trusted”—that is to say, he had no other trust. His religion was not a convenience, one thing among many things, an occasional exercise in piety; but it was a perpetual confidence, the one trust, the all-centralizing and all-ruling fact.
Then he “clave”—he kept close to. He would not allow any thing to come between his hand and the God he seized. The hand could do nothing except cleave to God and what was possible through that cleaving; and much is possible of a helpful and beneficent kind.
He “kept the commandments”—counted them one by one; examined himself in them; took himself daily to task about the whole ten. We live an off-hand life.