But God answered him, saying:
Do not say, "I am only a youth";
For to all to whom I shall send thee, thou shalt go,
And whatever I command thee, thou shalt speak.
Be not afraid of them,
For I am with thee to deliver thee.
And Jeremiah tells us that God, having stretched out His hand toward him and touched his lips to purify them, spoke to him further:—
Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth;
See, I have set thee this day over the nations and kingdoms,
To tear up, to break down and to destroy, to build up and to plant.
Now that God had selected him for a distinct and set purpose in life, no matter how incapable and unworthy he deemed himself, and being assured of His help and protection, Jeremiah walked slowly homeward. For the first time he noticed that the sun had risen big and bright and warm. His mind was calm and at rest, but his heart was filled with woe because of what the future held out for him and his people.
CHAPTER IV.
The Seething Caldron.
An old Hebrew proverb says, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and even when he is old he shall not depart from it." If one should say that the man who wrote this proverb must have thought of King Josiah, the statement could not be entirely denied. For the religious training he received at the hands of Zephaniah and Hilkiah soon showed itself in the way he began to revolutionize the religious life of Judah.
When he was only eighteen years old he began to uproot the heathen worship that had been reintroduced by his grandfather, after the death of Hezekiah and Isaiah. His aim was to cleanse the land entirely of the foreign altars and sanctuaries that Manasseh had erected to the gods of Babylonia and Assyria.
In the twelfth year of his reign, that is, in the year 627, the old chronicler tells us, Josiah