ld, and
especially the North, was (to use Jeremiah's word) _boiling_ with events
and possibilities of which God alone knew the end. Prophets had been
produced in Israel from like conditions in the previous century, and now
after a silence of nigh seventy years, prophets were again to appear:
Zephaniah, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Jeremiah.

For these northern omens conspired with others, ethical and therefore more
articulate, within Judah herself. It was two generations since Isaiah and
Hezekiah had died, and with them the human possibilities of reform. For
nearly fifty years Manasseh had opposed the pure religion of the prophets
of the eighth century, by persecution, by the introduction of foreign and
sensual cults, and especially by reviving in the name of Israel's God(110)
the ancient sacrifice of children, in order to propitiate His anger. Thus
it appears that the happier interests of religion--family feasts, pieties
of seed-time and harvest, gratitude for light, fountains and rain, and for
good fortune--were scattered among a host both of local and of foreign
deities; while for the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Moses and
Isaiah, the most horrible of superstitious rites were reserved, as if all
that His people could expect of Him was the abatement of a jealous and
hungry wrath.

A few voices crying through the night had indeed reminded Judah of what He
was and what He required. _He hath showed thee, O man, __ what is good;
and what doth the Lord require but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk
humbly with thy God._(111) At last with the overthrow of Manasseh's
successor, Amon, signs of a dawn appeared. The child of eight years who
was heir to the throne was secured, perhaps through his mother's
influence, by a party in Court and Temple that had kept loyal to the
higher faith; and the people, probably weary of the fanatic extravagance
of Manasseh, were content to have it so.

The young King Josiah, who to the end was to prove himself worthy of his
training, and the boy in the priest's home at Anathoth were of an age: a
fact not to be omitted from any estimate of the influences which moulded
Jeremiah in his youth. But no trace of this appears in what he has left
us; as a boy he may never have seen the King, and to the close of Josiah's
reign he seems to have remained too obscure to be noticed by his monarch;
yet at the last he has only good to say of Josiah:--

Did he not eat and drink,
And do judgment a