nd justice?
The cause of the poor and the needy he judged--
Then was it well.(112)

Attempts at reform were made soon after Josiah's accession,(113) but
little was achieved, and that little only in the capital and its Temple.
In the latter for four hundred years no deity of the land had been
worshipped save Yahweh, and He in no material form. It would be easy to
remove from the streets of Jerusalem any recently introduced Baals and
possibly, as Assyria's sovereignty relaxed, the worship of the Host of
Heaven. But beyond Jerusalem the task was more difficult. Every village
had the shrine of a deity before the God of Israel came to the land. The
names of these local Baalim, or Lords, had mostly vanished,(114) and
Israel claimed the rural sanctuaries for Yahweh. But the old rites, with
the old conceptions of deity attached to them, seem to have been
transferred to Him by the ignorant worshippers, till instead of one
Yahweh--one Lord--unique in character and in power, there were as many as
there had been Baalim, and they bore the same inferior and sometimes
repulsive characters. We cannot exaggerate this division of the Godhead
into countless local forms:--

As many as thy cities in number
So many O Judah thy gods!(115)

Their high places lay all round the Prophet and each had its bad
influence, not religious only but ethical, not only idolatrous but
immoral, with impure rites and orgies.

Lift to the bare heights thine eyes,
Where not wast thou tumbled?
The land thou hast fouled with thy whoredoms,(116)

--spiritual and physical both; the one led to the other.

This dissipation of the national mind upon many deities was reflected in
the nation's politics. With no faith in One Supreme God the statesmen of
Judah, just as in Isaiah's earlier days, fluttered between the great
powers which were bidding for the empire of the world. Egypt under
Psamtik's vigorous direction pressed north, flying high promises for the
restless vassals of Assyria. But Assyria, though weakened, had not become
negligible. Between the two the anchorless policy of Judah helplessly
drifted. To use Jeremiah's figure, suitable alike to her politics and her
religion, she was a faithless wife, off from her husband to one paramour
after another.

All this was chaos worse than the desert that crumbled before Anathoth, a
tragedy more bitter than the past which moaned through the land behind.
What had God to say? I