on so grand a scale.
The minutest details of the requirements of the Law were attended to.
The festival proclaimed the full restoration of the worship of Jehovah,
and kindled enthusiasm for his service. So great was this event that
Ezekiel dates the opening of his prophecies from it. "It seems probable
that we have in the eighty-fifth psalm a relic of this great
solemnity.... Its tone is sad amidst all the great public rejoicings; it
bewails the stubborn ungodliness of the people as a whole."

After the great Passover, which took place in the year 622, when Josiah
was twenty-six years of age, little is said of the pious king, who
reigned twelve years after this memorable event. One of the best, though
not one of the wisest, kings of Judah, he did his best to eradicate
every trace of idolatry; but the hearts of the people responded faintly
to his efforts. Reform was only outward and superficial,--an
illustration of the inability even of an absolute monarch to remove
evils to which the people cling in their hearts. To the eyes of
Jeremiah, there was no hope while the hearts of the people were
unchanged. "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his
spots?" he mournfully exclaims. "Much less can those who are accustomed
to do evil learn to do well." He had no illusions; he saw the true state
of affairs, and was not misled by mere outward and enforced reforms,
which partook of the nature of religious persecution, and irritated the
people rather than led to a true religious life among them. There was
nothing left to him but to declare woes and approaching calamities, to
which the people were insensible. They mocked and reviled him. His lofty
position secured him a hearing, but he preached to stones. The people
believed nothing but lies; many were indifferent and some were secretly
hostile, and he must have been pained and disappointed in view of the
incompleteness of his work through the secret opposition of the
popular leaders.

Josiah was the most virtuous monarch of Judah. It was a great public
misfortune that his life was cut short prematurely at the age of
thirty-eight, and in consequence of his own imprudence. He undertook to
oppose the encroachments of Necho II, king of Egypt, an able, warlike,
and enterprising monarch, distinguished for his naval expeditions, whose
ships doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and returned to Egypt in safety,
after a three years' voyage. Necho was not so successful in digging a
can