Selected Short Work of Charles John Vaughan
9781465654915
311 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The House is the Temple. We have travelled, therefore, from the north to the south of Palestine, from the capital of Israel to the capital of Judah. As soon as the two great prophets, Elijah and Elisha, are no more, the interest of the story centres no longer in the kingdom of the ten tribes: it reverts to the stock of David, and finds its latest gleam of beauty and glory in the national reformations and personal pieties of Hezekiah and Josiah. Elisha is not yet dead: but he has ceased to occupy the sacred page after the anointing of Jehu, until he appears once more, and finally, in the striking incidents of his death-bed and his grave. Meanwhile that Baal-worship which Jehu has extirpated in the north, has found refuge in the southern realm, under the fostering patronage of a daughter of the house of Ahab. Jehoram, son of Jehoshaphat, had married a second Jezebel, in the person of her daughter Athaliah. Jehoram reigned eight years, and was succeeded by his son Ahaziah, who perished, as we read last Sunday, with his uncle Jehoram, son of Ahab, king of Israel, under the hand of the avenging Jehu, the scourge of God. Then Athaliah, seeing that her son was dead, determined to reign for herself. She was one of those masculine spirits, one of those heroines of pride and crime, who can brook no puny, infant sovereigns; she could not live to be ruled by a grandchild; and so she took the decisive step of destroying all the seed royal, after which, it is said, Athaliah, late the queen-mother, did reign over the land. But it is seldom, on this earth—which is still God’s, however much, at certain times, the devil may claim it for his own—it is seldom, I say, that crime is quite prosperous, quite thorough: something is forgotten in every murder, which rises at last into a testimony; and some one, some little babe perhaps, is overlooked in every massacre; there is a sister, it may be, or an aunt—as it was here—whose heart yearns over that little cradle, and who contrives to rescue its unconscious occupant to be the heir of the throne and the avenger of the family. Such was King Joash; rescued by his aunt Jehosheba from her own mother’s fury, and by her hidden, during six years of earliest childhood, in one of the chambers of the Temple—for she was the wife of Jehoiada, the High Priest. In his seventh year, there was a conspiracy, a revolution, and a coronation. The little King was shown to the people in the temple-court, the crown was put upon him, the testimony (or book of the law) was given him, he was made and he was anointed, and all the people clapped their hands, and said, God save the king. And when the usurping grandmother, attracted by the tumult, came upon the scene, with the cry, Treason, treason! the High Priest had her forth without the ranges; she was allowed to pass unmolested through the crowd and through the guard, till she was outside the consecrated ground; and there she was slain.
