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 canal across the Isthmus of Suez, in which enterprise one hundred and twenty thousand men perished from hunger, fatigue, and disease.  But his great aim was to extend his empire to the limits reached by Rameses II., the Sesostris of the Greeks.  The great Assyrian empire was then breaking up, and Nineveh was about to fall before the Babylonians; so he seized the opportunity to invade Syria, a province of the Assyrian empire.  He must of course pass through Palestine, the great highway between Egypt and the East.  Josiah opposed his enterprise, fearing that if the Egyptian king conquered Syria, he himself would become the vassal of Egypt.  Jeremiah earnestly endeavored to dissuade his sovereign from embarking in so doubtful a war; even Necho tried to convince him through his envoys that he made war on Nineveh, not on Jerusalem, invoking—­as most intensely earnest men did in those days of tremendous impulse—­the sacred name of Deity as his authentication.  Said he:  “What have I to do with thee, thou