For, said he: 

   Great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because our
   fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do according
   unto all that which is written concerning us.

The devout young king threw himself into a thorough reformation of the prevailing religion.  All local altars were swept away, all idolatries were cleared from the Jerusalem temple, the priesthood was centred in the capital and more thoroughly organized; in short, as our fathers read the story, Mosaism was re-established, after some seven centuries of partial or total disuse.

Through processes which we cannot now follow, our later critics have, I think, fairly established the proposition, that this book of The Law was none other than the substance of our book of Deuteronomy, then for the first time written.  The plans of the prophetic reformers had contemplated the sweeping changes described above, in the interests of an ethical and spiritual religion.  They felt that they were but carrying out the principles of the nation’s great Founder.  Of his original conception of religion, bodied in The Ten Words, their aspirations were the legitimate historical development; as the leaf and bud are the growth of the far back roots.  This programme of the prophetic reformers, presented in its true light as a development of the ideas of Moses, was, by the priest Hilkiah, sent to the king as the law of the nation’s Founder, with the results sketched above.

Read in this light, the book takes on a fresh and fascinating interest.  It marks the organization of the movement toward a higher religion which had been started by the great prophets of the preceding century.  It becomes the Augsburg Confession of the Jewish Reformation, from which dates the gradual possession of the institutions of the nation by ethical and spiritual religion.

The lofty character of this book, the “St. John of the Old Testament,” as Ewald called it, is thus rendered intelligible; as it stands for the aspirations of the noblest movement in ancient Jewish history.  It is the issue of a long travail of soul to whose words we hearken in such a truth as this: 

   Hear, O Israel:  The Lord our God is one Lord:  and thou shalt love the
   Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
   thy might.

Placed in this position, the book of Deuteronomy becomes the key to Israel’s history, by which criticism is reconstructing that story, on the lines of the great laws of all life, with most significant consequences to the cause of religion.  The ideas and institutions known to us as The Mosaic Law come forth now as the crown and culmination of a long historic development.  Israel’s story is that of a slow and gradual education under the divine hand; not a relapse, but a progress, not an apostasy but an evolution.  Israel takes its place in the general order of humanity’s movement.  With it religion sweeps at once into the pathway of progress which science has shown to be the order of nature; and the historic revelation is seen to be, like the revelation in nature, a gradual, progressive manifestation of Him “whose goings forth are as the morning”—­its orbit the sweep of the ascending sun.