Manasseh’s life was spent in undoing what his father had done.  It seemed to be his great ambition to overturn and destroy the sacred edifice which his father’s hands, with untiring prayer and devotion, had raised.  Hezekiah had taught his people to trust in God, and in reliance on His help to sustain a noble independence separate from heathen alliances.  Manasseh hastened to join hands with Babylon, and make his nation the vassal of a great heathen empire.  Hezekiah had swept the land clean of idols.  Manasseh filled every grove and hillside with these vain images again.  Hezekiah had restored the Temple worship and the Mosaic ritual, and the moral law, and laboured to establish a reign of sobriety, purity, justice, and order.  Manasseh outraged all the moralities, and delighted in introducing everywhere the licentious abominations of the neighbouring peoples.  Hezekiah had cultivated and encouraged prophecy, and gathered about him great and noble souls like Isaiah and Habakkuk.  Manasseh drove them from his presence, and finally slew them.

There were new lights in those days, as there are now.  Men who sneered at all the old thoughts and ways, who swept Moses aside with disdain, and thought that David’s psalms were poor and feeble things, and that the old-fashioned religion was narrow and provincial, and that the stories of victories won by faith and miracles wrought by prayer were worn-out fictions.  They said that if the nation would prosper, it must turn its back on all this stuff, and follow new methods, and profess a new religion.  Let them make the great empire, Babylon, their model, with its advanced civilisation, and science, and literature, and vast stores of wealth, with its worship, too, of the sun, and stars, and fire, its religion full of jollity and license, which contrasted so happily with the sober and severe worship of Jehovah, and did not trouble men with unwelcome moral precepts.  See how great that empire had become, and how stationary and unprogressive was their own little kingdom, because it clung to the old ways.  That was what the new party said.  Away with the old-fashioned thoughts and the old-fashioned trusts and beliefs and worship.  We are wiser than our simple-minded fathers.  We know a few things more than these narrow-minded and crazy prophets.  We will have all things new.

And Manasseh, being a young man and as foolish as he was young, drank in greedily their counsels and made himself their leader.  For it is ever the temptation of young life to think lightly of their father’s wisdom, and to despise what they call the narrow religious beliefs, and the careful moral scruples of the old, and to fancy that they know all things so much better than those who have gone before.  They want to try experiments of their own with life, and shake off the shackles of old moral laws and religious creeds, and be free to do and think as they please, and put the Bible away on the shelf, and shove prayer aside as a sort of worn-out heirloom, and have a merrier and better time than the old folks knew.  That was the course which Manasseh took, just as headstrong and irreverent youths take it now.