Then followed that time which the Jewish people never speak of without shame—­a hideous reign of idolatry, and immorality, and injustice; an awful period of persecution for the few righteous and God-fearing people who were left when the prophets had been sought out and slain.  Isaiah sawn asunder, Habakkuk stoned to death, the faithful driven into dens and caves of earth.  It is of this time that we read in the Epistle to the Hebrews, in that graphic account of the martyred faithful:  “They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword:  they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented:  of whom the world was not worthy” (xi. 37, 38).  A few years of this sufficed to pull down the whole fabric of religion which Hezekiah had so painfully and patiently raised.  For it is so easy to destroy; so easy for folly and irreverence to pull down what wisdom and goodness have taken years in building; so easy for a vicious and irreligious son to bring shame and ruin upon the house which a godly father and mother have spent a lifetime in rearing with honour; so easy, by a few rash acts, to destroy the character and reputation which the prayers and training of years have sought to establish.  It is the easiest thing in the world to undo and overturn; there is no cleverness and courage required for destroying, the cleverness and courage are called for in building it up.

Manasseh succeeded to his heart’s content.  People followed him greedily, except the steadfast few.  And presently the prophets were all gone, and the worship of the true God was nowhere practised except in secret, and the sacred names were no more mentioned, and the land gave itself up to all the foul rites and the shameful indulgences of the heathen world, And then God’s retribution came swiftly.  Where the rotting carcase was, there the eagles gathered together.  These same Babylonians whose ways the renegade Jews had so much admired and imitated, swept down upon them with the talons of a vulture, with cruelty that spared neither tender woman nor innocent child, and Jerusalem was burned with fire, and Manasseh carried off in chains and flung into a foreign prison to muse in solitude over the end of his projects, and to find out there that the old ways had been the best.

There we are told that he repented, that he was stricken with shame because of all the evil that he had done, and turned with prayer and humility to the God whom he had defied.  And we are told that God was merciful and heard his entreaties, and accepted his repentance, and brought him back after sorrowful years of imprisonment to his land and throne.  This is the part of the story which most people emphasise.  That, they say, is the main lesson of the story—­Manasseh’s repentance, and how God accepted the rebellious sinner at the last and forgave him all his iniquities—­and they draw from that the conclusion that it is never too late to turn to God, and that all the dark doings of a man’s life are swept clean away, if at any time the heart repents and believes.