2.  How has modern science helped to free mankind from the curse of superstitious fear?

3.  Look up Micah in the Bible dictionary, and find out all you can about his personal history and work.

4.  Are superstition and wrong religious beliefs ever made the means of extortion and oppression to-day?  If so, how?

FOOTNOTES: 

[4] 1 Samuel 6. 19, Greek version.

CHAPTER XVIII

ONE JUST GOD OVER ALL PEOPLES

THE MESSAGE OF ISAIAH

The destruction of the northern kingdom by the Assyrian armies struck fear into the hearts of the Hebrews of the sister kingdom in the south.  No one had dreamed that such a thing could happen.  It is true that from the beginning of the terrible onrush the Assyrians had been almost irresistible.  All the little nations which had stood in their way had been swallowed up.

Moreover, the prophets Amos and Hosea had plainly foretold that some such calamity would be sent upon Israelites by Jehovah on account of their sins.  But very few of them believed these brave and lonely preachers of the truth.  “Jehovah send the Assyrians against us!  Why, that is absurd!  We are Jehovah’s people, and he is our God.  What has he to do with the Assyrians?  He may chastise us, but not by sending foreign armies to conquer us.  What would he do if we should be conquered?  He would have no nation to worship him.”  So they reasoned.

=Jehovah too weak to protect his people?=—­When, therefore, the Assyrians actually did come marching down from the Euphrates River, hundreds of thousands of them with their gleaming armor and their multitudes of horses and war chariots, and besieged and captured the city of Samaria, leaving it a ruin, most of the Hebrews, north and south, were sick with fear and bewilderment.  For them with their false notions it could mean only one thing:  their God, Jehovah, was too weak to protect his people against the greater gods of Nineveh.  The Assyrians said to them: 

="Let not thy God in whom thou trusteth deceive thee, saying, Jerusalem shall not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.  Behold, thou hast heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands, by destroying them utterly:  and shalt thou be delivered?  Have the gods of the nations delivered them?...  Where is the king of Hamath, and the king of Arpad, and the king of the city of Sepharvaim?"=

Against such taunts as these, the Hebrews, with their mistaken beliefs, could bring no answer.

THE CRAZE FOR FOREIGN GODS

With their faith in Jehovah breaking down there was a great running here and there after other gods and strange religions.  Instead of trusting quietly in Jehovah’s watchful care many of the people resorted in their terror to soothsayers and mediums, to “wizards that chirp and mutter.”  Jerusalem seems to have become almost as full of them as the cities of the Philistines, which had always been famous for their fortune-tellers and necromancers.