Forlong - Rivers of Life

212
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
worshipped together with statues or figures, evidently phallic, and with Asheroths or
“the Groves” of earlier and later days. These symbols, we are told, Hezekiah broke
and destroyed, but no purifications of one or two temples and certainly not the destruction
of symbols, can change the faith of a whole people, until the mind is educated
out of these. Hezekiah’s iconoclasm lasted only twenty-eight years, and then his son,
Manasseh, King of Judah, went back to the old worship in 698. “He did that which
was evil in the sight of the Lord, after the abominations of the heathen, he built up
again the high place which Hezekiah, his father, had destroyed” (2 Kings xxi). He
reared up altars for Baal, the phallic sun-god, and made a “grove” or asherah, as did
Ahab, King of Israel, and “worshipped all the host of heaven.” Nay, he built these
altars, and “set up the grove” even in Solomon’s holy temple, the two court-yards of
which he consecrated to Tsabeaniam, or the worship of the host of heaven. He worshipped
fire, and “made his son pass through the fire” ordeal, yet he maintained his
kingdom in peace, according to the writer of “Kings,” during a long reign of fiftyfive
years, and the hosts of Senakerib, King ofAsyria, whom the weak Hezekiah
had bought off (the narrntive says the Lord destroyed 185,000 soldiers miraculously
in one night!) never returned in his day; he slept with his fathers and was buried
in his own garden, his son Amon succeeding him in 643 B.C. The later writer
of Chronicles, although always anxious to paint highly, probably says truly that
Manasseh Was for a time in Asyrian captivity, but on this point the writer of “Kings”
is silent. King Amon and his people were likewise sun, fire, and phallic-worshippers.
The unknown, yet said to be inspired historian tells us that he (Amon) walked in all
the ways that his father walked, and served the idols that his father served, and worshipped
them (2 Kings xxi). He forsook the worship of the Jhavh, and only reigned
two or three years when he was assassinated by his servants, 641 B.C., according to the
dates given by Archbishop Usher in the margin of our Bibles. Amon’s son, Josiah,
seems to have continued the same worship up to the year 624 B.C., or for seventeen
years, when, owing to the rise of a noted high priest Hilkiah, the persecutions of the
old faith began: for the ripples of the Eastern wave had now reached Asia Minor.
It was not, however, on account of Manasseh’s faith that King Amon was assassinated,
and that the good King Azariah was smitten with leprosy and lived and died
in a cell; nor yet that Manasseh had a long and peaceful reign. God does not so
work out his purposes, though there those who would still try and persuade us to
this effect; for Josiah succeeded his father when a child of eight years old, and no
change took place in the worship of the people, or in the gods and altars of Solomon’s
“holy temple” till 624 B.C., by which time the old faiths of sun, fire, and Phallic
worship had flourished for seventy-four years (698 to 624 B.C.), or during the whole
lifetime of the then living race. No doubt Moses may be called the principal founder
of this Faith, for he dearly cherished his fire-ark with its overshadowing serpent
Wings, and its box of charms and witchcraft properties, although he much disliked