Well, this carbuncle needed a cataplasm, which is a poultice. Your old mother, who doctored her own children in the time when physicians were not as plentiful as they are now, will tell you that the very best poultice is a fig, and that was what was used upon the carbuncle of King Hezekiah. The power of God, accompanied by this human instrumentality, cured the king. In this age of discovery, when men know so much it kills them, and write so wisely it almost kills us, it has been found out that prayer to God is a dead failure. All things are arranged according to inexorable law. Ah, my friends, have we been so mistaken? Does God hear and answer prayer, or does He not? Why come out with a challenge in this day, and an experiment, when we have here the very experiment? Hezekiah was sick unto death; he prayed for his life; God heard him, and added fifteen years to that lifetime. The prayer saved him, the lump of figs applied being merely the God-appointed human instrumentality. JEHOIAKIM. We look in upon a room in Jerusalem. Two men are there. At the table sits Baruch, the scribe, with a roll of parchment and an iron pen in his hand. The other man is walking the floor, as if strangely agitated. There is an unearthly appearance about his countenance, and his whole frame quakes as if pressed upon by something unseen and supernal. This is Jeremiah, in the spirit of prophecy. Being too much excited to write with his own hands the words that the Almighty pours upon his mind about the coming destruction of Jerusalem, he dictates to Baruch, the scribe. It is a seething, scalding, burning denunciation of Jehoiakim, the king, and a prophecy of approaching disasters. Of course, King Jehoiakim hears of the occurrence, and he sends Jehudi to obtain the parchment and read its contents. It is winter. Jehoiakim is sitting in his comfortable winter house, by a fire that glows upon the hearth and lights up the faces of the lords, princes and senators who have gathered to hear the reading of the strange document. Silence is ordered. The royal circle bend forward to listen. Every eye is fixed. Jehudi unrolls the book gleaming with the words of God, and as he reads Jehoiakim frowns; his eye kindles; his cheek burns; his foot comes down with thundering indignation. King Jehoiakim snatches the book from Jehudi’s hand, feels for his knife, crumples up the book, and goes to work cutting it up with his penknife. Thus God’s book was permanently destroyed, and the king escaped. Was it destroyed? Did Jehoiakim escape? In a little while King Jehoiakim’s dead body is hurled forth to blacken in the sun, and the only epitaph that he ever had was that which Jeremiah wrote: “Buried with the burial of an ass.” To restore the book which was destroyed, Baruch again takes his seat at the table, while Jeremiah walks the floor and again dictates the terrible prophecy.