Who can mistake the atmosphere of the sea? How it blows away all the city dullness! How it quickens the blood! How it throws off increasing years, and makes the voyager feel almost young again! It is so with honesty, nobleness, charity and goodness of character when the surrounding air is charged with some kind of poison or pestilence. So it is that we come upon Hezekiah. Perhaps it is well for him that we approach his case after such an experience. He thus gets advantages that otherwise might not have been accorded to him. He looks the higher for the dwarfs that are round about him, the whiter because of the black population amid which he stands--at once a contrast and a rebuke. But from Hezekiah’s point of view the case was different. Behind him were traditions of the most corrupt sort. He was as a speckled bird in the line of his own family. It is hard to be good amid so much that is really bad. All attempts at goodness are accounted examples of affectation, conceit, vanity and pharisaism; and under such circumstances sometimes a man’s foes may be the people of his own household. They wish he was more pliable, less sabbatarian, less devoted to his Bible, less constant in his attendance at church. He might go once a day, and give himself one end of the rope not tethered to the altar; but he will not. Has that man an easy time of it? No hard word may be spoken to him--certainly no bitter word--and yet all the while he may be made to feel that perhaps, after all, he may be affecting somewhat of piety and purity, and that those who are looking on may be better critics of him than he is of himself. At all events, there come to him periods of trial, and sometimes he says within himself: “Shall I today be as constant as I have been, or may I not break away now? Have I not built up a character, and may I not retire upon my moral competence, and live henceforth the life of a latitudinarian? After a long spell of many years, surely I might intermit just a little.” Who shall say that the temptation is not subtle and strong? Some men have to force their way to church through innumerable and unnamable difficulties. This ought to be reckoned. Some credit must be due to men who are thus constant to their sense of public duty and religious obligation. Men are not always at church with the entire consent of those who are round about them. What, then, must be done? One of two things. Either yield to the temptation or resist it. You can not trifle with it. You can not compromise, and then recur to firmness, and again connive, and again balance, consider and hesitate. Virtue is not an intermittent grace. We must stand, or we must fall. Hezekiah had a wicked father. How will that wickedness come out in the son? Not, perhaps, as wickedness, but as infirmity, weakness, and want of constancy in some directions, though there may be no want of firmness in others. Can a man wholly escape the bad blood inherited of his father?