We must not forget that Hezekiah’s mother’s name was Abi, the daughter of Zachariah. How she came to marry a wicked husband must remain a mystery. But the mother will come up in the son. She was the daughter of Zachariah, and Zachariah was a prophet, or seer--a man with double sight--one of those strange men who can see beyond the merely visible and palpable, and can read things that lie behind. Zachariah came up again in his daughter, and the mother came up again in the son, and so there was a mysterious play of inheritance, transfer, transition, reappearance, somewhat of resurrection--a great tragic mystery of transformation and representation. We speak about a man as if he were self-contained--just standing upon so much ground, without relation behind or before, on the right hand or on the left. But no man is thus insularly placed; no man is an absolute solitary. Every man has in him the blood of the past and the life of the future. Can a son of a good mother be altogether bad? Most surely not. You must have mistaken the case if you thought so. Your very thinking so may constitute an element of hopefulness in your case. Take comfort from that suggestion. So long as you can think of yourself seriously and of the past and of your advantages, and can compare what you are with what you might have been, there is hope of you. But can there be in all history such an irony as this, that a man should have had a praying mother and himself be a prayerless man? No! It can not be. Somewhere--at some time and in some way--the better nature will assert itself, and out of a good seed surely there will come a good harvest. But the lesson does not lie upon one side only. Here is encouragement to the praying fathers and to praying mothers. Zachariah, read on; read between the lines of things; interpret events symbolically; read the apocalyptic sense of what is happening--and out of all this mental elevation and spiritual conduct there will come results in your daughter or your son. Abi, pray on. Be just to your father’s memory, and say: “He was a holy man. I must prove it by being a holy woman. He can not live upon a written character; he must live in my life. I will prove that such a child must have had a good father.” So the vital lessons fall--on the right hand, on the left, and around about us. Shame be to us if, amid this shower of monition and encouragement and stimulus, we be deaf and dumb and blind, unfeeling, unresponsive. Hezekiah will now go to work and prove himself to be an energetic reformer. “He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made; for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it; and he called it Nehustan.” He must have been a strong man. He had no colleague, no ally; no one to say to him: “Be brave, be true.” He went straight against the hardest wall that ever was built by the stubbornness and perversity of man.