A few voices crying through the night had indeed reminded Judah of what He was and what He required. _He hath showed thee, O man, __ what is good; and what doth the Lord require but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God._(111) At last with the overthrow of Manasseh’s successor, Amon, signs of a dawn appeared. The child of eight years who was heir to the throne was secured, perhaps through his mother’s influence, by a party in Court and Temple that had kept loyal to the higher faith; and the people, probably weary of the fanatic extravagance of Manasseh, were content to have it so. The young King Josiah, who to the end was to prove himself worthy of his training, and the boy in the priest’s home at Anathoth were of an age: a fact not to be omitted from any estimate of the influences which moulded Jeremiah in his youth. But no trace of this appears in what he has left us; as a boy he may never have seen the King, and to the close of Josiah’s reign he seems to have remained too obscure to be noticed by his monarch; yet at the last he has only good to say of Josiah:— Did he not eat and drink, And do judgment and justice? The cause of the poor and the needy he judged— Then was it well.(112) Attempts at reform were made soon after Josiah’s accession,(113) but little was achieved, and that little only in the capital and its Temple. In the latter for four hundred years no deity of the land had been worshipped save Yahweh, and He in no material form. It would be easy to remove from the streets of Jerusalem any recently introduced Baals and possibly, as Assyria’s sovereignty relaxed, the worship of the Host of Heaven. But beyond Jerusalem the task was more difficult. Every village had the shrine of a deity before the God of Israel came to the land. The names of these local Baalîm, or Lords, had mostly vanished,(114) and Israel claimed the rural sanctuaries for Yahweh. But the old rites, with the old conceptions of deity attached to them, seem to have been transferred to Him by the ignorant worshippers, till instead of one Yahweh—one Lord—unique in character and in power, there were as many as there had been Baalîm, and they bore the same inferior and sometimes repulsive characters. We cannot exaggerate this division of the Godhead into countless local forms:— As many as thy cities in number So many O Judah thy gods!(115) Their high places lay all round the Prophet and each had its bad influence, not religious only but ethical, not only idolatrous but immoral, with impure rites and orgies. Lift to the bare heights thine eyes, Where not wast thou tumbled? The land thou hast fouled with thy whoredoms,(116) —spiritual and physical both; the one led to the other.