While she was fitted to co-operate with her husband, and ready to promote his designs and to embrace the policy which had guided the court of Israel, she soon assumed and ever maintained that influence which the stronger mind, the more powerful will, ever exerts over the inferior and weaker. Through all his reign, Ahab ever deferred to her; and while she goaded him onward in his career of crime, she stimulated and upheld him by her daring defiance of the commands and threatenings of the prophets of the Lord. She possessed all the energy, power, and constancy which ever belongs to minds of a high order, and which fit them for greatness in virtue or crime--insuring widespread usefulness or leading to desperate wickedness. She never was turned from her course. She never faltered, trembled, or hesitated in the pursuit of her object. She witnessed, unawed and unmoved, miracles of judgment and of mercy. She saw unpitying a land consumed by drought and a people perishing by famine; and when the parched earth drank the showers of heaven, while she rejoiced, she was neither softened nor made penitent by the blessing. Ahab could not entirely divest himself of every national characteristic, or the remembrances and associations of his faith and his people. There still clung to him some remains of the fear of the "Lord God of his fathers," some feelings of reverence and awe for the name and worship of Jehovah. No such compunctions troubled Jezebel. When Elijah visited Ahab, the impious monarch quailed before him and trembled at the denunciation of Divine wrath. Jezebel answered his reproofs by scorn and threats, and her menaces drove the prophet from the altar where he had triumphed. Yet her history is replete with sad interest. While it declares the certain ruin which follows national sins and national corruption, it displays also much of the wonderful forbearance of Jehovah. As we retrace his dealings even with the guilty house of Ahab and the apostate people of Israel, we are reminded of _One_ who, ages after, wept over Jerusalem. "Oh, if thou hadst known, in this thy day, the things which belong to thy peace--but now they are hidden from thine eyes." During the earlier years of the reign of Ahab, while Jezebel was engaged with all zeal and activity in proselyting the people of Israel to the worship of Ashtaroth and Baal, she was constantly resisted by the prophets sent as messengers from Jehovah. And many miracles of mercy and of judgment, wrought before her by the power of the Lord God of Israel, should have convinced her of the truth of His messengers--His indisputable claim to be the God--the Lord God. She resisted all--not from the want of evidence or the power of believing, but from the perverseness of a determined will and a hardened heart. Yet he who styles himself a God merciful and gracious, long strove with her, though at last she provoked him to depart and leave her to her chosen way.