This was the curious, memorable entrance of the little King Joash upon a reign of forty years in Jerusalem. You can imagine how that scene must have printed itself on his memory. It must have given a strange, a solemn importance to the house of God, and all its belongings. The recollection of that sudden command, given by the High Priest, his uncle, preserver, and king-maker, _Have her forth without the ranges_, must have written upon his heart an indelible impression of the sacredness of that spot which could thus arrest revolution and make the most righteous doom impious. You will not wonder, therefore, if his young thoughts were first turned, as a Sovereign, to the wretched, the dilapidated state of the Temple itself. It appears that, on the one hand, there were long, careless arrears of temple income: people had grown indifferent to the payment of their most unquestionable dues to the Altar and the Priesthood: on the other hand, there was a positive as well as a negative defalcation; for on that sacred height of Mount Zion there had arisen, side by side with God’s Temple, a rival shrine of Baal; and the idolatress Athaliah, with her creatures, seems to have taken from the one to build the other: in short, the very foundation and wall-stones of the Holy House had been gradually pillaged and carted away, and the House itself stood a monument at once of modern shame and ancestral glory, needing the builder’s hand to restore it to decency and even to safety. As for the vessels of the House—all those costly priceless treasures with which the wealth and piety of king Solomon had filled it—they had gone, bit by bit, to buy off the annoyances of powerful neighbours: King Rehoboam, at the very outset of the schism, had given Shishak Solomon’s shields of gold, and replaced them with pitiful shameful shields of brass: it was too late, or too soon, to think of ornament—the present question was one entirely of use and substantial repair. It seems that even the efforts and injunctions of the young King were for many years ineffectual. In the twenty-third year of his reign the old breaches were still unrepaired. It is astonishing—men would not believe till they had tried it—how long it takes to re-awaken one slumbering conscience, or indeed to make one desired work of reparation, be it never so small—we see it ourselves at this moment in a side-chapel of this Church—a fact accomplished. And so King Joash, stung to the soul by the disappointment of his own good intentions, summons before him Jehoiada the Priest, his own uncle and benefactor, and expostulates with him and his brother-priests in the words of the text, _Why repair ye not the breaches of the House_?