Then he heard a voice, clearly and distinctly, saying over and over again: Before I formed thee, I knew thee; Before thou camest forth, I sanctified thee. I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations. and he knew that God was speaking to him. A stifled groan escaped his lips. The muscles of his face and body, tense up to this moment, relaxed. He dropped to his knees and gave up the fight. He buried his face in his arms and cried, in a muffled voice: Alas, O Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak; I am only a youth. This plea showed clearly what inward agonies Jeremiah had been through. Timid by nature, he shrank from God's call to him to go out and prophesy to the people of Judah and Jerusalem, and he struggled against it. Although he was now a young man of twenty-four or five, he feared to undertake this great task and to answer the call. He felt that he was yet too young and unprepared to deliver the message of God to his people. But God answered him, saying: Do not say, "I am only a youth"; For to all to whom I shall send thee, thou shalt go, And whatever I command thee, thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of them, For I am with thee to deliver thee. And Jeremiah tells us that God, having stretched out His hand toward him and touched his lips to purify them, spoke to him further:-- Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth; See, I have set thee this day over the nations and kingdoms, To tear up, to break down and to destroy, to build up and to plant. Now that God had selected him for a distinct and set purpose in life, no matter how incapable and unworthy he deemed himself, and being assured of His help and protection, Jeremiah walked slowly homeward. For the first time he noticed that the sun had risen big and bright and warm. His mind was calm and at rest, but his heart was filled with woe because of what the future held out for him and his people. CHAPTER IV. _The Seething Caldron._ An old Hebrew proverb says, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and even when he is old he shall not depart from it." If one should say that the man who wrote this proverb must have thought of King Josiah, the statement could not be entirely denied. For the religious training he received at the hands of Zephaniah and Hilkiah soon showed itself in the way he began to revolutionize the religious life of Judah. When he was only eighteen years old he began to uproot the heathen worship that had been reintroduced by his grandfather, after the death of Hezekiah and Isaiah. His aim was to cleanse the land entirely of the foreign altars and sanctuaries that Manasseh had erected to the gods of Babylonia and Assyria. In the twelfth year of his reign, that is, in the year 627, the old chronicler tells us, Josiah