If we had read two accounts so different, and presenting such insuperable difficulties to the harmonist, in secular historians, we should have made no attempt to reconcile them, but merely have endeavoured to find which record was the more trustworthy. If the pious Levitical king of 2 Chron. xiii. be a true picture of the idolater of 1 Kings xv. 3, it is clear that the accounts are difficult to reconcile, unless we resort to incessant and arbitrary hypotheses. But the earlier authority is clearly to be preferred when the two obviously conflict with each other. As it is we can only say that the kings of whom the chronicler approves are, as it were, clericalised, and seen "through a cloud of incense," all their faults being omitted. The edifying speech of Abijah, and his boast about purity of worship, sounds most strange on the lips of a king who--if he "walked in all the sins of his father"--suffered his people to be guilty of a worship grossly idolatrous, including the toleration of _Bamoth_, _Chammanim_, and _Asherim_ on every high hill and under every green tree; and of all the abominations of the neighbouring idolaters,[542]--a state of things infinitely worse than the symbolic Jehovah-worship which Jeroboam had set up. Yet such was the strange syncretism of religion in Jerusalem, of which Solomon had set the fatal example, that (as we learn quite incidentally) Abijah seems to have dedicated certain vessels--part of his warlike spoils--to the service of the Temple.[543] They were perhaps intended to supply the gaps left by the plundering raid of Shishak. After this brief and perplexing, but apparently eventful reign, Abijah was succeeded by his son Asa, whose long reign of forty-one years was contemporary with the reigns of no less than seven kings of Israel--Nadab, Baasha, Elah, Zimri, Omri, Tibni, and Ahab. We are told that--aided perhaps by such prophets as Hanani and Azariah, son of Oded[544] (or Iddo)--"he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord." Of this he gave an early, decisive, and courageous proof.