The king's pride was humbled to the dust. In the spirit of Job--"The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord"[533]--he resigned himself without a murmur to the will of Heaven, and exclaimed that all which God did must be well done. At least God granted him a respite. Peace and truth would be in his own days; for that let him be thankful. They were words of humble resignation, uttered by one who had learnt to believe that whatever God decreed was just and right.
It would be unjust to measure the feelings of those far centuries by those of our own day, and there was none of the gross selfishness in the words of Hezekiah which led Nero to quote the line--
"When I am dead, let earth be mixed with fire";
or which led Louis XIV. to say--
"Après moi le déluge."
We may perhaps trace in his exclamation something of the fatalism which gives a touch of apathy to the submissiveness of the Oriental. Some, too, have imagined that his distress was tinged by a gleam of happiness at the implicit promise that he should have a son. His wife's name was Hephzibah ("My delight is in her"), and within two years she brought forth the firstborn son, whose career, indeed, was dark and evil, but who became in due time an ancestor of the promised Messiah. The name "Manasseh" given him by his parents recalled the child born to Joseph in the land of his exile who had caused him to forget his sorrows.[534] Hezekiah had the spirit which says,--
"That which Thou blessest is most good, And unblest good is ill; And all is right which seems most wrong, So it be Thy sweet will."