So far in our Bible studies we have had many weary wanderings among bad men. The fear was that, to some extent, familiarity with them might blunt our own moral sensibility.
Man after man has passed before us out of whose very countenance the image of God had faded. How pleasant it is, and how spiritually exhilarating, to come upon a case in which we read of a different pattern of man! Of Hezekiah it is recorded in the eighteenth chapter of the second Book of Kings:
“And he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, according to all that David, his father, did.”
After a long journey underground we seem to have come suddenly upon a sweet garden, and the sight of it is as Heaven. The charm is always in the contrast. If things are not quite so good as we supposed them to be, they are all the better by reason of circumstances through which we have passed, which have made us ill at ease and have impoverished or disheartened us; then very little of the other kind goes a long way.
A man comes up out of the underground railway and says, when he emerges into the light:
“How fresh the air is here! What a healthy locality! How well to live in this neighborhood!”
Why does he speak so kindly of his surroundings? Not because of those surroundings intrinsically, but because of the contrast which they present to the circumstances through which he has just passed.
Hezekiah was no perfect man.
We shall see how noble he was, and how rich in many high qualities, yet how now and again we see the crutch of the cripple under the purple of the king.
It is well for us that he was occasionally and temporarily weak, or he would have been like a star which we can not touch, and at which we can not light our own torch.
Even Hezekiah was a man like ourselves in many particulars, and therefore what was good and sound in him is all the more attractive and is all the more possible to us.
Who can mistake an honest man?
If all men were upright, where would be the peculiarity of any individual man’s integrity? But, given a corrupt state of society, when the honest man appears we say: “The wind has changed. It blows balmily and healthfully. It comes from a fine origin, and brings with it many a blessing.”
Who can mistake the atmosphere of the sea? How it blows away all the city dullness! How it quickens the blood! How it throws off increasing years, and makes the voyager feel almost young again!
It is so with honesty, nobleness, charity and goodness of character when the surrounding air is charged with some kind of poison or pestilence.
So it is that we come upon Hezekiah.
Perhaps it is well for him that we approach his case after such an experience. He thus gets advantages that otherwise might not have been accorded to him. He looks the higher for the dwarfs that are round about him, the whiter because of the black population amid which he stands--at once a contrast and a rebuke.
But from Hezekiah’s point of view the case was different. Behind him were traditions of the most corrupt sort. He was as a speckled bird in the line of his own family. It is hard to be good amid so much that is really bad. All attempts at goodness are accounted examples of affectation, conceit, vanity and pharisaism; and under such circumstances sometimes a man’s foes may be the people of his own household. They wish he was more pliable, less sabbatarian, less devoted to his Bible, less constant in his attendance at church. He might go once a day, and give himself one end of the rope not tethered to the altar; but he will not.
Has that man an easy time of it?
No hard word may be spoken to him--certainly no bitter word--and yet all the while he may be made to feel that perhaps, after all, he may be affecting somewhat of piety and purity, and that those who are looking on may be better critics of him than he is of himself.
At all events, there come to him periods of trial, and sometimes he says within himself:
“Shall I today be as constant as I have been, or may I not break away now? Have I not built up a character, and may I not retire upon my moral competence, and live henceforth the life of a latitudinarian? After a long spell of many years, surely I might intermit just a little.”
Who shall say that the temptation is not subtle and strong? Some men have to force their way to church through innumerable and unnamable difficulties. This ought to be reckoned. Some credit must be due to men who are thus constant to their sense of public duty and religious obligation. Men are not always at church with the entire consent of those who are round about them.
What, then, must be done?
One of two things. Either yield to the temptation or resist it. You can not trifle with it. You can not compromise, and then recur to firmness, and again connive, and again balance, consider and hesitate. Virtue is not an intermittent grace. We must stand, or we must fall.