ATHALIAH.


[Illustration]

The pious king of Judah not only formed a political alliance with
Israel, but he even permitted, and probably encouraged, his son, and the
heir to his throne, to marry the daughter of the impious Ahab and the
idolatrous Jezebel. Jehoshaphat saw not the Queen of Israel as we see
her--as unlovely as she was unholy. Dazzled by the splendour of her
court, won by her grace and queenly bearing, he may have overlooked her
crimes. The most unprincipled have sometimes carefully and successfully
cultivated much that gives grace and attraction to social life. Some,
whose hearts have been utterly selfish and callous, and whose lives have
been one dark record of crime and cruelty, have yet shone as the centres
of splendid circles, diffusing all around them pleasure and gayety. And
men, themselves unstained, have been won by these fascinations to a
close association with those whose principles were worthy only of
reprobation, and whose association should have been shunned as in the
last degree contaminating.

The intimacies between those who love and worship God and those who
reject him are ever full of danger. And while the courtiers of Ahab and
the flatterers of Jehoshaphat may have applauded the liberal policy of
the King of Judah, and his freedom from the bigotry of the prophets who
would reform Israel, he was pursuing a course which was to involve his
family in calamity and bring corruption into his kingdom. Jerusalem and
Samaria were not very remote from each other, and the kings of Israel
and Judah seem at this period to have maintained frequent personal
intercourse: an intercourse which appears not to have elevated the moral