one of his latest discourses his anticipation for that time of
righteousness and the fear of God which is to dawn after the
Assyrian crisis is: "Then shall ye defile the silver covering of
your graven images and the golden plating of your molten images--ye
shall cast them away as a thing polluted; Begone! shall ye say
unto them" (xxx.22). If he thus hopes for a purification from
superstitious accretions of the places where Jehovah is worshipped,
it is clear that he is not thinking of their total abolition. Not
until about a century after the destruction of Samaria did men
venture to draw the practical conclusion from the belief in the
unique character of the temple at Jerusalem. That this was not
done from a mere desire to be logical, but with a view to further
reforms, need not be said. With the tone of repudiation in which
the earlier prophets, in the zeal of their opposition, had
occasionally spoken of practices of worship at large, there was
nothing to be achieved; the thing to be aimed at was not
abolition, but reformation, and the end it was believed would be
helped by concentration of all ritual in the capital. Prophets
and priests appear to have made common cause in the prosecution of
the work. It was the high priest Hilkiah who in the first instance
called attention to the discovered book which was to be made the
basis of action; the prophetess Huldah confirmed its divine
contents; the priests and prophets were a prominent element in the
assembly at which the new law was promulgated and sworn to. Now
an intimate fellowship between these two leading classes appears to
be characteristic of the whole course of the religious movement in
Judah, and to have been necessarily connected with the lines on
which that movement advanced; /1/

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