yearnings of a mother had a place in her soul.  In the hour of carnage, surrounded by all the horrors of death, the pride of her nature prevailed, and all the daring of her character was displayed.  She forgot neither the proprieties due to her rank nor the embellishments needful for her person.  With the vanity of the woman and the pride of a queen, “she painted her face and tired her head,” and then haughtily presenting herself before the murderer of her children, she uttered a maddening taunt and defiance.  By the hands of her servants she was cast from the windows of the palace of Israel into the very grounds which had been the vineyard of Naboth; and as she was dashed to the earth, the wheels of the chariot of the destroyer of her race passed over her, and the feet of the horses trampled upon her.  “And the dogs ate Jezebel by the walls of Jezreel.”  Thus her doom was accomplished!

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There have been many like her.  Her crimes have been sometimes equalled in atrocity.  Her ruling passions were pride and ambition; and she doubtless clung to the idols of her land from the unbounded license their worship gave to sensuality, and the opportunities it afforded, in its feasts and festivals, for display and gayety.

But she clung more tenaciously to her idolatry from motives of self-interest and national aggrandizement.  It was the test of loyalty for Israel.  It was in perfect consistency with such a character to turn away from all evidence and to reject what she did not wish to believe.  In the expressive language of the Bible, she “hardened her heart;” and doubtless, like skeptics of later days, she could ascribe what she could not disprove to the working of natural causes, or to the arts of priestcraft.

We can all stifle the convictions of conscience and contemn the principles which conflict with our interest or our inclination; and there are in every station unconscious imitators of the Queen of Israel.

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ATHALIAH.

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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.