detect these things as quickly and as surely as hers.  And if she is too careless to discover them, they will go unobserved and unchecked.  Unhappy is the mother who gives to society, or to friendship, or to pleasure the time which she owes to her sons and daughters, for she will have to reap in vain regrets the penalty of her neglect.  How rarely do good and true women and men go forth from a home in which a mother has been too busy with the giddy affairs of the pleasurable world to teach and pray with her children.  Still more rarely do permanently evil and incorrigible lives go forth from a home in which a noble and religious mother has made it the chief business of her life to mould and train her children in paths of pure thought and reverent purpose.  There is no religious work which a woman can do that equals this in importance, and none which secures such sure and blessed results.  That, then, is the main thought suggested by these chapters—­the measureless influence of women in forming lives for evil or for good.

Then comes the only other thing that we are told about this Ahaziah—­that he was killed because he happened to be found in evil company.  He lived badly because he followed the counsels of his mother, we read, and he died suddenly and tragically because he endeavoured to be on very friendly terms with his mother’s relatives.  He was King of Judah, and Judah with all its sins still worshipped God and was comparatively free from idolatry.  But Israel, over which Jehoram, his mother’s brother ruled, was given up to all the abominations of heathenism.  Its court was a horrible sink of iniquity, and God’s judgment had gone forth against it and all its doings.  Ahaziah must needs join hands and pledge friendship with his relatives, and for that purpose visited them—­probably he did not intend to do more.  It was just to look at the doings of this court, and have a taste of its pleasures, and then come back again.  But once there he was led on from step to step—­found Jehoram’s company very attractive, entered into his plans, went out with him to battle, took part, no doubt, in the worship of his gods, and then while the two were going hand and glove together, the long-deferred judgment of God fell on Jezebel’s house.  The soldier raised up by God for that purpose swooped down upon the wicked king and his favourites with resistless force, making no distinction; and Ahaziah, being one of the band, shared in the general destruction.

The destruction of Ahaziah, says the Book, was of God, by coming to Jehoram.  By his coquetting with evil he was made to pay the last penalty.  So runs the story, and it seems far removed from everything that concerns our lives—­yet not so far—­things of a similar kind are happening every day.  Men who tread the ways of sinners, who enter into any sort of fellowship with them, often find themselves involved very strangely and suddenly in their shame and their punishment.  You cannot go into ways