To conserve the new spirit of brotherhood which they awakened, they embodied in the book of the Law, that constituted the Magna Charta of the Reformation, a development of a gracious usage of the people. From immemorial antiquity there had been a recognized right of the populace to the natural yield of the soil in every seventh year. This common law they formally re-enacted, in the name of Jehovah, and added to it a provision for the release of debtors in the sabbatical year.[49]
We shall see in the nest period the fruitage of this new religion of social righteousness, in the remarkable legislation of the Restoration.
In these serious, strenuous secularities--so often neglected by the religious, or even opposed as irreligious--which now were consecrated to the service of Jehovah, religion found its true sphere, and developed its latent forces. A new era opened. The abominations of religion in former times became the exceptions rather than the rule, and gradually disappeared from society. After Jeremiah we hear no more of impurities hiding under the altar, or of savage superstition seeking to please Jehovah by outraging the holiest instincts of human nature. Jehovah became the name for a conception of Deity so spiritual, so holy, that henceforth the student of Israel's history should substitute--God.
It is a most interesting study to place these great prophets in their chronological order, and trace the development of this ethical religion. As one after another they come upon the stage of action they take up the great words of their masters and repeat them in their own way; take up the great tasks of their predecessors and carry them on toward completion; leading religion into an ever deepening spirituality. The prophets of the eighth century group around Isaiah, under whose influence Hezekiah attempted a partial reformation of the popular religion. The prophets of the seventh century group around Jeremiah, the master-spirit in the more thorough reformation carried out under Josiah. This second reformation achieved an institutional organization of ethical religion, that came just in time to create a body capable of holding the people together in loyalty to the true God, amid the break up of the nation.
