A history of the work of redemption. Containing the outlines of a body of…

XVI. God's wonderfully upholding his church and the true religion through this period. It was very wonderful, considering the many and great apostasies that there were of that […] to idolatry. When the ten tribes had generally and finally forsaken the true worship of God, God kept up the true religion in the kingdom of Judah; and when they corrupted themselves, as they very often did exceedingly, and idolatry was ready totally to swallow all up, yet God kept the lamp alive, and was often pleased when things seemed to be come to an extremity, and religion at its last gasp, to grant blessed revivals by remarkable out pourings of his Spirit, particularly in Hezekiah's and Jos••h's time.

XVI. God's wonderfully upholding his church and the true religion through this period. It was very wonderful, considering the many and great apostasies that there were of that 〈…〉 to idolatry. When the ten tribes had generally and finally forsaken the true worship of God, God kept up the true religion in the kingdom of Judah; and when they corrupted themselves, as they very often did exceedingly, and idolatry was ready totally to swallow all up, yet God kept the lamp alive, and was often pleased when things seemed to be come to an extremity, and religion at its last gasp, to grant blessed revivals by remarkable out pourings of his Spirit, particularly in Hezekiah's and Jos••h's time.

XVII. God remarkably kept the book of the law from being lost in times of general and long continued neglect of and enmity against it. The most remarkable instance of this kind that we have, was the preservation of the book of the law in the time of the great apostasy during the greatest part of the long reign of Manasseh, which lasted fifty-five years, and then after that the reign of Am•• his son. This while the book of the law was so much neglected, and such a careless and profane management of the affairs of the temple prevailed, that the book of the law, that use to be laid up by the side of the ak in the Holy of Holies, was lost for a long time; no body knew where it was. But yet God preserved it from being finally lost. In Josiah's time, when they came to repair the temple, it was found buried in rubbish, after it had been lost so long that Josiah himself seems to have been much a stranger to it till now. See