The first was under good King Josiah. It is reported in the twenty-third chapter of Second Kings. The temple had gone to decay. Its courts were profaned by the worship of Baal. His vessels and utensils had usurped the place of its ancient sacred furniture. The worship of Baal, and of the sun and moon and stars, had driven out the worship of Jehovah. The very existence of the Bible, hid away in the ark of the covenant, had been forgotten. The king began by repairing the dismantled temple. In the course of these repairs, the workmen came upon the old, forgotten Bible. The high priest gave it to the king's scribe, and the scribe brought it to the king. They sat down together, and the scribe read it aloud to Josiah. What a picture for an artist—that eager reading of the long-forgotten book of the law! There is enough in it, without interpretation or comment, to awaken the king's conscience and his fears. He sends for an interpreter. She answers his summons; for, curiously enough, the theologian whom God appointed at this time to open the word of God to the king and the nation was a woman. She declares the impending wrath of God upon idolatrous Judæa. The king sets on foot a national reform; the people acquiesce. The idolatrous implements are burned; the idolatrous priests are forbidden to go on with their licentious rites; the idols are reduced to ashes; the shrines, and groves, and high places, and altars, are defiled or destroyed. And then the passover, the great feast of the Lord, is kept with rejoicing—such a passover as had not been held since the days of the Judges, seven centuries before. The next revival was under Ezra and Nehemiah. It is described in the eighth chapter of Nehemiah. Judah had been carried away into captivity. A generation had died in Babylon. War and time, the two great destroyers, had ravaged Jerusalem. Then the providence of God opened the way, and Nehemiah and Ezra took back to the holy city a remnant of God's people. A great camp-meeting was organized. A pulpit of wood was put up in one of the open squares near the city-gate. One man could not reach the whole congregation with his voice, and other lesser stands were put up. The Bible was brought out. The blessing of God was asked upon it. Then Ezra and his assistant preachers read out of the Bible, and commented on it. They did not preach; they only “read in the book, in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading,” and the Bible did its work, the same work it had done two hundred years before. “The people wept when they heard the words of the law.” It convinced them of their sin. It warned them of their danger. It awakened their long-sleeping consciences. The third revival was that at Pentecost. The history is in the second chapter of Acts. The revival was preceded by a protracted meeting, which lasted ten days. The object of this meeting was to pray for the promised gift of the Holy Ghost. When the Spirit of God was poured out on the church, the public preaching began. We have a report of one sermon. It is not a long one. More than half of it is simple quotations from the Bible, the same Bible which was the means of the revivals under Nehemiah and Josiah. It was not the preaching, it was the word of God which pricked men in the heart. And not till they cried out, “What shall we do?” did Peter cease preaching to them their sins and begin pointing them to an all-sufficient Saviour. There are some important lessons to be learned from these three historic revivals. They were quiet though intense movements. There was excitement, no doubt, when Josiah was breaking up and burning down the idols and idolatrous shrines and groves; and there was excitement when all Jerusalem gathered at the water-gate to hear the law from a dozen different preachers; and excitement when three thousand souls renounced Judaism and accepted Christianity; but there was no attempt to create excitement. Josiah and his contemporaries simply read the Bible to the people. Ezra simply read and explained it to them, and when they fell to weeping calmed their passionate and useless feeling. Peter played no arts of the orator; neither did he appeal to the imagination, the pity, or the fears, of the people. He simply proved to them out of the Bible that they had killed their promised Messiah, their anticipated King. These were Biblical movements. It was the same Bible that Josiah read from to the people, both small and great, in the court of the dismantled temple, that Ezra interpreted before the water-gate, and that Peter preached from in the streets of Jerusalem; it was this same Bible that was Luther's cross-bow in the Reformation; it is because he is great in this Bible that Mr. Moody, without the arts of the orator, achieves such results. These were movements from indifference to repentance, from repentance to reformation, from repentance and reformation to peace and joy in believing. The first work of Josiah was to make the people feel the sin of the nation as he felt it; the first effect of Ezra's preaching was to make the people weep; the first effect of Peter's preaching was that his auditors were pricked in the heart. There is small use in offering medicine to a man who thinks he is well, or a Saviour to a man who thinks he is no sinner. Intense but quiet conviction is the work of the Spirit, the Bible interpreted and applied is the instrument, and repentance is the immediate object of all true revivals of religion.—Christian Weekly.