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+Project Gutenberg's The Book of Isaiah, Volume I (of 2), by George Adam Smith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Book of Isaiah, Volume I (of 2)
+
+Author: George Adam Smith
+
+Release Date: May 22, 2012 [EBook #39767]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOOK OF ISAIAH, VOLUME I ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Colin Bell, Julia Neufeld and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
+
+Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals.
+
+[=a] depicts a macron over "a" as in "d[=a]l"
+
+Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been preserved except in
+obvious cases of typographical error.
+
+All advertising has been moved to the end of the book.
+
+
+  THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE
+
+  EDITED BY THE REV.
+
+  SIR W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.
+
+  _Editor of "The Expositor," etc._
+
+
+  THE BOOK OF ISAIAH
+
+  BY THE REV.
+
+  GEORGE ADAM SMITH, M.A.
+
+  _VOLUME 1._
+
+  HODDER AND STOUGHTON
+  LONDON. MCMX
+
+
+
+
+  THE
+
+  BOOK OF ISAIAH
+
+  BY THE REV.
+
+  GEORGE ADAM SMITH, M.A., D.D.
+
+  _Professor of Hebrew in the Free Church College, Glasgow_
+
+  _IN TWO VOLUMES_
+  VOL. I.--ISAIAH I.-XXXIX.
+
+  _TWENTIETH EDITION_
+
+  HODDER AND STOUGHTON
+  LONDON. MCMX
+
+_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ltd., London and Aylesbury._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+  INTRODUCTION                                                        ix
+
+  TABLE OF DATES                                                     xvi
+
+
+  BOOK I.
+
+  _ISAIAH'S PREFACE AND PROPHECIES TO
+  THE DEATH OF AHAZ_, 727 B.C.
+
+  CHAP.
+
+  I. ISAIAH'S PREFACE--THE ARGUMENT OF THE LORD.                       3
+
+  ISAIAH i.
+
+  II. THE THREE JERUSALEMS                                            19
+
+  ISAIAH ii.-iv. 740-735 B.C.
+
+  III. THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD                                       35
+
+  ISAIAH v.; ix. 8-x. 4. 735 B.C.
+
+  IV. ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION                                  57
+
+  ISAIAH vi. 740. WRITTEN 735 OR 727 B.C. (?).
+
+  V. THE WORLD IN ISAIAH'S DAY AND ISRAEL'S GOD                       91
+
+  WITH A MAP.
+
+  VI. KING AND MESSIAH; PEOPLE AND CHURCH                            103
+
+  ISAIAH vii.-ix. 1-8. 735-732 B.C.
+
+  VII. THE MESSIAH                                                   131
+
+
+  BOOK II.
+
+  _PROPHECIES FROM THE ACCESSION OF HEZEKIAH
+  TO THE DEATH OF SARGON_,
+  727-705 B.C.
+
+  VIII. GOD'S COMMONPLACE                                            151
+
+  ISAIAH xxviii. ABOUT 725 B.C.
+
+  IX. ATHEISM OF FORCE AND ATHEISM OF FEAR                           168
+
+  ISAIAH x. 5-34. ABOUT 721 B.C.
+
+  X. THE SPIRIT OF GOD IN MAN AND THE ANIMALS                        179
+
+  ISAIAH xi.; xii. ABOUT 720 B.C. (?).
+
+  XI. DRIFTING TO EGYPT, 720-705 B.C.                                196
+
+  ISAIAH xx. (711 B.C.); xxi. 1-10 (710 B.C.); xxxviii.; xxxix.
+
+
+  BOOK III.
+
+  _ORATIONS ON INTRIGUES WITH EGYPT_,
+  _AND ORACLES ON FOREIGN NATIONS_,
+  705-702 B.C.
+
+  XII. ARIEL, ARIEL                                                  209
+
+  ISAIAH xxix. ABOUT 703 B.C.
+
+  XIII. POLITICS AND FAITH                                           221
+
+  ISAIAH xxx. ABOUT 702 B.C.
+
+  XIV. THREE TRUTHS ABOUT GOD                                        238
+
+  ISAIAH xxxi. ABOUT 702 B.C.
+
+  XV. A MAN; OR, CHARACTER AND THE CAPACITY TO
+  DISCRIMINATE CHARACTER                                             248
+
+  ISAIAH xxxii. 1-8. ABOUT 702 B.C. (?).
+
+  XVI. ISAIAH TO WOMEN                                               262
+
+  ISAIAH xxxii. 9-20. DATE UNCERTAIN.
+
+  XVII. ISAIAH TO THE FOREIGN NATIONS                                271
+
+  ISAIAH xiv. 24-xxi.; xxiii. VARIOUS DATES.
+
+  XVIII. TYRE; OR, THE MERCENARY SPIRIT                              288
+
+  ISAIAH xxiii. 702 B.C.
+
+
+  BOOK IV.
+
+  _JERUSALEM AND SENNACHERIB, 701 B.C._
+
+  XIX. AT THE LOWEST EBB                                             306
+
+  ISAIAH i.; xxii. Early in 701 B.C.
+
+  XX. THE TURN OF THE TIDE: MORAL EFFECTS OF FORGIVENESS             320
+
+  ISAIAH xxii.; xxxiii. LATER IN 701 B.C.
+
+  XXI. OUR GOD A CONSUMING FIRE                                      331
+
+  ISAIAH xxxiii.
+
+  XXII. THE RABSHAKEH; OR, LAST TRIALS OF FAITH                      343
+
+  ISAIAH xxxvi. 701 B.C.
+
+  XXIII. THIS IS THE VICTORY ... OUR FAITH                           352
+
+  ISAIAH xxxvii. 701 B.C.
+
+  XXIV. A REVIEW OF ISAIAH'S PREDICTIONS CONCERNING
+  THE DELIVERANCE OF JERUSALEM                                       368
+
+  XXV. AN OLD TESTAMENT BELIEVER'S SICK-BED; OR, THE
+  DIFFERENCE CHRIST HAS MADE                                         375
+
+  ISAIAH xxxviii.; xxxix. DATE UNCERTAIN.
+
+  XXVI. HAD ISAIAH A GOSPEL FOR THE INDIVIDUAL?                      389
+
+
+  BOOK V.
+
+  _PROPHECIES NOT RELATING TO ISAIAH'S
+  TIME._
+
+  XXVII. BABYLON AND LUCIFER                                         405
+
+  ISAIAH xii. 12-xiv. 23. DATE UNKNOWN.
+
+  XXVIII. THE EFFECT OF SIN ON OUR MATERIAL SURROUNDINGS             416
+
+  ISAIAH xxiv. DATE UNKNOWN.
+
+  XXIX. GOD'S POOR                                                   428
+
+  ISAIAH xxv.-xxvii.; xxxiv.; xxxv. DATES UNKNOWN.
+
+  XXX. THE RESURRECTION                                              444
+
+  ISAIAH xxvi.; xxvii.
+
+  INDEX OF CHAPTERS                                                  453
+
+  INDEX OF SUBJECTS                                                  455
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+As the following Exposition of the Book of Isaiah does not observe the
+canonical arrangement of the chapters, a short introduction is necessary
+upon the plan which has been adopted.
+
+The size and the many obscurities of the Book of Isaiah have limited the
+common use of it in the English tongue to single conspicuous passages,
+the very brilliance of which has cast their context and original
+circumstance into deeper shade. The intensity of the gratitude with
+which men have seized upon the more evangelical passages of Isaiah, as
+well as the attention which apologists for Christianity have too
+partially paid to his intimations of the Messiah, has confirmed the
+neglect of the rest of the Book. But we might as well expect to receive
+an adequate conception of a great statesman's policy from the epigrams
+and perorations of his speeches as to appreciate the message, which God
+has sent to the world through the Book of Isaiah, from a few lectures on
+isolated, and often dislocated, texts. No book of the Bible is less
+susceptible of treatment apart from the history out of which it sprang
+than the Book of Isaiah; and it may be added, that in the Old Testament
+at least there is none which, when set in its original circumstance and
+methodically considered as a whole, appeals with greater power to the
+modern conscience. Patiently to learn how these great prophecies were
+suggested by, and first met, the actual occasions of human life, is
+vividly to hear them speaking home to life still.
+
+I have, therefore, designed an arrangement which embraces all the
+prophecies, but treats them in chronological order. I will endeavour to
+render their contents in terms which appeal to the modern conscience;
+but, in order to be successful, such an endeavour presupposes the
+exposition of them in relation to the history which gave them birth. In
+these volumes, therefore, narrative and historical exposition will take
+precedence of practical application.
+
+Every one knows that the Book of Isaiah breaks into two parts between
+chaps. xxxix. and xl. Vol. I. of this Exposition covers chaps. i.-xxxix.
+Vol. II. will treat of chaps. xl.-lxvi. Again, within chaps. i.-xxxix.
+another division is apparent. The most of these chapters evidently bear
+upon events within Isaiah's own career, but some imply historical
+circumstances that did not arise till long after he had passed away. Of
+the five books into which I have divided Vol. I., the first four contain
+the prophecies relating to Isaiah's time (740-701 B.C.), and the fifth
+the prophecies which refer to later events (chaps. xiii.-xiv. 23;
+xxiv.-xxvii.; xxxiv.; xxxv.).
+
+The prophecies, whose subjects fall within Isaiah's times, I have taken
+in chronological order, with one exception. This exception is chap. i.,
+which, although it published near the end of the prophet's life, I treat
+of first, because, from its position as well as its character, it is
+evidently intended as a preface to the whole book. The difficulty of
+grouping the rest of Isaiah's oracles and orations is great. The plan I
+have adopted is not perfect, but convenient. Isaiah's prophesying was
+determined chiefly by _four_ Assyrian invasions of Palestine: the first,
+in 734-732 B.C., by Tiglath-pileser II., while Ahaz was on the throne;
+the second by Salmanassar and Sargon in 725-720, during which Samaria
+fell in 721; the third by Sargon, 712-710; the fourth by Sennacherib in
+701, which last three occurred while Hezekiah was king of Judah. But
+outside the Assyrian invasions there were three other cardinal dates in
+Isaiah's life: 740, his call to be a prophet; 727, the death of Ahaz,
+his enemy, and the accession of his pupil, Hezekiah; and 705, the death
+of Sargon, for Sargon's death led to the rebellion of the Syrian States,
+and it was this rebellion which brought on Sennacherib's invasion.
+Taking all these dates into consideration, I have placed in Book I. all
+the prophecies of Isaiah from his call in 740 to the death of Ahaz in
+727; they lead up to and illustrate Tiglath-pileser's invasion; they
+cover what I have ventured to call the prophet's apprenticeship, during
+which the theatre of his vision was mainly the internal life of his
+people, but he gained also his first outlook upon the world beyond. Book
+II. deals with the prophecies from the accession of Hezekiah in 727 to
+the death of Sargon in 705--a long period, but few prophecies, covering
+both Salmanassar's and Sargon's campaigns. Book III. is filled with the
+prophecies from 705 to 702, a numerous group, called forth from Isaiah
+by the rebellion and political activity in Palestine consequent on
+Sargon's death and preliminary to Sennacherib's arrival. Book IV.
+contains the prophecies which refer to Sennacherib's actual invasion of
+Judah and siege of Jerusalem, in 701.
+
+Of course, any chronological arrangement of Isaiah's prophecies must be
+largely provisional. Only some of the chapters are fixed to dates past
+possibility of doubt. The Assyriology which has helped us with these
+must yield further results before the controversies can be settled that
+exist with regard to the rest. I have explained in the course of the
+Exposition my reasons for the order which I have followed, and need only
+say here that I am still more uncertain about the generally received
+dates of chaps x. 5-xi., xvii. 12-14 and xxxii. The religious problems,
+however, were so much the same during the whole of Isaiah's career that
+uncertainties of date, _if they are confined to the limits of that
+career_, make little difference to the exposition of the book.
+
+Isaiah's doctrines, being so closely connected with the life of his day,
+come up for statement at many points of the narrative, in which this
+Exposition chiefly consists. But here and there I have inserted chapters
+dealing summarily with more important topics, such as The World in
+Isaiah's Day; The Messiah; Isaiah's Power of Prediction, with its
+evidence on the character of Inspiration; and the question, Had Isaiah a
+Gospel for the Individual? A short index will guide the student to
+Isaiah's teaching on other important points of theology and life, such
+as holiness, forgiveness, monotheism, immortality, the Holy Spirit, etc.
+
+Treating Isaiah's prophecies chronologically as I have done, I have
+followed a method which put me on the look-out for any traces of
+development that his doctrine might exhibit. I have recorded these as
+they occur, but it may be useful to collect them here. In chaps. ii.-iv.
+we have the struggle of the apprentice prophet's thoughts from the easy
+religious optimism of his generation, through unrelieved convictions of
+judgement for the whole people, to his final vision of the Divine
+salvation of a remnant. Again, chap. vii. following on chaps. ii.-vi.
+proves that Isaiah's belief in the Divine righteousness preceded, and
+was the parent of, his belief in the Divine sovereignty. Again, his
+successive pictures of the Messiah grow in contents, and become more
+spiritual. And again, he only gradually arrived at a clear view of the
+siege and deliverance of Jerusalem. One other fact of the same kind has
+impressed me since I wrote the exposition of chap. i. I have there
+stated that it is plain that Isaiah's conscience was perfect just
+because it consisted of two complementary parts: one of God the
+infinitely High, exalted in righteousness, far above the thoughts of His
+people, and the other of God the infinitely Near, concerned and jealous
+for all the practical details of their life. I ought to have added that
+Isaiah was more under the influence of the former in his earlier years,
+but that as he grew older and took a larger share in the politics of
+Judah it was the latter view of God, to which he most frequently gave
+expression. Signs of a development like these may be fairly used to
+correct or support the evidence which Assyriology affords for
+determining the chronological order of the chapters.
+
+But these signs of development are more valuable for the proof they give
+that the Book of Isaiah contains the experience and testimony of a real
+life: a life that learned and suffered and grew, and at last triumphed.
+There is not a single word about the prophet's birth or childhood, or
+fortune, or personal appearance, or even of his death. But between
+silence on his origin and silence on his end--and perhaps all the more
+impressively because of these clouds by which it is bounded--there
+shines the record of Isaiah's spiritual life and of the unfaltering
+career which this sustained,--clear and whole, from his commission by
+God in the secret experience of his own heart to his vindication in
+God's supreme tribunal of history. It is not only one of the greatest,
+but one of the most finished and intelligible, lives in history. My main
+purpose in expounding the book is to enable English readers, not only to
+follow its course, but to feel, and to be elevated by, its Divine
+inspiration.
+
+I may state that this Exposition is based upon a close study of the
+Hebrew text of Isaiah, and that the translations are throughout my own,
+except in one or two cases where I have quoted from the revised English
+version.
+
+With regard to the Revised Version of Isaiah, which I have had
+opportunities of thoroughly testing, I would like to say that my sense
+of the immense service which it renders to English readers of the Bible
+is only exceeded by my wonder that the Revisers have not gone just a
+very little farther, and adopted one or two simple contrivances which
+are in the line of their own improvements and would have greatly
+increased our large debt to them. For instance, why did they not make
+plain by inverted commas such undoubted interruptions of the prophet's
+own speech as that of the drunkards in chap. xxviii. 9, 10? Not to know
+that these verses are spoken in mockery of Isaiah, a mockery to which he
+replies in vv. 10-13, is to miss the meaning of the whole passage.
+Again, when they printed Job and the Psalms in metrical form, as well as
+the Hymn of Hezekiah, why did they not do the same with other poetical
+passages of Isaiah, particularly the great Ode on the King of Babylon in
+chap. xiv.? This is utterly spoiled in the form in which the Revisers
+have printed it. What English reader would guess that it was as much a
+piece of metre as any of the Psalms? Again, why have they so
+consistently rendered by the misleading word "judgement" a Hebrew term
+that no doubt sometimes means an act of doom, but far oftener the
+abstract quality of justice? It is such defects, along with a frequent
+failure to mark the proper emphasis in a sentence, that have led me to
+substitute a more literal version of my own.
+
+I have not thought it necessary to discuss the question of the
+chronology of the period. This has been done so often and so recently.
+See Robertson Smith's _Prophets of Israel_, pp. 145, 402, 413, Driver's
+_Isaiah_, p. 12, or any good commentary.
+
+I append a chronological table, and an index to the canonical chapters
+will be found before the index of subjects. The publishers have added a
+map of Isaiah's world in illustration of chap. v.
+
+
+
+
+TABLE OF DATES.
+
+
+  B.C.
+
+  745. Tiglath-pileser II. ascends the Assyrian Throne.
+
+  740. Uzziah dies. Jotham becomes sole King of Judah. Isaiah's
+  Inaugural Vision (Isa. vi.).
+
+  735. Jotham dies. Ahaz succeeds. League of Syria and Northern
+  Israel against Judah.
+
+  734-732. Syrian Campaign of Tiglath-pileser II. Siege and Capture
+  of Damascus. Invasion of Israel. Captivity of Zebulon,
+  Naphtali and Galilee (Isa. ix. 1). Ahaz visits Damascus.
+
+  727. Salmanassar IV. succeeds Tiglath-pileser II. Hezekiah succeeds
+  Ahaz (or in 725?).
+
+  725. Salmanassar marches on Syria.
+
+  722 or 721. Sargon succeeds Salmanassar. Capture of Samaria.
+  Captivity of all Northern Israel.
+
+  720 or 719. Sargon defeats Egypt at Rafia.
+
+  711. Sargon invades Syria (Isa. xx.). Capture of Ashdod.
+
+  709. Sargon takes Babylon from Merodach-baladan.
+
+  705. Murder of Sargon. Sennacherib succeeds.
+
+  701. Sennacherib invades Syria. Capture of Coast Towns. Siege
+  of Ekron and Battle of Eltekeh. Invasion of Judah. Submission
+  of Hezekiah. Jerusalem spared. Return of
+  Assyrians with the Rabshakeh to Jerusalem, while Sennacherib's
+  Army marches on Egypt. Disaster to Sennacherib's
+  Army near Pelusium. Disappearance of Assyrians from
+  before Jerusalem--all happening in this order.
+
+  697 or 696.   Death of Hezekiah. Manasseh succeeds.
+
+  681. Death of Sennacherib.
+
+  607. Fall of Nineveh and Assyria. Babylon supreme. Jeremiah.
+
+  599. First Deportation of Jews to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar.
+
+  588. Jerusalem destroyed. Second Deportation of Jews.
+
+  538. Cyrus captures Babylon. First Return of Jewish Exiles, under
+  Zerubbabel, happens soon after.
+
+  458. Second Return of Jewish Exiles, under Ezra.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+_PREFACE AND PROPHECIES TO THE DEATH OF AHAZ_,
+
+727 B.C.
+
+
+
+
+  ISAIAH:  i. THE PREFACE.
+
+     "     ii.-iv. 740-735 B.C.
+
+     "     v., ix. 8-x. 4. 735 B.C.
+
+     "     vi. About 735 B.C.
+
+     "     vii.-ix. 7. 734-732 B.C.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+_THE ARGUMENT OF THE LORD AND ITS CONCLUSION._
+
+ISAIAH i.--HIS GENERAL PREFACE.
+
+
+The first chapter of the Book of Isaiah owes its position not to its
+date, but to its character. It was published late in the prophet's life.
+The seventh verse describes the land as overrun by foreign soldiery, and
+such a calamity befell Judah only in the last two of the four reigns
+over which the first verse extends Isaiah's prophesying. In the reign of
+Ahaz, Judah was invaded by Syria and Northern Israel, and some have
+dated chapter i. from the year of that invasion, 734 B.C. In the reign
+again of Hezekiah some have imagined, in order to account for the
+chapter, a swarming of neighbouring tribes upon Judah; and Mr. Cheyne,
+to whom regarding the history of Isaiah's time we ought to listen with
+the greatest deference, has supposed an Assyrian invasion in 711, under
+Sargon. But hardly of this, and certainly not of that, have we adequate
+evidence, and the only other invasion of Judah in Isaiah's lifetime took
+place under Sennacherib, in 701. For many reasons this Assyrian invasion
+is to be preferred to that by Syria and Ephraim in 734 as the occasion
+of this prophecy. But there is really no need to be determined on the
+point. The prophecy has been lifted out of its original circumstance
+and placed in the front of the book, perhaps by Isaiah himself, as a
+general introduction to his collected pieces. It owes its position, as
+we have said, to its character. It is a clear, complete statement of the
+points which were at issue between the Lord and His own all the time
+Isaiah was the Lord's prophet. It is the most representative of Isaiah's
+prophecies, a summary, perhaps better than any other single chapter of
+the Old Testament, of the substance of prophetic doctrine, and a very
+vivid illustration of the prophetic spirit and method. We propose to
+treat it here as introductory to the main subjects and lines of Isaiah's
+teaching, leaving its historical references till we arrive in due course
+at the probable year of its origin, 701 B.C.[1]
+
+  [1] See p. 343.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Isaiah's preface is in the form of a Trial or Assize. Ewald calls it
+"The Great Arraignment." There are all the actors in a judicial process.
+It is a Crown case, and God is at once Plaintiff and Judge. He delivers
+both the Complaint in the beginning (vv. 2, 3) and the Sentence in the
+end. The Assessors are Heaven and Earth, whom the Lord's herald invokes
+to hear the Lord's plea (ver. 2). The people of Judah are the
+Defendants. The charge against them is one of brutish, ingrate
+stupidity, breaking out into rebellion. The Witness is the prophet
+himself, whose evidence on the guilt of his people consists in
+recounting the misery that has overtaken their land (vv. 4-9), along
+with their civic injustice and social cruelty--sins of the upper and
+ruling classes (vv. 10, 17, 21-23). The people's Plea-in-defence,
+laborious worship and multiplied sacrifice, is repelled and exposed (vv.
+10-17). And the Trial is concluded--_Come now, let us bring our
+reasoning to a close, saith the Lord_--by God's offer of pardon to a
+people thoroughly convicted (ver. 18). On which follow the Conditions of
+the Future: happiness is sternly made dependent on repentance and
+righteousness (vv. 19, 20). And a supplementary oracle is given (vv.
+24-31), announcing a time of affliction, through which the nation shall
+pass as through a furnace; rebels and sinners shall be consumed, but God
+will redeem Zion, and with her a remnant of the people.
+
+That is the plan of the chapter--a Trial at Law. Though it disappears
+under the exceeding weight of thought the prophet builds upon it, do not
+let us pass hurriedly from it, as if it were only a scaffolding.
+
+That God should argue at all is the magnificent truth on which our
+attention must fasten, before we inquire what the argument is about. God
+reasons with man--that is the first article of religion according to
+Isaiah. Revelation is not magical, but rational and moral. Religion is
+reasonable intercourse between one intelligent Being and another. God
+works upon man first through conscience.
+
+Over against the prophetic view of religion sprawls and reeks in this
+same chapter the popular--religion as smoky sacrifice, assiduous
+worship, and ritual. The people to whom the chapter was addressed were
+not idolaters.[2] Hezekiah's reformation was over. Judah worshipped her
+own God, whom the prophet introduces not as for the first time, but by
+Judah's own familiar names for Him--Jehovah, Jehovah of Hosts, the Holy
+One of Israel, the Mighty One, or Hero, of Israel. In this hour of
+extreme danger the people are waiting on Jehovah with great pains and
+cost of sacrifice. They pray, they sacrifice, they solemnize to
+perfection. But they do not _know_, they do not _consider_; this is the
+burden of their offence. To use a better word, they do not _think_. They
+are God's grown-up children (ver. 2)--_children_, that is to say, like
+the son of the parable, with native instincts for their God, and _grown
+up_--that is to say, with reason and conscience developed. But they use
+neither, stupider than very beasts. _Israel doth not know, my people
+doth not consider._ In all their worship conscience is asleep, and they
+are drenched in wickedness. Isaiah puts their life in an
+epigram--_wickedness and worship: I cannot away_, saith the Lord, _with
+wickedness and worship_ (ver. 13).
+
+  [2] At least those to whom the first twenty-three verses were addressed.
+  There is distinct blame of worshipping in the groves of Asherah in the
+  appended oracle (vv. 24-31), which is proof that this oracle was given
+  at an earlier period than the rest of the chapter--a fair instance of
+  the very great difficulty we have in determining the dates of the
+  various prophecies of Isaiah.
+
+But the pressure and stimulus of the prophecy lie in this, that although
+the people have silenced conscience and are steeped in a stupidity worse
+than ox or ass, God will not leave them alone. He forces Himself upon
+them; He compels them to think. In the order and calmness of nature
+(ver. 2), apart from catastrophe nor seeking to influence by any
+miracle, God speaks to men by the reasonable words of His prophet.
+Before He will publish salvation or intimate disaster He must rouse and
+startle conscience. His controversy precedes alike His peace and His
+judgements. An awakened conscience is His prophet's first demand. Before
+religion can be prayer, or sacrifice, or any acceptable worship, it must
+be a _reasoning together_ with God.
+
+That is what mean the arrival of the Lord, and the opening of the
+assize, and the call to know and consider. It is the terrible necessity
+which comes back upon men, however engrossed or drugged they may be, to
+pass their lives in moral judgement before themselves; a debate to which
+there is never any closure, in which forgotten things will not be
+forgotten, but a man "is compelled to repeat to himself things he
+desires to be silent about, and to listen to what he does not wish to
+hear, ... yielding to that mysterious power which says to him, Think.
+One can no more prevent the mind from returning to an idea than the sea
+from returning to a shore. With the sailor this is called the tide; with
+the guilty it is called remorse. God upheaves the soul as well as the
+ocean."[3] Upon that ever-returning and resistless tide Hebrew prophecy,
+with its Divine freight of truth and comfort, rides into the lives of
+men. This first chapter of Isaiah is just the parable of the awful
+compulsion to think which men call conscience. The stupidest of
+generations, formal and fat-hearted, are forced to consider and to
+reason. The Lord's court and controversy are opened, and men are whipped
+into them from His Temple and His altar.
+
+  [3] _Les Miserables_: "a Tempest in a Brain."
+
+For even religion and religiousness, the common man's commonest refuge
+from conscience--not only in Isaiah's time--cannot exempt from this
+writ. Would we be judged by our moments of worship, by our
+_temple-treading_, which is Hebrew for church-going, by the wealth of
+our sacrifice, by our ecclesiastical position? This chapter drags us out
+before the austerity and incorruptibleness of Nature. The assessors of
+the Lord are not the Temple nor the Law, but Heaven and Earth--not
+ecclesiastical conventions, but the grand moral fundamentals of the
+universe, purity, order and obedience to God. Religiousness, however,
+is not the only refuge from which we shall find Isaiah startling men
+with the trumpet of the Lord's assize. He is equally intolerant of the
+indulgent silence and compromises of the world, that give men courage to
+say, We are no worse than others. Men's lives, it is a constant truth of
+his, have to be argued out not with the world, but with God. If a man
+will be silent upon shameful and uncomfortable things, he cannot. His
+thoughts are not his own; God will think them for him as God thinks them
+here for unthinking Israel. Nor are the practical and intellectual
+distractions of a busy life any refuge from conscience. When the
+politicians of Judah seek escape from judgement by plunging into deeper
+intrigue and a more bustling policy, Isaiah is fond of pointing out to
+them that they are only forcing judgement nearer. They do but sharpen on
+other objects the thoughts whose edge must some day turn upon
+themselves.
+
+What is this questioning nothing holds away, nothing stills, and nothing
+wears out? It is the voice of God Himself, and its insistence is
+therefore as irresistible as its effect is universal. That is not mere
+rhetoric which opens the Lord's controversy: _Hear, O heavens, and give
+ear, O earth, for the Lord hath spoken_. All the world changes to the
+man in whom conscience lifts up her voice, and to the guilty Nature
+seems attentive and aware. Conscience compels heaven and earth to act as
+her assessors, because she is the voice, and they the creatures, of God.
+This leads us to emphasize another feature of the prophecy.
+
+We have called this chapter a trial-at-law; but it is far more a
+_personal_ than a legal controversy; of the formally forensic there is
+very little about it. Some theologies and many preachers have attempted
+the conviction of the human conscience by the technicalities of a system
+of law, or by appealing to this or that historical covenant, or by the
+obligations of an intricate and burdensome morality. This is not
+Isaiah's way. His generation is here judged by no system of law or
+ancient covenants, but by a living Person and by His treatment of
+them--a Person who is a Friend and a Father. It is not Judah and the law
+that are confronted; it is Judah and Jehovah. There is no contrast
+between the life of this generation and some glorious estate from which
+they or their forefathers have fallen; but they are made to hear the
+voice of a living and present God: _I have nourished and brought up
+children, and they have rebelled against Me_. Isaiah begins where Saul
+of Tarsus began, who, though he afterwards elaborated with wealth of
+detail the awful indictment of the abstract law against man, had never
+been able to do so but for that first confronting with the Personal
+Deity, _Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?_ Isaiah's ministry started
+from the vision of the Lord; and it was no covenant or theory, but the
+Lord Himself, who remained the prophet's conscience to the end.
+
+But though the living God is Isaiah's one explanation of conscience, it
+is God in two aspects, the moral effects of which are opposite, yet
+complementary. In conscience men are defective by forgetting either the
+sublime or the practical, but Isaiah's strength is to do justice to
+both. With him God is first the infinitely High, and then equally the
+infinitely Near. _The Lord is exalted in righteousness!_ yes, and
+sublimely above the people's vulgar identifications of His will with
+their own safety and success, but likewise concerned with every detail
+of their politics and social behaviour, not to be relegated to the
+Temple, where they were wont to confine Him, but by His prophet
+descending to their markets and councils, with His own opinion of their
+policies, interfering in their intrigues, meeting Ahaz at the conduit of
+the upper pool in the highway of the fuller's field, and fastening _eyes
+of glory_ on every pin and point of the dress of the daughters of Zion.
+He is no merely transcendent God. Though He be the High and Holy One, He
+will discuss each habit of the people, and argue upon its merits every
+one of their policies. His constant cry to them is _Come and let us
+reason together_, and to hear it is to have a conscience. Indeed, Isaiah
+lays more stress on this intellectual side of the moral sense than on
+the other, and the frequency with which in this chapter he employs the
+expressions _know_, and _consider_, and _reason_, is characteristic of
+all his prophesying. Even the most superficial reader must notice how
+much this prophet's doctrine of conscience and repentance harmonizes
+with the _metanoia_ of New Testament preaching.
+
+This doctrine, that God has an interest in every detail of practical
+life and will argue it out with men, led Isaiah to a revelation of God
+quite peculiar to himself. For the Psalmist it is enough that his soul
+_come to God, the living God_. It is enough for other prophets to awe
+the hearts of their generations by revealing _the Holy One_; but Isaiah,
+with his intensely practical genius, and sorely tried by the stupid
+inconsistency of his people, bends himself to make them understand that
+God is at least a _reasonable_ Being. Do not, his constant cry is, and
+he puts it sometimes in almost as many words--do not act as if there
+were a Fool on the throne of the universe, which you virtually do when
+you take these meaningless forms of worship as your only intercourse
+with Him, and beside them practise your rank iniquities, as if He did
+not see nor care. We need not here do more than mention the passages in
+which, sometimes by a word, Isaiah stings and startles self-conscious
+politicians and sinners beetle-blind in sin, with the sense that God
+Himself takes an interest in their deeds and has His own working-plans
+for their life. On the land question in Judah (v. 9): _In mine ears,
+saith the Lord of hosts_. When the people were paralyzed by calamity, as
+if it had no meaning or term (xxviii. 29): _This also cometh forth from
+the Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in counsel and excellent in
+effectual working_. Again, when they were panic-stricken, and madly
+sought by foolish ways their own salvation (xxx. 18): _For the Lord is a
+God of judgement--i.e._, of principle, method, law, with His own way and
+time for doing things--_blessed are all they that wait for Him_. And
+again, when politicians were carried away by the cleverness and success
+of their own schemes (xxxi. 2): _Yet He also is wise_, or clever. It was
+only a personal application of this Divine attribute when Isaiah heard
+the word of the Lord give him the minutest directions for his own
+practice--as, for instance, at what exact point he was to meet Ahaz
+(vii. 3); or that he was to take a board and write upon it in the vulgar
+character (viii. 1); or that he was to strip frock and sandals, and walk
+without them for three years (xx). Where common men feel conscience only
+as something vague and inarticulate, a flavour, a sting, a foreboding,
+the obligation of work, the constraint of affection, Isaiah heard the
+word of the Lord, clear and decisive on matters of policy, and definite
+even to the details of method and style.
+
+Isaiah's conscience, then, was perfect, because it was two-fold: _God is
+holy; God is practical_. If there be the glory, the purity as of fire,
+of His Presence to overawe, there is His unceasing inspection of us,
+there is His interest in the smallest details of our life, there are His
+fixed laws, from regard for all of which no amount of religious
+sensibility may relieve us. Neither of these halves of conscience can
+endure by itself. If we forget the first we may be prudent and for a
+time clever, but will also grow self-righteous, and in time
+self-righteousness means stupidity too. If we forget the second we may
+be very devotional, but cannot escape becoming blindly and
+inconsistently immoral. Hypocrisy is the result either way, whether we
+forget how high God is or whether we forget how near.
+
+To these two great articles of conscience, however--God is high and God
+is near--the Bible adds a greater third, God is Love. This is the
+uniqueness and glory of the Bible's interpretation of conscience. Other
+writings may equal it in enforcing the sovereignty and detailing the
+minutely practical bearings of conscience: the Bible alone tells man how
+much of conscience is nothing but God's love. It is a doctrine as
+plainly laid down as the doctrine about chastisement, though not half so
+much recognised--_Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth_. What is true of
+the material pains and penalties of life is equally true of the inward
+convictions, frets, threats and fears, which will not leave stupid man
+alone. To men with their obscure sense of shame, and restlessness, and
+servitude to sin the Bible plainly says, "You are able to sin because
+you have turned your back to the love of God; you are unhappy because
+you do not take that love to your heart; the bitterness of your remorse
+is that it is love against which you are ungrateful." Conscience is not
+the Lord's persecution, but His jealous pleading, and not the fierceness
+of His anger, but the reproach of His love. This is the Bible's doctrine
+throughout, and it is not absent from the chapter we are considering.
+Love gets the first word even in the indictment of this austere assize:
+_I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled
+against Me_. Conscience is already a Father's voice: the recollection,
+as it is in the parable of the prodigal, of a Father's mercy; the
+reproach, as it is with Christ's lamentation over Jerusalem, of outraged
+love. We shall find not a few passages in Isaiah, which prove that he
+was in harmony with all revelation upon this point, that conscience is
+the reproach of the love of God.
+
+But when that understanding of conscience breaks out in a sinner's heart
+forgiveness cannot be far away. Certainly penitence is at hand. And
+therefore, because of all books the Bible is the only one which
+interprets conscience as the love of God, so is it the only one that can
+combine His pardon with His reproach, and as Isaiah now does in a single
+verse, proclaim His free forgiveness as the conclusion of His bitter
+quarrel. _Come, let us bring our reasoning to a close, saith the_ LORD.
+_Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though
+they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool._ Our version, _Come,
+and let us reason together_, gives no meaning here. So plain an offer of
+pardon is not reasoning together; it is bringing reasoning to an end; it
+is the settlement of a dispute that has been in progress. Therefore we
+translate, with Mr. Cheyne, _Let us bring our reasoning to an end_. And
+how pardon can be the end and logical conclusion of conscience is clear
+to us, who have seen how much of conscience is love, and that the
+Lord's controversy is the reproach of His Father's heart, and His
+jealousy to make His own consider all His way of mercy towards them.
+
+But the prophet does not leave conscience alone with its personal and
+inward results. He rouses it to its social applications. The sins with
+which the Jews are charged in this charge of the Lord are public sins.
+The whole people is indicted, but it is the judges, princes and
+counsellors who are denounced. Judah's disasters, which she seeks to
+meet by worship, are due to civic faults, bribery, corruption of
+justice, indifference to the rights of the poor and the friendless.
+Conscience with Isaiah is not what it is with so much of the religion of
+to-day, a _cul de sac_, into which the Lord chases a man and shuts him
+up to Himself, but it is a thoroughfare by which the Lord drives the man
+out upon the world and its manifold need of him. There is little
+dissection and less study of individual character with Isaiah. He has no
+time for it. Life is too much about him, and his God too much interested
+in life. What may be called the more personal sins--drunkenness, vanity
+of dress, thoughtlessness, want of faith in God and patience to wait for
+Him--are to Isaiah more social than individual symptoms, and it is for
+their public and political effects that he mentions them. Forgiveness is
+no end in itself, but the opportunity of social service; not a sanctuary
+in which Isaiah leaves men to sing its praises or form doctrines of it,
+but a gateway through which he leads God's people upon the world with
+the cry that rises from him here: _Seek justice, relieve the oppressed,
+judge the fatherless, plead for the widow_.
+
+Before we pass from this form in which Isaiah figures religion we must
+deal with a suggestion it raises. No modern mind can come into this
+ancient court of the LORD's controversy without taking advantage of its
+open forms to put a question regarding the rights of man there. That God
+should descend to argue with men, what licence does this give to men? If
+religion be reasonable controversy of this kind, what is the place of
+doubt in it? Is not doubt man's side of the argument? Has he not also
+questions to put--the Almighty from his side to arraign? For God has
+Himself here put man on a level with Him, saying, _Come, and let us
+reason together_.
+
+A temper of this kind, though not strange to the Old Testament, lies
+beyond the horizon of Isaiah. The only challenge of the Almighty which
+in any of his prophecies he reports as rising from his own countrymen is
+the bravado of certain drunkards (chaps. v. and xxviii.). Here and
+elsewhere it is the very opposite temper from honest doubt which he
+indicts--the temper that _does not know_, that _does not consider_.
+Ritualism and sensualism are to Isaiah equally false, because equally
+unthinking. The formalist and the fleshly he classes together, because
+of their stupidity. What does it matter whether a man's conscience and
+intellect be stifled in his own fat or under the clothes with which he
+dresses himself? They are stifled, and that is the main thing. To the
+formalist Isaiah says, _Israel doth not know, my people doth not
+consider_; to the fleshly (chap. v.), _My people are gone into captivity
+for want of knowledge._ But _knowing_ and _considering_ are just that of
+which doubt, in its modern sense, is the abundance, and not the defect.
+The mobility of mind, the curiosity, the moral sensitiveness, the hunger
+that is not satisfied with the chaff of formal and unreal answers, the
+spirit to find out truth for one's self, wrestling with God--this is the
+very temper Isaiah would have welcomed in a people whose sluggishness
+of reason was as justly blamed by him as the grossness of their moral
+sense. And if revelation be of the form in which Isaiah so prominently
+sets it, and the whole Bible bears him out in this--if revelation be
+this argumentative and reasonable process, then human doubt has its part
+in revelation. It is, indeed, man's side of the argument, and as history
+shows, has often helped to the elucidation of the points at issue.
+
+Merely intellectual scepticism, however, is not within Isaiah's horizon.
+He would never have employed (nor would any other prophet) our modern
+habits of doubt, except as he employs these intellectual terms, _to
+know_ and _to consider_--viz., as instruments of moral search and
+conviction. Had he lived now he would have been found among those few
+great prophets who use the resources of the human intellect to expose
+the moral state of humanity; who, like Shakespeare and Hugo, turn man's
+detective and reflective processes upon his own conduct; who make
+himself stand at the bar of his conscience. And truly to have doubt of
+everything in heaven and earth, and never to doubt one's self, is to be
+guilty of as stiff and stupid a piece of self-righteousness as the
+religious formalists whom Isaiah exposes. But the moral of the chapter
+is plainly what we have shown it to be, that a man cannot stifle doubt
+and debate about his own heart or treatment of God; whatever else he
+thinks about and judges, he cannot help judging himself.
+
+_Note on the Place of Nature in the Argument of the Lord._--The office
+which the Bible assigns to Nature in the controversy of God with man is
+fourfold--Assessor, Witness, Man's Fellow-Convict, and Doomster or
+Executioner. Taking these backward:--1. Scripture frequently exhibits
+Nature as the _doomster of the Lord_. Nature has a terrible power of
+flashing back from her vaster surfaces the guilty impressions of man's
+heart; at the last day her thunders shall peal the doom of the wicked,
+and her fire devour them. In those prophecies of the book of Isaiah
+which relate to his own time this use is not made of Nature, unless it
+be in his very earliest prophecy in chap. ii., and in his references to
+the earthquake (v. 25). To Isaiah the sentences and scourges of God are
+political and historical, the threats and arms of Assyria. He employs
+the violences of Nature only as metaphors for Assyrian rage and force.
+But he often promises fertility as the effect of the Lord's pardon, and
+when the prophets are writing about Nature, it is difficult to say
+whether they are to be understood literally or poetically. But, at any
+rate, there is much larger use made of physical catastrophes and
+convulsions in those other prophecies which do not relate to Isaiah's
+own time, and are now generally thought not to be his. Compare chaps.
+xiii. and xiv. 2. The representation of the earth as the
+_fellow-convict_ of guilty man, sharing his curse, is very vivid in
+Isaiah xxiv.-xxvii. In the prophecies relating to his own time Isaiah,
+of course, identifies the troubles that afflict the land with the sin of
+the people, of Judah. But these are due to political causes--viz., the
+Assyrian invasion. 3. In the Lord's court of judgement the prophets
+sometimes employ Nature as _a witness_ against man, as, for instance,
+the prophet Micah (vi. 1, _ff_). Nature is full of associations; the
+enduring mountains have memories from old, they have been constant
+witnesses of the dealing of God with His people. 4. Or lastly, Nature
+may be used as the great _assessor_ of the conscience, sitting to
+expound the principles on which God governs life. This is Isaiah's
+favourite use of Nature. He employs her to corroborate his statement of
+the Divine law and illustrate the ways of God to men, as in the end of
+chap. xxviii., and no doubt in the opening verse of this chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+_THE THREE JERUSALEMS._
+
+ISAIAH ii.-iv. (740-735 B.C.).
+
+
+After the general introduction, in chap. i., to the prophecies of
+Isaiah, there comes another portion of the book, of greater length, but
+nearly as distinct as the first. It covers four chapters, the second to
+the sixth, all of them dating from the same earliest period of Isaiah's
+ministry, before 735 B.C. They deal with exactly the same subjects, but
+they differ greatly in form. One section (chaps. ii.-iv.) consists of a
+number of short utterances--evidently not all spoken at the same time,
+for they conflict with one another--a series of consecutive prophecies,
+that probably represent the stages of conviction through which Isaiah
+passed in his prophetic apprenticeship; a second section (chap. v.) is a
+careful and artistic restatement, in parable and oration, of the truths
+he has thus attained; while a third section (chap. vi.) is narrative,
+probably written subsequently to the first two, but describing an
+inspiration and official call, which must have preceded them both. The
+more one examines chaps. ii.-vi., and finds that they but express the
+same truths in different forms, the more one is confirmed in some such
+view of them as this, which, it is believed, the following exposition
+will justify. Chaps. v. and vi. are twin appendices to the long summary
+in ii.-iv.: chap. v. a public vindication and enforcement of the results
+of that summary, chap. vi. a private vindication to the prophet's heart
+of the very same truths, by a return to the secret moment of their
+original inspiration. We may assign 735 B.C., just before or just after
+the accession of Ahaz, as the date of the latest of these prophecies.
+The following is their historical setting.
+
+For more than half a century the kingdom of Judah, under two powerful
+and righteous monarchs, had enjoyed the greatest prosperity. Uzziah
+strengthened the borders, extended the supremacy and vastly increased
+the resources of his little State, which, it is well to remember, was in
+its own size not larger than three average Scottish counties. He won
+back for Judah the port of Elath on the Red Sea, built a navy, and
+restored the commerce with the far East, which Solomon began. He
+overcame, in battle or by the mere terror of his name, the neighbouring
+nations--the Philistines that dwelt in cities, and the wandering tribes
+of desert Arabs. The Ammonites brought him gifts. With the wealth, which
+the East by tribute or by commerce poured into his little principality,
+Uzziah fortified his borders and his capital, undertook large works of
+husbandry and irrigation, organized a powerful standing army, and
+supplied it with a siege artillery capable of slinging arrows and
+stones. _His name spread far abroad, for he was marvellously helped till
+he was strong._ His son Jotham (740-735 B.C.) continued his father's
+policy with nearly all his father's success. He built cities and
+castles, quelled a rebellion among his tributaries, and caused their
+riches to flow faster still into Jerusalem. But while Jotham bequeathed
+to his country a sure defence and great wealth, and to his people a
+strong spirit and prestige among the nations, he left another bequest,
+which robbed these of their value--the son who succeeded him. In 735
+Jotham died and Ahaz became king. He was very young, and stepped to the
+throne from the hareem. He brought to the direction of the government
+the petulant will of a spoiled child, the mind of an intriguing and
+superstitious woman. It was when the national policy felt the paralysis
+consequent on these that Isaiah published at least the later part of the
+prophecies now marked off as chaps. ii.-iv. of his book. _My people_, he
+cries--_my people! children are their oppressors, and women rule over
+them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy
+the way of thy paths._
+
+Isaiah had been born into the flourishing nation while Uzziah was king.
+The great events of that monarch's reign were his education, the still
+grander hopes they prompted the passion of his virgin fancy. He must
+have absorbed as the very temper of his youth this national
+consciousness which swelled so proudly in Judah under Uzziah. But the
+accession of such a king as Ahaz, while it was sure to let loose the
+passions and follies fostered by a period of rapid increase in luxury,
+could not fail to afford to Judah's enemies the long-deferred
+opportunity of attacking her. It was an hour both of the manifestation
+of sin and of the judgement of sin--an hour in which, while the majesty
+of Judah, sustained through two great reigns, was about to disappear in
+the follies of a third, the majesty of Judah's God should become more
+conspicuous than ever. Of this Isaiah had been privately conscious, as
+we shall see, for five years. _In the year that king Uzziah died_
+(740), the young Jew _saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and
+lifted up_. Startled into prophetic consciousness by the awful contrast
+between an earthly majesty that had so long fascinated men, but now sank
+into a leper's grave, and the heavenly, which rose sovereign and
+everlasting above it, Isaiah had gone on to receive conviction of his
+people's sin and certain punishment. With the accession of Ahaz, five
+years later, his own political experience was so far developed as to
+permit of his expressing in their exact historical effects the awful
+principles of which he had received foreboding when Uzziah died. What we
+find in chaps. ii.-iv. is a record of the struggle of his mind towards
+this expression; it is the summary, as we have already said, of Isaiah's
+apprenticeship.
+
+_The word that Isaiah, the son of Amoz, saw concerning Judah and
+Jerusalem._ We do not know anything of Isaiah's family or of the details
+of his upbringing. He was a member of some family of Jerusalem, and in
+intimate relations with the Court. It has been believed that he was of
+royal blood, but it matters little whether this be true or not. A spirit
+so wise and masterful as his did not need social rank to fit it for that
+intimacy with princes which has doubtless suggested the legend of his
+royal descent. What does matter is Isaiah's citizenship in Jerusalem,
+for this colours all his prophecy. More than Athens to Demosthenes, Rome
+to Juvenal, Florence to Dante, is Jerusalem to Isaiah. She is his
+immediate and ultimate regard, the centre and return of all his
+thoughts, the hinge of the history of his time, the one thing worth
+preserving amidst its disasters, the summit of those brilliant hopes
+with which he fills the future. He has traced for us the main features
+of her position and some of the lines of her construction, many of the
+great figures of her streets, the fashions of her women, the arrival of
+embassies, the effect of rumours. He has painted her aspect in triumph,
+in siege, in famine and in earthquake; war filling her valleys with
+chariots, and again nature rolling tides of fruitfulness up to her
+gates; her moods of worship and panic and profligacy--till we see them
+all as clearly as the shadow following the sunshine and the breeze
+across the cornfields of our own summers.
+
+If he takes wider observation of mankind, Jerusalem is his watch-tower.
+It is for her defence he battles through fifty years of statesmanship,
+and all his prophecy may be said to travail in anguish for her new
+birth. He was never away from her walls, but not even the psalms of the
+captives by the rivers of Babylon, with the desire of exile upon them,
+exhibit more beauty and pathos than the lamentations which Isaiah poured
+upon Jerusalem's sufferings or the visions in which he described her
+future solemnity and peace.
+
+It is not with surprise, therefore, that we find the first prophecies of
+Isaiah directed upon his mother city: _The word that Isaiah the son of
+Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem._ There is little about Judah in
+these chapters: the country forms but a fringe to the capital.
+
+Before we look into the subject of the prophecy, however, a short
+digression is necessary on the manner in which it is presented to us. It
+is not a reasoned composition or argument we have here; it is a vision,
+it is the word which Isaiah _saw_. The expression is vague, often abused
+and in need of defining. Vision is not employed here to express any
+magical display before the eyes of the prophet of the very words which
+he was to speak to the people, or any communication to his thoughts by
+dream or ecstasy. They are higher qualities of "vision" which these
+chapters unfold. There is, first of all, the power of forming an ideal,
+of seeing and describing a thing in the fulfilment of all the promise
+that is in it. But these prophecies are much more remarkable for two
+other powers of inward vision, to which we give the names of insight and
+intuition--insight into human character, intuition of Divine
+principles--_clear knowledge of what man is and how God will act_--a
+keen discrimination of the present state of affairs in Judah, and
+unreasoned conviction of moral truth and the Divine will. The original
+meaning of the Hebrew word _saw_, which is used in the title to this
+series, is to cleave, or split; then to see into, to see through, to get
+down beneath the surface of things and discover their real nature. And
+what characterizes the bulk of these visions is _penetrativeness_, the
+keenness of a man who will not be deceived by an outward show that he
+delights to hold up to our scorn, but who has a conscience for the inner
+worth of things and for their future consequences. To lay stress on the
+moral meaning of the prophet's vision is not to grudge, but to emphasize
+its inspiration by God. Of that inspiration Isaiah was himself assured.
+It was God's Spirit that enabled him to see thus keenly; for he saw
+things keenly, not only as men count moral keenness, but as God Himself
+sees them, in their value in His sight and in their attractiveness for
+His love and pity. In this prophecy there occurs a striking
+expression--_the eyes of the glory of God_. It was the vision of the
+Almighty Searcher and Judge, burning through man's pretence, with which
+the prophet felt himself endowed. This then was the second element in
+his vision--to penetrate men's hearts as God Himself penetrated them,
+and constantly, without squint or blur, to see right from wrong in their
+eternal difference. And the third element is the intuition of God's
+will, the perception of what line of action He will take. This last, of
+course, forms the distinct prerogative of Hebrew prophecy, that power of
+vision which is its climax; the moral situation being clear, to see then
+how God will act upon it.
+
+Under these three powers of vision Jerusalem, the prophet's city, is
+presented to us--Jerusalem in three lights, really three Jerusalems.
+First, there is flashed out (chap. ii. 2-5) a vision of the ideal city,
+Jerusalem idealized and glorified. Then comes (ii. 6-iv. 1) a very
+realistic picture, a picture of the actual Jerusalem. And lastly at the
+close of the prophecy (iv. 2-6) we have a vision of Jerusalem as she
+shall be after God has taken her in hand--very different indeed from the
+ideal with which the prophet began. Here are three successive motives or
+phases of prophecy, which, as we have said, in all probability summarize
+the early ministry of Isaiah, and present him to us _first_ as the
+idealist or visionary, _second_ as the realist or critic, and _third_ as
+the prophet proper or revealer of God's actual will.
+
+
+I. THE IDEALIST (ii. 1-5).
+
+All men who have shown our race how great things are possible have had
+their inspiration in dreaming of the impossible. Reformers, who at death
+were content to have lived for the moving forward but one inch of some
+of their fellow-men, began by believing themselves able to lift the
+whole world at once. Isaiah was no exception to this human fashion. His
+first vision was that of a Utopia, and his first belief that his
+countrymen would immediately realize it. He lifts up to us a very grand
+picture of a vast commonwealth centred in Jerusalem. Some think he
+borrowed it from an older prophet; Micah has it also; it may have been
+the ideal of the age. But, at any rate, if we are not to take verse 5 in
+scorn, Isaiah accepted this as his own. _And it shall come to pass in
+the last days, that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be
+established in the top of the mountains, and exalted above the hills,
+and all nations shall flow unto it._ The prophet's own Jerusalem shall
+be the light of the world, the school and temple of the earth, the seat
+of the judgement of the Lord, when He shall reign over the nations, and
+all mankind shall dwell in peace beneath Him. It is a glorious destiny,
+and as its light shines from the far-off horizon, _the latter days_, in
+which the prophet sees it, what wonder that he is possessed and cries
+aloud, _O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the
+LORD!_ It seems to the young prophet's hopeful heart as if at once that
+ideal would be realized, as if by his own word he could lift his people
+to its fulfilment.
+
+But that is impossible, and Isaiah perceives so as soon as he turns from
+the far-off horizon to the city at his feet, as soon as he leaves
+to-morrow alone and deals with to-day. The next verses of the
+chapter--from verse 6 onwards--stand in strong contrast to those which
+have described Israel's ideal. There Zion is full of the law and
+Jerusalem of the word of the Lord, the one religion flowing over from
+this centre upon the world. Here into the actual Jerusalem they have
+brought all sorts of foreign worship and heathen prophets; _they are
+replenished from the East, and are soothsayers like the Philistines, and
+strike hands with the children of strangers_. There all nations come to
+worship at Jerusalem; here her thought and faith are scattered over the
+idolatries of all nations. The ideal Jerusalem is full of spiritual
+blessings, the actual of the spoils of trade. There the swords are beat
+into ploughshares and the spears into pruning-hooks; here are vast and
+novel armaments, horses and chariots. There the Lord alone is
+worshipped; here the city is crowded with idols. The real Jerusalem
+could not possibly be more different from the ideal, nor its inhabitants
+as they are from what their prophet had confidently called on them to
+be.
+
+
+II. THE REALIST (ii. 6-iv. 1).
+
+Therefore Isaiah's attitude and tone suddenly change. The visionary
+becomes a realist, the enthusiast a cynic, the seer of the glorious city
+of God the prophet of God's judgement. The recoil is absolute in style,
+temper and thought, down to the very figures of speech which he uses.
+Before, Isaiah had seen, as it were, a lifting process at work,
+_Jerusalem in the top of the mountains, and exalted above the hills_.
+Now he beholds nothing but depression. _For the day of the LORD of hosts
+shall be upon every one that is proud and haughty, upon all that is
+lifted up, and it shall be brought low, and the Lord alone shall be
+exalted in that day._ Nothing in the great civilization, which he had
+formerly glorified, is worth preserving. The high towers, fenced walls,
+ships of Tarshish, treasures and armour must all perish, even the hills
+lifted by his imagination shall be bowed down, and _the LORD alone be
+exalted in that day_. This recoil reaches its extreme in the last verse
+of the chapter. The prophet, who had believed so much in man as to think
+possible an immediate commonwealth of nations, believes in man now so
+little that he does not hold him worth preserving: _Cease ye from man,
+whose breath is in his nostrils; for wherein is he to be accounted of?_
+
+Attached to this general denunciation are some satiric descriptions, in
+the third chapter, of the anarchy, to which society in Jerusalem is fast
+being reduced under its childish and effeminate king. The scorn of these
+passages is scathing; _the eyes of the glory of God_ burn through every
+rank, fashion and ornament in the town. King and court are not spared;
+the elders and princes are rigorously denounced. But by far the most
+striking effort of the prophet's boldness is his prediction of the
+overthrow of Jerusalem itself (ver. 8). What it cost Isaiah to utter and
+the people to hear we can only partly measure. To his own passionate
+patriotism it must have felt like treason, to the blind optimism of the
+popular religion it doubtless appeared the rankest heresy--to aver that
+the holy city, inviolate and almost unthreatened since the day David
+brought to her the ark of the Lord, and destined by the voice of her
+prophets, including Isaiah himself, to be established upon the tops of
+the mountains, was now to fall into ruin. But Isaiah's conscience
+overcomes his sense of consistency, and he who has just proclaimed the
+eternal glory of Jerusalem is provoked by his knowledge of her citizens'
+sins to recall his words and intimate her destruction. It may have been,
+that Isaiah was partly emboldened to so novel a threat, by his knowledge
+of the preparations which Syria and Israel were already making for the
+invasion of Judah. The prospect of Jerusalem, as the centre of a vast
+empire subject to Jehovah, however natural it was under a successful
+ruler like Uzziah, became, of course, unreal when every one of Uzziah's
+and Jotham's tributaries had risen in revolt against their successor,
+Ahaz. But of these outward movements Isaiah tells us nothing. He is
+wholly engrossed with Judah's sin. It is his growing acquaintance with
+the corruption of his fellow-countrymen that has turned his back on the
+ideal city of his opening ministry, and changed him into a prophet of
+Jerusalem's ruin. _Their tongue and their doings are against the Lord,
+to provoke the eyes of His glory._ Judge, prophet and elder, all the
+upper ranks and useful guides of the people, must perish. It is a sign
+of the degradation to which society shall be reduced, when Isaiah with
+keen sarcasm pictures the despairing people choosing a certain man to be
+their ruler because he alone has a coat to his back! (iii. 6).
+
+With increased scorn Isaiah turns lastly upon the women of Jerusalem
+(iii. 16-iv. 2), and here perhaps the change which has passed over him
+since his opening prophecy is most striking. One likes to think of how
+the citizens of Jerusalem took this alteration in their prophet's
+temper. We know how popular so optimist a prophecy as that of the
+mountain of the Lord's house must have been, and can imagine how men and
+women loved the young face, bright with a far-off light, and the dream
+of an ideal that had no quarrel with the present. "But what a change is
+this that has come over him, who speaks not of to-morrow, but of to-day,
+who has brought his gaze from those distant horizons to our streets, who
+stares every man in the face (iii. 9), and makes the women feel that no
+pin and trimming, no ring and bracelet, escape his notice! Our loved
+prophet has become an impudent scorner!" Ah, men and women of Jerusalem,
+beware of those eyes! _The glory of God_ is burning in them; they see
+you through and through, and they tell us that all your armour and the
+_show of your countenance_, and your foreign fashions are as nothing,
+for there are corrupt hearts below. This is your judgement, that
+_instead of sweet spices there shall be rottenness, and instead of a
+girdle a rope, and instead of well-set hair baldness, and instead of a
+stomacher a girding of sackcloth, and branding instead of beauty_. _Thy
+men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war. And her gates
+shall lament and mourn, and she shall be desolate and sit upon the
+ground!_
+
+This was the climax of the prophet's judgement. If the salt have lost
+its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for
+nothing but to be cast out and trodden under foot. If the women are
+corrupt the state is moribund.
+
+
+III. _The Prophet of the Lord_ (iv. 2-6).
+
+Is there, then, no hope for Jerusalem? Yes, but not where the prophet
+sought it at first, in herself, and not in the way he offered it--by the
+mere presentation of an ideal. There is hope, there is more--there is
+certain salvation in the Lord, but it only comes after judgement.
+Contrast that opening picture of the new Jerusalem with this closing
+one, and we shall find their difference to lie in two things. There the
+city is more prominent than the Lord, here the Lord is more prominent
+than the city; there no word of judgement, here judgement sternly
+emphasized as the indispensable way towards the blessed future. A more
+vivid sense of the Person of Jehovah Himself, a deep conviction of the
+necessity of chastisement: these are what Isaiah has gained during his
+early ministry, without losing hope or heart for the future. The bliss
+shall come only when the Lord shall _have washed away the filth of the
+daughters of Zion, and shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the
+midst thereof by the spirit of judgement and the spirit of burning_. It
+is a corollary of all this that the participants of that future shall be
+many fewer than in the first vision of the prophet. The process of
+judgement must weed men out, and in place of all nations coming to
+Jerusalem, to share its peace and glory, the prophet can speak now only
+of Israel--and only of a remnant of Israel. _The escaped of Israel, the
+left in Zion, and he that remaineth in Jerusalem._ This is a great
+change in Isaiah's ideal, from the supremacy of Israel over all nations
+to the bare survival of a remnant of his people.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Is there not in this threefold vision a parallel and example for our own
+civilisation and our thoughts about it? All work and wisdom begin in
+dreams. We must see our Utopias before we start to build our stone and
+lime cities.
+
+                  "It takes a soul
+  To move a body; it takes a high-souled man
+  To move the masses even to a cleaner stye;
+  It takes the ideal to blow an inch inside
+  The dust of the actual."
+
+But the light of our ideals dawns upon us only to show how poor by
+nature are the mortals who are called to accomplish them. The ideal
+rises still as to Isaiah only to exhibit the poverty of the real. When
+we lift our eyes from the hills of vision, and rest them on our
+fellow-men, hope and enthusiasm die out of us. Isaiah's disappointment
+is that of every one who brings down his gaze from the clouds to the
+streets. Be our ideal ever so desirable, be we ever so persuaded of its
+facility, the moment we attempt to apply it we shall be undeceived.
+Society cannot be regenerated all at once. There is an expression which
+Isaiah emphasizes in his motive of cynicism: _The show of their
+countenance doth witness against them._ It tells us that when he called
+his countrymen to turn to the light he lifted upon them he saw nothing
+but the exhibition of their sin made plain. When we bring light to a
+cavern whose inhabitants have lost their eyes by the darkness, the light
+does not make them see; we have to give them eyes again. Even so no
+vision or theory of a perfect state--the mistake which all young
+reformers make--can regenerate society. It will only reveal social
+corruption, and sicken the heart of the reformer himself. For the
+possession of a great ideal does not mean, as so many fondly imagine,
+work accomplished; it means work revealed--work revealed so vast, often
+so impossible, that faith and hope die down, and the enthusiast of
+yesterday becomes the cynic of to-morrow. _Cease ye from man, whose
+breath is in his nostrils, for wherein is he to be accounted?_ In this
+despair, through which every worker for God and man must pass, many a
+warm heart has grown cold, many an intellect become paralyzed. There is
+but one way of escape, and that is Isaiah's. It is to believe in God
+Himself; it is to believe that He is at work, that His purposes to man
+are saving purposes, and that with Him there is an inexhaustible source
+of mercy and virtue. So from the blackest pessimism shall arise new hope
+and faith, as from beneath Isaiah's darkest verses that glorious passage
+suddenly bursts like uncontrollable spring from the very feet of winter.
+_For that day shall the spring of the LORD be beautiful and glorious,
+and the fruit of the land shall be excellent and comely for them that
+are escaped of Israel._ This is all it is possible to say. There must be
+a future for man, because God loves him, and God reigns. That future can
+be reached only through judgement, because God is righteous.
+
+To put it another way: All of us who live to work for our fellow-men or
+who hope to lift them higher by our word begin with our own visions of a
+great future. These visions, though our youth lends to them an original
+generosity and enthusiasm, are, like Isaiah's, largely borrowed. The
+progressive instincts of the age into which we are born and the mellow
+skies of prosperity combine with our own ardour to make our ideal one of
+splendour. Persuaded of its facility, we turn to real life to apply it.
+A few years pass. We not only find mankind too stubborn to be forced
+into our moulds, but we gradually become aware of Another Moulder at
+work upon our subject, and we stand aside in awe to watch His
+operations. Human desires and national ideals are not always fulfilled;
+philosophic theories are discredited by the evolution of fact. Uzziah
+does not reign for ever; the sceptre falls to Ahaz: progress is checked,
+and the summer of prosperity draws to an end. Under duller skies
+ungilded judgement comes to view, cruel and inexorable, crushing even
+the peaks on which we built our future, yet purifying men and giving
+earnest of a better future, too. And so life, that mocked the control of
+our puny fingers, bends groaning to the weight of an Almighty Hand. God
+also, we perceive as we face facts honestly, has His ideal for men; and
+though He works so slowly towards His end that our restless eyes are too
+impatient to follow His order, He yet reveals all that shall be to the
+humbled heart and the soul emptied of its own visions. Awed and
+chastened, we look back from His Presence to our old ideals. We are
+still able to recognize their grandeur and generous hope for men. But we
+see now how utterly unconnected they are with the present--castles in
+the air, with no ladders to them from the earth. And even if they were
+accessible, still to our eyes, purged by gazing on God's own ways, they
+would no more appear desirable. Look back on Isaiah's early ideal from
+the light of his second vision of the future. For all its grandeur, that
+picture of Jerusalem is not wholly attractive. Is there not much
+national arrogance in it? Is it not just the imperfectly idealized
+reflection of an age of material prosperity such as that of Uzziah's
+was? Pride is in it, a false optimism, the highest good to be reached
+without moral conflict. But here is the language of pity, rescue with
+difficulty, rest only after sore struggle and stripping, salvation by
+the bare arm of God. So do our imaginations for our own future or for
+that of the race always contrast with what He Himself has in store for
+us, promised freely out of His great grace to our unworthy hearts, yet
+granted in the end only to those who pass towards it through discipline,
+tribulation and fire.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This, then, was Isaiah's apprenticeship, and its net result was to leave
+him with the remnant for his ideal: the remnant and Jerusalem secured as
+its rallying-point.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+_THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD, OR TRUE PATRIOTISM THE CONSCIENCE OF OUR
+COUNTRY'S SINS._
+
+ISAIAH v.; ix. 8-x. 4 (735 _B.C._).
+
+
+The prophecy contained in these chapters belongs, as we have seen, to
+the same early period of Isaiah's career as chapters ii.-iv., about the
+time when Ahaz ascended the throne after the long and successful reigns
+of his father and grandfather, when the kingdom of Judah seemed girt
+with strength and filled with wealth, but the men were corrupt and the
+women careless, and the earnest of approaching judgement was already
+given in the incapacity of the weak and woman-ridden king. Yet although
+this new prophecy issues from the same circumstances as its
+predecessors, it implies these circumstances a little more developed.
+The same social evils are treated, but by a hand with a firmer grasp of
+them. The same principles are emphasized--the righteousness of Jehovah
+and His activity in judgement--but the form of judgement of which Isaiah
+had spoken before in general terms looms nearer, and before the end of
+the prophecy we get a view at close quarters of the Assyrian ranks.
+
+Besides, opposition has arisen to the prophet's teaching. We saw that
+the obscurities and inconsistencies of chapters ii.-iv. are due to the
+fact that that prophecy represents several stages of experience through
+which Isaiah passed before he gained his final convictions. But his
+countrymen, it appears, have now had time to turn on these convictions
+and call them in question: it is necessary for Isaiah to vindicate them.
+The difference, then, between these two sets of prophecies, dealing with
+the same things, is that in the former (chapters ii.-iv.), we have the
+obscure and tortuous path of a conviction struggling to light in the
+prophet's own experience; here, in chapter v., we have its careful array
+in the light and before the people.
+
+The point of Isaiah's teaching against which opposition was directed was
+of course its main point, that God was about to abandon Judah. This must
+have appeared to the popular religion of the day as the rankest heresy.
+To the Jews the honour of Jehovah was bound up with the inviolability of
+Jerusalem and the prosperity of Judah. But Isaiah knew Jehovah to be
+infinitely more concerned for the purity of His people than for their
+prosperity. He had seen the LORD _exalted in righteousness_ above those
+national and earthly interests, with which vulgar men exclusively
+identified His will. Did the people appeal to the long time Jehovah had
+graciously led them for proof that He would not abandon them now? To
+Isaiah that gracious leading was but for righteousness' sake, and that
+God might make His own a holy people. Their history, so full of the
+favours of the Almighty, did not teach Isaiah as it did the common
+prophets of his time, the lesson of Israel's political security, but the
+far different one of their religious responsibility. To him it only
+meant what Amos had already put in those startling words, _You only have
+I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will visit upon
+you all your iniquities_. Now Isaiah delivered this doctrine at a time
+when it brought him the hostility of men's passions as well as of their
+opinions. Judah was arming for war. Syria and Ephraim were marching upon
+her. To threaten his country with ruin in such an hour was to run the
+risk of suffering from popular fury as a traitor as well as from
+priestly prejudice as a heretic. The strain of the moment is felt in the
+strenuousness of the prophecy. Chapter v., with its appendix, exhibits
+more grasp and method than its predecessors. Its literary form is
+finished, its feeling clear. There is a tenderness in the beginning of
+it, an inexorableness in the end and an eagerness all through, which
+stamp the chapter as Isaiah's final appeal to his countrymen at this
+period of his career.
+
+The chapter is a noble piece of patriotism--one of the noblest of a race
+who, although for the greater part of their history without a
+fatherland, have contributed more brilliantly than perhaps any other to
+the literature of patriotism, and that simply because, as Isaiah here
+illustrates, patriotism was to their prophets identical with religious
+privilege and responsibility. Isaiah carries this to its bitter end.
+Other patriots have wept to sing their country's woes; Isaiah's burden
+is his people's guilt. To others an invasion of their fatherland by its
+enemies has been the motive to rouse by song or speech their countrymen
+to repel it. Isaiah also hears the tramp of the invader; but to him is
+permitted no ardour of defence, and his message to his countrymen is
+that they must succumb, for the invasion is irresistible and of the very
+judgement of God. How much it cost the prophet to deliver such a message
+we may see from those few verses of it in which his heart is not
+altogether silenced by his conscience. The sweet description of Judah
+as a vineyard, and the touching accents that break through the roll of
+denunciation with such phrases as _My people are gone away into
+captivity unawares_, tell us how the prophet's love of country is
+struggling with his duty to a righteous God. The course of feeling
+throughout the prophecy is very striking. The tenderness of the opening
+lyric seems ready to flow into gentle pleading with the whole people.
+But as the prophet turns to particular classes and their sins his mood
+changes to indignation, the voice settles down to judgement; till when
+it issues upon that clear statement of the coming of the Northern hosts
+every trace of emotion has left it, and the sentences ring out as
+unfaltering as the tramp of the armies they describe.
+
+
+I. THE PARABLE OF THE VINEYARD (v. 1-7).
+
+Isaiah adopts the resource of every misunderstood and unpopular teacher,
+and seeks to turn the flank of his people's prejudices by an attack in
+parable on their sympathies. Did they stubbornly believe it impossible
+for God to abandon a State He had so long and so carefully fostered? Let
+them judge from an analogous case in which they were all experts. In a
+picture of great beauty Isaiah describes a vineyard upon one of the
+sunny promontories visible from Jerusalem. Every care had been given it
+of which an experienced vine-dresser could think, but it brought forth
+only wild grapes. The vine-dresser himself is introduced, and appeals to
+the men of Judah and Jerusalem to judge between him and his vineyard. He
+gets their assent that all had been done which could be done, and
+fortified with that resolves to abandon the vineyard. _I will lay it
+waste; it shall not be pruned nor digged, but there shall come up briers
+and thorns._ Then the stratagem comes out, the speaker drops the tones
+of a human cultivator, and in the omnipotence of the Lord of heaven he
+is heard to say, _I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain
+upon it_. This diversion upon their sympathies having succeeded, the
+prophet scarcely needs to charge the people's prejudices in face. His
+point has been evidently carried. _For the vineyard of Jehovah of hosts
+is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant; and He
+looked for judgement, but behold oppression, for righteousness, but
+behold a cry._
+
+The lesson enforced by Isaiah is just this, that in a people's
+civilization there lie the deepest responsibilities, for that is neither
+more nor less than their cultivation by God; and the question for a
+people is not how secure does this render them, nor what does it count
+for glory, but how far is it rising towards the intentions of its
+Author? Does it produce those fruits of righteousness for which alone
+God cares to set apart and cultivate the peoples? On this depends the
+question whether the civilization is secure, as well as the right of the
+people to enjoy and feel proud of it. There cannot be true patriotism
+without sensitiveness to this, for however rich be the elements that
+compose the patriot's temper, as piety towards the past, ardour of
+service for the present, love of liberty, delight in natural beauty and
+gratitude for Divine favour, so rich a temper will grow rancid without
+the salt of conscience; and the richer the temper is, the greater must
+be the proportion of that salt. All prophets and poets of patriotism
+have been moralists and satirists as well. From Demosthenes to
+Tourgenieff, from Dante to Mazzini, from Milton to Russell Lowell, from
+Burns to Heine, one cannot recall any great patriot who has not known
+how to use the scourge as well as the trumpet. Many opportunities will
+present themselves to us of illustrating Isaiah's orations by the
+letters and speeches of Cromwell, who of moderns most resembles the
+statesman-prophet of Judah; but nowhere does the resemblance become so
+close as when we lay a prophecy like this of Jehovah's vineyard by the
+side of the speeches in which the Lord Protector exhorted the Commons of
+England, although it was the hour of his and their triumph, to address
+themselves to their sins.
+
+So, then, the patriotism of all great men has carried a conscience for
+their country's sins. But while this is always more or less a burden to
+the true patriot, there are certain periods in which his care for his
+country ought to be this predominantly, and need be little else. In a
+period like our own, for instance, of political security and fashionable
+religion, what need is there in patriotic displays of any other kind?
+but how much for patriotism of this kind--of men who will uncover the
+secret sins, however loathsome, and declare the hypocrisies, however
+powerful, of the social life of the people! These are the patriots we
+need in times of peace; and as it is more difficult to rouse a torpid
+people to their sins than to lead a roused one against their enemies,
+and harder to face a whole people with the support only of conscience
+than to defy many nations if you but have your own at your back, so
+these patriots of peace are more to be honoured than those of war. But
+there is one kind of patriotism more arduous and honourable still. It is
+that which Isaiah displays here, who cannot add to his conscience hope
+or even pity, who must hail his country's enemies for his country's
+good, and recite the long roll of God's favours to his nation only to
+emphasize the justice of His abandonment of them.
+
+
+II. THE WILD GRAPES OF JUDAH (v. 8-24).
+
+The _wild grapes_ which Isaiah saw in the vineyard of the Lord he
+catalogues in a series of Woes (vv. 8-24), fruits all of them of love of
+money and love of wine. They are abuse of the soil (8-10, 17[4]), a
+giddy luxury which has taken to drink (11-16), a moral blindness and
+headlong audacity of sin which habitual avarice and drunkenness soon
+develop (18-21), and, again, a greed of drink and money--men's
+perversion of their strength to wine, and of their opportunities of
+justice to the taking of bribes (22-24). These are the features of
+corrupt civilization not only in Judah, and the voice that deplores them
+cannot speak without rousing others very clamant to the modern
+conscience. It is with remarkable persistence that in every civilization
+the two main passions of the human heart, love of wealth and love of
+pleasure, the instinct to gather and the instinct to squander, have
+sought precisely these two forms denounced by Isaiah in which to work
+their social havoc--appropriation of the soil and indulgence in strong
+drink. Every civilized community develops sooner or later its
+land-question and its liquor-question. "Questions" they are called by
+the superficial opinion that all difficulties may be overcome by the
+cleverness of men; yet problems through which there cries for remedy so
+vast a proportion of our poverty, crime and madness, are something worse
+than "questions." They are huge sins, and require not merely the
+statesman's wit, but all the penitence and zeal of which a nation's
+conscience is capable. It is in this that the force of Isaiah's
+treatment lies. We feel he is not facing questions of State, but sins of
+men. He has nothing to tell us of what he considers the best system of
+land tenure, but he enforces the principle that in the ease with which
+land may be absorbed by one person the natural covetousness of the human
+heart has a terrible opportunity for working ruin upon society. _Woe
+unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there
+be no room, and ye be made to dwell alone in the midst of the land._ We
+know from Micah that the actual process which Isaiah condemns was
+carried out with the most cruel evictions and disinheritances. Isaiah
+does not touch on its methods, but exposes its effects on the
+country--depopulation and barrenness,--and emphasizes its religious
+significance. _Of a truth many houses shall be desolate, even great and
+fair, without an inhabitant. For ten acres of vineyard shall yield one
+bath, and a homer of seed shall yield but an ephah.... Then shall
+lambs feed as in their pasture, and strangers shall devour the ruins of
+the fat ones--i.e._, of the luxurious landowners (9, 10, 17. See note
+on previous page). And in one of those elliptic statements by which he
+often startles us with the sudden sense that God Himself is acquainted
+with all our affairs, and takes His own interest in them, Isaiah adds,
+"All this was whispered to me by Jehovah: _In mine ears--the LORD of
+hosts_" (ver. 9).
+
+  [4] Ewald happily suggests that verse 17 has dropped out of, and should
+  be restored to, its proper position at the end of the first "woe," where
+  it contributes to the development of the meaning far more than from
+  where it stands in the text.
+
+During recent agitations in our own country one has often seen the "land
+laws of the Bible" held forth by some thoughtless demagogue as models
+for land tenure among ourselves; as if a system which worked well with a
+small tribe in a land they had all entered on equal footing, and where
+there was no opportunity for the industry of the people except in
+pasture and tillage, could possibly be applicable to a vastly larger and
+more complex population, with different traditions and very different
+social circumstances. Isaiah says nothing about the peculiar land _laws_
+of his people. He lays down principles, and these are principles valid
+in every civilization. God has made the land, not to feed the pride of
+the few, but the natural hunger of the many, and it is His will that the
+most be got out of a country's soil for the people of the country.
+Whatever be the system of land-tenure--and while all are more or less
+liable to abuse, it is the duty of a people to agitate for that which
+will be least liable--if it is taken advantage of by individuals to
+satisfy their own cupidity, then God will take account of them. There is
+a responsibility which the State cannot enforce, and the neglect of
+which cannot be punished by any earthly law, but all the more will God
+see to it. A nation's treatment of their land is not always prominent as
+a question which demands the attention of public reformers; but it
+ceaselessly has interest for God, who ever holds individuals to answer
+for it. The land-question is ultimately a religious question. For the
+management of their land the whole nation is responsible to God, but
+especially those who own or manage estates. This is a sacred office.
+When one not only remembers the nature of land--how it is an element of
+life, so that if a man abuse the soil it is as if he poisoned the air or
+darkened the heavens--but appreciates also the multitude of personal
+relations which the landowner or factor holds in his hand--the peace of
+homes, the continuity of local traditions, the physical health, the
+social fearlessness and frankness, and the thousand delicate
+associations which their habitations entwine about the hearts of
+men--one feels that to all who possess or manage land is granted an
+opportunity of patriotism and piety open to few, a ministry less
+honourable and sacred than none other committed by God to man for his
+fellow-men.
+
+After the land-sin Isaiah hurls his second Woe upon the drink-sin, and
+it is a heavier woe than the first. With fatal persistence the luxury of
+every civilization has taken to drink; and of all the indictments
+brought by moralists against nations, that which they reserve for
+drunkenness is, as here, the most heavily weighted. The crusade against
+drink is not the novel thing that many imagine who observe only its late
+revival among ourselves. In ancient times there was scarcely a State in
+which prohibitive legislation of the most stringent kind was not
+attempted, and generally carried out with a thoroughness more possible
+under despots than where, as with us, the slow consent of public opinion
+is necessary. A horror of strong drink has in every age possessed those
+who from their position as magistrates or prophets have been able to
+follow for any distance the drifts of social life. Isaiah exposes as
+powerfully as ever any of them did in what the peculiar fatality of
+drinking lies. Wine is a mocker by nothing more than by the moral
+incredulity which it produces, enabling men to hide from themselves the
+spiritual and material effects of over-indulgence in it. No one who has
+had to do with persons slowly falling from moderate to immoderate
+drinking can mistake Isaiah's meaning when he says, _They regard not the
+work of the LORD; neither have they considered the operation of His
+hands_. Nothing kills the conscience like steady drinking to a little
+excess; and religion, even while the conscience is alive, acts on it
+only as an opiate. It is not, however, with the symptoms of drink in
+individuals so much as with its aggregate effects on the nation that
+Isaiah is concerned. So prevalent is excessive drinking, so entwined
+with the social customs of the country and many powerful interests, that
+it is extremely difficult to rouse public opinion to its effects. And
+_so they go into captivity for lack of knowledge_. Temperance reformers
+are often blamed for the strength of their language, but they may
+shelter themselves behind Isaiah. As he pictures it, the national
+destruction caused by drink is complete. It is nothing less than the
+people's _captivity_, and we know what that meant to an Israelite. It
+affects all classes: _Their honourable men are famished, and their
+multitude parched with thirst.... The mean man is bowed down, and the
+great man is humbled._ But the want and ruin of this earth are not
+enough to describe it. The appetite of hell itself has to be enlarged to
+suffice for the consumption of the spoils of strong drink. _Therefore
+hell hath enlarged her desire and opened her mouth without measure; and
+their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth
+among them, descend into it._ The very appetite of hell has to be
+enlarged! Does it not truly seem as if the wild and wanton waste of
+drink were preventable, as if it were not, as many are ready to sneer,
+the inevitable evil of men's hearts choosing this form of issue, but a
+superfluous audacity of sin, which the devil himself did not desire or
+tempt men to? It is this feeling of the infernal gratuitousness of most
+of the drink-evil--the conviction that here hell would be quiet if only
+she were not stirred up by the extraordinarily wanton provocatives that
+society and the State offer to excessive drinking--which compels
+temperance reformers at the present day to isolate drunkenness and make
+it the object of a special crusade. Isaiah's strong figure has lost none
+of its strength to-day. When our judges tell us from the bench that
+nine-tenths of pauperism and crime are caused by drink, and our
+physicians that if only irregular tippling were abolished half the
+current sickness of the land would cease, and our statesmen that the
+ravages of strong drink are equal to those of the historical scourges of
+war, famine and pestilence combined, surely to swallow such a glut of
+spoil _the appetite of hell must have been_ still more enlarged, _and
+the mouth of hell made_ yet _wider_.
+
+The next three Woes are upon different aggravations of that moral
+perversity which the prophet has already traced to strong drink. In the
+first of these it is better to read, _draw punishment near with cords of
+vanity_, than _draw iniquity_. Then we have a striking antithesis--the
+drunkards mocking Isaiah over their cups with the challenge, as if it
+would not be taken up, _Let Jehovah make speed, and hasten His work of
+judgement, that we may see it_, while all the time they themselves were
+dragging that judgement near, _as with cart-ropes_, by their persistent
+diligence in evil. This figure of sinners jeering at the approach of a
+calamity while they actually wear the harness of its carriage is very
+striking. But the Jews are not only unconscious of judgement, they are
+confused as to the very principles of morality: _Who call evil good, and
+good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put
+bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!_
+
+In his fifth Woe the prophet attacks a disposition to which his scorn
+gives no peace throughout his ministry. If these sensualists had only
+confined themselves to their sensuality they might have been left alone;
+but with that intellectual bravado which is equally born with "Dutch
+courage" of drink, they interfered in the conduct of the State, and
+prepared arrogant policies of alliance and war that were the distress of
+the sober-minded prophet all his days. _Woe unto them that are wise in
+their own eyes and prudent in their own sight._
+
+In his last Woe Isaiah returns to the drinking habits of the upper
+classes, from which it would appear that among the judges even of Judah
+there were "six-bottle men." They sustained their extravagance by
+subsidies, which we trust were unknown to the mighty men of wine who
+once filled the seats of justice in our own country. _They justify the
+wicked for a bribe, and take away the righteousness of the righteous
+from him._ All these sinners, dead through their rejection of the law of
+Jehovah of hosts and the word of the Holy One of Israel, shall be like
+to the stubble, fit only for burning, and their blossom as the dust of
+the rotten tree.
+
+
+III. THE ANGER OF THE LORD (v. 25; ix. 8-x. 4; v. 26-30).
+
+This indictment of the various sins of the people occupies the whole of
+the second part of the oration. But a third part is now added, in which
+the prophet catalogues the judgements of the Lord upon them, each of
+these closing with the weird refrain, _For all this His anger is not
+turned away, but His hand is stretched out still_. The complete
+catalogue is usually obtained by inserting between the 25th and 26th
+verses of chapter v. the long passage from chapter ix., ver. 8, to
+chapter x., ver. 4. It is quite true that as far as chapter v. itself is
+concerned it does not need this insertion; but ix. 8-x. 4 is decidedly
+out of place where it now lies. Its paragraphs end with the same refrain
+as closes v. 25, which forms, besides, a natural introduction to them,
+while v. 26-30 form as natural a conclusion. The latter verses describe
+an Assyrian invasion, and it was always in an Assyrian invasion that
+Isaiah foresaw the final calamity of Judah. We may, then, subject to
+further light on the exceedingly obscure subject of the arrangement of
+Isaiah's prophecies, follow some of the leading critics, and place ix.
+8-x. 4 between verses 25-26 of chapter v.; and the more we examine them
+the more we shall be satisfied with our arrangement, for strung together
+in this order they form one of the most impressive series of scenes
+which even an Isaiah has given us.
+
+From these scenes Isaiah has spared nothing that is terrible in history
+or nature, and it is not one of the least of the arguments for putting
+them together that their intensity increases to a climax. Earthquakes,
+armed raids, a great battle and the slaughter of a people; prairie and
+forest fires, civil strife and the famine fever, that feeds upon itself;
+another battle-field, with its cringing groups of captives and heaps of
+slain; the resistless tide of a great invasion; and then, for final
+prospect, a desolate land by the sound of a hungry sea, and the light is
+darkened in the clouds thereof. The elements of nature and the elemental
+passions of man have been let loose together; and we follow the violent
+floods, remembering that it is sin which has burst the gates of the
+universe, and given the tides of hell full course through it. Over the
+storm and battle there comes booming like the storm-bell the awful
+refrain, _For all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is
+stretched out still._ It is poetry of the highest order, but in him who
+reads it with a conscience mere literary sensations are sobered by the
+awe of some of the most profound moral phenomena of life. The
+persistence of Divine wrath, the long-lingering effects of sin in a
+nation's history, man's abuse of sorrow and his defiance of an angry
+Providence, are the elements of this great drama. Those who are familiar
+with _King Lear_, will recognize these elements, and observe how
+similarly the ways of Providence and the conduct of men are represented
+there and here.
+
+What Isaiah unfolds, then, is a series of calamities that have overtaken
+the people of Israel. It is impossible for us to identify every one of
+them with a particular event in Israel's history otherwise known to us.
+Some it is not difficult to recognize; but the prophet passes in a
+perplexing way from Judah to Ephraim and Ephraim to Judah, and in one
+case, where he represents Samaria as attacked by Syria and the
+Philistines, he goes back to a period at some distance from his own.
+There are also passages, as for instance x. 1-4, in which we are unable
+to decide whether he describes a present punishment or threatens a
+future one. But his moral purpose, at least, is plain. He will show how
+often Jehovah has already spoken to His people by calamity, and because
+they have remained hardened under these warnings, how there now remains
+possible only the last, worst blow of an Assyrian invasion. Isaiah is
+justifying his threat of so unprecedented and extreme a punishment for
+God's people as overthrow by this Northern people, who had just appeared
+upon Judah's political horizon. God, he tells Israel, has tried
+everything short of this, and it has failed; now only this remains, and
+this shall not fail. The prophet's purpose, therefore, being not an
+accurate historical recital, but moral impressiveness, he gives us a
+more or less ideal description of former calamities, mentioning only so
+much as to allow us to recognize here and there that it is actual facts
+which he uses for his purpose of condemning Israel to captivity, and
+vindicating Israel's God in bringing that captivity near. The passage
+thus forms a parallel to that in Amos, with its similar refrain: _Yet ye
+have not returned unto Me, saith the Lord_ (Amos iv. 6-12), and only
+goes farther than that earlier prophecy in indicating that the
+instruments of the Lord's final judgement are to be the Assyrians.
+
+Five great calamities, says Isaiah, have fallen on Israel and left them
+hardened: 1st, earthquake (v. 25); 2nd, loss of territory (ix. 8-12);
+3rd, war and a decisive defeat (ix. 13-17); 4th, internal anarchy (ix.
+18-21); 5th, the near prospect of captivity (x. 1-4).
+
+1. THE EARTHQUAKE (v. 25).--Amos closes his series with an earthquake;
+Isaiah begins with one. It may be the same convulsion they describe, or
+may not. Although the skirts of Palestine both to the east and west
+frequently tremble to these disturbances, an earthquake in Palestine
+itself, up on the high central ridge of the land, is very rare. Isaiah
+vividly describes its awful simplicity and suddenness. _The Lord
+stretched forth His hand and smote, and the hills shook, and their
+carcases were like offal in the midst of the streets._ More words are
+not needed, because there was nothing more to describe. The Lord lifted
+His hand; the hills seemed for a moment to topple over, and when the
+living recovered from the shock there lay the dead, flung like refuse
+about the streets.
+
+2. THE LOSS OF TERRITORY (ix. 8-21).--So awful a calamity, in which the
+dying did not die out of sight nor fall huddled together on some far off
+battle-field, but the whole land was strewn with her slain, ought to
+have left indelible impression on the people. But it did not. The Lord's
+own word had been in it for Jacob and Israel (ix. 8), _that the people
+might know, even Ephraim and the inhabitants of Samaria_. But unhumbled
+they turned in the stoutness of their hearts, saying, when the
+earthquake had passed:[5] _The bricks are fallen, but we will build with
+hewn stones;[6] the sycomores are cut down, but we will change them into
+cedars_. Calamity did not make this people thoughtful; they felt God
+only to endeavour to forget Him. Therefore He visited them the second
+time. They did not feel the Lord shaking their land, so He sent their
+enemies to steal it from them: _the Syrians before and the Philistines
+behind; and they devour Israel with open mouth_. What that had been for
+appalling suddenness this was for lingering and harassing--guerilla
+warfare, armed raids, the land eaten away bit by bit. _Yet the people do
+not return unto Him that smote them, neither seek they the LORD of
+hosts._
+
+  [5] Read past tenses, as in the margin of Revised Version, for all the
+  future tenses, or better, the historical present, down to the end of the
+  chapter.
+
+  [6] It is part of the argument for connecting ix. 8 with v. 25 that this
+  phrase would be very natural after the earthquake described in v. 25.
+
+3. WAR AND DEFEAT (ix. 13-17).--The next consequent calamity passed from
+the land to the people themselves. A great battle is described, in which
+the nation is dismembered in one day. War and its horrors are told, and
+the apparent want of Divine pity and discrimination which they imply is
+explained. Israel has been led into these disasters by the folly of
+their leaders, whom Isaiah therefore singles out for blame. _For they
+that lead these people cause them to err, and they that are led of them
+are destroyed._ But the real horror of war is that it falls not upon
+its authors, that its victims are not statesmen, but the beauty of a
+country's youth, the helplessness of the widow and orphan. Some question
+seems to have been stirred by this in Isaiah's heart. He asks, Why does
+the Lord not rejoice in the young men of His people? Why has He no pity
+for widow and orphan, that He thus sacrifices them to the sin of the
+rulers? It is because the whole nation shares the ruler's guilt; _every
+one is an hypocrite and an evil-doer, and every mouth speaketh folly_.
+As ruler so people, is a truth Isaiah frequently asserts, but never with
+such grimness as here. War brings out, as nothing else does, the
+solidarity of a people in guilt.
+
+4. INTERNAL ANARCHY (ix. 18-21).--Even yet the people did not repent;
+their calamities only drove them to further wickedness. The prophet's
+eyes are opened to the awful fact that God's wrath is but the blast that
+fans men's hot sins to flame. This is one of those two or three awful
+scenes in history, in the conflagration of which we cannot tell what is
+human sin and what Divine judgement. There is a panic wickedness, sin
+spreading like mania, as if men were possessed by supernatural powers.
+The physical metaphors of the prophet are evident: a forest or prairie
+fire, and the consequent famine, whose fevered victims feed upon
+themselves. And no less evident are the political facts which the
+prophet employs these metaphors to describe. It is the anarchy which has
+beset more than one corrupt and unfortunate people, when their
+misleaders have been overthrown: the anarchy in which each faction seeks
+to slaughter out the rest. Jealousy and distrust awake the lust for
+blood, rage seizes the people as fire the forest, _and no man spareth
+his brother_. We have had modern instances of all this; these scenes
+form a true description of some days of the French Revolution, and are
+even a truer description of the civil war that broke out in Paris after
+her late siege.
+
+  "If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
+  Send quickly down to tame these vile offences,
+  'T will come,
+  Humanity must perforce prey on itself
+  Like monsters of the deep."[7]
+
+  [7] _King Lear_, act iv., sc. 2.
+
+5. THE THREAT OF CAPTIVITY (x. 1-4).--Turning now from the past, and
+from the fate of Samaria, with which it would appear he has been more
+particularly engaged, the prophet addresses his own countrymen in Judah,
+and paints the future for them. It is not a future in which there is any
+hope. The day of their visitation also will surely come, and the prophet
+sees it close in the darkest night of which a Jewish heart could
+think--the night of captivity. Where, he asks his unjust
+countrymen--where _will ye then flee for help? and where will you leave
+your glory_? Cringing among the captives, lying dead beneath heaps of
+dead--that is to be your fate, who will have turned so often and then so
+finally from God. When exactly the prophet thus warned his countrymen of
+captivity we do not know, but the warning, though so real, produced
+neither penitence in men nor pity in God. _For all this His anger is not
+turned away, but His hand is stretched out still._
+
+6. THE ASSYRIAN INVASION (v. 26-30).--The prophet is, therefore, free to
+explain that cloud which has appeared far away on the northern horizon.
+God's hand of judgement is still uplifted over Judah, and it is that
+hand which summons the cloud. The Assyrians are coming in answer to
+God's signal, and they are coming as a flood, to leave nothing but ruin
+and distress behind them. No description by Isaiah is more majestic than
+this one, in which Jehovah, who has exhausted every nearer means of
+converting His people, lifts His undrooping arm with a _flag to the
+nations that are far off, and hisses_ or whistles _for them from the end
+of the earth_. _And, behold, they come with speed, swiftly: there is no
+weary one nor straggler among them; none slumbers nor sleeps; nor loosed
+is the girdle of his loins, nor broken the latchet of his shoes; whose
+arrows are sharpened, and all their bows bent; their horses' hoofs are
+like the flint, and their wheels like the whirlwind; a roar have they
+like the lion's, and they roar like young lions; yea, they growl and
+grasp the prey, and carry it off, and there is none to deliver. And they
+growl upon him that day like the growling of the sea; and if one looks
+to the land, behold, dark and distress, and the light is darkened in the
+cloudy heaven._
+
+Thus Isaiah leaves Judah to await her doom. But the tones of his weird
+refrain awaken in our hearts some thoughts which will not let his
+message go from us just yet.
+
+It will ever be a question, whether men abuse more their sorrows or
+their joys; but no earnest soul can doubt, which of these abuses is the
+more fatal. To sin in the one case is to yield to a temptation; to sin
+in the other is to resist a Divine grace. Sorrow is God's last message
+to man; it is God speaking in emphasis. He who abuses it shows that he
+can shut his ears when God speaks loudest. Therefore heartlessness or
+impenitence after sorrow is more dangerous than intemperance in joy; its
+results are always more tragic. Now Isaiah points out that men's abuse
+of sorrow is twofold. Men abuse sorrow by mistaking it, and they abuse
+sorrow by defying it.
+
+Men abuse sorrow by mistaking it, when they see in it nothing but a
+penal or expiatory force. To many men sorrow is what his devotions were
+to Louis XI., which having religiously performed, he felt the more brave
+to sin. So with the Samaritans, who said in the stoutness of their
+hearts, _The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones;
+the sycomores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars._ To
+speak in this way is happy, but heathenish. It is to call sorrow "bad
+luck;" it is to hear no voice of God in it, saying, "Be pure; be humble;
+lean upon Me." This disposition springs from a vulgar conception of God,
+as of a Being of no permanence in character, easily irritated but
+relieved by a burst of passion, smartly punishing His people and then
+leaving them to themselves. It is a temper which says, "God is angry,
+let us wait a little; God is appeased, let us go ahead again." Over
+against such vulgar views of a Deity with a temper Isaiah unveils the
+awful majesty of God in holy wrath: _For all this His anger is not
+turned away, but His hand is stretched out still_. How grim and savage
+does it appear to our eyes till we understand the thoughts of the
+sinners to whom it was revealed! God cannot dispel the cowardly thought,
+that He is anxious only to punish, except by letting His heavy hand
+abide till it purify also. The permanence of God's wrath is thus an
+ennobling, not a stupefying doctrine.
+
+Men also abuse sorrow by defying it, but the end of this is madness. "It
+forms the greater part of the tragedy of _King Lear_, that the aged
+monarch, though he has given his throne away, retains his imperiousness
+of heart, and continues to exhibit a senseless, if sometimes
+picturesque, pride and selfishness in face of misfortune. Even when he
+is overthrown he must still command; he fights against the very
+elements; he is determined to be at least the master of his own
+sufferings and destiny. But for this the necessary powers fail him; his
+life thus disordered terminates in madness. It was only by such an
+affliction that a character like his could be brought to repentance, ...
+to humility, which is the parent of true love, and that love in him
+could be purified. Hence the melancholy close of that tragedy."[8] As
+Shakespeare has dealt with the king, so Isaiah with the people; he also
+shows us sorrow when it is defied bringing forth madness. On so impious
+a height man's brain grows dizzy, and he falls into that terrible abyss
+which is not, as some imagine, hell, but God's last purgatory.
+Shakespeare brings shattered Lear out of it, and Isaiah has a remnant of
+the people to save.
+
+  [8] Ulrici: _Shakespeare's Dramatic Art_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+_ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION._
+
+ISAIAH vi. (740 B.C.; WRITTEN 735? OR 725?).
+
+
+It has been already remarked that in chapter vi. we should find no other
+truths than those which have been unfolded in chapters ii.-v.: the Lord
+exalted in righteousness, the coming of a terrible judgement from Him
+upon Judah, and the survival of a bare remnant of the people. But
+chapter vi. treats the same subjects with a difference. In chapters
+ii.-iv. they gradually appear and grow to clearness in connection with
+the circumstances of Judah's history; in chapter v. they are formally
+and rhetorically vindicated; in chapter vi. we are led back to the
+secret and solemn moments of their first inspiration in the prophet's
+own soul. It may be asked why chapter vi. comes last and not first in
+this series, and why in an exposition, attempting to deal, as far as
+possible, chronologically with Isaiah's prophecies, his call should not
+form the subject of the first chapter. The answer is simple, and throws
+a flood of light upon the chapter. In all probability chapter vi. was
+written after its predecessors, and what Isaiah has put into it is not
+only what happened in the earliest moments of his prophetic life, but
+that spelt out and emphasized by his experience since. The ideal
+character of the narrative, and its date some years after the events
+which it relates, are now generally admitted. Of course the narrative is
+all fact. No one will believe that he, whose glance penetrated with such
+keenness the character of men and movements, looked with dimmer eye into
+his own heart. It is the spiritual process which the prophet actually
+passed through before the opening of his ministry. But it is that,
+developed by subsequent experience, and presented to us in the language
+of outward vision. Isaiah had been some years a prophet, long enough to
+make clear that prophecy was not to be for him what it had been for his
+predecessors in Israel, a series of detached inspirations and occasional
+missions, with short responsibilities, but a work for life, a profession
+and a career, with all that this means of postponement, failure, and
+fluctuation of popular feeling. Success had not come so rapidly as the
+prophet in his original enthusiasm had looked for, and his preaching had
+effected little upon the people. Therefore he would go back to the
+beginning, remind himself of that to which God had really called him,
+and vindicate the results of his ministry, at which people scoffed and
+his own heart grew sometimes sick. In chapter vi. Isaiah acts as his own
+remembrancer. If we keep in mind, that this chapter, describing Isaiah's
+call and consecration to the prophetic office, was written by a man who
+felt that office to be the burden of a lifetime, and who had to explain
+its nature and vindicate its results to his own soul--grown somewhat
+uncertain, it may be, of her original inspiration--we shall find light
+upon features of the chapter that are otherwise most obscure.
+
+
+1. THE VISION (vv. 1-4).
+
+Several years, then, Isaiah looks back and says, _In the year King
+Uzziah died._ There is more than a date given here; there is a great
+contrast suggested. Prophecy does not chronicle by time, but by
+experiences, and we have here, as it seems, the cardinal experience of a
+prophet's life.
+
+All men knew of that glorious reign with the ghastly end--fifty years of
+royalty, and then a lazar-house. There had been no king like this one
+since Solomon; never, since the son of David brought the Queen of Sheba
+to his feet, had the national pride stood so high or the nation's dream
+of sovereignty touched such remote borders. The people's admiration
+invested Uzziah with all the graces of the ideal monarch. The chronicler
+of Judah tells us _that God helped him and made him to prosper, and his
+name spread far abroad, and he was marvellously helped till he was
+strong_; he with the double name--Azariah, Jehovah-his-Helper; Uzziah,
+Jehovah-his-Strength. How this glory fell upon the fancy of the future
+prophet, and dyed it deep, we may imagine from those marvellous colours,
+with which in later years he painted the king in his beauty. Think of
+the boy, the boy that was to be an Isaiah, the boy with the germs of
+this great prophecy in his heart--think of him and such a hero as this
+to shine upon him, and we may conceive how his whole nature opened out
+beneath that sun of royalty and absorbed its light.
+
+Suddenly the glory was eclipsed, and Jerusalem learned that she had seen
+her king for the last time: _The Lord smote the king so that he was a
+leper unto the day of his death, and dwelt in a several house, and he
+was cut off from the house of the Lord._ Uzziah had gone into the
+temple, and attempted with his own hands to burn incense. Under a later
+dispensation of liberty he would have been applauded as a brave
+Protestant, vindicating the right of every worshipper of God to approach
+Him without the intervention of a special priesthood. Under the earlier
+dispensation of law his act could be regarded only as one of
+presumption, the expression of a worldly and irreverent temper, which
+ignored the infinite distance between God and man. It was followed, as
+sins of wilfulness in religion were always followed under the old
+covenant, by swift disaster. Uzziah suffered as Saul, Uzzah, Nadab and
+Abihu did. The wrath, with which he burst out on the opposing priests,
+brought on, or made evident as it is believed to have done in other
+cases, an attack of leprosy. The white spot stood out unmistakeably from
+the flushed forehead, and he was thrust from the temple--_yea, himself
+also hasted to go out_.
+
+We can imagine how such a judgement, the moral of which must have been
+plain to all, affected the most sensitive heart in Jerusalem. Isaiah's
+imagination was darkened, but he tells us that the crisis was the
+enfranchisement of his faith. _In the year King Uzziah died_--it is as
+if a veil had dropped, and the prophet saw beyond what it had hidden,
+_the Lord sitting on a throne high and lifted up_. That it is no mere
+date Isaiah means, but a spiritual contrast which he is anxious to
+impress upon us, is made clear by his emphasis of the rank and not the
+name of God. It is _the Lord sitting upon a throne--the Lord_
+absolutely, set over against the human prince. The simple antithesis
+seems to speak of the passing away of the young man's hero-worship and
+the dawn of his faith; and so interpreted, this first verse of chapter
+vi. is only a concise summary of that development of religious
+experience which we have traced through chapters ii.-iv. Had Isaiah ever
+been subject to the religious temper of his time, the careless optimism
+of a prosperous and proud people, who entered upon their religious
+services without awe, _trampling the courts of the Lord_, and used them
+like Uzziah, for their _own honour_, who felt religion to be an easy
+thing, and dismissed from it all thoughts of judgement and feelings of
+penitence--if ever Isaiah had been subject to that temper, then once for
+all he was redeemed by this stroke upon Uzziah. And, as we have seen,
+there is every reason to believe that Isaiah did at first share the too
+easy public religion of his youth. That early vision of his (ii. 2-5),
+the establishment of Israel at the head of the nations, to be
+immediately attained at his own word (v. 5) and without preliminary
+purification, was it not simply a less gross form of the king's own
+religious presumption? Uzziah's fatal act was the expression of the
+besetting sin of his people, and in that sin Isaiah himself had been a
+partaker. _I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a
+people of unclean lips._ In the person of their monarch the temper of
+the whole Jewish nation had come to judgement. Seeking the ends of
+religion by his own way, and ignoring the way God had appointed, Uzziah
+at the very moment of his insistence was hurled back and stamped
+unclean. The prophet's eyes were opened. The king sank into a leper's
+grave, but before Isaiah's vision the Divine majesty arose in all its
+loftiness. _I saw the Lord high and lifted up._ We already know what
+Isaiah means by these terms. He has used them of God's supremacy in
+righteousness above the low moral standards of men, of God's occupation
+of a far higher throne than that of the national deity of Judah, of
+God's infinite superiority to Israel's vulgar identification of His
+purposes with her material prosperity or His honour with the
+compromises of her politics, and especially of God's seat as their
+Judge over a people, who sought in their religion only satisfaction for
+their pride and love of ease.
+
+From this contrast the whole vision expands as follows.
+
+Under the mistaken idea that what Isaiah describes is the temple in
+Jerusalem, it has been remarked, that the place of his vision is
+wonderful in the case of one who set so little store by ceremonial
+worship. This, however, to which our prophet looks is no house built
+with hands, but Jehovah's own heavenly _palace_ (ver. 1--not _temple_);
+only Isaiah describes it in terms of the Jerusalem temple which was its
+symbol. It was natural that the temple should furnish Isaiah not only
+with the framework of his vision, but also with the platform from which
+he saw it. For it was in the temple that Uzziah's sin was sinned and
+God's holiness vindicated upon him. It was in the temple that, when
+Isaiah beheld the scrupulous religiousness of the people, the contrast
+of that with their evil lives struck him, and he summed it up in the
+epigram _wickedness and worship_ (i. 13). It was in the temple, in
+short, that the prophet's conscience had been most roused, and just
+where the conscience is most roused there is the vision of God to be
+expected. Very probably it was while brooding over Uzziah's judgement on
+the scene of its occurrence that Isaiah beheld his vision. Yet for all
+the vision contained the temple itself was too narrow. The truth which
+was to be revealed to Isaiah, the holiness of God, demanded a wider
+stage and the breaking down of those partitions, which, while they had
+been designed to impress God's presence on the worshipper, had only
+succeeded in veiling Him. So while the seer keeps his station on the
+threshold of the earthly building, soon to feel it rock beneath his
+feet, as heaven's praise bursts like thunder on the earth, and while his
+immediate neighbourhood remains the same familiar _house_, all beyond is
+glorified. The veil of the temple falls away, and everything behind it.
+No ark nor mercy-seat is visible, but a throne and a court--the palace
+of God in heaven, as we have it also pictured in the eleventh and
+twenty-ninth Psalms. The Royal Presence is everywhere. Isaiah describes
+no face, only a Presence and a Session: _the Lord sitting on a throne,
+and His skirts filled the palace_.
+
+  "No face; only the sight
+  Of a sweepy garment vast and white
+  With a hem that I could recognize."[9]
+
+  [9] Browning's "Christmas Eve."
+
+_Around_ (not _above_, as in the English version) were ranged the
+hovering courtiers, of what shape and appearance we know not, except
+that they veiled their faces and their feet before the awful
+Holiness,--all wings and voice, perfect readinesses of praise and
+service. The prophet heard them chant in antiphon, like the temple
+choirs of priests. And the one choir cried out, _Holy, holy, holy is
+Jehovah of hosts_; and the other responded, _The whole earth is full of
+His glory_.
+
+It is by the familiar name Jehovah of hosts--the proper name of Israel's
+national God--that the prophet hears the choirs of heaven address the
+Divine Presence. But what they ascribe to the Deity is exactly what
+Israel will not ascribe, and the revelation they make of His nature is
+the contradiction of Israel's thoughts concerning Him.
+
+What, in the first place, is HOLINESS? We attach this term to a definite
+standard of morality or an unusually impressive fulness of character.
+To our minds it is associated with very positive forces, as of comfort
+and conviction--perhaps because we take our ideas of it from the active
+operations of the Holy Ghost. The original force of the term _holiness_,
+however, was not positive but negative, and throughout the Old
+Testament, whatever modifications its meaning undergoes, it retains a
+negative flavour. The Hebrew word for holiness springs from a root which
+means _to set apart, make distinct, put at a distance from_. When God is
+described as the Holy One in the Old Testament it is generally with the
+purpose of withdrawing Him from some presumption of men upon His majesty
+or of negativing their unworthy thoughts of Him. The Holy One is the
+Incomparable: _To whom, then, will ye liken Me, that I should be equal
+to him? saith the Holy One_ (xl. 25). He is the Unapproachable: _Who is
+able to stand before Jehovah, this holy God?_ (1 Sam. vi. 20). He is the
+Utter Contrast of man: _I am God, and not man, the Holy One in the midst
+of thee_ (Hosea xi. 9). He is the Exalted and Sublime: _Thus saith the
+high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell
+in the high and holy place_ (lvii. 15). Generally speaking, then,
+holiness is equivalent to separateness, sublimity--in fact, just to that
+loftiness or exaltation which Isaiah has already so often reiterated as
+the principal attribute of God. In their thrice-repeated _Holy_ the
+seraphs are only telling more emphatically to the prophet's ears what
+his eyes have already seen, _the Lord high and lifted up_. Better
+expression could not be found for the full idea of Godhead. This little
+word _Holy_ radiates heaven's own breadth of meaning. Within its
+fundamental idea--distance or difference from man--what spaces are
+there not for every attribute of Godhead to flash? If the Holy One be
+originally He who is distinct from man and man's thoughts, and who
+impresses man from the beginning with the awful sublimity of the
+contrast in which He stands to him, how naturally may holiness come to
+cover not only that moral purity and intolerance of sin to which we now
+more strictly apply the term, but those metaphysical conceptions as
+well, which we gather up under the name "supernatural," and so finally,
+by lifting the Divine nature away from the change and vanity of this
+world, and emphasizing God's independence of all beside Himself, become
+the fittest expression we have for Him as the Infinite and
+Self-existent. Thus the word _holy_ appeals in turn to each of the three
+great faculties of man's nature, by which he can be religiously
+exercised--his conscience, his affections, his reason; it covers the
+impressions which God makes on man as a sinner, on man as a worshipper,
+on man as a thinker. The Holy One is not only the Sinless and
+Sin-abhorring, but the Sublime and the Absolute too.
+
+But while we recognize the exhaustiveness of the series of ideas about
+the Divine Nature, which develop from the root meaning of holiness, and
+to express which the word _holy_ is variously used throughout the
+Scriptures, we must not, if we are to appreciate the use of the word on
+this occasion, miss the motive of recoil which starts them all. If we
+would hear what Isaiah heard in the seraphs' song, we must distinguish
+in the three-fold ascription of holiness the intensity of recoil from
+the confused religious views and low moral temper of the prophet's
+generation. It is no scholastic definition of Deity which the seraphim
+are giving. Not for a moment is it to be supposed that to that age,
+whose representative is listening to them, they are attempting to convey
+an idea of the Trinity. Their thrice-uttered _Holy_ is not theological
+accuracy, but religious emphasis. This angelic revelation of the
+holiness of God was intended for a generation, some of whom were
+idol-worshippers, confounding the Godhead with the work of their own
+hands or with natural objects, and none of whom were free from a
+confusion in principle of the Divine with the human and worldly, for
+which now sheer mental slovenliness, now a dull moral sense, and now
+positive pride was to blame. To worshippers who _trampled_ the courts of
+the Lord with the careless feet, and looked up the temple with the
+unabashed faces, of routine, the cry of the seraphs, as they veiled
+their faces and their feet, travailed to restore that shuddering sense
+of the sublimity of the Divine Presence, which in the impressible youth
+of the race first impelled man, bowing low beneath the awful heavens, to
+name God by the name of the Holy. To men, again, careful of the legal
+forms of worship, but lawless and careless in their lives, the song of
+the seraphs revealed not the hard truth, against which they had already
+rubbed conscience trite, that God's law was inexorable, but the fiery
+fact that His whole nature burned with wrath towards sin. To men, once
+more, proud of their prestige and material prosperity, and presuming in
+their pride to take their own way with God, and to employ like Uzziah
+the exercises of religion for their own honour, this vision presented
+the real sovereignty of God: the Lord Himself seated on a throne
+_there_--just where they felt only a theatre for the display of their
+pride, or machinery for the attainment of their private ends. Thus did
+the three-fold cry of the angels meet the three-fold sinfulness of that
+generation of men.
+
+But the first line of the seraph's song serves more than a temporary
+end. The Trisagion rings, and has need to ring, for ever down the
+Church. Everywhere and at all times these are the three besetting sins
+of religious people--callousness in worship, carelessness in life, and
+the temper which employs the forms of religion simply for
+self-indulgence or self-aggrandisement. These sins are induced by the
+same habit of contentment with mere form; they can be corrected only by
+the vision of the Personal Presence who is behind all form. Our
+organization, ritual, law and sacrament--we must be able to see them
+fall away, as Isaiah saw the sanctuary itself disappear, before God
+Himself, if we are to remain heartily moral and fervently religious. The
+Church of God has to learn that no mere multiplication of forms, nor a
+more aesthetic arrangement of them, will redeem her worshippers from
+callousness. Callousness is but the shell which the feelings develop in
+self-defence when left by the sluggish and impenetrative soul to beat
+upon the hard outsides of form. And nothing will fuse this shell of
+callousness but that ardent flame, which is kindled at the touching of
+the Divine and human spirits, when forms have fallen away and the soul
+beholds with open face the Eternal Himself. As with worship, so with
+morality. Holiness is secured not by ceremonial, but by a reverence for
+a holy Being. We shall rub our consciences trite against moral maxims or
+religious rites. It is the effluence of a Presence, which alone can
+create in us, and keep in us, a clean heart. And if any object that we
+thus make light of ritual and religious law, of Church and sacrament,
+the reply is obvious. Ritual and sacrament are to the living God but as
+the wick of a candle to the light thereof. They are given to reveal Him,
+and the process is not perfect unless they themselves perish from the
+thoughts to which they convey Him. If God is not felt to be present, as
+Isaiah felt Him to be, to the exclusion of all forms, then these will be
+certain to be employed, as Uzziah employed them, for the sake of the
+only other spiritual being of whom the worshipper is conscious--himself.
+Unless we are able to forget our ritual in spiritual communion with the
+very God, and to become unconscious of our organization in devout
+consciousness of our personal relation to Him, then ritual will be only
+a means of sensuous indulgence, organization only a machinery for
+selfish or sectarian ends. The vision of God--this is the one thing
+needful for worship and for conduct.
+
+But while the one verse of the antiphon reiterates what Jehovah of hosts
+is in Himself, the other describes what He is in revelation. _The whole
+earth is full of His glory._ Glory is the correlative of holiness. Glory
+is that in which holiness comes to expression. Glory is the expression
+of holiness, as beauty is the expression of health. If holiness be as
+deep as we have seen, so varied then will glory be. There is nothing in
+the earth but it is the glory of God. _The fulness of the whole earth is
+His glory_, is the proper grammatical rendering of the song. For Jehovah
+of hosts is not the God only of Israel, but the Maker of heaven and
+earth, and not the victory of Israel alone, but the wealth and the
+beauty of all the world is His glory. So universal an ascription of
+glory is the proper parallel to that of absolute Godhead, which is
+implied in holiness.
+
+
+II. THE CALL (vv. 4-8).
+
+Thus, then, Isaiah, standing on earth, on the place of a great sin, with
+the conscience of his people's evil in his heart, and himself not
+without the feeling of guilt, looked into heaven, and beholding the
+glory of God, heard also with what pure praise and readiness of service
+the heavenly hosts surround His throne. No wonder the prophet felt the
+polluted threshold rock beneath him, or that as where fire and water
+mingle there should be the rising of a great smoke. For the smoke
+described is not, as some have imagined, that of acceptable incense,
+thick billows swelling through the temple to express the completion and
+satisfaction of the seraphs' worship; but it is the mist which ever
+arises where holiness and sin touch each other. It has been described
+both as the obscurity that envelops a weak mind in presence of a truth
+too great for it, and the darkness that falls upon a diseased eye when
+exposed to the mid-day sun. These are only analogies, and may mislead
+us. What Isaiah actually felt was the dim-eyed shame, the distraction,
+the embarrassment, the blinding shock of a personal encounter with One
+whom he was utterly unfit to meet. For this was a personal encounter. We
+have spelt out the revelation sentence by sentence in gradual argument;
+but Isaiah did not reach it through argument or brooding. It was not to
+the prophet what it is to his expositors, a pregnant thought, that his
+intellect might gradually unfold, but a Personal Presence, which
+apprehended and overwhelmed him. God and he were there face to face.
+_Then said I, Woe is me, for I am undone, because a man unclean of lips
+am I, and in the midst of a people unclean of lips do I dwell; for the
+King, Jehovah of hosts, mine eyes have beheld._
+
+The form of the prophet's confession, _uncleanness of lips_, will not
+surprise us as far as he makes it for himself. As with the disease of
+the body, so with the sin of the soul; each often gathers to one point
+of pain. Every man, though wholly sinful by nature, has his own
+particular consciousness of guilt. Isaiah being a prophet felt his
+mortal weakness most upon his lips. The inclusion of the people,
+however, along with himself under this form of guilt, suggests a wider
+interpretation of it. The lips are, as it were, the blossom of a man.
+_Grace is poured upon thy lips, therefore God hath blessed thee for
+ever. If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, able to
+bridle the whole body also._ It is in the blossom of a plant that the
+plant's defects become conspicuous; it is when all a man's faculties
+combine for the complex and delicate office of expression that any fault
+which is in him will come to the surface. Isaiah had been listening to
+the perfect praise of sinless beings, and it brought into startling
+relief the defects of his own people's worship. Unclean of lips these
+were indeed when brought against that heavenly choir. Their social and
+political sin--sin of heart and home and market--came to a head in their
+worship, and what should have been the blossom of their life fell to the
+ground like a rotten leaf beneath the stainless beauty of the seraphs'
+praise.
+
+While the prophet thus passionately gathered his guilt upon his lips, a
+sacrament was preparing on which God concentrated His mercy to meet it.
+Sacrament and lips, applied mercy and presented sin, now come together.
+_Then flew unto me one of the seraphim, and in his hand a glowing
+stone--with tongs had he taken it off the altar--and he touched my mouth
+and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips, and so thy iniquity passeth
+away and thy sin is atoned for._
+
+The idea of this function is very evident, and a scholar who has said
+that it "would perhaps be quite intelligible to the contemporaries of
+the prophet, but is undoubtedly obscure to us," appears to have said
+just the reverse of what is right; for so simple a process of atonement
+leaves out the most characteristic details of the Jewish ritual of
+sacrifice, while it anticipates in an unmistakeable manner the essence
+of the Christian sacrament. In a scene of expiation laid under the old
+covenant, we are struck by the absence of oblation or sacrificial act on
+the part of the sinner himself. There is here no victim slain, no blood
+sprinkled; an altar is only parenthetically suggested, and even then in
+its simplest form, of a hearth on which the Divine fire is continually
+burning. The _glowing stone_, not _live coal_ as in the English version,
+was no part of the temple furniture, but the ordinary means of conveying
+heat or applying fire in the various purposes of household life. There
+was, it is true, a carrying of fire in some of the temple services, as,
+for example, on the great Day of Atonement, but then it was effected by
+a small grate filled with living embers. In the household, on the other
+hand, when cakes had to be baked, or milk boiled, or water warmed, or in
+fifty similar applications of fire, a glowing stone taken from off the
+hearth was the invariable instrument. It is this swift and simple
+domestic process which Isaiah now sees substituted for the slow and
+intricate ceremonial of the temple--a seraph with a glowing stone in his
+hand, _with tongs had he taken it off the altar_. And yet the prophet
+feels this only as a more direct expression of the very same idea, with
+which the elaborate ritual was inspired--for which the victim was
+slain, and the flesh consumed in fire, and the blood sprinkled. Isaiah
+desires nothing else, and receives no more, than the ceremonial law was
+intended to assure to the sinner--pardon of his sin and reconciliation
+to God. But our prophet will have conviction of these immediately, and
+with a force which the ordinary ritual is incapable of expressing. The
+feelings of this Jew are too intense and spiritual to be satisfied with
+the slow pageant of the earthly temple, whose performances to a man in
+his horror could only have appeared so indifferent and far away from
+himself as not to be really his own nor to effect what he passionately
+desired. Instead therefore of laying his guilt in the shape of some
+victim on the altar, Isaiah, with a keener sense of its inseparableness
+from himself, presents it to God upon his own lips. Instead of being
+satisfied with beholding the fire of God consume it on another body than
+his own, at a distance from himself, he feels that fire visit the very
+threshold of his nature, where he has gathered the guilt, and consume it
+there. The whole secret of this startling nonconformity to the law, on
+the very floor of the temple, is that for a man who has penetrated to
+the presence of God the legal forms are left far behind, and he stands
+face to face with the truth by which they are inspired. In that Divine
+Presence Isaiah is his own altar; he acts his guilt in his own person,
+and so he feels the expiatory fire come to his very self directly from
+the heavenly hearth. It is a replica of the fifty-first Psalm: _For Thou
+delightest not in sacrifice, else would I give it; Thou hast no pleasure
+in burnt offering._ The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. This is
+my sacrifice, my sense of guilt gathered here upon my lips: my _broken
+and contrite heart_, who feel myself undone before Thee, _Lord, Thou
+wilt not despise_.
+
+It has always been remarked as one of the most powerful proofs of the
+originality and Divine force of Christianity, that from man's worship of
+God, and especially from those parts in which the forgiveness of sin is
+sought and assured, it did away with the necessity of a physical rite of
+sacrifice; that it broke the universal and immemorial habit by which man
+presented to God a material offering for the guilt of his soul. By
+remembering this fact we may measure the religious significance of the
+scene we now contemplate. Nearly eight centuries before there was
+accomplished upon Calvary that Divine Sacrifice for sin, which abrogated
+a rite of expiation, hitherto universally adopted by the conscience of
+humanity, we find a Jew, in the dispensation where such a rite was most
+religiously enforced, trembling under the conviction of sin, and upon a
+floor crowded with suggestions of physical sacrifice; yet the only
+sacrifice he offers is the purely spiritual one of confession. It is
+most notable. Look at it from a human point of view, and we can estimate
+Isaiah's immense spiritual originality; look at it from a Divine, and we
+cannot help perceiving a distinct foreshadow of what was to take place
+by the blood of Jesus under the new covenant. To this man, as to some
+others of his dispensation, whose experience our Christian sympathy
+recognizes so readily in the Psalms, there was granted aforetime
+boldness to enter into the holiest. For this is the explanation of
+Isaiah's marvellous disregard of the temple ritual. It is all behind
+him. This man has passed within the veil. Forms are all behind him, and
+he is face to face with God. But between two beings in that position,
+intercourse by the far off and uncertain signals of sacrifice is
+inconceivable. It can only take place by the simple unfolding of the
+heart. It must be rational, intelligent and by speech. When man is at
+such close quarters with God what sacrifice is possible but the
+sacrifice of the lips? Form for the Divine reply there must be some, for
+even Christianity has its sacraments, but like them this sacrament is of
+the very simplest form, and like them it is accompanied by the
+explanatory word. As Christ under the new covenant took bread and wine,
+and made the homely action of feeding upon them the sign and seal to His
+disciples of the forgiveness of their sins, so His angel under the old
+and sterner covenant took the more severe, but as simple and domestic
+form of fire to express the same to His prophet. And we do well to
+emphasize that the experimental value of this sacrament of fire is
+bestowed by the word attached to it. It is not a dumb sacrament, with a
+magical efficacy. But the prophet's mind is persuaded and his conscience
+set at peace by the intelligible words of the minister of the sacrament.
+
+Isaiah's sin being taken away, he is able to discern the voice of God
+Himself. It is in the most beautiful accordance with what has already
+happened that he hears this not as command, but request, and answers not
+of compulsion, but of freedom. _And I heard the voice of the Lord
+saying, Whom shall I send? and who will go for us? And I said, Here am
+I; send me._ What spiritual understanding alike of the will of God and
+the responsibility of man, what evangelic liberty and boldness, are
+here! Here we touch the spring of that high flight Isaiah takes both in
+prophecy and in active service for the State. Here we have the secret of
+the filial freedom, the life-long sense of responsibility, the regal
+power of initiative, the sustained and unfaltering career, which
+distinguish Isaiah among the ministers of the old covenant, and stamp
+him prophet by the heart and for the life, as many of them are only by
+the office and for the occasion. Other prophets are the servants of the
+God of heaven; Isaiah stands next the Son Himself. On others the hand of
+the Lord is laid in irresistible compulsion; the greatest of them are
+often ignorant, by turns headstrong and craven, deserving correction,
+and generally in need of supplementary calls and inspirations. But of
+such scourges and such doles Isaiah's royal career is absolutely without
+a trace. His course, begun in freedom, is pursued without hesitation or
+anxiety; begun in utter self-sacrifice, it knows henceforth no moment of
+grudging or disobedience. _Esaias is very bold_, because he is so free
+and so fully devoted. In the presence of mind with which he meets each
+sudden change of politics during that bewildering half-century of
+Judah's history, we seem to hear his calm voice repeating its first,
+_Here am I_. Presence of mind he always had. The kaleidoscope shifts: it
+is now Egyptian intrigue, now Assyrian force; now a false king requiring
+threat of displacement by God's own hero, now a true king, but helpless
+and in need of consolation; now a rebellious people to be condemned, and
+now an oppressed and penitent one to be encouraged:--different dangers,
+with different sorts of salvation possible, obliging the prophet to
+promise different futures, and to say things inconsistent with what he
+had already said. Yet Isaiah never hesitates; he can always say, _Here
+am I_. We hear that voice again in the spontaneousness and versatility
+of his style. Isaiah is one of the great kings of literature, with every
+variety of style under his sway, passing with perfect readiness, as
+subject or occasion calls, from one to another of the tones of a
+superbly endowed nature. Everywhere this man impresses us with his
+personality, with the wealth of his nature and the perfection of his
+control of it. But the personality is consecrated. The _Here am I_ is
+followed by the _send me_. And its health, harmony and boldness, are
+derived, Isaiah being his own witness, from this early sense of pardon
+and purification at the Divine hands. Isaiah is indeed a king and a
+priest unto God--a king with all his powers at his own command, a priest
+with them all consecrated to the service of Heaven.
+
+One cannot pass away from these verses without observing the plain
+answer which they give to the question, What is a call to the ministry
+of God? In these days of dust and distraction, full of party cries, with
+so many side issues of doctrine and duty presenting themselves, and the
+solid attractions of so many other services insensibly leading men to
+look for the same sort of attractiveness in the ministry, it may prove a
+relief to some to ponder the simple elements of Isaiah's call to be a
+professional and life-long prophet. Isaiah got no "call" in our
+conventional sense of the word, no compulsion that he must go, no
+articulate voice describing him as the sort of man needed for the work,
+nor any of those similar "calls" which sluggish and craven spirits so
+often desire to relieve them of the responsibility or the strenuous
+effort needed in deciding for a profession which their conscience will
+not permit them to refuse. Isaiah got no such call. After passing
+through the fundamental religious experiences of forgiveness and
+cleansing, which are in every case the indispensable premises of life
+with God, Isaiah was left to himself. No direct summons was addressed
+to him, no compulsion was laid on him; but he heard the voice of God
+asking generally for messengers, and he on his own responsibility
+answered it for himself in particular. He heard from the Divine lips of
+the Divine need for messengers, and he was immediately full of the mind
+that he was the man for the mission, and of the heart to give himself to
+it. So great an example cannot be too closely studied by candidates for
+the ministry in our own day. Sacrifice is not the half-sleepy,
+half-reluctant submission to the force of circumstance or opinion, in
+which shape it is so often travestied among us, but the resolute
+self-surrender and willing resignation of a free and reasonable soul.
+There are many in our day who look for an irresistible compulsion into
+the ministry of the Church; sensitive as they are to the material bias
+by which men roll off into other professions, they pray for something of
+a similar kind to prevail with them in this direction also. There are
+men who pass into the ministry by social pressure or the opinion of the
+circles they belong to, and there are men who adopt the profession
+simply because it is on the line of least resistance. From which false
+beginnings rise the spent force, the premature stoppages, the stagnancy,
+the aimlessness and heartlessness, which are the scandals of the
+professional ministry and the weakness of the Christian Church in our
+day. Men who drift into the ministry, as it is certain so many do,
+become mere ecclesiastical flotsam and jetsam, incapable of giving
+carriage to any soul across the waters of this life, uncertain of their
+own arrival anywhere, and of all the waste of their generation, the most
+patent and disgraceful. God will have no drift-wood for His sacrifices,
+no drift-men for His ministers. Self-consecration is the beginning of
+His service, and a sense of our own freedom and our own responsibility
+is an indispensable element in the act of self-consecration. _We_--not
+God--have to make the decision. We are not to be dead, but living,
+sacrifices, and everything which renders us less than fully alive both
+mars at the time the sincerity of our surrender and reacts for evil upon
+the whole of our subsequent ministry.
+
+
+III. THE COMMISSION (vv. 9-13).
+
+A heart so resolutely devoted as we have seen Isaiah's to be was surely
+prepared against any degree of discouragement, but probably never did
+man receive so awful a commission as he describes himself to have done.
+Not that we are to suppose that this fell upon Isaiah all at once, in
+the suddenness and distinctness with which he here records it. Our sense
+of its awfulness will only be increased when we realize that Isaiah
+became aware of it, not in the shock of a single discovery, sufficiently
+great to have carried its own anaesthetic along with it, but through a
+prolonged process of disillusion, and at the pain of those repeated
+disappointments, which are all the more painful that none singly is
+great enough to stupefy. It is just at this point of our chapter, that
+we feel most the need of supposing it to have been written some years
+after the consecration of Isaiah, when his experience had grown long
+enough to articulate the dim forebodings of that solemn moment. _Go and
+say to this people, Hearing, hear ye, but understand not; seeing, see
+ye, but know not. Make fat the heart of this people, and its ears make
+heavy, and its eyes smear, lest it see with its eyes, and hear with its
+ears, and its heart understand, and it turn again and be healed._ No
+prophet, we may be sure, would be asked by God to go and tell his
+audiences that in so many words, at the beginning of his career. It is
+only by experience that a man understands that kind of a commission,[10]
+and for the required experience Isaiah had not long to wait after
+entering on his ministry. Ahaz himself, in whose death-year it is
+supposed by many that Isaiah wrote this account of his consecration--the
+conduct of Ahaz himself was sufficient to have brought out the
+convictions of the prophet's heart in this startling form, in which he
+has stated his commission. By the word of the Lord and an offer of a
+sign from Him, Isaiah did make fat that monarch's heart and smear his
+eyes. And perverse as the rulers of Judah were in the examples and
+policies they set, the people were as blindly bent on following them to
+destruction. _Every one_, said Isaiah, when he must have been for some
+time a prophet--_every one is a hypocrite and an evildoer, and every
+mouth speaketh folly_.
+
+  [10] Even Calvin, though in order to prove that Isaiah had been
+  prophesying for some time before his inaugural vision, says that his
+  commission implies some years' actual experience of the obstinacy of the
+  people.
+
+But if that clear, bitter way of putting the matter can have come to
+Isaiah only with the experience of some years, why does he place it upon
+the lips of God, as they give him his commission? Because Isaiah is
+stating not merely his own singular experience, but a truth always true
+of the preaching of the word of God, and of which no prophet at the time
+of his consecration to that ministry can be without at least a
+foreboding. We have not exhausted the meaning of this awful commission
+when we say that it is only a forcible anticipation of the prophet's
+actual experience. There is more here than one man's experience. Over
+and over again are these words quoted in the New Testament, till we
+learn to find them true always and everywhere that the Word of God is
+preached to men,--the description of what would seem to be its necessary
+effect upon many souls. Both Jesus and Paul use Isaiah's commission of
+themselves. They do so like Isaiah at an advanced stage in their
+ministry, when the shock of misunderstanding and rejection has been
+repeatedly felt, but then not solely as an apt description of their own
+experience. They quote God's words to Isaiah as a prophecy fulfilled in
+their own case--that is to say, as the statement of a great principle or
+truth of which their own ministry is only another instance. Their own
+disappointments have roused them to the fact, that this is always an
+effect of the word of God upon numbers of men--to deaden their spiritual
+faculties. While Matthew and the book of Acts adopt the milder Greek
+version of Isaiah's commission, John gives a rendering that is even
+stronger than the original. _He hath blinded_, he says of God Himself,
+_their eyes and hardened their hearts, lest they should see with their
+eyes and perceive with their hearts_. In Mark's narrative Christ says
+that He speaks to them that are outside in parables, _for the purpose
+that seeing they may see, and not perceive, and hearing they may hear,
+and not understand, lest haply they should turn again and it should be
+forgiven them_. We may suspect, in an utterance so strange to the lips
+of the Lord of salvation, merely the irony of His baffled love. But it
+is rather the statement of what He believed to be the necessary effect
+of a ministry like His own. It marks the direction, not of His desire,
+but of natural sequence.
+
+With these instances we can go back to Isaiah and understand why he
+should have described the bitter fruits of experience as an imperative
+laid upon him by God. _Make fat the heart of this people, and its ears
+make heavy, and its eyes do thou smear._ It is the fashion of the
+prophet's grammar, when it would state a principle or necessary effect,
+to put it in the form of a command. What God expresses to Isaiah so
+imperatively as almost to take our breath away; what Christ uttered with
+such abruptness that we ask, Does He speak in irony? what Paul laid down
+as the conviction of a long and patient ministry, is the great truth
+that the Word of God has not only a saving power, but that even in its
+gentlest pleadings and its purest Gospel, even by the mouth of Him who
+came, not to condemn, but to save the world, it has a power that is
+judicial and condemnatory.
+
+It is frequently remarked by us as perhaps the most deplorable fact of
+our experience, that there exists in human nature an accursed facility
+for turning God's gifts to precisely the opposite ends from those for
+which He gave them. So common is man's misunderstanding of the plainest
+signs, and so frequent his abuse of the most evident favours of Heaven,
+that a spectator of the drama of human history might imagine its Author
+to have been a Cynic or Comedian, portraying for His own amusement the
+loss of the erring at the very moment of what might have been their
+recovery, the frustration of love at the point of its greatest warmth
+and expectancy. Let him look closer, however, and he will perceive, not
+a comedy, but a tragedy, for neither chance nor cruel sport is here at
+work, but free will and the laws of habit, with retribution and penalty.
+These actors are not puppets in the hand of a Power that moves them at
+will; each of them plays his own part, and the abuse and contradiction,
+of which he is guilty, are but the prerogative of his freedom. They are
+free beings who thus reject the gift of Divine assistance, and so
+piteously misunderstand Divine truth. Look closer still, and you will
+see that the way they talk, the impression they accept of God's
+goodness, the effect of His judgements upon them, is determined not at
+the moment of their choice, and not by a single act of their will, but
+by the whole tenor of their previous life. In the sudden flash of some
+gift or opportunity, men reveal the stuff of which they are made, the
+disposition they have bred in themselves. Opportunity in human life is
+as often judgement as it is salvation. When we perceive these things, we
+understand that life is not a comedy, where chance governs or
+incongruous situations are invented by an Almighty Satirist for his own
+sport, but a tragedy, with all tragedy's pathetic elements of royal
+wills contending in freedom with each other, of men's wills clashing
+with God's: men the makers of their own destinies, and Nemesis not
+directing, but following their actions. We go back to the very
+fundamentals of our nature on this dread question. To understand what
+has been called "a great law in human degeneracy," that "the evil heart
+can assimilate good to itself and convert it to its nature," we must
+understand what free will means, and take into account the terrible
+influence of habit.
+
+Now there is no more conspicuous instance of this law, than that which
+is afforded by the preaching of the Gospel of God. God's Word, as Christ
+reminds us, does not fall on virgin soil; it falls on soil already
+holding other seed. When a preacher stands up with the Word of God in a
+great congregation, vast as Scripture warrants us for believing his
+power to be, his is not the only power that is operative. Each man
+present has a life behind that hour and place, lying away in the
+darkness, silent and dead as far as the congregation are concerned, but
+in his own heart as vivid and loud as the voice of the preacher, though
+he be preaching never so forcibly. The prophet is not the only power in
+the delivery of God's Word, nor is the Holy Spirit the only power. That
+would make all preaching of the Word a mere display. But the Bible
+represents it as a strife. And now it is said of men themselves that
+they harden their hearts against the Word, and now--because such
+hardening is the result of previous sinning, and has therefore a
+judicial character--that God hardens their hearts. _Simon, Simon_, said
+Christ to a face that spread out to His own all the ardour of worship,
+_Satan is desiring to have you, but I have prayed that your faith fail
+not_. God sends His Word into our hearts; the Mediator stands by, and
+prays that it make us His own. But there are other factors in the
+operation, and the result depends on our own will; it depends on our own
+will, and it is dreadfully determined by our habits.
+
+Now this is one of the first facts to which a young reformer or prophet
+awakes. Such an awakening is a necessary element in his education and
+apprenticeship. He has seen the Lord high and lifted up. His lips have
+been touched by the coal from off the altar. His first feeling is that
+nothing can withstand that power, nothing gainsay this inspiration. Is
+he a Nehemiah, and the hand of the Lord has been mighty upon him? Then
+he feels that he has but to tell his fellows of it to make them as
+enthusiastic in the Lord's work as himself. Is he a Mazzini, aflame from
+his boyhood with aspirations for his country, consecrated from his birth
+to the cause of duty? Then he leaps with joy upon his mission; he has
+but to show himself, to speak, to lead the way, and his country is free.
+Is he--to descend to a lower degree of prophecy--a Fourier, sensitive
+more than most to how anarchic society is, and righteously eager to
+settle it upon stable foundations? Then he draws his plans for
+reconstruction, he projects his phalanges and phalansteres, and believes
+that he has solved the social problem. Is he--to come back to the
+heights--an Isaiah, with the Word of God in him like fire? Then he sees
+his vision of the perfect state; he thinks to lift his people to it by a
+word. _O house of Jacob_, he says, _come ye, and let us walk in the
+light of the Lord_!
+
+For all of whom the next necessary stage of experience is one of
+disappointment, with the hard commission, _Make the heart of this people
+fat_. They must learn that, if God has caught themselves young, and when
+it was possible to make them entirely His own, the human race to whom He
+sends them is old, too old for them to effect much upon the mass of it
+beyond the hardening and perpetuation of evil. Fourier finds that to
+produce his perfect State he would need to re-create mankind, to cut
+down the tree to the very roots, and begin again. After the first rush
+of patriotic fervour, which carried so many of his countrymen with him,
+Mazzini discovers himself in "a moral desert," confesses that the
+struggle to liberate his fatherland, which has only quickened him to
+further devotion in so great a cause, has been productive of scepticism
+in his followers, and has left them withered and hardened of heart,
+whom it had found so capable of heroic impulses. He tells us how they
+upbraided and scorned him, left him in exile, and returned to their
+homes, from which they had set out with vows to die for their country,
+doubting now whether there was anything at all worth living or dying for
+outside themselves. Mazzini's description of the first passage of his
+career is invaluable for the light which it throws upon this commission
+of Isaiah. History does not contain a more dramatic representation of
+the entirely opposite effects of the same Divine movement upon different
+natures. While the first efforts for the liberty of Italy materialized
+the greater number of his countrymen, whom Mazzini had persuaded to
+embark upon it, the failure and their consequent defection only served
+to strip this heroic soul of the last rags of selfishness, and
+consecrate it more utterly to the will of God and the duty that lay
+before it.
+
+A few sentences from the confessions of the Italian patriot may be
+quoted, with benefit to our appreciation of what the Hebrew prophet must
+have passed through.
+
+     "It was the tempest of doubt, which I believe all who devote their
+     lives to a great enterprise, yet have not dried and withered up
+     their soul--like Robespierre--beneath some barren intellectual
+     formula, but have retained a loving heart, are doomed, once at
+     least, to battle through. My heart was overflowing with and greedy
+     of affection, as fresh and eager to unfold to joy as in the days
+     when sustained by my mother's smile, as full of fervid hope for
+     others, at least, if not for myself. But during these fatal months
+     there darkened round me such a hurricane of sorrow, disillusion and
+     deception as to bring before my eyes, in all its ghastly nakedness,
+     a foreshadowing of the old age of my soul, solitary in a desert
+     world, wherein no comfort in the struggle was vouchsafed to me. It
+     was not only the overthrow for an indefinite period of every
+     Italian hope, ... it was the falling to pieces of that moral
+     edifice of faith and love from which alone I had derived strength
+     for the combat; the scepticism I saw arising round me on every
+     side; the failure of faith in those who had solemnly bound
+     themselves to pursue unshaken the path we had known at the outset
+     to be choked with sorrows; the distrust I detected in those most
+     dear to me, as to the motives and intentions which sustained and
+     urged me onward in the evidently unequal struggle.... When I felt
+     that I was indeed alone in the world, I drew back in terror at the
+     void before me. There, in that moral desert, doubt came upon me.
+     Perhaps I was wrong, and the world right? Perhaps my idea was
+     indeed a dream?... One morning I awoke to find my mind tranquil and
+     my spirit calmed, as one who has passed through a great danger. The
+     first thought that passed across my spirit was, _Your sufferings
+     are the temptations of egotism, and arise from a misconception of
+     life_.... I perceived that although every instinct of my heart
+     rebelled against that fatal and ignoble definition of life which
+     makes it to be a _search after happiness_, yet I had not completely
+     freed myself from the dominating influence exercised by it upon the
+     age.... I had been unable to realize the true ideal of love--love
+     without earthly hope.... Life is a mission, duty therefore its
+     highest law. From the idea of God I descended to faith in a mission
+     and its logical consequence--duty the supreme rule of life; and
+     having reached that faith, I swore to myself that nothing in this
+     world should again make me doubt or forsake it. It was, as Dante
+     says, passing through martyrdom to peace--'a forced and desperate
+     peace.' I do not deny, for I fraternized with sorrow, and wrapped
+     myself in it as in a mantle; but yet it was peace, for I learned to
+     suffer without rebellion, and to live calmly and in harmony with my
+     own spirit. I reverently bless God the Father for what consolations
+     of affection--I can conceive of no other--He has vouchsafed to me
+     in my later years; and in them I gather strength to struggle with
+     the occasional return of weariness of existence. But even were
+     these consolations denied me, I believe I should still be what I
+     am. Whether the sun shine with the serene splendour of an Italian
+     noon, or the leaden, corpse-like hue of the northern mist be above
+     us, I cannot see that it changes our duty. God dwells above the
+     earthly heaven, and the holy stars of faith and the future still
+     shine within our souls, even though their light consume itself
+     unreflected as the sepulchral lamp."
+
+Such sentences are the best commentary we can offer on our text. The
+cases of the Hebrew and Italian prophets are wonderfully alike. We who
+have read Isaiah's fifth chapter know how his heart also was
+"overflowing with and greedy of affection," and in the second and third
+chapters we have seen "the hurricane of sorrow, disillusion and
+deception darken round him." "The falling to pieces of the moral edifice
+of faith and love," "scepticism rising on every side," "failure of faith
+in those who had solemnly bound themselves," "distrust detected in those
+most dear to me"--and all felt by the prophet as the effect of the
+sacred movement God had inspired him to begin:--how exact a counterpart
+it is to the cumulative process of brutalizing which Isaiah heard God
+lay upon him, with the imperative _Make the heart of this people fat!_
+In such a morally blind, deaf and dead-hearted world Isaiah's faith was
+indeed "to consume itself unreflected like the sepulchral lamp." The
+glimpse into his heart given us by Mazzini enables us to realize with
+what terror Isaiah faced such a void. _O Lord, how long?_ This, too,
+breathes the air of "a forced and desperate peace," the spirit of one
+who, having realized life as a mission, has made the much more rare
+recognition that the logical consequence is neither the promise of
+success nor the assurance of sympathy, but simply the acceptance of
+duty, with whatever results and under whatever skies it pleases God to
+bring over him.
+
+  _Until cities fall into ruin without an inhabitant,
+  And houses without a man,
+  And the land be left desolately waste,
+  And Jehovah have removed man far away,
+  And great be the desert in the midst of the land;
+  And still if there be a tenth in it,
+  Even it shall be again for consuming.
+  Like the terebinth, and like the oak,
+  Whose stock when they are felled remaineth in them,
+  The holy seed shall be its stock._
+
+The meaning of these words is too plain to require exposition, but we
+can hardly over-emphasize them. This is to be Isaiah's one text
+throughout his career. "Judgement shall pass through; a remnant shall
+remain." All the politics of his day, the movement of the world's
+forces, the devastation of the holy land, the first captivities of the
+holy people, the reiterated defeats and disappointments of the next
+fifty years--all shall be clear and tolerable to Isaiah as the
+fulfilling of the sentence to which he listened in such "forced and
+desperate peace" on the day of his consecration. He has had the worst
+branded into him; henceforth no man nor thing may trouble him. He has
+seen the worst, and knows there is a beginning beyond. So when the
+wickedness of Judah and the violence of Assyria alike seem most
+unrestrained--Assyria most bent on destroying Judah, and Judah least
+worthy to live--Isaiah will yet cling to this, that a remnant must
+remain. All his prophecies will be variations of this text; it is the
+key to his apparent paradoxes. He will proclaim the Assyrians to be
+God's instrument, yet devote them to destruction. He will hail their
+advance on Judah, and yet as exultingly mark its limit, because of the
+determination in which he asked the question, _O Lord, how long?_ and
+the clearness with which he understood the _until_, that came in answer
+to it. Every prediction he makes, every turn he seeks to give to the
+practical politics of Judah, are simply due to his grasp of these two
+facts--a withering and repeated devastation, in the end a bare survival.
+He has, indeed, prophecies which travel farther; occasionally he is
+permitted to indulge in visions of a new dispensation. Like Moses, he
+climbs his Pisgah, but he is like Moses also in this, that his lifetime
+is exhausted with the attainment of the margin of a long period of
+judgement and struggle, and then he passes from our sight, and no man
+knoweth his sepulchre unto this day. As abruptly as this vision closes
+with the announcement of _the remnant_, so abruptly does Isaiah
+disappear on the fulfilment of the announcement--some forty years
+subsequent to this vision--in the sudden rescue of the holy seed from
+the grasp of Sennacherib.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have now finished the first period of Isaiah's career. Let us
+catalogue what are his leading doctrines up to this point. High above a
+very sinful people, and beyond all their conceptions of Him, Jehovah,
+the national God, rises holy, exalted in righteousness. From such a God
+to such a people it can only be judgement and affliction that pass; and
+these shall not be averted by the fact that He is the national God, and
+they His worshippers. Of this affliction the Assyrians gathering far off
+upon the horizon are evidently to be the instruments. The affliction
+shall be very sweeping; again and again shall it come; but the Lord will
+finally save a remnant of His people. Three elements compose this
+preaching--a very keen and practical conscience of sin; an overpowering
+vision of God, in whose immediate intimacy the prophet believes himself
+to be; and a very sharp perception of the politics of the day.
+
+One question rises. In this part of Isaiah's ministry there is no trace
+of that Figure whom we chiefly identify with his preaching, the Messiah.
+Let us have patience; it is not time for him; but the following is his
+connection with the prophet's present doctrines.
+
+Isaiah's great result at present is the certainty of a remnant. That
+remnant will require two things--they will require a rallying-point,
+and they will require a leader. Henceforth Isaiah's prophesying will be
+bent to one or other of these. The two grand purposes of his word and
+work will be, for the sake of the remnant, the inviolateness of Zion,
+and the coming of the Messiah. The former he has, indeed, already
+intimated (chap. iv.); the latter is now to share with it his hope and
+eloquence.
+
+[Illustration: (Map) Isaiah's World]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+_THE WORLD IN ISAIAH'S DAY AND ISRAEL'S GOD._
+
+735-730 B.C.
+
+
+Up to this point we have been acquainted with Isaiah as a prophet of
+general principles, preaching to his countrymen the elements of
+righteousness and judgement, and tracing the main lines of fate along
+which their evil conduct was rapidly forcing them. We are now to observe
+him applying these principles to the executive politics of the time, and
+following Judah's conduct to the issues he had predicted for it in the
+world outside herself. Hitherto he has been concerned with the inner
+morals of Jewish society; he is now to engage himself with the effect of
+these on the fortunes of the Jewish State. In his seventh chapter Isaiah
+begins that career of practical statesmanship, which not only made him
+"the greatest political power in Israel since David," but placed him,
+far above his importance to his own people, upon a position of influence
+over all ages. To this eminence Isaiah was raised, as we shall see, by
+two things. First, there was the occasion of his times, for he lived at
+a juncture at which the vision of the _World_, as distinguished from the
+_Nation_, opened to his people's eyes. Second, he had the faith which
+enabled him to realize the government of the World by the One God, whom
+he has already beheld exalted and sovereign within the Nation. In the
+Nation we have seen Isaiah led to emphasize very absolutely the
+righteousness of God; applying this to the whole World, he is now to
+speak as the prophet of what we call Providence. He has seen Jehovah
+ruling in righteousness in Judah; he is now to take possession of the
+nations of the World in Jehovah's name. But we mistake Isaiah if we
+think it is any abstract doctrine of providence which he is about to
+inculcate. For him God's providence has in the meantime but one end: the
+preservation of a remnant of the holy people. Afterwards we shall find
+him expecting besides, the conversion of the whole World to faith in
+Israel's God.
+
+The World in Isaiah's day was practically Western Asia. History had not
+long dawned upon Europe; over Western Asia it was still noon. Draw a
+line from the Caspian to the mouth of the Persian Gulf; between that
+line and another crossing the Levant to the west of Cyprus, and
+continuing along the Libyan border of Egypt, lay the highest forms of
+religion and civilisation which our race had by that period achieved.
+This was the World on which Isaiah looked out from Jerusalem, the
+furthest borders of which he has described in his prophecies, and in the
+political history of which he illustrated his great principles. How was
+it composed?
+
+There were, first of all, at either end of it, north-east and
+south-west, the two great empires of ASSYRIA and EGYPT, in many respects
+wonderful counterparts of each other. No one will understand the history
+of Palestine, who has not grasped its geographical position relative to
+these similar empires. Syria, shut up between the Mediterranean sea and
+the Arabian desert, has its outlets north and south into two great
+river-plains, each of them ending in a delta. Territories of that kind
+exert a double force on the world with which they are connected, now
+drawing across their boundaries the hungry races of neighbouring
+highlands and deserts, and again sending them forth, compact and
+resistless armies. This double action summarises the histories of both
+Egypt and Assyria from the earliest times to the period which we are now
+treating, and was the cause of the constant circulation, by which, as
+the Bible bears witness, the life of Syria was stirred from the Tower of
+Babel downwards. Mesopotamia and the Nile valley drew races as beggars
+to their rich pasture grounds, only to send them forth in subsequent
+centuries as conquerors. The century of Isaiah fell in a period of
+forward movement. Assyria and Egypt were afraid to leave each other in
+peace; and the wealth of Phoenicia, grown large enough to excite their
+cupidity, lay between them. In each of these empires, however, there was
+something to hamper this aggressive impulse. Neither Assyria nor Egypt
+was a homogeneous State. The valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile were,
+each of them the home of two nations. Beside Assyria lay Babylonia, once
+Assyria's mistress, and now of all the Assyrian provinces by far the
+hardest to hold in subjection, although it lay the nearest to home. In
+Isaiah's time, when an Assyrian monarch is unable to come into
+Palestine, Babylon is generally the reason; and it is by intriguing with
+Babylon that a king of Judah attempts to keep Assyria away from his own
+neighbourhood. But Babylon only delayed the Assyrian conquest. In Egypt,
+on the other hand, power was more equally balanced between the hardier
+people up the Nile and the wealthier people down the Nile--between the
+Ethiopians and the Egyptians proper. It was the repeated and undecisive
+contests between these two during the whole of Isaiah's day, which kept
+Egypt from being an effective force in the politics of Western Asia. In
+Isaiah's day no Egyptian army advanced more than a few leagues beyond
+its own frontier.
+
+Next in this world of Western Asia come the PHOENICIANS. We may say
+that they connected Egypt and Assyria, for although Phoenicia proper
+meant only the hundred and fifty miles of coast between Carmel and the
+bay of Antioch, the Phoenicians had large colonies on the delta of the
+Nile and trading posts upon the Euphrates. They were gathered into
+independent but more or less confederate cities, the chief of them Tyre
+and Sidon; which, while they attempted the offensive only in trade, were
+by their wealth and maritime advantages capable of offering at once a
+stronger attraction and a more stubborn resistance to the Assyrian arms,
+than any other power of the time. Between Phoenicia proper and the
+mouths of the Nile, the coast was held by groups of PHILISTINE cities,
+whose nearness to Egypt rather than their own strength was the source of
+a frequent audacity against Assyria, and the reason why they appear in
+the history of this period oftener than any other State as the object of
+Assyrian campaigns.
+
+Behind Phoenicia and the Philistines lay a number of inland
+territories: the sister-States of Judah and Northern Israel, with their
+cousins Edom, Moab, and Aram or Syria. Of which JUDAH and ISRAEL were
+together about the size of Wales; EDOM a mountain range the size and
+shape of Cornwall; MOAB, on its north, a broken tableland, about a
+Devonshire; and ARAM, or SYRIA, a territory round Damascus, of uncertain
+size, but considerable enough to have resisted Assyria for a hundred and
+twenty years. Beyond Aram, again, to the north, lay the smaller State of
+HAMATH, in the mouth of the pass between the Lebanons, with nothing
+from it to the Euphrates. And then, hovering upon the east of these
+settled States, were a variety of more or less NOMADIC TRIBES, whose
+refuges were the vast deserts of which so large a part of Western Asia
+consists.
+
+Here was a world, with some of its constituents wedged pretty firmly by
+mutual pressure, but in the main broken and restless--a political
+surface that was always changing. The whole was subject to the movements
+of the two empires at its extremes. One of them could not move without
+sending a thrill through to the borders of the other. The approximate
+distances were these:--from Egypt's border to Jerusalem, about one
+hundred miles; from Jerusalem to Samaria, forty-five; from Samaria to
+Damascus, one hundred and fifteen; from Damascus to Hamath, one hundred
+and thirty; and from Hamath to the Euphrates, one hundred; in all from
+the border of Egypt to the border of Assyria four hundred and ninety
+English statute miles. The main line of war and traffic, coming up from
+Egypt, kept the coast to the plain of Esdraelon, which it crossed
+towards Damascus, travelling by the north of the sea of Galilee, _the
+way of the sea_. Northern Israel was bound to fall an early prey to
+armies, whose easiest path thus traversed her richest provinces. Judah,
+on the other hand, occupied a position so elevated and apart, that it
+was likely to be the last that either Assyria or Egypt would achieve in
+their subjugation of the States between them.
+
+Thus, then, Western Asia spread itself out in Isaiah's day. Let us take
+one more rapid glance across it. Assyria to the north, powerful and on
+the offensive, but hampered by Babylon; Egypt on the south, weakened and
+in reserve; all the cities and States between turning their faces
+desperately northwards, but each with an ear bent back for the promises
+of the laggard southern power, and occasionally supported by its
+subsidies; Hamath, their advanced guard at the mouth of the pass between
+the Lebanons, looking out towards the Euphrates; Tyre and Sidon
+attractive to the Assyrian king, whose policy is ultimately commercial,
+by their wealth, both they and the Philistine cities obstructing his
+path by the coast to his great rival of Egypt; Israel bulwarked against
+Assyria by Hamath and Damascus, but in danger, as soon as they fall, of
+seeing her richest provinces overrun; Judah unlikely in the general
+restlessness to retain her hold upon Edom, but within her own borders
+tolerably secure, neither lying in the Assyrian's path to Egypt, nor
+wealthy enough to attract him out of it; safe, therefore, in the
+neutrality which Isaiah ceaselessly urges her to preserve, and in danger
+of suction into the whirlpool of the approach of the two empires only
+through the foolish desire of her rulers to secure an utterly
+unnecessary alliance with the one or the other of them.
+
+For a hundred and twenty years before the advent of Isaiah, the annals
+of the Assyrian kings record periodical campaigns against the cities of
+"the land of the west," but these isolated incursions were followed by
+no permanent results. In 745, however, five years before King Uzziah
+died, a soldier ascended the throne of Assyria, under the title of
+Tiglath-pileser II.,[11] who was determined to achieve the conquest of
+the whole world and its organization as his empire. Where his armies
+came, it was not simply to chastise or demand tribute, but to annex
+countries, carry away their populations and exploit their resources. It
+was no longer kings who were threatened; peoples found themselves in
+danger of extinction. This terrible purpose of the Assyrian was pursued
+with vast means and the utmost ferocity. He has been called the Roman of
+the East, and up to a certain degree we may imagine his policy by
+remembering all that is familiar to us of its execution by Rome: its
+relentlessness, impetus and mysterious action from one centre; the
+discipline, the speed, the strange appearance, of his armies. But there
+was an Oriental savagery about Assyria, from which Rome was free. The
+Assyrian kings moved in the power of their brutish and stormy gods--gods
+that were in the shape of bulls and had the wings as of the tempest. The
+annals of these kings, in which they describe their campaigns, are full
+of talk about trampling down their enemies; about showering tempests of
+clubs upon them, and raining a deluge of arrows; about overwhelming
+them, and sweeping them off the face of the land, and strewing them like
+chaff on the sea; about chariots with scythes, and wheels clogged with
+blood; about great baskets stuffed with the salted heads of their foes.
+It is a mixture of the Roman and Red Indian.
+
+  [11] The Pul of 2 Kings xv. 19 and the Tiglath-pileser of 2 Kings xvi.
+  are the same.
+
+Picture the effect of the onward movement of such a force upon the
+imaginations and policies of those little States that clustered round
+Judah and Israel. Settling their own immemorial feuds, they sought
+alliance with one another against this common foe. Tribes, that for
+centuries had stained their borders with one another's blood, came
+together in unions, the only reason for which was that their common fear
+had grown stronger than their mutual hate. Now and then a king would be
+found unwilling to enter such an alliance or eager to withdraw from it,
+in the hope of securing by his exceptional conduct the favour of the
+Assyrian, whom he sought further to ingratiate by voluntary tribute. The
+shifting attitudes of the petty kings towards Assyria bewilder the
+reader of the Assyrian annals. The foes of one year are the tributaries
+of the next; the State, that has called for help this campaign, appears
+as the rebel of that. In 742, Uzziah of Judah is cursed by
+Tiglath-pileser as an arch-enemy; Samaria and Damascus are recorded as
+faithful tributaries. Seven years later Ahaz of Judah offers tribute to
+the Assyrian king, and Damascus and Samaria are invaded by the Assyrian
+armies. What a world it was, and what politics! A world of petty clans,
+with no idea of a common humanity, and with no motive for union except
+fear; politics without a noble thought or long purpose in them, the
+politics of peoples at bay--the last flicker of dying nationalities,--
+_stumps of smoking firebrands_, as Isaiah described two of them.
+
+When we turn to the little we know of the religions of these tribes, we
+find nothing to arrest their restlessness or broaden their thoughts.
+These nations had their religions, and called on their gods, but their
+gods were made in their own image, their religion was the reflex of
+their life. Each of them employed, rather than worshipped, its deity. No
+nation believed in its god except as one among many, with his
+sovereignty limited to its own territory, and his ability to help it
+conditioned by the power of the other gods, against whose peoples he was
+fighting. There was no belief in "Providence," no idea of unity or of
+progress in history, no place in these religions for the great
+world-force that was advancing upon their peoples.
+
+From this condemnation we cannot except the people of Jehovah. It is
+undeniable that the mass of them occupied at this time pretty much the
+same low religious level as their neighbours. We have already seen
+(chap. i.) their mean estimate of what God required from themselves;
+with that corresponded their view of His position towards the world. To
+the majority of the Israelites their God was but one out of many, with
+His own battles to fight and have fought for Him, a Patron sometimes to
+be ashamed of, and by no means a Saviour in whom to place an absolute
+trust. When Ahaz is beaten by Syria, he says: _Because the gods of the
+kings of Syria helped them, therefore will I sacrifice to them, that
+they may help me_ (2 Chron. xxviii. 23). Religion to Ahaz was only
+another kind of diplomacy. He was not a fanatic, but a diplomat, who
+made his son to pass through the fire to Moloch, and burnt incense in
+the high places and on the hills, and under every green tree. He was
+more a political than a religious eclectic, who brought back the pattern
+of the Damascus altar to Jerusalem. The Temple, in which Isaiah saw the
+Lord high and lifted up, became under Ahaz, and by the help of the
+priesthood, the shelter of various idols; in every corner of Jerusalem
+altars were erected to other gods. This religious hospitality was the
+outcome neither of imagination nor of liberal thought; it was prompted
+only by political fear. Ahaz has been mistaken in the same way as
+Charles I. was--for a bigot, and one who subjected the welfare of his
+kingdom to a superstitious regard for religion. But beneath the cloak of
+religious scrupulousness and false reverence,[12] there was in Ahaz the
+same selfish fear for the safety of his crown and his dynasty, as those
+who best knew the English monarch tell us, was the real cause of his
+ceaseless intrigue and stupid obstinacy.
+
+  [12] Isa. vii. 12.
+
+Now that we have surveyed this world, its politics and its religion, we
+can estimate the strength and originality of the Hebrew prophets. Where
+others saw the conflicts of nations, aided by deities as doubtfully
+matched as themselves, they perceived all things working together by the
+will of one supreme God and serving His ends of righteousness. It would
+be wrong to say, that before the eighth century the Hebrew conception of
+God had been simply that of a national deity, for this would be to
+ignore the remarkable emphasis placed by the Hebrews from very early
+times upon Jehovah's righteousness. But till the eighth century the
+horizon of the Hebrew mind had been the border of their territory; the
+historical theatre on which it saw God working was the national life.
+Now, however, the Hebrews were drawn into the world; they felt movements
+of which their own history was but an eddy; they saw the advance of
+forces against which their own armies, though inspired by Jehovah, had
+no chance of material success. The perspective was entirely changed;
+their native land took to most of them the aspect of a petty and
+worthless province, their God the rank of a mere provincial deity; they
+refused the waters of Shiloah, that go softly, and rejoiced in the glory
+of the king of Assyria, the king of the great River and the hosts that
+moved with the strength of its floods. It was at this moment that the
+prophets of Israel performed their supreme religious service. While Ahaz
+and the mass of the people illustrated the impotence of the popular
+religion, by admitting to an equal place in the national temple the gods
+of their victorious foes, the prophets boldly took possession of the
+whole world in the name of Jehovah of hosts, and exalted Him to the
+throne of the supreme Providence. Now they could do this only by
+emphasizing and developing the element of righteousness in the old
+conception of Him. This attribute of Jehovah took absolute possession of
+the prophets; and in the strength of its inspiration they were enabled,
+at a time when it would have been the sheerest folly to promise Israel
+victory against a foe like Assyria, to asseverate that even that supreme
+world-power was in the hand of Jehovah, and that He must be trusted to
+lead up all the movements of which the Assyrians were the main force to
+the ends He had so plainly revealed to His chosen Israel. Even before
+Isaiah's time such principles had been proclaimed by Amos and Hosea, but
+it was Isaiah, who both gave to them their loftiest expression, and
+applied them with the utmost detail and persistence to the practical
+politics of Judah. We have seen him, in the preliminary stages of his
+ministry under Uzziah and Jotham, reaching most exalted convictions of
+the righteousness of Jehovah, as contrasted with the people's view of
+their God's "nationalism." But we are now to follow him boldly applying
+this faith--won within the life of Judah, won, as he tells us, by the
+personal inspiration of Judah's God--to the problems and movements of
+the whole world as they bear upon Israel's fate. The God, who is supreme
+in Judah through righteousness, cannot but be supreme everywhere else,
+for there is nothing in the world higher than righteousness. Isaiah's
+faith in a Divine Providence is a close corollary to his faith in
+Jehovah's righteousness; and of one part of that Providence he had
+already received conviction--_A remnant shall remain_. Ahaz may crowd
+Jerusalem with foreign altars and idols, so as to be able to say: "We
+have with us, on our side, Moloch and Chemosh and Rimmon and the gods of
+Damascus and Assyria." Isaiah, in the face of this folly, lifts up his
+simple gospel: "Immanu-El. We have with us, in our own Jehovah of hosts,
+El, the one supreme God, Ruler of heaven and earth."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+_KING AND MESSIAH; PEOPLE AND CHURCH._
+
+ISAIAH vii., viii., ix. 1-8.
+
+735-732 B.C.
+
+
+This section of the book of Isaiah (vii.-ix. 7) consists of a number of
+separate prophecies uttered during a period of at least three years:
+735-732 B.C. By 735 Ahaz had ascended the throne; Tiglath-pileser had
+been occupied in the far east for two years. Taking advantage of the
+weakness of the former and the distance of the latter, Rezin, king of
+Damascus, and Pekah, king of Samaria, planned an invasion of Judah. It
+was a venture they would not have dared had Uzziah been alive. While
+Rezin marched down the east of the Jordan and overturned the Jewish
+supremacy in Edom, Pekah threw himself into Judah, defeated the armies
+of Ahaz in one great battle, and besieged Jerusalem, with the object of
+deposing Ahaz and setting a Syrian, Ben-Tabeel, in his stead.
+Simultaneously the Philistines attacked Judah from the south-west. The
+motive of the confederates was in all probability anger with Ahaz for
+refusing to enter with them into a Pan-Syrian alliance against Assyria.
+In his distress Ahaz appealed to Tiglath-pileser, and the Assyrian
+swiftly responded. In 734--it must have been less than a year since Ahaz
+was attacked--the hosts of the north had overrun Samaria and swept as
+far south as the cities of the Philistines. Then, withdrawing his troops
+again, Tiglath-pileser left Hoshea as his vassal on Pekah's throne, and
+sending the population of Israel east of the Jordan into distant
+captivity, completed a two years' siege of Damascus (734-732) by its
+capture. At Damascus Ahaz met the conqueror, and having paid him
+tribute, took out a further policy of insurance in the altar-pattern,
+which he brought back with him to Jerusalem. Such were the three years,
+whose rapid changes unfolded themselves in parallel with these
+prophecies of Isaiah. The details are not given by the prophet, but we
+must keep in touch with them while we listen to him. Especially must we
+remember their central point, _the decision of Ahaz to call in the help
+of Assyria_, a decision which affected the whole course of politics for
+the next thirty years. Some of the oracles of this section were plainly
+delivered by Isaiah before that event, and simply seek to inspire Ahaz
+with a courage which should feel Assyrian help to be needless; others,
+again, imply that Ahaz has already called in the Assyrian: they taunt
+him with hankering after foreign strength, and depict the woes which the
+Assyrian will bring upon the land; while others (for example, the
+passage ix. 1-7) mean that the Assyrian has already come, and that the
+Galilean provinces of Israel have been depopulated, and promise a
+Deliverer. If we do not keep in mind the decision of Ahaz, we shall not
+understand these seemingly contradictory utterances, which it thoroughly
+explains. Let us now begin at the beginning of chapter vii. It opens
+with a bare statement, by way of title, of the invasion of Judah and the
+futile result; and then proceeds to tell us how Isaiah acted from the
+first rumour of the confederacy onward.
+
+
+I. THE KING (chap. vii.).
+
+_And it came to pass in the days of Ahaz, the son of Jotham, the son of
+Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezin, the king of Syria, and Pekah, the son
+of Remaliah, king of Israel, went up to Jerusalem to war against it, but
+could not prevail against it._ This is a summary of the whole adventure
+and issue of the war, given by way of introduction. The narrative proper
+begins in verse 2, with the effect of the first news of the league upon
+Ahaz and his people. Their hearts were moved, like the trees of the
+forest before the wind. The league was aimed so evidently against the
+two things most essential to the national existence and the honour of
+Jehovah; the dynasty of David, namely, and the inviolability of
+Jerusalem. Judah had frequently before suffered the loss of her
+territory; never till now were the throne and city of David in actual
+peril. But that, which bent both king and people by its novel terror,
+was the test Isaiah expected for the prophecies he had already uttered.
+Taking with him, as a summary of them, his boy with the name
+Shear-Jashub--_A-remnant-shall-return_--Isaiah faced Ahaz and his court
+in the midst of their preparation for the siege. They were
+examining--but more in panic than in prudence--the water supply of the
+city, when Isaiah delivered to them a message from the Lord, which may
+be paraphrased as follows: _Take heed and be quiet_, keep your eyes open
+and your heart still; _fear not, neither be faint-hearted, for the
+fierce anger of Rezin and Remaliah's son_. They have no power to set you
+on fire. They are _but stumps of expiring firebrands_, almost burnt out.
+While you wisely look after your water supply, do so in hope. This
+purpose of deposing you is vain. _Thus saith the Lord Jehovah: It shall
+not stand, neither shall it come to pass._ Of whom are you afraid? Look
+those foes of yours in the face. _The head of Syria is Damascus, and
+Damascus' head is Rezin_: is he worth fearing? _The head of Ephraim is
+Samaria, and Samaria's head is Remaliah's son_: is he worth fearing?
+Within a few years they will certainly be destroyed. But whatever
+estimate you make of your foes, whatever their future may be, for
+yourself have faith in God; for you that is the essential thing. _If ye
+will not believe, surely ye shall not be established._[13]
+
+  [13] There is a play upon words here, which may be reproduced in English
+  by the help of a North-England term: If ye have not _faith_, ye cannot
+  have _staith_.
+
+This paraphrase seeks to bring out the meaning of a passage confessedly
+obscure. It seems as if we had only bits of Isaiah's speech to Ahaz and
+must supply the gaps. No one need hesitate, however, to recognize the
+conspicuous personal qualities--the combination of political sagacity
+with religious fear, of common-sense and courage rooted in faith. In a
+word, this is what Isaiah will say to the king, clever in his alliances,
+religious and secular, and busy about his material defences: "Take unto
+you the shield of faith. You have lost your head among all these things.
+Hold it up like a man behind that shield; take a rational view of
+affairs. Rate your enemies at their proper value. But for this you must
+believe in God. Faith in Him is the essential condition of a calm mind
+and a rational appreciation of affairs."
+
+It is, no doubt, difficult for us to realize that the truth which Isaiah
+thus enforced on King Ahaz--the government of the world and human
+history by one supreme God--was ever a truth of which the race stood in
+ignorance. A generation like ours cannot be expected to put its mind in
+the attitude of those of Isaiah's contemporaries who believed in the
+real existence of many gods with limited sovereignties. To us, who are
+full of the instincts of Divine Providence and of the presence in
+history of law and progress, it is extremely hard even to admit the
+fact--far less fully to realize what it means--that our race had ever to
+receive these truths as fresh additions to their stock of intellectual
+ideas. Yet, without prejudice to the claims of earlier prophets, this
+may be confidently affirmed: that Isaiah where we now meet him stood on
+one side believing in one supreme God, Lord of heaven and earth, and his
+generation stood on the other side, believing that there were many gods.
+Isaiah, however, does not pose as the discoverer of the truth he
+preaches; he does not present it as a new revelation, nor put it in a
+formula. He takes it for granted, and proceeds to bring its moral
+influence to bear. He will infect men with his own utter conviction of
+it, in order that he may strengthen their character and guide them by
+paths of safety. His speech to Ahaz is an exhibition of the moral and
+rational effects of believing in Providence. Ahaz is a sample of the
+_character_ polytheism produced; the state of mind and heart to which
+Isaiah exhorts him is that induced by belief in one righteous and
+almighty God. We can make the contrast clear to ourselves by a very
+definite figure.
+
+The difference, which is made to the character and habits of men if the
+country they live in has a powerful government or not, is well known. If
+there be no such central authority, it is a case of every man's hand
+against his neighbour. Men walk armed to the teeth. A constant attitude
+of fear and suspicion warps the whole nature. The passions are excited
+and magnified; the intelligence and judgement are dwarfed. Just the
+same after its kind is life to the man or tribe, who believe, that the
+world in which they dwell and the life they share with others have no
+central authority. They walk armed with prejudices, superstitions and
+selfishnesses. They create, like Ahaz, their own providences, and still,
+like him, feel insecure. Everything is exaggerated by them; in each evil
+there lurks to their imagination unlimited hostility. They are without
+breadth of view or length of patience. But let men believe that life has
+a central authority, that God is supreme, and they will fling their
+prejudices and superstitions to the winds, now no more needed than the
+antiquated fortresses and weapons by which our forefathers, in days when
+the government was weak, were forced to defend their private interests.
+When we know that God reigns, how quiet and free it makes us! When
+things and men are part of His scheme and working out His ends, when we
+understand that they are not monsters but ministers, how reasonably we
+can look at them! Were we afraid of Syria and Ephraim? Why, the head of
+Syria is this fellow Rezin, the head of Ephraim this son of Remaliah!
+They cannot last long; God's engine stands behind to smite them. By the
+reasonable government of God, let us be reasonable! Let us take heed and
+be quiet. Have faith in God, and to faith will come her proper
+consequent of commonsense.
+
+For the higher a man looks, the farther he sees: to us that is the
+practical lesson of these first nine verses of the seventh chapter. The
+very gesture of faith bestows upon the mind a breadth of view. The man,
+who lifts his face to God in heaven, is he whose eyes sweep
+simultaneously the farthest prospect of earth, and bring to him a sense
+of the proportion of things. Ahaz, facing his nearest enemies, does not
+see over their heads, and in his consternation at their appearance
+prepares to embark upon any policy that suggests itself, even though it
+be so rash as the summoning of the Assyrian. Isaiah, on the other hand,
+with his vision fixed on God as the Governor of the world, is enabled to
+overlook the dust that darkens Judah's frontier, to see behind it the
+inevitable advance of the Assyrians, and to be assured that, whether
+Ahaz calls them to his quarrel or no, they will very soon of their own
+motion overwhelm both of his enemies. From these _two smoking
+firebrands_ there is then no real danger. But from the Assyrian, if once
+Judah entangle herself in his toils, there is the most extreme danger.
+Isaiah's advice is therefore not mere religious quietism; it is prudent
+policy. It is the best political advice that could have been offered at
+that crisis, as we have already been able to gather from a survey of the
+geographical and political dispositions of Western Asia,[14] apart
+altogether from religious considerations. But to Isaiah the calmness
+requisite for this sagacity sprang from his faith. Mr. Bagehot might
+have appealed to Isaiah's whole policy in illustration of what he has so
+well described as the military and political benefits of religion.
+Monotheism is of advantage to men not only by reason of "the high
+concentration of steady feeling" which it produces, but also for the
+mental calmness and sagacity, which surely spring from a pure and vivid
+conviction that the Lord reigneth.[15]
+
+  [14] Page 96.
+
+  [15] _Physics and Politics_ (International Scientific Series), pp. 75
+  ff. One of the finest modern illustrations of the connection between
+  faith and common-sense is found in the _Letters of General Gordon to His
+  Sister_. Gordon's coolness in face of the slave trade, the just survey
+  he makes of it, and the sensible advice which he gives about meeting it
+  stand well in contrast to the haste and rash proposals of
+  philanthropists at home, and are evidently due to his conviction that
+  the slave trade, like everything else in the world, is in the hands of
+  God, and so may be calmly studied and wisely checkmated. Gordon's
+  letters make very clear how much of his shrewdness in dealing with men
+  was due to the same source. It is instructive to observe throughout, how
+  his complete resignation to the will of God and his perfect obedience
+  delivered him from prejudices and partialities, from distractions and
+  desires, that make sober judgement impossible in other men.
+
+One other thing it is well we should emphasize, before we pass from
+Isaiah's speech to Ahaz. Nothing can be plainer than that Isaiah, though
+advocating so absolutely a quiescent belief in God, _is no fatalist_.
+Now other prophets there have been, insisting just as absolutely as
+Isaiah upon resignation to God the supreme, and the evident practical
+effect of their doctrine of the Divine sovereignty has been to make
+their followers, not shrewd political observers, but blind and apathetic
+fatalists. The difference between them and Isaiah has lain in the kind
+of character, which they and he have respectively attributed to the
+Deity, before exalting Him to the throne of absolute power and resigning
+themselves to His will. Isaiah, though as disciplined a believer in
+God's sovereignty and man's duty of obedience as any prophet that ever
+preached these doctrines, was preserved from the fatalism to which they
+so often lead by the conviction he had previously received of God's
+righteousness. Fatalism means resignation to fate, and fate means an
+omnipotence either without character, or (which is the same thing) of
+whose character we are ignorant. Fate is God _minus_ character, and
+fatalism is the characterless condition to which belief in such a God
+reduces man. History presents it to our view amid the most diverse
+surroundings. The Greek mind, so free and sunny, was bewildered and
+benumbed by belief in an inscrutable Nemesis. In the East how frequently
+is a temper of apathy or despair bred in men, to whom God is nothing but
+a despot! Even within Christianity we have had fanatics, so inordinately
+possessed with belief in God's sovereignty of election, to the exclusion
+of all other Divine truths, as to profess themselves, with impious
+audacity, willing to be damned for His glory. Such instances are enough
+to prove to us the extreme danger of making the sovereignty of God the
+_first_ article of our creed. It is not safe for men to exalt a deity to
+the throne of the supreme providence, till they are certified of his
+character. The vision of mere power intoxicates and brutalizes, no less
+when it is hallowed by the name of religion, than when, as in modern
+materialism, it is blindly interpreted as physical force. Only the
+people who have first learned to know their Deity intimately in the
+private matters of life, where heart touches heart, and the delicate
+arguments of conscience are not overborne by the presence of vast
+natural forces or the intricate movements of the world's history, can be
+trusted afterwards to enter these larger theatres of religion, without
+risk of losing their faith, their sensibility or their conscience.
+
+The whole course of revelation has been bent upon this: to render men
+familiarly and experimentally acquainted with the character of God,
+before laying upon them the duty of homage to His creative power or
+submission to His will. In the Old Testament God is the Friend, the
+Guide, the Redeemer of men, or ever He is their Monarch and Lawgiver.
+The Divine name which the Hebrew sees _excellent through all the earth_
+is the name that he has learned to know at home as _Jehovah, our Lord_
+(Ps. viii.). Jehovah trains His people to trust His personal troth and
+lovingkindness within their own courts, before He tests their allegiance
+and discipline upon the high places of the world. And when, amid the
+strange terrors of these and the novel magnitudes with which Israel,
+facing the world, had to reckon, the people lost their presence of mind,
+His elegy over them was, _My people are destroyed for lack of
+knowledge._ Even when their temple is full and their sacrifices of
+homage to His power most frequent, it is still their want of moral
+acquaintance with Himself of which He complains: _Israel doth not know;
+My people doth not consider._ What else was the tragedy in which Jewish
+history closed, than just the failure to perceive this lesson: that to
+have and to communicate the knowledge of the Almighty's character is of
+infinitely more value than the attempt to vindicate in any outward
+fashion Jehovah's supremacy over the world? This latter, this forlorn,
+hope was what Israel exhausted the evening of their day in attempting.
+The former--to communicate to the lives and philosophies of mankind a
+knowledge of the Divine heart and will, gained throughout a history of
+unique grace and miracle--was the destiny which they resigned to the
+followers of the crucified Messiah.
+
+For under the New Testament this also is the method of revelation. What
+our King desires before He ascends the throne of the world is that the
+world should know Him; and so He comes down among us, to be heard, and
+seen, and handled of us, that our hearts may learn His heart and know
+His love, unbewildered by His majesty. And for our part, when we
+ascribe to our King the glory and the dominion, it is as unto Him that
+loved us and washed us from our sins in His blood. For the chief thing
+for individuals, as for nations, is not to believe that God reigneth so
+much as to know what kind of God He is who reigneth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But Ahaz would not be persuaded. He had a policy of his own, and was
+determined to pursue it. He insisted on appealing to Assyria. Before he
+did so, Isaiah made one more attempt on his obduracy. With a vehemence,
+which reveals how critical he felt the king's decision to be, the
+prophet returned as if this time the very voice of Jehovah. _And Jehovah
+spake to Ahaz, saying, Ask thee a sign of Jehovah thy God; ask it either
+in Sheol below or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask,
+neither will I tempt the Lord._
+
+Isaiah's offer of a sign was one which the prophets of Israel used to
+make when some crisis demanded the immediate acceptance of their word by
+men, and men were more than usually hard to convince--a miracle such as
+the thunder that Samuel called out of a clear sky to impress Israel with
+God's opinion of their folly in asking for a king;[16] or as the rending
+of the altar which the man of God brought to pass to convict the sullen
+Jeroboam;[17] or as the regress of the shadow on the sun-dial, which
+Isaiah himself gave in assurance of recovery to the sick Hezekiah.[18]
+Such signs are offered only to weak or prejudiced persons. The most
+real faith, as Isaiah himself tells us, is unforced, the purest natures
+those which need no signs and wonders. But there are certain crises at
+which faith must be immediately forced, and Ahaz stood now at such a
+crisis; and there are certain characters who, unable to read a writ from
+the court of conscience and reason, must be served with one from a
+court--even though it be inferior--whose language they understand; and
+Ahaz was such a character. Isaiah knew his man, and prepared a pretty
+dilemma for him. By offering him whatever sign he chose to ask, Isaiah
+knew that the king would be committed before his own honour and the
+public conscience to refrain from calling in the Assyrians, and so Judah
+would be saved; or if the king refused the sign, the refusal would
+unmask him. Ahaz refused, and at once Isaiah denounced him and all his
+house. They were mere shufflers, playing fast and loose with God as well
+as men. _Hear ye now, O house of David. Is it a small thing for you to
+weary men, that ye must weary my God also?_ You have evaded God;
+therefore God Himself will take you in hand: _the Lord Himself shall
+give you a sign_.
+
+  [16] 1 Sam. xii. 17.
+
+  [17] 1 Kings xiii. 3.
+
+  [18] Chap. xxxviii.
+
+In order to follow intelligently the rest of Isaiah's address, we must
+clearly understand how the sign which he now promises differs in nature
+from the sign he had implored Ahaz to select, of whatever sort he may
+have expected that selection to be. The king's determination to call in
+Assyria has come between. Therefore, while the sign Isaiah first offered
+upon the spot was intended for an immediate pledge that God would
+establish Ahaz, if only he did not appeal to the foreigner, the sign
+Isaiah now offers shall come as a future proof of how criminal and
+disastrous the appeal to the foreigner has been. The first sign would
+have been an earnest of salvation; the second is to be an exposure of
+the fatal evil of Ahaz's choice. The first would have given some
+assurance of the swift overthrow of Ephraim and Syria; the second shall
+be some painful illustration of the fact that not only Syria and
+Ephraim, but Judah herself, shall be overwhelmed by the advance of the
+northern power. This second sign is one, therefore, which only time can
+bring round. Isaiah identifies it with a life not yet born.
+
+A Child, he says, shall shortly be born to whom his mother shall give
+the name Immanu-El--_God-with-us_. By the time this Child comes to years
+of discretion, _he shall eat butter and honey_. Isaiah then explains the
+riddle. He does not, however, explain who the mother is, having
+described her vaguely as _a_ or _the young woman of marriageable age_;
+for that is not necessary to the sign, which is to consist in the
+Child's own experience. To this latter he limits his explanation. Butter
+and honey are the food of privation, the food of a people, whose land,
+depopulated by the enemy, has been turned into pasture. Before this
+Child shall arrive at years of discretion not only shall Syria and
+Ephraim be laid waste, but the Lord Himself will have laid waste Judah.
+_Jehovah shall bring upon thee, and upon thy people and upon thy
+father's house days, that have not come, from the day that Ephraim
+departed from Judah; even the king of Assyria._ Nothing more is said of
+Immanuel, but the rest of the chapter is taken up with the details of
+Judah's devastation.
+
+Now this sign and its explanation would have presented little difficulty
+but for the name of the Child--Immanuel. Erase that, and the passage
+reads forcibly enough. Before a certain Child, whose birth is vaguely
+but solemnly intimated in the near future, shall have come to years of
+discretion, the results of the choice of Ahaz shall be manifest. Judah
+shall be devastated, and her people have sunk to the most rudimentary
+means of living. All this is plain. It is a form which Isaiah used more
+than once to measure the near future. And in other literatures, too, we
+have felt the pathos of realizing the future results of crime and the
+length to which disaster lingers, by their effect upon the lives of
+another generation:--
+
+  "The child that is unborn shall rue
+      The hunting of that day!"
+
+But why call the Child Immanuel? The name is evidently part of the sign,
+and has to be explained in connection with it. Why call a Child
+_God-with-us_ who is not going to act greatly or to be highly honoured,
+who is only going to suffer, for whom to come to years of intelligence
+shall only be to come to a sense of his country's disaster and his
+people's poverty? This Child who is used so pathetically to measure the
+flow of time and the return of its revenges, about whom we are told
+neither how he shall behave himself in the period of privation, nor
+whether he shall survive it--why is he called Immanuel? or why, being
+called Immanuel, has he so sordid a fate to contrast with so splendid a
+name?
+
+It seems to the present expositor quite impossible to dissociate so
+solemn an announcement by Jehovah to the house of David of the birth of
+a Child, so highly named, from that expectation of the coming of a
+glorious Prince which was current in this royal family since the days of
+its founder. Mysterious and abrupt as the intimation of Immanuel's birth
+may seem to us at this juncture, we cannot forget that it fell from
+Isaiah's lips on hearts which cherished as their dearest hope the
+appearance of a glorious descendant of David, and were just now the more
+sensitive to this hope that both David's city and David's dynasty were
+in peril. Could Ahaz possibly understand by Immanuel any other child
+than that Prince whose coming was the inalienable hope of his house? But
+if we are right in supposing that Ahaz made this identification, or had
+even the dimmest presage of it, then we understand the full force of the
+sign. Ahaz by his unbelief had not only disestablished himself (ver. 9):
+he had mortgaged the hope of Israel. In the flood of disaster, which his
+fatal resolution would bring upon the land, it mattered little what was
+to happen to himself. Isaiah does not trouble now to mention any penalty
+for Ahaz. But his resolve's exceeding pregnancy of peril is borne home
+to the king by the assurance that it will devastate all the golden
+future, and must disinherit the promised King. The Child, who is
+Israel's hope, is born; he receives the Divine name, and that is all of
+salvation or glory suggested. He grows up not to a throne or the majesty
+which the seventy-second Psalm pictures--the offerings of Sheba's and
+Seba's kings, the corn of his land shaking like the fruit of Lebanon,
+while they of the city flourish like the grass of the earth--but to the
+food of privation, to the sight of his country razed by his enemies into
+one vast common fit only for pasture, to loneliness and suffering. Amid
+the general desolation his figure vanishes from our sight, and only his
+name remains to haunt, with its infinite melancholy of what might have
+been, the thorn-choked vineyards and grass-grown courts of Judah.
+
+But even if it were to prove too fine a point, to identify Immanuel with
+the promised Messiah of David's house, and we had to fall back on some
+vaguer theory of him, finding him to be a personification,--either a
+representative of the coming generation of God's people, or a type of
+the promised to-morrow,--the moral effect of the sign would remain the
+same; and it is with this alone that we have here to do. Be this an
+individual, or a generation, or an age,--by the Name bestowed upon it,
+it was to have been a glorious, God-inhabited age, generation, or
+individual, and Ahaz has prematurely spoiled everything about it but the
+Name. The future shall be like a boy cursed by his fathers, brought into
+the world with glorious rights that are stamped in his title, but only
+to find his kingdom and estates no longer in existence, and all the
+circumstances dissipated, in which he might have realized the glorious
+meaning of his name. Type of innocent suffering, he is born to an empty
+title, his name the vestige of a great opportunity, the ironical
+monument of an irreparable crime.
+
+If Ahaz had any conscience left, we can imagine the effect of this upon
+him. To be punished for sin in one's own body and fortune, this is sore
+enough; but to see heaven itself blackened and all the gracious future
+frustrate, this is unspeakably terrible.
+
+Ahaz is thus the Judas of the Old Testament, if that conception of
+Judas' character be the right one which makes his wilful desire to bring
+about the kingdom of God in his own violent fashion the motive of his
+betrayal of Jesus. Of his own obduracy Ahaz has betrayed the Messiah and
+Deliverer of his people. The assurance of this betrayal is the sign of
+his obduracy, a signal and terrible proof of his irretrievable sin in
+calling upon the Assyrians. The king has been found wanting.
+
+
+II. THE PEOPLE (chap. viii.).
+
+The king has been found wanting; but Isaiah will appeal to the people.
+Chap. viii. is a collection of addresses to them, as chap. vii. was an
+expostulation with their sovereign. The two chapters are contemporary.
+In chap. viii. ver. 1, the narrative goes back upon itself, and returns
+to the situation as it was before Ahaz made his final resolution of
+reliance on Assyria. Vv. 1-4 of chap. viii. imply that the Assyrian has
+not yet been summoned by Ahaz to his assistance, and therefore run
+parallel to chap. vii. vv. 3-9; but chap. viii. ver. 5 and following
+verses sketch the evils that are to come upon Judah and Israel,
+consequent upon the arrival of the Assyrians in Palestine, in answer to
+the appeal of Ahaz. These evils for land and nation are threatened as
+absolutely to the people, as they had been to the king. And then the
+people are thrown over (viii. 14), as the king had been; and Isaiah
+limits himself to his disciples (ver. 16)--the _remnant_ that was
+foretold in chap. vi.
+
+This appeal from monarch to people is one of the most characteristic
+features of Isaiah's ministry. Whatever be the matter committed to him,
+Isaiah is not allowed to rest till he has brought it home to the popular
+conscience; and however much he may be able to charge national disaster
+upon the folly of politicians or the obduracy of a king, it is the
+people whom he holds ultimately responsible. The statesman, according to
+Isaiah, cannot rise far above the level of his generation; the people
+set the fashion to their most autocratic rulers. This instinct for the
+popular conscience, this belief in the moral solidarity of a nation and
+their governors, was the motive of the most picturesque passages in
+Isaiah's career, and inspired some of the keenest epigrams in which he
+conveyed the Divine truth. We have here a case in illustration. Isaiah
+had met Ahaz and his court _at the conduit of the upper pool, in the
+highway of the fuller's field_, preparing for the expected siege of the
+city, and had delivered to them the Lord's message not to fear, for that
+Syria-Ephraim would certainly be destroyed. But that was not enough. It
+was now laid upon the prophet to make public and popular advertisement
+of the same truth.
+
+Isaiah was told to take a large, smooth board, and write thereon in the
+character used by the common people--_with the pen of a man_--as if it
+were the title to a prophecy, the compound word "Maher-shalal-hash-baz."
+This was not only an intelligibly written, but a significantly sonorous,
+word--one of those popular cries in which the liveliest sensations are
+struck forth by the crowded, clashing letters, full to the dullest ears
+of rumours of war: _speed-spoil-hurry-prey_. The interpretation of it
+was postponed, the prophet meantime taking two faithful witnesses to its
+publication. In a little a son was born to Isaiah, and to this child he
+transferred the noisy name. Then its explanation was given. The double
+word was the alarm of a couple of invasions. _Before the boy shall have
+knowledge to cry, My father, my mother, the riches of Damascus and the
+spoil of Samaria shall be carried away before the king of Assyria._ So
+far nothing was told the people that had not been told their king; only
+the time of the overthrow of their two enemies was fixed with greater
+precision. At the most in a year, Damascus and Samaria would have
+fallen. The ground was already vibrating to the footfall of the northern
+hosts.
+
+The rapid political changes, which ensued in Palestine, are reflected on
+the broken surface of this eighth chapter. We shall not understand
+these abrupt and dislocated oracles, uttered at short intervals during
+the two years of the Assyrian campaign, unless we realize that northern
+shadow passing and repassing over Judah and Israel, and the quick
+alternations of pride and penitence in the peoples beneath it. We need
+not try to thread the verses on any line of thought. Logical connection
+among them there is none. Let us at once get down into the currents of
+popular feeling, in which Isaiah, having left Ahaz, is now labouring,
+and casting forth these cries.
+
+It is a period of powerful currents, a people wholly in drift, and the
+strongest man of them arrested only by a firm pressure of the Lord's
+hand. _For Jehovah spake thus to me with a strong hand, and instructed
+me, that I should not walk in the way of this people._ The character of
+the popular movement, _the way of this people_, which nearly lifted
+Isaiah off his feet, is evident. It is that into which every nation
+drifts, who have just been loosened from a primitive faith in God, and
+by fear or ambition have been brought under the fascination of the great
+world. On the one hand, such a generation is apt to seek the security of
+its outward life in things materially large and splendid, to despise as
+paltry its old religious forms, national aspirations and achievements,
+and be very desirous to follow foreign fashion and rival foreign wealth.
+On the other hand, the religious spirit of such an age, withdrawn from
+its legitimate objects, seeks satisfaction in petty and puerile
+practices, demeaning itself spiritually, in a way that absurdly
+contrasts with the grandeur of its material ambitions. Such a stage in
+the life of a people has its analogy in the growth of the individual,
+when the boy, new to the world, by affecting the grandest companions
+and models, assumes an ambitious manner, with contempt for his former
+circumstances, yet inwardly remains credulous, timid and liable to
+panic. Isaiah reveals that it was such a stage, which both the kingdoms
+of Israel had now reached. _This people hath refused the waters of
+Shiloah, that go softly, and rejoice in Rezin and Remaliah's son._
+
+It was natural, that when the people of Judah contrasted their own
+estate with that of Assyria, or even of Damascus, they should despise
+themselves. For what was Judah? A petty principality, no larger than
+three of our own counties. And what was Jerusalem? A mere mountain
+village, some sixty or seventy acres of barren rock, cut into tongues by
+three insignificant valleys, down which there sometimes struggled tiny
+threads of water, though the beds were oftener dry, giving the town a
+withered and squalid look--no great river to nourish, ennoble or
+protect. What were such a country and capital to compare with the empire
+of Assyria?--the empire of the two rivers, whose powerful streams washed
+the ramparts, wharves, and palace stairs of mighty cities! What was
+Jerusalem even to the capital of Rezin? Were not Abana and Pharpar,
+rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel, let alone
+these waterless wadys, whose bleached beds made the Jewish capital so
+squalid? It was the Assyrian's vast water system--canals, embankments,
+sluices, and the wealth of water moving through them--that most
+impressed the poor Jew, whose streams failed him in summer, and who had
+to treasure up his scanty stores of rainwater in the cisterns, with
+which the rocky surface of his territory is still so thickly indented.
+There had, indeed, been at Jerusalem some attempt to conduct water. It
+was called _The Shiloah_--_conduit_ or _aqueduct_, literally _emissary_
+in the old sense of the word--a rough, narrow tunnel of some thousand
+feet in length, hewn through the living rock from the only considerable
+spring on the east side of Jerusalem, to a reservoir within the walls.
+To this day _The Shiloah_ presents itself as not by any means a
+first-class piece of engineering. Ahaz had either just made the tunnel
+or repaired it; but if the water went no faster than it travels now, the
+results were indeed ridiculous. Well might _this people despise the
+waters of the Shiloah, that go trickling_, when they thought upon the
+rivers of Damascus or the broad streams of Mesopotamia. Certainly it was
+enough to dry up the patriotism of the Judean, if he was capable of
+appreciating only material value, to look upon this bare, riverless
+capital, with its bungled aqueduct and trickling water supply. On merely
+material grounds, Judah was about the last country at that time, in
+which her inhabitants might be expected to show pride or confidence.
+
+But woe to the people, whose attachment to their land is based upon its
+material advantages, who have lost their sense for those spiritual
+presences, from an appreciation of which springs all true love of
+country, with warrior's courage in her defence and statesman's faith in
+her destiny! The greatest calamity, which can befall any people, is to
+forfeit their enthusiasm for the soil, on which their history has been
+achieved and their hearths and altars lie, by suffering their faith in
+the presence of God, of which these are but the tokens, to pass away.
+With this loss Isaiah now reproaches Judah. The people are utterly
+materialized; their delights have been in gold and silver, chariots and
+horses, fenced cities and broad streams, and their faith has now
+followed their delights. But these things to which they flee will only
+prove their destruction. The great foreign river, whose waters they
+covet, will overflow them: _even the king of Assyria and all his glory,
+and he shall come up over all his channels and go over all his banks;
+and he shall sweep onward into Judah; he shall overflow and pass
+through; he shall reach even to the neck; and the stretching out of his
+wings shall fill the breadth of thy land, O Immanuel_, thou who art
+_God-with-us_. At the sound of the Name, which floats in upon the floods
+of invasion like the Ark on the waters of old, Isaiah pulls together his
+distraught faith in his country, and forgetting her faults, flings
+defiance at her foes. _Associate yourselves, ye peoples, and ye shall be
+broken in pieces; and give ear, all ye of far-off countries, gird
+yourselves, and ye shall be broken in pieces. Take counsel together, and
+it shall be brought to nought; speak the word, and it shall not stand:
+for Immanu-El_--"With us is God." The challenge was made good. The
+prophet's faith prevailed over the people's materialism, and Jerusalem
+remained inviolable till Isaiah's death.
+
+Meantime the Assyrian came on. But the infatuated people of Judah
+continued to tremble rather before the doomed conspirators, Rezin and
+Pekah. It must have been a time of huge excitement. The prophet tells us
+how he was steadied by the pressure of the Lord's hand, and how, being
+steadied, the meaning of the word "Immanuel" was opened out to him.
+_God-with-us_ is the one great fact of life. Amid all the possible
+alliances and all the possible fears of a complex political situation,
+He remains the one certain alliance, the one real fear. _Say ye not, A
+conspiracy, concerning all whereof this people say, A conspiracy;
+neither fear ye their fear, nor be in dread thereof. Jehovah of hosts,
+Him shall ye sanctify; and let Him be your fear, and let Him be your
+dread._ God is the one great fact of life, but what a double-edged
+fact--_a sanctuary to all who put their trust in Him, but a rock of
+offence to both houses of Israel!_ The figure is very picturesque. An
+altar, a common stone on steps, one of those which covered the land in
+large numbers--it is easy to see what a double purpose that might serve.
+What a joy the sight would be to the weary wanderer or refugee who
+sought it, what a comfort as he leant his weariness upon it, and knew he
+was safe! But those who were flying over the land, not seeking Jehovah,
+not knowing indeed what they sought, blind and panic-stricken--for them
+what could that altar do but trip them up like any other common rock in
+their way? "In fact, Divine justice is something which is either
+observed, desired, or attained, and is then man's weal, or, on the other
+hand, is overlooked, rejected, or sought after in a wild, unintelligent
+spirit, and only in the hour of need, and is then their lasting
+ruin."[19]
+
+  [19] Ewald.
+
+The Assyrian came on, and the temper of the Jews grew worse. Samaria was
+indeed doomed from the first, but for some time Isaiah had been
+excepting Judah from a judgement for which the guilt of Northern Israel
+was certainly riper. He foresaw, of course, that the impetus of invasion
+might sweep the Assyrians into Judah, but he had triumphed in this: that
+Judah was Immanuel's land, and that all who arrayed themselves against
+her must certainly come to nought. But now his ideas have changed, as
+Judah has persisted in evil. He knows now that God is for a
+stumbling-block to _both_ houses of Israel; nay, that upon Jerusalem
+herself He will fall as a gin and a snare. Only for a little group of
+individuals, separate from both States, and gathered round the prophet
+and the word of God given to him, is salvation certain. People, as well
+as king, have been found wanting. There remains only this _remnant_.
+
+Isaiah then at last sees his _remnant_. But the point we have reached is
+significant for more than the fulfilment of his expectations. This is
+the first appearance in history of a religious community, apart from the
+forms of domestic or national life. "Till then no one had dreamed of a
+fellowship of faith dissociated from all national forms, bound together
+by faith in the Divine word alone. It was the birth of a new era in
+religion, for it was the birth of the conception of the Church, the
+first step in the emancipation of spiritual religion from the forms of
+political life."[20]
+
+  [20] Robertson Smith, _Prophets of Israel_, p. 275.
+
+The plan of the seventh and eighth chapters is now fully disclosed. As
+the king for his unworthiness has to give place to the Messiah, so the
+nation for theirs have to give place to the Church. In the seventh
+chapter the king was found wanting, and the Messiah promised. In the
+eighth chapter the people are found wanting; and the prophet, turning
+from them, proceeds to form the Church among those who accept the Word,
+which king and people have refused. _Bind thou up the testimony, and
+seal the teaching[21] among my disciples. And I will wait on Jehovah,
+who hideth His face from the house of Jacob, and I will look for Him.
+Behold, I and the children Jehovah hath given me are for signs and
+wonders in Israel from Jehovah of hosts, Him that dwelleth in Mount
+Zion._
+
+  [21] English Version, "law," but not the law of Moses. Isaiah refers to
+  the word that has come by himself.
+
+This, then, is the situation: revelation concluded, the Church formed
+upon it, and the nation abandoned. But is that situation final? The
+words just quoted betray the prophet's hope that it is not. He says: _I
+will wait._ He says again: The LORD is only _hiding His face from the
+house of Jacob_. I will expect again the shining of His countenance. I
+will hope for Divine grace and the nation being once more conterminous.
+The rest of the section (to ix. 7) is the development of this hope,
+which stirs in the prophet's heart after he has closed the record of
+revelation.
+
+The darkness deepened across Israel. The Assyrian had come. The northern
+floods kept surging among the little States of Palestine, and none knew
+what might be left standing. We can well understand Isaiah pausing, as
+he did, in face of such rapid and incontrollable movements. When
+Tiglath-pileser swept over the plain of Esdraelon, casting down the king
+of Samaria and the Philistine cities, and then swept back again,
+carrying off upon his ebb the populations east of the Jordan, it looked
+very like as if both the houses of Israel should fall. In their panic,
+the people betook themselves to morbid forms of religion; and at first
+Isaiah was obliged to quench the hope and pity he had betrayed for them
+in indignation at the utter contrariety of their religious practices to
+the word of God. There can be no Divine grace for the people as long as
+they _seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto the wizards
+that chirp and that mutter_. For such a disposition the prophet has
+nothing but scorn, _Should not a people seek unto their God? On behalf
+of the living should they seek unto the dead?_ They must come back to
+the prophet's own word before hope may dawn. _To the revelation and the
+testimony! If they speak not according to this word, surely there is no
+morning for them._
+
+The night, however, grew too awful for scorn. There had been no part of
+the land so given to the idolatrous practices, which the prophet
+scathed, as _the land of Zebulon and the land of Naphtali, by the sea
+beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles_. But all the horrors of
+captivity had now fallen upon it, and it had received at the Lord's hand
+double for all its sins. The night had been torn enough by lightning;
+was there no dawn? The darkness of these provinces fills the prophet's
+silenced thoughts. He sees a people _hardly bestead and hungry, fretting
+themselves, cursing their king_, who had betrayed them, _and their God_,
+who had abandoned them, _turning their faces upwards_ to heaven and
+_downwards_ to the sacred soil from which they were being dragged, _but,
+behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish; and into thick
+darkness they are driven away_. It is a murky picture, yet through the
+smoke of it we are able to discern a weird procession of Israelites
+departing into captivity. We date it, therefore, about 732 B.C., the
+night of Israel's first great captivity. The shock and the pity of this
+rouse the prophet's great heart. He cannot continue to say that there is
+no morning for those benighted provinces. He will venture a great hope
+for their people.
+
+Over how many months the crowded verses, viii. 21-ix. 7, must be spread,
+it is useless now to inquire--whether the revulsion they mark arose all
+at once in the prophet's mind, or hope grew gradually brighter as the
+smoke of war died away on Israel's northern frontier during 731 B.C. It
+is enough that we can mark the change. The prophet's tones pass from
+sarcasm to pity (viii. 20, 21); from pity to hope (viii. 22-ix. 1); from
+hope to triumph in the vision of salvation actually achieved (ix. 2).
+_The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that
+dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, on them hath the light
+shined._ For a mutilated, we see a multiplied, nation; for the fret of
+hunger and the curses of defeat, we hear the joy of harvest and of spoil
+after victory. _For the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his
+shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, Thou hast broken as in the day of
+Midian._ War has rolled away for ever over that northern horizon, and
+all the relics of war in the land are swept together into the fire. _For
+all the armour of the armed man in the tumult, and the garments rolled
+in blood, shall even be for burning, and for fuel of fire._ In the
+midday splendour of this peace, which, after the fashion of Hebrew
+prophecy, is described as already realized, Isaiah hails the Author of
+it all in that gracious and marvellous Child whose birth he had already
+intimated, Heir to the throne of David, but entitled by a fourfold name,
+too generous, perhaps, for a mere mortal, _Wonderful-Counsellor_,
+_Hero-God_, _Father-Everlasting_, _Prince-of-peace_, who shall redeem
+the realms of his great forerunner and maintain _Israel with justice and
+righteousness from henceforth, even for ever_.
+
+When, finally, the prophet inquires what has led his thoughts through
+this rapid change from satisfaction (chap. viii. 16) with the salvation
+of a small _remnant_ of believers in the word of God--a little kernel of
+patience in the midst of a godless and abandoned people--to the daring
+vision of a whole nation redeemed and established in peace under a
+Godlike King, he says: _The zeal of the Lord of hosts hath performed
+this._
+
+_The zeal_, translates our English version, but no one English word will
+give it. It is that mixture of hot honour and affection to which
+"jealousy" in its good sense comes near. It is that overflow of the love
+that cannot keep still, which, when men think God has surely done all He
+will or can do for an ungrateful race, visits them in their distress,
+and carries them forward into unconceived dispensations of grace and
+glory. It is the Spirit of God, which yearns after the lost, speaks to
+the self-despairing of hope, and surprises rebel and prophet alike with
+new revelations of love. We have our systems representing God's work up
+to the limits of our experience, and we settle upon them; but the
+Almighty is ever greater than His promise or than His revelation of
+Himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+_THE MESSIAH._
+
+
+We have now reached that point of Isaiah's prophesying at which the
+Messiah becomes the most conspicuous figure on his horizon. Let us take
+advantage of it, to gather into one statement all that the prophet told
+his generation concerning that exalted and mysterious Person.[22]
+
+  [22] The Messiah, or _Anointed_, is used in the Old Testament of many
+  agents of God: high-priest (Lev. iv. 3); ministers of the Word (Ps. cv.
+  15); Cyrus (Isa. xlv. 1); but mostly of God's king, actual (1 Sam. xxiv.
+  7), or expected (Dan. ix. 25). So it became in Jewish theology the
+  technical term for the coming King and the Captain of salvation.
+
+When Isaiah began to prophesy, there was current among the people of
+Judah the expectation of a glorious King. How far the expectation was
+defined it is impossible to ascertain; but this at least is historically
+certain. A promise had been made to David (2 Sam. vii. 4-17) by which
+the permanence of his dynasty was assured. His offspring, it was said,
+should succeed him, yet eternity was promised not to any individual
+descendant, but to the dynasty. Prophets earlier than Isaiah emphasized
+this establishment of the house of David, even in the days of Israel's
+greatest distress; but they said nothing of a single monarch with whom
+the fortunes of the house were to be identified. It is clear, however,
+even without the evidence of the Messianic Psalms, that the hope of such
+a hero was quick in Israel. Besides the documentary proof of David's own
+last words (2 Sam. xxiii.), there is the manifest impossibility of
+dreaming of an ideal kingdom apart from the ideal king. Orientals, and
+especially Orientals of that period, were incapable of realizing the
+triumph of an idea or an institution without connecting it with a
+personality. So that we may be perfectly sure, that when Isaiah began to
+prophesy the people not only counted upon the continuance of David's
+dynasty, as they counted upon the presence of Jehovah Himself, but were
+familiar with the ideal of a monarch, and lived in hope of its
+realization.
+
+In the first stage of his prophecy, it is remarkable, Isaiah makes no
+use of this tradition, although he gives more than one representation of
+Israel's future in which it might naturally have appeared. No word is
+spoken of a Messiah even in the awful conversation, in which Isaiah
+received from the Eternal the fundamentals of his teaching. The only
+hope there permitted to him is the survival of a bare, leaderless few of
+the people, or, to use his own word, _a stump_, with no sign of a
+prominent sprout upon it. In connection, however, with the survival of a
+remnant, as we have said on chap. vi. (p. 89), it is plain that there
+were two indispensable conditions, which the prophet could not help
+having to state sooner or later. Indeed, one of them he had mentioned
+already. It was indispensable that the people should have a leader, and
+that they should have a rallying-point. They must have their King, and
+they must have their City. Every reader of Isaiah knows that it is on
+these two themes the prophet rises to the height of his
+eloquence--Jerusalem shall remain inviolable; a glorious King shall be
+given unto her. But it has not been so generally remarked, that Isaiah
+is far more concerned and consistent about the secure city than about
+the ideal monarch. From first to last the establishment and peace of
+Jerusalem are never out of his thoughts, but he speaks only now and then
+of the King to come. Through long periods of his ministry, though
+frequently describing the blessed future, he is silent about the
+Messiah, and even sometimes so groups the inhabitants of that future, as
+to leave no room for Him among them. Indeed, the silences of Isaiah upon
+this Person are as remarkable as the brilliant passages, in which he
+paints His endowments and His work.
+
+If we consider the moment, chosen by Isaiah for announcing the Messiah
+and adding his seal to the national belief in the advent of a glorious
+Son of David, we find some significance in the fact that it was a
+moment, when the throne of David was unworthily filled and David's
+dynasty was for the first time seriously threatened. It is impossible to
+dissociate the birth of a boy called _Immanuel_, and afterwards so
+closely identified with the fortunes of the whole land (vii. 8), from
+the public expectation of a King of glory; and critics are almost
+unanimous in recognizing Immanuel again in the Prince-of-the-Four-Names
+in chap. ix. Immanuel, therefore, is the Messiah, the promised King of
+Israel. But Isaiah makes his own first intimation of Him, not when the
+throne was worthily filled by an Uzziah or a Jotham, but when a fool and
+traitor to God abused its power, and the foreign conspiracy to set up a
+Syrian prince in Jerusalem imperilled the whole dynasty. Perhaps we
+ought not to overlook the fact, that Isaiah does not here designate
+Immanuel as a descendant of David. The vagueness with which the mother
+is described has given rise to a vast amount of speculation as to what
+particular person the prophet meant by her. But may not Isaiah's
+vagueness be the only intention he had in mentioning a mother at all?
+The whole house of David shared at that moment the sin of the king (vii.
+13); and it is not presuming too much upon the freedom of our prophet to
+suppose, that he shook himself loose from the tradition, which entailed
+the Messiah upon the royal family of Judah, and at least left it an open
+question, whether Immanuel might not, in consequence of their sin,
+spring from some other stock.
+
+It is, however, far less with the origin, than with the experience, of
+Immanuel that Isaiah is concerned; and those who embark upon curious
+inquiries, as to who exactly the mother might be, are busying themselves
+with what the prophet had no interest in, while neglecting that in which
+really lay the significance of the sign that he offered.
+
+Ahaz by his wilfulness has made a Substitute necessary. But Isaiah is
+far more taken up with this: that he has actually mortgaged the
+prospects of that Substitute. The Messiah comes, but the wilfulness of
+Ahaz has rendered His reign impossible. He, whose advent has hitherto
+not been foretold except as the beginning of an era of prosperity, and
+whose person has not been painted but with honour and power, is
+represented as a helpless and innocent Sufferer--His prospects
+dissipated by the sins of others, and Himself born only to share His
+people's indigence (p. 115). Such a representation of the Hero's fate is
+of the very highest interest. We are accustomed to associate the
+conception of a suffering Messiah only with a much later development of
+prophecy, when Israel went into exile; but the conception meets us
+already here. It is another proof that _Esaias is very bold_. He calls
+his Messiah Immanuel, and yet dares to present Him as nothing but a
+Sufferer--a Sufferer for the sins of others. Born only to suffer with
+His people, who should have inherited their throne--that is Isaiah's
+first doctrine of the Messiah.
+
+Through the rest of the prophecies published during the Syro-Ephraitic
+troubles the Sufferer is slowly transformed into a Deliverer. The stages
+of this transformation are obscure. In chap. viii. Immanuel is no more
+defined than in chap. vii. He is still only a Name of hope upon an
+unbroken prospect of devastation. _The stretching out of his
+wings_--_i.e._, the floods of the Assyrian--_shall fill the breadth of
+Thy land, O Immanuel_. But this time that the prophet utters the Name,
+he feels inspired by new courage. He grasps at Immanuel as the pledge of
+ultimate salvation. Let the enemies of Judah work their worst; it shall
+be in vain, _for Immanuel, God is with us_. And then, to our
+astonishment, while Isaiah is telling us how he arrived at the
+convictions embodied in this Name, the personality of Immanuel fades
+away altogether, and Jehovah of hosts Himself is set forth as the sole
+sanctuary of those who fear Him. There is indeed a double displacement
+here. Immanuel dissolves in two directions. As a Refuge, He is displaced
+by Jehovah; as a Sufferer and a Symbol of the sufferings of the land, by
+a little community of disciples, the first embodiment of the Church, who
+now, with Isaiah, can do nothing except wait for the Lord (pp. 124-126).
+
+Then, when the prophet's yearning thoughts, that will not rest upon so
+dark a closure, struggle once more, and struggling pass from despair to
+pity, and from pity to hope, and from hope to triumph in a salvation
+actually achieved, they hail all at once as the Hero of it the Son whose
+birth was promised. With an emphasis, which vividly reveals the sense of
+exhaustion in the living generation and the conviction that only
+something fresh, and sent straight from God Himself, can now avail
+Israel, the prophet cries: _Unto us a Child is born; unto us a Son is
+given_. The Messiah appears in a glory that floods His origin out of
+sight. We cannot see whether He springs from the house of David; but
+_the government is to be upon His shoulder_, and He shall reign _on
+David's throne with righteousness for ever_. His title shall be
+fourfold: _Wonderful-Counsellor_, _God-Hero_, _Father-Everlasting_,
+_Prince-of-Peace_.
+
+These Four Names do certainly not invite us to grudge them meaning, and
+they have been claimed as incontrovertible proofs, that the prophet had
+an absolutely Divine Person in view. Some distinguished scholars insist
+that the promised Deliverer is nothing less than a God in the
+metaphysical sense of the word.[23] There are serious reasons, however,
+which make us doubt this conclusion, and, though we firmly hold that
+Jesus Christ was God, prevent us from recognizing these names as
+prophecies of His Divinity. Two of the names are capable of being used
+of an earthly monarch: _Wonderful-Counsellor_ and _Prince-of-Peace_,
+which are, within the range of human virtue, in evident contrast to
+Ahaz, at once foolish in the conception of his policy and warlike in its
+results. It will be more difficult to get Western minds to see how
+_Father-Everlasting_ may be applied to a mere man, but the ascription of
+eternity is not unusual in Oriental titles, and in the Old Testament is
+sometimes rendered to things that perish. When Hebrews speak of any one
+as everlasting, that does not necessarily imply Divinity. The second
+name, which we render _God-Hero_, is, it is true, used of Jehovah
+Himself in the very next chapter to this, but in the plural it is also
+used of men by Ezekiel (xxxii. 21). The part of it translated _God_ is a
+frequent name of the Divine Being in the Old Testament, but literally
+means only _mighty_, and is by Ezekiel (xxxi. 11) applied to
+Nebuchadnezzar. We should hesitate, therefore, to understand by these
+names "a God in the metaphysical sense of the word."
+
+  [23] I regret very much that in previous editions I should have
+  erroneously imputed this opinion to Dr. Hermann Schultz--through a
+  mistranslation of his words on pp. 726, 727 of his _A. T. Theologie_.
+
+We fall back with greater confidence on other arguments of a more
+general kind, which apply to all Isaiah's prophecies of the Messiah. If
+Isaiah had one revelation rather than another to make, it was the
+revelation of the unity of God. Against king and people, who crowded
+their temple with the shrines of many deities, Isaiah presented Jehovah
+as the one only God. It would simply have nullified the force of his
+message, and confused the generation to which he brought it, if either
+he or they had conceived of the Messiah, with the conceiving of
+Christian theology, as a separate Divine personality.
+
+Again, as Mr. Robertson Smith has very clearly explained,[24] the
+functions assigned by Isaiah to the King of the future are simply the
+ordinary duties of the monarchy, for which He is equipped by the
+indwelling of that Spirit of God, that makes all wise men wise and
+valorous men valorous. "We believe in a Divine and eternal Saviour,
+because the work of salvation as we understand it in the light of the
+New Testament is essentially different from the work of the wisest and
+best earthly king." But such an earthly king's work is all Isaiah looks
+for. So that, so far from its being derogatory to Christ to grudge the
+sense of Divinity to these names, it is a fact that the more spiritual
+our notions are of the saving work of Jesus, the less inclined shall we
+be to claim the prophecies of Isaiah in proof of His Deity.
+
+  [24] _Prophets of Israel_, p. 306.
+
+There is a third argument in the same direction, the force of which we
+appreciate only when we come to discover how very little from this point
+onwards Isaiah had to say about the promised king. In chaps. i.-xxxix.
+only three other passages are interpreted as describing the Messiah. The
+first of these, xi. 1-5, dating perhaps from about 720, when Hezekiah
+was king, tells us, for the first and only time by Isaiah's lips, that
+the Messiah is to be a scion of David's house, and confirms what we have
+said: that His duties, however perfectly they were to be discharged,
+were the usual duties of Judah's monarchy.[25] The second passage,
+xxxii. 1 ff., which dates probably from after 705, when Hezekiah was
+still king, is, if indeed it refers at all to the Messiah, a still
+fainter, though sweeter, echo of previous descriptions. While the third
+passage, xxxiii. 17: _Thou shalt see thy king in his beauty_, does not
+refer to the Messiah at all, but to Hezekiah, then prostrate and in
+sackcloth, with Assyria thundering at the gate of Jerusalem (701). The
+mass of Isaiah's predictions of the Messiah thus fall within the reign
+of Ahaz, and just at the point at which Ahaz proved an unworthy
+representative of Jehovah, and Judah and Israel were threatened with
+complete devastation. There is a repetition when Hezekiah has come to
+the throne. But in the remaining seventeen years, except perhaps for one
+allusion, Isaiah is silent on the ideal king, although he continued
+throughout that time to unfold pictures of the blessed future which
+contained every other Messianic feature, and the realization of which he
+placed where he had placed his Prince-of-the-Four-Names--in connection,
+that is, with the approaching defeat of the Assyrians. Ignoring the
+Messiah, during these years Isaiah lays all the stress of his prophecy
+on the inviolability of Jerusalem; and while he promises the recovery of
+the actually reigning monarch from the distress of the Assyrian
+invasion,--as if that were what the people chiefly desired to see, and
+not a brighter, stronger substitute,--he hails Jehovah Himself, in
+solitary and undeputed sovereignty, as Judge, Lawgiver, Monarch and
+Saviour (xxxiii. 22). Between Hezekiah, thus restored to his beauty, and
+Jehovah's own presence, there is surely no room left for another royal
+personage. But these very facts--that Isaiah felt most compelled to
+predict an ideal king when the actual king was unworthy, and that, on
+the contrary, when the reigning king proved worthy, approximating to the
+ideal, Isaiah felt no need for another, and indeed in his prophecies
+left no room for another--form surely a powerful proof that the king he
+expected was not a supernatural being, but a human personality,
+extraordinarily endowed by God, one of the descendants of David by
+ordinary succession, but fulfilling the ideal which his forerunners had
+missed. Even if we allow that the four names contain among them the
+predicate of Divinity, we must not overlook the fact that the Prince is
+only called by them. It is not that _He is_, but that He shall be
+called, _Wonderful-Counsellor_, _God-Hero_, _Father-Everlasting_,
+_Prince-of-Peace_. Nowhere is there a dogmatic statement that He is
+Divine. Besides, it is inconceivable that if Isaiah, the prophet of the
+unity of God, had at any time a second Divine Person in his hope, he
+should have afterwards remained so silent about Him. To interpret the
+ascription of the Four Names as a conscious definition of Divinity, at
+all like the Christian conception of Jesus Christ, is to render the
+silence of Isaiah's later life and the silence of subsequent prophets
+utterly inexplicable.
+
+  [25] See further on this passage pp. 180-183. As is there pointed out,
+  while these passages on the Messiah are indeed infrequent and
+  unconnected, there is a very evident progress through them of Isaiah's
+  conception of his Hero's character.
+
+On these grounds, then, we decline to believe that Isaiah saw in the
+king of the future "a God in the metaphysical sense of the word." Just
+because we know the proofs of the Divinity of Jesus to be so spiritual,
+do we feel the uselessness of looking for them to prophecies, that
+manifestly describe purely earthly and civil functions.
+
+But such a conclusion by no means shuts us out from tracing a relation
+between these prophecies and the appearance of Jesus. The fact, that
+Isaiah allowed them to go down to posterity, proves that he himself did
+not count them to have been exhausted in Hezekiah. And this fact of
+their preservation is ever so much the more significant, that their
+literal truth was discredited by events. Isaiah had evidently foretold
+the birth and bitter youth of Immanuel for the _near_ future. Immanuel's
+childhood was to begin with the devastation of Ephraim and Syria, and to
+be passed in circumstances consequent on the devastation of Judah, which
+was to follow close upon that of her two enemies. But although Ephraim
+and Syria were immediately spoiled, as Isaiah foresaw, Judah lay in
+peace all the reign of Ahaz and many years after his death. So that had
+Immanuel been born in the next twenty-five years after the announcement
+of His birth, He would not have found in His own land the circumstances
+which Isaiah foretold as the discipline of His boyhood. Isaiah's
+forecast of Judah's fate was, therefore, falsified by events. That the
+prophet or his disciples should have allowed it to remain, is proof that
+they believed it to have contents, which the history they had lived
+through neither exhausted nor discredited. In the prophecies of the
+Messiah there was something ideal, which was as permanent and valid for
+the future as the prophecy of the Remnant or that of the visible majesty
+of Jehovah. If the attachment, at which the prophet aimed when he
+launched these prophecies on the stream of time, was denied them by
+their own age, that did not mean their submersion, but only their
+freedom to float further down the future and seek attachment there.
+
+This boldness, to entrust to future ages a prophecy discredited by
+contemporary history, argues a profound belief in its moral meaning and
+eternal significance; and it is this boldness, in face of disappointment
+continued from generation to generation in Israel, that constitutes the
+uniqueness of the Messianic hope among that people. To sublimate this
+permanent meaning of the prophecies from the contemporary material, with
+which it is mixed, is not difficult. Isaiah foretells his Prince on the
+supposition that certain things are fulfilled. When the people are
+reduced to the last extreme, when there is no more a king to rally or to
+rule them, when the land is in captivity, when revelation is closed,
+when, in despair of the darkness of the Lord's face, men have taken to
+them that have familiar spirits and wizards that peep and mutter, then,
+in that last sinful, hopeless estate of man, a Deliverer shall appear.
+_The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform it._ This is the first
+article of Isaiah's Messianic creed, and stands back behind the Messiah
+and all Messianic blessings, their exhaustless origin. Whatsoever man's
+sin and darkness be, the Almighty lives, and His zeal is infinite.
+Therefore it is a fact eternally true, that whatsoever Deliverer His
+people need and can receive shall be sent to them, and shall be styled
+by whatsoever names their hearts can best appreciate. Titles shall be
+given Him to attract their hope and their homage, and not a definition
+of His nature, of which their theological vocabulary would be incapable.
+This is the vital kernel of Messianic prophecy in Isaiah. The _zeal of
+the Lord_, kindling the dark thoughts of the prophet as he broods over
+his people's need of salvation, suddenly makes a Saviour
+visible--visible just as He is needed there and then. Isaiah hears Him
+hailed by titles that satisfy the particular wants of the age, and
+express men's thoughts as far up the idea of salvation and majesty as
+they of that age can rise. But the prophet has also perceived that sin
+and disaster will so accumulate before the Messiah comes, that, though
+innocent, He shall have to bear tribulation and pass to His prime
+through suffering. No one with open mind can deny, that in this moderate
+estimate of the prophet's meaning there is a very great deal of the
+essence of the Gospel as it has been fulfilled in the personal
+consciousness and saving work of Jesus Christ,--as much of that essence,
+indeed, as it was possible to communicate to so early a generation, and
+one whose religious needs were so largely what we call temporal. But if
+we grant this, and if at the same time we appreciate the uniqueness of
+such a hope as this of Israel, then surely it must be allowed to have
+the appearance of a special preparation for Christ's life and work; and
+so, to use very moderate words which have been applied to Messianic
+prophecy in general, it may be taken "as a proof of its true connection
+with the Gospel dispensation as part of one grand scheme in the counsels
+of Providence."[26]
+
+  [26] Stanton: _The Jewish and Christian Messiah_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Men do not ask when they drink of a streamlet high up on the hills, "Is
+this going to be a great river?" They are satisfied if it is water
+enough to quench their thirst. And so it was enough for Old Testament
+believers if they found in Isaiah's prophecy of a Deliverer--as they did
+find--what satisfied their own religious needs, without convincing them
+to what volumes it should swell. But this does not mean that in using
+these Old Testament prophecies we Christians should limit our enjoyment
+of them to the measure of the generation to whom they were addressed. To
+have known Christ must make the predictions of the Messiah different to
+a man. You cannot bring so infinite an ocean of blessing into historic
+connection with these generous, expansive intimations of the Old
+Testament without its passing into them. If we may use a rough figure,
+the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament are tidal rivers. They not
+only run, as we have seen, to their sea, which is Christ; they feel His
+reflex influence. It is not enough for a Christian to have followed the
+historical direction of the prophecies, or to have proved their
+connection with the New Testament as parts of one Divine harmony. Forced
+back by the fulness of meaning to which he has found their courses
+open, he returns to find the savour of the New Testament upon them, and
+that where he descended shallow and tortuous channels, with all the
+difficulties of historical exploration, he is borne back on full tides
+of worship. To use the appropriate words of Isaiah, _the Lord is with
+him there, a place of broad rivers and streams_.
+
+With all this, however, we must not forget that, beside these prophecies
+of a great earthly ruler, there runs another stream of desire and
+promise, in which we see a much stronger premonition of the fact that a
+Divine Being shall some day dwell among men. We mean the Scriptures in
+which it is foretold that Jehovah Himself shall visibly visit Jerusalem.
+This line of prophecy, taken along with the powerful anthropomorphic
+representations of God,--astonishing in a people like the Jews, who so
+abhorred the making of an image of the Deity upon the likeness of
+anything in heaven and earth,--we hold to be the proper Old Testament
+instinct that the Divine should take human form and tabernacle amongst
+men. But this side of our subject--the relation of the anthropomorphism
+of the Old Testament to the Incarnation--we postpone till we come to the
+second part of the book of Isaiah, in which the anthropomorphic figures
+are more frequent and daring than they are here.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II.
+
+_PROPHECIES FROM THE ACCESSION OF HEZEKIAH TO THE DEATH OF SARGON,
+727-705_ B.C.
+
+
+
+
+  ISAIAH:--
+
+  xxviii. 725 B.C.
+
+  x. 5-34. 721 B.C.
+
+  xi., xii. About 720 B.C.?
+
+  xx. 711 B.C.
+
+  xxi. 1-10. 710 B.C.
+
+  xxxviii., xxxix. Between 712 and 705 B.C.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II.
+
+
+The prophecies with which we have been engaged (chaps. ii.-x. 4) fall
+either before or during the great Assyrian invasion of Syria, undertaken
+in 734-732 by Tiglath-pileser II., at the invitation of King Ahaz.
+Nobody has any doubt about that. But when we ask what prophecies of
+Isaiah come next in chronological order, we raise a storm of answers. We
+are no longer on the sure ground we have been enjoying.
+
+Under the canonical arrangement the next prophecy is "The Woe upon the
+Assyrian" (x. 5-34). In the course of this the Assyrian is made to boast
+of having overthrown Samaria (vv. 9-11): _Is not Samaria as Damascus?...
+Shall I not, as I have done unto Samaria and her idols, so do to
+Jerusalem and her idols?_ If _Samaria_ mean the capital city of Northern
+Israel--and the name is never used in these parts of Scripture for
+anything else--and if the prophet be quoting a boast which the Assyrian
+was actually in a position to make, and not merely imagining a boast,
+which he would be likely to make some years afterwards (an entirely
+improbable view, though held by one great scholar[27]), then an event is
+here described as past and over which did not happen during
+Tiglath-pileser's campaign, nor indeed till twelve years after it.
+Tiglath-pileser did not require to besiege Samaria in the campaign of
+734-732. The king, Pekah, was slain by a conspiracy of his own subjects;
+and Hoshea, the ringleader, who succeeded, willingly purchased the
+stability of a usurped throne by homage and tribute to the king of
+kings. So Tiglath-pileser went home again, satisfied to have punished
+Israel by carrying away with him the population of Galilee. During his
+reign there was no further appearance of the Assyrians in Palestine, but
+at his death in 727 Hoshea, after the fashion of Assyrian vassals when
+the throne at Nineveh changed occupants, attempted to throw off the yoke
+of the new king, Salmanassar IV. Along with the Phoenician and
+Philistine cities, Hoshea negotiated an alliance with So, or Seve, the
+Ethiopian, a usurper who had just succeeded in establishing his
+supremacy over the land of the Pharaohs. In a year Salmanassar marched
+south upon the rebels. He took Hoshea prisoner on the borders of his
+territory (725), but, not content, as his predecessor had been, with the
+submission of the king, _he came up throughout all the land, and went up
+to Samaria, and besieged it three years_.[28] He did not live to see the
+end of the siege, and Samaria was taken in 722 by Sargon, his successor.
+Sargon overthrew the kingdom and uprooted the people. The northern
+tribes were carried away into a captivity, from which as tribes they
+never returned.
+
+  [27] Delitzsch, who fancies that the fall of Samaria is a completed
+  affair only in the vision of the prophet, not in reality.
+
+  [28] 2 Kings xvii. 5.
+
+It was evidently this complete overthrow of Samaria by Sargon in
+722-721, which Isaiah had behind him when he wrote x. 9-11. We must,
+therefore, date the prophecy after 721, when nothing was left as a
+bulwark between Judah and the Assyrian. We do so with reluctance. There
+is much in x. 5-34 which suits the circumstances of Tiglath-pileser's
+invasion. There are phrases and catch-words coinciding with those in
+vii.-ix. 7; and the whole oration is simply a more elaborate expression
+of that defiance of Assyria, which inspires such of the previous
+prophecies as viii. 9, 10. Besides, with the exception of Samaria, all
+the names in the Assyrian's boastful catalogue--Carchemish, Calno,
+Arpad, Hamath and Damascus--might as justly have been vaunted by the
+lips of Tiglath-pileser as by those of Sargon. But in spite of these
+things, which seem to vindicate the close relation of x. 5-34 to the
+prophecies which precede it in the canon, the mention of Samaria as
+being already destroyed justifies us in divorcing it from them. While
+they remain dated from before 732, we place it subsequent to 722.
+
+Was Isaiah, then, silent these ten years? Is there no prophecy lying
+farther on in his book that treats of Samaria as still standing? Besides
+an address to the fallen Damascus in xvii. 1-11, which we shall take
+later with the rest of Isaiah's oracles on foreign states, there is one
+large prophecy, chap. xxviii., which opens with a description of the
+magnates of Samaria lolling in drunken security on their vine-crowned
+hill, but God's storms are ready to break. Samaria has not yet fallen,
+but is threatened and shall fall soon. The first part of chap. xxviii.
+can only refer to the year, in which Salmanassar advanced upon
+Samaria--726 or 725. There is nothing in the rest of it to corroborate
+this date; but the fact, that there are several turns of thought and
+speech very similar to turns of thought and speech in x. 5-34, makes us
+the bolder to take away xxviii. from its present connection with
+xxix.-xxxii., and place it just before x. 5-34.
+
+Here then is our next group of prophecies, all dating from the first
+seven years of the reign of Hezekiah: xxviii., a warning addressed to
+the politicians of Jerusalem from the impending fate of those of Samaria
+(date 725); x. 5-34, a woe upon the Assyrian (date about 720),
+describing his boasts and his progress in conquest till his sudden crash
+by the walls of Jerusalem; xi., of date uncertain, for it reflects no
+historical circumstance, but standing in such artistic contrast to x.
+that the two must be treated together; and xii., a hymn of salvation,
+which forms a fitting conclusion to xi. With these we shall take the few
+fragments of the book of Isaiah which belong to the fifteen years
+720-705, and are as straws to show how Judah all that time was drifting
+down to alliance with Egypt--xx., xxi. 1-10, and xxxviii.-xxxix. This
+will bring us to 705, and the beginning of a new series of prophecies,
+the richest of Isaiah's life, and the subject of our third book.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+_GOD'S COMMONPLACE._
+
+ISAIAH xxviii. (ABOUT 725 B.C.)
+
+
+The twenty-eighth chapter of the Book of Isaiah is one of the greatest
+of his prophecies. It is distinguished by that regal versatility of
+style, which places its author at the head of Hebrew writers. Keen
+analyses of character, realistic contrasts between sin and judgement,
+clever retorts and epigrams, rapids of scorn, and "a spate" of
+judgement, but for final issue a placid stream of argument banked by
+sweet parable--such are the literary charms of the chapter, which
+derives its moral grandeur from the force with which its currents set
+towards faith and reason, as together the salvation of states,
+politicians and private men. The style mirrors life about ourselves, and
+still tastes fresh to thirsty men. The truths are relevant to every day
+in which luxury and intemperance abound, in which there are eyes too
+fevered by sin to see beauty in simple purity, and minds so surfeited
+with knowledge or intoxicated with their own cleverness, that they call
+the maxims of moral reason commonplace and scorn religious instruction
+as food for babes.
+
+Some time when the big, black cloud was gathering again on the north,
+Isaiah raised his voice to the magnates of Jerusalem: "Lift your heads
+from your wine-bowls; look north. The sunshine is still on Samaria, and
+your fellow-drinkers there are revelling in security. But the storm
+creeps up behind. They shall certainty perish soon; even you cannot help
+seeing that. Let it scare you, for their sin is yours, and that storm
+will not exhaust itself on Samaria. Do not think that your clever
+policies, alliance with Egypt or the treaty with Assyria herself, shall
+save you. Men are never saved from death and hell by making covenants
+with them. Scorners of religion and righteousness, except ye cease being
+sceptical and drunken, and come back from your diplomacy to faith and
+reason, ye shall not be saved! This destruction that looms is going to
+cover the whole earth. So stop your running to and fro across it in
+search of alliances. _He that believeth shall not make haste._ Stay at
+home and trust in the God of Zion, for Zion is the one thing that shall
+survive." In the parable, which closes the prophecy, Isaiah offers some
+relief to this dark prospect: "Do not think of God as a mere
+disaster-monger, maker of terrors for men. He has a plan, even in
+catastrophe, and this deluge, which looks like destruction for all of
+us, has its method, term and fruits, just as much as the husbandman's
+harrowing of the earth or threshing of the corn."
+
+The chapter with this argument falls into four divisions.
+
+
+I. THE WARNING FROM SAMARIA (vv. 1-6).
+
+They had always been hard drinkers in North Israel. Fifty years before,
+Amos flashed judgement on those who trusted in the mount of Samaria,
+_lolling upon their couches and gulping their wine out of basons_, women
+as well as men. Upon these same drunkards of Ephraim, now soaked and
+_stunned with wine_, Isaiah fastens his Woe. Sunny the sky and balmy the
+air in which they lie, stretched upon flowers by the heads of their fat
+valleys--a land that tempts its inhabitants with the security of
+perpetual summer. But God's swift storm drives up the valley--hail, rain
+and violent streams from every gorge. Flowers, wreaths and pampered
+bodies are trampled in the mire. The glory of sunny Ephraim is as the
+first ripe fig a man findeth, and _while it is yet in his hand, he
+eateth it up_. But while drunken magnates and the flowers of a rich land
+are swept away, there is a residue who can and do abide even that storm,
+to whom the Lord Himself shall be for a crown, _a spirit of justice to
+him that sitteth for justice, and for strength to them that turn back
+the battle at the gate_.
+
+Isaiah's intention is manifest, and his effort a great one. It is to rob
+passion of its magic and change men's temptations to their disgusts, by
+exhibiting how squalid passion shows beneath disaster, and how
+gloriously purity shines surviving it. It is to strip luxury and
+indulgence of their attractiveness by drenching them with the storm of
+judgement, and then not to leave them stunned, but to rouse in them a
+moral admiration and envy by the presentation of certain grand survivals
+of the storm--unstained justice and victorious valour. Isaiah first
+sweeps the atmosphere, hot from infective passion, with the cold tempest
+from the north. Then in the clear shining after rain he points to two
+figures, which have preserved through temptation and disaster, and now
+lift against a smiling sky, the ideal that those corrupt judges and
+drunken warriors have dragged into the mire--_him that sitteth for
+justice and him that turneth back the battle at the gate_. The escape
+from sensuality, this passage suggests, is two-fold. There is the
+exposure to nature where God's judgements sweep their irresistible way;
+and then from the despair, which the unrelieved spectacle of judgement
+produces, there is the recovery to moral effort through the admiration
+of those purities and heroisms, that by God's Spirit have survived.
+
+When God has put a conscience into the art or literature of any
+generation, they have followed this method of Isaiah, but not always to
+the healthy end which he reaches. To show the slaves of Circe the
+physical disaster impending--which you must begin by doing if you are to
+impress their brutalized minds--is not enough. The lesson of Tennyson's
+"Vision of Sin" and of Arnold's "New Sirens," that night and frost,
+decay and death, come down at last on pampered sense, is necessary, but
+not enough. Who stops there remains a defective and morbid moralist.
+When you have made the sensual shiver before the disease that inevitably
+awaits them, you must go on to show that there are men who have the
+secret of surviving the most terrible judgements of God, and lift their
+figures calm and victorious against the storm-washed sky. Preach the
+depravity of men, but never apart from the possibilities that remain in
+them. It is Isaiah's health as a moralist that he combines the two. No
+prophet ever threatened judgement more inexorable and complete than he.
+Yet he never failed to tell the sinner, how possible it was for him to
+be different. If it were necessary to crush men in the mud, Isaiah would
+not leave them there with the hearts of swine. But he put conscience in
+them, and the envy of what was pure, and the admiration of what was
+victorious. Even as they wallowed, he pointed them to the figures of
+men like themselves, who had survived and overcome by the Spirit of
+God. Here we perceive the ethical possibilities, that lay in his
+fundamental doctrine of a remnant. Isaiah never crushed men beneath the
+fear of judgement, without revealing to them the possibility and beauty
+of victorious virtue. Had we lived in those great days, what a help he
+had been to us--what a help he may be still!--not only firm to declare
+that the wages of sin is death, but careful to effect that our
+humiliation shall not be despair, and that even when we feel our shame
+and irretrievableness the most, we shall have the opportunity to behold
+our humanity crowned and seated on the throne from which we had fallen,
+our humanity driving back the battle from the gate against which we had
+been hopelessly driven! That seventh verse sounds like a trumpet in the
+ears of enervated and despairing men.
+
+
+II. GOD'S COMMONPLACE (vv. 7-13).
+
+But Isaiah has cast his pearls before swine. The men of Jerusalem, whom
+he addresses, are too deep in sensuality to be roused by his noble
+words. _Even priest and prophet stagger through strong drink_; and the
+class that should have been the conscience of the city, responding
+immediately to the word of God, _reel in vision and stumble in
+judgement_. They turn upon Isaiah's earnest message with tipsy men's
+insolence. Verses 9 and 10 should be within inverted commas, for they
+are the mocking reply of drunkards over their cups. _Whom is he going to
+teach knowledge, and upon whom is he trying to force "the Message,"_ as
+he calls it? _Them that are weaned from the milk and drawn from the
+breasts?_ Are we school-children, that he treats us with his endless
+platitudes and repetitions--_precept upon precept and precept upon
+precept, line upon line and line upon line, here a little and there a
+little?_ So did these bibulous prophets, priests and politicians mock
+Isaiah's messages of judgement, wagging their heads in mimicry of his
+simple, earnest tones. "We must conceive the abrupt, intentionally
+short, reiterated and almost childish words of verse 10 as spoken in
+mimicry, with a mocking motion of the head, and in a childish,
+stammering, taunting tone."[29]
+
+  [29] Ewald. The original runs thus: "Ki tsav la-tsav, tsav la-tsav qav
+  la-qav, qav la-qav; z'eir sham z'eir sham."
+
+But Isaiah turns upon them with their own words: "You call me,
+Stammerer! I tell you that God, Who speaks through me, and Whom in me
+you mock, will one day speak again to you in a tongue that shall indeed
+sound stammering to you. When those far-off barbarians have reached your
+walls, and over them taunt you in uncouth tones, then shall you hear how
+God can stammer. For these shall be the very voice of Him, and as He
+threatens you with captivity it shall be your bitterness to remember how
+by me He once offered you _a rest and refreshing_, which you refused. I
+tell you more. God will not only speak in words, but in deeds, and then
+truly your nickname for His message shall be fulfilled to you. Then
+shall the word of the Lord be unto you _precept upon precept, precept
+upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a
+little_. For God shall speak with the terrible simplicity and slowness
+of deeds, with the gradual growth of fate, with the monotonous stages of
+decay, till step by step you _go, and stumble backward, and be broken,
+and snared, and taken_. You have scorned my instruction as monosyllables
+fit for children! By irritating monosyllables of gradual penalty shall
+God instruct you the second time."
+
+This is not only a very clever and cynical retort, but the statement of
+a moral principle. We gather from Isaiah that God speaks twice to men,
+first in words and then by deeds, but both times very simply and
+plainly. And if men deride and abuse the simplicity of the former, if
+they ignore moral and religious truths because they are elementary, and
+rebel against the quiet reiteration of simple voices, with which God
+sees it most healthy to conduct their education, then they shall be
+stunned by the commonplace pertinacity, with which the effects of their
+insolence work themselves out in life. God's ways with men are mostly
+commonplace; that is the hardest lesson we have to learn. The tongue of
+conscience speaks like the tongue of time, prevailingly by ticks and
+moments; not in undue excitement of soul and body, not in the stirring
+up of our passions nor by enlisting our ambitions, not in thunder nor in
+startling visions, but by everyday precepts of faithfulness, honour and
+purity, to which conscience has to rise unwinged by fancy or ambition,
+and dreadfully weighted with the dreariness of life. If we, carried away
+upon the rushing interests of the world, and with our appetite spoiled
+by the wealth and piquancy of intellectual knowledge, despise the simple
+monitions of conscience and Scripture, as uninteresting and childish,
+this is the risk we run,--that God will speak to us in another, and this
+time unshirkable, kind of commonplace. What that is we shall understand,
+when a career of dissipation or unscrupulous ambition has bereft life of
+all interest and joy, when one enthusiasm after another grows dull, and
+one pleasure after another tasteless, when all the little things of life
+preach to us of judgement, and _the grasshopper becometh a burden_, and
+we, slowly descending through the drab and monotony of decay, suffer the
+last great commonplace, death. There can be no greater irony than for
+the soul, which has sinned by too greedily seeking for sensation, to
+find sensation absent even from the judgements she has brought upon
+herself. Poor Heine's _Confessions_ acknowledge, at once with the
+appreciation of an artist and the pain of a victim, the satire, with
+which the Almighty inflicts, in the way that Isaiah describes, His
+penalties upon sins of sense.
+
+
+III. COVENANTS WITH DEATH AND HELL (vv. 14-22).
+
+To Isaiah's threats of destruction, the politicians of Jerusalem
+replied, We have bought destruction off! They meant some treaty with a
+foreign power. Diplomacy is always obscure, and at that distance its
+details are buried for us in impenetrable darkness. But we may safely
+conclude that it was either the treaty of Ahaz with Assyria, or some
+counter-treaty executed with Egypt since this power began again to rise
+into pretentiousness, or more probably still it was a secret agreement
+with the southern power, while the open treaty with the northern was yet
+in force. Isaiah, from the way in which he speaks, seems to have been in
+ignorance of all, except that the politician's boast was an unhallowed,
+underhand intrigue, accomplished by much swindling and false conceit of
+cleverness. This wretched subterfuge Isaiah exposes in some of the most
+powerful sentences he ever uttered. A faithless diplomacy was never more
+thoroughly laid bare, in its miserable mixture of political pedantry and
+falsehood.
+
+_Therefore hear the word of Jehovah, ye men of scorn, rulers of this
+people, which is in Jerusalem!_
+
+_Because ye have said, We have entered into a covenant with Death, and
+with Hell have we made a bargain; the "Overflowing Scourge,"_ a current
+phrase of Isaiah's which they fling back in his teeth, _when it passeth
+along, shall not come unto us, for we have set lies as our refuge, and
+in falsehood have we hidden ourselves_ [the prophet's penetrating scorn
+drags up into their boast the secret conscience of their hearts, that
+after all lies did form the basis of this political arrangement],
+_therefore thus saith the Lord Jehovah: Behold, I lay in Zion for
+foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner-stone of sure
+foundation; he that believeth shall not make haste._ No need of swift
+couriers to Egypt, and fret and fever of poor political brains in
+Jerusalem! The word _make haste_ is onomatopoetic, like our _fuss_, and,
+if fuss may be applied to the conduct of high affairs of state, its
+exact equivalent in meaning.
+
+_And I will set justice for a line, and righteousness for a plummet, and
+hail shall sweep away the subterfuge of lies, and the secrecy shall
+waters overflow. And cancelled shall be your covenant with Death, and
+your bargain with Hell shall not stand._
+
+"_The Overflowing Scourge_," indeed! _When it passeth over, then ye
+shall be unto it for trampling. As often as it passeth over, it shall
+take you away, for morning by morning shall it pass over, by day and by
+night. Then shall it be sheer terror to realize "the Message"!_ Too late
+then for anything else. Had you realized "the Message" now, what rest
+and refreshing! But then only terror.
+
+_For the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself upon it, and
+the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in it._ This proverb
+seems to be struck out of the prophet by the belief of the politicians,
+that they are creating a stable and restful policy for Judah. It
+flashes an aspect of hopeless uneasiness over the whole political
+situation. However they make their bed, with Egypt's or Assyria's help,
+they shall not find it comfortable. No cleverness of theirs can create a
+satisfactory condition of affairs, no political arrangement, nothing
+short of faith, of absolute reliance on that bare foundation-stone laid
+in Zion,--God's assurance that Jerusalem is inviolable.
+
+_For Jehovah shall arise as on Mount Peratsim; He shall be stirred as in
+the valley of Gibeon, to do His deed--strange is this deed of His, and
+to bring to pass His act--strange is His act._
+
+_Now, therefore, play no more the scorner, lest your bands be made
+tight, for a consumption, and that determined, have I heard from the
+Lord, Jehovah of hosts, upon the whole earth._ This finishes the matter.
+Possibility of alliance there is for sane men nowhere in this world of
+Western Asia, so evidently near convulsion. Only the foundation-stone in
+Zion shall be left. Cling to that!
+
+When the pedantic members of the General Assembly of the Kirk of
+Scotland, in the year 1650, were clinging with all the grip of their
+hard logic, but with very little heart, to the "Divine right of kings,"
+and attempting an impossible state, whose statute-book was to be the
+Westminster Confession, and its chief executive officer King Charles
+II., Cromwell, then encamped at Musselburgh, sent them that letter in
+which the famous sentence occurs: "I beseech you in the bowels of
+Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken. Precept may be upon
+precept, line may be upon line," he goes on to say, "and yet the Word of
+the Lord may be to some a word of Judgement; that they may fall
+backward, and be broken, and be snared, and be taken! There may be a
+spiritual fulness, which the world may call drunkenness; as in the
+second Chapter of the _Acts_. There may be, as well, a carnal confidence
+upon misunderstood and misapplied precepts, which may be called
+spiritual drunkenness. There may be a _Covenant_ made with Death and
+Hell! I will not say yours was so. But judge if such things have a
+politic aim: To avoid the overflowing scourge; or, To accomplish worldly
+interests? And if therein you have confederated with wicked and carnal
+men, and have respect for them, or otherwise have drawn them in to
+associate with us, Whether this be a covenant of God and spiritual?
+Bethink yourselves; we hope we do.
+
+"I pray you read the Twenty-eighth of Isaiah, from the fifth to the
+fifteenth verse. And do not scorn to know that it is the Spirit that
+quickens and giveth life."[30]
+
+  [30] _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_, Letter cxxxvi.
+
+Cromwell, as we have said, is the best commentator Isaiah has ever had,
+and that by an instinct born, not only of the same faith, but of
+experience in tackling similar sorts of character. In this letter he is
+dealing, like Isaiah, with stubborn pedants, who are endeavouring to
+fasten the national fortunes upon a Procrustean policy. The diplomacy of
+Jerusalem was very clever; the Covenanting ecclesiasticism of Edinburgh
+was logical and consistent. But a Jewish alliance with Assyria and the
+attempt of Scotsmen to force their covenant upon the whole United
+Kingdom were equally sheer impossibilities. In either case _the bed was
+shorter than that a man could stretch himself on it, and the covering
+narrower than that he could wrap himself in it_. Both, too, were
+covenants with Death and Hell; for if the attempt of the Scots to secure
+Charles II. by the Covenant was free from the falsehood of Jewish
+diplomacy, it was fatally certain if successful to have led to the
+subversion of their highest religious interests; and history has proved
+that Cromwell was no more than just in applying to it the strong
+expressions, which Isaiah uses of Judah's ominous treaties with the
+unscrupulous heathen. Over against so pedantic an idea, as that of
+forcing the life of the three nations into the mould of the one
+Covenant, and so fatal a folly as the attempt to commit the interests of
+religion to the keeping of the dissolute and perjured king, Cromwell
+stands in his great toleration of everything but unrighteousness and his
+strong conviction of three truths:--that the religious life of Great
+Britain and Ireland was too rich and varied for the Covenant: that
+national and religious interests so complicated and precious could be
+decided only upon the plainest principles of faith and justice: and
+that, tested by these principles, Charles II. and his crew were as
+utterly without worth to the nation and as pregnant with destruction, as
+Isaiah felt Assyria and Egypt to be to Judah. The battle-cries of the
+two parties at Dunbar are significant of the spiritual difference
+between them. That of the Scots was "The Covenant!" Cromwell's was
+Isaiah's own, "The Lord of hosts!" However logical, religious and
+sincere theirs might be, it was at the best a scheme of men too narrow
+for events, and fatally compromised by its association with Charles II.
+But Cromwell's battle-cry required only a moderately sincere faith from
+those who adopted it, to ensure their victory. For to them it meant just
+what it had meant to Isaiah, loyalty to a Divine providence, supreme in
+righteousness, the willingness to be guided by events, interpreting them
+by no tradition or scheme, but only by conscience. He who understands
+this will be able to see which side was right in that strange civil war,
+where both so sincerely claimed to be Scriptural.
+
+It may be wondered why we spend so much argument on comparing the
+attempt to force Charles II. into the Solemn League and Covenant with
+the impious treaty of Judah with the heathen. But the argument has not
+been wasted, if it have shown how even sincere and religious men may
+make covenants with death, and even Church creeds and constitutions
+become beds too short that a man may lie upon them, coverings narrower
+than that he can wrap himself in them. Not once or twice has it happened
+that an old and hallowed constitution has become, in the providence of
+God, unfit for the larger life of a people or of a Church, and yet is
+clung to by parties in that Church or people from motives of theological
+pedantry or ecclesiastical cowardice. Sooner or later a crisis is sure
+to arrive, in which the defective creed has to match itself against some
+interest of justice; and then endless compromises have to be
+entertained, that discover themselves perilously like _bargains with
+hell_. If we of this generation have to make a public application of the
+twenty-eighth chapter of Isaiah, it lies in this direction. There are
+few things, to which his famous proverb of the short bed can be applied
+more aptly, than to the attempt to fasten down the religious life and
+thought of the present age too rigorously upon a creed of the fashion of
+two or three hundred years ago.
+
+But Isaiah's words have wider application. Short of faith as he
+exemplified it, there is no possibility for the spirit of man to be free
+from uneasiness. It is so all along the scale of human endeavour. No
+power of patience or of hope is his, who cannot imagine possibilities
+of truth outside his own opinions, nor trust a justice larger than his
+private rights. It is here very often that the real test of our faith
+meets us. If we seek to fit life solely to the conception of our
+privileges, if in the preaching of our opinions no mystery of higher
+truth awe us at least into reverence and caution; then, whatever
+religious creeds we profess, we are not men of faith, but shall surely
+inherit the bitterness and turmoil that are the portion of unbelievers.
+If we make it the chief aim of our politics to drive cheap bargains for
+our trade or to be consistent to party or class interests; if we trim
+our conscience to popular opinion; if we sell our honesty in business or
+our love in marriage, that we may be comfortable in the world; then,
+however firmly we be established in reputation or in welfare, we have
+given our spiritual nature a support utterly inadequate to its needs,
+and we shall never find rest. Sooner or later, a man must feel the pinch
+of having cut his life short of the demands of conscience. Only a
+generous loyalty to her decrees will leave him freedom of heart and room
+for his arm to swing. Nor will any philosophy, however comprehensive,
+nor poetic fancy, however elastic, be able without the complement of
+faith to arrange, to account for, or to console us for, the actual facts
+of experience. It is only belief in the God of Isaiah, a true and loving
+God, omnipotent Ruler of our life, that can bring us peace. There was
+never a sorrow, that did not find explanation in that, never a tired
+thought, that would not cling to it. There are no interests so scattered
+nor energies so far-reaching that there is not return and rest for them
+under the shadow of His wings. _He that believeth shall not make haste._
+_Be still_, says a psalm of the same date as Isaiah--_Be still, and know
+that I am God_.
+
+
+IV. THE ALMIGHTY THE ALL-METHODICAL (vv. 23-29).
+
+The patience of faith, which Isaiah has so nobly preached, he now
+proceeds to vindicate by reason. But the vindication implies that his
+audience are already in another mood. From confidence in their clever
+diplomacy, heedless of the fact that God has His own purposes concerning
+them, they have swung round to despair before His judgements. Their
+despair, however, is due to the same fault as their careless
+confidence--the forgetfulness that God works by counsel and method. Even
+a calamity, so universal and extreme as that, of whose certainty the
+prophet has now convinced them, has its measure and its term. To
+persuade the crushed and superstitious Jews of this, Isaiah employs a
+parable. "You know," he says, "the husbandman. Have you ever seen him
+keep on _harrowing and breaking the clods of his land_ for mere sport,
+and without farther intention? Does not the harrowing time lead to the
+sowing time? Or again, when he threshes his crops, does he thresh for
+ever? Is threshing the end he has in view? Look, how he varies the
+rigour of his instrument by the kind of plant he threshes. For delicate
+plants, like fitches and cummin, he does not use the _threshing sledge_
+with the sharp teeth, or the lumbering _roller, but the fitches are
+beaten out with a staff and the cummin with a rod_. And in the case of
+_bread corn_, which needs _his roller and horses_, he does not use these
+upon it till it is all _crushed to dust_." The application of this
+parable is very evident. If the husbandman be so methodical and careful,
+shall the God who taught him not also be so? If the violent treatment of
+land and fruits be so measured and adapted for their greater
+fruitfulness and purity, ought we not to trust God to have the same
+intentions in His violent treatment of His people? Isaiah here returns
+to his fundamental gospel: that the Almighty is the All-methodical, too.
+Men forget this. In their times of activity they think God indifferent;
+they are too occupied with their own schemes for shaping life, to
+imagine that He has any. In days of suffering, again, when disaster
+bursts, they conceive of God only as force and vengeance. Yet, says
+Isaiah, _Jehovah of hosts is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in that
+sort of wisdom which causes things to succeed_. This last word of the
+chapter is very expressive. It literally means _furtherance, help,
+salvation_, and then _the true wisdom or insight which ensures these:
+the wisdom which carries things through_. It splendidly sums up Isaiah's
+gospel to the Jews, cowering like dogs before the coming calamity: God
+is not mere force or vengeance. His judgements are not chaos. But _He is
+wonderful in counsel_, and all His ways have _furtherance_ or
+_salvation_ for their end.
+
+We have said this is one of the finest prophecies of Isaiah. His
+political foresight was admirable, when he alone of his countrymen
+predicted the visitation of Assyria upon Judah. But now, when all are
+convinced of it, how still more wonderful does he seem facing that novel
+disaster, with the whole world's force behind it, and declaring its
+limit. He has not the temptation, so strong in prophets of judgement, to
+be a mere disaster-monger, and leave judgement on the horizon
+unrelieved. Nor is he afraid, as other predicters of evil have been, of
+the monster he has summoned to the land. The secret of this is that from
+the first he predicted the Assyrian invasion, not out of any private
+malice nor merely by superior political foresight, but because he
+knew--and knew, as he tells us, by the inspiration of God's own
+Spirit--that God required such an instrument to punish the
+unrighteousness of Judah. If the enemy was summoned by God at the first,
+surely till the last the enemy shall be in God's hand.
+
+To this enemy we are now to see Isaiah turn with the same message he has
+delivered to the men of Jerusalem.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+_ATHEISM OF FORCE AND ATHEISM OF FEAR._
+
+ISAIAH x. 5-34 (ABOUT 721 B.C.).
+
+
+In chap. xxviii. Isaiah, speaking in the year 725 when Salmanassar IV.
+was marching on Samaria, had explained to the politicians of Jerusalem
+how entirely the Assyrian host was in the hand of Jehovah for the
+punishment of Samaria and the punishment and purification of Judah. The
+invasion which in that year loomed so awful was not unbridled force of
+destruction, implying the utter annihilation of God's people, as
+Damascus, Arpad and Hamath had been annihilated. It was Jehovah's
+instrument for purifying His people, with its appointed term and its
+glorious intentions of fruitfulness and peace.
+
+In the tenth chapter Isaiah turns with this truth to defy the Assyrian
+himself. It is four years later. Samaria has fallen. The judgement,
+which the prophet spoke upon the luxurious capital, has been fulfilled.
+All Ephraim is an Assyrian province. Judah stands for the first time
+face to face with Assyria. From Samaria to the borders of Judah is not
+quite two days' march, to the walls of Jerusalem a little over two. Now
+shall the Jews be able to put to the test their prophet's promise! What
+can possibly prevent Sargon from making Zion as Samaria, and carrying
+her people away in the track of the northern tribes to captivity?
+
+There was a very fallacious human reason, and there was a very sound
+Divine one.
+
+The fallacious human reason was the alliance which Ahaz had made with
+Assyria. In what state that alliance now was, does not clearly appear,
+but the most optimist of the Assyrian party at Jerusalem could not,
+after all that had happened, be feeling quite comfortable about it. The
+Assyrian was as unscrupulous as themselves. There was too much impetus
+in the rush of his northern floods to respect a tiny province like
+Judah, treaty or no treaty. Besides, Sargon had as good reason to
+suspect Jerusalem of intriguing with Egypt, as he had against Samaria or
+the Philistine cities; and the Assyrian kings had already shown their
+meaning of the covenant with Ahaz by stripping Judah of enormous
+tribute.
+
+So Isaiah discounts in this prophecy Judah's treaty with Assyria. He
+speaks as if nothing was likely to prevent the Assyrian's immediate
+march upon Jerusalem. He puts into Sargon's mouth the intention of this,
+and makes him boast of the ease with which it can be accomplished (vv.
+7-11). In the end of the prophecy he even describes the probable
+itinerary of the invader from the borders of Judah to his arrival on the
+heights, over against the Holy City (vv. 27 last clause to 32).[31]
+
+  [31] It will be noticed that in the above version a different reading is
+  adopted from the meaningless clause at the end of verse 27 in the
+  English version, out of which a proper heading for the subsequent
+  itinerary has been obtained by Robertson Smith (_Journal of Philology_,
+  1884, p. 62).
+
+_Cometh up from the North the Destroyer._
+
+_He is come upon Ai; marcheth through Migron; at Michmash musters his
+baggage._
+
+_They have passed through the Pass; "Let Geba be our bivouac."_
+
+_Terror-struck is Ramah; Gibeah of Saul hath fled._
+
+_Make shrill thy voice, O daughter of Gallim! Listen, Laishah! Answer
+her, Anathoth!_
+
+_In mad flight is Madmenah; the dwellers in Gebim gather their stuff to
+flee._
+
+_This very day he halteth at Nob; he waveth his hand at the Mount of the
+Daughter of Zion, the Hill of Jerusalem._
+
+This is not actual fact; but it is vision of what may take place to-day
+or to-morrow. For there is nothing--not even that miserable treaty--to
+prevent such a violation of Jewish territory, within which, it ought to
+be kept in mind, lie all the places named by the prophet.
+
+But the invasion of Judah and the arrival of the Assyrian on the heights
+over against Jerusalem does not mean that the Holy City and the shrine
+of Jehovah of hosts are to be destroyed; does not mean that all the
+prophecies of Isaiah about the security of this rallying-place for the
+remnant of God's people are to be annulled, and Israel annihilated. For
+just at the moment of the Assyrian's triumph, when he brandishes his
+hand over Jerusalem, as if he would harry it like a bird's nest, Isaiah
+beholds him struck down, and crash like the fall of a whole Lebanon of
+cedars (vv. 33, 34).
+
+_Behold the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, lopping the topmost boughs with a
+sudden crash,_
+
+_And the high ones of stature hewn down, and the lofty are brought low!_
+
+_Yea, He moweth down the thickets of the forest with iron, and Lebanon
+by a Mighty One falleth._
+
+All this is poetry. We are not to suppose that the prophet actually
+expected the Assyrian to take the route, which he has laid down for him
+with so much detail. As a matter of fact, Sargon did not advance across
+the Jewish frontier, but turned away by the coast-land of Philistia to
+meet his enemy of Egypt, whom he defeated at Rafia, and then went home
+to Nineveh, leaving Judah alone. And, although some twenty years later
+the Assyrian did appear before Jerusalem, as threatening as Isaiah
+describes, and was cut down in as sudden and miraculous a manner, yet it
+was not by the itinerary Isaiah here marked for him that he came, but in
+quite another direction: from the south-west. What Isaiah merely insists
+upon is that there is nothing in that wretched treaty of Ahaz--that
+fallacious _human_ reason--to keep Sargon from overrunning Judah to the
+very walls of Jerusalem, but that, even though he does so, there is a
+most sure _Divine_ reason for the Holy City remaining inviolate.
+
+The Assyrian expected to take Jerusalem. But he is not his own master.
+Though he knows it not, and his only instinct is that of destruction
+(ver. 7), he is the rod in God's hand. And when God shall have used him
+for the needed punishment of Judah, then will God visit upon him his
+arrogance and brutality. This man, who says he will exploit the whole
+earth as he harries a bird's nest (ver. 14), who believes in nothing but
+himself, saying, _By the strength of my hand I have done it, and by my
+wisdom, for I am prudent_, is but the instrument of God, and all his
+boasting is that of _the axe against him that heweth therewith and of
+the saw against him that wieldeth it_. _As if_, says the prophet, with a
+scorn still fresh for those who make material force the ultimate power
+in the universe--_As if a rod should shake them that lift it up, or as
+if a staff should lift up him that is not wood_. By the way, Isaiah has
+a word for his countrymen. What folly is theirs, who now put all their
+trust in this world-force, and at another time cower in abject fear
+before it! Must he again bid them look higher, and see that Assyria is
+only the agent in God's work of first punishing the whole land, but
+afterwards redeeming His people! In the midst of denunciation the
+prophet's stern voice breaks into the promise of this later hope (vv.
+24-27_a_); and at last the crash of the fallen Assyrian is scarcely
+still, before Isaiah has begun to declare a most glorious future of
+grace for Israel. But this carries us over into the eleventh chapter,
+and we had better first of all gather up the lessons of the tenth.
+
+This prophecy of Isaiah contains a great Gospel and two great Protests,
+which the prophet was enabled to make in the strength of it: one against
+the Atheism of Force, and one against the Atheism of Fear.
+
+The Gospel of the chapter is just that which we have already emphasized
+as the gospel _par excellence_ of Isaiah: the Lord exalted in
+righteousness, God supreme over the supremest men and forces of the
+world. But we now see it carried to a height of daring not reached
+before. This was the first time that any man faced the sovereign force
+of the world in the full sweep of victory, and told himself and his
+fellow-men: "This is not travelling in the greatness of its own
+strength, but is simply a dead, unconscious instrument in the hand of
+God." Let us, at the cost of a little repetition, get at the heart of
+this. We shall find it wonderfully modern.
+
+Belief in God had hitherto been local and circumscribed. Each nation, as
+Isaiah tells us, had walked in the name of its god, and limited his
+power and prevision to its own life and territory. We do not blame the
+peoples for this. Their conception of God was narrow, because their life
+was narrow, and they confined the power of their deity to their own
+borders because, in fact, their thoughts seldom strayed beyond. But now
+the barriers, that had so long enclosed mankind in narrow circles, were
+being broken down. Men's thoughts travelled through the breaches, and
+learned that outside their fatherland there lay the world. Their lives
+thereupon widened immensely, but their theologies stood still. They felt
+the great forces which shook the world, but their gods remained the same
+petty, provincial deities. Then came this great Assyrian power, hurtling
+through the nations, laughing at their gods as idols, boasting that it
+was by his own strength he overcame them, and to simple eyes making good
+his boast as he harried the whole earth like a bird's nest. No wonder
+that men's hearts were drawn from the unseen spiritualities to this very
+visible brutality! No wonder all real faith in the gods seemed to be
+dying out, and that men made it the business of their lives to seek
+peace with this world-force, that was carrying everything, including the
+gods themselves, before it! Mankind was in danger of practical atheism:
+of placing, as Isaiah tells us, the ultimate faith which belongs to a
+righteous God in this brute force: of substituting embassies for
+prayers, tribute for sacrifice, and the tricks and compromises of
+diplomacy for the endeavour to live a holy and righteous life. Behold,
+what questions were at issue: questions that have come up again and
+again in the history of human thought, and that are tugging at us to-day
+harder than ever!--whether the visible, sensible forces of the
+universe, that break so rudely in upon our primitive theologies, are
+what we men have to make our peace with, or whether there is behind them
+a Being, who wields them for purposes, far transcending them, of justice
+and of love; whether, in short, we are to be materialists or believers
+in God. It is the same old, ever-new debate. The factors of it have only
+changed a little as we have become more learned. Where Isaiah felt the
+Assyrians, we are confronted by the evolution of nature and history, and
+the material forces into which it sometimes looks ominously like as if
+these could be analysed. Everything that has come forcibly and
+gloriously to the front of things, every drift that appears to dominate
+history, all that asserts its claim on our wonder, and offers its own
+simple and strong solution of our life--is our Assyria. It is precisely
+now, as then, a rush of new powers across the horizon of our knowledge,
+which makes the God, who was sufficient for the narrower knowledge of
+yesterday, seem petty and old-fashioned to-day. This problem no
+generation can escape, whose vision of the world has become wider than
+that of its predecessors. But Isaiah's greatness lay in this: that it
+was given to him to attack the problem the first time it presented
+itself to humanity with any serious force, and that he applied to it the
+only sure solution--a more lofty and spiritual view of God than the one
+which it had found wanting. We may thus paraphrase his argument: "Give
+me a God who is more than a national patron, give me a God who cares
+only for righteousness, and I say that every material force the world
+exhibits is nothing but subordinate to Him. Brute force cannot be
+anything but an instrument, _an axe_, _a saw_, something essentially
+mechanical and in need of an arm to lift it. Postulate a supreme and
+righteous Ruler of the world, and you not only have all its movements
+explained, but may rest assured, that it shall only be permitted to
+execute justice and purify men. The world cannot prevent their
+salvation, if God have willed this."
+
+Isaiah's problem was thus the fundamental one between faith and atheism;
+but we must notice that it did not arise theoretically, nor did he meet
+it by an abstract proposition. This fundamental religious
+question--whether men are to trust in the visible forces of the world or
+in the invisible God--came up as a bit of practical politics. It was not
+to Isaiah a philosophical or theological question. It was an affair in
+the foreign policy of Judah.
+
+Except to a few thinkers, the question between materialism and faith
+never does present itself as one of abstract argument. To the mass of
+men it is always a question of practical life. Statesmen meet it in
+their policies, private persons in the conduct of their fortunes. Few of
+us trouble our heads about an intellectual atheism, but the temptations
+to practical atheism abound unto us all day by day. Materialism never
+presents itself as a mere _ism_; it always takes some concrete form. Our
+Assyria may be the world in Christ's sense, that flood of successful,
+heartless, unscrupulous, scornful forces which burst on our innocence,
+with their challenge to make terms and pay tribute, or go down
+straightway in the struggle for existence. Beside their frank and
+forceful demands, how commonplace and irrelevant do the simple precepts
+of religion often seem; and how the great brazen laugh of the world
+seems to bleach the beauty out of purity and honour! According to our
+temper, we either cower before its insolence, whining that character and
+energy of struggle and religious peace are impossible against it; and
+that is the Atheism of Fear, with which Isaiah charged the men of
+Jerusalem, when they were paralysed before Assyria. Or we seek to ensure
+ourselves against disaster by alliance with the world. We make ourselves
+one with it, its subjects and imitators. We absorb the world's temper,
+get to believe in nothing but success, regard men only as they can be
+useful to us, and think so exclusively of ourselves as to lose the
+faculty of imagining about us any other right or need or pity. And all
+that is the Atheism of Force, with which Isaiah charged the Assyrian. It
+is useless to think, that we common men cannot possibly sin after the
+grand manner of this imperial monster. In our measure we fatally can. In
+this commercial age private persons very easily rise to a position of
+influence, which gives almost as vast a stage for egotism to display
+itself as the Assyrian boasted. But after all the human Ego needs very
+little room to develop the possibilities of atheism that are in it. An
+idol is an idol, whether you put it on a small or a large pedestal. A
+little man with a little work may as easily stand between himself and
+God, as an emperor with the world at his feet. Forgetfulness that he is
+a servant, a trader on graciously entrusted capital--and then at the
+best an unprofitable one--is not less sinful in a small egoist than in a
+great one; it is only very much more ridiculous, than Isaiah, with his
+scorn, has made it to appear in the Assyrian.
+
+Or our Assyria may be the forces of nature, which have swept upon the
+knowledge of this generation with the novelty and impetus, with which
+the northern hosts burst across the horizon of Israel. Men to-day, in
+the course of their education, become acquainted with laws and forces,
+which dwarf the simpler theologies of their boyhood, pretty much as the
+primitive beliefs of Israel dwindled before the arrogant face of
+Assyria. The alternative confronts them either to retain, with a
+narrowed and fearful heart, their old conceptions of God, or to find
+their enthusiasm in studying, and their duty in relating themselves to,
+the forces of nature alone. If this be the only alternative, there can
+be no doubt but that most men will take the latter course. We ought as
+little to wonder at men of to-day abandoning certain theologies and
+forms of religion for a downright naturalism--for the study of powers
+that appeal so much to the curiosity and reverence of man--as we wonder
+at the poor Jews of the eighth century before Christ forsaking their
+provincial conceptions of God as a tribal Deity for homage to this great
+Assyrian, who handled the nations and their gods as his playthings. But
+is such the only alternative? Is there no higher and sovereign
+conception of God, in which even these natural forces may find their
+explanation and term? Isaiah found such a conception for his problem,
+and his problem was very similar to ours. Beneath his idea of God,
+exalted and spiritual, even the imperial Assyrian, in all his arrogance,
+fell subordinate and serviceable. The prophet's faith never wavered, and
+in the end was vindicated by history. Shall we not at least attempt his
+method of solution? We could not do better than by taking his factors.
+Isaiah got a God more powerful than Assyria, by simply _exalting_ the
+old God of his nation _in righteousness_. This Hebrew was saved from the
+terrible conclusion, that the selfish, cruel force which in his day
+carried all before it was the highest power in life, simply by believing
+righteousness to be more exalted still. But have twenty-five centuries
+made any change upon this power, by which Isaiah interpreted history
+and overcame the world? Is righteousness less sovereign now than then,
+or was conscience more imperative when it spoke in Hebrew than when it
+speaks in English? Among the decrees of nature, at last interpreted for
+us in all their scope and reiterated upon our imaginations by the ablest
+men of the age, truth, purity and civic justice as confidently assert
+their ultimate victory, as when they were threatened merely by the
+arrogance of a human despot. The discipline of science and the glories
+of the worship of nature are indeed justly vaunted over the childish and
+narrow-minded ideas of God, that prevail in much of our average
+Christianity. But more glorious than anything in earth or heaven is
+character, and the adoration of a holy and loving will makes more for
+"victory and law" than the discipline or the enthusiasm of science.
+Therefore, if our conceptions of God are overwhelmed by what we know of
+nature, let us seek to enlarge and spiritualize them. Let us insist, as
+Isaiah did, upon His righteousness, until our God once more appear
+indubitably supreme.
+
+Otherwise we are left with the intolerable paradox, that truth and
+honesty, patience and the love of man to man, are after all but the
+playthings and victims of force; that, to adapt the words of Isaiah, the
+rod really shakes him who lifts it up, and the staff is wielding that
+which is not wood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+_THE SPIRIT OF GOD IN MAN AND THE ANIMALS._
+
+ISAIAH xi., xii. (ABOUT 720 B.C.?)
+
+
+Beneath the crash of the Assyrian with which the tenth chapter closes,
+we pass out into the eleventh upon a glorious prospect of Israel's
+future. The Assyrian when he falls shall fall for ever like the cedars
+of Lebanon, that send no fresh sprout forth from their broken stumps.
+But out of the trunk of the Judaean oak, also brought down by these
+terrible storms, Isaiah sees springing a fair and powerful Branch.
+Assyria, he would tell us, has no future. Judah has a future, and at
+first the prophet sees it in a scion of her royal house. The nation
+shall be almost exterminated, the dynasty of David hewn to a stump; _yet
+there shall spring a shoot from the stock of Jesse, and a branch from
+his roots shall bear fruit_.
+
+The picture of this future, which fills the eleventh chapter, is one of
+the most extensive that Isaiah has drawn. Three great prospects are
+unfolded in it: a prospect of mind, a prospect of nature and a prospect
+of history. To begin with, there is (vv. 2-5) the geography of a royal
+mind in its stretches of character, knowledge and achievement. We have
+next (vv. 5-9) a vision of the restitution of nature, Paradise regained.
+And, thirdly (vv. 9-16), there is the geography of Israel's redemption,
+the coasts and highways along which the hosts of the dispersion sweep up
+from captivity to a station of supremacy over the world. To this third
+prospect chapter xii. forms a fitting conclusion, a hymn of praise in
+the mouth of returning exiles.[32] The human mind, nature and history
+are the three dimensions of life, and across them all the prophet tells
+us that the Spirit of the Lord will fill the future with His marvels of
+righteousness, wisdom and peace. He presents to us three great ideals:
+the perfect indwelling of our humanity by the Spirit of God; the peace
+and communion of all nature, covered with the knowledge of God; the
+traversing of all history by the Divine purposes of redemption.
+
+  [32] The authenticity of this hymn has been called in question.
+
+
+I. THE MESSIAH AND THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD (xi. 1-5).
+
+The first form, in which Isaiah sees Israel's longed-for future
+realised, is that which he so often exalts and makes glistering upon the
+threshold of the future--the form of a king. It is a peculiarity, which
+we cannot fail to remark about Isaiah's scattered representations of
+this brilliant figure, that they have no connecting link. They do not
+allude to one another, nor employ a common terminology, even the word
+_king_ dropping out of some of them. The earliest of the series bestows
+a name on the Messiah, which none of the others repeat, nor does Isaiah
+say in any of them, This is He of whom I have spoken before. Perhaps the
+disconnectedness of these oracles is as strong a proof as is necessary
+of the view we have formed that throughout his ministry our prophet had
+before him no distinct, identical individual, but rather an ideal of
+virtue and kinghood, whose features varied according to the conditions
+of the time. In this chapter Isaiah recalls nothing of Immanuel, or of
+the Prince-of-the-Four-Names. Nevertheless (besides for the first time
+deriving the Messiah from the house of David), he carries his
+description forward to a stage which lies beyond and to some extent
+implies his two previous portraits. Immanuel was only a Sufferer with
+His people in the day of their oppression. The Prince-of-the-Four-Names
+was the Redeemer of his people from their captivity, and stepped to his
+throne not only after victory, but with the promise of a long and just
+government shining from the titles by which He was proclaimed. But now
+Isaiah not only speaks at length of this peaceful reign--a chronological
+advance--but describes his hero so inwardly that we also feel a certain
+spiritual advance. The Messiah is no more a mere experience, as Immanuel
+was, nor only outward deed and promise, like the Prince-of-the-Four-Names,
+but at last, and very strongly, _a character_. The second verse is the
+definition of this character; the third describes the atmosphere in
+which it lives. _And there shall rest upon him the Spirit of Jehovah,
+the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might,
+the spirit of knowledge and the fear of Jehovah; and he shall draw breath
+in the fear of Jehovah_--in other words, ripeness but also sharpness of
+mind; moral decision and heroic energy; piety in its two forms of
+knowing the will of God and feeling the constraint to perform it. We
+could not have a more concise summary of the strong elements of a ruling
+mind. But it is only as Judge and Ruler that Isaiah cares here to think
+of his hero. Nothing is said of the tender virtues, and we feel that the
+prophet still stands in the days of the need of inflexible government
+and purgation in Judah.
+
+Dean Plumptre has plausibly suggested, that these verses may represent
+the programme which Isaiah set before his pupil Hezekiah on his
+accession to the charge of a nation, whom his weak predecessor had
+suffered to lapse into such abuse of justice and laxity of morals.[33]
+The acts of government described are all of a punitive and repressive
+character. The hero speaks only to make the land tremble: _And He shall
+smite the land[34] with the rod of His mouth_ [what need, after the
+whispering, indecisive Ahaz!], _and with the breath of His lips shall He
+slay the wicked_.
+
+  [33] Dean Plumptre notes the identity of the ethical terminology of this
+  passage with that of the book of Proverbs, and conjectures that the
+  additions to the original nucleus, chaps. x.-xxiv., and therefore the
+  whole form, of the book of Proverbs, may be due to the editorship of
+  Isaiah, and perhaps was the manual of ethics, on which he sought to
+  mould the character of Hezekiah (_Expositor_, series ii., v., p. 213).
+
+  [34] Perhaps for _land--'arets_--we ought, with Lagarde, to read
+  _tyrant--'arits_.
+
+This, though a fuller and more ethical picture of the Messiah than even
+the ninth chapter, is evidently wanting in many of the traits of a
+perfect man. Isaiah has to grow in his conception of his Hero, and will
+grow as the years go on, in tenderness. His thirty-second chapter is a
+much richer, a more gracious and humane picture of the Messiah. There
+the Victor of the ninth and righteous Judge of the eleventh chapters is
+represented as _a Man_, who shall not only punish but protect, and not
+only reign but inspire, who shall be life as well as victory and justice
+to His people--_an hiding-place from the wind and a covert from the
+tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great
+rock in a weary land_.
+
+A conception so limited to the qualifications of an earthly monarch, as
+this of chap. xi., gives us no ground for departing from our previous
+conclusion, that Isaiah had not a "supernatural" personality in his
+view. The Christian Church, however, has not confined the application of
+the passage to earthly kings and magistrates, but has seen its perfect
+fulfilment in the indwelling of Christ's human nature by the Holy Ghost.
+But it is remarkable, that for this exegesis she has not made use of the
+most "supernatural" of the details of character here portrayed. If the
+Old Testament has a phrase for sinlessness, that phrase occurs here, in
+the beginning of the third verse. In the authorized English version it
+is translated, _and shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of
+the Lord_, and in the Revised Version, _His delight shall be in the fear
+of the Lord_, and on the margin the literal meaning of _delight_ is
+given as _scent_. But the phrase may as well mean, _He shall draw his
+breath in the fear of the Lord_; and it is a great pity, that our
+revisers have not even on the margin given to English readers any
+suggestion of so picturesque, and probably so correct, a rendering. It
+is a most expressive definition of sinlessness--sinlessness which was
+the attribute of Christ alone. We, however purely intentioned we be, are
+compassed about by an atmosphere of sin. We cannot help breathing what
+now inflames our passions, now chills our warmest feelings, and makes
+our throats incapable of honest testimony or glorious praise. As oxygen
+to a dying fire, so the worldliness we breathe is to the sin within us.
+We cannot help it; it is the atmosphere into which we are born. But from
+this Christ alone of men was free. He was His own atmosphere, _drawing
+breath in the fear of the Lord_. Of Him alone is it recorded, that,
+though living in the world, He was never infected with the world's sin.
+The blast of no man's cruelty ever kindled unholy wrath within His
+breast; nor did men's unbelief carry to His soul its deadly chill. Not
+even when He was led of the devil into the atmosphere of temptation, did
+His heart throb with one rebellious ambition. Christ _drew breath in the
+fear of the Lord_.
+
+But draughts of this atmosphere are possible to us also, to whom the
+Holy Spirit is granted. We too, who sicken with the tainted breath of
+society, and see the characters of children about us fall away and the
+hidden evil within leap to swift flame before the blasts of the
+world--we too may, by Christ's grace, _draw breath_, like Him, _in the
+fear of the Lord_. Recall some day when, leaving your close room and the
+smoky city, you breasted the hills of God, and into opened lungs drew
+deep draughts of the fresh air of heaven. What strength it gave your
+body, and with what a glow of happiness your mind was filled! What that
+is physically, Christ has made possible for us men morally. He has
+revealed stretches and eminences of life, where, following in His
+footsteps, we also shall draw for our breath the fear of God. This air
+is inspired up every steep hill of effort, and upon all summits of
+worship. In the most passion-haunted air, prayer will immediately bring
+this atmosphere about a man, and on the wings of praise the poorest soul
+may rise from the miasma of temptation, and sing forth her song into the
+azure with as clear a throat as the lark's.
+
+And what else is heaven to be, if not this? God, we are told, shall be
+its Sun; but its atmosphere shall be His fear, _which is clean and
+endureth for ever_. Heaven seems most real as a moral open-air, where
+every breath is an inspiration, and every pulse a healthy joy, where no
+thoughts from within us find breath but those of obedience and praise,
+and all our passions and aspirations are of the will of God. He that
+lives near to Christ, and by Christ often seeks God in prayer, may
+create for himself even on earth such a heaven, _perfecting holiness in
+the fear of God_.
+
+
+II. THE SEVEN SPIRITS OF GOD (xi. 2, 3).
+
+This passage, which suggests so much of Christ, is also for Christian
+Theology and Art a classical passage on the Third Person of the Trinity.
+If the texts in the book of Revelation (chaps. i. 4; iii. 1; iv. 5; v.
+6) upon the Seven Spirits of God were not themselves founded on this
+text of Isaiah, it is certain that the Church immediately began to
+interpret them by its details. While there are only six spirits of God
+named here--three pairs--yet, in order to complete the perfect number,
+the exegesis of early Christianity sometimes added _the Spirit of the
+Lord_ at the beginning of verse 2 as the central branch of a
+seven-branched candlestick; or sometimes _the quick understanding in the
+fear of the Lord_ in the beginning of verse 3 was attached as the
+seventh branch. (Compare Zech. iv. 6.)
+
+It is remarkable that there is almost no single text of Scripture, which
+has more impressed itself upon Christian doctrine and symbol than this
+second verse of the eleventh chapter, interpreted as a definition of the
+Seven Spirits of God. In the theology, art and worship of the Middle
+Ages it dominated the expression of the work of the Holy Ghost. First,
+and most native to its origin, arose the employment of this text at the
+coronation of kings and the fencing of tribunals of justice. What Isaiah
+wrote for Hezekiah of Judah became the official prayer, song or ensample
+of the earliest Christian kings in Europe. It is evidently the model of
+that royal hymn--not by Charlemagne, as usually supposed, but by his
+grandson Charles the Bald--the _Veni Creator Spiritus_. In a Greek
+miniature of the tenth century, the Holy Spirit, as a dove, is seen
+hovering over King David, who displays the prayer: _Give the king Thy
+judgements, O God, and Thy righteousness to the king's son_, while there
+stand on either side of him the figures of Wisdom and Prophecy.[35]
+Henry III.'s order of knighthood, "Du Saint Esprit," was restricted to
+political men, and particularly to magistrates. But perhaps the most
+interesting identification of the Holy Spirit with the rigorous virtues
+of our passage occurs in a story of St. Dunstan, who, just before mass
+on the day of Pentecost, discovered that three coiners, who had been
+sentenced to death, were being respited till the Festival of the Holy
+Ghost should be over. "It shall not be thus," cried the indignant saint,
+and gave orders for their immediate execution. There was remonstrance,
+but he, no doubt with the eleventh of Isaiah in mind, insisted, and was
+obeyed. "I now hope," he said, resuming the mass, "that God will be
+pleased to accept the sacrifice I am about to offer." "Whereupon," says
+the veracious _Acts of the Saints_, "a snow-white dove did, in the
+vision of many, descend from heaven, and until the sacrifice was
+completed remain above his head in silence, with wings extended and
+motionless." Which may be as much legend as we have the heart to make
+it, but nevertheless remains a sure proof of the association, by
+discerning mediaevals who could read their Scriptures, of the Holy Spirit
+with the decisiveness and rigorous justice of Isaiah's "mirror for
+magistrates."[36]
+
+  [35] Didron, _Christian Iconography_, Engl. trans., i., 432.
+
+  [36] Didron, _Christian Iconography_, Engl. trans., i., 426.
+
+But the influence of our passage may be followed to that wider
+definition of the Spirit's work, which made Him the Fountain of all
+intelligence. The Spirits of the Lord mentioned by Isaiah are
+prevailingly intellectual; and the mediaeval Church, using the details of
+this passage to interpret Christ's own intimation of the Paraclete as
+the Spirit of truth,--remembering also the story of Pentecost, when the
+Spirit bestowed the gifts of tongues, and the case of Stephen, who, in
+the triumph of his eloquence and learning, was said to be full of the
+Holy Ghost,--did regard, as Gregory of Tours expressly declared, the
+Holy Spirit as the "God of the intellect more than of the heart." All
+Councils were opened by a mass to the Holy Ghost, and few, who have
+examined with care the windows of mediaeval churches, will have failed to
+be struck with the frequency with which the Dove is seen descending upon
+the heads of miraculously learned persons, or presiding at discussions,
+or hovering over groups of figures representing the sciences.[37] To the
+mediaeval Church, then, the Holy Spirit was the Author of the intellect,
+more especially of the governing and political intellect; and there can
+be little doubt, after a study of the variations of this doctrine, that
+the first five verses of the eleventh of Isaiah formed upon it the
+classical text of appeal. To Christians, who have been accustomed by the
+use of the word _Comforter_ to associate the Spirit only with the
+gentle and consoling influences of heaven, it may seem strange to find
+His energy identified with the stern rigour of the magistrate. But in
+its practical, intelligent and reasonable uses the mediaeval doctrine is
+greatly to be preferred, on grounds both of Scripture and common-sense,
+to those two comparatively modern corruptions of it, one of which
+emphasizes the Spirit's influence in the exclusive operation of the
+grace of orders, and the other, driving to an opposite extreme,
+dissipates it into the vaguest religiosity. It is one of the curiosities
+of Christian theology, that a Divine influence, asserted by Scripture
+and believed by the early Church to manifest itself in the successful
+conduct of civil offices and the fulness of intellectual learning,
+should in these latter days be so often set up in a sort of
+"supernatural" opposition to practical wisdom and the results of
+science. But we may go back to Isaiah for the same kind of correction on
+this doctrine, as he has given us on the doctrine of faith; and while we
+do not forget the richer meaning the New Testament bestows on the
+operation of the Divine Spirit, we may learn from the Hebrew prophet to
+seek the inspiration of the Holy Ghost in all the endeavours of science,
+and not to forget that it is His guidance alone which enables us to
+succeed in the conduct of our offices and fortunes.
+
+  [37] See Didron for numerous interesting instances of this.
+
+
+III. THE REDEMPTION OF NATURE (xi. 6-9).
+
+But Isaiah will not be satisfied with the establishment of a strong
+government in the land and the redemption of human society from chaos.
+He prophesies the redemption of all nature as well. It is one of those
+errors, which distort both the poetry and truth of the Bible, to suppose
+that by the bears, lions and reptiles which the prophet now sees tamed
+in the time of the regeneration, he intends the violent human characters
+which he so often attacks. When Isaiah here talks of the beasts, he
+means the beasts. The passage is not allegorical, but direct, and forms
+a parallel to the well-known passage in the eighth of Romans. Isaiah and
+Paul, chief apostles of the two covenants, both interrupt their
+magnificent odes upon the outpouring of the Spirit, to remind us that
+the benefits of this will be shared by the brute and unintelligent
+creation. And, perhaps, there is no finer contrast in the Scriptures
+than here, where beside so majestic a description of the intellectual
+faculties of humanity Isaiah places so charming a picture of the
+docility and sportfulness of wild animals,--_And a little child shall
+lead them_.
+
+We, who live in countries, from which wild beasts have been
+exterminated, cannot understand the insecurity and terror, that they
+cause in regions where they abound. A modern seer of the times of
+regeneration would leave the wild animals out of his vision. They do not
+impress any more the human conscience or imagination. But they once did
+so most terribly. The hostility between man and the beasts not only
+formed once upon a time the chief material obstacle in the progress of
+the race, but remains still to the religious thinker the most pathetic
+portion of that groaning and travailing of all creation, which is so
+heavy a burden on his heart. Isaiah, from his ancient point of view, is
+in thorough accord with the order of civilisation, when he represents
+the subjugation of wild animals as the first problem of man, after he
+has established a strong government in the land. So far from rhetorizing
+or allegorizing--above which literary forms it would appear to be
+impossible for the appreciation of some of his commentators to follow
+him--Isaiah is earnestly celebrating a very real moment in the laborious
+progress of mankind. Isaiah stands where Hercules stood, and Theseus,
+and Arthur when
+
+    "There grew great tracts of wilderness,
+  Wherein the beast was ever more and more,
+  But man was less and less till Arthur came.
+                                And he drave
+  The heathen, and he slew the beast, and felled
+  The forest, and let in the sun, and made
+  Broad pathways for the hunter and the knight,
+  And so returned."
+
+But Isaiah would solve the grim problem of the warfare between man and
+his lower fellow-creatures in a very different way from that, of which
+these heroes have set the example to humanity. Isaiah would not have the
+wild beasts exterminated, but tamed. There our Western and modern
+imagination may fail to follow him, especially when he includes reptiles
+in the regeneration, and prophesies of adders and lizards as the
+playthings of children. But surely there is no genial man, who has
+watched the varied forms of life that sport in the Southern sunshine,
+who will not sympathize with the prophet in his joyous vision. Upon a
+warm spring day in Palestine, to sit upon the grass, beside some old
+dyke or ruin with its face to the south, is indeed to obtain a rapturous
+view of the wealth of life, with which the bountiful God has blessed and
+made merry man's dwelling-place. How the lizards come and go among the
+grey stones, and flash like jewels in the dust! And the timid snake
+rippling quickly past through the grass, and the leisurely tortoise,
+with his shiny back, and the chameleon, shivering into new colour as he
+passes from twig to stone and stone to straw,--all the air the while
+alive with the music of the cricket and the bee! You feel that the ideal
+is not to destroy these pretty things as vermin. What a loss of colour
+the lizards alone would imply! But, as Isaiah declares,--whom we may
+imagine walking with his children up the steep vineyard paths, to watch
+the creatures come and go upon the dry dykes on either hand,--the ideal
+is to bring them into sympathy with ourselves, make pets of them and
+playthings for children, who indeed stretch out their hands in joy to
+the pretty toys. Why should we need to fight with, or destroy, any of
+the happy life the Lord has created? Why have we this loathing to it,
+and need to defend ourselves from it, when there is so much suffering we
+could cure, and so much childlikeness we could amuse and be amused by,
+and yet it will not let us near? To these questions there is not another
+answer but the answer of the Bible: that this curse of conflict and
+distrust between man and his fellow-creatures is due to man's sin, and
+shall only be done away by man's redemption.
+
+Nor is this Bible answer,--of which the book of Genesis gives us the one
+end, and this text of Isaiah the other,--a mere pious opinion, which the
+true history of man's dealing with wild beasts by extermination proves
+to be impracticable. We may take on scientific authority a few facts as
+hints from nature, that after all man is to blame for the wildness of
+the beasts, and that through his sanctification they may be restored to
+sympathy with himself. Charles Darwin says: "It deserves notice, that at
+an extremely ancient period, when man first entered any country the
+animals living there would have felt no instinctive or inherited fear of
+him, and would consequently have been tamed far more easily than at
+present." And he gives some very instructive facts in proof of this with
+regard to dogs, antelopes, manatees and hawks. "Quadrupeds and birds
+which have seldom been disturbed by man dread him no more than do our
+English birds the cows or horses grazing in the fields."[38] Darwin's
+details are peculiarly pathetic in their revelation of the brutes' utter
+trustfulness in man, before they get to know him. Persons, who have had
+to do with individual animals of a species that has never been
+thoroughly tamed, are aware that the difficulty of training them lies in
+convincing them of our sincerity and good-heartedness, and that when
+this is got over they will learn almost any trick or habit. The
+well-known lines of Burns to the field-mouse gather up the cause of all
+this in a fashion very similar to the Bible's.
+
+  [38] Darwin, _Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication_, pp.
+  20, 21.
+
+  "I'm truly sorry man's dominion
+  Has broken nature's social union,
+  And justifies that ill opinion,
+      Which makes thee startle
+  At me, thy poor earth-born companion
+      And fellow-mortal."
+
+How much the appeal of suffering animals to man--the look of a wounded
+horse or dog with a meaning which speech would only spoil, the tales of
+beasts of prey that in pain have turned to man as their physician, the
+approach of the wildest birds in winter to our feet as their
+Providence--how much all these prove Paul's saying that the _earnest
+expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of
+God_. And we have other signals, than those afforded by the pain and
+pressure of the beasts themselves, of the time when they and man shall
+sympathize. The natural history of many of our breeds of domesticated
+animals teaches us the lesson that their growth in skill and
+character--no one who has enjoyed the friendship of several dogs will
+dispute the possibility of character in the lower animals--has been
+proportionate to man's own. Though savages are fond of keeping and
+taming animals, they fail to advance them to the stages of cunning and
+discipline, which animals reach under the influence of civilised
+man.[39] "No instance is on record," says Darwin, "of such dogs as
+bloodhounds, spaniels or true greyhounds having been kept by savages;
+they are the products of long-continued civilisation."
+
+  [39] Galton, quoted by Darwin.
+
+These facts, if few, certainly bear in the direction of Isaiah's
+prophecy, that not by extermination of the beasts, but by the influence
+upon them of man's greater force of character, may that warfare be
+brought to an end, of which man's sin, according to the Bible, is the
+original cause.
+
+The practical "uses" of such a passage of Scripture as this are plain.
+Some of them are the awful responsibility of man's position as the
+keystone of creation, the material effects of sin, and especially the
+religiousness of our relation to the lower animals. More than once do
+the Hebrew prophets liken the Almighty's dealings with man to merciful
+man's dealings with his beasts.[40] Both Isaiah and Paul virtually
+declare that man discharges to the lower creatures a mediatorial office.
+To say so will of course seem an exaggeration to some people, but not to
+those who, besides being grateful to remember what help in labour and
+cheer in dreariness we owe our humble fellow-creatures, have been
+fortunate enough to enjoy the affection and trust of a dumb friend. Men
+who abuse the lower animals sin very grievously against God; men who
+neglect them lose some of the religious possibilities of life. If it is
+our business in life to have the charge of animals, we should magnify
+our calling. Every coachman and carter ought to feel something of the
+priest about him; he should think no amount of skill and patience too
+heavy if it enables him to gain insight into the nature of creatures of
+God, all of whose hope, by Scripture and his own experience, is towards
+himself.
+
+  [40] Isa. lxiii. 13, 14; Hos. xi. 4.
+
+Our relation to the lower animals is one of the three great relations of
+our nature. For God our worship; for man our service; for the beasts our
+providence, and according both to Isaiah and Paul, the mediation of our
+holiness.
+
+
+IV. THE RETURN AND SOVEREIGNTY OF ISRAEL (xi. 10-16).
+
+In passing from the second to the third part of this prophecy, we cannot
+but feel that we descend to a lower point of view and a less pure
+atmosphere of spiritual ambition. Isaiah, who has just declared peace
+between man and beast, finds that Judah must clear off certain scores
+against her neighbours before there can be peace between man and man. It
+is an interesting psychological study. The prophet, who has been able to
+shake off man's primeval distrust and loathing of wild animals, cannot
+divest himself of the political tempers of his age. He admits, indeed,
+the reconciliation of Ephraim and Judah; but the first act of the
+reconciled brethren, he prophesies with exultation, will be to _swoop
+down upon_ their cousins Edom, Moab and Ammon, and their neighbours the
+Philistines. We need not longer dwell on this remarkable limitation of
+the prophet's spirit, except to point out that while Isaiah clearly saw
+that Israel's own purity would not be perfected except by her political
+debasement, he could not as yet perceive any way for the conversion of
+the rest of the world except through Israel's political supremacy.
+
+The prophet, however, is more occupied with an event preliminary to
+Israel's sovereignty, namely the return from exile. His large and
+emphatic assertions remind the not yet captive Judah through how much
+captivity she has to pass before she can see the margin of the blessed
+future which he has been describing to her. Isaiah's words imply a much
+more general captivity than had taken place by the time he spoke them,
+and we see that he is still keeping steadily in view that thorough
+reduction of his people, to the prospect of which he was forced in his
+inaugural vision. Judah has to be dispersed, even as Ephraim has been,
+before the glories of this chapter shall be realized.
+
+We postpone further treatment of this prophecy, along with the hymn
+(chap. xii.), which is attached to it, to a separate chapter, dealing
+with all the representations, which the first half of the book of Isaiah
+contains, of the return from exile.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+_DRIFTING TO EGYPT._
+
+ISAIAH xx.; xxi. 1-10; xxxviii.; xxxix.
+
+(720-705 B.C.).
+
+
+From 720, when chap. xi. may have been published, to 705--or, by rough
+reckoning, from the fortieth to the fifty-fifth year of Isaiah's
+life--we cannot be sure that we have more than one prophecy from him;
+but two narratives have found a place in his book which relate events
+that must have taken place between 712 and 705. These narratives are
+chap. xx.: How Isaiah Walked Stripped and Barefoot for a Sign against
+Egypt, and chaps. xxxviii. and xxxix.: The Sickness of Hezekiah, with
+the Hymn he wrote, and his Behaviour before the Envoys from Babylon. The
+single prophecy belonging to this period is chap. xxi. 1-10, _Oracle of
+the Wilderness of the Sea_, which announces the fall of Babylon. There
+has been considerable debate about the authorship of this oracle, but
+Cheyne, mainly following Dr. Kleinert, gives substantial reasons for
+leaving it with Isaiah. We postpone the full exposition of chaps.
+xxxviii., xxxix., to a later stage, as here it would only interrupt the
+history. But we will make use of chaps. xx. and xxi. 1-10 in the course
+of the following historical sketch, which is intended to connect the
+first great period of Isaiah's prophesying, 740-720, with the second,
+705-701.
+
+All these fifteen years, 720-705, Jerusalem was drifting to the refuge
+into which she plunged at the end of them--drifting to Egypt. Ahaz had
+firmly bound his people to Assyria, and in his reign there was no talk
+of an Egyptian alliance. But in 725, when the _overflowing scourge_ of
+Assyrian invasion threatened to sweep into Judah as well as Samaria,
+Isaiah's words give us some hint of a recoil in the politics of
+Jerusalem towards the southern power. The _covenants with death and
+hell_, which the men of scorn flaunted in his face as he harped on the
+danger from Assyria, may only have been the old treaties with Assyria
+herself, but the _falsehood and lies_ that went with them were most
+probably intrigues with Egypt. Any Egyptian policy, however, that may
+have formed in Jerusalem before 719, was entirely discredited by the
+crushing defeat, which in that year Sargon inflicted upon the empire of
+the Nile, almost on her own borders, at Rafia.
+
+Years of quietness for Palestine followed this decisive battle. Sargon,
+whose annals engraved on the great halls of Khorsabad enable us to read
+the history of the period year by year, tells us that his next campaigns
+were to the north of his empire, and till 711 he alludes to Palestine
+only to say that tribute was coming in regularly, or to mention the
+deportation to Hamath or Samaria of some tribe he had conquered far
+away. Egypt, however, was everywhere busy among his feudatories.
+Intrigue was Egypt's _forte_. She is always represented in Isaiah's
+pages as the talkative power of many promises. Her fair speech was very
+sweet to men groaning beneath the military pressure of Assyria. Her
+splendid past, in conjunction with the largeness of her promise,
+excited the popular imagination. Centres of her influence gathered in
+every state. An Egyptian party formed in Jerusalem. Their intrigue
+pushed mines in all directions, and before the century was out the
+Assyrian peace in Western Asia was broken by two great Explosions. The
+first of these, in 711, was local and abortive; the second, in 705, was
+universal, and for a time entirely destroyed the Assyrian supremacy.
+
+The centre of the Explosion of 711 was Ashdod, a city of the
+Philistines. The king had suddenly refused to continue the Assyrian
+tribute, and Sargon had put another king in his place. But the
+people--in Ashdod, as everywhere else, it was the people who were
+fascinated by Egypt--pulled down the Assyrian puppet and elevated Iaman,
+a friend to Pharaoh. The other cities of the Philistines, with Moab,
+Edom and Judah, were prepared by Egyptian promise to throw in their lot
+with the rebels. Sargon gave them no time. "In the wrath of my heart, I
+did not divide my army, and I did not diminish the ranks, but I marched
+against Asdod with my warriors, who did not separate themselves from the
+traces of my sandals. I besieged, I took, Asdod and Gunt-Asdodim.... I
+then made again these towns. I placed the people whom my arm had
+conquered. I put over them my lieutenant as governor. I considered them
+like Assyrians, and they practised obedience."[41] It is upon this
+campaign of Sargon that Mr. Cheyne argues for the invasion of Judah, to
+which he assigns so many of Isaiah's prophecies, as, _e.g._, chaps. i.
+and x. 5-34. Some day Assyriology may give us proof of this supposition.
+We are without it just now. Sargon speaks no word of invading Judah,
+and the only part of the book of Isaiah that unmistakably refers to this
+time is the picturesque narrative of chap. xx.
+
+  [41] _Records of the Past_, vii., 40.
+
+In this we are told that _in the year_ the _Tartan_, the Assyrian
+commander-in-chief, _came to Ashdod when Sargon king of Assyria sent
+him_ [that is to be supposed the year of the first revolt in Ashdod, to
+which Sargon himself did not come], _and he fought against Ashdod and
+took it:--in that time Jehovah had spoken by the hand of Isaiah the son
+of Amoz, saying, Go and loose the sackcloth_, the prophet's robe, _from
+off thy loins, and thy sandal strip from off thy foot; and he did so,
+walking naked_, that is unfrocked, _and barefoot_. For Egyptian intrigue
+was already busy; the temporary success of the Tartan at Ashdod did not
+discourage it, and it needed a protest. _And Jehovah said, As My servant
+Isaiah hath walked unfrocked and barefoot three years for a sign and a
+portent against Egypt and against Ethiopia_ [note the double name, for
+the country was now divided between two rulers, the secret of her
+impotence to interfere forcibly in Palestine] _so shall the king of
+Assyria lead away the captives of Egypt and exiles of Ethiopia, young
+and old, stripped and barefoot, and with buttocks uncovered, to the
+shame of Egypt. And they shall be dismayed and ashamed, because of
+Ethiopia their expectation and because of Egypt their boast. And the
+inhabitant of this coastland_ [that is, all Palestine, and a name for it
+remarkably similar to the phrase used by Sargon, "the people of
+Philistia, Judah, Edom and Moab, dwelling by the sea"[42]] _shall say in
+that day, Behold, such is our expectation, whither we had fled for help
+to deliver ourselves from the king of Assyria, and how shall we
+escape--we?_
+
+  [42] Cheyne.
+
+This parade of Isaiah for three years, unfrocked and barefoot, is
+another instance of that habit on which we remarked in connection with
+chap. viii. 1: the habit of finally carrying everything committed to him
+before the bar of the whole nation. It was to the mass of the people God
+said, _Come and let us reason together._ Let us not despise Isaiah in
+his shirt any more than we do Diogenes in his tub, or with a lantern in
+his hand, seeking for a man by its rays at noonday. He was bent on
+startling the popular conscience, because he held it true that a
+people's own morals have greater influence on their destinies than the
+policies of their statesmen. But especially anxious was Isaiah, as we
+shall again see from chap. xxxi., to bring this Egyptian policy home to
+the popular conscience. Egypt was a big-mouthed, blustering power,
+believed in by the mob: to expose her required public, picturesque and
+persistent advertisement. So Isaiah continued his walk for three years.
+The fall of Ashdod, left by Egypt to itself, did not disillusion the
+Jews, and the rapid disappearance of Sargon to another part of his
+empire where there was trouble, gave the Egyptians audacity to continue
+their intrigues against him.[43]
+
+  [43] W. R. Smith, _Prophets of Israel_, p. 282.
+
+Sargon's new trouble had broken out in Babylon, and was much more
+serious than any revolt in Syria. Merodach Baladan, king of Chaldea, was
+no ordinary vassal, but as dangerous a rival as Egypt. When he rose, it
+meant a contest between Babylon and Nineveh for the sovereignty of the
+world. He had long been preparing for war. He had an alliance with Elam,
+and the tribes of Mesopotamia were prepared for his signal of revolt.
+Among the charges brought against him by Sargon is that, "against the
+will of the gods of Babylon, he had sent during twelve years
+ambassadors." One of these embassies may have been that which came to
+Hezekiah after his great sickness (chap. xxxix.). _And Hezekiah was glad
+of them, and showed them the house of his spicery, the silver, and the
+gold, and the spices, and the precious oil, and all the house of his
+armour and all that was found in his treasures; there was nothing in his
+house nor in all his dominion that Hezekiah showed them not._ Isaiah was
+indignant. He had hitherto kept the king from formally closing with
+Egypt; now he found him eager for an alliance with another of the powers
+of man. But instead of predicting the captivity of Babylon, as he
+predicted the captivity of Egypt, by the hand of Assyria, Isaiah
+declared, according to chap. xxxix., that Babylon would some day take
+Israel captive; and Hezekiah had to content himself with the prospect
+that this calamity was not to happen in his time.
+
+Isaiah's prediction of the exile of Israel to Babylon is a matter of
+difficulty. The difficulty, however, is not that of conceiving how he
+could have foreseen an event which took place more than a century later.
+Even in 711 Babylon was not an unlikely competitor for the supremacy of
+the nations. Sargon himself felt that it was a crisis to meet her. Very
+little might have transferred the seat of power from the Tigris to the
+Euphrates. What, therefore, more probable than that when Hezekiah
+disclosed to these envoys the whole state of his resources, and excused
+himself by saying _that they were come from a far country, even
+Babylon_, Isaiah, seized by a strong sense of how near Babylon stood to
+the throne of the nations, should laugh to scorn the excuse of
+distance, and tell the king that his anxiety to secure an alliance had
+only led him to place the temptation to rob him in the face of a power
+that was certainly on the way to be able to do it? No, the difficulty is
+not that the prophet foretold a captivity of the Jews in Babylon, but
+that we cannot reconcile what he says of that captivity with his
+intimation of the immediate destruction of Babylon, which has come down
+to us in chap. xxi. 1-10.
+
+In this prophecy Isaiah regards Babylon as he has been regarding
+Egypt--certain to go down before Assyria, and therefore wholly
+unprofitable to Judah. If the Jews still thought of returning to Egypt
+when Sargon hurried back from completing her discomfiture in order to
+beset Babylon, Isaiah would tell them it was no use. Assyria has brought
+her full power to bear on the Babylonians; Elam and Media are with her.
+He travails with pain for the result. Babylon is not expecting a siege;
+but _preparing the table, eating and drinking_, when suddenly the cry
+rings through her, "_Arise, ye princes; anoint the shield._ The enemy is
+upon us." So terrible and so sudden a warrior is this Sargon! At his
+words nations move; when he saith, _Go up, O Elam! Besiege, O Media!_ it
+is done. And he falls upon his foes before their weapons are ready. Then
+the prophet shrinks back from the result of his imagination of how it
+happened--for that is too painful--upon the simple certainty, which God
+revealed to him, that it must happen. As surely as Sargon's columns went
+against Babylon, so surely must the message return that Babylon has
+fallen. Isaiah puts it this way. The Lord bade him get on his
+watchtower--that is his phrase for observing the signs of the times--and
+speak whatever he saw. And he saw a military column on the march: _a
+troop of horsemen by pairs, a troop of asses, a troop of camels_. It
+passed him out of sight, _and he hearkened very diligently_ for news.
+But none came. It was a long campaign. _And he cried like a lion_ for
+impatience, _O my Lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower by day,
+and am set in my ward every night_. Till at last, _behold, there came a
+troop of men, horsemen in pairs, and_ now _one answered and said,
+Fallen, fallen is Babylon, and all the images of her gods he hath broken
+to the ground_. The meaning of this very elliptical passage is just
+this: as surely as the prophet saw Sargon's columns go out against
+Babylon, so sure was he of her fall. Turning to his Jerusalem, he says,
+_My own threshed one, son of my floor, that which I have heard from
+Jehovah of hosts, the God of Israel, have I declared unto you_. How
+gladly would I have told you otherwise! But this is His message and His
+will. Everything must go down before this Assyrian.
+
+Sargon entered Babylon before the year was out, and with her conquest
+established his fear once more down to the borders of Egypt. In his
+lifetime neither Judah nor her neighbours attempted again to revolt. But
+Egypt's intrigue did not cease. Her mines were once more laid, and the
+feudatories of Assyria only waited for their favourite opportunity, a
+change of tyrants on the throne at Nineveh. This came very soon. In the
+fifteenth year of his reign, having finally established his empire,
+Sargon inscribed on the palace at Khorsabad the following prayer to
+Assur: "May it be that I, Sargon, who inhabit this palace, may be
+preserved by destiny during long years for a long life, for the
+happiness of my body, for the satisfaction of my heart, and may I arrive
+to my end! May I accumulate in this palace immense treasures, the
+booties of all countries, the products of mountains and valleys!" The
+god did not hear. A few months later, in 705, Sargon was murdered; and
+before Sennacherib, his successor, sat down on the throne, the whole of
+Assyrian supremacy in the south-west of Asia went up in the air. It was
+the second of the great Explosions we spoke of, and the rest of Isaiah's
+prophecies are concerned with its results.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III.
+
+ORATIONS ON THE EGYPTIAN INTRIGUES AND ORACLES ON FOREIGN NATIONS,
+705-702 B.C.
+
+
+
+
+ISAIAH:--
+
+
+  xxix. About 703.
+
+  xxx. A little later.
+
+  xxxi.    "     "
+
+  xxxii. 1-8.    "
+
+  xxxii. 9-20. Date uncertain.
+
+             _______
+
+  xiv. 28-xxi. 736-702.
+
+  xxiii. About 703.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III.
+
+
+We now enter the prophecies of Isaiah's old age, those which he
+published after 705, when his ministry had lasted for at least
+thirty-five years. They cover the years between 705, the date of
+Sennacherib's accession to the Assyrian throne, and 701, when his army
+suddenly disappeared from before Jerusalem.
+
+They fall into three groups:--
+
+1. Chaps. xxix.-xxxii., dealing with Jewish politics while Sennacherib
+is still far from Palestine, 704-702, and having Egypt for their chief
+interest, Assyria lowering in the background.
+
+2. Chaps. xiv. 28-xxi. and xxiii., a group of oracles on foreign
+nations, threatened, like Judah, by Assyria.
+
+3. Chaps. i., xxii., and xxxiii., and the historical narrative in
+xxxvi., and xxxvii., dealing with Sennacherib's invasion of Judah and
+siege of Jerusalem in 701; Egypt and every foreign nation now fallen out
+of sight, and the storm about the Holy City too thick for the prophet to
+see beyond his immediate neighbourhood.
+
+The _first and second_ of these groups--orations on the intrigues with
+Egypt and oracles on the foreign nations--delivered while Sennacherib
+was still far from Syria, form the subject of this Third Book of our
+exposition.
+
+The prophecies on the siege of Jerusalem are sufficiently numerous and
+distinctive to be put by themselves, along with their appendix
+(xxxviii., xxxix.), in our Fourth Book.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+_ARIEL, ARIEL._
+
+ISAIAH xxix. (about 703 B.C.).
+
+
+In 705 Sargon, King of Assyria, was murdered, and Sennacherib, his
+second son, succeeded him. Before the new ruler mounted the throne, the
+vast empire, which his father had consolidated, broke into rebellion,
+and down to the borders of Egypt cities and tribes declared themselves
+again independent. Sennacherib attacked his problem with Assyrian
+promptitude. There were two forces, to subdue which at the beginning
+made the reduction of the rest certain: Assyria's vassal kingdom and
+future rival for the supremacy of the world, Babylon; and her present
+rival, Egypt. Sennacherib marched on Babylon first.
+
+While he did so the smaller States prepared to resist him. Too small to
+rely on their own resources, they looked to Egypt, and among others who
+sought help in that quarter was Judah. There had always been, as we have
+seen, an Egyptian party among the politicians of Jerusalem; and
+Assyria's difficulties now naturally increased its influence. Most of
+the prophecies in chaps. xxix.-xxxii. are forward to condemn the
+alliance with Egypt and the irreligious politics of which it was the
+fruit.
+
+At the beginning, however, other facts claim Isaiah's attention. After
+the first excitement, consequent on the threats of Sennacherib, the
+politicians do not seem to have been specially active. Sennacherib found
+the reduction of Babylon a harder task than he expected, and in the end
+it turned out to be three years before he was free to march upon Syria.
+As one winter after another left the work of the Assyrian army in
+Mesopotamia still unfinished, the political tension in Judah must have
+relaxed. The Government--for King Hezekiah seems at last to have been
+brought round to believe in Egypt--pursued their negotiations no longer
+with that decision and real patriotism, which the sense of near danger
+rouses in even the most selfish and mistaken of politicians, but rather
+with the heedlessness of principle, the desire to show their own
+cleverness and the passion for intrigue which run riot among statesmen,
+when danger is near enough to give an excuse for doing something, but
+too far away to oblige anything to be done in earnest. Into this false
+ease, and the meaningless, faithless politics, which swarmed in it,
+Isaiah hurled his strong prophecy of chap. xxix. Before he exposes in
+chaps. xxx., xxxi., the folly of trusting to Egypt in the hour of
+danger, he has here the prior task of proving that hour to be near and
+very terrible. It is but one instance of the ignorance and fickleness of
+the people, that their prophet has first to rouse them to a sense of
+their peril, and then to restrain their excitement under it from rushing
+headlong for help to Egypt.
+
+Chap. xxix. is an obscure oracle, but its obscurity is designed. Isaiah
+was dealing with a people, in whom political security and religious
+formalism had stifled both reason and conscience. He sought to rouse
+them by a startling message in a mysterious form. He addressed the city
+by an enigma:--
+
+_Ho! Ari-El, Ari-El! City David beleaguered! Add a year to a year, let
+the feasts run their round, then will I bring straitness upon Ari-El,
+and there shall be moaning and bemoaning,[44] and yet she shall be unto
+Me as an Ari-El._
+
+  [44] Cheyne.
+
+The general bearing of this enigma became plain enough after the sore
+siege and sudden deliverance of Jerusalem in 701. But we are unable to
+make out one or two of its points. _Ari-El_ may mean either _The Lion of
+God_ (2 Sam. xxiii. 20), or _The Hearth of God_ (Ezek. xliii. 15, 16).
+If the same sense is to be given to the four utterances of the name,
+then _God's-Lion_ suits better the description of ver. 4; but
+_God's-Hearth_ seems suggested by the feminine pronoun in ver. 1, and is
+a conception to which Isaiah returns in this same group of prophecies
+(xxxi. 9). It is possible that this ambiguity was part of the prophet's
+design; but if he uses the name in both senses, some of the force of his
+enigma is lost to us. In any case, however, we get a picturesque form
+for a plain meaning. In a year after the present year is out, says
+Isaiah, God Himself will straiten the city, whose inhabitants are now so
+careless, and she shall be full of mourning and lamentation.
+Nevertheless in the end she shall be a true Ari-El: be it a true
+_God's-Lion_, victor and hero; or a true _God's-Hearth_, His own
+inviolate shrine and sanctuary.
+
+The next few verses (3-8) expand this warning. In plain words, Jerusalem
+is to undergo a siege. God Himself shall _encamp against thee--round
+about_ reads our English version, but more probably, as with the change
+of a letter, the Septuagint reads it--_like David_. If we take this
+second reading, the reference to David in the enigma itself (ver. 1)
+becomes clear. The prophet has a very startling message to deliver: that
+God will besiege His own city, the city of David! Before God can make
+her in truth His own, make her verify her name, He will have to
+beleaguer and reduce her. For so novel and startling an intimation the
+prophet pleads a precedent: "_City which David_ himself _beleaguered_!
+Once before in thy history, ere the first time thou wast made God's own
+hearth, thou hadst to be besieged. As then, so now. Before thou canst
+again be a true Ari-El I must _beleaguer thee like David_." This reading
+and interpretation gives to the enigma a reason and a force which it
+does not otherwise possess.
+
+Jerusalem, then, shall be reduced to the very dust, and whine and
+whimper in it (like a sick _lion_, if this be the figure the prophet is
+pursuing), when suddenly it is _the surge of_ her foes--literally _thy
+strangers_--whom the prophet sees as _small dust, and as passing chaff
+shall the surge of tyrants be; yea, it shall be in the twinkling of an
+eye, suddenly_. _From Jehovah of hosts shall she be visited with thunder
+and with earthquake and a great noise,--storm-wind, and tempest and the
+flame of fire devouring. And it shall be as a dream, a vision of the
+night, the surge of all the nations that war against Ariel, yea all that
+war against her and her stronghold, and they that press in upon her. And
+it shall be as if the hungry had been dreaming, and lo! he was eating;
+but he hath awaked, and his soul is empty: and as if the thirsty had
+been dreaming, and lo! he was drinking; but he hath awaked, and lo! he
+is faint, and his soul is ravenous: thus shall be the surge of all the
+nations that war against Mount Zion._ Now that is a very definite
+prediction, and in its essentials was fulfilled. In the end Jerusalem
+was invested by Sennacherib, and reduced to sore straits, when very
+suddenly--it would appear from other records, in a single night--the
+beleaguering force disappeared. This actually happened; and although the
+main business of a prophet, as we now clearly understand, was not to
+predict definite events, yet, since the result here predicted was one on
+which Isaiah staked his prophetic reputation and pledged the honour of
+Jehovah and the continuance of the true religion among men, it will be
+profitable for us to look at it for a little.
+
+Isaiah foretells a great event and some details. The event is a double
+one: the reduction of Jerusalem to the direst straits by siege and her
+deliverance by the sudden disappearance of the besieging army. The
+details are that the siege will take place after a year (though the
+prophet's statement of time is perhaps too vague to be treated as a
+prediction), and that the deliverance will come as a great natural
+convulsion--thunder, earthquake and fire--which it certainly did not do.
+The double event, however, stripped of these details, did essentially
+happen.
+
+Now it is plain that any one with a considerable knowledge of the world
+at that day must easily have been able to assert the probability of a
+siege of Jerusalem by the mixed nations who composed Sennacherib's
+armies. Isaiah's orations are full of proofs of his close acquaintance
+with the peoples of the world, and Assyria, who was above them.
+Moreover, his political advice, given at certain crises of Judah's
+history, was conspicuous not only for its religiousness, but for what we
+should call its "worldly-wisdom:" it was vindicated by events. Isaiah,
+however, would not have understood the distinction we have just made.
+To him political prudence was part of religion. _The LORD of hosts is
+for a spirit of judgement to him that sitteth in judgement, and for
+strength to them that turn back the battle to the gate._ Knowledge of
+men, experience of nations, the mental strength which never forgets
+history, and is quick to mark new movements as they rise, Isaiah would
+have called the direct inspiration of God. And it was certainly these
+qualities in this Hebrew, which provided him with the materials for his
+prediction of the siege of Jerusalem.
+
+But it has not been found that such talents by themselves enable
+statesmen calmly to face the future, or clearly to predict it. Such
+knowledge of the past, such vigilance for the present, by themselves
+only embarrass, and often deceive. They are the materials for
+prediction, but a ruling principle is required to arrange them. A
+general may have a strong and well-drilled force under him, and a
+miserably weak foe in front; but if the sun is not going to rise
+to-morrow, if the laws of nature are not going to hold, his familiarity
+with his soldiers and expertness in handling them will not give him
+confidence to offer battle. He takes certain principles for granted, and
+on these his soldiers become of use to him, and he makes his venture.
+Even so Isaiah handled his mass of information by the grasp which he had
+of certain principles, and his facts fell clear into order before his
+confident eyes. He believed in the real government of God. _I also saw
+the Lord sitting, high and lifted up._ He felt that God had even this
+Assyria in His hands. He knew that all God's ends were righteousness,
+and he was still of the conviction that Judah for her wickedness
+required punishment at the Lord's hands. Grant these convictions to him
+in the superhuman strength in which he tells us he was conscious of
+receiving them from God, and it is easy to see how Isaiah could not help
+predicting a speedy siege of Jerusalem, how he already beheld the
+valleys around her bristling with barbarian spears.
+
+The prediction of the sudden raising of this siege was the equally
+natural corollary to another religious conviction, which held the
+prophet with as much intensity, as that which possessed him with the
+need of Judah's punishment. Isaiah never slacked his hold on the truth
+that in the end God would save Zion, and keep her for Himself. Through
+whatever destruction, a root and remnant of the Jewish people must
+survive. Zion is impregnable because God is in her, and because her
+inviolateness is necessary for the continuance of true religion in the
+world. Therefore as confident as his prediction of the siege of
+Jerusalem is Isaiah's prediction of her delivery. And while the prophet
+wraps the fact in vague circumstance, while he masks, as it were, his
+ignorance of how in detail it will actually take place by calling up a
+great natural convulsion, yet he makes it abundantly clear--as, with his
+religious convictions and his knowledge of the Assyrian power, he cannot
+help doing--that the deliverance will be unexpected and unexplainable by
+the natural circumstances of the Jews themselves, that it will be
+evident as the immediate deed of God.
+
+It is well for us to understand this. We shall get rid of the mechanical
+idea of prophecy, according to which prophets made exact predictions of
+fact by some particular and purely official endowment. We shall feel
+that prediction of this kind was due to the most unmistakeable
+inspiration, the influence upon the prophet's knowledge of affairs of
+two powerful religious convictions, for which he himself was strongly
+sure that he had the warrant of the Spirit of God.
+
+Into the easy, selfish politics of Jerusalem, then, Isaiah sent this
+thunderbolt, this definite prediction: that in a year or more Jerusalem
+would be besieged and reduced to the direst straits. He tells us that it
+simply dazed the people. They were like men suddenly startled from
+sleep, who are too stupid to read a message pushed into their hands (vv.
+9-12).
+
+Then Isaiah gives God's own explanation of this stupidity. The cause of
+it is simply religious formalism. _This people draw nigh unto Me with
+their mouth, and with their lips do they honour Me, but their heart is
+far from Me, and their fear of Me is a mere commandment of men, a thing
+learned by rote._ This was what Israel called religion--bare ritual and
+doctrine, a round of sacrifices and prayers in adherence to the
+tradition of the fathers. But in life they never thought of God. It did
+not occur to these citizens of Jerusalem that He cared about their
+politics, their conduct of justice, or their discussions and bargains
+with one another. Of these they said, taking their own way, _Who seeth
+us, and who knoweth us?_ Only in the Temple did they feel God's fear,
+and there merely in imitation of one another. None had an original
+vision of God in real life; they learned other men's thoughts about Him,
+and took other men's words upon their lips, while their heart was far
+away. In fact, speaking words and listening to words had wearied the
+spirit and stifled the conscience of them.
+
+For such a disposition Isaiah says there is only one cure. It is a new
+edition of his old gospel, that God speaks to us in facts, not forms.
+Worship and a lifeless doctrine have demoralized this people. God shall
+make Himself so felt in real life that even their dull senses shall not
+be able to mistake Him. _Therefore, behold, I am proceeding to work
+marvellously upon this people, a marvellous work and a wonder! and the
+wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the cleverness of their
+clever ones shall be obscured._ This is not the promise of what we call
+a miracle. It is a historical event on the same theatre as the
+politicians are showing their cleverness, but it shall put them all to
+shame, and by its force make the dullest feel that God's own hand is in
+it. What the people had ceased to attribute to Jehovah was ordinary
+intelligence; they had virtually said, _He hath no understanding_. The
+_marvellous work_, therefore, which He threatens shall be a work of
+wisdom, not some convulsion of nature to cow their spirits, but a
+wonderful political result, that shall shame their conceit of
+cleverness, and teach them reverence for the will and skill of God. Are
+the politicians trying to change the surface of the world, thinking that
+they _are turning things upside down_, and supposing that they can keep
+God out of account: _Who seeth us, and who knoweth us?_ God Himself is
+the real Arranger and Politician. He will turn things upside down!
+Compared with their attempt, how vast His results shall be! As if the
+whole surface of the earth were altered, _Lebanon changed into
+garden-land, and garden-land counted as forest_! But this, of course, is
+metaphor. The intent of the miracle is to show that God hath
+understanding; therefore it must be a work, the prudence and
+intellectual force of which politicians can appreciate, and it shall
+take place in their politics. But not for mere astonishment's sake is
+_the wonder_ to be done. For blessing and morality shall it be: to cure
+the deaf and blind; to give to the meek and the poor a new joy; to
+confound the tyrant and the scorner; to make Israel worthy of God and
+her own great fathers. _Therefore thus saith Jehovah to the house of
+Jacob, He that redeemed Abraham: Not now ashamed shall Jacob be, and not
+now shall his countenance blanch._ So unworthy hitherto have this stupid
+people been of so great ancestors! _But now when his_ (Jacob's)
+_children behold the work of My hand in the midst of him, they shall
+hallow My name, yea, they shall hallow the Holy One of Jacob, and the
+God of Israel shall they make their fear. They also that err in spirit
+shall know understanding, and they that are unsettled shall learn to
+accept doctrine_.
+
+Such is the meaning of this strong chapter. It is instructive in two
+ways.
+
+_First_, it very clearly declares Isaiah's view of the method of God's
+revelation. Isaiah says nothing of the Temple, the Shechinah, the Altar,
+or the Scripture; but he points out how much the exclusive confinement
+of religion to forms and texts has deadened the hearts of his countrymen
+towards God. In your real life, he says to them, you are to seek, and
+you shall find, Him. There He is evident in miracles,--not physical
+interruptions and convulsions, but social mercies and moral providences.
+The quickening of conscience, the dispersion of ignorance, poor men
+awakening to the fact that God is with them, the overthrow of the social
+tyrant, history's plain refutation of the atheist, the growth of civic
+justice and charity--In these, said the Hebrew prophet to the Old
+Testament believer, Behold your God!
+
+Wherefore, _secondly_, we also are to look for God in events and deeds.
+We are to know that nothing can compensate us for the loss of the open
+vision of God's working in history and in life about us,--not ecstasy
+of worship nor orthodoxy of doctrine. To confine our religion to these
+latter things is to become dull towards God even in them, and to forget
+Him everywhere else. And this is a fault of our day, just as it was of
+Isaiah's. So much of our fear of God is conventional, orthodox and not
+original, a trick caught from men's words or fashions, not a part of
+ourselves, nor won, like all that is real in us, from contact with real
+life. In our politics, in our conduct with men, in the struggle of our
+own hearts for knowledge and for temperance, and in service--there we
+are to learn to fear God. But there, and wherever else we are busy, self
+comes too much in the way; we are fascinated with our own cleverness; we
+ignore God, saying, _Who seeth us? who knoweth us?_ We get to expect Him
+only in the Temple and on the Sabbath, and then only to influence our
+emotions. But it is in deeds, and where we feel life most real, that we
+are to look for Him. He makes Himself evident to us by wonderful works.
+
+For these He has given us three theatres--the Bible, our country's
+history, and for each man his own life.
+
+We have to take the Bible, and especially the life of Christ, and to
+tell ourselves that these wonderful events did really take place. In
+Christ God did dwell; by Christ He spoke to man; man was converted,
+redeemed, sanctified, beyond all doubt. These were real events. To be
+convinced of their reality were worth a hundred prayers.
+
+Then let us follow the example of the Hebrew prophets, and search the
+history of our own people for the realities of God. Carlyle says in a
+note to Cromwell's fourth speech to Parliament, that "the Bible of every
+nation is its own history." This note is drawn from Carlyle by
+Cromwell's frequent insistence, that we must ever be turning from forms
+and rituals to study God's will and ways in history. And that speech of
+Cromwell is perhaps the best sermon ever delivered on the subject of
+this chapter. For he said: "What are all our histories but God
+manifesting Himself, that He hath shaken, and tumbled down and trampled
+upon everything that He hath not planted!" And again, speaking of our
+own history, he said to the House of Commons: "We are a people with the
+stamp of God upon us, ... whose appearances and providences among us
+were not to be outmatched by any story." Truly this is national
+religion:--the reverential acknowledgment of God's hand in history; the
+admiration and effort of moral progress; the stirring of conscience when
+we see wrong; the expectation, when evil abounds, that God will bring
+justice and purity to us if we labour with Him for them.
+
+But for each man there is the final duty of turning to himself.
+
+                    "My soul repairs its fault
+  When, sharpening sense's hebetude,
+  She turns on my own life! So viewed,
+  No mere mote's breadth but teems immense
+  With witnessings of providence:
+  And woe to me if when I look
+  Upon that record, the sole book
+  Unsealed to me, I take no heed
+  Of any warning that I read!"[45]
+
+  [45] Browning's _Christmas Eve_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+_POLITICS AND FAITH._
+
+ISAIAH xxx. (ABOUT 702 B.C.).
+
+
+This prophecy of Isaiah rises out of circumstances a little more
+developed than those in which chap. xxix. was composed. Sennacherib is
+still engaged with Babylon, and it seems that it will yet be long before
+he marches his armies upon Syria. But Isaiah's warning has at last
+roused the politicians of Judah from their carelessness. We need not
+suppose that they believed all that Isaiah predicted about the dire
+siege which Jerusalem should shortly undergo and her sudden deliverance
+at the hand of the Lord. Without the two strong religious convictions,
+in the strength of which, as we have seen, he made the prediction, it
+was impossible to believe that this siege and deliverance must certainly
+happen. But the politicians were at least startled into doing something.
+They did not betake themselves to God, to whom it had been the purpose
+of Isaiah's last oration to shut them up. They only flung themselves
+with more haste into their intrigues with Egypt. But in truth haste and
+business were all that was in their politics: these were devoid both of
+intelligence and faith. Where the sole motive of conduct is fear,
+whether uneasiness or panic, force may be displayed, but neither
+sagacity nor any moral quality. This was the case with Judah's Egyptian
+policy, and Isaiah now spends two chapters in denouncing it. His
+condemnation is twofold. The negotiations with Egypt, he says, are bad
+politics and bad religion; but the bad religion is the root and source
+of the other. Yet while he vents all his scorn on the politics, he uses
+pity and sweet persuasiveness when he comes to speak of the eternal
+significance of the religion. The two chapters are also instructive,
+beyond most others of the Old Testament, in the light they cast on
+revelation--its scope and methods.
+
+Isaiah begins with the bad politics. In order to understand how bad they
+were, we must turn for a little to this Egypt, with whom Judah was now
+seeking an alliance.
+
+In our late campaign on the Upper Nile we heard a great deal of the
+Mudir of Dongola. His province covers part of the ancient kingdom of
+Ethiopia; and in Meirawi, the village whose name appeared in so many
+telegrams, we can still discover Meroe, the capital of Ethiopia. Now in
+Isaiah's day the king of Ethiopia was, what the Mudir of Dongola was at
+the time of our war, an ambitious person of no small energy; and the
+ruler of Egypt proper was, what the Khedive was, a person of little
+influence or resource. Consequently there happened what might have
+happened a few years ago but for the presence of the British army in
+Egypt. The Ethiopian came down the Nile, defeated Pharaoh and burned him
+alive. But he died, and his son died after him; and before their
+successor could also come down the Nile, the legitimate heir to Pharaoh
+had regained part of his power. Some years ensued of uncertainty as to
+who was the real ruler of Egypt.
+
+It was in this time of unsettlement that Judah sought Egypt's help. The
+ignorance of the policy was manifest to all who were not blinded by fear
+of Assyria or party feeling. To Isaiah the Egyptian alliance is a folly
+and fatality that deserve all his scorn (vv. 1-8).
+
+_Woe to the rebellious children, saith the Lord, executing a policy, but
+it is not from Me; and weaving a web, but not of My spirit, that they
+may heap sin upon sin; who set themselves on the way to go down to
+Egypt, and at My mouth they have not inquired, to flee to the refuge of
+Pharaoh, and to hide themselves in the shadow of Egypt. But the refuge
+of Pharaoh shall be unto you for shame, and the hiding in the shadow of
+Egypt for confusion!_ How can a broken Egypt help you? _When his princes
+are at Zoan, and his ambassadors are come to Hanes, they shall all be
+ashamed of a people that cannot profit them, that are not for help nor
+for profit, but for shame, and also for reproach._
+
+Then Isaiah pictures the useless caravan which Judah has sent with
+tribute to Egypt, strings of asses and camels struggling through the
+desert, _land of trouble and anguish_, amid lions and serpents, and all
+for _a people that shall not profit them_ (ver. 6).
+
+What tempted Judah to this profitless expenditure of time and money?
+Egypt had a great reputation, and was a mighty promiser. Her brilliant
+antiquity had given her a habit of generous promise, and dazzled other
+nations into trusting her. Indeed, so full were Egyptian politics of
+bluster and big language, that the Hebrews had a nickname for Egypt.
+They called her Rahab--_Stormy-speech_, _Blusterer_, _Braggart_. It was
+the term also for the crocodile, as being a _monster_, so that there was
+a picturesqueness as well as moral aptness in the name. Ay, says Isaiah,
+catching at the old name and putting to it another which describes
+Egyptian helplessness and inactivity, I call her _Rahab Sit-still_,
+_Braggart-that-sitteth-still_, _Stormy-speech Stay-at-home_. _Blustering
+and inactivity, blustering and sitting still_, that is her character;
+_for Egypt helpeth in vain and to no purpose_.
+
+Knowing how sometimes the fate of a Government is affected by a happy
+speech or epigram, we can understand the effect of this cry upon the
+politicians of Jerusalem. But that he might impress it on the popular
+imagination and memory as well, Isaiah wrote his epigram on a tablet,
+and put it in a book. We must remind ourselves here of chap. xx., and
+remember how it tells us that Isaiah had already some years before this
+endeavoured to impress the popular imagination with the folly of an
+Egyptian alliance, _walking unfrocked and barefoot three years for a
+sign and a portent upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia_ (see p. 199).
+
+So that already Isaiah had appealed from politicians to people on this
+Egyptian question, just as he appealed thirty years ago from court to
+market-place on the question of Ephraim and Damascus.[46] It is another
+instance of that prophetic habit of his, on which we remarked in
+expounding chap. viii.; and we must again emphasize the habit, for chap.
+xxx. here swings round upon it. Whatever be the matter committed to him,
+Isaiah is not allowed to rest till he brings it home to the popular
+conscience; and however much he may be able to charge national disaster
+upon the folly of politicians or the obduracy of a king, it is the
+people whom he holds ultimately responsible. To Isaiah a nation's
+politics are not arbitrary; they are not dependent on the will of kings
+or the management of parties. They are the natural outcome of the
+nation's character. What the people are, that will their politics be. If
+you wish to reform the politics, you must first regenerate the people;
+and it is no use to inveigh against a senseless policy, like this
+Egyptian one, unless you go farther and expose the national temper which
+has made it possible. A people's own morals have greater influence on
+their destinies than their despots or legislators. Statesmen are what
+the State makes them. No Government will attempt a policy for which the
+nation behind it has not a conscience; and for the greater number of
+errors committed by their rulers, the blame must be laid on the people's
+own want of character or intelligence.
+
+  [46] Chap. viii. 1 (p. 119).
+
+This is what Isaiah now drives home (xxx. 9 ff.). He tracks the bad
+politics to their source in bad religion, the Egyptian policy to its
+roots in the prevailing tempers of the people. The Egyptian policy was
+doubly stamped. It was disobedience to the word of God; it was
+satisfaction with falsehood. The statesmen of Judah shut their ears to
+God's spoken word; they allowed themselves to be duped by the Egyptian
+Pretence. But these, says Isaiah, are precisely the characteristics of
+the whole Jewish people. _For it is a rebellious people, lying children,
+children that will not hear the revelation of the LORD_. It was these
+national failings--the want of virtues which are the very substance of a
+nation: truth and reverence or obedience--that had culminated in the
+senseless and suicidal alliance with Egypt. Isaiah fastens on their
+falsehood first: _Which say to the seers, Ye shall not see, and to the
+prophets, Ye shall not prophesy unto us right things; speak to us smooth
+things: prophesy deceits_. No wonder such a character had been
+fascinated by "Rahab"! It was a natural Nemesis, that a people who
+desired from their teachers fair speech rather than true vision should
+be betrayed by the confidence their statesmen placed in the Blusterer,
+_that blustered and sat still_. Truth is what this people first require,
+and therefore the _revelation of the LORD_ will in the first instance be
+the revealing of the truth. Men who will strip pretence off the reality
+of things; men who will call things by their right names, as Isaiah had
+set himself to do; honest satirists and epigrammatists--these are the
+bearers of God's revelation. For it is one of the means of Divine
+salvation to call things by their right names, and here in God's
+revelation also epigrams have their place. So much for truth.
+
+But reverence is truth's other self, for reverence is simply loyalty to
+the supremest truth. And it is against the truth that the Jews have
+chiefly sinned. They had shut their eyes to Egypt's real character, but
+that was a small sin beside this: that they turned their backs on the
+greatest reality of all--God Himself. _Get you out of the way_, they
+said to the prophets, _turn out of the path; keep quiet in our presence
+about the Holy One of Israel_. Isaiah's effort rises to its culmination
+when he seeks to restore the sense of this Reality to his people. His
+spirit is kindled at the words _the Holy One of Israel_, and to the end
+of chap. xxxi. leaps up in a series of brilliant and sometimes scorching
+descriptions of the name, the majesty and the love of God. Isaiah is not
+content to have used his power of revelation to unveil the political
+truth about Egypt. He will make God Himself visible to this people.
+Passionately does he proceed to enforce upon the Jews what God thinks
+about their own condition (vv. 12-14), then to persuade them to rely
+upon Him alone, and wait for the working of His reasonable laws (vv.
+15-18). Rising higher, he purges with pity their eyes to see God's very
+presence, their ears to hear His voice, their wounds to feel His touch
+(vv. 19-26). Then he remembers the cloud of invasion on the horizon, and
+bids them spell, in its uncouth masses, the articulate name of the Lord
+(vv. 27-33). And he closes with another series of figures by which God's
+wisdom, and His jealousy and His tenderness are made very bright to them
+(chap. xxxi.).
+
+These brilliant prophecies may not have been given all at the same time:
+each is complete in itself. They do not all mention the negotiations
+with Egypt, but they are all dark with the shadow of Assyria. Chap. xxx.
+vv. 19-26 almost seem to have been written in a time of actual siege;
+but vv. 27-33 represent Assyria still upon the horizon. In this,
+however, these passages are fitly strung together: that they equally
+strain to impress a blind and hardened people with the will, the majesty
+and the love of God their Saviour.
+
+
+I. THE BULGING WALL (vv. 12-14).
+
+Starting from their unwillingness to listen to the voice of the Lord in
+their Egyptian policy, Isaiah tells the people that if they refused to
+hear His word for guidance, they must now listen to it for judgement.
+_Wherefore thus saith the Holy One of Israel: Because ye look down on
+this word, and trust in perverseness and crookedness, and lean thereon,
+therefore this iniquity shall be to you as a breach ready to fall,
+bulging out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an
+instant._ _This iniquity_, of course, is the embassy to Egypt. But that,
+as we have seen, is only the people's own evil character coming to a
+head; and by the breaking of the wall, we are therefore to suppose that
+the prophet means the collapse not only of this Egyptian policy, but of
+the whole estate and substance of the Jewish people. It will not be your
+enemy that will cause a breach in the nation, but your teeming iniquity
+shall cause the breach--to wit, this Egyptian folly. Judah will burst
+her bulwarks from the inside. You may build the strongest form of
+government round a people, you may buttress it with foreign alliances,
+but these shall simply prove occasions for the internal wickedness to
+break forth. Your supposed buttresses will prove real breaches; and of
+all your social structure there will not be left as much as will make
+the fragments of a single home, not _a sherd_ big enough _to carry fire
+from the hearth, or to hold water from the cistern_.
+
+
+II. NOT ALLIANCES, BUT RELIANCE (vv. 15-18).
+
+At this point, either Isaiah was stung by the demands of the politicians
+for an alternative to their restless Egyptian policy which he condemned,
+or more likely he rose, unaided by external influence, on the prophet's
+native instinct to find some purely religious ground on which to base
+his political advice. The result is one of the grandest of all his
+oracles. _For thus saith the Lord Jehovah, the Holy One of Israel: In
+returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence
+shall be your strength; and ye would not. But ye said, No, for upon
+horses will we flee; wherefore ye shall flee: and upon the swift will we
+ride; wherefore swift shall be they that pursue you! One thousand at the
+rebuke of one--at the rebuke of five shall ye flee: till ye be left as a
+bare pole on the top of a mountain, and as a standard on an hill. And
+therefore will the LORD wait that He may be gracious unto you, and
+therefore will He hold aloof that He may have mercy upon you, for a God
+of judgement is the LORD; blessed are all they that wait for Him._ The
+words of this passage are their own interpretation and enforcement, all
+but one; and as this one is obscure in its English guise, and the
+passage really swings from it, we may devote a paragraph to its meaning.
+
+_A God of judgement is the LORD_ is an unfortunately ambiguous
+translation. We must not take _judgement_ here in our familiar sense of
+the word. It is not a sudden deed of doom, but a long process of law. It
+means _manner_, _method_, _design_, _order_, _system_, the ideas, in
+short, which we sum up under the word "law." Just as we say of a man,
+_He is a man of judgement_, and mean thereby not that by office he is a
+doomster, but that by character he is a man of discernment and prudence,
+so simply does Isaiah say here that _Jehovah is a God of judgement_, and
+mean thereby not that He is One, whose habit is sudden and awful deeds
+of penalty or salvation, but, on the contrary, that, having laid down
+His lines according to righteousness and established His laws in wisdom,
+He remains in His dealings with men consistent with these.
+
+Now it is a great truth that the All-mighty and All-merciful is the
+All-methodical too; and no religion is complete in its creed or healthy
+in its influence, which does not insist equally on all these. It was
+just the want of this third article of faith which perverted the souls
+of the Jews in Isaiah's day, which (as we have seen under Chapter I.)
+allowed them to make their worship so mechanical and material--for how
+could they have been satisfied with mere forms if they had but once
+conceived of God as having even ordinary intelligence?--and which
+turned their political life into such a mass of intrigue, conceit and
+falsehood, for how could they have dared to suppose that they would get
+their own way, or have been so sure of their own cleverness, if only
+they had had a glimpse of the perception, that God, the Ruler of the
+world, had also His policy regarding them? They believed He was the
+Mighty, they believed He was the Merciful, but because they forgot that
+He was the Wise and the Worker by law, their faith in His might too
+often turned into superstitious terror, their faith in His mercy
+oscillated between the sleepy satisfaction that He was an indulgent God
+and the fretful impatience that He was an indifferent one. Therefore
+Isaiah persisted from first to last in this: that God worked by law;
+that He had His plan for Judah, as well as these politicians; and, as we
+shall shortly find him reminding them when intoxicated with their own
+cleverness, _that He also is wise_ (xxxi. 2). Here by the same thought
+he bids them be at peace, and upon the rushing tides of politics,
+drawing them to that or the other mad venture, to swing by this anchor:
+that God has His own law and time for everything. No man could bring the
+charge of fatalism against such a policy of quietness. For it thrilled
+with intelligent appreciation of the Divine method. When Isaiah said,
+_In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and confidence
+shall be your strength_, he did not ask his restless countrymen to yield
+sullenly to an infinite force or to bow in stupidity beneath the
+inscrutable will of an arbitrary despot, but to bring their conduct into
+harmony with a reasonable and gracious plan, which might be read in the
+historical events of the time, and was vindicated by the loftiest
+religious convictions. Isaiah preached no submission to fate, but
+reverence for an all-wise Ruler, whose method was plain to every
+clear-sighted observer of the fortunes of the nations of the world, and
+whose purpose could only be love and peace to His own people (cf. p.
+110).
+
+
+III. GOD'S TABLE IN THE MIDST OF THE ENEMIES (vv. 19-26).
+
+This patient purpose of God Isaiah now proceeds to describe in its
+details. Every line of his description has its loveliness, and is to be
+separately appreciated. There is perhaps no fairer prospect from our
+prophet's many windows. It is not argument nor a programme, but a series
+of rapid glimpses, struck out by language, which often wants logical
+connection, but never fails to make us see.
+
+To begin with, one thing is sure: the continuance of the national
+existence. Isaiah is true to his original vision--the survival of a
+remnant. _For a people in Zion--there shall be abiding in Jerusalem._ So
+the brief essential is flashed forth. _Thou shalt surely weep no more;
+surely He will be gracious unto thee at the voice of thy crying; with
+His hearing of thee He will answer thee._ Thus much of general promise
+had been already given. Now upon the vagueness of the Lord's delay
+Isaiah paints realistic details, only, however, that he may make more
+vivid the real presence of the Lord. The siege shall surely come, with
+its sorely concrete privations, but the _Lord_ will be there, equally
+distinct. _And though the Lord give you the bread of penury and the
+water of tribulation_--perhaps the technical name for siege
+rations--_yet shall not thy Teacher hide Himself any more, but thine
+eyes shall ever be seeing thy Teacher; and thine ears shall hear a word
+behind thee, saying, This is the way: walk ye in it, when ye turn to the
+right hand or when ye turn to the left._ Real, concrete sorrows, these
+are they that make the heavenly Teacher real! It is linguistically
+possible, and more in harmony with the rest of the passage, to turn
+_teachers_, as the English version has it, into the singular, and to
+render it by _Revealer_. The word is an active participle, "Moreh," from
+the same verb as the noun "Torah," which is constantly translated "Law"
+in our version, but is, in the Prophets at least, more nearly equivalent
+to "instruction," or to our modern term "revelation" (cf. ver. 9).
+Looking thus to the One Revealer, and hearkening to the One Voice, _the
+lying and rebellious children_ shall at last be restored to that
+capacity for truth and obedience the loss of which has been their ruin.
+Devoted to the Holy One of Israel, they shall scatter their idols as
+loathsome (ver. 22). But thereupon a wonder is to happen. As the
+besieged people, conscious of the One Great Presence in the midst of
+their encompassed city, cast their idols through the gates and over the
+walls, a marvellous vision of space and light and fulness of fresh food
+bursts upon their starved and straitened souls (ver. 23). Promise more
+sympathetic was never uttered to a besieged and famished city. Mark that
+all down the passage there is no mention of the noise or instruments of
+battle. The prophet has not spoken of the besiegers, who they may be,
+how they may come, nor of the fashion of their war, but only of the
+effects of the siege on those within: confinement, scant and bitter
+rations. And now he is almost wholly silent about the breaking up of the
+investing army and the trail of their slaughter. No battle breaks this
+siege, but a vision of openness and plenty dawns noiselessly over its
+famine and closeness. It is not vengeance or blood that an exhausted and
+penitent people thirst after. But as they have been caged in a
+fortress, narrow, dark and stony, so they thirst for the sight of the
+sower, and the drop of the rain on the broken, brown earth, and the
+juicy corn, and the meadow for their cribbed cattle, and the noise of
+brooks and waterfalls, and above and about it all fulness of light. _And
+He shall give the rain of thy seed, that thou shalt sow the ground
+withal, and bread, even the increase of the ground, and it shall be
+juicy and fat; thy cattle shall feed that day in a broad meadow. And the
+oxen and the young asses that till the ground shall eat savoury
+provender, winnowed with the shovel and with the fan. And there shall be
+upon every lofty mountain and upon every lifted hill rivers, streams of
+water, in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall. And the
+light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the
+sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day that the
+LORD bindeth up the hurt of His people and healeth the stroke of their
+wound._ It is one of Isaiah's fairest visions, and he is very much to be
+blamed who forces its beauty of nature into an allegory of spiritual
+things. Here literally God spreads His people a table in the midst of
+their enemies.
+
+
+IV. THE NAME OF THE LORD (vv. 27-33).
+
+But Isaiah lays down "the oaten pipe" and lifts again a brazen trumpet
+to his lips. Between him and that sunny landscape of the future, of
+whose pastoral details he has so sweetly sung, roll up now the uncouth
+masses of the Assyrian invasion, not yet fully gathered, far less
+broken. We are back in the present again, and the whole horizon is
+clouded.
+
+The passage does not look like one from which comfort or edification can
+be derived, but it is of extreme interest. The first two verses, for
+instance, only require a little analysis to open a most instructive
+glimpse into the prophet's inner thoughts about the Assyrian progress,
+and show us how they work towards the expression of its full meaning.
+_Behold, the Name of Jehovah cometh from afar--burning His anger and
+awful the uplifting smoke; His lips are full of wrath, and His tongue as
+fire that devoureth; and His breath is as an overflowing torrent--even
+unto the neck it reacheth--to shake the nations in a sieve of
+destruction, and a bridle that leadeth astray on the jaws of the
+peoples._
+
+_The Name of Jehovah_ is the phrase the prophets use when they wish to
+tell us of the personal presence of God. When we hear a name cried out,
+we understand immediately that a person is there. So when the prophet
+calls, _Behold, the Name of Jehovah_, in face of the prodigious advance
+of Assyria, we understand that he has caught some intuition of God's
+presence in that uplifting of the nations of the north at the word of
+the great King and their resistless sweep southward upon Palestine. In
+that movement God is personally present. The Divine presence Isaiah then
+describes in curiously mingled metaphor, which proves how gradually it
+was that he struggled to a knowledge of its purpose there. First of all
+he describes the advance of Assyria as a thunderstorm, heavy clouds and
+darting, devouring fire. His imagination pictures a great face of wrath.
+The thick curtains of cloud as they roll over one another suggest the
+heavy lips, and the lightnings the fiery tongue. Then the figure passes
+from heaven to earth. The thunderstorm has burst, and becomes the
+_mountain torrent_, which speedily _reaches the necks_ of those who are
+caught in its bed. But then the prophet's conscience suggests something
+more than sudden and sheer force in this invasion, and the _tossing_ of
+the torrent naturally leads him to express this new element in the
+figure of _a sieve_. His thought about the Assyrian flood thus passes
+from one of simple force and rush to one of judgement and being well
+kept in hand. He sees its ultimate check at Jerusalem, and so his last
+figure of it is the figure of _a bridle_, or _lasso_, such as is thrown
+upon the jaws of a wild animal when you wish to catch and tame him.
+
+This gradual progress from the sense of sheer wild force, through that
+of personal wrath, to discipline and sparing is very interesting. Vague
+and chaotic that disaster rolled up the horizon upon Judah. _It cometh
+from afar._ The politicians fled from it to their refuge behind the
+Egyptian Pretence. But Isaiah bids them face it. The longer they look,
+the more will conscience tell them that the unavoidable wrath of God is
+in it; no blustering Rahab will be able to hide them from the anger of
+the Face that lowers there. But let them look longer still, and the
+unrelieved features of destruction will change to a hand that sifts and
+checks, the torrent will become a sieve, and the disaster show itself
+well held in by the power of their own God.
+
+So wildly and impersonally still do the storms of sorrow and disaster
+roll up the horizon on men's eyes, and we fly in vague terror from them
+to our Egyptian refuges. So still does conscience tell us it is futile
+to flee from the anger of God, and we crouch hopeless beneath the rush
+of imaginations of unchecked wrath, blackening the heavens and turning
+every path of life to a tossing torrent. May it then be granted us to
+have some prophet at our side to bid us face our disaster once more, and
+see the discipline and judgement of the Lord, the tossing only of His
+careful sieve, in the wild and cruel waves! We may not be poets like
+Isaiah nor able to put the processes of our faith into such splendid
+metaphors as he, but faith is given us to follow the same course as his
+thoughts did, and to struggle till she arrives at the consciousness of
+God in the most uncouth judgements that darken her horizon--the
+consciousness of God present not only to smite, but to sift, and in the
+end to spare.
+
+Of the angel who led Israel to the land of promise, God said, _My Name
+is in him_. Our faith is not perfect till we can, like Isaiah, feel the
+same of the blackest angel, the heaviest disaster, God can send us, and
+be able to spell it out articulately: _The LORD, the LORD, a God
+merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and
+truth_.
+
+For delivery, says Isaiah, shall come to the people of God in the
+crisis, as sudden and as startling into song as the delivery from Egypt
+was. _Ye shall have a song as in the night when a holy feast is kept,
+and gladness of heart, as when one goeth with a pipe to come into the
+mountain of the LORD, to the Rock of Israel._
+
+After this interval of solemn gladness, the storm and fire break out
+afresh, and rage again through the passage. But their direction is
+reversed, and whereas they had been shown rolling up the horizon as
+towards Judah, they are now shown rolling down the horizon in pursuit of
+the baffled Assyrian. The music of the verses is crashing. _And the LORD
+shall cause the peal[47] of His voice to be heard, and the lighting down
+of His arm to be seen in the fury of anger, yea flame of devouring
+fire--bursting and torrent and hailstones. For from the voice of the
+LORD shall the Assyrian be scattered when He shall smite with the rod.
+And every passage of the rod of fate which the LORD bringeth down upon
+him shall be with tabrets and harps, and in battles of waving shall he
+be fought against._ The meaning is obscure, but palpable. Probably the
+verse describes the ritual of the sacrifice to Moloch, to which there is
+no doubt the next verse alludes. To sympathize with the prophet's
+figure, we need of course an amount of information about the details of
+that ritual which we are very far from possessing. But Isaiah's meaning
+is evidently this. The destruction of the Assyrian host will be liker a
+holocaust than a battle, like one of those fatal sacrifices to Moloch
+which are directed by the solemn waving of a staff, and accompanied by
+the music, not of war, but of festival. _Battles of waving_ is a very
+obscure phrase, but the word translated _waving_ is the technical term
+for the waving of the victim before the sacrifice to signify its
+dedication to the deity; "and these _battles of waving_ may perhaps have
+taken place in the fashion in which single victims were thrown from one
+spear to another till death ensued."[48] At all events, it is evident
+that Isaiah means to suggest that the Assyrian dispersion is a religious
+act, a solemn holocaust rather than one of this earth's ordinary
+battles, and directed by Jehovah Himself from heaven. This becomes clear
+enough in the next verse: _For a Topheth hath been set in order
+beforehand; yea, for Moloch is it arranged; He hath made it deep and
+broad; the pile thereof is fire and much wood; the breath of the LORD,
+like a torrent of brimstone, shall kindle it_. So the Assyrian power was
+in the end to go up in flame.
+
+  [47] So Dr. B. Davis, quoted by Cheyne.
+
+  [48] So Bredenkamp in his recent commentary on Isaiah.
+
+We postpone remarks on Isaiah's sense of the fierceness of the Divine
+righteousness till we reach his even finer expression of it in chap.
+xxxiii.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+_THREE TRUTHS ABOUT GOD._
+
+ISAIAH xxxi. (ABOUT 702 B.C.).
+
+
+Chap. xxxi., which forms an appendage to chaps. xxix. and xxx., can
+scarcely be reckoned among the more important prophecies of Isaiah. It
+is a repetition of the principles which the prophet has already
+proclaimed in connection with the faithless intrigues of Judah for an
+alliance with Egypt, and it was published at a time when the statesmen
+of Judah were further involved in these intrigues, when events were
+moving faster, and the prophet had to speak with more hurried words.
+Truths now familiar to us are expressed in less powerful language. But
+the chapter has its own value; it is remarkable for three very unusual
+descriptions of God, which govern the following exposition of it. They
+rise in climax, enforcing three truths:--that in the government of life
+we must take into account God's wisdom; we must be prepared to find many
+of His providences grim and savage-looking; but we must also believe
+that He is most tender and jealous for His people.
+
+
+I. YET HE ALSO IS WISE (vv. 1-3).
+
+We must suppose the negotiations with Egypt to have taken for the moment
+a favourable turn, and the statesmen who advocated them to be
+congratulating themselves upon some consequent addition to the fighting
+strength of Judah. They could point to many chariots and a strong body
+of cavalry in proof of their own wisdom and refutation of the prophet's
+maxim, _In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength; in
+returning and rest shall ye be saved_.
+
+Isaiah simply answers their self-congratulation with the utterance of a
+new Woe, and it is in this that the first of the three extraordinary
+descriptions of God is placed. _Woe unto them that go down to Egypt for
+help; upon horses do they stay, and trust in chariots because they are
+many, and in horsemen because they are very strong: but they look not
+unto the Holy One of Israel, and Jehovah they do not seek. Yet He also
+is wise._ You have been clever and successful, but have you forgotten
+that _God also is wise_, that He too has His policy, and acts reasonably
+and consistently? You think you have been making history; but God also
+works in history, and surely, to put it on the lowest ground, with as
+much cleverness and persistence as you do. _Yet He also is wise, and
+will bring evil, and will not call back His words, but will arise
+against the house of the evil-doers, and against the help of them that
+work iniquity._
+
+This satire was the shaft best fitted to pierce the folly of the rulers
+of Judah. Wisdom, a reasonable plan for their aims and prudence in
+carrying it out, was the last thing they thought of associating with
+God, whom they relegated to what they called their religion--their
+temples, worship and poetry. When their emotions were stirred by solemn
+services, or under great disaster, or in the hour of death, they
+remembered God and it seemed natural to them that in these great
+exceptions of life He should interfere; but in their politics and their
+trade, in the common course and conduct of life, they ignored Him and
+put their trust in their own wisdom. They limited God to the ceremonies
+and exceptional occasions of life, when they looked for His glory or
+miraculous assistance, but they never thought that in their ordinary
+ways He had any interest or design.
+
+The forgetfulness, against which Isaiah directs this shaft of satire, is
+the besetting sin of very religious people, of very successful people,
+and of very clever people.
+
+It is the temptation of an ordinary Christian, church-going people, like
+ourselves, with a religion so full of marvellous mercies, and so blessed
+with regular opportunities of worship, to think of God only in
+connection with these, and practically to ignore that along the far
+greater stretches of life He has any interest or purpose regarding us.
+Formally-religious people treat God as if He were simply a
+constitutional sovereign, to step in at emergencies, and for the rest to
+play a nominal and ceremonial part in the conduct of their lives.
+Ignoring the Divine wisdom and ceaseless providence of God, and couching
+their hearts upon easy views of His benevolence, they have no other
+thought of Him, than as a philanthropic magician, whose power is
+reserved to extricate men when they have got past helping themselves.
+From the earliest times that way of regarding God has been prevalent,
+and religious teachers have never failed to stigmatize it with the
+hardest name for folly. _Fools_, says the Psalmist, _are afflicted when
+they draw near unto the gates of death; then_, only then, _do they cry
+unto the Lord in their trouble_. _Thou fool!_ says Christ of the man
+who kept God out of the account of his life. God is not mocked, although
+we ignore half His being and confine our religion to such facile views
+of His nature. With this sarcasm, Isaiah reminds us that it is not a
+Fool who is on the throne of the universe; yet is the Being whom the
+imaginations of some men place there any better? O wise men, _God also
+is wise_. Not by fits and starts of a benevolence similar to that of our
+own foolish and inconsistent hearts does He work. Consistency, reason
+and law are the methods of His action; and they apply closely,
+irretrievably, to all of our life. Hath He promised evil? Then evil will
+proceed. Let us believe that God keeps His word; that He is thoroughly
+attentive to all we do; that His will concerns the whole of our life.
+
+But the temptation to refuse to God even ordinary wisdom is also the
+temptation of very successful and very clever people, such as these
+Jewish politicians fancied themselves to be, or such as the Rich Fool in
+the parable. They have overcome all they have matched themselves
+against, and feel as if they were to be masters of their own future. Now
+the Bible and the testimony of men invariably declare that God has one
+way of meeting such fools--the way Isaiah suggests here. God meets them
+with their own weapons; He outmatches them in their own fashion. In the
+eighteenth Psalm it is written, _With the pure Thou wilt show Thyself
+pure, and with the perverse Thou wilt show Thyself froward_. The Rich
+Fool congratulates himself that his soul is his own; says God, _This
+night thy soul shall be required of thee_. The Jewish politicians pride
+themselves on their wisdom; _Yet God also is wise_, says Isaiah
+significantly. After Moscow Napoleon is reported to have exclaimed,
+"The Almighty is too strong for me." But perhaps the most striking
+analogy to this satire of Isaiah is to be found in the "Confessions" of
+that Jew, from whose living sepulchre we are so often startled with
+weird echoes of the laughter of the ancient prophets of his race. When
+Heine, Germany's greatest satirist, lay upon a bed to which his evil
+living had brought him before his time, and the pride of art, which had
+been, as he says, his god, was at last crushed, he tells us what it was
+that crushed him. They were singing his songs in every street of his
+native land, and his fame had gone out through the world, while he lay
+an exile and paralysed upon his "mattress-grave." "Alas!" he cries, "the
+irony of Heaven weighs heavily upon me. The great Author of the
+universe, the celestial Aristophanes, wished to show me, the petty,
+earthly, German Aristophanes, how my most trenchant satires are only
+clumsy patchwork compared with His, and how immeasurably He excels me in
+humour and colossal wit." That is just a soul writing in its own heart's
+blood this terrible warning of Isaiah: _Yet God also is wise_.
+
+_Yea, the Egyptians are men, and not God, and their horses flesh, and
+not spirit; and when Jehovah shall stretch out His hand, both he that
+helpeth shall stumble, and he that is holpen shall fall, and they all
+shall perish together._
+
+
+II. THE LION AND HIS PREY (ver. 4).
+
+But notwithstanding what he has said about God destroying men who trust
+in their own cleverness, Isaiah goes on to assert that God is always
+ready to save what is worth saving. The people, the city, His own
+city--God will save that. To express God's persistent grace towards
+Jerusalem, Isaiah uses two figures borrowed from the beasts. Both of
+them are truly Homeric, and fire the imagination at once; but the first
+is not one we should have expected to find as a figure of the saving
+grace of God. Yet Isaiah knows it is not enough for men to remember how
+wise God always is. They need also to be reminded how grim and cruel He
+must sometimes appear, even in His saving providences. _For thus saith
+Jehovah unto me: Like as when the lion growleth, and the young lion over
+his prey, if a mob of shepherds be called forth against him, from their
+voice he will not shrink in dismay, nor for their noise abase himself;
+so shall Jehovah of hosts come down to fight for Mount Zion and the hill
+thereof._ A lion with a lamb in his claws, growling over it, while a
+crowd of shepherds come up against him; afraid to go near enough to kill
+him, they try to frighten him away by shouting at him. But he holds his
+prey unshrinking.
+
+It is a figure that startles at first. To liken God with a saving hold
+upon His own to a wild lion with his claws in the prey! But horror plays
+the part of a good emphasis; while if we look into the figure, we shall
+feel our horror change to appreciation. There is something majestic in
+that picture of the lion with the shouting shepherds, too afraid to
+strike him. _He will not be dismayed at their voice, nor abase himself
+for the noise of them._ Is it, after all, an unworthy figure of the
+Divine Claimant for this city, who kept unceasing hold upon her after
+His own manner, mysterious and lionlike to men, undisturbed by the
+screams, formulas, and prayers of her mob of politicians and
+treaty-mongers? For these are the _shepherds_ Isaiah means--sham
+shepherds, the shrieking crew of politicians, with their treaties and
+military display. God will save and carry Jerusalem His own way, paying
+no heed to such. _He will not be dismayed at their voice, nor abase
+Himself for the noise of them._
+
+There is more than the unyielding persistency of Divine grace taught
+here. There is that to begin with. God will never let go what He has
+made His own: the souls He has redeemed from sin, the societies He has
+redeemed from barbarism, the characters He has hold of, the lives He has
+laid His hand upon. Persistency of saving grace--let us learn that
+confidently in the parable. But that is only half of what it is meant to
+teach. Look at the shepherds: shepherds shouting round a lion; why does
+Isaiah put it that way, and not as David did--lions growling round a
+brave shepherd, with the lamb in his arms? Because it so appeared then
+in the life Isaiah was picturing, because it often looks the same in
+real life still. These politicians--they seemed, they played the part
+of, shepherds; and Jehovah, who persistently frustrated their plans for
+the salvation of the State--He looked the lion, delivering Jerusalem to
+destruction. And very often to men does this arrangement of the parts
+repeat itself; and while human friends are anxious and energetic about
+them, God Himself appears in providences more lionlike than shepherdly.
+He grasps with the savage paw of death some one as dear to us as that
+city was to Isaiah. He rends our body or soul or estate. And friends and
+our own thoughts gather round the cruel bereavement or disaster with
+remonstrance and complaint. Our hearts cry out, doing, like shepherds,
+their best to scare by prayer and cries the foe they are too weak to
+kill. We all know the scene, and how shabby and mean that mob of human
+remonstrances looks in face of the great Foe, majestic though
+inarticulate, that with sullen persistence carries off its prey. All we
+can say in such times is that if it is God who is the lion, then it is
+for the best. For _though He slay me, yet will I trust Him_; and, after
+all, it is safer to rely on the mercies of God, lionlike though they be,
+than on the weak benevolences and officious pities of the best of human
+advisers. "Thy will be done"--let perfect reverence teach us to feel
+that, even when providence seems as savage as men that day thought God's
+will towards Jerusalem.
+
+In addition then to remembering, when men seem by their cleverness and
+success to rule life, that God is wiser and His plans more powerful than
+theirs, we are not to forget, when men seem more anxious and merciful
+than His dark providence, that for all their argument and action His
+will shall not alter. But now we are to hear that this will, so hard and
+mysterious, is as merciful and tender as a mother's.
+
+
+III. THE MOTHER-BIRD AND HER NEST (ver. 5).
+
+_As birds hovering, so will Jehovah of hosts cover Jerusalem, He will
+cover and deliver it: He will pass over and preserve it._ At last we are
+through dark providence, to the very heart of the Almighty. The meaning
+is familiar from its natural simplicity and frequent use in Scripture.
+Two features of it our version has not reproduced. The word _birds_
+means the smaller kind of feathered creatures, and the word _hovering_
+is feminine in the original: _As little mother-birds hovering, so will
+Jehovah of hosts protect Jerusalem_. We have been watching in spring the
+hedge where we know is a nest. Suddenly the mother-bird, who has been
+sitting on a branch close by, flutters off her perch, passes backwards
+and forwards, with flapping wings that droop nervously towards the nest
+over her young. A hawk is in the sky, and till he disappears she will
+hover--the incarnation of motherly anxiety. This is Isaiah's figure. His
+native city, on which he poured so much of his heart in lyrics and
+parables, was again in danger. Sennacherib was descending upon her; and
+the pity of Isaiah's own heart for her, evil though she was, suggested
+to him a motherhood of pity in the breast of God. The suggestion God
+Himself approved. Centuries after, when He assumed our flesh and spoke
+our language, when He put His love into parables lowly and familiar to
+our affections, there were none of them more beautiful than that which
+He uttered of this same city, weeping as He spake: _O Jerusalem,
+Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a
+hen gathereth her brood under her wings, and ye would not!_
+
+With such fountains in Scripture, we need not, as some have done, exalt
+the Virgin, or virtually make a fourth person in the Godhead, and that a
+woman, in order to satisfy those natural longings of the heart which the
+widespread worship of the mother of Jesus tells us are so peremptory.
+For all fulness dwelleth in God Himself. Not only may we rejoice in that
+pity and wise provision for our wants, in that pardon and generosity,
+which we associate with the name of father, but also in the wakefulness,
+the patience, the love, lovelier with fear, which make a mother's heart
+so dear and indispensable. We cannot tell along what wakened nerve the
+grace of God may reach our hearts; but Scripture has a medicine for
+every pain. And if any feel their weakness as little children feel it,
+let them know that the Spirit of God broods over them, as a mother over
+her babe; and if any are in pain or anxiety, and there is no human
+heart to suffer with them, let them know that as closely as a mother may
+come to suffer with her child, and as sensitive as she is to its danger,
+so sensitive is God Almighty to theirs, and that He gives them proof of
+their preciousness to Him by suffering with them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How these three descriptions meet the three failings of our faith! We
+forget that God is ceaselessly at work in wisdom in our lives. We forget
+that God must sometimes, even when He is saving us, seem lionlike and
+cruel. We forget that "the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully
+kind."
+
+Having thus made vivid the presence of their Lord to the purged eyes of
+His people, patient, powerful in order, wise in counsel, persistent in
+grace, and, last of all, very tender, Isaiah concludes with a cry to the
+people to turn to this Lord, from whom they have so deeply revolted. Let
+them cast away their idols, and there shall be no fear of the result of
+the Assyrian invasion. The Assyrian shall fall, not by the sword of man,
+but the immediate stroke of God. _And his rock shall pass away by reason
+of terror, and his princes shall be dismayed at the ensign, saith the
+Lord, whose fire is in Zion, and His furnace in Jerusalem._ And so
+Isaiah closes this series of prophecies on the keynote with which it
+opened in the first verse of chap. xxix.: that Jerusalem is Ariel--_the
+hearth and altar, the dwelling-place and sanctuary, of God_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+_A MAN: CHARACTER AND THE CAPACITY TO DISCRIMINATE CHARACTER._
+
+ISAIAH xxxii. 1-8 (ABOUT 702 B.C.?).
+
+
+The Assyrians being thus disposed of, Isaiah turns to a prospect, on
+which we have scarcely heard him speak these twenty years, since Assyria
+appeared on the frontier of Judah--the religious future and social
+progress of his own people. This he paints in a small prophecy of eight
+verses, the first eight of chap. xxxii.--verses 9-20 of that chapter
+apparently springing from somewhat different conditions.
+
+The first eight verses of chap. xxxii. belong to a class of prophecies
+which we may call Isaiah's "escapes." Like St. Paul, Isaiah, when he has
+finished some exposition of God's dealings with His people or argument
+with the sinners among them, bursts upon an unencumbered vision of the
+future, and with roused conscience, and voice resonant from long debate,
+takes his loftiest flights of eloquence. In Isaiah's book we have
+several of these visions, and each bears a character of its own
+according to the sort of sinners from whom the prophet shook himself
+loose to describe it and the kind of indignation that filled his heart
+at the time. We have already seen, how in some of Isaiah's visions the
+Messiah has the chief place, while from others He is altogether absent.
+But here we come upon another inconsistency. Sometimes, as in chap. xi.,
+Isaiah is content with nothing but a new dispensation--the entire
+transformation of nature, when there shall be no more desert or storm,
+but to the wild animals docility shall come, and among men an end to
+sorrow, fraud and war. But again he limits his prophetic soul and
+promises less. As if, overcome by the spectacle of the more clamant
+needs and horrible vices of society, he had said, we must first get rid
+of these, we must supply those, before we can begin to dream of heaven.
+Such is Isaiah's feeling here. This prophecy is not a vision of society
+glorified, but of society established and reformed, with its foundation
+firmly settled (ver. 1), with its fountain forces in full operation
+(ver. 2), and with an absolute check laid upon its worst habits, as, for
+instance, the moral grossness, lying and pretence which the prophet has
+been denouncing for several chapters (vv. 3-8). This moderation of the
+prophecy brings it within the range of practical morals; while the
+humanity of it, its freedom from Jewish or Oriental peculiarities,
+renders it thoroughly modern. If every unfulfilled prophecy ought to be
+an accusing conscience in the breast of the Christian Church, there will
+be none more clamant and practical than this one. Its demands are
+essential to the social interests of to-day.
+
+In ver. 1 we have the presupposition of the whole prophecy: _Behold, in
+righteousness shall a king reign, and princes--according to justice
+shall they rule_. A just government is always the basis of Isaiah's
+vision of the future. Here he defines it with greater abstractness than
+he has been wont to do. It is remarkable, that a writer, whose pen has
+already described the figure of the coming King so concretely and with
+so much detail, should here content himself with a general promise of a
+righteous government, regarding, as he seems to do, rather the office of
+kinghood, than any single eminent occupier of it. That the prophet of
+Immanuel, and still more the prophet of the Prince-of-the-Four-Names
+(chap. ix. 7), and of the Son of Jesse (chap. xi. 1), should be able to
+paint the ideal future, and speak of the just government that was to
+prevail in it, without at the same time referring to his previous very
+explicit promises of a royal Individual, is a fact which we cannot
+overlook in support of the opinion we have expressed on pp. 180 and 181
+concerning the object of Isaiah's Messianic hopes.
+
+Nor is the vagueness of the first verse corrected by the terms of the
+second: _And a man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind_, etc. We
+have already spoken of this verse as an ethical advance upon Isaiah's
+previous picture of the Messiah (see p. 182). But while, of course, the
+Messiah was to Isaiah the ideal of human character, and therefore shared
+whatsoever features he might foresee in its perfect development, it is
+evident that in this verse Isaiah is not thinking of the Messiah alone
+or particularly. When he says with such simplicity _a_ man, he means any
+man, he means the ideal for every man. Having in ver. 1 laid down the
+foundation for social life, he tells us in ver. 2 what the shelter and
+fountain force of society are to be: not science nor material wealth,
+but personal influence, the strength and freshness of the human
+personality. _A man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind and a
+covert from the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the
+shadow of a great rock in a weary land._ After just government (ver. 1)
+great characters are the prophet's first demand (ver. 2), and then (vv.
+3-8) he will ask for the capacity to discriminate character. "Character
+and the capacity to discriminate character" indeed summarizes this
+prophecy.
+
+
+I. A MAN (ver. 2).
+
+Isaiah has described personal influence on so grand a scale that it is
+not surprising that the Church has leapt to his words as a direct
+prophecy of Jesus Christ. They are indeed a description of Him, out of
+whose shadow advancing time has not been able to carry the children of
+men, who has been the shelter and fertility of every generation since He
+was lifted up, and to whom the affections of individual hearts never
+rise higher than when they sing--
+
+  "Rock of ages, cleft for me,
+  Let me hide myself in Thee."
+
+Such a rock was Christ indeed; but, in accordance with what we have said
+above, the prophet here has no individual specially in his view, but is
+rather laying down a general description of the influence of individual
+character, of which Christ Jesus was the highest instance. Taken in this
+sense, his famous words present us, _first_, with a philosophy of
+history, at the heart of which there is, _secondly_, a great gospel, and
+in the application of which there is, _thirdly_, a great ideal and duty
+for ourselves.
+
+1. Isaiah gives us in this verse a PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. Great men are
+not the whole of life, but they are the condition of all the rest; if it
+were not for the big men, the little ones could scarcely live. The first
+requisites of religion and civilisation are outstanding characters.
+
+In the East the following phenomenon is often observed. Where the desert
+touches a river-valley or oasis, the sand is in a continual state of
+drift from the wind, and it is this drift which is the real cause of the
+barrenness of such portions of the desert at least as abut upon the
+fertile land. For under the rain, or by infiltration of the river,
+plants often spring up through the sand, and there is sometimes promise
+of considerable fertility. It never lasts. Down comes the periodic
+drift, and life is stunted or choked out. But set down a rock on the
+sand, and see the difference its presence makes. After a few showers, to
+the leeward side of this some blades will spring up; if you have
+patience, you will see in time a garden. How has the boulder produced
+this? Simply by arresting the drift.
+
+Now that is exactly how great men benefit human life. A great man serves
+his generation, serves the whole race, by arresting the drift. Deadly
+forces, blind and fatal as the desert wind, sweep down human history. In
+the beginning it was the dread of Nature, the cold blast which blows
+from every quarter on the barbarian, and might have stunted men to
+animals. But into some soul God breathed a great breath of freedom, and
+the man defied Nature. Nature has had her revenge by burying the rebel
+in oblivion. On the distant horizon of history we can see, merely in
+some old legend, the evidence of his audacity. But the drift was
+arrested; behind the event men took shelter, in the shelter grew free,
+and learned to think out what the first great resister felt.
+
+When history had left this rock behind, and the drift had again space to
+grow, the same thing happened; and the hero this time was Abraham. He
+laid his back to the practice of his forefathers, and lifting his brow
+to heaven, was the first to worship the One Unseen God. Abraham
+believed; and in the shadow of his faith, and sheltered by his example,
+his descendants learned to believe too. To-day from within the three
+great spiritual religions men look back to him as the father of the
+faithful.
+
+When Isaiah, while all his countrymen were rushing down the mad, steep
+ways of politics, carried off by the only powers that were as yet known
+in these ways, fear of death and greed to be on the side of the
+strongest--when Isaiah stood still amid that panic rush, and uttered the
+memorable words, _In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength;
+in returning and rest shall ye be saved_, he stopped one of the most
+dangerous drifts in history, and created in its despite a shelter for
+those spiritual graces, which have always been the beauty of the State,
+and are now coming to be recognized as its strength.
+
+When, in the early critical days of the Church, that dark drift of
+Jewish custom, which had overflown the barriers set to the old
+dispensation, threatened to spread its barrenness upon the fields of the
+Gentile world, already white to the harvest of Christ, and Peter and
+Barnabas and all the Apostles were carried away by it, what was it that
+saved Christianity? Under God, it was this: that Paul got up and, as he
+tells us, withstood Peter to the face.
+
+And, again, when the powers of the Roman Church and the Roman Empire,
+checked for a little by the efforts which began the Reformation,
+gathered themselves together and rose in one awful front of emperor,
+cardinals, and princes at the Diet of Worms, what was it that stood fast
+against that drift of centuries, and proved the rock, under whose
+shelter men dared to read God's pure word again, and preach His Gospel?
+It was the word of a lonely monk: "Here stand I. I cannot otherwise. So
+help me, God."
+
+So that Isaiah is right. A single man has been as _an hiding-place from
+the wind and a covert from the tempest_. History is swept by drifts:
+superstition, error, poisonous custom, dust-laden controversy. What has
+saved humanity has been the upraising of some great man to resist those
+drifts, to set his will, strong through faith, against the prevailing
+tendency, and be the shelter of the weaker, but not less desirous, souls
+of his brethren. "The history of what man has accomplished in the world
+is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked there." Under
+God, personal human power is the highest force, and God has ever used it
+as His chief instrument.
+
+2. But in this philosophy of history there is a GOSPEL. Isaiah's words
+are not only man's ideal; they are God's promise, and that promise has
+been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the most conspicuous
+example--none others are near Him--of this personal influence in which
+Isaiah places all the shelter and revival of society. God has set His
+seal to the truth, that the greatest power in shaping human destiny is
+man himself, by becoming one with man, by using a human soul to be the
+Saviour of the race. _A man_, says Isaiah, _shall be as an hiding-place
+from the wind, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land_; and the
+Rock of ages was a Man. The world indeed knew that personal character
+could go higher than all else in the world, but they never knew how high
+till they saw Jesus Christ, or how often till they numbered His
+followers.
+
+This figure of a rock, a rock resisting drift, gives us some idea, not
+only of the commanding influence of Christ's person, but of that special
+office from which all the glory of His person and of His name arises:
+that _He saves His people from their sins_.
+
+For what is sin? Sin is simply the longest, heaviest drift in human
+history. It arose in the beginning, and has carried everything before it
+since. "The oldest custom of the race," it is the most powerful habit of
+the individual. Men have reared against it government, education,
+philosophy, system after system of religion. But sin overwhelmed them
+all.
+
+Only Christ resisted, and His resistance saves the world. Alone among
+human lives presented to our view, that of Christ is sinless. What is so
+prevalent in human nature that we cannot think of a human individual
+without it never stained Christ's life. Sin was about Him; it was not
+that He belonged to another sphere of things which lay above it. Sin was
+about Him. He rose from its midst with the same frailty as other men,
+encompassed by the same temptations; but where they rose to fall, He
+rose to stand, and standing, became the world's Saviour. The great
+tradition was broken; the drift was arrested. Sin never could be the
+same again after the sinless manhood of Christ. The old world's sins and
+cruel customs were shut out from the world that came after. Some of them
+ceased so absolutely as scarcely to be afterwards named; and the rest
+were so curbed that no civilised society suffered them to pass from its
+constraint, and no public conscience tolerated them as natural or
+necessary evils.
+
+What the surface of the world's life bears so deeply, that does every
+individual, who puts his trust in Jesus, feel to the core. Of Jesus the
+believer can truly say that life on _this_ side of Him is very different
+from life on _that_. Temptations keep far away from the heart that keeps
+near to Christ. Under the shadow of our Rock, for us the evil of the
+present loses all its suggestiveness, the evil of the past its awful
+surge of habit and guilty fear.
+
+3. But there is not only a philosophy of history and a gospel in this
+promise of _a man_. There is a great DUTY and IDEAL for every one. If
+this prophecy distinctly reaches forward to Jesus Christ as its only
+perfect fulfilment, the vagueness of its expression permits of its
+application to all, and through Him its fulfilment by all becomes a
+possibility. Now each of us may be a rock, a shelter and a source of
+fertility to the life around him in three modes of constant influence.
+We can be like Christ, the Rock, in shutting out from our neighbours the
+knowledge and infection of sin, in keeping our conversation so
+unsuggestive and unprovocative of evil, that, though sin drift upon us,
+it shall never drift through us. And we may be like Christ, the Rock, in
+shutting out blame from other men; in sheltering them from the east wind
+of pitiless prejudice, quarrel or controversy; in stopping the unclean
+and bitter drifts of scandal and gossip. How many lives have lost their
+fertility for the want of a little silence and a little shadow! Some
+righteous people have a terribly north-eastern exposure; children do not
+play about their doors, nor the prodigal stop there. And again, as there
+are a number of men and women who fall in struggling for virtue simply
+because they never see it successful in others, and the spectacle of one
+pure, heroic character would be their salvation, here is another way in
+which each servant of God may be a rock. Of the late Clerk Maxwell it
+was said, "He made faith in goodness easy to other men." _A man shall be
+as streams of water in a desert place._
+
+
+II. CAPACITY TO DISTINGUISH CHARACTER (vv. 3-8).
+
+But after the coming of this ideal, it is not paradise that is regained.
+Paradise is farther off. We must have truth to begin with: truth and the
+capacity to discriminate character. The sternness with which Isaiah thus
+postpones his earlier vision shows us how sore his heart was about the
+_lying_ temper of his people. We have heard him deploring the
+fascination of their false minds by the Egyptian Pretence. Their
+falseness, however, had not only shown itself in their foreign politics,
+but in their treatment of one another, in their social fashions,
+judgements and worships. In society there prevailed a want of moral
+insight and of moral courage. At home also the Jews had failed to call
+things by their right names (cf. p. 226). Therefore next in their future
+Isaiah desires the cure of moral blindness, haste and cowardice (vv. 3,
+4), with the explosion of all social lies (ver. 5). Men shall stand out
+for what they are, whether they be bad--for the bad shall not be wanting
+(vv. 6, 7)--or good (ver. 8). On righteous government (ver. 1) and
+influence of strong men (ver. 2) must follow social truthfulness (vv.
+3-8). Such is the line of the prophet's demands. The details of vv. 3-8
+are exceedingly interesting.
+
+_And not closed shall be the eyes of them that see, and the ears of them
+that hear shall be pricked up._ The context makes it clear that this is
+spoken, not of intellectual, but of moral, insight and alertness. _And
+the heart of the hasty shall learn how to know, and the tongue of the
+stammerer be quick_ (the verb is the same as the _hasty_ of the
+previous clause) _to speak plain things_. _Startlingly plain
+things_--for the word literally means _blinding-white_, and is so used
+of the sun--_startlingly plain_, like that scorching epigram upon Egypt.
+The morally rash and the morally timid are equal fathers of lies.
+
+In illustration Isaiah takes the conventional abuse of certain moral
+terms, exposes it and declares it shall cease: _The vile person shall no
+more be called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful_. _Liberal_
+and _bountiful_ were conventional names. The Hebrew word for _liberal_
+originally meant exactly that--_open-hearted_, _generous_,
+_magnanimous_. In the East it is the character which above all they call
+princely. So like our words "noble" and "nobility," it became a term of
+rank, _lord_ or _prince_, and was often applied to men who were not at
+all great-hearted, but the very opposite--even to the _vile person_.
+_Vile person_ is literally the _faded_ or the _exhausted_, whether
+mentally or morally--the last kind of character that could be princely.
+The other conventional term used by Isaiah refers to wealth rather than
+rank. The Hebrew for _bountiful_ literally means _abundant_, a man
+blessed with plenty, and is used in the Old Testament both for the rich
+and the fortunate. Its nearest English equivalent is perhaps _the
+successful man_. To this Isaiah fitly opposes a name, wrongly rendered
+in our version _churl_, but corrected in the margin to _crafty_--_the
+fraudulent_, _the knave_. When moral discrimination comes, says Isaiah,
+men will not apply the term _princely_ to _worn-out_ characters, nor
+grant them the social respect implied by the term. They will not call
+the _fraudulent_ the _fortunate_, nor canonise him as successful, who
+has gotten his wealth by underhand means. _The worthless character shall
+no more be called princely, nor the knave hailed as the successful._ But
+men's characters shall stand out true in their actions, and by their
+fruits ye shall know them. In those magic days the heart shall come to
+the lips, and its effects be unmistakeable. _For the worthless person,
+worthlessness shall he speak_--what else can he?--_and his heart shall
+do iniquity, to practise profaneness and to utter against the LORD rank
+error, to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will cause the drink
+of the thirsty to fail_. _The tools, too, of the knave_ (a play upon
+words here--"Keli Kelav," _the knave his knives_) _are evil; he! low
+tricks he deviseth to destroy the poor with words of falsehood, even
+when the poor speaks justice_ (that is, has justice as well as poverty
+to plead for him). _But the princely things deviseth, and he upon
+princely things shall stand_--not upon conventional titles or rank, or
+the respect of insincere hearts, but upon actual deeds of generosity and
+sacrifice.
+
+After great characters, then, what society needs is capacity to discern
+character, and the chief obstacle in the way of this discernment is the
+substitution of a conventional morality for a true morality, and of some
+distinctions of man's making for the eternal difference which God has
+set between right and wrong.
+
+Human progress consists, according to Isaiah, of getting rid of these
+conventions; and in this history bears him out. The abolition of
+slavery, the recognition of the essential nobility of labour, the
+abolition of infanticide, the emancipation of woman--all these are due
+to the release of men's minds from purely conventional notions, and the
+courageous application in their place of the fundamental laws of
+righteousness and love. If progress is still to continue, it must be by
+the same method. In many directions it is still a false
+conventionalism,--sometimes the relic of barbarism, sometimes the fruit
+of civilisation,--that blocks the way. The savage notions which
+obstruct the enforcement of masculine purity have to be exposed. Nor
+shall we ever get true commercial prosperity, or the sense of security
+which is indispensable to that, till men begin to cease calling
+transactions all right merely because they are the custom of the trade
+and the means to which its members look for profits.
+
+But, above all, as Isaiah tells us, we need to look to our use of
+language. It is one of the standing necessities of pure science to
+revise the terminology, to reserve for each object a special name, and
+see that all men understand the same object by the same name. Otherwise
+confusion comes in, and science is impossible. The necessity, though not
+so faithfully recognized, is as imperative in morals. If we consider the
+disgraceful mistakes in popular morals which have been produced by the
+transference and degradation of names, we shall feel it to be a
+religious duty to preserve for these their proper meaning. In the
+interests of morality, we must not be careless in our use of moral
+terms. As Socrates says in the _Phaedo_: "To use words wrongly and
+indefinitely is not merely an error in itself; it also creates evil in
+the soul."[49] What noxious misconceptions, what mistaken ideals of
+life, are due to the abuse of these four words alone: "noble,"
+"gentleman," "honour" and "Christian"! By applying these, in flattery or
+deceit, to persons unworthy of them, men have not only deprived them of
+the virtue which originally the mere utterance of them was enough to
+instil into the heart, but have sent forth to the world under their
+attractiveness second-rate types of character and ideals. The word
+"gentleman"! How the heart sickens as it thinks what a number of people
+have been satisfied to aim at a shoddy and superficial life because it
+was labelled with this gracious name. Conventionalism has deprived the
+English language of some of its most powerful sermons by devoting terms
+of singular moral expressiveness to do duty as mere labels upon
+characters that are dead, or on ranks and offices, for the designation
+of which mere cyphers might have sufficed.
+
+  [49] Cf. further with this passage F. J. Church, _Trial and Death of
+  Socrates_, Introd. xli. ff.
+
+We must not forget, however, Isaiah's chief means for the abolition of
+this conventionalism and the substitution of a true moral vision and
+terminology. These results are to follow from the presence of the great
+character, _A Man_, whom he has already lifted up. Conventionalism is
+another of the drifts which that _Rock_ has to arrest. Setting ourselves
+to revise our dictionaries or to restore to our words their original
+meanings out of our memories is never enough. The rising of a
+conspicuous character alone can dissipate the moral haze; the sense of
+his influence will alone fill emptied forms with meaning. So Christ
+Jesus judged and judges the world by His simple presence; men fall to
+His right hand and to His left. He calls things by their right names,
+and restores to each term of religion and morals its original ideal,
+which the vulgar use of the world had worn away.[50]
+
+  [50] Cf. with the fifth and sixth verses of chap. xxxii. the forcible
+  passage in the introduction to Carlyle's _Cromwell's Letters_,
+  beginning, "Sure enough, in the Heroic Century, as in the Unheroic,
+  knaves and cowards ... were not wanting. But the question always
+  remains, Did they lie chained?" etc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+_ISAIAH TO WOMEN._
+
+ISAIAH xxxii. 9-20 (DATE UNCERTAIN).
+
+
+The date of this prophecy, which has been appended to those spoken by
+Isaiah during the Egyptian intrigues (704-702), is not certain. It is
+addressed to women, and there is no reason why the prophet, when he was
+upbraiding the men of Judah for their false optimism, should not also
+have sought to awaken the conscience of their wives and daughters on
+what is the besetting sin rather of women than of men. The chief
+evidence for dissociating the prophecy from its immediate predecessors
+is that it predicts, or apparently predicts (vv. 13-14), the ruin of
+Jerusalem, whereas in these years Isaiah was careful to exempt the Holy
+City from the fate which he saw falling on the rest of the land. But
+otherwise the argument of the prophecy is almost exactly that of chaps.
+xxix.-xxx. By using the same words when he blames the women for _ease_
+and _carelessness_ in vv. 9-11, as he does when he promises _confidence_
+and _quiet resting-places_ in vv. 17, 18, Isaiah makes clear that his
+purpose is to contrast the false optimism of society during the
+postponement of the Assyrian invasion with that confidence and stability
+upon righteousness which the Spirit of God can alone create. The
+prophecy, too, has the usual three stages: sin in the present,
+judgement in the immediate future, and a state of blessedness in the
+latter days. The near date at which judgement is threatened--_days
+beyond a year_--ought to be compared with chap. xxix. 1: _Add ye a year
+to a year; let the feasts come round_.
+
+The new points are--that it is the women who are threatened, that
+Jerusalem itself is pictured in ruin, and that the pouring out of the
+Spirit is promised as the cause of the blessed future.
+
+
+I. THE CHARGE TO THE WOMEN (vv. 9-12)
+
+is especially interesting, not merely for its own terms, but because it
+is only part of a treatment of women which runs through the whole of
+Scripture.
+
+Isaiah had already delivered against the women of Jerusalem a severe
+diatribe (chap. iii.), the burden of which was their vanity and
+haughtiness. With the satiric temper, which distinguishes his earlier
+prophecies, he had mimicked their ogling and mincing gait, and described
+pin by pin their fashions and ornaments, promising them instead of these
+things _rottenness_ and _baldness_, and _a girdle of sackcloth and
+branding for beauty_. But he has grown older, and penetrating below
+their outward fashion and gait, he charges them with thoughtlessness as
+the besetting sin of their sex. _Ye women that are at ease, rise up, and
+hear my voice; ye careless daughters, give ear to my speech. For days
+beyond a year shall ye be troubled, O careless women, for the vintage
+shall fail; the ingathering shall not come. Tremble, ye women that are
+at ease; be troubled, ye careless ones._ By a pair of epithets he
+describes their fault; and almost thrice does he repeat the pair, as if
+he would emphasize it past all doubt. The besetting sin of women, as he
+dins into them, is ease; an ignorant and unthinking contentment with
+things as they are; thoughtlessness with regard to the deeper mysteries
+of life; disbelief in the possibility of change.
+
+But Isaiah more than hints that these besetting sins of women are but
+the defects of their virtues. The literal meaning of the two adjectives
+he uses, _at ease_ and _careless_, is _restful_ and _trustful_.
+Scripture throughout employs these words both in a good and a bad sense.
+Isaiah does so himself in this very chapter (compare these verses with
+vv. 17, 18). In the next chapter he describes the state of Jerusalem
+after redemption as a state of _ease_ or _restfulness_, and we know that
+he never ceased urging the people to _trustfulness_. For such truly
+religious conditions he uses exactly the same names as for the shallow
+optimism with which he now charges his countrywomen. And so doing, he
+reminds us of an important law of character. The besetting sins of
+either sex are its virtues prostituted. A man's greatest temptations
+proceed from his strength; but the glory of the feminine nature is
+repose, and trust is the strength of the feminine character, in which
+very things, however, lies all the possibility of woman's degradation.
+Woman's faith amounts at times to real intuition; but what risks are
+attached to this prophetic power--of impatience, of contentment with the
+first glance at things, "the inclination," as a great moralist has put
+it, "to take too easily the knowledge of the problems of life, and to
+rest content with what lies nearest her, instead of penetrating to a
+deeper foundation." Women are full of indulgence and hope; but what
+possibilities lie there of deception, false optimism, and want of that
+anxiety which alone makes progress possible. Women are more inclined
+than men to believe all things; but how certain is such a temper to
+sacrifice the claims of truth and honour. Women are full of tact, the
+just favourites of success, with infinite power to plead and please; but
+if they are aware of this, how certain is such a self-consciousness to
+produce negligence and the fatal sleep of the foolish virgins.
+
+Scripture insists repeatedly on this truth of Isaiah's about the
+besetting sin of women. The prophet Amos has engraved it in one of his
+sharpest epigrams, declaring that thoughtlessness is capable of turning
+women into very brutes, and their homes into desolate ruins: _Hear this
+word, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria, which
+oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say unto their lords,
+Bring and let us drink. The Lord Jehovah hath sworn by His holiness
+that, lo, the days shall come upon you that they shall take you away
+with hooks, and your residue with fish-hooks, and ye shall go out at the
+breaches, every one straight before her, and ye shall cast yourselves
+into Harmon, saith Jehovah._ It is a cowherd's picture of women: a troop
+of cows, heavy, heedless animals, trampling in their anxiety for food
+upon every frail and lowly object in the way. There is a cowherd's
+coarseness in it, but a prophet's insight into character. Not of
+Jezebels, or Messalinas, or Lady-Macbeths is it spoken, but of the
+ordinary matrons of Samaria. Thoughtlessness is able to make brutes out
+of women of gentle nurture, with homes and a religion. For
+thoughtlessness when joined to luxury or beauty plays with cruel
+weapons. It means greed, arrogance, indifference to suffering,
+wantonness, pride of conquest, dissimulation in love, and revenge for
+little slights; and there is no waste, unkind sport, insolence,
+brutality, or hysterical violence to which it will not lead. Such women
+are known, as Amos pictured them, through many degrees of this
+thoughtlessness: interrupters of conversation, an offence to the wise;
+devourers of many of the little ones of God's creation for the sake of
+their own ornament; tormentors of servants and subordinates for the sake
+of their own ease; out of the enjoyment of power or for admiration's
+sake breakers of hearts. And are not all such victims of thoughtlessness
+best compared, with Amos, to a cow--an animal that rushes at its grass
+careless of the many daisies and ferns it tramples, that will destroy
+the beauty of a whole country lane for a few mouthfuls of herbage?
+Thoughtlessness, says Amos--_and the Lord GOD hath sworn it by His
+holiness_--is the very negation of womanhood, the ruin of homes.
+
+But when we turn from the degradation of woman as thus exposed by the
+prophets to her glory as lifted up in the New Testament, we find that
+the same note is struck. Woman in the New Testament is gracious
+according as she is thoughtful; she offends even when otherwise
+beautiful by her feeling overpowering her thought. Martha spoils a most
+estimable character by one moment of unthinking passion, in which she
+accuses the Master of carelessness. Mary chooses the better part in
+close attention to her Master's words. The Ten Virgins are divided into
+five wise and five foolish. Paul seems to have been struck, as Isaiah
+was, with the natural tendency of the female character, for the first
+duty he lays upon the old women is to _teach the young women to think
+discreetly_, and he repeats the injunction, putting it before chastity
+and industry--_Teach them_, he says, _teach them discretion_ (Titus ii.
+4, 5). In Mary herself, the mother of our Lord, we see two graces of
+character, to the honour of which Scripture gives equal place--faith and
+thoughtfulness. The few sentences, which are all that he devotes to
+Mary's character, the Evangelist divides equally between these two. She
+was called _blessed_ because she believed the word of the Lord. But
+trustfulness did not mean in her, as in other women, neglect to think.
+Twice, at an interval of twelve years, we are shown thoughtfulness and
+carefulness of memory as the habitual grace of this first among women.
+_Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. His mother
+kept all these sayings in her heart._[51] What was Mary's glory was
+other women's salvation. By her own logic the sufferer of Capernaum,
+whom many physicians failed to benefit, found her cure; by her
+persistent argument the Syrophenician woman received her daughter to
+health again. And when our Lord met that flippant descendant of the
+_kine of Bashan, that are in the mount of Samaria_, how did He treat her
+that He might save her but by giving her matter to think about, by
+speaking to her in riddles, by exploding her superficial knowledge, and
+scattering her easy optimism?
+
+  [51] Cf. Newman, _Oxford University Sermons_, xv.
+
+So does all Scripture declare, in harmony with the oracle of Isaiah,
+that thoughtlessness and easy contentment with things as they be, are
+the besetting sins of woman. But her glory is discretion.
+
+II. The next new point in this prophecy is the
+
+
+DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM (vv. 13-15).
+
+_Upon the land of my people shall come up thorns and briers; yea, upon
+all the houses of joy in the joyous city: for the palace shall be
+forsaken; the populous city shall be deserted; Ophel and the Watch-tower
+shall be for dens for ever, a joy of wild asses, a pasture of flocks._
+The attempt has been made to confine this reference to the outskirts of
+the sacred city, but it is hardly a just one. The prophet, though he
+does not name the city, evidently means Jerusalem, and means the whole
+of it. Some therefore deny the authenticity of the prophecy. Certainly
+it is almost impossible to suppose, that so definite a sentence of ruin
+can have been published at the same time as the assurances of
+Jerusalem's inviolability in the preceding orations. But that does not
+prevent the hypothesis that it was uttered by Isaiah at an earlier
+period, when, as in chaps. ii. and iii., he did say extreme things about
+the destruction of his city. It must be noticed, however, that Isaiah
+speaks with some vagueness; that at the present moment he is not
+concerned with any religious truth or will of the Almighty, but simply
+desires to contrast the careless gaiety of the women of Jerusalem with
+the fate hanging over them. How could he do this more forcibly than by
+turning the streets and gardens of their delights into ruins and the
+haunts of the wild ass, even though it should seem inconsistent with his
+declaration that Zion was inviolable? Licence for a certain amount of
+inconsistency is absolutely necessary in the case of a prophet who had
+so many divers truths to utter to so many opposite interests and
+tempers. Besides, at this time he had already reduced Jerusalem very low
+(xxix. 4).
+
+
+III. THE SPIRIT OUTPOURED (vv. 15-20).
+
+The rest of the prophecy is luminous rather than lucid, full of suffused
+rather than distinct meanings. The date of the future regeneration is
+indefinite--another feature more in harmony with Isaiah's earlier
+prophecies than his later. The cause of the blessing is the outpouring
+of the Spirit of God (ver. 15). Righteousness and peace are to come to
+earth by a distinct creative act of God. Isaiah adds his voice to the
+invariable testimony of prophets and apostles, who, whether they speak
+of society or the heart of individual man, place their hope in new life
+from above by the Spirit of the living God. Victor Hugo says, "There are
+no weeds in society, only bad cultivators;" and places all hope of
+progress towards perfection in proper methods of social culture. These
+are needed, as much as the corn, which will not spring from the sunshine
+alone, requires the hand of the sower, and the harrow. And Isaiah, too,
+speaks here of human conduct and effort as required to fill up the
+blessedness of the future: righteousness and labour. But first, and
+indispensably, he, with all the prophets, places the Spirit of God.
+
+It appears that Isaiah looked for the fruits of the Spirit both as
+material and moral. He bases the quiet resting-places and regular
+labours of the future not on righteousness only, but on fertility and
+righteousness. _The wilderness shall become a fruitful field_, and _what
+is_ to-day _a fruitful field shall be counted as a forest_. That this
+proverb, used by Isaiah more than once, is not merely a metaphor for the
+moral revolution he describes in the next verse, is proved by his having
+already declared the unfruitfulness of their soil as part of his
+people's punishment. Fertility is promised for itself, and as the
+accompaniment of moral bountifulness. _And there shall dwell in the
+wilderness justice, and righteousness shall abide in the fruitful field.
+And the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect, or
+service, of righteousness, quietness and confidence for ever. And my
+people shall abide in a peaceable habitation, and in sure dwellings, and
+in quiet resting-places.... Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters,
+that send forth the feet of the ox and the ass!_
+
+There is not a prophecy more characteristic of Isaiah. It unfolds what
+for him were the two essential and equal contents of the will of God: a
+secure land and a righteous people, the fertility of nature and the
+purity of society. But in those years (705-702) he did not forget that
+something must come between him and that paradise. Across the very
+middle of his vision of felicity there dashes a cruel storm. In the gap
+indicated above Isaiah wrote, _But it shall hail in the downfall of the
+forest, and the city shall be utterly laid low._ A hailstorm between the
+promise and fulfilment of summer! Isaiah could only mean the Assyrian
+invasion, which was now lowering so dark. Before it bursts we must
+follow him to the survey which he made, during these years before the
+siege of Jerusalem, of the foreign nations on whom, equally with
+Jerusalem, that storm was to sweep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+_ISAIAH TO THE FOREIGN NATIONS._
+
+ISAIAH xiv. 24-32, xv.-xxi., and xxiii. (736-702 B.C.).
+
+
+The centre of the Book of Isaiah (chaps. xiii. to xxiii.) is occupied by
+a number of long and short prophecies which are a fertile source of
+perplexity to the conscientious reader of the Bible. With the
+exhilaration of one who traverses plain roads and beholds vast
+prospects, he has passed through the opening chapters of the book as far
+as the end of the twelfth; and he may look forward to enjoying a similar
+experience when he reaches those other clear stretches of vision from
+the twenty-fourth to the twenty-seventh and from the thirtieth to the
+thirty-second. But here he loses himself among a series of prophecies
+obscure in themselves and without obvious relation to one another. The
+subjects of them are the nations, tribes and cities with which in
+Isaiah's day, by war or treaty or common fear in face of the Assyrian
+conquest, Judah was being brought into contact. There are none of the
+familiar names of the land and tribes of Israel which meet the reader in
+other obscure prophecies and lighten their darkness with the face of a
+friend. The names and allusions are foreign, some of them the names of
+tribes long since extinct, and of places which it is no more possible to
+identify. It is a very jungle of prophecy, in which, without much
+Gospel or geographical light, we have to grope our way, thankful for an
+occasional gleam of the picturesque--a sandstorm in the desert, the
+forsaken ruins of Babylon haunted by wild beasts, a view of Egypt's
+canals or Phoenicia's harbours, a glimpse of an Arab raid or of a
+grave Ethiopian embassy.
+
+But in order to understand the Book of Isaiah, in order to understand
+Isaiah himself in some of the largest of his activities and hopes, we
+must traverse this thicket. It would be tedious and unprofitable to
+search every corner of it. We propose, therefore, to give a list of the
+various oracles, with their dates and titles, for the guidance of
+Bible-readers, then to take three representative texts and gather the
+meaning of all the oracles round them.
+
+First, however, two of the prophecies must be put aside. The
+twenty-second chapter does not refer to a foreign State, but to
+Jerusalem itself; and the large prophecy which opens the series (chaps.
+xiii.-xiv. 23) deals with the overthrow of Babylon in circumstances that
+did not arise till long after Isaiah's time, and so falls to be
+considered by us along with similar prophecies at the close of this
+volume. (See Book V.)
+
+All the rest of these chapters--xiv.-xxi. and xxiii.--refer to Isaiah's
+own day. They were delivered by the prophet at various times throughout
+his career; but the most of them evidently date from immediately after
+the year 705, when, on the death of Sargon, there was a general
+rebellion of the Assyrian vassals.
+
+1. xiv. 24-27. OATH OF JEHOVAH that the Assyrian shall be broken.
+Probable date, towards 701.
+
+2. xiv. 28-32. ORACLE FOR PHILISTIA. Warning to Philistia not to rejoice
+because one Assyrian king is dead, for a worse one shall arise: _Out of
+the serpent's root shall come forth a basilisk_. Philistia shall be
+melted away, but Zion shall stand. The inscription to this oracle (ver.
+28) is not genuine. The oracle plainly speaks of the death and accession
+of Assyrian, not Judaean, kings. It may be ascribed to 705, the date of
+the death of Sargon and accession of Sennacherib. But some hold that it
+refers to the previous change on the Assyrian throne--the death of
+Salmanassar and the accession of Sargon.
+
+3. xv.-xvi. 12. ORACLE FOR MOAB. A long prophecy against Moab. This
+oracle, whether originally by himself at an earlier period of his life,
+or more probably by an older prophet, Isaiah adopts and ratifies, and
+intimates its immediate fulfilment, in xvi. 13, 14. _This is the word
+which Jehovah spake concerning Moab long ago. But now Jehovah hath
+spoken, saying, Within three years, as the years of an hireling, and the
+glory of Moab shall be brought into contempt with all the great
+multitude, and the remnant shall be very small and of no account._ The
+dates both of the original publication of this prophecy and of its
+reissue with the appendix are quite uncertain. The latter may fall about
+711, when Moab was threatened by Sargon for complicity in the Ashdod
+conspiracy (p. 198), or in 704, when, with other States, Moab came under
+the cloud of Sennacherib's invasion. The main prophecy is remarkable for
+its vivid picture of the disaster that has overtaken Moab and for the
+sympathy with her which the Jewish prophet expresses; for the mention of
+a _remnant_ of Moab; for the exhortation to her to send tribute in her
+adversity _to the mount of the daughter of Zion_ (xvi. 1); for an appeal
+to Zion to shelter the outcasts of Moab and to take up her cause: _Bring
+counsel, make a decision, make thy shadow as the night in the midst of
+the noonday; hide the outcasts, bewray not the wanderer_; for a
+statement of the Messiah similar to those in chaps. ix. and xi.; and for
+the offer to the oppressed Moabites of the security of Judah in
+Messianic times (vv. 4, 5). But there is one great obstacle to this
+prospect of Moab lying down in the shadow of Judah--Moab's arrogance.
+_We have heard of the pride of Moab, that he is very proud_ (ver. 6, cf.
+Jer. xlviii. 29, 42; Zeph. ii. 10), which pride shall not only keep this
+country in ruin, but prevent the Moabites prevailing in prayer at their
+own sanctuary (ver. 12)--a very remarkable admission about the worship
+of another god than Jehovah.
+
+4. xvii. 1-11. ORACLE FOR DAMASCUS. One of the earliest and most crisp
+of Isaiah's prophecies. Of the time of Syria's and Ephraim's league
+against Judah, somewhere between 736 and 732.
+
+5. xvii. 12-14. UNTITLED. The crash of the peoples upon Jerusalem and
+their dispersion. This magnificent piece of sound, which we analyse
+below, is usually understood of Sennacherib's rush upon Jerusalem. Verse
+14 is an accurate summary of the sudden break-up and "retreat from
+Moscow" of his army. The Assyrian hosts are described as _nations_, as
+they are elsewhere more than once by Isaiah (xxii. 6, xxix. 7). But in
+all this there is no final reason for referring the oracle to
+Sennacherib's invasion, and it may just as well be interpreted of
+Isaiah's confidence of the defeat of Syria and Ephraim (734-723). Its
+proximity to the oracle against Damascus would then be very natural, and
+it would stand as a parallel prophecy to viii. 9: _Make an uproar, O ye
+peoples, and ye shall be broken in pieces; and give ear, all ye of the
+distances of the earth: gird yourselves, and ye shall be broken in
+pieces; gird yourselves, and ye shall be broken in pieces_--a prophecy
+which we know belongs to the period of the Syro-Ephraimitic league.
+
+6. xviii. _Untitled._ An address to Ethiopia, _land of a rustling of
+wings, land of many sails, whose messengers dart to and fro upon the
+rivers in their skiffs of reed_. The prophet tells Ethiopia, cast into
+excitement by the news of the Assyrian advance, how Jehovah is resting
+quietly till the Assyrian be ripe for destruction. When the Ethiopians
+shall see His sudden miracle, they shall send their tribute to Jehovah,
+_to the place of the name of Jehovah of hosts, Mount Zion_. It is
+difficult to know to which southward march of Assyria to ascribe this
+prophecy--Sargon's or Sennacherib's? For at the time of both of these an
+Ethiopian ruled Egypt.
+
+7. xix. _Oracle for Egypt._ The first fifteen verses describe judgement
+as ready to fall on the land of the Pharaohs. The last ten speak of the
+religious results to Egypt of that judgement, and they form the most
+universal and "missionary" of all Isaiah's prophecies. Although doubts
+have been expressed of the Isaian authorship of the second half of this
+chapter on the score of its universalism, as well as of its literary
+style, which is judged to be "a pale reflection" of Isaiah's own, there
+is no final reason for declining the credit of it to Isaiah, while there
+are insuperable difficulties against relegating it to the late date
+which is sometimes demanded for it. On the date and authenticity of this
+prophecy, which are of great importance for the question of Isaiah's
+"missionary" opinions, see Cheyne's introduction to the chapter and
+Robertson Smith's notes in _The Prophets of Israel_ (p. 433). The latter
+puts it in 703, during Sennacherib's advance upon the south. The former
+suggests that the second half may have been written by the prophet much
+later than the first, and justly says, "We can hardly imagine a more
+'swan-like end' for the dying prophet."
+
+8. xx. UNTITLED. Also upon Egypt, but in narrative and of an earlier
+date than at least the latter half of xix. Tells how Isaiah walked naked
+and barefoot in the streets of Jerusalem for a sign against Egypt and
+against the help Judah hoped to get from her in the years 711-709, when
+the Tartan, or Assyrian commander-in-chief, came south to subdue Ashdod.
+See pp. 198-200.
+
+9. xxi. 1-10. ORACLE FOR THE WILDERNESS OF THE SEA, announcing but
+lamenting the fall of Babylon. Probably 709. See pp. 202, 203.
+
+10. xxi. 11, 12. ORACLE FOR DUMAH. Dumah, or _Silence_--in Ps. xciv. 17,
+cxv. 17, _the land of the silence of death_, the grave--is probably used
+as an anagram for Edom and an enigmatic sign to the wise Edomites, in
+their own fashion, of the kind of silence their land is lying under--the
+silence of rapid decay. The prophet hears this silence at last broken by
+a cry. Edom cannot bear the darkness any more. _Unto me one is calling
+from Seir, Watchman, how much off the night? how much off the night?[52]
+Said the watchman, Cometh the morning, and also the night: if ye will
+inquire, inquire, come back again._ What other answer is possible for a
+land on which the silence of decay seems to have settled down? He may,
+however, give them an answer later on, if they will come back. Date
+uncertain, perhaps between 704 and 701.
+
+  [52] Our translation, though picturesque, is misleading. The voice does
+  not inquire, "What of the night?" _i.e._, whether it be fair or foul
+  weather, but "How much of the night is passed?" literally "What from off
+  the night?" This brings out a pathos that our English version has
+  disguised. Edom feels that her night is lasting terribly long.
+
+11. xxi. 13-17. ORACLE FOR ARABIA. From Edom the prophet passes to their
+neighbours the Dedanites, travelling merchants. And as he saw night upon
+Edom, so, by a play upon words, he speaks of evening upon Arabia: _in
+the forest, in Arabia_, or with the same consonants, _in the evening_.
+In the time of the insecurity of the Assyrian invasion the travelling
+merchants have to go aside from their great trading roads _in the
+evening to lodge in the thickets_. There they entertain fugitives, or
+(for the sense is not quite clear) are themselves as fugitives
+entertained. It is a picture of the _grievousness of war_, which was now
+upon the world, flowing down even those distant, desert roads. But
+things have not yet reached the worst. The fugitives are but the heralds
+of armies, that _within a year_ shall waste the _children of Kedar_, for
+Jehovah, the God of Israel, hath spoken it. So did the prophet of little
+Jerusalem take possession of even the far deserts in the name of his
+nation's God.
+
+12. xxiii. ORACLE FOR TYRE. Elegy over its fall, probably as Sennacherib
+came south upon it in 703 or 702. To be further considered by us (pp.
+288 ff.).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These then are Isaiah's oracles for the Nations, who tremble, intrigue
+and go down before the might of Assyria.
+
+We have promised to gather the circumstances and meaning of these
+prophecies round three representative texts. These are--
+
+1. _Ah! the booming of the peoples, the multitudes, like the booming of
+the seas they boom; and the rushing of the nations, like the rushing of
+mighty waters they rush; nations, like the rushing of many waters they
+rush. But He rebuketh it, and it fleeth afar off, and is chased like the
+chaff on the mountains before the wind and like whirling dust before the
+whirlwind_ (xvii. 12, 13).
+
+2. _What then shall one answer the messengers of a nation? That Jehovah
+hath founded Zion, and in her shall find refuge the afflicted of His
+people_ (xiv. 32).
+
+3. _In that day shall Israel be a third to Egypt and to Assyria, a
+blessing in the midst of the earth, for that Jehovah of hosts hath
+blessed them, saying, Blessed be My people Egypt, and the work of My
+hands Assyria, and Mine inheritance Israel_ (xix. 24, 25).
+
+1. The first of these texts shows all the prophet's prospect filled with
+storm, the second of them the solitary rock and lighthouse in the midst
+of the storm: Zion, his own watchtower and his people's refuge; while
+the third of them, looking far into the future, tells us, as it were, of
+the firm continent which shall rise out of the waters--Israel no longer
+a solitary lighthouse, _but in that day shall Israel be a third to Egypt
+and to Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth_. These three texts
+give us a summary of the meaning of all Isaiah's obscure prophecies to
+the foreign nations--a stormy ocean, a solitary rock in the midst of it,
+and the new continent that shall rise out of the waters about the rock.
+
+The restlessness of Western Asia beneath the Assyrian rule (from 719,
+when Sargon's victory at Rafia extended that rule to the borders of
+Egypt) found vent, as we saw (p. 198), in two great Explosions, for both
+of which the mine was laid by Egyptian intrigue. The first Explosion
+happened in 711, and was confined to Ashdod. The second took place on
+Sargon's death in 705, and was universal. Till Sennacherib marched
+south on Palestine in 701, there were all over Western Asia hurryings to
+and fro, consultations and intrigues, embassies and engineerings from
+Babylon to Meroe in far Ethiopia, and from the tents of Kedar to the
+cities of the Philistines. For these Jerusalem the one inviolate capital
+from the Euphrates to the river of Egypt, was the natural centre. And
+the one far-seeing, steady-hearted man in Jerusalem was Isaiah. We have
+already seen that there was enough within the city to occupy Isaiah's
+attention, especially from 705 onward; but for Isaiah the walls of
+Jerusalem, dear as they were and thronged with duty, neither limited his
+sympathies nor marked the scope of the gospel he had to preach.
+Jerusalem is simply his watchtower. His field--and this is the peculiar
+glory of the prophet's later life--his field is the world.
+
+How well fitted Jerusalem then was to be the world's watchtower, the
+traveller may see to this day. The city lies upon the great central
+ridge of Palestine, at an elevation of two thousand five hundred feet
+above the level of the sea. If you ascend the hill behind the city, you
+stand upon one of the great view-points of the earth. It is a forepost
+of Asia. To the east rise the red hills of Moab and the uplands of
+Gilead and Bashan, on to which wandering tribes of the Arabian deserts
+beyond still push their foremost camps. Just beyond the horizon lie the
+immemorial paths from Northern Syria into Arabia. Within a few hours'
+walk along the same central ridge, and still within the territory of
+Judah, you may see to the north, over a wilderness of blue hills,
+Hermon's snowy crest; you know that Damascus is lying just beyond, and
+that through it and round the base of Hermon swings one of the longest
+of the old world's highways--the main caravan road from the Euphrates
+to the Nile. Stand at gaze for a little, while down that road there
+sweep into your mind thoughts of the great empire, whose troops and
+commerce it used to carry. Then, bearing these thoughts with you, follow
+the line of the road across the hills to the western coastland, and so
+out upon the great Egyptian desert, where you may wait till it has
+brought you imagination of the southern empire to which it travels.
+Then, lifting your eyes a little further, let them sweep back again from
+south to north, and you have the whole of the west, the new world, open
+to you, across the fringe of yellow haze that marks the sands of the
+Mediterranean. It is even now one of the most comprehensive prospects in
+the world. But in Isaiah's day, when the world was smaller, the high
+places of Judah either revealed or suggested the whole of it.
+
+But Isaiah was more than a spectator of this vast theatre. He was an
+actor upon it. The court of Judah, of which during Hezekiah's reign he
+was the most prominent member, stood in more or less close connection
+with the courts of all the kingdoms of Western Asia; and in those days
+when the nations were busy with intrigue against their common enemy this
+little highland town and fortress became a gathering place of peoples.
+From Babylon, from far-off Ethiopia, from Edom, from Philistia, and no
+doubt from many other places also, embassies came to King Hezekiah, or
+to inquire of his prophet. The appearance of some of them lives for us
+still in Isaiah's descriptions: _tall and shiny_ figures of Ethiopians
+(xviii. 2), with whom we are able to identify the lithe, silky-skinned,
+shining-black bodies of the present tribes of the Upper Nile. Now the
+prophet must have talked much with these strangers, for he displays a
+knowledge of their several countries and ways of life that is full and
+accurate. The agricultural conditions of Egypt; her social ranks and her
+industries (xix.); the harbours and markets of Tyre (xxiii.); the
+caravans of the Arab nomads as in times of war they shun the open desert
+and seek the thickets (xxi. 14)--Isaiah paints these for us with a vivid
+realism. We see how this statesman of the least of States, this prophet
+of a religion which was confessed over only a few square miles, was
+aware of the wide world, and how he loved the life that filled it. They
+are no mere geographical terms with which Isaiah thickly studs these
+prophecies. He looks out upon, and paints for us, lands and cities
+surging with men--their trades, their castes, their religions, their
+besetting tempers and sins, their social structures and national
+policies, all quick and bending to the breeze and the shadow of the
+coming storm from the north.
+
+We have said that in nothing is the regal power of our prophet's style
+so manifest as in the vast horizons, which, by the use of a few words,
+he calls up before us. Some of the finest of these revelations are made
+in this part of his book, so obscure and unknown to most. Who can ever
+forget those descriptions of Ethiopia in the eighteenth chapter?--"_Ah!
+the land of the rustling of wings, which borders on the rivers of Cush,
+which sendeth heralds on the sea, and in vessels of reed on the face of
+the waters! Travel, fleet messengers, to a people lithe and shining, to
+a nation feared from ever it began to be, a people strong, strong and
+trampling, whose land the rivers divide_; or of Tyre in chapter
+xxiii.?--"_And on great waters the seed of Shihor, the harvest of the
+Nile, was her revenue; and she was the mart of nations._ What expanses
+of sea! what fleets of ships! what floating loads of grain! what
+concourse of merchants moving on stately wharves beneath high
+warehouses!
+
+Yet these are only segments of horizons, and perhaps the prophet reaches
+the height of his power of expression in the first of the three texts,
+which we have given as representative of his prophecies on foreign
+nations (p. 278). Here three or four lines of marvellous sound repeat
+the effect of the rage of the restless world as it rises, storms and
+breaks upon the steadfast will of God. The phonetics of the passage are
+wonderful. The general impression is that of a stormy ocean booming in
+to the shore and then crashing itself out into one long hiss of spray
+and foam upon its barriers. The details are noteworthy. In ver. 12 we
+have thirteen heavy M-sounds, besides two heavy B's, to five N's, five
+H's, and four sibilants. But in ver. 13 the sibilants predominate; and
+before the sharp rebuke of the Lord the great, booming sound of ver. 12
+scatters out into a long _yish-sh[=a] 'oon_. The occasional use of a
+prolonged vowel amid so many hurrying consonants produces exactly the
+effect now of the lift of a storm swell out at sea and now of the pause
+of a great wave before it crashes on the shore. "_Ah, the booming of the
+peoples, the multitudes, like the booming of the seas they boom; and the
+rushing of the nations, like the rushing of the mighty waters they rush:
+nations, like the rushing of many waters they rush. But He checketh
+it_--a short, sharp word with a choke and a snort in it--_and it fleeth
+far away, and is chased like chaff on mountains before wind, and like
+swirling dust before a whirlwind_."
+
+So did the rage of the world sound to Isaiah as it crashed into pieces
+upon the steadfast providence of God. To those who can feel the force of
+such language nothing need be added upon the prophet's view of the
+politics of the outside world these twenty years, whether portions of it
+threatened Judah in their own strength, or the whole power of storm that
+was in it rose with the Assyrian, as in all his flood he rushed upon
+Zion in the year 701.
+
+2. But amid this storm Zion stands immovable. It is upon Zion that the
+storm crashes itself into impotence. This becomes explicit in the second
+of our representative texts: _What then shall one answer the messengers
+of a nation? That Jehovah hath founded Zion, and in her shall find a
+refuge the afflicted of His people_ (xiv. 32). This oracle was drawn
+from Isaiah by an embassy of the Philistines. Stricken with panic at the
+Assyrian advance, they had sent messengers to Jerusalem, as other tribes
+did, with questions and proposals of defences, escapes and alliances.
+They got their answer. Alliances are useless. Everything human is going
+down. Here, here alone, is safety, because the LORD hath decreed it.
+
+With what light and peace do Isaiah's words break out across that
+unquiet, hungry sea! How they tell the world for the first time, and
+have been telling it ever since, that, apart from all the struggle and
+strife of history, there is a refuge and security of men, which God
+Himself has assured. The troubled surface of life, nations heaving
+uneasily, kings of Assyria and their armies carrying the world before
+them--these are not all. The world and her powers are not all. Religion,
+in the very teeth of life, builds her refuge for the afflicted.
+
+The world seems wholly divided between force and fear. Isaiah says, It
+is not true. Faith has her abiding citadel in the midst, a house of God,
+which neither force can harm nor fear enter.
+
+This then was Isaiah's Interim-Answer to the Nations--Zion at least is
+secure for the people of Jehovah.
+
+3. Isaiah could not remain content, however, with so narrow an
+interim-answer: Zion at least is secure, whatever happens to the rest of
+you. The world was there, and had to be dealt with and accounted
+for--had even to be saved. As we have already seen, this was the problem
+of Isaiah's generation; and to have shirked it would have meant the
+failure of his faith to rank as universal.
+
+Isaiah did not shirk it. He said boldly to his people, and to the
+nations: "The faith we have covers this vaster life. Jehovah is not only
+God of Israel. He rules the world." These prophecies to the foreign
+nations are full of revelations of the sovereignty and providence of
+God. The Assyrian may seem to be growing in glory; but Jehovah is
+watching from the heavens, till he be ripe for cutting down (xviii. 4).
+Egypt's statesmen may be perverse and wilful; but Jehovah of hosts
+swingeth His hand against the land: _they shall tremble and shudder_
+(xix. 16). Egypt shall obey His purposes (17). Confusion may reign for a
+time, but a signal and a centre shall be lifted up, and the world gather
+itself in order round the revealed will of God. The audacity of such a
+claim for his God becomes more striking when we remember that Isaiah's
+faith was not the faith of a majestic or a conquering people. When he
+made his claim, Judah was still tributary to Assyria, a petty highland
+principality, that could not hope to stand by material means against the
+forces which had thrown down her more powerful neighbours. It was no
+experience of success, no mere instinct of being on the side of fate,
+which led Isaiah so resolutely to pronounce that not only should his
+people be secure, but that his God would vindicate His purposes upon
+empires like Egypt and Assyria. It was simply his sense that Jehovah was
+exalted in righteousness. Therefore, while inside Judah only the remnant
+that took the side of righteousness would be saved, outside Judah
+wherever there was unrighteousness, it would be rebuked, and wherever
+righteousness, it would be vindicated. This is the supremacy which
+Isaiah proclaimed for Jehovah over the whole world.
+
+How spiritual this faith of Isaiah was, is seen from the next step the
+prophet took. Looking out on the troubled world, he did not merely
+assert that his God ruled it, but he emphatically said, what was a far
+more difficult thing to say, that it would all be consciously and
+willingly God's. God rules this, not to restrain it only, but to make it
+His own. The knowledge of Him, which is to-day our privilege, shall be
+to-morrow the blessing of the whole world.
+
+When we point to the Jewish desire, so often expressed in the Old
+Testament, of making the whole world subject to Jehovah, we are told
+that it is simply a proof of religious ambition and jealousy. We are
+told that this wish to convert the world no more stamps the Jewish
+religion as being a universal, and therefore presumably a Divine,
+religion than the Mohammedans' zeal to force their tenets on men at the
+point of the sword is a proof of the truth of Islam.
+
+Now we need not be concerned to defend the Jewish religion in its every
+particular, even as propounded by an Isaiah. It is an article of the
+Christian creed that Judaism was a minor and imperfect dispensation,
+where truth was only half revealed and virtue half developed. But at
+least let us do the Jewish religion justice; and we shall never do it
+justice till we pay attention to what its greatest prophets thought of
+the outside world, how they sympathized with this, and _in what way_
+they proposed to make it subject to their own faith.
+
+_Firstly_ then, there is something in the very manner of Isaiah's
+treatment of foreign nations, which causes the old charges of religious
+exclusiveness to sink in our throats. Isaiah treats these foreigners at
+least as men. Take his prophecies on Egypt or on Tyre or on
+Babylon--nations which were the hereditary enemies of his nation--and
+you find him speaking of their natural misfortunes, their social decays,
+their national follies and disasters, with the same pity and with the
+same purely moral considerations, with which he has treated his own
+land. When news of those far-away sorrows comes to Jerusalem, it moves
+this large-hearted prophet to mourning and tears. He breathes out to
+distant lands elegies as beautiful as he has poured upon Jerusalem. He
+shows as intelligent an interest in their social evolutions as he does
+in those of the Jewish State. He gives a picture of the industry and
+politics of Egypt as careful as his pictures of the fashions and
+statecraft of Judah. In short, as you read his prophecies upon foreign
+nations, you perceive that before the eyes of this man humanity, broken
+and scattered in his days as it was, rose up one great whole, every part
+of which was subject to the same laws of righteousness, and deserved
+from the prophet of God the same love and pity. To some few tribes he
+says decisively that they shall certainly be wiped out, but even them he
+does not address in contempt or in hatred. The large empire of Egypt,
+the great commercial power of Tyre, he speaks of in language of respect
+and admiration; but that does not prevent him from putting the plain
+issue to them which he put to his own countrymen: If you are
+unrighteous, intemperate, impure--lying diplomats and dishonest rulers,
+you shall certainly perish before Assyria. If you are righteous,
+temperate, pure, if you do trust in truth and God, nothing can move you.
+
+But, _secondly_, he, who thus treated all nations with the same strict
+measures of justice and the same fulness of pity with which he treated
+his own, was surely not far from extending to the world the religious
+privileges, which he has so frequently identified with Jerusalem. In his
+old age, at least Isaiah looked forward to the time when the particular
+religious opportunities of the Jew should be the inheritance of
+humanity. For their old oppressor Egypt, for their new enemy Assyria, he
+anticipates the same experience and education, which has made Israel the
+firstborn of God. Speaking to Egypt, Isaiah concludes a missionary
+sermon, fit to take its place beside that which Paul uttered on the
+Areopagus to the younger Greek civilisation, with the words, _In that
+day shall Israel be a third to Egypt and to Assyria, a blessing in the
+midst of the earth, for that Jehovah of hosts hath blessed them, saying,
+Blessed be Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands and Israel
+Mine inheritance_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+_TYRE; OR, THE MERCENARY SPIRIT._
+
+ISAIAH xxiii. (702 B.C.).
+
+
+The task, which was laid upon the religion of Israel while Isaiah was
+its prophet, was the task, as we have often told ourselves, of facing
+the world's forces, and of explaining how they were to be led captive
+and contributory to the religion of the true God. And we have already
+seen Isaiah accounting for the largest of these forces: the Assyrian.
+But besides Assyria, that military empire, there was another power in
+the world, also novel to Israel's experience and also in Isaiah's day
+grown large enough to demand from Israel's faith explanation and
+criticism. This was Commerce, represented by the Phoenicians, with
+their chief seats at Tyre and Sidon, and their colonies across the seas.
+Not even Egypt exercised such influence on Isaiah's generation as
+Phoenicia did; and Phoenician influence, though less visible and
+painful than Assyrian, was just as much more subtle and penetrating as
+in these respects the influence of trade exceeds that of war. Assyria
+herself was fascinated by the glories of Phoenician commerce. The
+ambition of her kings, who had in that century pushed south to the
+Mediterranean, was to found a commercial empire. The mercenary spirit,
+as we learn from prophets earlier than Isaiah, had begun also to leaven
+the life of the agricultural and shepherd tribes of Western Asia. For
+good or for evil commerce had established itself as a moral force in the
+world. Isaiah's chapter on Tyre is, therefore, of the greatest interest.
+It contains the prophet's vision of commerce the first time commerce had
+grown vast enough to impress his people's imagination, as well as a
+criticism of the temper of commerce from the standpoint of the religion
+of the God of righteousness. Whether as a historical study or a message
+addressed to the mercantile tempers of our own day, the chapter is
+worthy of close attention.
+
+But we must first impress ourselves with the utter contrast between
+Phoenicia and Judah in the matter of commercial experience, or we
+shall not feel the full force of this excursion which the prophet of a
+high, inland tribe of shepherds makes among the wharves and warehouses
+of the great merchant city on the sea.
+
+The Phoenician empire, it has often been remarked, presents a very
+close analogy to that of Great Britain; but even more entirely than in
+the case of Great Britain the glory of that empire was the wealth of its
+trade, and the character of the people was the result of their
+mercantile habits. A little strip of land, one hundred and forty miles
+long, and never more than fifteen broad, with the sea upon one side and
+the mountains upon the other, compelled its inhabitants to become miners
+and seamen. The hills shut off the narrow coast from the continent to
+which it belongs, and drove the increasing populations to seek their
+destiny by way of the sea. These took to it kindly, for they had the
+Semite's born instinct for trading. Planting their colonies all round
+the Mediterranean, exploiting every mine within reach of the coastland,
+establishing great trading depots both on the Nile and the Euphrates,
+with fleets that passed the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic and
+the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb into the Indian Ocean, the Phoenicians
+constructed a system of trade, which was not exceeded in range or
+influence till, more than two thousand years later, Portugal made the
+discovery of America and accomplished the passage of the Cape of Good
+Hope. From the coasts of Britain to those of Northwest India, and
+probably to Madagascar, was the extent of Phoenician credit and
+currency. Their trade tapped river basins so far apart as those of the
+Indus, the Euphrates, probably the Zambesi, the Nile, the Rhone, the
+Guadalquivir. They built ships and harbours for the Pharaohs and for
+Solomon. They carried Egyptian art and Babylonian knowledge to the
+Grecian archipelago, and brought back the metals of Spain and Britain.
+No wonder the prophet breaks into enthusiasm as he surveys Phoenician
+enterprise! _And on great waters the seed of Shihor, the harvest of the
+Nile, was her revenue; and she was the mart of nations._
+
+But upon trade the Phoenicians had built an empire. At home their
+political life enjoyed the freedom, energy and resources which are
+supplied by long habits of an extended commerce with other peoples. The
+constitution of the different Phoenician cities was not, as is
+sometimes supposed, republican, but monarchical; and the land belonged
+to the king. Yet the large number of wealthy families at once limited
+the power of the throne, and saved the commonwealth from being dependent
+upon the fortunes of a single dynasty. The colonies in close relation
+with the mother country assured an empire with its life in better
+circulation and with more reserve of power than either Egypt or
+Assyria. Tyre and Sidon were frequently overthrown, but they rose again
+oftener than the other great cities of antiquity, and were still places
+of importance when Babylon and Nineveh lay in irreparable ruin. Besides
+their native families of royal wealth and influence and their
+flourishing colonies, each with its prince, these commercial States kept
+foreign monarchs in their pay, and sometimes determined the fate of a
+dynasty. Isaiah entitles Tyre _the giver of crowns, the maker of kings,
+whose merchants are princes, and her traffickers are the honourable of
+the earth_.
+
+But trade with political results so splendid had an evil effect upon the
+character and spiritual temper of the people. By the indiscriminating
+ancients the Phoenicians were praised as inventors; the rudiments of
+most of the arts and sciences, of the alphabet and of money have been
+ascribed to them. But modern research has proved that of none of the
+many elements of civilisation which they introduced to the West were
+they the actual authors. The Phoenicians were simply carriers and
+middlemen. In all time there is no instance of a nation so wholly given
+over to buying and selling, who frequented even the battlefields of the
+world that they might strip the dead and purchase the captive.
+Phoenician history--though we must always do the people the justice to
+remember that we have their history only in fragments--affords few signs
+of the consciousness that there are things which a nation may strive
+after for their own sake, and not for the money they bring in. The
+world, which other peoples, still in the reverence of the religious
+youth of the race, regarded as a house of prayer, the Phoenicians had
+already turned into a den of thieves. They trafficked even with the
+mysteries and intelligences; and their own religion is largely a
+mixture of the religions of the other peoples, with whom they came into
+contact. The national spirit was venal and mercenary--the heart of an
+hireling, or, as Isaiah by a baser name describes it, the heart of _an
+harlot_. There is not throughout history a more perfect incarnation of
+the mercenary spirit than the Phoenician nation.
+
+Now let us turn to the experience of the Jews, whose faith had to face
+and account for this world-force.
+
+The history of the Jews in Europe has so identified them with trade that
+it is difficult for us to imagine a Jew free from its spirit or ignorant
+of its methods. But the fact is that in the time of Isaiah Israel was as
+little acquainted with commerce as it is possible for a civilised nation
+to be. Israel's was an inland territory. Till Solomon's reign the people
+had neither navy nor harbour. Their land was not abundant in materials
+for trade--it contained almost no minerals, and did not produce a
+greater supply of food than was necessary for the consumption of its
+inhabitants. It is true that the ambition of Solomon had brought the
+people within the temptations of commerce. He established trading
+cities, annexed harbours and hired a navy. But even then, and again in
+the reign of Uzziah, which reflects much of Solomon's commercial glory,
+Israel traded by deputies, and the mass of the people remained innocent
+of mercantile habits. Perhaps to moderns the most impressive proof of
+how little Israel had to do with trade is to be found in their laws of
+money-lending and of interest. The absolute prohibition which Moses
+placed upon the charging of interest could only have been possible among
+a people with the most insignificant commerce. To Isaiah himself
+commerce must have appeared alien. Human life, as he pictures it, is
+composed of war, politics and agriculture; his ideals for society are
+those of the shepherd and the farmer. We moderns cannot dissociate the
+future welfare of humanity from the triumphs of trade.
+
+  "For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
+  Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be;
+  Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
+  Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales."
+
+But all Isaiah's future is full of gardens and busy fields, of
+irrigating rivers and canals:--
+
+_Until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness
+become a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be counted for a
+forest.... Blessed are ye, that sow beside all waters, that send forth
+the feet of the ox and the ass._
+
+_And He shall give the rain of thy seed, that thou shalt sow the ground
+withal, and bread-corn, the increase of the ground; and it shall be
+juicy and fat: in that day shall thy cattle feed in large pastures._
+
+Conceive how trade looked to eyes which dwelt with enthusiasm upon
+scenes like these! It must have seemed to blast the future, to disturb
+the regularity of life with such violence as to shake religion herself!
+With all our convictions of the benefits of trade, even we feel no
+greater regret or alarm than when we observe the invasion by the rude
+forces of trade of some scene of rural felicity: blackening of sky and
+earth and stream; increasing complexity and entanglement of life;
+enormous growth of new problems and temptations; strange knowledge,
+ambitions and passions, that throb through life and strain the tissue of
+its simple constitution, like novel engines, which shake the ground and
+the strong walls, accustomed once to re-echo only the simple music of
+the mill-wheel and the weaver's shuttle. Isaiah did not fear an invasion
+of Judah by the habits and the machines of trade. There is no
+foreboding in this chapter of the day when his own people were to take
+the place of the Phoenicians as the commercial _harlots_ of the world,
+and a Jew was to be synonymous with usurer and _publican_. Yet we may
+employ our feelings to imagine his, and understand what this
+prophet--seated in the sanctuary of a pastoral and agricultural tribe,
+with its simple offerings of doves, and lambs and sheaves of corn,
+telling how their homes, and fields and whole rustic manner of life were
+subject to God--thought, and feared, and hoped of the vast commerce of
+Phoenicia, wondering how it also should be sanctified to Jehovah.
+
+First of all, Isaiah, as we might have expected from his large faith and
+broad sympathies, accepts and acknowledges this great world-force. His
+noble spirit shows neither timidity nor jealousy before it. Before his
+view what an unblemished prospect of it spreads! His descriptions tell
+more of his appreciation than long laudations would have done. He grows
+enthusiastic upon the grandeur of Tyre; and even when he prophesies that
+Assyria shall destroy it, it is with the feeling that such a destruction
+is really a desecration, and as if there lived essential glory in great
+commercial enterprise. Certainly from such a spirit we have much to
+learn. How often has religion, when brought face to face with the new
+forces of a generation--commerce, democracy or science--shown either a
+base timidity or baser jealousy, and met the innovations with cries of
+detraction or despair! Isaiah reads a lesson to the modern Church in the
+preliminary spirit with which she should meet the novel experiences of
+Providence. Whatever judgement may afterwards have to be passed, there
+is the immediate duty of frankly recognising greatness wherever it may
+occur. This is an essential principle, from the forgetfulness of which
+modern religion has suffered much. Nothing is gained by attempting to
+minimise new departures in the world's history; but everything is lost
+if we sit down in fear of them. It is a duty we owe to ourselves, and a
+worship which Providence demands from us, that we ungrudgingly
+appreciate every magnitude of which history brings us the knowledge.
+
+It is almost an unnecessary task to apply Isaiah's meaning to the
+commerce of our own day. But let us not miss his example in this: that
+the right to criticise the habits of trade and the ability to criticise
+them healthily are alone won by a just appreciation of trade's
+world-wide glory and serviceableness. There is no use preaching against
+the venal spirit and manifold temptations and degradations of trade,
+until we have realised the indispensableness of trade and its capacity
+for disciplining and exalting its ministers. The only way to correct the
+abuses of "the commercial spirit," against which many in our day are
+loud with indiscriminate rebuke, is to impress its victims, having first
+impressed yourself, with the opportunities and the ideals of commerce. A
+thing is great partly by its traditions and partly by its
+opportunities--partly by what it has accomplished and partly by the
+doors of serviceableness of which it holds the key. By either of these
+standards the magnitude of commerce is simply overwhelming. Having
+discovered the world-forces, commerce has built thereon the most
+powerful of our modern empires. Its exigencies compel peace; its
+resources are the sinews of war. If it has not always preceded religion
+and science in the conquest of the globe, it has shared with them their
+triumphs. Commerce has recast the modern world, so that we hardly think
+of the old national divisions in the greater social classes which have
+been its direct creation. Commerce determines national policies; its
+markets are among the schools of statesmen; its merchants _are_ still
+_princes, and its traffickers the honourable of the earth_.
+
+Therefore let all merchants and their apprentices believe, "Here is
+something worth putting our manhood into, worth living for, not with our
+brains only or our appetites, but with our conscience, with our
+imagination, with every curiosity and sympathy of our nature. Here is a
+calling with a healthy discipline, with a free spirit, with unrivalled
+opportunities of service, with an ancient and essential dignity." The
+reproach which is so largely imagined upon trade is the relic of a
+barbarous age. Do not tolerate it, for under its shadow, as under other
+artificial and unhealthy contempts of society, there are apt to grow up
+those sordid and slavish tempers, which soon make men deserve the
+reproach that was at first unjustly cast upon them. Dissipate the base
+influence of this reproach by lifting the imagination upon the antiquity
+and world-wide opportunities of trade--trade, _whose origin_, as Isaiah
+so finely puts it, _is of ancient days; and her feet carry her afar off
+to sojourn_.
+
+So generous an appreciation of the grandeur of commerce does not prevent
+Isaiah from exposing its besetting sin and degradation.
+
+The vocation of a merchant differs from others in this, that there is no
+inherent nor instinctive obligation in it to ends higher than those of
+financial profit--emphasized in our days into the more dangerous
+constraint of _immediate_ financial profit. No profession is of course
+absolutely free from the risk of this servitude; but other professions
+offer escapes, or at least mitigations, which are not possible to
+nearly the same extent in trade. Artist, artisan, preacher and statesman
+have ideals which generally act contrary to the compulsion of profit and
+tend to create a nobility of mind strong enough to defy it. They have
+given, so to speak, hostages to heaven--ideals of beauty, of accurate
+scholarship or of moral influence, which they dare not risk by
+abandoning themselves to the hunt for gain. But the calling of a
+merchant is not thus safeguarded. It does not afford those visions,
+those occasions of being caught away to the heavens, which are the
+inherent glories of other lives. The habits of trade make this the first
+thought--not what things of beauty are in themselves, not what men are
+as brothers, not what life is as God's discipline, but what things of
+beauty, and men and opportunities are worth to us--and in these times
+what they are _immediately_ worth--as measured by money. In such an
+absorption art, humanity, morals and religion become matters of growing
+indifference.
+
+To this spirit, which treats all things and men, high or low, as matters
+simply of profit, Isaiah gives a very ugly name. We call it the
+mercenary or venal spirit. Isaiah says it is the spirit of _the harlot_.
+
+The history of Phoenicia justified his words. To-day we remember her
+by nothing that is great, by nothing that is original. She left no art
+nor literature, and her once brave and skilful populations degenerated
+till we know them only as the slave-dealers, panders and prostitutes of
+the Roman empire. If we desire to find Phoenicia's influence on the
+religion of the world, we have to seek for it among the most sensual of
+Greek myths and the abominable practices of Corinthian worship. With
+such terrible literalness was Isaiah's harlot-curse fulfilled.
+
+What is true of Phoenicia may become true of Britain, and what has
+been seen on the large scale of a nation is exemplified every day in
+individual lives. The man who is entirely eaten up with the zeal of gain
+is no better than what Isaiah called Tyre. He has prostituted himself to
+covetousness. If day and night our thoughts are of profit, and the
+habit, so easily engendered in these times, of asking only, "What can I
+make of this?" is allowed to grow upon us, it shall surely come to pass
+that we are found sacrificing, like the poor unfortunate, the most
+sacred of our endowments and affections for gain, demeaning our natures
+at the feet of the world for the sake of the world's gold. A woman
+sacrifices her purity for coin, and the world casts her out. But some
+who would not touch her have sacrificed honour and love and pity for the
+same base wage, and in God's sight are no better than she. Ah, how much
+need is there for these bold, brutal standards of the Hebrew prophet to
+correct our own social misappreciations!
+
+Now for a very vain delusion upon this subject! It is often imagined in
+our day that if a man seek atonement for the venal spirit through the
+study of art, through the practice of philanthropy or through the
+cultivation of religion, he shall surely find it. This is
+false--plausible and often practised but utterly false. Unless a man see
+and reverence beauty in the very workshop and office of his business,
+unless he feel those whom he meets there, his employes and customers, as
+his brethren, unless he keep his business methods free from fraud, and
+honestly recognise his gains as a trust from the Lord, then no amount of
+devotion elsewhere to the fine arts, nor perseverance in philanthropy,
+nor fondness for the Church evinced by ever so large subscriptions, will
+deliver him from the devil of mercenariness. That is a plea of _alibi_
+that shall not prevail on the judgement day. He is only living a double
+life, whereof his art, philanthropy or religion is the occasional and
+dilettante portion, with not nearly so much influence on his character
+as the other, his calling and business, in which he still sacrifices
+love to gain. His real world--the world in which God set him, to buy and
+sell indeed, but also to serve and glorify his God--he is treating only
+as a big warehouse and exchange. And so much is this the case at the
+present day, in spite of all the worship of art and religion which is
+fashionable in mercantile circles, that we do not go too far when we say
+that if Jesus were now to visit our large markets and manufactories, in
+which the close intercourse of numbers of human persons renders the
+opportunities of service and testimony to God so frequent, He would
+scourge men from them, as He scourged the traffickers of the Temple, for
+that they had forgotten that _here_ was their Father's house, where
+their brethren had to be owned and helped, and their Father's glory
+revealed to the world.
+
+A nation with such a spirit was of course foredoomed to destruction.
+Isaiah predicts the absolute disappearance of Tyre from the attention of
+the world. _Tyre shall be forgotten seventy years._ _Then_, like some
+poor unfortunate whose day of beauty is past, she shall in vain practise
+her old advertisements on men. _After the end of seventy years it shall
+be unto Tyre as in the song of the harlot: Take an harp, go about the
+city, thou harlot that hast been forgotten; make sweet melody, sing many
+songs, that thou mayest be remembered._
+
+But Commerce is essential to the world. Tyre must revive; and the
+prophet sees her revive as the minister of Religion, the purveyor of the
+food of the servants of the Lord, and of the accessories of their
+worship. It must be confessed, that we are not a little shocked when we
+find Isaiah continuing to apply to Commerce his metaphor of a harlot,
+even after Commerce has entered the service of the true religion. He
+speaks of her wages being devoted to Jehovah, just in the same manner as
+those of certain notorious women of heathen temples were devoted to the
+idol of the temple. This is even against the directions of the Mosaic
+law. Isaiah, however, was a poet; and in his flights we must not expect
+him to carry the whole Law on his back. He was a poet, and probably no
+analogy would have more vividly appealed to his Oriental audience. It
+will be foolish to allow our natural prejudice against what we may feel
+to be the unhealthiness of the metaphor to blind us to the magnificence
+of the thought which he clothes in it.
+
+All this is another proof of the sanity and far sight of our prophet.
+Again we find that his conviction that judgement is coming does not
+render his spirit morbid, nor disturb his eye for things of beauty and
+profit in the world. Commerce, with all her faults, is essential, and
+must endure, nay shall prove in the days to come Religion's most
+profitable minister. The generosity and wisdom of this passage are the
+more striking when we remember the extremity of unrelieved denunciation
+to which other great teachers of religion have allowed themselves to be
+hurled by their rage against the sins of trade. But Isaiah, in the
+largest sense of the expression, is a man of the world--a man of the
+world because God made the world and rules it. Yet even from his far
+sight was hidden the length to which in the last days Commerce would
+carry her services to man and God, proving as she has done, under the
+flag of another Phoenicia, to all the extent of Isaiah's longing, one
+of Religion's most sincere and profitable handmaids.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV.
+
+_JERUSALEM AND SENNACHERIB_, 701 B.C.
+
+
+
+
+ISAIAH:--
+
+  xxxvi. 1.     Early in 701.
+
+  i.               "       "
+
+  xxii.            "       "
+
+  xxxiii.        A little later.
+
+  xxxvi. 2-xxxvii. "       "
+
+             _______
+
+  xxxviii.-xxxix. Date uncertain.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV.
+
+
+Into this fourth book we put all the rest of the prophecies of the Book
+of Isaiah, that have to do with the prophet's own time: chaps. i., xxii.
+and xxxiii., with the narrative in xxxvi., xxxvii. All these refer to
+the only Assyrian invasion of Judah and siege of Jerusalem: that
+undertaken by Sennacherib in 701.
+
+It is, however, right to remember once more, that many authorities
+maintain that there were two Assyrian invasions of Judah--one by Sargon
+in 711, the other by Sennacherib in 701--and that chaps. i. and xxii.
+(as well as x. 5-34) belong to the former of these. The theory is
+ingenious and tempting; but, in the silence of the Assyrian annals about
+any invasion of Judah by Sargon, it is impossible to adopt it. And
+although chaps. i. and xxii. differ very greatly in tone from chap.
+xxxiii., yet to account for the difference it is not necessary to
+suppose two different invasions, with a considerable period between
+them. Virtually, as will appear in the course of our exposition,
+Sennacherib's invasion of Judah was a double one.
+
+1. The first time Sennacherib's army invaded Judah they took all the
+fenced cities, and probably invested Jerusalem, but withdrew on payment
+of tribute and the surrender of the _casus belli_, the Assyrian vassal
+Padi, whom the Ekronites had deposed and given over to the keeping of
+Hezekiah. To this invasion refer Isa. i., xxii. and the first verse of
+xxxvi.: _Now it came to pass in the fourteenth[53] year of King Hezekiah
+that Sennacherib, King of Assyria, came up against all the fenced cities
+of Judah and took them._ This verse is the same as 2 Kings xviii. 13, to
+which, however, there is added in vv. 14-16 an account of the tribute
+sent by Hezekiah to Sennacherib at Lachish, that is not included in the
+narrative in Isaiah. Compare 2 Chron. xxxii. 1.
+
+  [53] It is confusing to find this date attached to Sennacherib's
+  invasion of 701, unless, with one or two critics, we place Hezekiah's
+  accession in 715. But Hezekiah acceded in 728 or 727, and 701 would
+  therefore be his twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year. Mr. Cheyne, who
+  takes 727 as the year of Hezekiah's accession, gets out of the
+  difficulty by reading "Sargon" for "Sennacherib" in this verse and in 2
+  Kings xiii., and thus secures another reference to that invasion of
+  Judah, which he supposes to have taken place under Sargon between 712
+  and 710. By the change of a letter some would read _twenty-fourth_ for
+  _fourteenth_. But in any case this date is confusing.
+
+2. But scarcely had the tribute been paid when Sennacherib, himself
+advancing to meet Egypt, sent back upon Jerusalem a second army of
+investment, with which was the Rabshakeh; and this was the army that so
+mysteriously disappeared from the eyes of the besieged. To the
+treacherous return of the Assyrians and the sudden deliverance of
+Jerusalem from their grasp refer Isa. xxxiii., xxxvi. 2-xxxvii., with
+the fuller and evidently original narrative in 2 Kings xviii. 17-xix.
+Compare 2 Chron. xxxii. 9-23.
+
+To the history of this double attempt upon Jerusalem in 701--xxxvi. and
+xxxvii.--there has been appended in xxxviii. and xxxix. an account of
+Hezekiah's illness and of an embassy to him from Babylon. These events
+probably happened some years before Sennacherib's invasion. But it will
+be most convenient for us to take them in the order in which they stand
+in the canon. They will naturally lead us up to a question that it is
+necessary we should discuss before taking leave of Isaiah--whether this
+great prophet of the endurance of the kingdom of God upon earth had any
+gospel for the individual who dropped away from it into death.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+_AT THE LOWEST EBB._
+
+ISAIAH i. and xxii. (701 B.C.).
+
+
+In the drama of Isaiah's life we have now arrived at the final act--a
+short and sharp one of a few months. The time is 701 B.C., the fortieth
+year of Isaiah's ministry, and about the twenty-sixth of Hezekiah's
+reign. The background is the invasion of Palestine by Sennacherib. The
+stage itself is the city of Jerusalem. In the clear atmosphere before
+the bursting of the storm Isaiah has looked round the whole world--his
+world--uttering oracles on the nations from Tyre to Egypt and from
+Ethiopia to Babylon. But now the Assyrian storm has burst, and all
+except the immediate neighbourhood of the prophet is obscured. From
+Jerusalem Isaiah will not again lift his eyes.
+
+The stage is thus narrow and the time short, but the action one of the
+most critical in the history of Israel, taking rank with the Exodus from
+Egypt and the Return from Babylon. To Isaiah himself it marks the summit
+of his career. For half a century Zion has been preparing for,
+forgetting and again preparing for, her first and final struggle with
+the Assyrian. Now she is to meet her foe, face to face across her own
+walls. For forty years Isaiah has predicted for the Assyrian an
+uninterrupted path of conquest to the very gates of Jerusalem, but
+certain check and confusion there. Sennacherib has overrun the world,
+and leaps upon Zion. The Jewish nation await their fate, Isaiah his
+vindication, and the credit of Israel's religion, one of the most
+extraordinary tests to which a spiritual faith was ever subjected.
+
+In the end, by the mysterious disappearance of the Assyrian, Jerusalem
+was saved, the prophet was left with his remnant and the future still
+open for Israel. But at the beginning of the end such an issue was by no
+means probable. Jewish panic and profligacy almost prevented the Divine
+purpose, and Isaiah went near to breaking his heart over the city, for
+whose redemption he had travailed for a lifetime. He was as sure as ever
+that this redemption must come, but a collapse of the people's faith and
+patriotism at the eleventh hour made its coming seem worthless.
+Jerusalem appeared bent on forestalling her deliverance by moral
+suicide. Despair, not of God but of the city, settled on Isaiah's heart;
+and in such a mood he wrote chap. xxii. We may entitle it therefore,
+though written at a time when the tide should have been running to the
+full, "At the Lowest Ebb."
+
+We have thus stated at the outset the motive of this chapter, because it
+is one of the most unexpected and startling of all Isaiah's prophecies.
+In it "we can discern precipices." Beneath our eyes, long lifted by the
+prophet to behold a future _stretching very far forth_, this chapter
+suddenly yawns, a pit of blackness. For utterness of despair and the
+absolute sentence which it passes on the citizens of Zion we have had
+nothing like it from Isaiah since the evil days of Ahaz. The historical
+portions of the Bible which cover this period are not cleft by such a
+crevasse, and of course the official Assyrian annals, full as they are
+of the details of Sennacherib's campaign in Palestine, know nothing of
+the moral condition of Jerusalem.[54] Yet if we put the Hebrew and
+Assyrian narratives together, and compare them with chaps. i. and xxii.
+of Isaiah, we may be sure that the following was something like the
+course of events which led down to this woeful depth in Judah's
+experience.
+
+  [54] _Records of the Past_, i. 33 ff. vii.; Schrader's _Cuneiform
+  Inscriptions and the Old Testament_ (Whitehouse's translation).
+
+In a Syrian campaign Sennacherib's path was plain--to begin with the
+Phoenician cities, march quickly south by the level coastland,
+subduing the petty chieftains upon it, meet Egypt at its southern end,
+and then, when he had rid himself of his only formidable foe, turn to
+the more delicate task of warfare among the hills of Judah--a campaign
+which he could scarcely undertake with a hostile force like Egypt on his
+flank. This course, he tells us, he followed. "In my third campaign, to
+the land of Syria I went. Luliah (Elulaeus), King of Sidon--for the
+fearful splendour of my majesty overwhelmed him--fled to a distant spot
+in the midst of the sea. His land I entered." City after city fell to
+the invader. The princes of Aradus, Byblus and Ashdod, by the coast, and
+even Moab and Edom, far inland, sent him their submission. He attacked
+Ascalon, and captured its king. He went on, and took the Philistine
+cities of Beth-dagon, Joppa, Barka and Azor, all of them within forty
+miles of Jerusalem, and some even visible from her neighbourhood. South
+of this group, and a little over twenty-five miles from Jerusalem, lay
+Ekron; and here Sennacherib had so good a reason for anger, that the
+inhabitants, expecting no mercy at his hands, prepared a stubborn
+defence.
+
+Ten years before this Sargon had set Padi, a vassal of his own, as king
+over Ekron; but the Ekronites had risen against Padi, put him in chains,
+and sent him to their ally Hezekiah, who now held him in Jerusalem.
+"These men," says Sennacherib, "were now terrified in their hearts; the
+shadows of death overwhelmed them."[55] Before Ekron was reduced,
+however, the Egyptian army arrived in Philistia, and Sennacherib had to
+abandon the siege for these arch-enemies. He defeated them in the
+neighbourhood, at Eltekeh, returned to Ekron, and completed its siege.
+Then, while he himself advanced southwards in pursuit of the Egyptians,
+he detached a corps, which, marching eastwards through the mountain
+passes, overran all Judah and threatened Jerusalem. "And Hezekiah, King
+of Judah, who had not bowed down at my feet, forty-six of his strong
+cities, his castles and the smaller towns in their neighbourhood beyond
+number, by casting down ramparts and by open attack, by battle--_zuk_,
+of the feet; _nisi_, hewing to pieces and casting down (?)--I besieged,
+I captured.... He himself, like a bird in a cage, inside Jerusalem, his
+royal city, I shut him up; siege-towers against him I constructed, for
+he had given command to renew the bulwarks of the great gate of his
+city."[56] But Sennacherib does not say that he took Jerusalem, and
+simply closes the narrative of his campaign with the account of large
+tribute which Hezekiah sent after him to Nineveh.
+
+  [55] _Records of the Past_, i. 38; vii. 62.
+
+  [56] _Ibid._, i., 40; Schrader, i., 286.
+
+Here, then, we have material for a graphic picture of Jerusalem and her
+populace, when chaps. i. and xxii. were uttered by Isaiah.
+
+At Jerusalem we are within a day's journey of any part of the territory
+of Judah. We feel the kingdom throb to its centre at Assyria's first
+footfall on the border. The nation's life is shuddering in upon its
+capital, couriers dashing up with the first news; fugitives hard upon
+them; palace, arsenal, market and temple thrown into commotion; the
+politicians busy; the engineers hard at work completing the
+fortifications, leading the suburban wells to a reservoir within the
+walls, levelling every house and tree outside which could give shelter
+to the besiegers, and heaping up the material on the ramparts, till
+there lies nothing but a great, bare, waterless circle round a
+high-banked fortress. Across this bareness the lines of fugitives
+streaming to the gates; provincial officials and their retinues;
+soldiers whom Hezekiah had sent out to meet the foe, returning without
+even the dignity of defeat upon them; husbandmen, with cattle and
+remnants of grain in disorder; women and children; the knaves, cowards
+and helpless of the whole kingdom pouring their fear, dissoluteness and
+disease into the already-unsettled populace of Jerusalem. Inside the
+walls opposing political factions and a weak king; idle crowds, swaying
+to every rumour and intrigue; the ordinary restraints and regularities
+of life suspended, even patriotism gone with counsel and courage, but in
+their place fear and shame and greed of life. Such was the state in
+which Jerusalem faced the hour of her visitation.
+
+Gradually the Visitant came near over the thirty miles which lay between
+the capital and the border. Signs of the Assyrian advance were given in
+the sky, and night after night the watchers on Mount Zion, seeing the
+glare in the west, must have speculated which of the cities of Judah was
+being burned. Clouds of smoke across the heavens from prairie and forest
+fires told how war, even if it passed, would leave a trail of famine;
+and men thought with breaking hearts of the villages and fields,
+heritage of the tribes of old, that were now bare to the foot and the
+fire of the foreigner. _Your country is desolate; your cities are burned
+with fire; your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is
+desolate as the overthrow of strangers. And the daughter of Zion is left
+as a booth in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers. Except
+Jehovah of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have
+been as Sodom, we should have been like unto Gomorrah._[57] Then came
+touch of the enemy, the appearance of armed bands, vistas down
+Jerusalem's favourite valleys of chariots, squadrons of horsemen
+emerging upon the plateaus to north and west of the city, heavy
+siege-towers and swarms of men innumerable. _And Elam bare the quiver,
+with troops of men and horsemen; and Kir uncovered the shield._ At last
+they saw their fears of fifty years face to face! Far-away names were
+standing by their gates, actual bowmen and flashing shields! As
+Jerusalem gazed upon the terrible Assyrian armaments, how many of her
+inhabitants remembered Isaiah's words delivered a generation
+before!--_Behold, they shall come with speed swiftly; none shall be
+weary or stumble among them; neither shall the string of their loins be
+lax nor the latchet of their shoes be broken; whose arrows are sharp,
+and all their bows bent; their horses' hoofs shall be counted like
+flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind; their roaring shall be like a
+lion: they shall roar like young lions. For all this His anger is not
+turned away, but His hand is stretched out still._
+
+  [57] Chap. i. 7-9.
+
+There were, however, two supports, on which that distracted populace
+within the walls still steadied themselves. The one was the
+Temple-worship, the other the Egyptian alliance.
+
+History has many remarkable instances of peoples betaking themselves in
+the hour of calamity to the energetic discharge of the public rites of
+religion. But such a resort is seldom, if ever, a real moral conversion.
+It is merely physical nervousness, apprehension for life, clutching at
+the one thing within reach that feels solid, which it abandons as soon
+as panic has passed. When the crowds in Jerusalem betook themselves to
+the Temple, with unwonted wealth of sacrifice, Isaiah denounced this as
+hypocrisy and futility. _To what purpose is the multitude of your
+sacrifices unto Me? saith Jehovah.... I am weary to bear them. And when
+ye spread forth your hands, I will hide Mine eyes from you; yea, when ye
+make many prayers, I will not hear_ (i. 11-15).
+
+Isaiah might have spared his scornful orders to the people to desist
+from worship. Soon afterwards they abandoned it of their own will, but
+from motives very different from those urged by him. The second support
+to which Jerusalem clung was the Egyptian alliance--the pet project of
+the party then in power. They had carried it to a successful issue,
+taunting Isaiah with their success.[58] He had continued to denounce
+it, and now the hour was approaching when their cleverness and
+confidence were to be put to the test. It was known in Jerusalem that an
+Egyptian army was advancing to Sennacherib, and politicians and people
+awaited the encounter with anxiety.
+
+  [58] See p. 238.
+
+We are aware what happened. Egypt was beaten at Eltekeh; the alliance
+was stamped a failure; Jerusalem's last worldly hope was taken from her.
+When the news reached the city, something took place, of which our moral
+judgement tells us more than any actual record of facts. The Government
+of Hezekiah gave way; the rulers, whose courage and patriotism had been
+identified with the Egyptian alliance, lost all hope for their country,
+and fled, as Isaiah puts it, _en masse_ (xxii. 3). There was no battle,
+no defeat at arms (_id._ 2, 3); but the Jewish State collapsed.
+
+Then, when the last material hope of Judah fell, fell her religion too.
+The Egyptian disappointment, while it drove the rulers out of their
+false policies, drove the people out of their unreal worship. What had
+been a city of devotees became in a moment a city of revellers. Formerly
+all had been sacrifices and worship, but now feasting and blasphemy.
+_Behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh
+and drinking wine: Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die_ (_id._
+13. The reference of ver. 12 is probably to chap. i.).
+
+Now all Isaiah's ministry had been directed just against these two
+things: the Egyptian alliance and the purely formal observance of
+religion--trust in the world and trust in religiousness. And together
+both of these had given way, and the Assyrian was at the gates. Truly it
+was the hour of Isaiah's vindication. Yet--and this is the tragedy--it
+had come too late. The prophet could not use it. The two things he said
+would collapse had collapsed, but for the people there seemed now no
+help to be justified from the thing which he said would remain. What was
+the use of the city's deliverance, when the people themselves had
+failed! The feelings of triumph, which the prophet might have expressed,
+were swallowed up in unselfish grief over the fate of his wayward and
+abandoned Jerusalem.
+
+_What aileth thee now_--and in these words we can hear the old man
+addressing his fickle child, whose changefulness by this time he knew so
+well--_what aileth thee now that thou art wholly gone up to the
+housetops_--we see him standing at his door watching this ghastly
+holiday--_O thou that art full of shoutings, a tumultuous city, a joyous
+town?_ What are you rejoicing at in such an hour as this, when you have
+not even the bravery of your soldiers to celebrate, when you are without
+that pride which has brought songs from the lips of a defeated people as
+they learned that their sons had fallen with their faces to the foe, and
+has made even the wounds of the dead borne through the gate lips of
+triumph, calling to festival! _For thy slain are not slain with the
+sword, neither are they dead in battle._
+
+  _All thy chiefs fled in heaps;
+    Without bow they were taken:
+  All thine that were found were taken in heaps;
+    From far had they run.
+  Wherefore I say, Look away from me;
+    Let me make bitterness bitterer by weeping.
+  Press not to comfort me
+    For the ruin of the daughter of my people._
+
+Urge not your mad holiday upon me! _For a day of discomfiture and of
+breaking and of perplexity hath the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, in the
+valley of vision, a breaking down of the wall and a crying to the
+mountain._ These few words of prose, which follow the pathetic elegy,
+have a finer pathos still. The cumulative force of the successive
+clauses is very impressive: _disappointment_ at the eleventh hour; the
+sense of a being _trampled_ and overborne by sheer brute force; the
+counsels, courage, hope and faith of fifty years crushed to blank
+_perplexity_, and all this from Himself--_the Lord, Jehovah of
+hosts_--in the very _valley of vision_, the home of prophecy; as if He
+had meant of purpose to destroy these long confidences of the past on
+the floor where they had been wrestled for and asserted, and not by the
+force of the foe, but by the folly of His own people, to make them
+ashamed. The last clause crashes out the effect of it all; every
+spiritual rampart and refuge torn down, there is nothing left but an
+appeal to the hills to fall and cover us--_a breaking down of the wall
+and a crying to the mountain_.
+
+On the brink of the precipice, Isaiah draws back for a moment, to
+describe with some of his old fire the appearance of the besiegers (vv.
+6-8_a_). And this suggests what kind of preparation Jerusalem had made
+for her foe--every kind, says Isaiah, but the supreme one. The arsenal,
+Solomon's _forest-house_, with its cedar pillars, had been looked to
+(ver. 8), the fortifications inspected and increased, and the suburban
+waters brought within them (vv. 9-11_a_). _But ye looked not unto Him
+that had done this_, who had brought this providence upon you; _neither
+had ye respect unto Him that fashioned it long ago_, whose own plan it
+had been. To your alliances and fortifications you fled in the hour of
+calamity, but not to Him in whose guidance the course of calamity lay.
+And therefore, when your engineering and diplomacy failed you, your
+religion vanished with them. _In that day did the Lord, Jehovah of
+hosts, call to weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding
+with sackcloth; but, behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing
+sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: Let us eat and drink, for
+to-morrow we shall die._ It was the dropping of the mask. For half a
+century this people had worshipped God, but they had never trusted Him
+beyond the limits of their treaties and their bulwarks. And so when
+their allies were defeated, and their walls began to tremble, their
+religion, bound up with these things, collapsed also; they ceased even
+to be men, crying like beasts, _Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
+die_. For such a state of mind Isaiah will hold out no promise; it is
+the sin against the Holy Ghost, and for it there is no forgiveness. _And
+Jehovah of hosts revealed Himself in mine ears. Surely this iniquity
+shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord, Jehovah of
+hosts._
+
+Back forty years the word had been, _Go and tell this people, Hear ye
+indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make
+the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their
+eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and
+understand with their heart, and turn again and be healed._ What
+happened now was only what was foretold then: _And if there be yet a
+tenth in it, it shall again be for consumption._ That radical revision
+of judgement was now being literally fulfilled, when Isaiah, sure at
+last of his remnant within the walls of Jerusalem, was forced for their
+sin to condemn even them to death.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nevertheless, Isaiah had still respect to the ultimate survival of a
+remnant. How firmly he believed in it could not be more clearly
+illustrated than by the fact that when he had so absolutely devoted his
+fellow-citizens to destruction he also took the most practical means for
+securing a better political future. If there is any reason, it can only
+be this, for putting the second section of chap. xxii., which advocates
+a change of ministry in the city (vv. 15-22), so close to the first,
+which sees ahead nothing but destruction for the State (vv. 1-14).
+
+The _mayor of the palace_ at this time was one Shebna, also called
+_minister_ or _deputy_ (lit. _friend_ of the king). That his father is
+not named implies perhaps that Shebna was a foreigner; his own name
+betrays a Syrian origin; and he has been justly supposed to be the
+leader of the party then in power, whose policy was the Egyptian
+alliance, and whom in these latter years Isaiah had so frequently
+denounced as the root of Judah's bitterness. To this unfamilied
+intruder, who had sought to establish himself in Jerusalem, after the
+manner of those days, by hewing himself a great sepulchre, Isaiah
+brought sentence of violent banishment: _Behold, Jehovah will be
+hurling, hurling thee away, thou big man, and crumpling, crumpling thee
+together. He will roll, roll thee on, thou rolling-stone, like a ball_
+thrown out _on broad level ground; there shall thou die, and there shall
+be the chariots of thy glory, thou shame of the house of thy lord. And I
+thrust thee from thy post, and from thy station do they pull thee down_.
+This vagabond was not to die in his bed, nor to be gathered in his big
+tomb to the people on whom he had foisted himself. He should continue a
+_rolling-stone_. For him, like Cain, there was a land of Nod; and upon
+it he was to find a vagabond's death.
+
+To fill this upstart's place, Isaiah solemnly designated a man with a
+father: Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah. The formulas he uses are perhaps
+the official ones customary upon induction to an office. But it may be
+also, that Isaiah has woven into these some expressions of even greater
+promise than usual. For this change of office-bearers was critical, and
+the overthrow of the "party of action" meant to Isaiah the beginning of
+the blessed future. _And it shall come to pass that in that day I will
+call My servant Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah; and I will clothe him with
+thy robe, and with thy girdle will I strengthen him, and thine
+administration will I give into his hand, and he shall be for a father
+to the inhabitant of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. And I will set
+the key of the house of David upon his shoulder; and he shall open, and
+none shut: and he shall shut, and none open. And I will hammer him in, a
+nail in a firm place, and he shall be for a throne of glory to his
+father's house._ Thus to the last Isaiah will not allow Shebna to forget
+that he is without root among the people of God, that he has neither
+father nor family.
+
+But a family is a temptation, and the weight of it may drag even the man
+of the Lord's own hammering out of his place. This very year we find
+Eliakim in Shebna's post,[59] and Shebna reduced to be secretary; but
+Eliakim's family seem to have taken advantage of their relative's
+position, and either at the time he was designated, or more probably
+later, Isaiah wrote two sentences of warning upon the dangers of
+nepotism. Catching at the figure, with which his designation of Eliakim
+closed, that Eliakim would be a peg in a solid wall, a throne on which
+the glory of his father's house might settle, Isaiah reminds the
+much-encumbered statesman that the firmest peg will give way if you hang
+too much on it, the strongest man be pulled down by his dependent and
+indolent family. _They shall hang upon him all the weight of his
+father's house, the scions and the offspring_ (terms contrasted as
+degrees of worth), _all the little vessels, from the vessels of cups to
+all the vessels of flagons_. _In that day, saith Jehovah of hosts, shall
+the peg that was knocked into a firm place give way, and it shall be
+knocked out and fall, and down shall be cut the burden that was upon it,
+for Jehovah hath spoken._
+
+  [59] Isa. xxxvi. 3.
+
+So we have not one, but a couple of tragedies. Eliakim, the son of
+Hilkiah, follows Shebna, the son of Nobody. The fate of the overburdened
+nail is as grievous as that of the rolling stone. It is easy to pass
+this prophecy over as a trivial incident; but when we have carefully
+analysed each verse, restored to the words their exact shade of
+signification, and set them in their proper contrasts, we perceive the
+outlines of two social dramas, which it requires very little imagination
+to invest with engrossing moral interest.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+_THE TURN OF THE TIDE: MORAL EFFECTS OF FORGIVENESS._
+
+ISAIAH xxii., contrasted with xxxiii. (701 B.C.).
+
+
+The collapse of Jewish faith and patriotism in the face of the enemy was
+complete. Final and absolute did Isaiah's sentence ring out: _Surely
+this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith Jehovah of
+hosts._ So we learn from chap. xxii., written, as we conceive, in 701,
+when the Assyrian armies had at last invested Jerusalem. But in chap.
+xxxiii., which critics unite in placing a few months later in the same
+year, Isaiah's tone is entirely changed. He hurls the woe of the Lord
+upon the Assyrians; confidently announces their immediate destruction;
+turns, while the whole city's faith hangs upon him, in supplication to
+the Lord; and announces the stability of Jerusalem, her peace, her glory
+and the forgiveness of all her sins. It is this great moral difference
+between chaps. xxii. and xxxiii.--prophecies that must have been
+delivered within a few months of each other--which this chapter seeks to
+expound.
+
+In spite of her collapse, as pictured in chap. xxii., Jerusalem was not
+taken. Her rulers fled; her people, as if death were certain, betook
+themselves to dissipation; and yet the city did not fall into the hands
+of the Assyrian. Sennacherib himself does not pretend to have taken
+Jerusalem. He tells us how closely he invested Jerusalem, but he does
+not add that he took it, a silence which is the more significant that he
+records the capture of every other town which his armies attempted. He
+says that Hezekiah offered him tribute, and details the amount he
+received. He adds that the tribute was not paid at Jerusalem (as it
+would have been had Jerusalem been conquered), but that for "the payment
+of the tribute and the performance of homage" Hezekiah "despatched his
+envoy"[60] to him when he was at some distance from Jerusalem. All this
+agrees with the Bible narrative. In the book of Kings we are told how
+Hezekiah sent to the King of Assyria at Lachish, saying, _I have
+offended; return from me; that which thou puttest upon me I will bear_.
+_And the King of Assyria appointed unto Hezekiah, King of Judah, three
+hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold. And Hezekiah gave
+him all the silver that was found in the house of Jehovah and in the
+treasures of the king's house. At the same time did Hezekiah cut off the
+gold from the doors of the temple of Jehovah, and from the pillars which
+Hezekiah, King of Judah, had overlaid, and gave it to the King of
+Assyria._[61] It was indeed a sore submission, when even the Temple of
+the Lord had to be stripped of its gold. But it purchased the relief of
+the city; and no price was too high to pay for that at such a moment as
+the present, when the populace was demoralised. We may even see
+Isaiah's hand in the submission. The integrity of Jerusalem was the one
+fact on which the word of the Lord had been pledged, on which the
+promised remnant could be rallied. The Assyrian must not be able to say
+that he has made Zion's God like the gods of the heathen, and her people
+must see that even when they have given her up Jehovah can hold her for
+Himself, though in holding He tear and wound (xxxi. 4). The Temple is
+greater than the gold of the Temple; let even the latter be stripped off
+and sold to the heathen if it can purchase the integrity of the former.
+So Jerusalem remained inviolate; she was still _the virgin, the daughter
+of Zion_.
+
+  [60] Schrader, _Cuneiform Inscriptions_, _O.T._, i., p. 286.
+
+  [61] 2 Kings xviii. 13-16. Here closes a paragraph. Ver. 17 begins to
+  describe what Sennacherib did, in spite of Hezekiah's submission. He had
+  withdrawn the army that had invested Jerusalem, for Hezekiah purchased
+  its withdrawal by the tribute he sent. But Sennacherib, in spite of
+  this, sent another corps of war against Jerusalem, which second attack
+  is described in ver. 17 and onwards.
+
+And now upon the redeemed city Isaiah could proceed to rebuild the
+shattered faith and morals of her people. He could say to them,
+"Everything has turned out as, by the word of the Lord, I said it
+should. The Assyrian has come down; Egypt has failed you. Your
+politicians, with their scorn of religion and their confidence in their
+cleverness, have deserted you. I told you that your numberless
+sacrifices and pomp of unreal religion would avail you nothing in your
+day of disaster, and lo! when this came, your religion collapsed. Your
+abounding wickedness, I said, could only close in your ruin and
+desertion by God. But one promise I kept steadfast: that Jerusalem would
+not fall; and to your penitence, whenever it should be real, I assured
+forgiveness. Jerusalem stands to-day, according to my word; and I repeat
+my gospel. History has vindicated my word, but _Come now, let us bring
+our reasoning to a close, saith the Lord; though your sins be as
+scarlet, they shall be white as snow: though they be red like crimson,
+they shall be as wool_. I call upon you to build again on your redeemed
+city, and by the grace of this pardon, the fallen ruins of your life."
+
+Some such sermon--if indeed not actually part of chap. i.--we must
+conceive Isaiah to have delivered to the people when Hezekiah had bought
+off Sennacherib, for we find the state of Jerusalem suddenly altered.
+Instead of the panic, which imagined the daily capture of the city, and
+rushed in hectic holiday to the housetops, crying, _Let us eat and
+drink, for to-morrow we die_, we see the citizens back upon the walls,
+trembling yet trusting. Instead of sweeping past Isaiah in their revelry
+and leaving him to feel that after forty years of travail he had lost
+all his influence with them, we see them gathering round about him as
+their single hope and confidence (xxxvii.). King and people look to
+Isaiah as their counsellor, and cannot answer the enemy without
+consulting him. What a change from the days of the Egyptian alliance,
+embassies sent off against his remonstrance, and intrigues developed
+without his knowledge; when Ahaz insulted him, and the drunken magnates
+mimicked him, and, in order to rouse an indolent people, he had to walk
+about the streets of Jerusalem for three years, stripped like a captive!
+Truly this was the day of Isaiah's triumph, when God by events
+vindicated his prophecy, and all the people acknowledged his leadership.
+
+It was the hour of the prophet's triumph, but the nation had as yet only
+trials before it. God has not done with nations or men when He has
+forgiven them. This people, whom of His grace, and in spite of
+themselves, God had saved from destruction, stood on the brink of
+another trial. God had given them a new lease of life, but it was
+immediately to pass through the furnace. They had bought off
+Sennacherib, but Sennacherib came back.
+
+When Sennacherib got the tribute, he repented of the treaty he had made
+with Hezekiah. He may have felt that it was a mistake to leave in his
+rear so powerful a fortress, while he had still to complete the
+overthrow of the Egyptians. So, in spite of the tribute, he sent a force
+back to Jerusalem to demand her surrender. We can imagine the moral
+effect upon King Hezekiah and his people. It was enough to sting the
+most demoralised into courage. Sennacherib had doubtless expected so
+pliant a king and so crushed a people to yield at once. But we may
+confidently picture the joy of Isaiah, as he felt the return of the
+Assyrians to be the very thing required to restore spirit to his
+demoralised countrymen. Here was a foe, whom they could face with a
+sense of justice, and not, as they had met him before, in carnal
+confidence and the pride of their own cleverness. Now was to be a war
+not, like former wars, undertaken merely for party glory, but with the
+purest feelings of patriotism and the firmest sanctions of religion, a
+campaign to be entered upon, not with Pharaoh's support and the strength
+of Egyptian chariots, but with God Himself as an ally--of which it could
+be said to Judah, _Thy righteousness shall go before thee, and the glory
+of the Lord shall be thy rereward_.
+
+On what free, exultant wings the spirit of Isaiah must have risen to the
+sublime occasion! We know him as by nature an ardent patriot and
+passionate lover of his city, but through circumstance her pitiless
+critic and unsparing judge. In all the literature of patriotism there
+are no finer odes and orations than those which it owes to him; from no
+lips came stronger songs of war, and no heart rejoiced more in the
+valour that turns the battle from the gate. But till now Isaiah's
+patriotism had been chiefly a conscience of his country's sins, his
+passionate love for Jerusalem repressed by as stern a loyalty to
+righteousness, and all his eloquence and courage spent in holding his
+people from war and persuading them _to returning and rest_. At last
+this conflict is at an end. The stubbornness of Judah, which has divided
+like some rock the current of her prophet's energies, and forced it back
+writhing and eddying upon itself, is removed. Isaiah's faith and his
+patriotism run free with the force of twin-tides in one channel, and we
+hear the fulness of their roar as they leap together upon the enemies of
+God and the fatherland. _Woe to thee, thou spoiler, and thou wast not
+spoiled, thou treacherous dealer, and they did not deal treacherously
+with thee! Whenever thou ceasest to spoil, thou shall be spoiled; and
+whenever thou hast made an end to deal treacherously, they shall deal
+treacherously with thee. O Jehovah, be gracious unto us; for Thee have
+we waited: be Thou their arm every morning, our salvation also in the
+time of trouble. From the noise of a surging the peoples have fled; from
+the lifting up of Thyself the nations are scattered. And gathered is
+your spoil, the gathering of the caterpillar; like the leaping of
+locusts, they are leaping upon it. Exalted is Jehovah; yea, He dwelleth
+on high: He hath filled Zion with justice and righteousness. And there
+shall be stability of thy times, wealth of salvation, wisdom and
+knowledge; the fear of Jehovah, it shall be his treasure_ (xxxiii. 1-6).
+
+Thus, then, do we propose to bridge the gulf which lies between chaps.
+i. and xxii. on the one hand and chap. xxxiii. on the other. If they are
+all to be dated from the year 701, some such bridge is necessary. And
+the one we have traced is both morally sufficient and in harmony with
+what we know to have been the course of events.
+
+What do we learn from it all? We learn a great deal upon that truth
+which chap. xxxiii. closes by announcing--the truth of Divine
+forgiveness.
+
+The forgiveness of God is the foundation of every bridge from a hopeless
+past to a courageous present. That God can make the past be for guilt as
+though it had not been is always to Isaiah the assurance of the future.
+An old Greek miniature[62] represents him with Night behind him, veiled
+and sullen and holding a reversed torch. But before him stands Dawn and
+Innocence, a little child, with bright face and forward step and torch
+erect and burning. From above a hand pours light upon the face of the
+prophet, turned upwards. It is the message of a Divine pardon. Never did
+prophet more wearily feel the moral continuity of the generations, the
+lingering and ineradicable effects of crime. Only faith in a pardoning
+God could have enabled him, with such conviction of the inseparableness
+of yesterday and to-morrow, to make divorce between them, and turning
+his back on the past, as this miniature represents, hail the future as
+Immanuel, a child of infinite promise. From exposing and scourging the
+past, from proving it corrupt and pregnant with poison for all the
+future, Isaiah will turn on a single verse, and give us a future without
+war, sorrow or fraud. His pivot is ever the pardon of God. But nowhere
+is his faith in this so powerful, his turning upon it so swift, as at
+this period of Jerusalem's collapse, when, having sentenced the people
+to death for their iniquity--_It was revealed in mine ears by Jehovah of
+hosts, Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die,
+saith the Lord, Jehovah of hosts_ (xxii. 14)--he swings round on his
+promise of a little before--_Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall
+be white as snow_--and to the people's penitence pronounces in the last
+verse of chap. xxxiii. a final absolution: _The inhabitant shall not
+say, I am sick; the people that dwell therein are forgiven their
+iniquity_. If chap. xxxiii. be, as many think, Isaiah's latest oracle,
+then we have the literal crown of all his prophesying in these two
+words: _forgiven iniquity_. It is as he put it early that same year:
+_Come now and let us bring our reasoning to a close; though your sins be
+as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow: though they be red like
+crimson, they shall be as wool_. If man is to have a future, this must
+be the conclusion of all his past.
+
+  [62] Didron _Christian Iconography_, fig. 52.
+
+But the absoluteness of God's pardon, making the past as though it had
+not been, is not the only lesson which the spiritual experience of
+Jerusalem in that awful year of 701 has for us. Isaiah's gospel of
+forgiveness is nothing less than this: that when God gives pardon He
+gives Himself. The name of the blessed future, which is entered through
+pardon--as in that miniature, a child--is Immanuel: _God-with-us_. And
+if it be correct that we owe the forty-sixth Psalm to these months when
+the Assyrian came back upon Jerusalem, then we see how the city, that
+had abandoned God, is yet able to sing when she is pardoned, _God is our
+refuge and our strength, a very present help in the midst of troubles_.
+And this gospel of forgiveness is not only Isaiah's. According to the
+whole Bible, there is but one thing which separates man from God--that
+is sin, and when sin is done away with, God cannot be kept from man. In
+giving pardon to man, God gives back to man Himself. How gloriously
+evident this truth becomes in the New Testament! Christ, who is set
+before us as the Lamb of God, who beareth the sins of the world, is also
+Immanuel--God-with-us. The Sacrament, which most plainly seals to the
+believer the value of the One Sacrifice for sin, is the Sacrament in
+which the believer feeds upon Christ and appropriates Him. The sinner,
+who comes to Christ, not only receives pardon for Christ's sake, but
+receives Christ. Forgiveness means nothing less than this: that in
+giving pardon God gives Himself.
+
+But if forgiveness mean all this, then the objections frequently brought
+against a conveyance of it so unconditioned as that of Isaiah fall to
+the ground. Forgiveness of such a kind cannot be either unjust or
+demoralising. On the contrary, we see Jerusalem permoralised by it. At
+first, it is true, the sense of weakness and fear abounds, as we learn
+from the narrative in chaps. xxxvi. and xxxvii. But where there was
+vanity, recklessness and despair, giving way to dissipation, there is
+now humility, discipline and a leaning upon God, that are led up to
+confidence and exultation. Jerusalem's experience is just another proof
+that any moral results are possible to so great a process as the return
+of God to the soul. Awful is the responsibility of them who receive such
+a Gift and such a Guest; but the sense of that awfulness is the
+atmosphere, in which obedience and holiness and the courage that is born
+of both love best to grow. One can understand men scoffing at messages
+of pardon so unconditioned as Isaiah's, who think they "mean no more
+than a clean slate." Taken in this sense, the gospel of forgiveness must
+prove a savour of death unto death. But just as Jerusalem interpreted
+the message of her pardon to mean that _God is in the midst of her; she
+shall not be moved_, and straightway obedience was in all her hearts,
+and courage upon all her walls, so neither to us can be futile the New
+Testament form of the same gospel, which makes our pardoned soul the
+friend of God, accepted in the Beloved, and our body His holy temple.
+
+Upon one other point connected with the forgiveness of sins we get
+instruction from the experience of Jerusalem. A man has difficulty in
+squaring his sense of forgiveness with the return on the back of it of
+his old temptations and trials, with the hostility of fortune and with
+the inexorableness of nature. Grace has spoken to his heart, but
+Providence bears more hard upon him than ever. Pardon does not change
+the outside of life; it does not immediately modify the movements of
+history, or suspend the laws of nature. Although God has forgiven
+Jerusalem, Assyria comes back to besiege her. Although the penitent be
+truly reconciled to God, the constitutional results of his fall remain:
+the frequency of temptation, the power of habit, the bias and facility
+downwards, the physical and social consequences. Pardon changes none of
+these things. It does not keep off the Assyrians.
+
+But if pardon means the return of God to the soul, then in this we have
+the secret of the return of the foe. Men could not try nor develop a
+sense of the former except by their experience of the latter. We have
+seen why Isaiah must have welcomed the perfidious reappearance of the
+Assyrians after he had helped to buy them off. Nothing could better test
+the sincerity of Jerusalem's repentance, or rally her dissipated forces.
+Had the Assyrians not returned, the Jews would have had no experimental
+proof of God's restored presence, and the great miracle would never
+have happened that rang through human history for evermore--a
+trumpet-call to faith in the God of Israel. And so still _the Lord
+scourgeth every son whom He receiveth_, because He would put our
+penitence to the test; because He would discipline our disorganised
+affections, and give conscience and will a chance of wiping out defeat
+by victory; because He would baptize us with the most powerful baptism
+possible--the sense of being trusted once more to face the enemy upon
+the fields of our disgrace.
+
+That is why the Assyrians came back to Jerusalem, and that is why
+temptations and penalties still pursue the penitent and forgiven.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+_OUR GOD A CONSUMING FIRE._
+
+ISAIAH xxxiii. (701 B.C.).
+
+
+We have seen how the sense of forgiveness and the exultant confidence,
+which fill chap. xxxiii., were brought about within a few months after
+the sentence of death, that cast so deep a gloom on chap. xxii. We have
+expounded some of the contents of chap. xxxiii., but have not exhausted
+the chapter; and in particular we have not touched one of Isaiah's
+principles, which there finds perhaps its finest expression: the
+consuming righteousness of God.
+
+There is no doubt that chap. xxxiii. refers to the sudden disappearance
+of the Assyrian from the walls of Jerusalem. It was written, part
+perhaps on the eve of that deliverance, part immediately after morning
+broke upon the vanished host. Before those verses which picture the
+disappearance of the investing army, we ought in strict chronological
+order to take the narrative in chaps. xxxvi. and xxxvii.--the return of
+the besiegers, the insolence of the Rabshakeh, the prostration of
+Hezekiah, Isaiah's solitary faith, and the sudden disappearance of the
+Assyrian. It will be more convenient, however, since we have already
+entered chap. xxxiii., to finish it, and then to take the narrative of
+the events which led up to it.
+
+The opening verses of chap. xxxiii. fit the very moment of the crisis,
+as if Isaiah had flung them across the walls in the teeth of the
+Rabshakeh and the second embassy from Sennacherib, who had returned to
+demand the surrender of the city in spite of Hezekiah's tribute for her
+integrity: _Woe to thee, thou spoiler, and thou wast not spoiled, thou
+treacherous dealer, and they did not deal treacherously with thee_!
+_When thou ceasest to spoil, thou shalt be spoiled; and when thou makest
+an end to deal treacherously, they shall deal treacherously with thee._
+Then follows the prayer, as already quoted, and the confidence in the
+security of Jerusalem (ver. 2). A new paragraph (vv. 7-12) describes
+Rabshakeh and his company demanding the surrender of the city; the
+disappointment of the ambassadors who had been sent to treat with
+Sennacherib (ver. 7); the perfidy of the great king, who had broken the
+covenant they had made with him and swept his armies back upon Judah
+(ver. 8); the disheartening of the land under this new shock (ver. 9);
+and the resolution of the Lord now to rise and scatter the invaders:
+_Now will I arise, saith Jehovah; now will I lift up Myself; now will I
+be exalted_. _Ye shall conceive chaff; ye shall bring forth stubble;
+your breath is a fire, that shall devour you. And the peoples shall be
+as the burnings of lime, as thorns cut down that are burned in the fire_
+(vv. 10-12).
+
+After an application of this same fire of God's righteousness to the
+sinners _within_ Jerusalem, to which we shall presently return, the rest
+of the chapter pictures the stunned populace awaking to the fact that
+they are free. Is the Assyrian really gone, or do the Jews dream as they
+crowd the walls, and see no trace of him? Have they all vanished--the
+Rabshakeh, _by the conduit of the upper pool, with his loud voice_ and
+insults; the scribes to whom they handed the tribute, and who prolonged
+the agony by counting it under their eyes; the scouts and engineers
+insolently walking about Zion and mapping out her walls for the assault;
+the close investment of barbarian hordes, with their awesome speech and
+uncouth looks! _Where is he that counted? where is he that weighed the
+tribute? where is he that counted the towers? Thou shall not see the
+fierce people, a people of a deep speech that thou canst not perceive,
+of a strange tongue that thou canst not understand._ They have vanished.
+Hezekiah may lift his head again. O people--sore at heart to see thy
+king in sackcloth and ashes[63] as the enemy devoured province after
+province of thy land and cooped thee up within the narrow walls, thou
+scarcely didst dare to peep across--take courage, the terror is gone! _A
+king in his beauty thine eyes shall see; they shall behold the land
+spreading very far forth_ (ver. 17). We had thought to die in the
+restlessness and horror of war, never again to know what stable life and
+regular worship were, our Temple services interrupted, our home a
+battlefield. But _look upon Zion_; behold again _she is the city of our
+solemn diets; thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tent
+that shall not be removed, the stakes whereof shall never be plucked up,
+neither shall the cords thereof be broken. But there Jehovah_, whom we
+have known only for affliction, _shall be in majesty for us_. Other
+peoples have their natural defences, Assyria and Egypt their Euphrates
+and Nile; but God Himself shall be for us _a place of rivers, streams,
+broad on both hands, on which never a galley shall go, nor gallant ship
+shall pass upon it_. Without sign of battle, God shall be our refuge and
+our strength. It was that marvellous deliverance of Jerusalem by the
+hand of God, with no effort of human war, which caused Isaiah to invest
+with such majesty the meagre rock, its squalid surroundings and paltry
+defences. The insignificant and waterless city was glorious to the
+prophet because God was in her. One of the richest imaginations which
+patriot ever poured upon his fatherland was inspired by the simplest
+faith saint ever breathed. Isaiah strikes again the old keynote (chap.
+viii.) about the waterlessness of Jerusalem. We have to keep in mind the
+Jews' complaints of this, in order to understand what the forty-sixth
+Psalm means when it says, _There is a river the streams whereof make
+glad the city of our God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most
+High_--or what Isaiah means when he says, _Glorious shall Jehovah be
+unto us, a place of broad rivers and streams_. Yea, he adds, Jehovah is
+everything to us: Jehovah is our Judge; Jehovah is our Lawgiver; Jehovah
+is our King: He will save us.
+
+  [63] Chap. xxxvii.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such were the feelings aroused in Jerusalem by the sudden relief of the
+city. Some of the verses, which we have scarcely touched, we will now
+consider more fully as the expression of a doctrine which runs
+throughout Isaiah, and indeed is one of his two or three fundamental
+truths--that the righteousness of God is an all-pervading atmosphere, an
+atmosphere that wears and burns.
+
+For forty years the prophet had been preaching to the Jews his gospel,
+_God-with-us_; but they never awakened to the reality of the Divine
+presence till they saw it in the dispersion of the Assyrian army. Then
+God became real to them (ver. 14). The justice of God, preached so long
+by Isaiah, had always seemed something abstract. Now they saw how
+concrete it was. It was not only a doctrine: it was a fact. It was a
+fact that was a fire. Isaiah had often called it a fire; they thought
+this was rhetoric. But now they saw the actual burning--_the peoples as
+the burning of lime, as thorns cut down that are burned in the fire_.
+And when they felt the fire so near, each sinner of them awoke to the
+fact that he had something burnable in himself, something which could as
+little stand the fire as the Assyrians could. There was no difference in
+this fire outside and inside the walls. What it burned there it would
+burn here. Nay, was not Jerusalem the dwelling-place of God, and Ariel
+the very hearth and furnace of the fire which they saw consume the
+Assyrians? _Who_, they cried in their terror--_Who among us shall dwell
+with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting
+burnings?_
+
+We are familiar with Isaiah's fundamental God-with-us, and how it was
+spoken not for mercy only, but for judgement (chap. viii.). If
+_God-with-us_ meant love with us, salvation with us, it meant also
+holiness with us, judgement with us, the jealousy of God breathing upon
+what is impure, false and proud. Isaiah felt this so hotly, that his
+sense of it has broken out into some of the fieriest words in all
+prophecy. In his younger days he told the citizens not _to provoke the
+eyes of God's glory_, as if Heaven had fastened on their life two
+gleaming orbs, not only to pierce them with its vision, but to consume
+them with its wrath. Again, in the lowering cloud of calamity he had
+seen _lips of indignation, a tongue as a devouring fire_, and in the
+overflowing stream which finally issued from it the hot _breath of the
+Almighty_. These are unforgettable descriptions of the ceaseless
+activity of Divine righteousness in the life of man. They set our
+imaginations on fire with the prophet's burning belief in this. But they
+are excelled by another, more frequently used by Isaiah, wherein he
+likens the holiness of God to an universal and constant fire. To Isaiah
+life was so penetrated by the active justice of God, that he described
+it as bathed in fire, as blown through with fire. Righteousness was no
+mere doctrine to this prophet: it was the most real thing in history; it
+was the presence which pervaded and explained all phenomena. We shall
+understand the difference between Isaiah and his people if we have ever
+for our eyes' sake looked at a great conflagration through a coloured
+glass which allowed us to see the solid materials--stone, wood and
+iron--but prevented us from perceiving the flames and shimmering heat.
+To look thus is to see pillars, lintels and cross-beams twist and fall,
+crumble and fade; but how inexplicable the process seems! Take away the
+glass, and everything is clear. The fiery element is filling all the
+interstices, that were blank to us before, and beating upon the solid
+material. The heat becomes visible, shimmering even where there is no
+flame. Just so had it been with the sinners in Judah these forty years.
+Their society and politics, individual fortunes and careers, personal
+and national habits--the home, the Church, the State--common outlines
+and shapes of life--were patent to every eye, but no man could explain
+the constant decay and diminution, because all were looking at life
+through a glass darkly. Isaiah alone faced life with open vision, which
+filled up for him the interstices of experience and gave terrible
+explanation to fate. It was a vision that nearly scorched the eyes out
+of him. Life as he saw it was steeped in flame--the glowing
+righteousness of God. Jerusalem was full _of the spirit of justice, the
+spirit of burning. The light of Israel is for a fire, and his Holy One
+for a flame._ The Assyrian empire, that vast erection which the strong
+hands of kings had reared, was simply their pyre, made ready for the
+burning. _For a Topheth is prepared of old; yea, for the king it is made
+ready; He hath made it deep and large; the pile thereof is fire and much
+wood; the breath of Jehovah, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle
+it._[64] So Isaiah saw life, and flashed it on his countrymen. At last
+the glass fell from their eyes also, and they cried aloud, _Who among us
+shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with
+everlasting burnings?_ Isaiah replied that there is one thing which can
+survive the universal flame, and that is character: _He that walketh
+righteously and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of fraud,
+that shaketh his hands from the holding of bribes, that stoppeth his
+ears from the hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from looking on
+evil, he shall dwell on high: his place of defence shall be the
+munitions of rocks: his bread shall be given him: his water shall be
+sure._
+
+  [64] Chaps. iv. 4; xxx. 33.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Isaiah's Vision of Fire suggests two thoughts to us.
+
+1. Have we done well to confine our horror of the consuming fires of
+righteousness to the next life? If we would but use the eyes which
+Scripture lends us, the rifts of prophetic vision and awakened
+conscience by which the fogs of this world and of our own hearts are
+rent, we should see fires as fierce, a consumption as pitiless, about us
+here as ever the conscience of a startled sinner fearfully looked for
+across the grave. Nay, have not the fires, with which the darkness of
+eternity has been made lurid, themselves been kindled at the burnings of
+this life? Is it not because men have felt how hot this world was being
+made for sin that they have had a _certain fearful expectation of
+judgement and the fierceness of fire_? We shudder at the horrible
+pictures of hell which some older theologians and poets have painted for
+us; but it was not morbid fancy, nor the barbarism of their age nor
+their own heart's cruelty that inspired these men. It was their hot
+honour for the Divine holiness; it was their experience of how pitiless
+to sin Providence is already in this life; it was their own scorched
+senses and affections--brands, as many honest men among them felt
+themselves, plucked from the burning. Our God _is_ a consuming
+fire--here as well as yonder. Hell has borrowed her glare from the
+imagination of men aflame with the real fieriness of life, and may
+be--more truly than of old--pictured as the dead and hollow cinder left
+by those fires, of which, as every true man's conscience is aware, this
+life is full. It was not hell that created conscience; it was conscience
+that created hell, and conscience was fired by the vision which fired
+Isaiah--of all life aglow with the righteousness of God--_God with us_,
+as He was with Jerusalem, _a spirit of burning and a spirit of justice_.
+This is the pantheism of conscience, and it stands to reason. God is the
+one power of life. What can exist beside Him except what is like Him?
+Nothing--sooner or later nothing but what is like Him. The will that is
+as His will, the heart that is pure, the character that is
+transparent--only these dwell with the everlasting fire, and burning
+with God, as the bush which Moses saw, are nevertheless not consumed.
+Let us lay it to heart--Isaiah has nothing to tell us about hell-fire,
+but a great deal about the pitiless justice of God in this life.
+
+2. The second thought suggested by Isaiah's Vision of Life is a
+comparison of it with the theory of life which is fashionable to-day.
+Isaiah's figure for life was a burning. Ours is a battle, and at first
+sight ours looks the truer. Seen through a formula which has become
+everywhere fashionable, life is a fierce and fascinating warfare.
+Civilised thought, when asked to describe any form of life or to account
+for a death or survival, most monotonously replies, "The struggle for
+existence." The sociologist has borrowed the phrase from the biologist,
+and it is on everybody's lips to describe their idea of human life. It
+is uttered by the historian when he would explain the disappearance of
+this national type, the prevalence of that one. The economist traces
+depression and failures, the fatal fevers of speculation, the cruelties
+and bad humours of commercial life, to the same source. A merchant with
+profits lessening and failure before him relieves his despair and
+apologizes to his pride with the words, "It is all due to competition."
+Even character and the spiritual graces are sometimes set down as
+results of the same material process. Some have sought to deduce from it
+all intelligence, others more audaciously all ethics; and it is certain
+that in the silence of men's hearts after a moral defeat there is no
+excuse more frequently offered to conscience by will than that the
+battle was too hot.
+
+But fascinating as life is when seen through this formula, does not the
+formula act on our vision precisely as the glass we supposed, which when
+we look through it on a conflagration shows us the solid matter and the
+changes through which this passes, but hides from us the real agent? One
+need not deny the reality of the struggle for existence, or that its
+results are enormous. We struggle with each other, and affect each other
+for good and for evil, sometimes past all calculation. But we do not
+fight in a vacuum. Let Isaiah's vision be the complement of our own
+feeling. We fight in an atmosphere that affects every one of us far more
+powerfully than the opposing wits or wills of our fellow-men. Around us
+and through us, within and without as we fight, is the all-pervading
+righteousness of God; and it is far oftener the effects of this which we
+see in the falls and the changes of life than the effects of our
+struggle with each other, enormous though these may be. On this point
+there is an exact parallel between our days and the days of Isaiah. Then
+the politicians of Judah, looking through their darkened glass at life,
+said, Life is simply a war in which the strongest prevail, a game which
+the most cunning win. So they made fast their alliances, and were ready
+to meet the Assyrian, or they fled in panic before him, according as
+Egypt or he seemed the stronger. Isaiah saw that with Assyrian and Jew
+another Power was present--the real reason of every change in politics,
+collapse or crash in either of the empires--the active righteousness of
+God. Assyrian and Jew had not only to contend with each other. They were
+at strife with Him. We now see plainly that Isaiah was right. Far more
+operative than the intrigues of politicians or the pride of Assyria,
+because it used these simply as its mines and its fuel, was the law of
+righteousness, the spiritual force which is as impalpable as the
+atmosphere, yet strong to burn and try as a furnace seven times heated.
+And Isaiah is equally right for to-day. As we look at life through our
+fashionable formula it does seem a mass of struggle, in which we catch
+only now and then a glimpse of the decisions of righteousness, but the
+prevailing lawlessness of which we do not hesitate to make the reason of
+all that happens, and in particular the excuse of our own defeats. We
+are wrong. Righteousness is not an occasional spark; righteousness is
+the atmosphere. Though our dull eyes see it only now and then strike
+into flame in the battle of life, and take for granted that it is but
+the flash of meeting wits or of steel on steel, God's justice is
+everywhere, pervasive and pitiless, affecting the combatants far more
+than they have power to affect one another.
+
+We shall best learn the truth of this in the way the sinners in
+Jerusalem learned it--each man first looking into himself. _Who among us
+shall dwell with the everlasting burnings?_ Can we attribute all our
+defeats to the opposition that was upon us at the moment they occurred?
+When our temper failed, when our charity relaxed, when our resoluteness
+gave way, was it the hotness of debate, was it the pressure of the
+crowd, was it the sneer of the scorner, that was to blame? We all know
+that these were only the occasions of our defeats. Conscience tells us
+that the cause lay in a slothful or self-indulgent heart, which the
+corrosive atmosphere of Divine righteousness had been consuming, and
+which, sapped and hollow by its effect, gave way at every material
+shock.
+
+With the knowledge that conscience gives us, let us now look at a kind
+of figure which must be within the horizon of all of us. Once it was the
+most commanding stature among its fellows, the straight back and broad
+brow of a king of men. But now what is the last sight of him that will
+remain with us, flung out there against the evening skies of his life? A
+bent back (we speak of character), a stooping face, the shrinking
+outlines of a man ready to collapse. It was not the struggle for
+existence that killed him, for he was born to prevail in it. It was the
+atmosphere that told on him. He carried in him that on which the
+atmosphere could not but tell. A low selfishness or passion inhabited
+him, and became the predominant part of him, so that his outward life
+was only its shell; and when the fire of God at last pierced this, he
+was as thorns cut down, that are burned in the fire.
+
+We can explain much with the outward eye, but the most of the
+explanation lies beyond. Where our knowledge of a man's life ends, the
+great meaning of it often only begins. All the vacancy beyond the
+outline we see is full of that meaning. God is there, and _God is a
+consuming fire_. Let us not seek to explain lives only by what we see of
+them, the visible strife of man with man and nature. It is the invisible
+that contains the secret of what is seen. We see the shoulders stoop,
+but not the burden upon them; the face darken, but look in vain for what
+casts the shadow; the light sparkle in the eye, but cannot tell what
+star of hope its glance has caught. And even so when we behold fortune
+and character go down in the warfare of this world, we ought to remember
+that it is not always the things we see that are to blame for the fall,
+but that awful flame which, unseen by common man, has been revealed to
+the prophets of God.
+
+Righteousness and retribution, then, are an atmosphere--not lines or
+laws that we may happen to stumble upon, not explosives, that, being
+touched, burst out on us, but the atmosphere--always about us and always
+at work, invisible and yet more mighty than aught we see. _God, in whom
+we live and move and have our being, is a consuming fire._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+_THE RABSHAKEH; OR, LAST TEMPTATIONS OF FAITH._
+
+ISAIAH xxxvi. (701 B.C.).
+
+
+It remains for us now to follow in chaps. xxxvi., xxxvii., the
+historical narrative of the events, the moral results of which we have
+seen so vivid in chap. xxxiii.--the perfidious return of the Assyrians
+to Jerusalem after Hezekiah had bought them off and their final
+disappearance from the Holy Land.
+
+This historical narrative has also its moral. It is not annals, but
+drama. The whole moral of Isaiah's prophesying is here flung into a duel
+between champions of the two tempers, which we have seen in perpetual
+conflict throughout his book. The two tempers are--on Isaiah's side an
+absolute and unselfish faith in God, Sovereign of the world and Saviour
+of His people; on the side of the Assyrians a bare, brutal confidence in
+themselves, in human cleverness and success, a vaunting contempt of
+righteousness and of pity. The main interest of Isaiah's book has
+consisted in the way these tempers oppose each other, and alternately
+influence the feeling of the Jewish community. That interest is now to
+culminate in the scene which brings near such thorough representatives
+of the two tempers as Isaiah and the Rabshakeh, with the crowd of
+wavering Jews between. Most strikingly, Assyria's last assault is not of
+force, but of speech, delivering upon faith the subtle arguments of the
+worldly temper; and as strikingly, while all official religion and
+power of State stand helpless against them, these arguments are met by
+the bare word of God. In this mere statement of the situation, however,
+we perceive that much more than the quarrel of a single generation is
+being decided. This scene is a parable of the everlasting struggle
+between faith and force, with doubt and despair between them. In the
+clever, self-confident, persuasive personage with two languages on his
+tongue and an army at his back; in the fluttered representatives of
+official religion who meet him and are afraid of the effect of his
+speech on the common people; in the ranks of dispirited men who hear the
+dialogue from the wall; in the sensitive king so aware of faith, and yet
+so helpless to bring faith forth to peace and triumph; and, in the
+background of the whole situation, the serene prophet of God, grasping
+only God's word, and by his own steadfastness carrying the city over the
+crisis and proving that faith indeed can be _the substance of things
+hoped for_--we have a phase of the struggle ordained unto every
+generation of men, and which is as fresh to-day as when Rabshakeh played
+the cynic and the scribes and elders filled the part of nervous
+defenders of the faith, under the walls of faith's fortress, two
+thousand five hundred years ago.
+
+
+THE RABSHAKEH.
+
+This word is a Hebrew transliteration of the Assyrian Rab-sak, _chief of
+the officers_. Though there is some doubt on the point, we may naturally
+presume from the duties he here discharges that the Rabshakeh was a
+civilian--probably the civil commissioner or political officer attached
+to the Assyrian army, which was commanded, according to 2 Kings xviii.
+16, by the Tartan or commander-in-chief himself.
+
+In all the Bible there is not a personage more clever than this
+Rabshakeh, nor more typical. He was an able deputy of the king who sent
+him, but he represented still more thoroughly the temper of the
+civilisation to which he belonged. There is no word of this man which is
+not characteristic. A clever, fluent diplomatist, with the traveller's
+knowledge of men and the conqueror's contempt for them, the Rabshakeh is
+the product of a victorious empire like the Assyrian, or, say, like the
+British. Our services sometimes turn out the like of him--a creature
+able to speak to natives in their own language, full and ready of
+information, mastering the surface of affairs at a glance, but always
+baffled by the deeper tides which sway nations; a deft player upon party
+interests and the superficial human passions, but unfit to touch the
+deep springs of men's religion and patriotism. Let us speak, however,
+with respect of the Rabshakeh. From his rank (Sayce calls him the
+Vizier), as well as from the cleverness with which he explains what we
+know to have been the policy of Sennacherib towards the populations of
+Syria, he may well have been the inspiring mind at this time of the
+great Assyrian empire--Sennacherib's Bismarck.
+
+The Rabshakeh had strutted down from the great centre of civilisation,
+with its temper upon him, and all its great resources at his back,
+confident to twist these poor provincial tribes round his little finger.
+How petty he conceived them we infer from his never styling Hezekiah
+_the king_. This was to be an occasion for the Rabshakeh's own
+glorification. Jerusalem was to fall to his clever speeches. He had
+indeed the army behind him, but the work to be done was not the rough
+work of soldiers. All was to be managed by him, the civilian and orator.
+This fellow, with his two languages and clever address, was to step out
+in front of the army and finish the whole business.
+
+The Rabshakeh spoke extremely well. With his first words he touched the
+sore point of Judah's policy: her trust in Egypt. On this he spoke like
+a very Isaiah. But he showed a deeper knowledge of Judah's internal
+affairs, and a subtler deftness in using it, when he referred to the
+matter of the altars. Hezekiah had abolished the high places in all
+parts of the land, and gathered the people to the central sanctuary in
+Jerusalem. The Assyrian knew that a number of Jews must look upon this
+disestablishment of religion in the provinces as likely to incur
+Jehovah's displeasure and turn Him against them. Therefore he said, _But
+if thou say unto me, We trust in Jehovah our God, is not that He whose
+high places and whose altars Hezekiah hath taken away, and hath said to
+Judah and to Jerusalem, Ye shall worship before this altar?_ And then,
+having shaken their religious confidence, he made sport of their
+military strength. And finally he boldly asserted, _Jehovah said unto
+me, Go up against this land and destroy it_. All this shows a master in
+diplomacy, a most clever demagogue. The scribes and elders felt the
+edge, and begged him to sheathe it in a language unknown to the common
+people. But he, conscious of his power, spoke the more boldly,
+addressing himself directly to the poorer sort of the garrison, on whom
+the siege would press most heavily. His second speech to them is a good
+illustration of the policy pursued by Assyria at this time towards the
+cities of Palestine. We know from the annals of Sennacherib that his
+customary policy, to seduce the populations of a hostile State from
+allegiance to their rulers, had succeeded in other cases; and it was so
+plausibly uttered in this case, that it seemed likely to succeed again.
+To the common soldiers on the walls, with the prospect of being reduced
+to the foul rations of a prolonged siege (ver. 12), Sennacherib's
+ambassador offers rich and equal property and enjoyment. _Make a treaty
+with me, and come out to me, and eat every one of his vine and every one
+of his fig tree, and drink ye every one of the water of his cistern,
+until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of
+corn and grapes, a land of bread-corn and orchards. Every one_!--it is a
+most subtle assault upon the discipline, comradeship and patriotism of
+the common soldiers by the promises of a selfish, sensuous equality and
+individualism. But then the speaker's native cynicism gets the better of
+him--it is not possible for an Assyrian long to play the part of
+clemency--and, with a flash of scorn, he asks the sad men upon the walls
+whether they really believe that Jehovah can save them: _Hath any of the
+gods of the nations delivered his land out of the hand of the King of
+Assyria, ... that Jehovah should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?_ All
+the range of their feelings does he thus run through, seeking with sharp
+words to snap each cord of faith in God, of honour to the king and love
+of country. Had the Jews heart to answer him, they might point out the
+inconsistency between his claim to have been sent by Jehovah and the
+contempt he now pours upon their God. But the inconsistency is
+characteristic. The Assyrian has some acquaintance with the Jewish
+faith; he makes use of its articles when they serve his purpose, but his
+ultimatum is to tear them to shreds in their believers' faces. He treats
+the Jews as men of culture still sometimes treat barbarians, first
+scornfully humouring their faith and then savagely trampling it under
+foot.
+
+So clever were the speeches of the Rabshakeh. We see why he was
+appointed to this mission. He was an expert both in the language and
+religion of this tribe, perched on its rock in the remote Judaean
+highlands. For a foreigner he showed marvellous familiarity with the
+temper and internal jealousies of the Jewish religion. He turned these
+on each other almost as adroitly as Paul himself did in the disputes
+between Sadducees and Pharisees. How the fellow knew his cleverness,
+strutting there betwixt army and town! He would show his soldier friends
+the proper way of dealing with stubborn barbarians. He would astonish
+those faith-proud highlanders by exhibiting how much he was aware of the
+life behind their thick walls and silent faces, _for the king's
+commandment was, Answer him not_.
+
+And yet did the Rabshakeh, with all his raking, know the heart of Judah?
+No, truly. The whole interest of this man is the incongruity of the
+expertness and surface-knowledge, which he spattered on Jerusalem's
+walls, with the deep secret of God, that, as some inexhaustible well,
+the fortress of the faith carried within her. Ah, Assyrian, there is
+more in starved Jerusalem than thou canst put in thy speeches! Suppose
+Heaven were to give those sharp eyes of thine power to look through the
+next thousand years, and see this race and this religion thou puffest
+at, the highest-honoured, hottest-hated of the world, centre of
+mankind's regard and debate, but thou, and thy king and all the glory of
+your empire wrapped deep in oblivion. To this little fortress of
+highland men shall the heart of great peoples turn: kings for its
+nursing-fathers and queens for its nursing-mothers, the forces of the
+Gentiles shall come to it, and from it new civilisations take their
+laws; while thou and all thy paraphernalia disappear into blackness,
+haunted only by the antiquary, the world taking an interest in thee just
+in so far as thou didst once hopelessly attempt to understand Jerusalem
+and capture her faith by thine own interpretation of it. Curious pigmy,
+very grand thou thinkest thyself, and surely with some right as delegate
+of the king of kings, parading thy cleverness and thy bribes before
+these poor barbarians; but the world, called to look upon you both from
+this eminence of history, grants thee to be a very good head of an
+intelligence department, with a couple of languages on thy glib tongue's
+end, but adjudges that with the starved and speechless men before thee
+lies the secret of all that is worth living and dying for in this world.
+
+The Rabshakeh's plausible futility and Jerusalem's faith, greatly
+distressed before him, are typical. Still as men hang moodily over the
+bulwarks of Zion, doubtful whether life is worth living within the
+narrow limits which religion prescribes, or righteousness worth fighting
+for with such privations and hope deferred, comes upon them some elegant
+and plausible temptation, loudly calling to give the whole thing up.
+Disregarding the official arguments and evidences that push forward to
+parley, it speaks home in practical tones to men's real selves--their
+appetites and selfishnesses. "You are foolish fellows," it says, "to
+confine yourselves to such narrowness of life and self-denial! The fall
+of your faith is only a matter of time: other creeds have gone; yours
+must follow. And why fight the world for the sake of an idea, or from
+the habits of a discipline? Such things only starve the human spirit;
+and the world is so generous, so free to every one, so tolerant of each
+enjoying his own, unhampered by authority or religion."
+
+In our day what has the greatest effect on the faith of many men is just
+this mixture, that pervades the Rabshakeh's address,--of a superior
+culture pretending to expose religion, with the easy generosity, which
+offers to the individual a selfish life, unchecked by any discipline or
+religious fear. That modern Rabshakeh, Ernest Renan, with the forces of
+historical criticism at his back, but confident rather in his own skill
+of address, speaking to us believers as poor picturesque provincials,
+patronising our Deity, and telling us that he knows His intentions
+better than we do ourselves, is a very good representative of the
+enemies of the Faith, who owe their impressiveness upon common men to
+the familiarity they display with the contents of the Faith, and the
+independent, easy life they offer to the man who throws his strict faith
+off. Superior knowledge, with the offer on its lips of a life on good
+terms with the rich and tolerant world--pretence of science promising
+selfishness--that is to-day, as then under the walls of Jerusalem, the
+typical enemy of the Faith. But if faith be held simply as the silent
+garrison of Jerusalem held it, faith in a Lord God of righteousness, who
+has given us a conscience to serve Him, and has spoken to us in plain
+explanation of this by those whom we can see, understand and trust--not
+only by an Isaiah, but by a Jesus--then neither mere cleverness nor the
+ability to promise comfort can avail against our faith. A simple
+conscience of God and of duty may not be able to answer subtle arguments
+word for word, but she can feel the incongruity of their cleverness with
+her own precious secret; she can at least expose the fallacy of their
+sensuous promises of an untroubled life. No man, who tempts us from a
+good conscience with God in the discipline of our religion and the
+comradeship of His people, can ensure that there will be no starvation
+in the pride of life, no captivity in the easy tolerance of the world.
+To the heart of man there will always be captivity in selfishness; there
+will always be exile in unbelief. Even where the romance and sentiment
+of faith are retained, after the manner of Renan, it is only to mock us
+with mirage. _As in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is, our heart
+and flesh shall cry out for the living God, as we have aforetime seen
+Him in the sanctuary._ The land, in which the tempter promises a life
+undisturbed by religious restraints, is not our home, neither is it
+freedom. By the conscience that is in us, God has set us on the walls of
+faith, with His law to observe, with His people to stand by; and against
+us are the world and its tempters, with all their wiles to be defied. If
+we go down from the charge and shelter of so simple a religion, then,
+whatever enjoyment we have, we shall enjoy it only with the fears of the
+deserter and the greed of the slave.
+
+In spite of scorn and sensuous promise from Rabshakeh to Renan, let us
+lift the hymn which these silent Jews at last lifted from the walls of
+their delivered city: _Walk about Zion and go round about her; tell ye
+the towers thereof. Mark ye well her bulwarks, and consider her palaces,
+that ye may tell it to the generation to come. For this God is our God
+for ever and ever. He will be our Guide even unto death._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+_THIS IS THE VICTORY.... OUR FAITH._
+
+ISAIAH xxxvii. (701 B.C.).
+
+
+Within the fortress of the faith there is only silence and
+embarrassment. We pass from the Rabshakeh, posing outside the walls of
+Zion, to Hezekiah, prostrate within them. We pass with the distracted
+councillors, by the walls crowded with moody and silent soldiers, many
+of them--if this be the meaning of the king's command that they should
+not parley--only too ready to yield to the plausible infidel. We are
+astonished. Has faith nothing to say for herself? Have this people of so
+long Divine inspiration no habit of self-possession, no argument in
+answer to the irrelevant attacks of their enemy? Where are the
+traditions of Moses and Joshua, the songs of Deborah and David? Can men
+walk about Zion, and their very footsteps on her walls ring out no
+defiance?
+
+Hezekiah's complaint reminds us that in this silence and distress we
+have no occasional perplexity of faith, but her perpetual burden. Faith
+is inarticulate because of her greatness. Faith is courageous and
+imaginative; but can she convert her confidence and visions into fact?
+Said Hezekiah, _This is a day of trouble, and rebuke and contumely, for
+the children are come to the birth, and there is not strength to bring
+them forth_. These words are not a mere metaphor for anguish. They are
+the definition of a real miscarriage. In Isaiah's contemporaries faith
+has at last engendered courage, zeal for God's house and strong
+assurance of victory; but she, that has proved fertile to conceive and
+carry these confidences, is powerless to bring them forth into real
+life, to transform them to actual fact. Faith, complains Hezekiah, is
+not the substance of things hoped for. At the moment when her subjective
+assurances ought to be realized as facts, she is powerless to bring them
+to the birth.
+
+It is a miscarriage we are always deploring. Wordsworth has said,
+"Through love, through hope, through faith's transcendent dower, we feel
+that we are greater than we know." Yes, greater than we can articulate,
+greater than we can tell to men like the Rabshakeh, even though he talk
+the language of the Jews; and therefore, on the whole, it is best to be
+silent in face of his argument. But greater also, we sometimes fear,
+than we can realise to ourselves in actual character and victory. All
+life thrills with the pangs of inability to bring the children of faith
+to the birth of experience. The man, who has lost his faith or who takes
+his faith easily, never knows, of course, this anguish of Hezekiah. But
+the more we have fed on the promises of the Bible, the more that the
+Spirit of God has engendered in our pure hearts assurances of justice
+and of peace, the more we shall sometimes tremble with the fear that in
+outward fact there is no life for these beautiful conceptions of the
+soul. Do we really believe in the Fatherhood of God--believe in it till
+it has changed us inwardly, and we carry a new sense of destiny, a new
+conscience of justice, a new disgust of sin, a new pity for pain? Then
+how full of the anguish of impotence must our souls feel when they
+consciously survey one day of common life about us, or when we honestly
+look back on a year of our own conduct! Does it not seem as if upon one
+or two hideous streets in some centre of our civilisation all
+Christianity, with its eighteen hundred years of promise and impetus,
+had gone to wreck? Is God only for the imagination of man? Is there no
+God outwardly to control and grant victory? Is He only a Voice, and not
+the Creator? Is Christ only a Prophet, and not the King?
+
+And then over these disappointments there faces us all the great
+miscarriage itself--black, inevitable death. Hezekiah cried from despair
+that the Divine assurance of the permanence of God's people in the world
+was about to be wrecked on fact. But often by a deathbed we utter the
+same lament about the individual's immortality. There is everything to
+prove a future life except the fact of it within human experience. This
+life is big with hopes, instincts, convictions of immortality; and yet
+where within our sight have these ever passed to the birth of fact?[65]
+Death is a great miscarriage. _The children have come to the birth, and
+there is not strength to bring them forth._
+
+  [65] Cf. Browning's _La Saisiaz_.
+
+And yet within the horizon of this life at least--the latter part of the
+difficulty we postpone to another chapter--_faith is the substance of
+things hoped for_, as Isaiah did now most brilliantly prove. For the
+miracle of Jerusalem's deliverance, to which the narrative proceeds, was
+not that by faith the prophet foretold it, but that by faith he did
+actually himself succeed in bringing it to pass. The miracle, we say,
+was not that Isaiah made accurate prediction of the city's speedy
+relief from the Assyrian, but far more that upon his solitary
+steadfastness, without aid of battle, he did carry her disheartened
+citizens through this crisis of temptation, and kept them, though
+silent, to their walls till the futile Assyrian drifted away. The
+prediction, indeed, was not, although its terms appear exact, so very
+marvellous for a prophet to make, who had Isaiah's religious conviction
+that Jerusalem must survive and Isaiah's practical acquaintance with the
+politics of the day. _Behold, I am setting in him a spirit; and he shall
+hear a rumour, and shall return into his own land._ We may recall the
+parallel case of Charlemagne in his campaign against the Moors in Spain,
+from which he was suddenly and unseasonably hastened north on a
+disastrous retreat by news of the revolt of the Saxons.[66] In the vast
+Assyrian territories rebellions were constantly occurring, that demanded
+the swift appearance of the king himself; and God's Spirit, to whose
+inspiration Isaiah traced all political perception, suggested to him the
+possibility of one of these. In the end, the Bible story implies that it
+was not a rumour from some far-away quarter so much as a disaster here
+in Syria, which compelled Sennacherib's "retreat from Moscow." But it
+is possible that both causes were at work, and that as Napoleon offered
+the receipt of news from Paris as his reason for hurriedly abandoning
+the unfortunate Spanish campaign of 1808, so Sennacherib made the rumour
+of some news from his capital or the north the occasion for turning his
+troops from a theatre of war, where they had not met with unequivocal
+success, and had at last been half destroyed by the plague. Isaiah's
+further prediction of Sennacherib's death must also be taken in a
+general sense, for it was not till twenty years later that the Assyrian
+tyrant met this violent end: _I will cause him to fall by the sword in
+his own land_. But do not let us waste our attention on the altogether
+minor point of the prediction of Jerusalem's deliverance, when the great
+wonder, of which the prediction is but an episode, lies lengthened and
+manifest before us--that Isaiah, when all the defenders of Jerusalem
+were distracted and her king prostrate, did by the single steadfastness
+of his spirit sustain her inviolate, and procure for her people a safe
+and glorious future.
+
+  [66] A still more striking analogy may be found in the case of Napoleon
+  I. when in the East in 1799. He had just achieved a small victory which
+  partly masked the previous failure of his campaign, when "Sir Sydney
+  Smith now contrived that he should receive a packet of journals, by
+  which he was informed of all that had passed recently in Europe and the
+  disasters that France had suffered. His resolution was immediately
+  taken. On August 22nd he wrote to Kleber announcing that he transferred
+  to him the command of the expedition, and that he himself would return
+  to Europe.... After carefully spreading false accounts of his
+  intentions, he set sail on the night of the same day" (Professor Seeley,
+  article "Napoleon" in the _Ency. Brit._).
+
+The baffled Rabshakeh returned to his master, whom he found at Libnah,
+_for he had heard that he had broken up from Lachish_. Sennacherib, the
+narrative would seem to imply, did not trouble himself further about
+Jerusalem till he learned that Tirhakah, the Ethiopian ruler of Egypt,
+was marching to meet him with probably a stronger force than that which
+Sennacherib had defeated at Eltekeh. Then, feeling the danger of leaving
+so strong a fortress as Jerusalem in his rear, Sennacherib sent to
+Hezekiah one more demand for surrender. Hezekiah spread his enemy's
+letter before the Lord. His prayer that follows is remarkable for two
+features, which enable us to see how pure and elevated a monotheism
+God's Spirit had at last developed from the national faith of Israel.
+The Being whom the king now seeks he addresses by the familiar name
+_Jehovah of hosts, God of Israel_, and describes by the physical
+figure--_who art enthroned upon the cherubim_. But he conceives of this
+God with the utmost loftiness and purity, ascribing to Him not only
+sovereignty and creatorship, but absolute singularity of Godhead. We
+have but to compare Hezekiah's prayer with the utterances of his
+predecessor Ahaz, to whom many gods were real, and none absolutely
+sovereign, or with the utterances of Israelites far purer than Ahaz, to
+whom the gods of the nations, though inferior to Jehovah, were yet real
+existences, in order to mark the spiritual advance made by Israel under
+Isaiah. It is a tribute to the prophet's force, which speaks volumes,
+when the deputation from Hezekiah talk to him of _thy God_ (ver. 4). For
+Isaiah by his ministry had made Israel's God to be new in Israel's eyes.
+
+Hezekiah's lofty prayer drew forth through the prophet an answer from
+Jehovah (vv. 21-32). This is one of the most brilliant of Isaiah's
+oracles. It is full of much, with which we are now familiar: the triumph
+of the inviolable fortress, _the virgin daughter of Zion_, and her scorn
+of the arrogant foe; the prophet's appreciation of Asshur's power and
+impetus, which only heightens his conviction that Asshur is but an
+instrument in the hand of God; the old figure of the enemy's sudden
+check as of a wild animal by hook and bridle; his inevitable retreat to
+the north. But these familiar ideas are flung off with a terseness and
+vivacity, which bear out the opinion that here we have a prophecy of
+Isaiah, not revised and elaborated for subsequent publication, like the
+rest of his book, but in its original form, struck quickly forth to meet
+the city's sudden and urgent prayer.
+
+The new feature of this prophecy is the sign added to it (ver. 30). This
+sign reminds us of that which in opposite terms described to Ahaz the
+devastation of Judah by the approaching Assyrians (chap. vii.). The wave
+of Assyrian war is about to roll away again, and Judah to resume her
+neglected agriculture, but not quite immediately. During this year of
+701 it has been impossible, with the Assyrians in the land, to sow the
+seed, and the Jews have been dependent on the precarious crop of what
+had fallen from the harvest of the previous year and sown
+itself--_saphiah_, or _aftergrowth_. Next year, it being now too late to
+sow for next year's harvest, they must be content with the _shahis--wild
+corn, that which springs of itself. But the third year sow ye, and reap,
+and plant vineyards and eat the fruit thereof._ Perhaps we ought not to
+interpret these numbers literally. The use of three gives the statement
+a formal and general aspect, as if the prophet only meant, It may be not
+quite at once that we get rid of the Assyrians; but when they do go,
+then they go for good, and you may till your land again without fear of
+their return. Then rings out the old promise, so soon now to be
+accomplished, about _the escaped_ and _the remnant_; and the great
+pledge of the promise is once more repeated: _The zeal of Jehovah of
+hosts will perform this_. With this exclamation, as in ix. 7, the
+prophecy reaches a natural conclusion; and vv. 33-35 may have been
+uttered by Isaiah a little later, when he was quite sure that the
+Assyrian would not even attempt to repeat his abandoned blockade of
+Jerusalem.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last in a single night the deliverance miraculously came. It is
+implied by the scattered accounts of those days of salvation, that an
+Assyrian corps continued to sit before Jerusalem even after the
+Rabshakeh had returned to the headquarters of Sennacherib. The
+thirty-third of Isaiah, as well as those Psalms which celebrate the
+Assyrian's disappearance from Judah, describe it as having taken place
+from under the walls of Jerusalem and the astonished eyes of her
+guardians. It was not, however, upon this force--perhaps little more
+than a brigade of observation (xxxiii. 18)--that the calamity fell which
+drove Sennacherib so suddenly from Syria. _And there went forth_ (_that
+night_, adds the book of Kings) _the angel of Jehovah; and he smote in
+the camp of Assyria one hundred and eighty-five thousand; and when the
+camp arose in the morning, behold all of them were corpses, dead men.
+And Sennacherib, King of Assyria, broke up, and returned and dwelt in
+Nineveh._ Had this pestilence dispersed the camp that lay before
+Jerusalem, and left beneath the walls so considerable a number of
+corpses, the exclamations of surprise at the sudden disappearance of
+Assyria, which occur in Isa. xxxiii. and in Psalms xlviii. and lxxvi.,
+could hardly have failed to betray the fact. But these simply speak of
+vague _trouble_ coming _upon them that were assembled about Zion_, and
+of their swift decampment. The trouble was the news of the calamity,
+whose victims were the main body of the Assyrian army, who had been
+making for the borders of Egypt, but were now scattered northwards like
+chaff.
+
+For details of this disaster we look in vain, of course, to the Assyrian
+annals, which only record Sennacherib's abrupt return to Nineveh. But it
+is remarkable that the histories of both of his chief rivals in this
+campaign, Judah and Egypt, should contain independent reminiscences of
+so sudden and miraculous a disaster to his host. From Egyptian sources
+there has come down through Herodotus (ii. 14), a story that a king of
+Egypt, being deserted by the military caste, when "Sennacherib King of
+the Arabs and Assyrians" invaded his country, entered his sanctuary and
+appealed with weeping to his god; that the god appeared and cheered him,
+that he raised an army of artisans and marched to meet Sennacherib in
+Pelusium; that by night a multitude of field-mice ate up the quivers,
+bow-strings and shield-straps of the Assyrians; and that, as these fled
+on the morrow, very many of them fell. A stone statue of the king, adds
+Herodotus, stood in the temple of Hephaestus, having a mouse in the hand.
+Now, since the mouse was a symbol of sudden destruction, and even of the
+plague, this story of Herodotus seems to be merely a picturesque form of
+a tradition that pestilence broke out in the Assyrian camp. The parallel
+with the Bible narrative is close. In both accounts it is a prayer of
+the king that prevails. In both the Deity sends His agent--in the
+grotesque Egyptian an army of mice, in the sublime Jewish His angel. In
+both the effects are sudden, happening in a single night. From the
+Assyrian side we have this corroboration: that Sennacherib did abruptly
+return to Nineveh without taking Jerusalem or meeting with Tirhakah, and
+that, though he reigned for twenty years more, he never again made a
+Syrian campaign. Sennacherib's convenient story of his return may be
+compared to the ambiguous account which Caesar gives of his first
+withdrawal from Britain, laying emphasis on the submission of the tribes
+as his reason for a swift return to France--a return which was rather
+due to the destruction of his fleet by storm and the consequent
+uneasiness of his army. Or, as we have already said, Sennacherib's
+account may be compared to Napoleon's professed reason for his sudden
+abandonment of his Spanish campaign and his quick return to Paris in
+1808.
+
+The neighbourhood in which the Assyrian army suffered this great
+disaster[67] was notorious in antiquity for its power of pestilence.
+Making every allowance for the untutored imagination of the ancients, we
+must admit the Serbonian bog, between Syria and Egypt, to have been a
+place terrible for filth and miasma. The noxious vapours travelled far;
+but the plagues, with which this swamp several times desolated the
+world, were first engendered among the diseased and demoralised
+populations, whose villages festered upon its margin. A Persian army was
+decimated here in the middle of the fourth century before Christ. "The
+fatal disease which depopulated the earth in the time of Justinian and
+his successors first appeared in the neighbourhood of Pelusium, between
+the Serbonian bog and the eastern channel of the Nile."[68] To the north
+of the bog the Crusaders also suffered from the infection. It is,
+therefore, very probable that the moral terror of this notorious
+neighbourhood, as well as its malaria, acting upon an exhausted and
+disappointed army in a devastated land, was the secondary cause in the
+great disaster, by which the Almighty humbled the arrogance of Asshur.
+The swiftness, with which Sennacherib's retreat is said to have begun,
+has been equalled by the turning-points of other historical campaigns.
+Alexander the Great's decision to withdraw from India was, after
+victories as many as Sennacherib's, made in three days. Attila vanished
+out of Italy as suddenly as Sennacherib, and from a motive less evident.
+In the famous War of the Fosse the Meccan army broke off from their
+siege of Mohammed in a single stormy night. Napoleon's career went back
+upon itself with just as sharp a bend no less than thrice--in 1799, on
+Sennacherib's own ground in Syria; in 1808, in Spain; and in 1812, when
+he turned from Moscow upon "one memorable night of frost, in which
+twenty thousand horses perished, and the strength of the French army was
+utterly broken."[69]
+
+  [67] The statement of the Egyptian legend, that it was from a point in
+  the neighbourhood of Pelusium that Sennacherib's army commenced its
+  retreat, is not contradicted by anything in the Jewish records, which
+  leave the locality of the disaster very vague, but, on the contrary,
+  receives some support from what Isaiah expresses as at least the
+  intention of Sennacherib (chap. xxxvii. 25).
+
+  [68] Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_, xliii.
+
+  [69] Arnold, _Lectures on Modern History_, 177, quoted by Stanley.
+
+The amount of the Assyrian loss is enormous, and implies of course a
+much higher figure for the army which was vast enough to suffer it; but
+here are some instances for comparison. In the early German invasions of
+Italy whole armies and camps were swept away by the pestilential
+climate. The losses of the First Crusade were over three hundred
+thousand. The soldiers of the Third Crusade, upon the scene of
+Sennacherib's war, were reckoned at more than half a million, and their
+losses by disease alone at over one hundred thousand.[70] The Grand Army
+of Napoleon entered Russia two hundred and fifty thousand, but came out,
+having suffered no decisive defeat, only twelve thousand; on the retreat
+from Moscow alone ninety thousand perished.
+
+  [70] Gibbon, xlii.; lix.
+
+What we are concerned with, however, is neither the immediate occasion
+nor the exact amount of Sennacherib's loss, but the bare fact, so
+certainly established, that, having devastated Judah to the very walls
+of Jerusalem, the Assyrian was compelled by some calamity apart from
+human war to withdraw before the sacred city itself was taken. For this
+was the essential part of Isaiah's prediction; upon this he had staked
+the credit of the pure monotheism, whose prophet he was to the world. If
+we keep before us these two simple certainties about the great
+Deliverance: _first_, that it had been foretold by Jehovah's word, and
+_second_, that it had been now achieved, despite all human probability,
+by Jehovah's own arm, we shall understand the enormous spiritual
+impression which it left upon Israel. The religion of the one supreme
+God, supreme in might because supreme in righteousness, received a most
+emphatic historical vindication, a signal and glorious triumph. Well
+might Isaiah exclaim, on the morning of the night during which that
+Assyrian host had drifted away from Jerusalem, _Jehovah is our Judge_;
+_Jehovah is our Lawgiver_; _Jehovah is our King_: _He saveth us_. No
+other god for the present had any chance in Judah. Idolatry was
+discredited, not by the political victory of a puritan faction, not even
+by the distinctive genius or valour of a nation, but by an evident act
+of Providence, to which no human aid had been contributory. It was
+nothing less than the baptism of Israel in spiritual religion, the grace
+of which was never wholly undone.
+
+Nevertheless, the story of Jehovah's triumph cannot be justly recounted
+without including the reaction which followed upon it within the same
+generation. Before twenty years had passed from the day, on which
+Jerusalem, with the forty-sixth Psalm on her lips, sought with all her
+heart the God of Isaiah, she relapsed into an idolatry, that wore only
+this sign of the uncompromising puritanism it had displaced: that it
+was gloomy, and filled with a sense of sin unknown to Israel's
+idolatries previous to the age of Isaiah. The change would be almost
+incomprehensible to us, who have realized the spiritual effects of
+Sennacherib's disappearance, if we had not within our own history a
+somewhat analogous experience. Puritanism was as gloriously accredited
+by event and seemed to be as generally accepted by England under
+Cromwell as faith in the spiritual religion of Isaiah was vindicated by
+the deliverance of Jerusalem and the peace of Judah under Hezekiah. But
+swiftly as the ruling temper in England changed after Cromwell's death,
+and Puritanism was laid under the ban, and persecution and
+licentiousness broke out, so quickly when Hezekiah died did Manasseh his
+son--no change of dynasty here--_do evil in the sight of Jehovah, and
+make Judah to sin, building again the high places and rearing up altars
+for Baal and altars in the house of Jehovah, whereof Jehovah had said,
+In Jerusalem will I put My name_. Idolatry was never so rampant in
+Judah. _Moreover, Manasseh shed innocent blood till he filled Jerusalem
+from one end to another._ It is in this carnage that tradition has
+placed the death of Isaiah. He, who had been Judah's best counsellor
+through five reigns, on whom the whole nation had gathered in the day of
+her distress, and by whose faith her long-hoped-for salvation had at
+last become substantive, was violently put to death by the son of
+Hezekiah. It is said that he was _sawn asunder_.[71]
+
+  [71] Heb. xi.
+
+The parallel, which we are pursuing, does not, however, close here. "As
+soon," says an English historian, "as the wild orgy of the Restoration
+was over, men began to see that nothing that was really worthy in the
+work of Puritanism had been undone. The whole history of English
+progress since the Restoration, on its moral and spiritual sides, has
+been the history of Puritanism."
+
+For the principles of Isaiah and their victory we may make a claim as
+much larger than this claim, as Israel's influence on the world has been
+greater than England's. Israel never wholly lost the grace of the
+baptism wherewith she was baptized in 701. Even in her history there was
+no event in which the unaided interposition of God was more conspicuous.
+It is from an appreciation of the meaning of such a Providence that
+Israel derives her character--that character which marks her off so
+distinctively from her great rival in the education of the human race,
+and endows her ministry with its peculiar value to the world. If we are
+asked for the characteristics of the Hellenic genius, we point to the
+august temples and images of beauty in which the wealth and art of man
+have evolved in human features most glorious suggestions of divinity, or
+we point to Thermopylae, where human valour and devotion seem grander
+even in unavailing sacrifice than the almighty Fate, that renders them
+the prey of the barbarian. In Greece the human is greater than the
+divine. But if we are asked to define the spirit of Israel, we remember
+the worship which Isaiah has enjoined in his opening chapter, a worship
+that dispenses even with temple and with sacrifice, but, from the first
+strivings of conscience to the most certain enjoyment of peace, ascribes
+all man's experience to the word of God. In contrast with Thermopylae, we
+recall Jerusalem's Deliverance, effected apart from human war by the
+direct stroke of Heaven. In Judah man is great simply as he rests on
+God. The rocks of Thermopylae, how imperishably beautiful do they shine
+to latest ages with the comradeship, the valour, the sacrificial blood
+of human heroes! It is another beauty which Isaiah saw upon the bare,
+dry rocks of Zion, and which has drawn to them the admiration of the
+world. _There_, he said, _Jehovah is glory for us, a place of broad
+rivers and streams_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence
+is your strength._ How divine Isaiah's message is, may be proved by the
+length of time mankind is taking to learn it. The remarkable thing is,
+that he staked so lofty a principle, and the pure religion of which it
+was the temper, upon a political result, that he staked them upon, and
+vindicated them by, a purely local and material success--the relief of
+Jerusalem from the infidel. Centuries passed, and Christ came. He did
+not--for even He could not--preach a more spiritual religion than that
+which He had committed to His greatest forerunner, but He released this
+religion, and the temper of faith which Isaiah had so divinely
+expressed, from the local associations and merely national victories,
+with which even Isaiah had been forced to identify them. The destruction
+of Jerusalem by the heathen formed a large part of Christ's prediction
+of the immediate future; and He comforted the remnant of faith with
+these words, to some of which Isaiah's lips had first given their
+meaning: _Ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem worship
+the Father. God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him
+in spirit and in truth._
+
+Again centuries passed--no less than eighteen from Isaiah--and we find
+Christendom, though Christ had come between, returning to Isaiah's
+superseded problem, and, while reviving its material conditions, unable
+to apply to them the prophet's spiritual temper. The Christianity of
+the Crusades fell back upon Isaiah's position without his spirit. Like
+him, it staked the credit of religion upon the relief of the holy city
+from the grasp of the infidel; but, in ghastly contrast to that pure
+faith and serene confidence with which a single Jew maintained the
+inviolateness of Mount Zion in the face of Assyria, with what pride and
+fraud, with what blood and cruelty, with what impious invention of
+miracle and parody of Divine testimony, did countless armies of
+Christendom, excited by their most fervent prophets and blessed by their
+high-priest, attempt in vain the recovery of Jerusalem from the Saracen!
+The Crusades are a gigantic proof of how easy it is to adopt the
+external forms of heroic ages, how difficult to repeat their inward
+temper. We could not have more impressive witness borne to the fact that
+humanity--though obedient to the orthodox Church, though led by the
+strongest spirits of the age, though hallowed by the presence of its
+greatest saints, though enduring all trials, though exhibiting an
+unrivalled power of self-sacrifice and enthusiasm, though beautified by
+courtesy and chivalry, and though doing and suffering all for Christ's
+sake--may yet fail to understand the old precept that _in returning and
+rest men are saved, in quietness and in confidence is their strength_.
+Nothing could more emphatically prove the loftiness of Isaiah's teaching
+than this failure of Christendom even to come within sight of it.
+
+Have we learned this lesson yet? O God of Israel, God of Isaiah, in
+returning to whom and resting upon whom alone we are saved, purge us of
+self and of the pride of life, of the fever and the falsehood they
+breed. Teach us that in quietness and in confidence is our strength.
+Help us to be still and know that Thou art God.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+_A REVIEW OF ISAIAH'S PREDICTIONS CONCERNING THE DELIVERANCE OF
+JERUSALEM._
+
+
+As we have gathered together all that Isaiah prophesied concerning the
+Messiah, so it may be useful for closer students of his book if we now
+summarise (even at the risk of a little repetition) the facts of his
+marvellous prediction of the siege and delivery of Jerusalem. Such a
+review, besides being historically interesting, ought to prove of
+edification in so far as it instructs us in the kind of faith by which
+the Holy Ghost inspired a prophet to foretell the future.
+
+1. The primary conviction with which Isaiah felt himself inspired by the
+Spirit of Jehovah was a purely moral one--that a devastation of Judah
+was necessary for her people's sin, to which he shortly added a
+religious one: that a remnant would be saved. He had this double
+conviction as early as 740 B.C. (vi. 11-13).
+
+2. Looking round the horizon for some phenomenon with which to identify
+this promised judgement, Isaiah described the latter at first without
+naming any single people as the invaders of Judah (v. 26 ff.). It may
+have been that for a moment he hesitated between Assyria and Egypt. Once
+he named them together as equally the Lord's instruments upon Judah
+(vii. 18), but only once. When Ahaz resolved to call Assyria into the
+Syrian quarrels, Isaiah exclusively designated the northern power as the
+scourge he had predicted; and when in 732 the Assyrian armies had
+overrun Samaria, he graphically described their necessary overflow into
+Judah also (viii.). This invasion did not spread to Judah, but Isaiah's
+combined moral and political conviction, for both elements of which he
+claimed the inspiration of God's Spirit, seized him with renewed
+strength in 725, when Salmanassar marched south upon Israel (xxviii.);
+and in 721, when Sargon captured Samaria, Isaiah uttered a vivid
+description of his speedy arrival before Jerusalem (x. 28 ff.). This
+prediction was again disappointed. But Sargon's departure without
+invading Judah, and her second escape from him on his return to Syria in
+711, did not in the least induce Isaiah to relax either of his two
+convictions. Judah he proclaimed to be as much in need of punishment as
+ever (xxix.-xxxii.); and, though on Sargon's death all Palestine
+revolted from Assyria to Egypt, he persisted that this would not save
+her from Sennacherib (xiv. 29 ff.; xxix.-xxx.). The "dourness" with
+which his countrymen believed in Egypt naturally caused the prophet to
+fill his orations at this time with the _political_ side of his
+conviction that Assyria was stronger than Egypt; but because Jerusalem's
+Egyptian policy springs from a deceitful temper (xxx. 1, 9, 10) he is as
+earnest as ever with his _moral_ conviction that judgement is coming.
+After 705 his pictures of a siege of Jerusalem grow more definite
+(xxix.; xxx.). He seems scorched by the nearness of the Assyrian
+conflagration (xxx. 27 ff.). At last in 701, when Sennacherib comes to
+Palestine, the siege is pictured as immediate--chaps. i. and xx., which
+also show at its height the prophet's moral conviction of the necessity
+of the siege for punishing his people.
+
+3. But over against this _moral_ conviction, that Judah must be
+devastated for her sin, and this _political_, that Assyria is to be the
+instrument, even to the extreme of a siege of Jerusalem, the prophet
+still holds strongly to the _religious_ assurance that God cannot allow
+His shrine to be violated or His people to be exterminated. At first it
+is only of the people that Isaiah speaks--_the remnant_ (vi.; viii. 18).
+Jerusalem is not mentioned in the verses that describe the overflowing
+of all Judah by Assyria (viii. 7). It is only when at last, in 721, the
+prophet realizes how near a siege of Jerusalem may be (x. 11, 28-32),
+that he also pictures the sudden destruction of the Assyrian on his
+arrival within sight of her walls (x. 33). In 705, when the siege of the
+sacred city once more becomes imminent, the prophet again reiterates to
+the heathen that Zion alone shall stand among the cities of Syria (xiv.
+32). To herself he says that, though she shall be besieged and brought
+very low, she shall finally be delivered (xxix. 1-8; xxx. 19-26; xxxi.
+1, 4, 5). It is true, this conviction seems to be broken--once by a
+prophecy of uncertain date (xxxii. 14), which indicates a desolation of
+the buildings of Jerusalem, and once by the prophet's sentence of death
+upon the inhabitants in the hour of their profligacy (xxii.)--but when
+the city has repented, and the enemy have perfidiously come back to
+demand her surrender, Isaiah again asseverates, though all are hopeless,
+that she shall not fall (xxxvii.).
+
+4. Now, with regard to the method of Jerusalem's deliverance, Isaiah has
+uniformly described this as happening not by human battle. From the
+beginning he said that Israel should be delivered in the last extremity
+of their weakness (vi. 13). On the Assyrian's arrival over against the
+city, Jehovah is to lop him off (x. 33). When her enemies have invested
+Jerusalem, Jehovah is to come down in thunder and a hurricane and sweep
+them away (after 705, xxix. 5-8). They are to be suddenly disappointed,
+like a hungry man waking from a dream of food. A beautiful promise is
+given of the raising of the siege without mention of struggle or any
+weapon (xxx. 20-26). The Assyrian is to be checked as a wild bull is
+checked _with a lasso_, is to be slain _by the lighting down of the
+Lord's arm, by the voice of the Lord_, through a judgement that shall be
+like a solemn holocaust to God than a human battle (xxx. 30-33). When
+the Assyrian comes back, and Hezekiah is crushed by the new demand for
+surrender, Isaiah says that, by a Divinely inspired impulse,
+Sennacherib, hearing bad news, shall suddenly return to his own land
+(xxxviii. 7).
+
+It is only in very little details that these predictions differ. The
+thunderstorm and torrents of fire are, of course, but poetic variations.
+In 721, however, the prophet hardly anticipates the very close siege,
+which he pictures after 705; and while from 705 to 702 he identifies the
+relief of Jerusalem with a great calamity to the Assyrian army about to
+invade Judah, yet in 701, when the Assyrians are actually on the spot,
+he suggests that nothing but a rumour shall cause their retreat and so
+leave Jerusalem free of them.
+
+5. In all this we see a certain FIXITY and a certain FREEDOM. The
+freedom, the changes and inconsistencies in the prediction, are entirely
+limited to those of Isaiah's convictions which we have called political,
+and which the prophet evidently gathered from his observation of
+political circumstances as these developed before his eyes from year to
+year. But what was fixed and unalterable to Isaiah, he drew from the
+moral and religious convictions to which his political observation was
+subservient; viz., Judah's very sore punishment for sin, the survival of
+a people of God in the world, and their deliverance by His own act.
+
+6. This "Bible-reading" in Isaiah's predictive prophecies reveals very
+clearly the nature of inspiration under the old covenant. To Isaiah
+inspiration was nothing more nor less than the possession of certain
+strong moral and religious convictions, which he felt he owed to the
+communication of the Spirit of God, and according to which he
+interpreted, and even dared to foretell, the history of his people and
+the world. Our study completely dispels, on the evidence of the Bible
+itself, that view of inspiration and prediction, so long held in the
+Church, which it is difficult to define, but which means something like
+this: that the prophet beheld a vision of the future in its actual
+detail and read this off as a man may read the history of the past out
+of a book or a clear memory. This is a very simple view, but too simple
+either to meet the facts of the Bible, or to afford to men any of that
+intellectual and spiritual satisfaction which the discovery of the
+Divine methods is sure to afford. The literal view of inspiration is too
+simple to be true, and too simple to be edifying. On the other hand, how
+profitable, how edifying, is the Bible's own account of its inspiration!
+To know that men interpreted, predicted and controlled history in the
+power of the purest moral and religious convictions--in the knowledge
+of, and the loyalty to, certain fundamental laws of God--is to receive
+an account of inspiration, which is not only as satisfying to the reason
+as it is true to the facts of the Bible, but is spiritually very
+helpful by the lofty example and reward it sets before our own faith. By
+faith differing in degree, but not in kind, from ours, _faith which is
+the substance of things hoped for_, these men became prophets of God,
+and received the testimony of history that they spoke from Him. Isaiah
+prophesied and predicted all he did from loyalty to two simple truths,
+which he tells us he received from God Himself: that sin must be
+punished, and that the people of God must be saved. This simple faith,
+acting along with a wonderful knowledge of human nature and ceaseless
+vigilance of affairs, constituted inspiration for Isaiah.
+
+There is thus, with great modifications, an analogy between the prophet
+and the scientific observer of the present day. Men of science are able
+to affirm the certainty of natural phenomena by their knowledge of the
+laws and principles of nature. Certain forces being present, certain
+results must come to pass. The Old Testament prophets, working in
+history, a sphere where the problems were infinitely more complicated by
+the presence and powerful operation of man's free-will, seized hold of
+principles as conspicuous and certain to them as the laws of nature are
+to the scientist; and out of their conviction of these they proclaimed
+the necessity of certain events. God is inflexibly righteous, He cannot
+utterly destroy His people or the witness of Himself among men: these
+were the laws. Judah shall be punished, Israel shall continue to exist:
+these were the certainties deduced from the laws. But for the exact
+conditions and forms both of the punishment and its relief the prophets
+depended upon their knowledge of the world, of which, as these pages
+testify, they were the keenest and largest-hearted observers that ever
+appeared.
+
+This account of prophecy may be offered with advantage to those who are
+prejudiced against prophecy as full of materials, which are inexplicable
+to minds accustomed to find a law and reason for everything. Grant the
+truths of the spiritual doctrines, which the prophets made their
+premises, and you must admit that their predictions are neither
+arbitrary nor bewildering. Or begin at the other end: verify that these
+facts took place, and that the prophets actually predicted them; and if
+you are true to your own scientific methods, you will not be able to
+resist the conclusion that the spiritual laws and principles, by which
+the predictions were made, are as real as those by which in the realm of
+nature you proclaim the necessity of certain physical phenomena--and all
+this in spite of there being at work in the prophets' sphere a force,
+the free-will of man, which cannot interfere with the laws you work by,
+as it can with those on which they depend.
+
+But, to turn from the apologetic value of this account of prophecy to
+the experimental, we maintain that it brings out a new sacredness upon
+common life. If it be true that Isaiah had no magical means for
+foretelling the future, but simply his own spiritual convictions and his
+observation of history, that may, of course, deprive some eyes of a
+light which they fancied they saw bursting from heaven. But, on the
+other hand, does it not cast a greater glory upon daily life and
+history, to have seen in Isaiah this close connection between spiritual
+conviction and political event? Does it not teach us that life is
+governed by faith; that the truths we profess are the things that make
+history; that we carry the future in our hearts; that not an event
+happens but is to be used by us as meaning the effect of some law of
+God, and not a fact appears but is the symbol and sacrament of His
+truth?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+_AN OLD TESTAMENT BELIEVER'S SICK-BED; OR, THE DIFFERENCE CHRIST HAS
+MADE._
+
+ISAIAH xxxviii.; xxxix. (DATE UNCERTAIN).
+
+
+To the great national drama of Jerusalem's deliverance, there have been
+added two scenes of a personal kind, relating to her king. Chaps.
+xxxviii. and xxxix. are the narrative of the sore sickness and recovery
+of King Hezekiah, and of the embassy which Merodach-baladan sent him,
+and how he received the embassy. The date of these events is difficult
+to determine. If, with Canon Cheyne, we believe in an invasion of Judah
+by Sargon in 711, we shall be tempted to refer them, as he does, to that
+date--the more so that the promise of fifteen additional years made to
+Hezekiah in 711, the fifteenth year of his reign, would bring it up to
+the twenty-nine, at which it is set in 2 Kings xviii. 2. That, however,
+would flatly contradict the statement both of Isaiah xxxviii. 1 and 2
+Kings xx. 1 that Hezekiah's sickness fell in the days of the invasion of
+Judah by Sennacherib; that is, after 705. But to place the promise of
+fifteen additional years to Hezekiah after 705, when we know he had been
+reigning for at least twenty years, would be to contradict the verse,
+just cited, which sums up the years of his reign as twenty-nine. This
+is, in fact, one of the instances, in which we must admit our present
+inability to elucidate the chronology of this portion of the book of
+Isaiah. Mr. Cheyne thinks the editor mistook the siege by Sennacherib
+for the siege by Sargon. But as the fact of a siege by Sargon has never
+been satisfactorily established, it seems safer to trust the statement
+that Hezekiah's sickness occurred in the reign of Sennacherib, and to
+allow that there has been an error somewhere in the numbering of the
+years. It is remarkable that the name of Merodach-baladan does not help
+us to decide between the two dates. There was a Merodach-baladan in
+rebellion against Sargon in 710, and there was one in rebellion against
+Sennacherib in 705. It has not yet been put past doubt as to whether
+these two are the same. The essential is that there was a
+Merodach-baladan alive, real or only claimant king of Babylon, about
+705, and that he was likely at that date to treat with Hezekiah, being
+himself in revolt against Assyria. Unable to come to any decision about
+the conflicting numbers, we leave uncertain the date of the events
+recounted in chaps. xxxviii., xxxix. The original form of the narrative,
+but wanting Hezekiah's hymn, is given in 2 Kings xx.[72]
+
+  [72] Isa. xxxviii., xxxix., has evidently been abridged from 2 Kings xx.
+  and in some points has to be corrected by the latter. Chap. xxxviii. 21,
+  22, of course, must be brought forward before ver. 7.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have given to this chapter the title "An Old Testament Believer's
+Deathbed; or, The Difference Christ has made," not because this is the
+only spiritual suggestion of the story, but because it seems to the
+present expositor as if this were the predominant feeling left in
+Christian minds after reading for us the story. In Hezekiah's conduct
+there is much of courage for us to admire, as there are other elements
+to warn us; but when we have read the whole story, we find ourselves
+saying, What a difference Christ has made to me! Take Hezekiah from two
+points of view, and then let the narrative itself bring out this
+difference.
+
+Here is a man, who, although he lived more than twenty-five centuries
+ago is brought quite close to our side. Death, who herds all men into
+his narrow fold, has crushed this Hebrew king so close to us that we can
+feel his very heart beat. Hezekiah's hymn gives us entrance into the
+fellowship of his sufferings. By the figures he so skilfully uses he
+makes us feel that pain, the shortness of life, the suddenness of death
+and the utter blackness beyond were to him just what they are to us. And
+yet this kinship in pain, and fear and ignorance only makes us the more
+aware of something else which we have and he has not.
+
+Again, here is a man to whom religion gave all it could give without the
+help of Christ; a believer in the religion out of which Christianity
+sprang, perhaps the most representative Old Testament believer we could
+find, for Hezekiah was at once the collector of what was best in its
+literature and the reformer of what was worst in its worship; a man
+permeated by the past piety of his Church, and enjoying as his guide and
+philosopher the boldest prophet who ever preached the future
+developments of its spirit. Yet when we put Hezekiah and all that Isaiah
+can give him on one side, we shall again feel for ourselves on the other
+what a difference Christ has made.
+
+This difference a simple study of the narrative will make clear.
+
+
+I.
+
+_In those days Hezekiah became sick unto death._ They were critical days
+for Judah--no son born to the king (2 Kings xxi. 1), the work of
+reformation in Judah not yet consolidated, the big world tossing in
+revolution all around. Under God, everything depended on an experienced
+ruler; and this one, without a son to succeed him, was drawing near to
+death. We will therefore judge Hezekiah's strong passion for life to
+have been patriotic as well as selfish. He stood in the midtime of his
+days, with a faithfully executed work behind him and so good an example
+of kinghood that for years Isaiah had not expressed his old longing for
+the Messiah. The Lord had counted Hezekiah righteous; that twin-sign had
+been given him which more than any other assured an Israelite of
+Jehovah's favour--a good conscience and success in his work. Well,
+therefore, might he cry when Isaiah brought him the sentence of death,
+_Ah, now, Jehovah, remember, I beseech Thee, how I have walked before
+Thee in truth and with a perfect heart, and have done that which is good
+in Thine eyes. And Hezekiah wept with a great weeping._
+
+There is difficulty in the strange story which follows. The dial was
+probably a pyramid of steps on the top of which stood a short pillar or
+obelisk. When the sun rose in the morning, the shadow cast by the pillar
+would fall right down the western side of the pyramid to the bottom of
+the lowest step. As the sun ascended the shadow would shorten, and creep
+up inch by inch to the foot of the pillar. After noon, as the sun began
+to descend to the west, the shadow would creep down the eastern steps;
+and the steps were so measured that each one marked a certain degree of
+time. It was probably afternoon when Isaiah visited the king. The shadow
+was _going down_ according to the regular law; the sign consisted in
+causing the shadow to shrink up the steps again. Such a reversal of the
+ordinary progress of the shadow may have been caused in either of two
+ways: by the whole earth being thrown back on its axis, which we may
+dismiss as impossible, or by the occurrence of the phenomenon known as
+refraction. Refraction is a disturbance in the atmosphere by which the
+rays of the sun are bent or deflected from their natural course into an
+angular one. In this case, instead of shooting straight over the top of
+the obelisk, the rays of the sun had been bent down and inward, so that
+the shadow fled up to the foot of the obelisk. There are many things in
+the air which might cause this; it is a phenomenon often observed; and
+the Scriptural narratives imply that on this occasion it was purely
+local (2 Chron. xxxii. 31). Had we only the narrative in the book of
+Isaiah, the explanation would have been easy. Isaiah, having given the
+sentence of death, passed the dial in the palace courtyard, and saw the
+shadow lying ten degrees farther up than it should have done, the sight
+of which coincided with the inspiration that the king would not die; and
+Isaiah went back to announce to Hezekiah his reprieve, and naturally
+call his attention to this as a sign, to which a weak and desponding man
+would be glad to cling. But the original narrative in the book of Kings
+tells us that Isaiah offered Hezekiah a choice of signs: that the shadow
+should either advance or retreat, and that the king chose the latter.
+The sign came in answer to Isaiah's prayer, and is narrated to us as a
+special Divine interposition. But a medicine accompanied it, and
+Hezekiah recovered through a poultice of figs laid on the boil from
+which he suffered.
+
+While recognising for our own faith the uselessness of a discussion on
+this sign offered to a sick man, let us not miss the moral lessons of so
+touching a narrative, nor the sympathy with the sick king which it is
+fitted to produce, and which is our best introduction to the study of
+his hymn.
+
+Isaiah had performed that most awful duty of doctor or minister the
+telling of a friend that he must die. Few men have not in their personal
+experience a key to the prophet's feelings on this occasion. The leaving
+of a dear friend for the last time; the coming out into the sunlight
+which he will nevermore share with us; the passing by the dial; the
+observation of the creeping shadow; the feeling that it is only a
+question of time, the passion of prayer into which that feeling throws
+us that God may be pleased to put off the hour and spare our friend; the
+invention, that is born, like prayer, of necessity: a cure we suddenly
+remember; the confidence which prayer and invention bring between them;
+the return with the joyful news; the giving of the order about the
+remedy--cannot many in their degree rejoice with Isaiah in such an
+experience? But he has, too, a conscience of God and God's work to which
+none of us may pretend: he knows how indispensable to that work his
+royal pupil is, and out of this inspiration he prophesies the will of
+the Lord that Hezekiah shall recover.
+
+Then the king, with a sick man's sacramental longing, asks a sign. Out
+through the window the courtyard is visible; there stands the same
+step-dial of Ahaz, the long pillar on the top of the steps, the shadow
+creeping down them through the warm afternoon sunshine. To the sick man
+it must have been like the finger of death coming nearer. _Shall the
+shadow_, asks the prophet, _go forward ten steps or go back ten steps?
+It is easy_, says the king, alarmed, _for the shadow to go down ten
+steps_. Easy for it to go down! Has he not been feeling that all the
+afternoon? "Do not," we can fancy him saying, with the gasp of a man who
+has been watching its irresistible descent--"do not let that black thing
+come farther; but _let the shadow go backward ten steps_."
+
+The shadow returned, and Hezekiah got his sign. But when he was well, he
+used it for more than a sign. He read a great spiritual lesson in it.
+The time, which upon the dial had been apparently thrown back, had in
+his life been really thrown back; and God had given him his years to
+live over again. The past was to be as if it had never been, its guilt
+and weakness wiped out. _Thou hast cast behind Thy back all my sins._ As
+a newborn child Hezekiah felt himself uncommitted by the past, not a
+sin's-doubt nor a sin's-cowardice in him, with the heart of a little
+child, but yet with the strength and dignity of a grown man, for it is
+the magic of tribulation to bring innocence with experience. _I shall go
+softly_, or literally, _with dignity or caution, as in a procession, all
+my years because of the bitterness of my soul. O Lord, upon such things
+do men live; and altogether in them is the life of my spirit.... Behold,
+for perfection was it bitter to me,_ so _bitter_. And through it all
+there breaks a new impression of God. _What shall I say? He hath both
+spoken with me, and Himself hath done it._ As if afraid to impute his
+profits to the mere experience itself, _In them is the life of my
+spirit_, he breaks in with _Yea, Thou hast recovered me; yea, Thou hast
+made me to live_. And then, by a very pregnant construction, he adds,
+_Thou hast loved my soul out of the pit of destruction; that is, of
+course, loved, and by Thy love lifted_, but he uses the one word loved,
+and gives it the active force of _drawing_ or _lifting_. In this lay the
+head and glory of Hezekiah's experience. He was a religious man, an
+enthusiast for the Temple services, and had all his days as his friend
+the prophet whose heart was with the heart of God; but it was not
+through any of these means God came near him, not till he lay sick and
+had turned his face to the wall. Then indeed he cried, _What shall I
+say? He hath both spoken with me, and Himself hath done it!_
+
+Forgiveness, a new peace, a new dignity and a visit from the living God!
+Well might Hezekiah exclaim that it was only through a near sense of
+death that men rightly learned to live. _Ah, Lord, it is upon these
+things that men live; and wholly therein is the life of my spirit._ It
+is by these things men live, and therein I have learned for the first
+time what life is!
+
+In all this at least we cannot go beyond Hezekiah, and he stands an
+example to the best Christian among us. Never did a man bring richer
+harvest from the fields of death. Everything that renders life really
+life--peace, dignity, a new sense of God and of His forgiveness--these
+were the spoils which Hezekiah won in his struggle with the grim enemy.
+He had snatched from death a new meaning for life; he had robbed death
+of its awful pomp, and bestowed this on careless life. Hereafter he
+should walk with the step and the mien of a conqueror--_I shall go in
+solemn procession all my years because of the bitterness of my soul_--or
+with the carefulness of a worshipper, who sees at the end of his course
+the throne of the Most High God, and makes all his life an ascent
+thither.
+
+This is the effect which every great sorrow and struggle has upon a
+noble soul. Come to the streets of the living. Who are these, whom we
+can so easily distinguish from the crowd by their firmness of step and
+look of peace, walking softly where some spurt and some halt, holding,
+without rest or haste, the tenor of their way, as if they marched to
+music heard by their ears alone? These are they which have come out of
+great tribulation. They have brought back into time the sense of
+eternity. They know how near the invisible worlds lie to this one, and
+the sense of the vast silences stills all idle laughter in their hearts.
+The life that is to other men chance or sport, strife or hurried flight,
+has for them its allotted distance; is for them a measured march, a
+constant worship. _For the bitterness of their soul they go in
+procession all their years._ Sorrow's subjects, they are our kings;
+wrestlers with death, our veterans: and to the rabble armies of society
+they set the step of a nobler life.
+
+Count especially the young man blessed, who has looked into the grave
+before he has faced the great temptations of the world, and has not
+entered the race of life till he has learned his stride in the race with
+death. They tell us that on the outside of civilisation, where men carry
+their lives in their hands, a most thorough politeness and dignity are
+bred, in spite of the want of settled habits, by the sense of danger
+alone; and we know how battle and a deadly climate, pestilence or the
+perils of the sea have sent back to us the most careless of our youth
+with a self-possession and regularity of mind, that it would have been
+hopeless to expect them to develop amid the trivial trials of village
+life.
+
+But the greatest duty of us men is not to seek nor to pray for such
+combats with death. It is when God has found these for us to remain
+true to our memories of them. The hardest duty of life is to remain true
+to our psalms of deliverance, as it is certainly life's greatest
+temptation to fall away from the sanctity of sorrow, and suffer the
+stately style of one who knows how near death hovers to his line of
+march to degenerate into the broken step of a wanton life. This was
+Hezekiah's temptation, and this is why the story of his fall in the
+thirty-ninth chapter is placed beside his vows in the thirty-eighth--to
+warn us how easy it is for those who have come conquerors out of a
+struggle with death to fall a prey to common life. He had said, _I will
+walk softly all my years_; but how arrogantly and rashly he carried
+himself when Merodach-baladan sent the embassy to congratulate him on
+his recovery. It was not with the dignity of the veteran, but with a
+childish love of display, perhaps also with the too restless desire to
+secure an alliance, that he showed the envoys _his storehouse, the
+silver, and the gold, and the spices, and the precious oil, and all the
+house of his armour and all that was found in his treasures. There was
+nothing which Hezekiah did not show them in his house nor in all his
+dominion._ In this behaviour there was neither caution nor sobriety, and
+we cannot doubt but that Hezekiah felt the shame of it when Isaiah
+sternly rebuked him and threw upon all his house the dark shadow of
+captivity.
+
+It is easier to win spoils from death than to keep them untarnished by
+life. Shame burns warm in a soldier's heart when he sees the arms he
+risked life to win rusting for want of a little care. Ours will not burn
+less if we discover that the strength of character we brought with us
+out of some great tribulation has been slowly weakened by subsequent
+self-indulgence of vanity. How awful to have fought for character with
+death only to squander it upon life! It is well to keep praying, "My
+God, suffer me not to forget my bonds and my bitterness. In my hours of
+wealth and ease, and health and peace, by the memory of Thy judgements
+deliver me, good Lord."
+
+
+II.
+
+So far then Hezekiah is an example and warning to us all. With all our
+faith in Christ, none of us, in the things mentioned, may hope to excel
+this Old Testament believer. But notice very particularly that
+Hezekiah's faith and fortitude are profitable only for this life. It is
+when we begin to think, What of the life to come? that we perceive the
+infinite difference Christ has made.
+
+We know what Hezekiah felt when his back was turned on death, and he
+came up to life again. But what did he feel when he faced the other way,
+and his back was to life? With his back to life and facing deathwards,
+Hezekiah saw nothing, that was worth hoping for. To him to die was to
+leave God behind him, to leave the face of God as surely as he was
+leaving the face of man. _I said, I shall not see Jah, Jah in the land
+of the living; I shall gaze upon man no more with the inhabitants of the
+world._ The beyond was not to Hezekiah absolute nothingness, for he had
+his conceptions, the popular conceptions of his time, of a sort of
+existence that was passed by those who had been men upon earth. The
+imagination of his people figured the gloomy portals of a nether
+world--_Sheol_, the _Hollow_ (Dante's "hollow realm"), or perhaps the
+_Craving_--into which death herds the shades of men, bloodless,
+voiceless, without love or hope or aught that makes life worth living.
+With such an existence beyond, to die to life here was to Hezekiah like
+as when a weaver rolls up the finished web. My life may be a pattern for
+others to copy, a banner for others to fight under, but for me it is
+finished. Death has cut it from the loom. Or it was like going into
+captivity. _Mine age is removed and is carried away from me into exile,
+like a shepherd's tent_--exile which to a Jew was the extreme of
+despair, implying as it did absence from God, and salvation and the
+possibility of worship. _Sheol cannot praise Thee; death cannot
+celebrate Thee: they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy
+faithfulness._
+
+Of this then at the best Hezekiah was sure: a respite of fifteen
+years--nothing beyond. Then the shadow would not return upon the dial;
+and as the king's eyes closed upon the dear faces of his friends, his
+sense of the countenance of God would die too, and his soul slip into
+the abyss, hopeless of God's faithfulness.
+
+It is this awful anticlimax, which makes us feel the difference Christ
+has made. This saint stood in almost the clearest light that revelation
+cast before Jesus. He was able to perceive in suffering a meaning and
+derive from it a strength not to be exceeded by any Christian. Yet his
+faith is profitable for this life alone. For him character may wrestle
+with death over and over again, and grow the stronger for every grapple,
+but death wins the last throw.
+
+It may be said that Hezekiah's despair of the future is simply the
+morbid thoughts of a sick man or the exaggerated fancies of a poet. "We
+must not," it is urged, "define a poet's language with the strictness of
+a theology." True, and we must also make some allowance for a man dying
+prematurely in the midst of his days. But if this hymn is only poetry,
+it would have been as easy to poetise on the opposite possibilities
+across the grave. So quick an imagination as Hezekiah's could not have
+failed to take advantage of the slightest scintilla of glory that
+pierced the cloud. It must be that his eye saw none, for all his poetry
+droops the other way. We seek in heaven for praise in its fulness; there
+we know God's servants shall see Him face to face. But of this Hezekiah
+had not the slightest imagination; he anxiously prayed that he might
+recover _to strike the stringed instruments all the days of his life in
+the house of Jehovah. The living, the living, he praiseth thee, as I do
+this day; the father to the children shall make known Thy truth._ But
+_they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy faithfulness_.
+
+Now compare all this with the Psalms of Christian hope; with the faith
+that fills Paul; with his ardour who says, _To me to depart is far
+better_; with the glory which John beholds with open face: the hosts of
+the redeemed praising God and walking in the light of His face, all the
+geography of that country laid down, and the plan of the new Jerusalem
+declared to the very fashion of her stones; with the audacity since of
+Christian art and song: the rapture of Watts' hymns and the exhilaration
+of Wesley's praise as they contemplate death; and with the joyful and
+exact anticipations of so many millions of common men as they turn their
+faces to the wall. In all these, in even the Book of the Revelation,
+there is of course a great deal of pure fancy. But imagination never
+bursts in anywhither till fact has preceded. And it is just because
+there is a great fact standing between us and Hezekiah that the pureness
+of our faith and the richness of our imagination of immortality differ
+so much from his. That fact is Jesus Christ, His resurrection and
+ascension. It is He who has made all the difference and brought life and
+immortality to light.
+
+And we shall know the difference if we lose our faith in that fact. For
+_except Christ be risen from the dead_ and gone before to a country
+which derives all its reality and light for our imagination from that
+Presence, which once walked with us in the flesh, there remains for us
+only Hezekiah's courage to make the best of a short reprieve, only
+Hezekiah's outlook into Hades when at last we turn our faces to the
+wall. But to be stronger and purer for having met with death, as he was,
+only that we must afterwards succumb, with our purity and our strength,
+to death--this is surely to be, as Paul said, _of all men the most
+miserable_.
+
+Better far to own the power of an endless life, which Christ has sealed
+to us, and translate Hezekiah's experience into the new calculus of
+immortality. If to have faced death as he did was to inherit dignity and
+peace and sense of power, what glory of kingship and queenship must sit
+upon those faces in the other world who have been at closer quarters
+still with the King of terrors, and through Christ their strength have
+spoiled him of his sting and victory! To have felt the worst of death
+and to have triumphed--this is the secret of the peaceful hearts,
+unfaltering looks and faces of glory, _which pass in solemn procession
+of worship_ through all eternity before the throne of God.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We shall consider the Old Testament views of a future life and
+resurrection more fully in chaps. xxvii. and xxx. of this volume.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+HAD ISAIAH A GOSPEL FOR THE INDIVIDUAL?
+
+
+The two narratives, in which Isaiah's career culminates--that of the
+Deliverance of Jerusalem (xxxvi.; xxxvii.) and that of the Recovery of
+Hezekiah (xxxviii.; xxxix.)--cannot fail, coming together as they do, to
+suggest to thoughtful readers a striking contrast between Isaiah's
+treatment of the community and his treatment of the individual, between
+his treatment of the Church and his treatment of single members. For in
+the first of these narratives we are told how an illimitable future,
+elsewhere so gloriously described by the prophet, was secured for the
+Church upon earth; but the whole result of the second is the gain for a
+representative member of the Church of a respite of fifteen years.
+Nothing, as we have seen, is promised to the dying Hezekiah of a future
+life; no scintilla of the light of eternity sparkles either in Isaiah's
+promise or in Hezekiah's prayer. The net result of the incident is a
+reprieve of fifteen years: fifteen years of a character strengthened,
+indeed, by having met with death, but, it would sadly seem, only in
+order to become again the prey of the vanities of this world (chap.
+xxxix.). So meagre a result for the individual stands strangely out
+against the perpetual glory and peace assured to the community. And it
+suggests this question: Had Isaiah any real gospel for the individual?
+If so, what was it?
+
+First of all, we must remember that God in His providence seldom gives
+to one prophet or generation more than a single main problem for
+solution. In Isaiah's day undoubtedly the most urgent problem--and
+Divine problems are ever practical, not philosophical--was the
+continuance of the Church upon earth. It had really got to be a matter
+of doubt whether a body of people possessing the knowledge of the true
+God, and able to transfuse and transmit it, could possibly survive among
+the political convulsions of the world, and in consequence of its own
+sin. Isaiah's problem was the reformation and survival of the Church. In
+accordance with this, we notice how many of his terms are collective,
+and how he almost never addresses the individual. It is the _people_,
+upon whom he calls--_the nation, Israel, the house of Jacob My vineyard,
+the men of Judah His pleasant plantation_. To these we may add the
+apostrophes to the city of Jerusalem, under many personifications:
+_Ariel, Ariel, inhabitress of Zion, daughter of Zion_. When Isaiah
+denounces sin, the sinner is either the whole community or a class in
+the community, very seldom an individual, though there are some
+instances of the latter, as Ahaz and Shebna. It is _This people hath
+rejected_, or _The people would not_. When Jerusalem collapsed, although
+there must have been many righteous men still within her, Isaiah said,
+_What aileth thee that all belonging to thee have gone up to the
+housetops?_ (xxii. 1). His language is wholesale. When he is not
+attacking society, he attacks classes or groups: _the rulers_, the
+land-grabbers, the drunkards, _the sinners_, _the judges_, _the house of
+David_, _the priests and the prophets_, _the women_. And the sins of
+these he describes in their social effects, or in their results upon
+the fate of the whole people; but he never, except in two cases, gives
+us their individual results. He does not make evident, like Jesus or
+Paul, the eternal damage a man's sin inflicts on his own soul.
+
+Similarly when Isaiah speaks of God's grace and salvation the objects of
+these are again collective--_the remnant; the escaped_ (also a
+collective noun); a _holy seed_; a _stock_ or _stump_. It is a _restored
+nation_ whom he sees under the Messiah, the perpetuity and glory of a
+_city_ and _a State_. What we consider to be a most personal and
+particularly individual matter--the forgiveness of sin--he promises,
+with two exceptions, only to the community: _This people that dwelleth
+therein hath its iniquity forgiven_. We can understand all this social,
+collective and wholesale character of his language only if we keep in
+mind his Divinely appointed work--the substance and perpetuity of a
+purified and secure Church of God.
+
+Had Isaiah then no gospel for the individual? This will indeed seem
+impossible to us if we keep in view the following considerations:--
+
+1. ISAIAH HIMSELF had passed through a powerfully individual experience.
+He had not only felt the solidarity of the people's sin--_I dwell among
+a people of unclean lips_--he had first felt his own particular guilt:
+_I am a man of unclean lips_. One who suffered the private experiences
+which are recounted in chap. vi.; whose _own eyes_ had _seen_ the _King,
+Jehovah of hosts_; who had gathered on his own lips his guilt and felt
+the fire come from heaven's altar by an angelic messenger specially to
+purify him; who had further devoted himself to God's service with so
+thrilling a sense of his own responsibility, and had so thereby felt his
+solitary and individual mission--he surely was not behind the very
+greatest of Christian saints in the experience of guilt, of personal
+obligation to grace and of personal responsibility. Though the record of
+Isaiah's ministry contains no narratives, such as fill the ministries of
+Jesus and Paul, of anxious care for individuals, could he who wrote of
+himself that sixth chapter have failed to deal with men as Jesus dealt
+with Nicodemus, or Paul with the Philippian gaoler? It is not
+picturesque fancy, nor merely a reflection of the New Testament temper,
+if we realize Isaiah's intervals of relief from political labour and
+religious reform occupied with an attention to individual interests,
+which necessarily would not obtain the permanent record of his public
+ministry. But whether this be so or not, the sixth chapter teaches that
+for Isaiah all public conscience and public labour found its necessary
+preparation in personal religion.
+
+2. But, again, Isaiah had an INDIVIDUAL FOR HIS IDEAL. To him the future
+was not only an established State; it was equally, it was first, a
+glorious king. Isaiah was an Oriental. We moderns of the West place our
+reliance upon institutions; we go forward upon ideas. In the East it is
+personal influence that tells, persons who are expected, followed and
+fought for. The history of the West is the history of the advance of
+thought, of the rise and decay of institutions, to which the greatest
+individuals are more or less subordinate. The history of the East is the
+annals of personalities; justice and energy in a ruler, not political
+principles, are what impress the Oriental imagination. Isaiah has
+carried this Oriental hope to a distinct and lofty pitch. The Hero whom
+he exalts on the margin of the future, as its Author, is not only a
+person of great majesty, but a character of considerable decision. At
+first only the rigorous virtues of the ruler are attributed to Him
+(chap. xi. 1 ff.), but afterwards the graces and influence of a much
+broader and sweeter humanity (xxxii. 2). Indeed, in this latter oracle
+we saw that Isaiah spoke not so much of his great Hero, as of what any
+individual might become. _A man_, he says, _shall be as an hiding-place
+from the wind_. Personal influence is the spring of social progress, the
+shelter and fountain force of the community. In the following verses the
+effect of so pure and inspiring a presence is traced in the
+discrimination of individual character--each man standing out for what
+he is--which Isaiah defines as his second requisite for social progress.
+In all this there is much for the individual to ponder, much to inspire
+him with a sense of the value and responsibility of his own character,
+and with the certainty that by himself he shall be judged and by himself
+stand or fall. _The worthless person shall be no more called princely,
+nor the knave said to be bountiful._
+
+3. If any details of character are wanting in the picture of Isaiah's
+Hero, they are supplied by HEZEKIAH'S SELF-ANALYSIS (chap. xxxviii.). We
+need not repeat what we have said in the previous chapter of the king's
+appreciation of what is the strength of a man's character, and
+particularly of how character grows by grappling with death. In this
+matter the most experienced of Christian saints may learn from Isaiah's
+pupil.
+
+Isaiah had then, without doubt, a gospel for the individual; and to this
+day the individual may plainly read it in his book, may truly, strongly,
+joyfully live by it--so deeply does it begin, so much does it help to
+self-knowledge and self-analysis, so lofty are the ideals and
+responsibilities which it presents. But is it true that Isaiah's gospel
+is for this life only?
+
+Was Isaiah's silence on the immortality of the individual due wholly to
+the cause we have suggested in the beginning of this chapter--that God
+gives to each prophet his single problem, and that the problem of Isaiah
+was the endurance of the Church upon earth? There is no doubt that this
+is only partly the explanation.
+
+The Hebrew belonged to a branch of humanity--the Semitic--which, as its
+history proves, was unable to develop any strong imagination of, or
+practical interest in, a future life apart from foreign influence or
+Divine revelation. The pagan Arabs laughed at Mahommed when he preached
+to them of the Resurrection; and even to-day, after twelve centuries of
+Moslem influence, their descendants in the centre of Arabia, according
+to the most recent authority,[73] fail to form a clear conception of, or
+indeed to take almost any practical interest in, another world. The
+northern branch of the race, to which the Hebrews belonged, derived from
+an older civilisation a prospect of Hades, that their own fancy
+developed with great elaboration. This prospect, however, which we shall
+describe fully in connection with chaps. xiv. and xxvi., was one
+absolutely hostile to the interests of character in this life. It
+brought all men, whatever their life had been on earth, at last to a
+dead level of unsubstantial and hopeless existence. Good and evil,
+strong and weak, pious and infidel, alike became shades, joyless and
+hopeless, without even the power to praise God. We have seen in
+Hezekiah's case how such a prospect unnerved the most pious souls, and
+that revelation, even though represented at his bedside by an Isaiah,
+offered him no hope of an issue from it. The strength of character,
+however, which Hezekiah professes to have won in grappling with death,
+added to the closeness of communion with God which he enjoyed in this
+life, only brings out the absurdity of such a conclusion to life as the
+prospect of Sheol offered to the individual. If he was a pious man, if
+he was a man who had never felt himself deserted by God in this life, he
+was bound to revolt from so God-forsaken an existence after death. This
+was actually the line along which the Hebrew spirit went out to victory
+over those gloomy conceptions of death, that were yet unbroken by a
+risen Christ. _Thou wilt not_, the saint triumphantly cried, _leave my
+soul in Sheol, nor wilt Thou suffer Thine holy one to see corruption_.
+It was faith in the almightiness and reasonableness of God's ways, it
+was conviction of personal righteousness, it was the sense that the Lord
+would not desert His own in death, which sustained the believer in face
+of that awful shadow through which no light of revelation had yet
+broken.
+
+  [73] Doughty's _Arabia Deserta: Travels in Northern Arabia_, 1876-1878.
+
+If these, then, were the wings by which a believing soul under the Old
+Testament soared over the grave, Isaiah may be said to have contributed
+to the hope of personal immortality just in so far as he strengthened
+them. By enhancing as he did the value and beauty of individual
+character, by emphasizing the indwelling of God's Spirit, he was
+bringing life and immortality to light, even though he spoke no word to
+the dying about the fact of a glorious life beyond the grave. By
+assisting to create in the individual that character and sense of God,
+which alone could assure him he would never die, but pass from the
+praise of the Lord in this life to a nearer enjoyment of His presence
+beyond, Isaiah was working along the only line by which the Spirit of
+God seems to have assisted the Hebrew mind to an assurance of heaven.
+
+But further in his favourite gospel of the REASONABLENESS OF GOD--that
+God does not work fruitlessly, nor create and cultivate with a view to
+judgement and destruction--Isaiah was furnishing an argument for
+personal immortality, the force of which has not been exhausted. In a
+recent work on _The Destiny of Man_[74] the philosophic author maintains
+the reasonableness of the Divine methods as a ground of belief both in
+the continued progress of the race upon earth and in the immortality of
+the individual. "From the first dawning of life we see all things
+working together towards one mighty goal--the evolution of the most
+exalted and spiritual faculties which characterize humanity. Has all
+this work been done for nothing? Is it all ephemeral, all a bubble that
+bursts, a vision that fades? On such a view the riddle of the universe
+becomes a riddle without a meaning. The more thoroughly we comprehend
+the process of evolution by which things have come to be what they are,
+the more we are likely to feel that to deny the everlasting persistence
+of the spiritual element in man is to rob the whole process of its
+meaning. It goes far towards putting us to permanent intellectual
+confusion. For my own part, I believe in the immortality of the soul,
+not in the sense in which I accept demonstrable truths of science, but
+as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work."
+
+  [74] By Professor Fiske.
+
+From the same argument Isaiah drew only the former of these two
+conclusions. To him the certainty that God's people would survive the
+impending deluge of Assyria's brute force was based on his faith that
+the Lord is _a God of judgement_, of reasonable law and method, and
+could not have created or fostered so spiritual a people only to destroy
+them. The progress of religion upon earth was certain. But does not
+Isaiah's method equally make for the immortality of the individual? He
+did not draw this conclusion, but he laid down its premises with a
+confidence and richness of illustration that have never been excelled.
+
+We, therefore, answer the question we put at the beginning of the
+chapter thus:--Isaiah had a gospel for the individual for this life, and
+all the necessary premises of a gospel for the individual for the life
+to come.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK V.
+
+_PROPHECIES NOT RELATING TO ISAIAH'S TIME._
+
+ISAIAH:--
+
+xiii.-xiv. 23
+
+xxiv.-xxvii.
+
+xxxiv.
+
+xxxv.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK V.
+
+
+In the first thirty-nine chapters of the Book of Isaiah--the half which
+refers to the prophet's own career and the politics contemporary with
+that--we find four or five prophecies containing no reference to Isaiah
+himself nor to any Jewish king under whom he laboured, and painting both
+Israel and the foreign world in quite a different state from that in
+which they lay during his lifetime. These prophecies are chap. xiii., an
+Oracle announcing the Fall of Babylon, with its appendix, chap. xiv.
+1-23, the Promise of Israel's Deliverance and an Ode upon the Fall of
+the Babylonian Tyrant; chaps. xxiv.-xxvii., a series of Visions of the
+breaking up of the universe, of restoration from exile, and even of
+resurrection from the dead; chap. xxxiv., the Vengeance of the Lord upon
+Edom; and chap. xxxv., a Song of Return from Exile.
+
+In these prophecies Assyria is no longer the dominant world-force, nor
+Jerusalem the inviolate fortress of God and His people. If Assyria or
+Egypt is mentioned, it is but as one of the three classical enemies of
+Israel; and Babylon is represented as the head and front of the hostile
+world. The Jews are no longer in political freedom and possession of
+their own land; they are either in exile or just returned from it to a
+depopulated country. With these altered circumstances come another
+temper and new doctrine. The horizon is different, and the hopes that
+flush in dawn upon it are not quite the same as those which we have
+contemplated with Isaiah in his immediate future. It is no longer the
+repulse of the heathen invader; the inviolateness of the sacred city;
+the recovery of the people from the shock of attack, and of the land
+from the trampling of armies. But it is the people in exile, the
+overthrow of the tyrant in his own home, the opening of prison doors,
+the laying down of a highway through the wilderness, the triumph of
+return and the resumption of worship. There is, besides, a promise of
+the resurrection, which we have not found in the prophecies we have
+considered.
+
+With such differences, it is not wonderful that many have denied the
+authorship of these few prophecies to Isaiah. This is a question that
+can be looked at calmly. It touches no dogma of the Christian faith.
+Especially it does not involve the other question, so often--and, we
+venture to say, so unjustly--started on this point, Could not the Spirit
+of God have inspired Isaiah to foresee all that the prophecies in
+question foretell, even though he lived more than a century before the
+people were in circumstances to understand them? Certainly, God is
+almighty. The question is not, Could He have done this? but one somewhat
+different: Did He do it? and to this an answer can be had only from the
+prophecies themselves. If these mark the Babylonian hostility or
+captivity as already upon Israel, this is a testimony of Scripture
+itself, which we cannot overlook, and beside which even unquestionable
+traces of similarity to Isaiah's style or the fact that these oracles
+are bound up with Isaiah's own undoubted prophecies have little weight.
+"Facts" of style will be regarded with suspicion by any one who knows
+how they are employed by both sides in such a question as this; while
+the certainty that the Book of Isaiah was put into its present form
+subsequently to his life will permit of,--and the evident purpose of
+Scripture to secure moral impressiveness rather than historical
+consecutiveness will account for,--later oracles being bound up with
+unquestioned utterances of Isaiah.
+
+Only one of the prophecies in question confirms the tradition that it is
+by Isaiah, viz., chap. xiii., which bears the title _Oracle of Babylon
+which Isaiah, son of Amoz, did see_; but titles are themselves so much
+the report of tradition, being of a later date than the rest of the
+text, that it is best to argue the question apart from them.
+
+On the other hand, Isaiah's authorship of these prophecies, or at least
+the possibility of his having written them, is usually defended by
+appealing to his promise of the return from exile in chap. xi. and his
+threat of a Babylonish captivity in chap. xxxix. This is an argument
+that has not been fairly met by those who deny the Isaianic authorship
+of chaps. xiii.-xiv. 23, xxiv.-xxvii., and xxxv. It is a strong
+argument, for while, as we have seen (p. 201), there are good grounds
+for believing Isaiah to have been likely to make such a prediction of a
+Babylonish captivity as is attributed to him in chap. xxxix. 6, almost
+all the critics agree in leaving chap. xi. to him. But if chap. xi. is
+Isaiah's, then he undoubtedly spoke of an exile much more extensive than
+had taken place by his own day. Nevertheless, even this ability in xi.
+to foretell an exile so vast does not account for passages in xiii.-xiv.
+23, xxiv.-xxvii., which represent the Exile either as present or as
+actually over. No one who reads these chapters without prejudice can
+fail to feel the force of such passages in leading him to decide for an
+exilic or post-exilic authorship (see pp. 429 ff.).
+
+Another argument against attributing these prophecies to Isaiah is that
+their visions of the last things, representing as they do a judgement on
+the whole world, and even the destruction of the whole material
+universe, are incompatible with Isaiah's loftiest and final hope of an
+inviolate Zion at last relieved and secure, of a land freed from
+invasion and wondrously fertile, with all the converted world, Assyria
+and Egypt, gathered round it as a centre. This question, however, is
+seriously complicated by the fact that in his youth Isaiah did
+undoubtedly prophesy a shaking of the whole world and the destruction of
+its inhabitants, and by the probability that his old age survived into a
+period, whose abounding sin would again make natural such wholesale
+predictions of judgement as we find in chap. xxiv.
+
+Still, let the question of the eschatology be as obscure as we have
+shown, there remains this clear issue. In some chapters of the Book of
+Isaiah, which, from our knowledge of the circumstances of his times, we
+know must have been published while he was alive, we learn that the
+Jewish people has never left its land, nor lost its independence under
+Jehovah's anointed, and that the inviolateness of Zion and the retreat
+of the Assyrian invaders of Judah, without effecting the captivity of
+the Jews, are absolutely essential to the endurance of God's kingdom on
+earth. In other chapters we find that the Jews have left their land,
+have been long in exile (or from other passages have just returned), and
+that the religious essential is no more the independence of the Jewish
+State under a theocratic king, but only the resumption of the Temple
+worship. Is it possible for one man to have written both these sets of
+chapters? Is it possible for one age to have produced them? That is the
+whole question.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+BABYLON AND LUCIFER.
+
+ISAIAH xiii. 2-xiv. 23 (DATE UNCERTAIN).
+
+
+This double oracle is against the City (xiii. 2-xiv. 2) and the Tyrant
+(xiv. 3-23) of Babylon.
+
+
+I. THE WICKED CITY (xiii. 2-xiv. 23).
+
+The first part is a series of hurried and vanishing scenes--glimpses of
+ruin and deliverance caught through the smoke and turmoil of a Divine
+war. The drama opens with the erection of a gathering _standard upon a
+bare mountain_ (ver. 2). He who gives the order explains it (ver. 3),
+but is immediately interrupted by _Hark! a tumult on the mountains, like
+a great people. Hark! the surge of the kingdoms of nations gathering
+together. Jehovah of hosts is mustering the host of war._ It is the _day
+of Jehovah_ that is _near_, the day of His war and of His judgement upon
+the world.
+
+This Old Testament expression, _the day of the LORD_, starts so many
+ideas that it is difficult to seize any one of them and say this is just
+what is meant. For _day_ with a possessive pronoun suggests what has
+been appointed aforehand, or what must come round in its turn; means
+also opportunity and triumph, and also swift performance after long
+delay. All these thoughts are excited when we couple _a day_ with any
+person's name. And therefore as with every dawn some one awakes saying,
+This is my day; as with every dawn comes some one's chance, some soul
+gets its wish, some will shows what it can do, some passion or principle
+issues into fact: so God also shall have His day, on which His justice
+and power shall find their full scope and triumph. Suddenly and simply,
+like any dawn that takes its turn on the round of time, the great
+decision and victory of Divine justice shall at last break out of the
+long delay of ages. _Howl ye, for the day of Jehovah is near; as
+destruction from the Destructive does it come._ Very savage and quite
+universal is its punishment. _Every human heart melteth._ Countless
+faces, white with terror, light up its darkness like flames. Sinners are
+_to be exterminated out of the earth; the world is to be punished for
+its iniquity_. Heaven, the stars, sun and moon aid the horror and the
+darkness, heaven shivering above, the earth quaking beneath; and
+between, the peoples like shepherdless sheep drive to and fro through
+awful carnage.
+
+From ver. 17 the mist lifts a little. The vague turmoil clears up into a
+siege of Babylon by the Medians, and then settles down into Babylon's
+ruin and abandonment to wild beasts. Finally (xiv. 1) comes the
+religious reason of so much convulsion: _For Jehovah will have
+compassion upon Jacob, and choose again Israel, and settle them upon
+their own ground; and the foreign sojourner shall join himself to them,
+and they shall associate themselves to the house of Jacob_.
+
+This prophecy evidently came to a people already in captivity--a very
+different circumstance of the Church of God from that in which we have
+seen her under Isaiah. But upon this new stage it is still the same old
+conquest. Assyria has fallen, but Babylon has taken her place. The old
+spirit of cruelty and covetousness has entered a new body; the only
+change is that it has become wealth and luxury instead of brute force
+and military glory. It is still selfishness and pride and atheism. At
+this, our first introduction to Babylon, it might have been proper to
+explain why throughout the Bible from Genesis to Revelation this one
+city should remain in fact or symbol the enemy of God and the stronghold
+of darkness. But we postpone what may be said of her singular
+reputation, till we come to the second part of the Book of Isaiah where
+Babylon plays a larger and more distinct role. Here her destruction is
+simply the most striking episode of the Divine judgement upon the whole
+earth. Babylon represents civilisation; she is the brow of the world's
+pride and enmity to God. One distinctively Babylonian characteristic,
+however, must not be passed over. With a ring of irony in his voice, the
+prophet declares, _Behold, I stir up the Medes against thee, who regard
+not silver and take no pleasure in gold_. The worst terror that can
+assail us is the terror of forces, whose character we cannot fathom, who
+will not stop to parley, who do not understand our language nor our
+bribes. It was such a power, with which the resourceful and luxurious
+Babylon was threatened. With money the Babylonians did all they wished
+to do, and believed everything else to be possible. They had subsidised
+kings, bought over enemies, seduced the peoples of the earth. The foe
+whom God now sent them was impervious to this influence. From their pure
+highlands came down upon corrupt civilisation a simple people, whose
+banner was a leathern apron, whose goal was not booty nor ease but power
+and mastery, who came not to rob but to displace.
+
+The lessons of the passage are two: that the people of God are
+something distinct from civilisation, though this be universal and
+absorbent as a very Babylon; and that the resources of civilisation are
+not even in material strength the highest in the universe, but God has
+in His armoury weapons heedless of men's cunning, and in His armies
+agents impervious to men's bribes. Every civilisation needs to be told,
+according to its temper, one of these two things. Is it hypocritical?
+Then it needs to be told that civilisation is not one with the people of
+God. Is it arrogant? Then it needs to be told that the resources of
+civilisation are not the strongest forces in God's universe. Man talks
+of the triumph of mind over matter, of the power of culture, of the
+elasticity of civilisation; but God has natural forces, to which all
+these are as the worm beneath the hoof of the horse: and if moral need
+arise, He will call His brute forces into requisition. _Howl ye, for the
+day of Jehovah is near; as destruction from the Destructive does it
+come._ There may be periods in man's history when, in opposition to
+man's unholy art and godless civilisation, God can reveal Himself only
+as destruction.
+
+
+II. THE TYRANT (xiv. 3-23).
+
+To the prophecy of the overthrow of Babylon there is annexed, in order
+to be sung by Israel in the hour of her deliverance, a _satiric ode_ or
+_taunt-song_ (Heb. _mashal_, Eng. ver. _parable_) upon the King of
+Babylon. A translation of this spirited poem in the form of its verse
+(in which, it is to be regretted, it has not been rendered by the
+English revisers) will be more instructive than a full commentary. But
+the following remarks of introduction are necessary. The word _mashal_,
+by which this ode is entitled, means comparison, _similitude_ or
+_parable_, and was applicable to every sentence composed of at least two
+members that compared or contrasted their subjects. As the great bulk of
+Hebrew poetry is sententious, and largely depends for rhythm upon its
+parallelism, _mashal_ received a general application; and while another
+term--_shir_--more properly denotes lyric poetry, _mashal_ is applied to
+rhythmical passages in the Old Testament of almost all tempers: to mere
+predictions, proverbs, orations, satires or taunt-songs, as here, and to
+didactic pieces. The parallelism of the verses in our ode is too evident
+to need an index. But the parallel verses are next grouped into
+strophes. In Hebrew poetry this division is frequently effected by the
+use of a refrain. In our ode there is no refrain, but the strophes are
+easily distinguished by difference of subject-matter. Hebrew poetry does
+not employ rhyme, but makes use of assonance, and to a much less extent
+of alliteration--a form which is more frequent in Hebrew prose. In our
+ode there is not much either of assonance or alliteration. But, on the
+other hand, the ode has but to be read to break into a certain rough and
+swinging rhythm. This is produced by long verses rising alternate with
+short ones falling. Hebrew verse at no time relied for a metrical effect
+upon the modern device of an equal or proportionate number of syllables.
+The longer verses of this ode are sometimes too short, the shorter too
+long, variations to which a rude chant could readily adapt itself. But
+the alternation of long and short is sustained throughout, except for a
+break at ver. 10 by the introduction of the formula _And they answered
+and said_, which evidently ought to stand for a long and a short verse
+if the number of double verses in the second strophe is to be the same
+as it is--seven--in the first and in the third.
+
+The scene of the poem, the Underworld and abode of the shades of the
+dead, is one on which some of the most splendid imagination and music of
+humanity has been expended. But we must not be disappointed if we do not
+here find the rich detail and glowing fancy of Virgil's or of Dante's
+vision. This simple and even rude piece of metre, liker ballad than
+epic, ought to excite our wonder not so much for what it has failed to
+imagine as for what, being at its disposal, it has resolutely stinted
+itself in employing. For it is evident that the author of these lines
+had within his reach the rich, fantastic materials of Semitic mythology,
+which are familiar to us in the Babylonian remains. With an austerity,
+that must strike every one who is acquainted with these, he uses only so
+much of them as to enable him to render with dramatic force his simple
+theme--the vanity of human arrogance.[75]
+
+  [75] "Those principles of natural philosophy which smothered the
+  religions of the East with their rank and injurious growth are almost
+  entirely absent from the religion of the Hebrews. Here the motive-power
+  of development is to be found in ethical ideas, which, though not indeed
+  alien to the life of other nations, were not the source from which their
+  religious notions were derived."--(Lotze's _Microcosmos_, Eng. Transl.,
+  il., 466.)
+
+For this purpose he employs the idea of the Underworld which was
+prevalent among the northern Semitic peoples. Sheol--the _gaping_ or
+_craving_ place--which we shall have occasion to describe in detail when
+we come to speak of belief in the resurrection,[76] is the state after
+death that craves and swallows all living. There dwell the shades of men
+amid some unsubstantial reflection of their earthly state (ver. 9), and
+with consciousness and passion only sufficient to greet the arrival of
+the new-comer and express satiric wonder at his fall (ver. 9). With the
+arrogance of the Babylonian kings, this tyrant thought to scale the
+heavens to set his throne in the _mount of assembly_ of the immortals,
+_to match the Most High_.[77] But his fate is the fate of all
+mortals--to go down to the weakness and emptiness of Sheol. Here, let us
+carefully observe, there is no trace of a judgement for reward or
+punishment. The new victim of death simply passes to his place among his
+equals. There was enough of contrast between the arrogance of a tyrant
+claiming Divinity and his fall into the common receptacle of mortality
+to point the prophet's moral without the addition of infernal torment.
+Do we wish to know the actual punishment of his pride and cruelty? It is
+visible above ground (strophe 4); not with his spirit, but with his
+corpse; not with himself, but with his wretched family. His corpse is
+unburied, his family exterminated; his name disappears from the
+earth.[78]
+
+  [76] P. 447 ff.
+
+  [77] It is, however, only just to add that, as Mr. Sayce has pointed out
+  in the Hibbert Lectures for 1887 (p. 365), the claims of Babylonian
+  kings and heroes for a seat on the mountain of the gods were not always
+  mere arrogance, but the first efforts of the Babylonian mind to
+  emancipate itself from the gloomy conceptions of Hades and provide a
+  worthy immortality for virtue. Still most of the kings who pray for an
+  entrance among the gods do so on the plea that they have been successful
+  tyrants--a considerable difference from such an assurance as that of the
+  sixteenth Psalm.
+
+  [78] The popular Semitic conception of Hades contained within it neither
+  grades of condition, according to the merits of men, nor any trace of an
+  infernal torment in aggravation of the unsubstantial state to which all
+  are equally reduced. This statement is true of the Old Testament till at
+  least the Book of Daniel. Sheol is lit by no lurid fires, such as made
+  the later Christian hell intolerable to the lost. That life is
+  unsubstantial; that darkness and dust abound; above all, that God is not
+  there, and that it is impossible to praise Him, is all the punishment
+  which is given in Sheol. Extraordinary vice is punished above ground, in
+  the name and family of the sinner. Sheol, with its monotony, is for
+  average men; but extraordinary piety can break away from it (Ps. xvi.).
+
+Thus, by the help of only a few fragments from the popular mythology,
+the sacred satirist achieves his purpose. His severe monotheism is
+remarkable in its contrast to Babylonian poems upon similar subjects. He
+will know none of the gods of the underworld. In place of the great
+goddess, whom a Babylonian would certainly have seen presiding, with her
+minions, over the shades, he personifies--it is a frequent figure of
+Hebrew poetry--the abyss itself. _Sheol shuddereth at thee._ It is the
+same when he speaks (ver. 13) of the deep's great opposite, that _mount
+of assembly_ of the gods, which the northern Semites believed to soar to
+a silver sky _in the recesses of the north_ (ver. 14), upon the great
+range which in that direction bounded the Babylonian plain. This Hebrew
+knows of no gods there but One, whose are the stars, who is the Most
+High. Man's arrogance and cruelty are attempts upon His majesty. He
+inevitably overwhelms them. Death is their penalty: blood and squalor on
+earth, the concourse of shuddering ghosts below.
+
+  _The kings of the earth set themselves,
+  And the rulers take counsel together,
+  Against the Lord and against His Anointed.
+  He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh;
+  The Lord shall have them in derision._
+
+He who has heard that laughter sees no comedy in aught else. This is the
+one unfailing subject of Hebrew satire, and it forms the irony and the
+rigour of the following ode.[79]
+
+  [79] Readers will remember a parallel to this ode in Carlyle's famous
+  chapter on Louis the Unforgotten. No modern has rivalled Carlyle in his
+  inheritance of this satire, except it be he whom Carlyle called "that
+  Jew blackguard Heine."
+
+The only other remarks necessary are these. In ver. 9 the Authorized
+Version has not attempted to reproduce the humour of the original
+satire, which styles them that were chief men on earth _chief-goats_ of
+the herd, bell-wethers. The phrase _they that go down to the stones of
+the pit_ should be transferred from ver. 19 to ver. 20.
+
+_And thou shalt lift up this proverb upon the King of Babylon, and shalt
+say,_--
+
+I.
+
+  Ah! stilled is the tyrant,
+    And stilled is the fury!
+  Broke hath Jehovah the rod of the wicked,
+    Sceptre of despots:
+  Stroke of (the) peoples with passion,
+    Stroke unremitting,
+  Treading in wrath (the) nations,
+    Trampling unceasing.
+  Quiet, at rest, is the whole earth,
+    They break into singing;
+  Even the pines are jubilant for thee,
+    Lebanon's cedars!
+  "Since thou liest low, cometh not up
+    Feller against us."
+
+II.
+
+  Sheol from under shuddereth at thee
+    To meet thine arrival,
+  Stirring up for thee the shades,
+    All great-goats of earth!
+  Lifteth erect from their thrones
+    All kings of peoples.
+
+10. _All of them answer and say to thee,_--
+
+  "Thou, too, made flaccid like us,
+    To us hast been levelled!
+  Hurled to Sheol is the pride of thee,
+    Clang of the harps of thee;
+  Under thee strewn are (the) maggots
+    Thy coverlet worms."
+
+III.
+
+  How art thou fallen from heaven
+    Daystar, son of the dawn
+  (How) art thou hewn down to earth,
+    Hurtler at nations.
+  And thou, thou didst say in thine heart,
+    "The heavens will I scale,
+  Far up to the stars of God
+    Lift high my throne,
+  And sit on the mount of assembly,
+    Far back of the north,
+  I will climb on the heights of (the) cloud,
+    I will match the Most High!"
+  Ah! to Sheol thou art hurled,
+    Far back of the pit!
+
+IV.
+
+  Who see thee at thee are gazing;
+    Upon thee they muse:
+  Is this the man that staggered the earth,
+    Shaker of kingdoms?
+  Setting the world like the desert,
+    Its cities he tore down;
+  Its prisoners he loosed not
+    (Each of them) homeward.
+  All kings of peoples, yes all,
+    Are lying in their state;
+  But thou! thou art flung from thy grave,
+    Like a stick that is loathsome.
+  Beshrouded with slain, the pierced of the sword,
+    Like a corpse that is trampled.
+  They that go down to the stones of a crypt,
+    Shalt not be with them in burial.
+  For thy land thou hast ruined,
+    Thy people hast slaughtered.
+  Shall not be mentioned for aye
+    Seed of the wicked!
+  Set for his children a shambles,
+    For guilt of their fathers!
+  They shall not rise, nor inherit (the) earth,
+    Nor fill the face of the world with cities.
+
+V.
+
+  But I will arise upon them,
+    Sayeth Jehovah of hosts;
+  And I will cut off from Babel
+    Record and remnant,
+  And scion and seed,
+    Saith Jehovah:
+  Yea, I will make it the bittern's heritage,
+    Marshes of water!
+  And I will sweep it with sweeps of destruction,
+    Sayeth Jehovah of hosts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+_THE EFFECT OF SIN ON OUR MATERIAL CIRCUMSTANCE._
+
+ISAIAH xxiv. (DATE UNCERTAIN).
+
+
+The twenty-fourth of Isaiah is one of those chapters, which almost
+convince the most persevering reader of Scripture that a consecutive
+reading of the Authorized Version is an impossibility. For what does he
+get from it but a weary and unintelligent impression of destruction,
+from which he gladly escapes to the nearest clear utterance of gospel or
+judgement? Criticism affords little help. It cannot clearly identify the
+chapter with any historical situation. For a moment there is a gleam of
+a company standing outside the convulsion, and to the west of the
+prophet, while the prophet himself suffers captivity.[80] But even this
+fades before we make it out; and all the rest of the chapter has too
+universal an application--the language is too imaginative, enigmatic and
+even paradoxical--to be applied to an actual historical situation, or to
+its development in the immediate future. This is an ideal description,
+the apocalyptic vision of a last, great day of judgement upon the whole
+world; and perhaps the moral truths are all the more impressive that the
+reader is not distracted by temporary or local references.
+
+  [80] vv. 14-16, which are very perplexing. In 14 a company is introduced
+  to us very vaguely as _those_ or _yonder ones_, who are represented as
+  seeing the bright side of the convulsion which is the subject of the
+  chapter. _They cry aloud from the sea_; that is, _from the west_ of the
+  prophet. He is therefore in the east, and in captivity, in the centre of
+  the convulsion. The problem is to find any actual historical situation,
+  in which part of Israel was in the east in captivity, and part in the
+  west free and full of reasons for praising God for the calamity, out of
+  which their brethren saw no escape for themselves.
+
+With the very first verse the prophecy leaps far beyond all particular
+or national conditions: _Behold, Jehovah shall be emptying the earth and
+rifling it; and He shall turn it upside down and scatter its
+inhabitants_. This is expressive and thorough; the words are those which
+were used for cleaning a dirty dish. To the completeness of this opening
+verse there is really nothing in the chapter to add. All the rest of the
+verses only illustrate this upturning and scouring of the material
+universe. For it is with the material universe that the chapter is
+concerned. Nothing is said of the spiritual nature of man--little,
+indeed, about man at all. He is simply called _the inhabitant of the
+earth_, and the structure of society (ver. 2) is introduced only to make
+more complete the effect of the convulsion of the earth itself. Man
+cannot escape those judgements which shatter his material habitation. It
+is like one of Dante's visions. _Terror, and Pit and Snare upon thee, O
+inhabitant of the earth! And it shall come to pass that he who fleeth
+from the noise of the Terror shall fall into the Pit, and he who cometh
+up out of the midst of the Pit shall be taken in the Snare. For the
+windows on high are opened, and the foundations of the earth do shake.
+Broken, utterly broken, is the earth; shattered, utterly shattered, the
+earth; staggering, very staggering, the earth; reeling, the earth
+reeleth like a drunken man: she swingeth to and fro like a hammock._ And
+so through the rest of the chapter it is the material life of man that
+is cursed: _the new wine_, _the vine_, _the tabrets_, _the harp_, _the
+song_, and the merriness in men's hearts which these call forth. Nor
+does the chapter confine itself to the earth. The closing verses carry
+the effect of judgement to the heavens and far limits of the material
+universe. _The host of the high ones on high_ (ver. 21) are not
+spiritual beings, the angels. They are material bodies, the stars.
+_Then, too, shall the moon be confounded, and the stars ashamed_, when
+the Lord's kingdom is established and His righteousness made gloriously
+clear.
+
+What awful truth is this for illustration of which we see not man, but
+his habitation, the world and all its surroundings, lifted up by the
+hand of the Lord, broken open, wiped out and shaken, while man himself,
+as if only to heighten the effect, staggers hopelessly like some broken
+insect on the quaking ruins? What judgement is this, in which not only
+one city or one kingdom is concerned, as in the last prophecy of which
+we treated, but the whole earth is convulsed, and moon and sun
+confounded?
+
+The judgement is the visitation of man's sins on his material
+surroundings--_The earth's transgression shall be heavy upon it; and it
+shall rise, and not fall_. The truth on which this judgement rests is
+that between man and his material circumstance--the earth he inhabits,
+the seasons which bear him company through time and the stars to which
+he looks high up in heaven--there is a moral sympathy. _The earth also
+is profaned under the inhabitants thereof, because they have
+transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting
+covenant._
+
+The Bible gives no support to the theory that matter itself is evil. God
+created all things; _and God saw everything that He had made; and,
+behold, it was very good_. When, therefore, we read in the Bible that
+the earth is cursed, we read that it is cursed for man's sake; when we
+read of its desolation, it is as the effect of man's crime. The Flood,
+the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues of Egypt and other
+great physical catastrophes happened because men were stubborn or men
+were foul. We cannot help noticing, however, that matter was thus
+convulsed or destroyed, not only for the purpose of punishing the moral
+agent, but because of some poison which had passed from him into the
+unconscious instruments, stage and circumstance of his crime. According
+to the Bible, there would appear to be some mysterious sympathy between
+man and Nature. Man not only governs Nature; he infects and informs her.
+As the moral life of the soul expresses itself in the physical life of
+the body for the latter's health or corruption, so the conduct of the
+human race affects the physical life of the universe to its farthest
+limits in space. When man is reconciled to God, the wilderness blossoms
+like a rose; but the guilt of man sullies, infects and corrupts the
+place he inhabits and the articles he employs; and their destruction
+becomes necessary, not for his punishment so much as because of the
+infection and pollution that is in them.
+
+The Old Testament is not contented with a general statement of this
+great principle, but pursues it to all sorts of particular and private
+applications. The curses of the Lord fell, not only on the sinner, but
+on his dwelling, on his property and even on the bit of ground these
+occupied. This was especially the case with regard to idolatry. When
+Israel put a pagan population to the sword, they were commanded to raze
+the city, gather its wealth together, burn all that was burnable and put
+the rest into the temple of the Lord as a thing _devoted_ or
+_accursed_, which it would harm themselves to share (Deut. vii. 25, 26;
+xiii. 7). The very site of Jericho was cursed, and men were forbidden to
+build upon its horrid waste. The story of Achan illustrates the same
+principle.
+
+It is just this principle which chap. xxiv. extends to the whole
+universe. What happened in Jericho because of its inhabitants' idolatry
+is now to happen to the whole earth because of man's sin. _The earth
+also is profane under her inhabitants, because they have transgressed
+the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant._ In
+these words the prophet takes us away back to the covenant with Noah,
+which he properly emphasizes as a covenant with all mankind. With a
+noble universalism, for which his race and their literature get too
+little credit, this Hebrew recognises that once all mankind were holy
+unto God, who had included them under His grace, that promised the
+fixedness and fertility of nature. But that covenant, though of grace,
+had its conditions for man. These had been broken. The race had grown
+wicked, as it was before the Flood; and therefore, in terms which
+vividly recall that former judgement of God--_the windows on high are
+opened_--the prophet foretells a new and more awful catastrophe. One
+word which he employs betrays how close he feels the moral sympathy to
+be between man and his world. _The earth_, he says, _is profane_. This
+is a word, whose root meaning is _that which has fallen away_ or
+_separated itself_, which is _delinquent_. Sometimes, perhaps, it has a
+purely moral significance, like our word "abandoned" in the common
+acceptance: he who has fallen far and utterly into sin, _the reckless
+sinner_. But mostly it has rather the religious meaning of one who has
+fallen out of the covenant relation with God and the relevant benefits
+and privileges. Into this covenant not only Israel and their land, but
+humanity and the whole world, have been brought. Is man under covenant
+grace? The world is also. Does man fall? So does the world, becoming
+with him _profane_. The consequence of breaking the covenant oath was
+expressed in Hebrew by a technical word; and it is this word which,
+translated _curse_, is applied in ver. 6 to the earth.
+
+The whole earth is to be broken up and dissolved. What then is to become
+of the people of God--the indestructible remnant? Where are they to
+settle? In this new deluge is there a new ark? For answer the prophet
+presents us with an old paradise (ver. 23). He has wrecked the universe;
+but he says now, _Jehovah of hosts shall dwell in Mount Zion and in
+Jerusalem_. It would be impossible to find a better instance of the
+limitations of Old Testament prophecy than this return to the old
+dispensation after the old dispensation has been committed to the
+flames. At such a crisis as the conflagration of the universe for the
+sin of man, the hope of the New Testament looks for the creation of a
+new heaven and a new earth, but there is no scintilla of such a hope in
+this prediction. The imagination of the Hebrew seer is beaten back upon
+the theatre his conscience has abandoned. He knows "the old is out of
+date," but for him "the new is not yet born;" and, therefore, convinced
+as he is that the old must pass away, he is forced to borrow from its
+ruins a provisional abode for God's people, a figure for the truth which
+grips him so firmly, that, in spite of the death of all the universe for
+man's sin, there must be a visibleness and locality of the Divine
+majesty, a place where the people of God may gather to bless His holy
+name.
+
+In this contrast of the power of spiritual imagination possessed
+respectively by the Old and New Testaments we must not, however, lose
+the ethical interest which the main lesson of this chapter has for the
+individual conscience. A breaking universe, the great day of judgement,
+may be too large and too far off to impress our conscience. But each of
+us has his own world--body, property and environment--which is as much
+and as evidently affected by his own sins as our chapter represents the
+universe to be by the sins of the race.
+
+To grant that the moral and physical universes are from the same hand is
+to affirm a sympathy and mutual reaction between them. This affirmation
+is confirmed by experience, and this experience is of two kinds. To the
+guilty man Nature seems aware, and flashes back from her larger surfaces
+the magnified reflection of his own self-contempt and terror. But,
+besides, men are also unable to escape attributing to the material
+instruments or surroundings of their sin a certain infection, a certain
+power of recommunicating to their imaginations and memories the desire
+for sin, as well as of inflicting upon them the pain and penalty of the
+disorder it has produced among themselves. Sin, though born, as Christ
+said, in the heart, has immediately a material expression; and we may
+follow this outwards through man's mind, body and estate, not only to
+find it "hindering, disturbing, complicating all," but reinfecting with
+the lust and odour of sin the will which gave it birth. As sin is put
+forth by the will, or is cherished in the heart, so we find error cloud
+the mind, impurity the imagination, misery the feelings, and pain and
+weariness infect the flesh and bone. God, who modelled it, alone knows
+how far man's physical form has been degraded by the sinful thoughts
+and habits of which for ages it has been the tool and expression; but
+even our eyes may sometimes trace the despoiler, and that not only in
+the case of what are preferably named sins of the flesh, but even with
+lusts that do not require for their gratification the abuse of the body.
+Pride, as one might think the least fleshly of all the vices, leaves yet
+in time her damning signature, and will mark the strongest faces with
+the sad symptoms of that mental break-down, for which unrestrained pride
+is so often to blame. If sin thus disfigures the body, we know that sin
+also infects the body. The habituated flesh becomes the suggester of
+crime to the will which first constrained it to sin, and now wearily,
+but in vain, rebels against the habits of its instrument. But we recall
+all this about the body only to say that what is true of the body is
+true of the soul's greater material surroundings. With the sentence
+_Thou shalt surely die_, God connects this other: _Cursed is the ground
+for thy sake_.
+
+When we pass from a man's body, the wrapping we find next nearest to his
+soul is his property. It has always been an instinct of the race, that
+there is nothing a man may so infect with the sin of his heart as his
+handiwork and the gains of his toil. And that is a true instinct, for,
+in the first place, the making of property perpetuates a man's own
+habits. If he is successful in business, then every bit of wealth he
+gathers is a confirmation of the motives and tempers in which he
+conducted his business. A man deceives himself as to this, saying, Wait
+till I have made enough; then I will put away the meanness, the
+harshness and the dishonesty with which I made it. He shall not be able.
+Just because he has been successful, he will continue in his habit
+without thinking; just because there has been no break-down to convict
+of folly and suggest penitence, so he becomes hardened. Property is a
+bridge on which our passions cross from one part of our life to another.
+The Germans have an ironical proverb: "The man who has stolen a hundred
+thousand dollars _can afford_ to live honestly." The emphasis of the
+irony falls on the words in italics: he can afford, but never does. His
+property hardens his heart, and keeps him from repentance.
+
+But the instinct of humanity has also been quick to this: that the curse
+of ill-gotten wealth passes like bad blood from father to child. What is
+the truth in this matter? A glance at history will tell us. The
+accumulation of property is the result of certain customs, habits and
+laws. In its own powerful interest property perpetuates these down the
+ages, and infects the fresh air of each new generation with their
+temper. How often in the history of mankind has it been property gained
+under unjust laws or cruel monopolies which has prevented the abolition
+of these, and carried into gentler, freer times the pride and
+exclusiveness of the age, by whose rude habits it was gathered. This
+moral transference, which we see on so large a scale in public history,
+is repeated to some extent in every private bequest. A curse does not
+necessarily follow an estate from the sinful producer of it to his heir;
+but the latter is, _by the bequest itself_ generally brought into so
+close a contact with his predecessor as to share his conscience and be
+in sympathy with his temper. And the case is common where an heir,
+though absolutely up to the date of his succession separate from him who
+made and has left the property, nevertheless finds himself unable to
+alter the methods, or to escape the temper, in which the property has
+been managed. In nine cases out of ten property carries conscience and
+transfers habit; if the guilt does not descend, the infection does.
+
+When we pass from the effect of sin upon property to its effect upon
+circumstance, we pass to what we can affirm with even greater
+conscience. Man has the power of permanently soaking and staining his
+surroundings with the effect of sins in themselves momentary and
+transient. Sin increases terribly by the mental law of association. It
+is not the gin-shop and the face of wanton beauty that alone tempt men
+to sin. Far more subtle seductions are about every one of us. That we
+have the power of inflicting our character upon the scenes of our
+conduct is proved by some of the dreariest experiences of life. A
+failure in duty renders the place of it distasteful and enervating. Are
+we irritable and selfish at home? Then home is certain to be depressing,
+and little helpful to our spiritual growth. Are we selfish and niggardly
+in the interest we take in others? Then the congregation we go to, the
+suburb we dwell in, will appear insipid and unprofitable; we shall be
+past the possibility of gaining character or happiness from the ground
+where God planted us and meant us to grow. Students have been idle in
+their studies till every time they enter them a reflex languor comes
+down like stale smoke, and the room they desecrated takes its revenge on
+them. We have it in our power to make our workshops, our laboratories
+and our studies places of magnificent inspiration, to enter which is to
+receive a baptism of industry and hope; and we have power to make it
+impossible ever to work in them again at full pitch. The pulpit, the
+pew, the very communion-table, come under this law. If a minister of God
+have made up his mind to say nothing from his accustomed place, which
+has not cost him toil, to feel nothing but a dependence on God and a
+desire for souls, then he will never set foot there but the power of the
+Lord shall be upon him. But there are men who would rather set foot
+anywhere than in their pulpit--men who out of it are full of fellowship,
+information, and infective health, but there they are paralysed with the
+curse of their idle past. How history shows us that the most sacred
+shelters and institutions of man become tainted with sin, and are
+destroyed in revolution or abandoned to decay by the intolerant
+conscience of younger generations! How the hidden life of each man feels
+his past sins possessing his home and hearth, his pew, and even his
+place at the Sacrament, till it is sometimes better for his soul's
+health to avoid these!
+
+Such considerations give a great moral force to the doctrine of the Old
+Testament that man's sin has rendered necessary the destruction of his
+material circumstances, and that the Divine judgement includes a broken
+and a rifled universe.
+
+The New Testament has borrowed this vision from the Old, but added, as
+we have seen, with greater distinctness, the hope of new heavens and a
+new earth. We have not concluded the subject, however, when we have
+pointed this out, for the New Testament has another gospel. The grace of
+God affects even the material results of sin; the Divine pardon that
+converts the sinner converts his circumstance also; Christ Jesus
+sanctifies even the flesh, and is the Physician of the body as well as
+the Saviour of the soul. To Him physical evil abounds only that He may
+show forth His glory in curing it. _Neither did this man sin nor his
+parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him._ To
+Paul the _whole creation groaneth and travaileth with_ the sinner _till
+now_, the hour of the sinner's redemption. The Gospel bestows an
+evangelic liberty which permits the strong Christian to partake of meats
+offered to idols. And, finally, _all things work together for good to
+them that love God_, for although to the converted and forgiven sinner
+the material pains which his sins have brought on him may continue into
+his new life, they are experienced by him no more as the just penalties
+of an angry God, but as the loving, sanctifying chastisements of his
+Father in heaven.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+_GOD'S POOR._
+
+ISAIAH xxv.-xxvii. (DATE UNCERTAIN).
+
+
+We have seen that no more than the faintest gleam of historical
+reflection brightens the obscurity of chap. xxiv., and that the disaster
+which lowers there is upon too world-wide a scale to be forced within
+the conditions of any single period in the fortunes of Israel. In chaps.
+xxv.-xxvii., which may naturally be held to be a continuation of chap.
+xxiv., the historical allusions are more numerous. Indeed, it might be
+said they are too numerous, for they contradict one another to the
+perplexity of the most acute critics. They imply historical
+circumstances for the prophecy both before and after the exile. On the
+one hand, the blame of idolatry in Judah (xxvii. 9), the mention of
+Assyria and Egypt (xxvii. 12, 13), and the absence of the name of
+Babylon are indicative of a pre-exilic date.[81] Arguments from style
+are always precarious; but it is striking that some critics, who deny
+that chaps. xxiv.-xxvii. can have come as a whole from Isaiah's time,
+profess to see his hand in certain passages.[82] Then, secondly, through
+these verses which point to a pre-exilic date there are woven, almost
+inextricably, phrases of actual exile: expressions of the sense of
+living on a level and in contact with the heathen (xxvi. 9, 10); a
+request to God's people to withdraw from the midst of a heathen public
+to the privacy of their chambers (20, 21); prayers and promises of
+deliverance from the oppressor (_passim_); hopes of the establishment of
+Zion, and of the repopulation of the Holy Land. And, thirdly, some
+verses imply that the speaker has already returned to Zion itself: he
+says more than once, _in this mountain_; there are hymns celebrating a
+deliverance actually achieved, as--God _has done a marvel. For Thou hast
+made a citadel into a heap, a fortified city into a ruin, a castle of
+strangers to be no city, not to be built again._ Such phrases do not
+read as if the prophet were creating for the lips of his people a psalm
+of triumph against a far future deliverance; they have in them the ring
+of what has already happened.
+
+  [81] The mention of Moab (xxv. 10, 11) is also consistent with a
+  pre-exilic date, but does not necessarily imply it.
+
+  [82] _E.g._, xxv. 6-8, 10, 11; xxvii. 10, 11, 9, 12, 13.
+
+This bare statement of the allusions of the prophecy will give the
+ordinary reader some idea of the difficulties of Biblical criticism.
+What is to be made of a prophecy uttering the catch-words and breathing
+the experience of three distinct periods? One solution of the difficulty
+may be that we have here the composition of a Jew already returned from
+exile to a desecrated sanctuary and depopulated land, who has woven
+through his original utterances of complaint and hope the experience of
+earlier oppressions and deliverances, using even the names of earlier
+tyrants. In his immediate past a great city that oppressed the Jews has
+fallen, though, if this is Babylon, it is strange that he nowhere names
+it. But his intention is rather religious than historical; he seeks to
+give a general representation of the attitude of the world to the
+people of God, and of the judgement which God brings on the world. This
+view of the composition is supported by either of two possible
+interpretations of that difficult verse xxvii. 1: _In that day Jehovah
+with His sword, the hard and the great and the strong, shall perform
+visitation upon Leviathan, Serpent Elusive, and upon Leviathan, Serpent
+Tortuous; and He shall slay the Dragon that is in the sea._ Cheyne
+treats these monsters as mythic personifications of the clouds, the
+darkness and the powers of the air, so that the verse means that, just
+as Jehovah is supreme in the physical world, He shall be in the moral.
+But it is more probable that the two Leviathans mean Assyria and
+Babylon--the _Elusive_ one, Assyria on the swift-shooting Tigris; the
+_Tortuous_ one, Babylon on the winding Euphrates--while _the Dragon that
+is in the sea_ or _the west_ is Egypt. But if the prophet speaks of a
+victory over Israel's three great enemies all at once, that means that
+he is talking universally or ideally; and this impression is further
+heightened by the mythic names he gives them. Such arguments, along with
+the undoubted post-exilic fragments in the prophecy, point to a late
+date, so that even a very conservative critic, who is satisfied that
+Isaiah is the author, admits that "the _possibility_ of exilic
+authorship does not allow itself to be denied."
+
+If this character which we attribute to the prophecy be correct--viz.,
+that it is a summary or ideal account of the attitude of the alien world
+to Israel, and of the judgement God has ready for the world--then,
+though itself be exilic, its place in the Book of Isaiah is
+intelligible. Chaps. xxiv.-xxvii. fitly crown the long list of Isaiah's
+oracles upon the foreign nations; they finally formulate the purposes
+of God towards the nations and towards Israel, whom the nations have
+oppressed. Our opinions must not be final or dogmatic about this matter
+of authorship; the obscurities are not nearly cleared up. But if it be
+ultimately found certain that this prophecy, which lies in the heart of
+the Book of Isaiah, is not by Isaiah himself, that need neither startle
+nor unsettle us. No doctrinal question is stirred by such a discovery,
+not even that of the accuracy of the Scriptures. For that a book is
+entitled by Isaiah's name does not necessarily mean that it is all by
+Isaiah; and we shall feel still less compelled to believe that these
+chapters are his when we find other chapters called by his name while
+these are not said to be by him. In truth there is a difficulty here,
+only because it is supposed that a book entitled by Isaiah's name must
+necessarily contain nothing but what is Isaiah's own. Tradition may have
+come to say so; but the Scripture itself, bearing as it does
+unmistakable marks of another age than Isaiah's, tells us that tradition
+is wrong: and the testimony of Scripture is surely to be preferred,
+especially when it betrays, as we have seen, sufficient reasons why a
+prophecy, though not Isaiah's, was attached to his genuine and undoubted
+oracles. In any case, however, as even the conservative critic whom we
+have quoted admits, "for the religious value" of the prophecy "the
+question" of the authorship "is thoroughly irrelevant."
+
+We shall perceive this at once as we now turn to see what is the
+religious value of our prophecy. Chaps. xxv.-xxvii. stand in the front
+rank of evangelical prophecy. In their experience of religion, their
+characterisations of God's people, their expressions of faith, their
+missionary hopes and hopes of immortality, they are very rich and
+edifying. Perhaps their most signal feature is their designation of the
+people of God. In this collection of prayers and hymns the people of God
+are not regarded as a political body. They are only once called the
+_nation_ and spoken of in connection with a territory (xxvi. 15). Only
+twice are they named with the national names of Israel and Jacob (xxvii.
+6, 9, 12). We miss Isaiah's promised king, his pictures of righteous
+government, his emphasis upon social justice and purity, his interest in
+the foreign politics of his State, his hopes of national grandeur and
+agricultural felicity. In these chapters God's people are described by
+adjectives signifying spiritual qualities. Their nationality is no more
+pleaded, only their suffering estate and their hunger and thirst after
+God. The ideals that are presented for the future are neither political
+nor social, but ecclesiastical. We saw how closely Isaiah's prophesying
+was connected with the history of his time. The people of this prophecy
+seem to have done with history, and to be interested only in worship.
+And along with the assurance of the continued establishment of Zion as
+the centre for a secure and holy people, filling a secure and fertile
+land,--with which, as we have seen, the undoubted visions of Isaiah
+content themselves, while silent as to the fate of the individuals who
+drop from this future through death,--we have the most abrupt and
+thrilling hopes expressed for the resurrection of these latter to share
+in the glory of the redeemed and restored community.
+
+Among the names applied to God's people there are three which were
+destined to play an enormous part in the history of religion. In the
+English version these appear as two: _poor and needy_; but in the
+original they are three. In chap. xxv. 4: _Thou hast been a stronghold
+to the poor and a stronghold to the needy, poor_ renders a Hebrew word,
+"d[=a]l," literally _wavering_, _tottering_, _infirm_, then _slender_ or
+_lean_, then _poor_ in fortune and estate; _needy_ literally renders the
+Hebrew "'ebhyon," Latin _egenus_. In chap. xxvi. 6: _the foot of the
+poor and the steps of the needy, needy_ renders "d[=a]l," while _poor_
+renders "'[=a]ni," a passive form--_forced_, _afflicted_, _oppressed_,
+then _wretched_, whether under persecution, poverty, loneliness or
+exile, and so _tamed_, _mild_, _meek_. These three words, in their root
+ideas of _infirmity_, _need_ and positive _affliction_, cover among them
+every aspect of physical poverty and distress. Let us see how they came
+also to be the expression of the highest moral and evangelical virtues.
+
+If there is one thing which distinguishes the people of the revelation
+from other historical nations, it is the evidence afforded by their
+dictionaries of the power to transmute the most afflicting experiences
+of life into virtuous disposition and effectual desire for God. We see
+this most clearly if we contrast the Hebrews' use of their words for
+_poor_ with that of the first language which was employed to translate
+these words--the Greek in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament.
+In the Greek temper there was a noble pity for the unfortunate; the
+earliest Greeks regarded beggars as the peculiar proteges of Heaven.
+Greek philosophy developed a capacity for enriching the soul in
+misfortune; Stoicism gave imperishable proof of how bravely a man could
+hold poverty and pain to be things indifferent, and how much gain from
+such indifference he could bring to his soul. But in the vulgar opinion
+of Greece penury and sickness were always disgraceful; and Greek
+dictionaries mark the degradation of terms, which at first merely noted
+physical disadvantage, into epithets of contempt or hopelessness. It is
+very striking that it was not till they were employed to translate the
+Old Testament ideas of poverty that the Greek words for "poor" and
+"lowly" came to bear an honourable significance. And in the case of the
+Stoic, who endured poverty or pain with such indifference, was it not
+just this indifference that prevented him from discovering in his
+tribulations the rich evangelical experience which, as we shall see,
+fell to the quick conscience and sensitive nerves of the Hebrew?
+
+Let us see how this conscience was developed. In the East poverty
+scarcely ever means physical disadvantage alone: in its train there
+follow higher disabilities. A poor Eastern cannot be certain of fair
+play in the courts of the land. He is very often a wronged man, with a
+fire of righteous anger burning in his breast. Again, and more
+important, misfortune is to the quick religious instinct of the Oriental
+a sign of God's estrangement. With us misfortune is so often only the
+cruelty, sometimes real sometimes imagined, of the rich; the unemployed
+vents his wrath at the capitalist, the tramp shakes his fist after the
+carriage on the highway. In the East they do not forget to curse the
+rich, but they remember as well to humble themselves beneath the hand of
+God. With an unfortunate Oriental the conviction is supreme, God is
+angry with me; I have lost His favour. His soul eagerly longs for God.
+
+A poor man in the East has, therefore, not only a hunger for food: he
+has the hotter hunger for justice, the deeper hunger for God. Poverty in
+itself, without extraneous teaching, develops nobler appetites. The
+physical, becomes the moral, pauper; poor in substance, he grows poor in
+spirit. It was by developing, with the aid of God's Spirit, this quick
+conscience and this deep desire for God, which in the East are the very
+soul of physical poverty, that the Jews advanced to that sense of
+evangelical poverty of heart, blessed by Jesus in the first of His
+Beatitudes as the possession of the kingdom of heaven.
+
+Till the Exile, however, the poor were only a portion of the people. In
+the Exile the whole nation became poor, and henceforth "God's poor"
+might become synonymous with "God's people." This was the time when the
+words received their spiritual baptism. Israel felt the physical curse
+of poverty to its extreme of famine. The pains, privations and terrors,
+which the glib tongues of our comfortable middle classes, as they sing
+the psalms of Israel, roll off so easily for symbols of their own
+spiritual experience, were felt by the captive Hebrews in all their
+concrete physical effects. The noble and the saintly, the gentle and the
+cultured, priest, soldier and citizen, woman, youth and child, were torn
+from home and estate, were deprived of civil standing, were imprisoned,
+fettered, flogged and starved to death. We learn something of what it
+must have been from the words which Jeremiah addressed to Baruch, a
+youth of good family and fine culture: _Seekest thou great things for
+thyself? Seek them not, for, behold, I will bring evil upon all flesh,
+saith the LORD; only thy life will I give unto thee for a prey in all
+places whither thou goest._ Imagine a whole nation plunged into poverty
+of this degree--not born into it having known no better things, nor
+stunted into it with sensibility and the power of expression sapped out
+of them, but plunged into it, with the unimpaired culture, conscience
+and memories of the flower of the people. When God's own hand sent
+fresh from Himself a poet's soul into "the clay biggin'" of an Ayrshire
+ploughman, what a revelation we received of the distress, the discipline
+and the graces of poverty! But in the Jewish nation as it passed into
+exile there were a score of hearts with as unimpaired an appetite for
+life as Robert Burns; and, worse than he, they went to feel its pangs
+away from home. Genius, conscience and pride drank to the dregs in a
+foreign land the bitter cup of the poor. The Psalms and Lamentations
+show us how they bore their poison. A Greek Stoic might sneer at the
+complaint and sobbing, the self-abasement so strangely mixed with fierce
+cries for vengeance. But the Jew had within him the conscience that will
+not allow a man to be a Stoic. He never forgot that it was for his sin
+he suffered, and therefore to him suffering could not be a thing
+indifferent. With this, his native hunger for justice reached in
+captivity a famine pitch; his sense of guilt was equalled by as sincere
+an indignation at the tyrant who held him in his brutal grasp. The
+feeling of estrangement from God increased to a degree that only the
+exile of a Jew could excite: the longing for God's house and the worship
+lawful only there; the longing for the relief which only the sacrifices
+of the Temple could bestow; the longing for God's own presence and the
+light of His face. _My soul thirsteth for Thee, my flesh longeth after
+Thee, in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is, as I have looked
+upon Thee in the sanctuary, to see Thy power and Thy glory. For Thy
+lovingkindness is better than life!_
+
+_Thy lovingkindness is better than life!_--is the secret of it all.
+There is that which excites a deeper hunger in the soul than the hunger
+for life, and for the food and money that give life. This spiritual
+poverty is most richly bred in physical penury, it is strong enough to
+displace what feeds it. The physical poverty of Israel which had
+awakened these other hungers of the soul--hunger for forgiveness, hunger
+for justice, hunger for God--was absorbed by them; and when Israel came
+out of exile, _to be poor_ meant, not so much to be indigent in this
+world's substance as to feel the need of pardon, the absence of
+righteousness, the want of God.
+
+It is at this time, as we have seen, that Isa. xxiv.-xxvii. was written;
+and it is in the temper of this time that the three Hebrew words for
+"poor" and "needy" are used in chaps. xxv. and xxvi. The returned exiles
+were still politically dependent and abjectly poor. Their discipline
+therefore continued, and did not allow them to forget their new lessons.
+In fact, they developed the results of these further, till in this
+prophecy we find no fewer than five different aspects of spiritual
+poverty.
+
+1. We have already seen how strong the sense of sin is in chap. xxiv.
+This POVERTY of PEACE is not so fully expressed in the following
+chapters, and indeed seems crowded out by the sense of the _iniquity of
+the inhabitants of the earth_ and the desire for their judgement (xxvi.
+21).
+
+2. The feeling of the POVERTY of JUSTICE is very strong in this
+prophecy. But it is to be satisfied; in part it has been satisfied (xxv.
+1-4). _A strong city_, probably Babylon, has fallen. _Moab shall be
+trodden down in his place, even as straw is trodden down in the water of
+the dunghill._ The complete judgement is to come when the Lord shall
+destroy the two _Leviathans_ and the great _Dragon of the west_ (xxvii.
+1). It is followed by the restoration of Israel to the state in which
+Isaiah (chap. v. 1) sang so sweetly of her. _A pleasant vineyard, sing
+ye of her. I, Jehovah, her Keeper, moment by moment do I water her;
+lest any make a raid upon her, night and day will I keep her._ The
+Hebrew text then reads, _Fury is not in Me_; but probably the Septuagint
+version has preserved the original meaning: _I have no walls_. If this
+be correct, then Jehovah is describing the present state of Jerusalem,
+the fulfilment of Isaiah's threat, chap. v. 6: _Walls I have not; let
+there but be briers and thorns before me! With war will I stride against
+them; I will burn them together._ But then there breaks the softer
+alternative of the reconciliation of Judah's enemies: _Or else let him
+seize hold of My strength; let him make peace with Me--peace let him
+make with Me_. In such a peace Israel shall spread, and his fulness
+become the riches of the Gentiles. _In that by-and-bye Jacob shall take
+root, Israel blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with
+fruit._
+
+Perhaps the wildest cries that rose from Israel's famine of justice were
+those which found expression in chap. xxxiv. This chapter is so largely
+a repetition of feelings we have already met with elsewhere in the Book
+of Isaiah, that it is necessary now only to mention its original
+features. The subject is, as in chap. xiii., the Lord's judgement upon
+all the nations; and as chap. xiii. singled out Babylon for special
+doom, so chap. xxxiv. singles out Edom. The reason of this distinction
+will be very plain to the reader of the Old Testament. From the day the
+twins struggled in their mother Rebekah's womb, Israel and Edom were
+either at open war or burned towards each other with a hate, which was
+the more intense for wanting opportunities of gratification. It is an
+Eastern edition of the worst chapters in the history of England and
+Ireland. No bloodier massacres stained Jewish hands than those which
+attended their invasions of Edom, and Jewish psalms of vengeance are
+never more flagrant than when they touch the name of the children of
+Esau. The only gentle utterance of the Old Testament upon Israel's
+hereditary foe is a comfortless enigma. Isaiah's _Oracle for Dumah_
+(xxii. 11 f.), shows that even that large-hearted prophet, in face of
+his people's age-long resentment at Edom's total want of appreciation of
+Israel's spiritual superiority, could offer Edom, though for the moment
+submissive and inquiring, nothing but a sad, ambiguous answer. Edom and
+Israel, each after his fashion, exulted in the other's misfortunes:
+Israel by bitter satire when Edom's impregnable mountain-range was
+treacherously seized and overrun by his allies (Obadiah 4-9); Edom, with
+the harassing, pillaging habits of a highland tribe, hanging on to the
+skirts of Judah's great enemies, and cutting off Jewish fugitives, or
+selling them into slavery, or malignantly completing the ruin of
+Jerusalem's walls after her overthrow by the Chaldeans (Obadiah 10-14;
+Ezek. xxxv. 10-15; Ps. cxxxi. 7). In _the quarrel of Zion_ with the
+nations of the world Edom had taken the wrong side,--his profane, earthy
+nature incapable of understanding his brother's spiritual claims, and
+therefore envious of him, with the brutal malice of ignorance, and
+spitefully glad to assist in disappointing such claims. This is what we
+must remember when we read the indignant verses of chap. xxxiv. Israel,
+conscious of his spiritual calling in the world, felt bitter resentment
+that his own brother should be so vulgarly hostile to his attempts to
+carry it out. It is not our wish to defend the temper of Israel towards
+Edom. The silence of Christ before the Edomite Herod and his men of war
+has taught the spiritual servants of God what is their proper attitude
+towards the malignant and obscene treatment of their claims by vulgar
+men. But at least let us remember that chap. xxxiv., for all its
+fierceness, is inspired by Israel's conviction of a spiritual destiny
+and service for God, and by the natural resentment that his own kith and
+kin should be doing their best to render these futile. That a famine of
+bread makes its victims delirious does not tempt us to doubt the
+genuineness of their need and suffering. As little ought we to doubt or
+to ignore the reality or the purity of those spiritual convictions, the
+prolonged starvation of which bred in Israel such feverish hate against
+his twin-brother Esau. Chap. xxxiv., with all its proud prophecy of
+judgement, is, therefore, also a symptom of that aspect of Israel's
+poverty of heart, which we have called a hunger for the Divine justice.
+
+3. POVERTY OF THE EXILE. But as fair flowers bloom upon rough stalks, so
+from Israel's stern challenges of justice there break sweet prayers for
+home. Chap. xxxiv., the effusion of vengeance on Edom, is followed by
+chap. xxxv., the going forth of hope to the return from exile and the
+establishment of the ransomed of the Lord in Zion.[83] Chap. xxxv. opens
+with a prospect beyond the return, but after the first two verses
+addresses itself to the people still in a foreign captivity, speaking of
+their salvation (vv. 3, 4), of the miracles that will take place in
+themselves (vv. 5, 6) and in the desert between them and their home (vv.
+6, 7), of the highway which God shall build, evident and secure (vv. 8,
+9), and of the final arrival in Zion (ver. 10). In that march the usual
+disappointments and illusions of desert life shall disappear. _The
+mirage shall become a pool_; and the clump of vegetation which afar off
+the hasty traveller hails for a sign of water, but which on his approach
+he discovers to be the withered grass of a _jackal's lair_, shall indeed
+be _reeds and rushes_, standing green in fresh water. Out of this
+exuberant fertility there emerges in the prophet's thoughts a great
+highway, on which the poetry of the chapter gathers and reaches its
+climax. Have we of this nineteenth century, with our more rapid means of
+passage, not forgotten the poetry of the road? Are we able to appreciate
+either the intrinsic usefulness or the gracious symbolism of the king's
+highway? How can we know it as the Bible-writers or our forefathers knew
+it when they made the road the main line of their allegories and
+parables of life? Let us listen to these verses as they strike the three
+great notes in the music of the road: _And an highway shall be there,
+and a way; yea, The Way of Holiness shall it be called, for the unclean
+shall not pass over it_--that is what is to distinguish this road from
+all other roads. But here is what it is as being a road. First, it shall
+be unmistakably plain: _The wayfaring man, yea fools, shall not err
+therein_. Second, it shall be perfectly secure: _No lion shall be there,
+nor shall any ravenous beast go up thereon; they shall not be met with
+there_. Third, it shall bring to a safe arrival and ensure a complete
+overtaking: _And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come with
+singing unto Zion, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they
+shall overtake gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee
+away_.
+
+  [83] Even at the risk of incurring Canon Cheyne's charge of
+  "ineradicable error," I feel I must keep to the older view of chap.
+  xxxv. which makes it refer to the return from exile. No doubt the
+  chapter covers more than the mere return, and includes "the glorious
+  condition of Israel after the return;" but vv. 4 and 10 are undoubtedly
+  addressed to Jews still in exile and undelivered.
+
+4. So Israel was to come home. But to Israel home meant the Temple, and
+the Temple meant God. The poverty of the Exile was, in the essence of
+it, POVERTY OF GOD, POVERTY OF LOVE. The prayers which express this are
+very beautiful,--that trail like wounded animals to the feet of their
+master, and look up in His face with large eyes of pain. _And they shall
+say in that day, Lo, this is our God: we have waited for Him, that He
+should save us; this is the LORD: we have waited for Him; we will
+rejoice and be glad in His salvation.... Yea, in the way of Thy
+ordinances, O LORD, have we waited for Thee; to Thy name and to Thy
+Memorial was the desire of our soul. With my soul have I desired Thee in
+the night; yea, by my spirit within me do I seek Thee with dawn_ (chaps.
+xxv. 9; xxvi. 8).
+
+An Arctic explorer was once asked, whether during eight months of slow
+starvation which he and his comrades endured they suffered much from the
+pangs of hunger. No, he answered, we lost them in the sense of
+abandonment, in the feeling that our countrymen had forgotten us and
+were not coming to the rescue. It was not till we were rescued and
+looked in human faces that we felt how hungry we were. So is it ever
+with God's poor. They forget all other need, as Israel did, in their
+need of God. Their outward poverty is only the weeds of their heart's
+widowhood. _But Jehovah of hosts shall make to all the peoples in this
+mountain a banquet of fat things, a banquet of wines on the lees, fat
+things bemarrowed, wines on the lees refined._
+
+We need only note here--for it will come up for detailed treatment in
+connection with the second half of Isaiah--that the centre of Israel's
+restored life is to be the Temple, not, as in Isaiah's day, the king;
+that her dispersed are to gather from all parts of the world at the
+sound of the Temple _trumpet_; and that her national life is to consist
+in worship (cf. xxvii. 13).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These then were four aspects of Israel's poverty of heart: a hunger for
+pardon, a hunger for justice, a hunger for home, and a hunger for God.
+For the returning Jews these wants were satisfied only to reveal a
+deeper poverty still, the complaint and comfort of which we must reserve
+to another chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX.
+
+_THE RESURRECTION._
+
+ISAIAH xxvi. 14-19; xxv. 6-9.
+
+
+Granted the pardon, the justice, the Temple and the God, which the
+returning exiles now enjoyed, the possession of these only makes more
+painful the shortness of life itself. This life is too shallow and too
+frail a vessel to hold peace and righteousness and worship and the love
+of God. St. Paul has said, _If in this life only we have hope in Christ,
+we are of all men most miserable_. What avails it to have been pardoned,
+to have regained the Holy Land and the face of God, if the dear dead are
+left behind in graves of exile, and all the living must soon pass into
+that captivity,[84] from which there is no return?
+
+  [84] Hezekiah's expression for death, xxxviii. 12.
+
+It must have been thoughts like these, which led to the expression of
+one of the most abrupt and powerful of the few hopes of the resurrection
+which the Old Testament contains. This hope, which lightens chap. xxv.
+7, 8, bursts through again--without logical connection with the
+context--in vv. 14-19 of chap. xxvi.
+
+The English version makes ver. 14 to continue the reference to the
+lords, whom in ver. 13 Israel confesses to have served instead of
+Jehovah. "They are _dead; they shall not live_: they are _deceased; they
+shall not rise_." Our translators have thus intruded into their version
+the verb "they are," of which the original is without a trace. In the
+original, _dead_ and _deceased_ (literally _shades_) are themselves the
+subject of the sentence--a new subject and without logical connection
+with what has gone before. The literal translation of ver. 14 therefore
+runs: _Dead men do not live; shades do not rise: wherefore Thou visitest
+them and destroyest them, and perisheth all memory of them_. The prophet
+states a fact, and draws an inference. The fact is, that no one has ever
+returned from the dead; the inference, that it is God's own _visitation_
+or _sentence_ which has gone forth upon them, and they have really
+ceased to exist. But how intolerable a thought is this in presence of
+the other fact that God has here on earth above gloriously enlarged and
+established His people (ver. 15). _Thou hast increased the nation,
+Jehovah; Thou hast increased the nation. Thou hast covered Thyself with
+glory; Thou hast expanded all the boundaries of the land._ To this
+follows a verse (16), the sense of which is obscure, but palpable. It
+"feels" to mean that the contrast which the prophet has just painted
+between the absolute perishing of the dead and the glory of the Church
+above ground is the cause of great despair and groaning: _O Jehovah, in
+The Trouble they supplicate Thee; they pour out incantations when Thy
+discipline is upon them_.[85] In face of _The_ Trouble and _The_
+Discipline _par excellence_ of God, what else can man do but betake
+himself to God? God sent death; in death He is the only resource.
+Israel's feelings in presence of The Trouble are now expressed in ver.
+17: _Like as a woman with child that draweth near the time of her
+delivery writheth and crieth out in her pangs, so have we been before
+Thee, O Jehovah_. Thy Church on earth is pregnant with a life, which
+death does not allow to come to the birth. _We have been with child; we
+have been in the pangs, as it were; we have brought forth wind; we make
+not the earth_, in spite of all we have really accomplished upon it in
+our return, our restoration and our enjoyment of Thy presence--_we make
+not the earth salvation, neither are the inhabitants of the world
+born_.[86]
+
+  [85] I think this must be the meaning of ver. 16, if we are to allow
+  that it has any sympathy with vv. 14 and 15. Bredenkamp suggests that
+  the persons meant are themselves the dead. Jehovah has glorified the
+  Church on earth; but the dead below are still in trouble, and _pour out
+  prayers_ (Virgil's "preces fundunt," _AEneid_, vi., 55), beneath this
+  punishment which God causes to pass on all men (ver. 14). Bredenkamp
+  bases this exegesis chiefly on the word for "prayer," which means
+  _chirping_ or _whispering_, a kind of voice imputed to the shades by the
+  Hebrews and other ancient peoples. But while this word does originally
+  mean _whispering_, it is never in Scripture applied to the dead, but, on
+  the other hand, is a frequent name for _divining_ or _incantation_. I
+  therefore have felt compelled to understand it as used in this passage
+  of the living, whose only resource in face of death--_Goa's discipline
+  par excellence_--is to pour out incantations. If it be objected that the
+  prophet would scarcely parallel the ordinary incantations on behalf of
+  the dead with supplications to Jehovah, the answer is that he is talking
+  poetically or popularly.
+
+  [86] English version, _fallen; i.e._, like our expression for the birth
+  of animals, _dropped_.
+
+The figures are bold. Israel achieves, through God's grace, everything
+but the recovery of her dead; this, which alone is worth calling
+_salvation_, remains wanting to her great record of deliverances. The
+living Israel is restored, but how meagre a proportion of the people it
+is! The graves of home and of exile do not give up their dead. These are
+not born again to be inhabitants of the upper world.
+
+The figures are bold, but bolder is the hope that breaks from them. Like
+as when the Trumpet shall sound, ver. 19 peals forth the promise of the
+resurrection--peals the promise forth, in spite of all experience,
+unsupported by any argument, and upon the strength of its own inherent
+music. _Thy dead shall live! my dead bodies shall arise!_ The change of
+the personal pronoun is singularly dramatic. Returned Israel is the
+speaker, first speaking to herself: _thy dead_, as if upon the
+depopulated land, in face of all its homes in ruin, and only the
+sepulchres of ages standing grim and steadfast, she addressed some
+despairing double of herself; and secondly speaking _of_ herself: _my
+dead bodies_, as if all the inhabitants of these tombs, though dead,
+were still her own, still part of her, the living Israel, and able to
+arise and bless with their numbers their bereaved mother. These she now
+addresses: _Awake and sing, ye dwellers in the dust, for a dew of lights
+is Thy dew, and the land bringeth forth the dead_.[87]
+
+  [87] Technical Hebrew word for the inhabitants of the underworld--_the
+  shades_.
+
+If one has seen a place of graves in the East, he will appreciate the
+elements of this figure, which takes _dust_ for death and _dew_ for
+life. With our damp graveyards mould has become the traditional
+trappings of death; but where under the hot Eastern sun things do not
+rot into lower forms of life, but crumble into sapless powder, that will
+not keep a worm in life, _dust_ is the natural symbol of death. When
+they die, men go not to feed fat the mould, but _down into the dust_;
+and there the foot of the living falls silent, and his voice is choked,
+and the light is thickened and in retreat, as if it were creeping away
+to die. The only creatures the visitor starts are timid, unclean bats,
+that flutter and whisper about him like the ghosts of the dead. There
+are no flowers in an Eastern cemetery; and the withered branches and
+other ornaments are thickly powdered with the same dust that chokes, and
+silences and darkens all.
+
+Hence the Semitic conception of the underworld was dominated by dust. It
+was not water nor fire nor frost nor altogether darkness, which made the
+infernal prison horrible, but that upon its floor and rafters, hewn from
+the roots and ribs of the primeval mountains, dust lay deep and choking.
+Amid all the horrors he imagined for the dead, Dante did not include one
+more awful than the horror of dust. The picture which the northern
+Semites had before them when they turned their faces to the wall was of
+this kind.[88]
+
+  [88] Extracted from the Assyrian _Descent of Istar to Hades_ (Dr.
+  Jeremias' German translation, p. 11, and _Records of the Past_, i.,
+  145).
+
+  The house of darkness....
+  The house men enter, but cannot depart from.
+  The road men go, but cannot return.
+  The house from whose dwellers the light is withdrawn.
+  The place where dust is their food, their nourishment clay.
+  The light they behold not; in darkness they dwell.
+  They are clothed like birds, all fluttering wings.
+  On the door and the gateposts, the dust lieth deep.
+
+Either, then, an Eastern sepulchre, or this its infernal double, was
+gaping before the prophet's eyes. What more final and hopeless than the
+dust and the dark of it?
+
+But for dust there is dew, and even to graveyards the morning comes that
+brings dew and light together. The wonder of dew is that it is given
+from a clear heaven, and that it comes to sight with the dawn. If the
+Oriental looks up when dew is falling, he sees nothing to thank for it
+between him and the stars. If he sees dew in the morning, it is equal
+liquid and lustre; it seems to distil from the beams of the sun--_the
+sun, which riseth with healing under his wings_. The dew is thus doubly
+"dew of light." But our prophet ascribes the dew of God, that is to
+raise the dead, neither to stars nor dawn, but, because of its Divine
+power, to that higher supernal glory which the Hebrews conceived to have
+existed before the sun, and which they styled, as they styled their God,
+by the plural of majesty: _A dew of lights is Thy dew_.[89] As, when the
+dawn comes, the drooping flowers of yesterday are seen erect and
+lustrous with the dew, every spike a crown of glory, so also shall be
+the resurrection of the dead. There is no shadow of a reason for
+limiting this promise to that to which some other passages of
+resurrection in the Old Testament have to be limited: a corporate
+restoration of the holy State or Church. This is the resurrection of its
+individual members to a community which is already restored, the
+recovery by Israel of her dead men and women from their separate graves,
+each with his own freshness and beauty, in that glorious morning when
+the Sun of righteousness shall arise, with healing under His wings--_Thy
+dew_, O Jehovah!
+
+  [89] Cf. James i. 17.
+
+Attempts are so often made to trace the hopes of resurrection, which
+break the prevailing silence of the Old Testament on a future life, to
+foreign influences experienced in the Exile, that it is well to
+emphasize the origin and occasion of the hopes that utter themselves so
+abruptly in this passage. Surely nothing could be more inextricably
+woven with the national fortunes of Israel, as nothing could be more
+native and original to Israel's temper, than the verses just expounded.
+We need not deny that their residence among a people, accustomed as the
+Babylonians were to belief in the resurrection, may have thawed in the
+Jews that reserve which the Old Testament clearly shows that they
+exhibited towards a future life. The Babylonians themselves had received
+most of their suggestions of the next world from a non-Semitic race; and
+therefore it would not be to imagine anything alien to the ascertained
+methods of Providence if we were to suppose that the Hebrews, who showed
+what we have already called the Semitic want of interest in a future
+life, were intellectually tempered by their foreign associations to a
+readiness to receive any suggestions of immortality, which the Spirit of
+God might offer them through their own religious experience. That it was
+this last, which was the effective cause of Israel's hopes for the
+resurrection of her dead, our passage puts beyond doubt. Chap. xxvi.
+shows us that the occasion of these hopes was what is not often noticed:
+the returned exiles' disappointment with the meagre repopulation of the
+holy territory. A restoration of the State or community was not enough:
+the heart of Israel wanted back in their numbers her dead sons and
+daughters.
+
+If the occasion of these hopes was thus an event in Israel's own
+national history, and if the impulse to them was given by so natural an
+instinct of her own heart, Israel was equally indebted to herself for
+the convictions that the instinct was not in vain. Nothing is more clear
+in our passage than that Israel's first ground of hope in a future life
+was her simple, untaught reflection upon the power of her God. Death was
+_His chastening_. Death came from Him, and remained in His power. Surely
+He would deliver from it. This was a very old belief in Israel. _The
+Lord killeth and maketh alive; He bringeth down to Sheol and bringeth
+up._ Such words, of course, might be only an extreme figure for recovery
+from disease, and the silence of so great a saint as Hezekiah about any
+other issue into life than by convalescence from mortal sickness
+staggers us into doubt whether an Israelite ever did think of a
+resurrection. But still there was Jehovah's almightiness; a man could
+rest his future on that, even if he had not light to think out what sort
+of a future it would be. So mark in our passage, how confidence is
+chiefly derived from the simple utterance of the name of Jehovah, and
+how He is hailed as _our God_. It seems enough to the prophet to connect
+life with Him and to say merely, _Thy dew_. As death is God's own
+discipline, so life, _Thy dew_, is with Him also.
+
+Thus in its foundation the Old Testament doctrine of the resurrection is
+but the conviction of the sufficiency of God Himself, a conviction which
+Christ turned upon Himself when He said, _I am the Resurrection and the
+Life. Because I live, ye shall live also._
+
+If any object that in this picture of a resurrection we have no real
+persuasion of immortality, but simply the natural, though impossible,
+wish of a bereaved people that their dead should to-day rise from their
+graves to share to-day's return and glory--a revival as special and
+extraordinary as that appearing of the dead in the streets of Jerusalem
+when the Atonement was accomplished, but by no means that general
+resurrection at the last day which is an article of the Christian
+faith--if any one should bring this objection, then let him be referred
+to the previous promise of immortality in chap. xxv. The universal and
+final character of the promise made there is as evident as of that for
+which Paul borrowed its terms in order to utter the absolute
+consequences of the resurrection of the Son of God: _Death is swallowed
+up in victory_. For the prophet, having in ver. 6 described the
+restoration of the people, whom exile had starved with a famine of
+ordinances, to _a feast in Zion of fat things and wines on the lees well
+refined_, intimates that as certainly as exile has been abolished, with
+its dearth of spiritual intercourse, so certainly shall God Himself
+destroy death: _And He shall swallow up in this mountain_--perhaps it is
+imagined, as the sun devours the morning mist on the hills--_the mask of
+the veil, the veil that is upon all the peoples, and the film spun upon
+all the nations. He hath swallowed up death for ever, and the Lord
+Jehovah shall wipe away tears from off all faces, and the reproach of
+His people shall He remove from off all the earth, for Jehovah hath
+spoken it. And they shall say in that day, Behold, this is our God: we
+have waited for Him, and He shall save us; this is Jehovah: we have
+waited for Him; we will rejoice and be glad in His salvation._ Thus over
+all doubts, and in spite of universal human experience, the prophet
+depends for immortality on God Himself. In chap. xxvi. 3 our version
+beautifully renders, _Thou wilt keep_ him _in perfect peace_ whose
+_mind_ is _stayed_ on Thee, _because he trusteth in Thee_. This is a
+confidence valid for the next life as well as for this. _Therefore trust
+ye in the LORD_ for ever. Amen.
+
+Almighty God, we praise Thee that, in the weakness of all our love and
+the darkness of all our knowledge before death, Thou hast placed
+assurance of eternal life in simple faith upon Thyself. Let this faith
+be richly ours. By Thine omnipotence, by Thy righteousness, by the love
+Thou hast vouchsafed, we lift ourselves and rest upon Thy word. _Because
+I live, ye shall live also._ Oh keep us steadfast in union with Thyself,
+through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX TO CHAPS. I.-XXXIX.
+
+
+  CHAPTERS OF      DATE B.C.                CHAPTERS OF THE
+    ISAIAH.                                    EXPOSITION.
+
+  i.                701                  I., XIX., p. 311 ff.
+  ii.-iv.           740-735              II.
+  v.                735                  III.
+  vi.               740;                 IV., XXVI., 391 f.
+                    written 735 or 727
+  vii.-ix. 7        734-732              VI.
+  vii. 14 ff.       734                  VII. 133
+  viii.             734-733              VII. 135
+  ix. 1-7           732                  VII. 136
+  ix. 8-x. 4        735                  III. 47 ff.
+  x. 5-34           About 721            IX. 147
+  xi. [xii.]        About 720?           X.
+  xi. 1-6                                VII. 138
+  xiii.-xiv. 23     ?                    XXVII.
+  xiv. 24-27        Towards 701          XVII. 272
+  xiv. 28-32        705                  XVII. 272
+  xv.-xvi. 12       ?                    XVII. 273
+  xvi. 13, 14       711 or 704?          XVII. 273
+  xvii. 1-11        Between 736 and 732  XVII. 274
+  xvii. 12-14       ?                    XVII. 274, 277, 281 f.
+  xviii.            711 or towards 701?  XVII. 275
+  xix.              703 or after 700?    XVII. 275, 278, 284 ff.
+  xx.               711-709              XI. 198-200, XVII. 276
+  xxi. 1-10         Probably 709         XI. 201, XVII. 276
+  xxi. 11, 12       Between 704 and 701  XVII. 276
+  xxi. 13, 17                            XVII. 277
+  xxii.             701                  XIX., XX.
+  xxiii.            703 or 702           XVII. 277, XVIII.
+  xxiv.             ?                    XXVIII.
+  xxv.-xxvii.       ?                    XXIX.-XXX.
+  xxviii.           About 725            VIII. 149
+  xxix.-xxxii.                           p. 207
+  xxix.             About 703            XII.
+  xxx.              About 702            XIII.
+  xxxi.             About 702            XIV.
+  xxxii. 1-8        About 702?           XV.
+  xxxii. 9-20       Date uncertain       XVI.
+  xxxiii.           701                  XX., XXI., 207, 304
+  xxxiv.            ?                    XXIX. 438 ff.
+  xxxv.             ?                    XXIX. 440 f.
+  xxxvi. 1          701                  303 f.
+  xxxvi. 2-xxxvii.  701                  303 f.
+  xxxvi. 2-22       701                  XXII. 303 f.
+  xxxvii.           701                  XXIII.
+  xxxviii.-xxxix.   Date uncertain       XXV. 304
+  xxxviii.                               XXVI. 393
+  xxxix.                                 XI. 201
+
+
+
+
+SHORT INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
+
+
+  Ahaz, 98;
+    compared with Charles I., 99, 103 ff., 113;
+    Judas of Old Testament, 118.
+
+  Animals, the lower, 190 ff.;
+    our mediatorship to, 193.
+
+  Anthropomorphism, 144.
+
+  Arabia, 277.
+
+  Aram, 94, 103 ff.
+
+  Ashdod, 198.
+
+  Assyria and Assyrians, 53, 92 f., 95, 97, 103 f., 122, and _passim_.
+
+  Atheism, two kinds of, 172 ff.
+
+
+  Babylon, 93, 201, 405.
+
+  Babylonian captivity, 201, 402.
+
+  Bribery, 47.
+
+
+  Captivity of Israel, first, 128;
+    second, 148.
+
+  Christ, 80, 142 ff., 254 ff., 328, 426.
+
+  Church, origin of idea of, 126.
+
+  Commerce, 296.
+
+  Conscience, 6;
+    its threefold character, 12;
+    simplicity, 151.
+
+  Cromwell, 160 ff., 220.
+
+
+  Damascus, 95, 120, 122, 274.
+
+  Drunkenness, 44 f., 152 ff.
+
+
+  Earthquake, 50.
+
+  Edom, 94, 276, 438 ff.
+
+  Egypt, 92, 96, 197 ff., 222 ff., _passim_.
+
+  Ekron, 308 f.
+
+  Eliakim, 317.
+
+  Ethiopia, 93, 222, 275.
+
+
+  Faith, moral results of, 106 f., 163 f.;
+    power to shape history, 109, 352 ff.
+
+  Fatalism, 110.
+
+  Forgiveness of sin, 13, 71 ff., 326 ff., 361, 381.
+
+  Formalism, 216, 240.
+
+  Free-will, 82.
+
+
+  Glory, 68.
+
+
+  Hamath, 94.
+
+  Heine, 158, 242, 413.
+
+  Hezekiah, 352, 378 ff., _passim_.
+
+  Holiness, 63 ff.
+
+  Holy Spirit, 185-188.
+
+
+  Immanuel, 102, 115, 124 ff., 133 ff.
+
+  Immortality, 385 ff., 394 ff., 410, 444 ff.
+
+  Individual, the, and the community, 389 ff.
+
+  Inspiration, 23 ff., 213, 372.
+
+  Isaiah:
+    apprenticeship, 19;
+    youth, 21, 59;
+    a son of Jerusalem, 22;
+    threefold vision, 23-25;
+    idealist, 25;
+    realist, 27;
+    prophet, 30;
+    patriotism, a conscience of his country's sins, 30 f.;
+    call and consecration, 57 ff.;
+    personality, 75 f., 253;
+    comp. with Mazzini, 85-87;
+    with Moses, 88;
+    contribution to religious development of Israel, 101, 284, 288;
+    no fatalist, 110;
+    habit of appealing to the people, 119;
+    saved from the popular drift, 121;
+    scorn, 127;
+    sanity, 109, 154 f., 166, 300;
+    comp. with Cromwell, 160 ff., 220;
+    self-control, 166;
+    regard for animals, 190;
+    walks stripped for a sign, 199;
+    inspiration, 213, 372;
+    working of his imagination, 234;
+    style, 281;
+    humanity, 285, 294;
+    triumph, 323 ff.;
+    imagination and conscience, 335;
+    lesson for all time, 366;
+    contrasted with Crusaders, 367;
+    personal religion, 391;
+    ideal, 392;
+    satire, 29, 139, 156.
+
+  Israel, religious condition, 99;
+    and Greece, 365.
+
+
+  Jerusalem, 22, 25 ff., 169 f., 211 f., 231 f., 243, 267 f., 279,
+      Book IV., _passim_.
+
+
+  "King Lear," 49, 55.
+
+
+  Land question, 41 ff.
+
+  Language, abuse of, 260.
+
+
+  Maher-shalal-hash-baz, 120.
+
+  Mazzini, 84-86.
+
+  Merodach-baladan, 200, 376.
+
+  Messiah, 89, 90, 115 ff., 129, 131-144, 180 ff., 249.
+
+  Moab, 94, 273.
+
+  Monotheism, moral and political advantages, 108-110;
+    growth in Israel, 357, 363.
+
+
+  Name of the LORD, 233 ff.
+
+  Nature, fourfold use of by the prophets, 16 f.;
+    redemption of, 188;
+    destruction of, 417 ff.
+
+
+  Palestine, 92.
+
+  People, the, ultimately responsible, 119, 198, 224 ff.
+
+  Philistines, 94, 272.
+
+  Phoenicia, 94, 96, 288 ff.
+
+  Poetry, Hebrew, 411.
+
+  Polytheism, 99, 107.
+
+  Preaching the word, 82, 83.
+
+  Prophecy, its power of vision, 23-25;
+    its service to religion, 100 f.
+
+  Providence, 98.
+
+
+  Rabshakeh, the, 343 ff.
+
+  Remnant, the, 31, 87, 101, 126, 129, and _passim_.
+
+  Resurrection, 387, 444 ff.
+
+  Return from exile, 195, 401 ff., 429, 440 f., 450.
+
+  Righteousness, Isaiah's doctrine of, 334 ff.
+
+
+  Sacrament, an Old Testament, 74.
+
+  Samaria, 95, 147, 152 ff.
+
+  Sargon, 148, 169, 198 ff.
+
+  Scepticism, 15.
+
+  Sennacherib, 209, 302, 308 ff., 355 ff.
+
+  Serbonian bog, 361.
+
+  Shebna, 317.
+
+  Sheol, 385, 410, 447 ff.
+
+  Shiloah, 122.
+
+  Sin, 52, 69, _passim_;
+    effect on man's material circumstance, 416.
+
+  Sorrow, man's abuse of, 54.
+
+
+  Tiglath-pileser II., 96, 103 f.
+
+
+  Uzziah, 59 f., 98.
+
+
+  War, 51.
+
+  Women, Isaiah to, 262.
+
+  Wrath of God, 47 f., 55.
+
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+CHAPS. XL.-LXVI.
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+
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+
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+
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+light of modern research. Mr. Smith has here shown something of the
+power of criticism to do constructive work, and has made it abundantly
+evident that some, at least, of the recent critical results may be used
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+
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+English, at least, there is no book from which the reader can carry away
+in his mind's eye so clear, connected, and permanent a picture of
+Palestine as from Dr. Smith's."--_Daily News._
+
+"A very noteworthy contribution to the study of sacred history, based
+upon the three indispensable conditions of personal acquaintance with
+the land, a study of the explorations, discoveries, and decipherments,
+especially of the last twenty years, and the employment of the results
+of Biblical criticism during the same period. The necessity and
+importance of such an undertaking need no demonstration, and the results
+as set forth in Dr. Smith's learned and laborious work will be
+appreciated by all competent scholars."--_Times._
+
+"It is not often that we have to review a book so thorough and so
+masterly, and, at the same time, written in a style which commands
+attention as well as admiration.... It contains and 'uses' the important
+parts of all the immense mass of modern research and discovery, enriched
+and illuminated by a mind of imagination and poetry, as well as
+scholarship."--_Saturday Review._
+
+"This is really a great book. A subject of fascinating interest has been
+treated with an ability and a fulness which leave nothing to be
+desired."--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+     LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON.
+
+
+FOUR PSALMS.
+
+_Cloth, 1s. 6d._
+
+"These expositions are in every way admirable, and worthy of the highest
+admiration."--_Aberdeen Free Press._
+
+"Very choice expositions in a deeply spiritual vein. Learning, genius,
+and grace combine to make these four choice psalms more precious than
+ever."--_Baptist._
+
+
+MODERN CRITICISM AND PREACHING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
+
+_Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s._
+
+DR. ROBERTSON NICOLL says in _The British Weekly_: "Dr. George Adam
+Smith has given us a fresh, brilliant, Christian book on a vital
+subject. In some respects it is perhaps on an even higher level than
+anything else he has written. It would be impertinent in us to speak of
+the scholarship shown everywhere. Dr. Smith is as accurate as he is
+brilliant. There are many evidences not only of his scholarship, but of
+the wide range his reading has covered. The book is written throughout
+with marked distinction, and in a high and generous spirit. It is
+anything but a mere _resume_. It is full of originality and
+suggestiveness, and is alive and challenging from end to end. It is as
+powerful and ardent as anything Dr. Smith has written, and it is also
+spiritual and subtle."
+
+
+THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS.
+
+_Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s._
+
+
+JERUSALEM.
+
+_In Two Volumes. Net, 24s._
+
+
+THE LIFE OF HENRY DRUMMOND, F.R.S.E.
+
+_With Portrait. Cloth, 3s. 6d._
+
+"A very large audience may safely be predicted for his biography. The
+work is well done.... A more devote life has rarely been portrayed, a
+cleaner soul has not often been unveiled."--_Spectator._
+
+     LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON
+
+
+THE BOOK OF THE TWELVE PROPHETS.
+
+Commonly called the Minor.
+
+_In Two Volumes. Crown 8vo, cloth, 7s. 6d. each._
+
+VOL. I.--AMOS, HOSEA AND MICAH.
+
+     VOL. II.--ZEPHANIAH, NAHUM, HABAKKUK, OBADIAH, HAGGAI, ZECHARIAH
+     I.-VIII., "MALACHI," JOEL, "ZECHARIAH" IX.-XIV., AND JONAH.
+
+"In Dr. Smith's volumes we have much more than a popular exposition of
+the minor Prophets. We have that which will satisfy the scholar and the
+student quite as much as the person who reads for pleasure and for
+edification.... If the minor Prophets do not become popular reading it
+is not because anything more can be done to make them attractive. Dr.
+Smith's volumes present this part of Scripture in what is at once the
+most attractive and the most profitable form."--DR. MARCUS DODS in the
+_British Weekly_.
+
+"By his two volumes on Isaiah, and that preceding the present one of the
+Prophets, Professor Smith gave abundant evidence both of his Hebrew
+scholarship and his capacity as an expositor of Scripture, ... and he
+has now put us under fresh obligations by publishing this volume, which
+in no respect falls behind its predecessors."--_Scotsman._
+
+"The volume which completes the great enterprise is one of the
+best."--_Methodist Times._
+
+"The volume altogether, in its accurate scholarship, its vivid
+descriptions, its bold and candid treatment of difficulties, and its
+fulness of reference to the labours of other critics of every school,
+forms not only one of the most brilliant of the series, but one of the
+foremost of British contributions to the literature of its special
+subject."--_Christian World._
+
+     LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON.
+
+
+
+
+THE SECOND VOLUME OF THE EXPOSITOR'S GREEK TESTAMENT.
+
+EDITED BY THE REV. W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.
+
+Editor of the _Expositor_, _Expositor's Bible_, _etc._
+
+
+_CONTAINING_
+
+THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES.
+
+By the Rev. Professor R. J. KNOWLING, D.D., Vice-Principal of King's
+College, London.
+
+
+THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS.
+
+By the Rev. Professor JAMES DENNEY, D.D.
+
+
+THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS.
+
+By the Rev. Professor G. G. FINDLAY, B.A., D.D.
+
+
+THE THIRD VOLUME, CONTAINING
+
+THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS.
+
+By the Very Rev. Dean BERNARD, D.D.
+
+
+THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS.
+
+By the Rev. FREDERIC RENDALL, M.A.
+
+
+THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS.
+
+By the Rev. Principal SALMOND, D.D.
+
+
+THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS.
+
+By the Rev. H. A. A. KENNEDY, D.Sc.
+
+
+THE EPISTLE TO THE COLOSSIANS.
+
+By the Rev. Professor A. S. PEAKE, M.A.
+
+_The price of each volume is 28s. Volumes I. and II. may still be had at
+subscription price, viz. 30s._
+
+_Those who have subscribed for Volumes I. and II. may have Volume III.
+on payment of 15s._
+
+LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON.
+
+
+THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE EXPOSITOR'S GREEK TESTAMENT.
+
+EDITED BY THE REV. W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.
+
+Editor of the _Expositor_, _Expositor's Bible_, _etc_.
+
+The First Volume, of 880 pages, handsomely bound in buckram cloth,
+consists of the Gospels of ST. MATTHEW, ST. MARK, and ST. LUKE by the
+Rev. Professor A. B. BRUCE, D.D., and the Gospel of ST. JOHN by the Rev.
+Professor MARCUS DODS, D.D.
+
+_The Price of each volume is 28s; but for those who PAY IN ADVANCE the
+price for two volumes is 30s._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+FROM PRESS NOTICES OF VOLUME I.
+
+"Dr. Bruce's commentary on the Synoptics is a notable piece of work. It
+is cheering and refreshing to find these books, with which our inner
+life is so closely bound up, treated frankly and honestly, as well as
+adequately for English readers, and withal in so believing and reverent
+a spirit that the treatment need not repel the most orthodox.... All is
+set forth with great frankness and admirable common sense, and often in
+racy language, not without an occasional Scottish flavour."--_Athenaeum._
+
+"The first thing that strikes one when he takes up the volume on the
+Gospels is the uncommon handsomeness of the book. It is a joy to handle
+it and look into its pages. It is the very book to lure a student into
+reading. The form is so superb, the paper so choice and so light, the
+margins so delightfully broad, the type so clear and so tasteful....
+The two scholars to whom this volume has been committed are the very
+men for the work. Each is a master of his subject, and each has gone
+into his task _con amore_.... A work worthy of the most cordial
+appreciation."--_Critical Review._
+
+     LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON.
+
+
+
+
+WORKS BY THE REV. A. M. FAIRBAIRN, M.A., D.D., LL.D.,
+
+PRINCIPAL OF MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD.
+
+_Crown 8vo, cloth, 7s. 6d._
+
+
+CATHOLICISM--ROMAN AND ANGLICAN.
+
+"Dr. Fairbairn's able and striking volume.... The treatment is
+throughout so thoughtful and free from narrow polemical bias."--_Times._
+
+"The book is certainly one every theologian must welcome--high-minded in
+tone, broad in its outlook, penetrating in its vision, and full of
+luminous _apercus_ on the history of thought and of events."--_Literature._
+
+
+_Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d._
+
+RELIGION IN HISTORY AND IN MODERN LIFE.
+
+Together with an Essay on the Church and the Working Classes.
+
+"In its new dress, 'Religion in History' is a timely and weighty
+contribution to a subject with which theologians but too seldom venture
+to grapple."--_Scotsman._
+
+"It is one of the best pieces of work which even Principal Fairbairn has
+ever done."--_Aberdeen Free Press._
+
+
+_8vo, cloth, 12s._
+
+THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN MODERN THEOLOGY.
+
+"His work is, without doubt, one of the most valuable and comprehensive
+contributions to theology that has been made during this
+generation."--_The Spectator._
+
+"A more vivid summary of church history has never been given. With its
+swift characterisation of schools and politics, with its subtle tracings
+of the development of various tendencies through the influence of their
+invironment, of reaction, and of polemic; with its contrasts of
+different systems, philosophies, and races; with its portraits of men;
+with its sense of progress and revolt--this part of Dr. Fairbairn's book
+is no mere annal, but drama, vivid and full of motion, representative of
+the volume and sweep of Christianity through the centuries."--_The
+Speaker._
+
+     LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON.
+
+
+WORKS BY SIR W. M. RAMSAY, D.C.L., LL.D.,
+
+PROFESSOR OF HUMANITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN, AND HON. FELLOW OF
+EXETER AND LINCOLN COLLEGES, OXFORD.
+
+
+8_vo, cloth, with Map, 10s. 6d._
+
+ST. PAUL THE TRAVELLER AND THE ROMAN CITIZEN.
+
+"Professor Ramsay brings not only his great experience as a traveller
+and archaeologist, but the resources of an ingenious mind, and a lively
+style. The book is, like everything Professor Ramsay does,
+extraordinarily alive. It shows everywhere personal learning, personal
+impression; it has the sharp touch of the traveller and the
+eye-witness."--_Times._
+
+
+_With Maps and Illustrations, 8vo, cloth, 12s._
+
+THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE BEFORE A.D. 170.
+
+"The whole volume is full of freshness and originality.... I lay down
+his book with warm and sincere admiration. He has succeeded in investing
+a number of critical discussions with extraordinary vividness and
+reality."--PROFESSOR W. SANDAY, in _The Expositor_.
+
+
+_Crown_ 8_vo_, _cloth_, 5_s_.
+
+WAS CHRIST BORN AT BETHLEHEM?
+
+A Study in the Credibility of St. Luke.
+
+"The work is characterised by great earnestness as well as ability,
+while the learning which it displays is such as may be expected from one
+who has long made the topics discussed matter of special study, for the
+pursuit of which he has also had special opportunities."--_Scotsman._
+
+"There is much interesting matter on allied topics in this learned and
+informing work, which will sustain Professor Ramsay's reputation as an
+accomplished and courageous scholar."--_Christian World._
+
+     LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Book of Isaiah, Volume I (of 2), by
+George Adam Smith
+
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