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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029305781 
 
THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE, 
 
 Edited by Rev. W. R. Nicoll, Editor London Expositor. 
 
 This series consists of Expository Lectures on ALL THE BOOKS 
 OF THE BIBLE by the foremost Preachers and Theologians of the 
 day. While regard is had up to the latest results of Scholarship, the 
 volumes v/ill be essentially popular, and adapted to general readers quite 
 as much as lo the clergy. Six volumes published a year, in large crovi^n 
 8vo volumes of about 450 pages each, strongly bound. Price per vol. $1.50. 
 
 Six Volumes for 1889. 
 
 THE PASTOBAIi EPISTLES. By Rev. Alexander Plummer, 
 
 D. D. 
 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. Vol. i (chapters 1-39). By Rev. George 
 
 Adam Smith. 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS. By Rev. Prof. G. G. 
 
 FiNDLAY. 
 
 THE EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN. By Rt. Rev. W. Alexander, 
 
 D. D. 
 THE BOOK OF REVELATION. By Rev. Prof. William Mil- 
 
 LIGAN. 
 
 THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS. Ry Rev. 
 Marcus Dods, D. D. 
 
 Six Volumes Published in 1888. 
 
 COLOSSIANS AND PHILEMON. By Rev. Alex. Maclaren, D.D. 
 
 ST. MARK. By Rev. G. A. Chadwick, D. D. 
 
 GENESIS. By Rev. Marcus Dods, D. D. 
 
 I. AND II. SAMUEL. By Rev. Prof. W. G. Blaikie, D. D. 
 
 2 vols. 
 EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. By Rev. Principal T. C. 
 
 Edwards, D. D. 
 
 A complete descriptive circular {sent on application) of this series 
 with criticarnotices of the first six volumes published, and names of the 
 Expositors engaged on the other Books of the Bible, viz. : Rev. Prof B 
 B. WARFIELD, of Princeton Theological Seminary ; Rev. Dr. T. 
 MUNRO GIBSON (formerly of Chicago) ; Rev. Prof. T. K. CIIEYNE- 
 Rev. Prof .J. M. FULLER, 'Ki.\\a\-ai Speakers' Commentary ; Kt Rev. Dr. 
 A. BARRY; Rev. C. G. MOULE, of Cambridge; Rev. Principal RAINY 
 D. D. ; Rev. ALEX. MACLAREN, D. D., etc., etc. 
 
 Copies sent by mail, post-paid, on receipt of price . 
 
 A /^ A •OTl/TOTTJ/MWri A. OrtIO* W« A T» t 
 
THE 
 
 BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 BV THE REV. 
 
 GEORGE ADAM SjVIITH, M.A. 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES. 
 VOL. I.— ISAIAH I.— XXXIX. 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 
 A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON, 
 
 714 BROADWAY, 
 
 -4d 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 TAGS 
 
 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 . • « , • • I9 
 
 Isaiah ii. — iv. 740 — 735 B.C. 
 
 III. THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD . o , , , 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 . 9I 
 With a Map. 
 
 VI. KING AND MESSIAH; PEOPLE AND CHURCH . , I03 
 
 Isaiah vii. — ix. i — 8. 735 — 732 b.c. 
 
 VII. THE MESSIAH ,.131 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 PROPHECIES FROM THE ACCESSION OF HEZEKIAH 
 TO THE DEATH OF S ARGON, 
 
 727 705 B.C. 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 VIII. god's commonplace . . . . . .151 
 
 Isaiah xxviii. About 725 e.g. 
 
 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. . . . I96 
 
 Isaiah xx, (711 b.c.) ; xxi. 1 — 10 (710 B.C.); xxxviii.; yy^ix. 
 
 BOOK III. 
 
 ORATIONS ON INTRIGUES WITH EGYPT, 
 
 AND ORACLES ON FOREIGN NATIONS, 
 
 705 — 7°2 B.c 
 
 XIL ARIEL, ARIEL . . . o « • « . 209 
 
 Isaiah xxix. About 703 B.C. 
 
 Xm. 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. i — 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. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 BOOK IV. 
 JERUSALEM AND SENNACHERIB, 701 b.c. 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 XIX. AT THE LOWEST EBB 306 
 
 Isaiah i. ; xxii. Early in 701 B.C. 
 
 XX. THE TURN OF THE TIDE : MORAL EFFECTS OF FOR- 
 GIVENESS , . 320 
 
 Isaiah xxii. ; xxxiii. Later in 701 B.C. 
 
 XXI. OUR GOD A CONSUMING FIRE . . . , , 33I 
 
 Isaiah xxxiii. 
 
 XXII. THE RABSHAKEH ; OR, LAST TRIALS OF FAITH . 343 
 
 Isaiah xxxvi. 701 B.C. 
 
 XXIH. 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 ... 37S 
 
 Isaiah xxxviii. ; xxxix. Date Uncertain. 
 
 XXVI. HAD ISAIAH A GOSPEL FOR THE INDIVIDUAL? . 389 
 
 BOOK V. 
 
 PROPHECIES NOT RELA TING TO ISAIAH'S 
 TIME. 
 
 XXVII. BABYLON AND LUCIFER ... , « 405 
 
 Isaiah xii. 12— xiv. 23. Date Unknown, 
 
 XXVIII. THE EFFECT OF SIN ON OUR MATERIAL SUR- 
 ROUNDINGS • 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 mes- 
 sage, 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 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 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 chrono- 
 logical 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, nar- 
 rative 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. — Ixvi. 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 cir- 
 cumstances 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 was published near the end of the prophet's life I 
 treat of first, because, from its position as well as its 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 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 hfe : 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 pro- 
 phecies from the accession of Hezekiah in 727 to the 
 death of Sargon in 705 — a long period, but few pro- 
 phecies, 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 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Palestine consequent on Sargon's death and pre- 
 liminary 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 contro- 
 versies 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 In- 
 spiration ; 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 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 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 con- 
 science 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. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 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 ex- 
 ceeded 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 im- 
 provements and would have greatly increased our 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 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 repUes 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 
 quaUty 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 ot 
 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. i). Ahaz visits Damascus. 
 
 727. Salmanassar IV. succeeds Tiglath-pileser II. Hezekiah suc- 
 ceeds 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. Sub- 
 mission of Hezekiah. Jerusalem spared. Return of 
 Assyrians with the Rabshakeh to Jerusalem, while Sen- 
 nacherib'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. 
 
 ERRATA. 
 
 P. 57, third line of title : read ur 727 1 
 „ 85, line 15 : for it read iheni, 
 
BOOK I. 
 
 PREFACE AND 
 PROPHECIES TO THE DEATH OF AHAZ, 
 
 727 B.C. 
 
 VOX.. I 
 
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. 
 
 ''T~^HE first chapter of the Book of Isaiah owes its 
 X position not to its date, but to its character. 
 It was pubHshed late in the prophet's hfe. 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 71 1, 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 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 is 
 found, 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* 
 
 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 delixers 
 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 — siijs of the iipper 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 
 
 * See p 343 
 
i.] THE ARGUMENT OF THE LORD. 
 
 to a close, saith the Lord — by God's offer of pardon 
 to a people thoroughly convicted (ver. i8). On 
 which follow the Conditions of the Future : happiness 
 is sternly made dependent on repentance and right- 
 eousness (vv. 19, 20). And a supplementary oracle 
 is given (vv. 24 — 31), announcing a time of afQiction, 
 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.* 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 
 
 * 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 chapte« —a 
 fair instance of the very great difficulty we have in determining tue 
 dates of the various prophecies of Isaiah. 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 con- 
 science 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). 
 
 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 con- 
 science 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 con- 
 
i.] THE ARGUMENT OF THE LORD. -] 
 
 sider. It is the terrible necessity which comes back 
 upon men, however engrossed or drugged they may be, 
 to pass their hves 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." * 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 conpulsion to think 
 which men call conscience. The stupidest of genera- 
 tions, 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. 
 
 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 conven- 
 tions, but the grand moral fundamentals of the universe, 
 
 * Les Miserabhs : " a Tempest in a Brain." 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 distrac- 
 tions 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 
 
i.j THE ARGUMENT OF THE LORD. 9 
 
 theologies and many preachers have attempted the 
 conviction of the human conscience by the technicaUties 
 of a system of law, or by appealing to this or that historical 
 covenant, or by the obligations of an intricate and burden- 
 some morality. This is not Isaiah's way. His gene- 
 ration 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 : / 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 hving God is Isaiah's one ex- 
 planation of conscience, it is God in two aspects, 
 the moral effects of which are opposite, yet comple- 
 mentary. 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 pohtics and social behaviour, 
 
10 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 pohcies, 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 con- 
 science 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 in- 
 tensely 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 meaning- 
 
i.] THE ARGUMENT OF THE LORD. il 
 
 less 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 para- 
 lyzed by calamity, as if it had no meaning or term 
 (xxvili. 29): This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, 
 which is wonderful in counsel and excellent in effectual 
 ivorhing. 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. i) ; or that he 
 was to strip frock and sandals, and walk without them 
 for three years (xx). Where common men feel con- 
 science 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. 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 
 detaihng 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 
 
i.] THE ARGUMENT OF THE LORD. 13 
 
 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 : / 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, 
 
14 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 
 
i.] THE ARGUMENT OF THE LORD. t; 
 
 court of the Lord's controversy without taking advan- 
 tage 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 pro- 
 phecies 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 sen- 
 sualism 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 
 
1 6 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 reason- 
 able 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 elucida- 
 tion 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 hved 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 Shake- 
 speare 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 : — I. Scripture 
 
i.] THE ARGUMENT OF THE LORD. 17 
 
 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 convul- 
 sions 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 repre- 
 sentation 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. i, ff). Nature is full of associa- 
 tions ; 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. 
 VOL. I 3 
 
l8 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 repre- 
 sent 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 examiner 
 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. 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 are twin appendices to the long summary in ii. — iv. : 
 chap. V. a pubhc vindication and enforcement of the 
 resuhs of that summary, chap. vi. a private vindica- 
 tion 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 cr 
 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 en- 
 joyed the greatest prosperity. Uz/iah strengthened 
 the borders, extended the supremacy and vastly in- 
 creased 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 Httle principality, Uzziah 
 fortified his borders and his capital, undertook large 
 works of husbandry and irrigation, organized a power- 
 ful standing army, and supplied it with a siege artillery 
 capable of shnging arrows and stones. His name 
 spread jar 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 rebelhon among his 
 tributaries, and caused their riches to flow faster still 
 into Jerusalem. But while Jotham bequeathed to his 
 
ii.— iv.] THE THREE JERUSALEMS. 21 
 
 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 v/ere his education, the still grander 
 hopes they prompted the passion of his virgin fancy. 
 He must have absoi bed 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 
 
THE BOOK Of ISAIAH. 
 
 Uzziah died (740), the young Jew saw the Lord sitting 
 upon a throne, high and lifted up. Startled into pro- 
 phetic 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 Amos, 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 
 ail 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 
 
ii.— iv.] THE THREE JERUSALEMS. 23 
 
 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 eartliqualce; war filUng Iier 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 the breeze across the corn- 
 fields 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 
 
24 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 penetrative- 
 ness, 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 
 
ii.— iv.] THE THREE JERUSALEMS. ze, 
 
 penetrated them, and constantly, without squint or blur, 
 to see rfght from wrong in their eternal difference. And 
 the third element is the intuition of God's will, the per- 
 ception of what line of action He will take. This last, of 
 course, forms the distinct prerogative of Hebrew pro- 
 phecy, 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. i) 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. i — S)- 
 All men who have shown our race how great things 
 are possible have had their inspiration in dreaming 01 
 the impossible. Reformers, who at death were content 
 to have lived for the moving forward but one inch 01 
 some of their fellow-men, began by believing them- 
 selves 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 
 
25 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 Jeru- 
 salem 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 facob, 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 reaUzed, 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 
 
ii.— iv.] THE THREE JERUSALEMS. 27 
 
 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. i). 
 
 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 
 
28 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 pre- 
 diction 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 passirnate 
 patriotism it must have felt Hke treason, to the bhnd 
 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 cf 
 her prophets, including Isaiah him.self, 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 paitly 
 emboldened to so novel a threat, by his knowledge cf 
 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 
 
11.— iv.] THE THREE JERUSALEMS. 29 
 
 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-country- 
 men 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 
 atid through, and they tell us that all your armour and 
 
30 
 
 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 oj 
 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 fdth of the daughters of Zion, and 
 shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst 
 
ii.— iv.] THE THREE JERUSALEMS. 31 
 
 thereof by the spirit oj 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 01 
 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 acleaner stye J 
 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 enthu- 
 siasm 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 
 
32 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 undeceived. Society cannot be regenerated all at 
 once. There is an expression which Isaiah empha- 
 sizes 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 aU 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 pur- 
 poses, 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 passaoe 
 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 
 
ii.— iv.] THE THREE JERUSALEMS. 33 
 
 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 enthu- 
 siasm, 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 dis- 
 credited by the evolution of fact. Uzziah does not 
 reign for ever ; the sceptre falls to Ahaz : pro- 
 gress 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 
 ! lis ideal for men ; and though He works so slowly, 
 lowards His end that our restless eyes are too im- 
 
 voi-. I, 3 
 
34 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 patient 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 uncon- 
 nected 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 arro- 
 gance in it ? Is it not just the imperfectly idealized 
 reflection of an age of material prosperity such a's 
 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 in. 
 
 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 ot' 
 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 pre- 
 decessors, 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 teach- 
 ing. We saw that the obscurities and inconsistencies of 
 chapters ii. — iv. are due to the fact that that prophecy 
 
36 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 represents several stages of experience through which 
 Isaiah passed before he gained his final convictions. 
 But his countrymen, it appears, have nowr had time to 
 turn on these convictions and call them in question : it 
 is necessary for Isaiah to vindicate them. The differ- 
 ence, 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 ihe 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 opposi- 
 tion 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 start- 
 ting words. You only have I known of all the families 
 of the earth : therefore I will visit upon you all your 
 
v.;ix. 8-x. 4-] THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD. 37 
 
 iniquities. Now Isaiah delivered this doctrine at a time 
 when it brought him the hostiUty 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 hterary 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 
 rehgious 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 
 lias 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 
 
38 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 strugghng 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 judge- 
 ment ; 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. i — 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 
 
v.; ix. 8— X. 4.] THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD. 39 
 
 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, / 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 
 
40 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 difficiilt 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. 
 
v.; ix. 8— X. 4.] THE VINEYARD OE THE LORD. 41 
 
 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*), 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 per- 
 sistence 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-ques- 
 tion. " 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 " ques- 
 tions." They are huge sins, and require not merely 
 the statesman's wit, but all the penitence and zeal of 
 
 * 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. 
 
42 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 which a nation's conscience is capable. It is in this 
 that the force of Isaiah's treatment Hes. 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 tlietn that join house to house, thai 
 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 dis- 
 inheritances. Isaiah does not touch on its methods, 
 but exposes its effects on the country — depopulation 
 and barrenness, — and emphasizes its religious signifi- 
 cance. 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). 
 
 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 
 
v.; ix. 8— X. 4.] THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD. 43 
 
 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 indi- 
 viduals 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 
 
44 THE BOOK OP ISAIAH. 
 
 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, how- 
 
v.; ix. 8— X. 4.] THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD. 45 
 
 ever, 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 drink- 
 ing, 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 lan- 
 guage, 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 
 
46 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 tim.e they themselves were dragging 
 that judgement near, as with cart-ropes, by their per- 
 sistent 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 minis- 
 try. 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 rourage" of drink, they interfered in 
 
V. : ix. 8— X. 4.] THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD. i\,-i 
 
 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 wiclzed 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 2Sth 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 con- 
 cerned 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, 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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. Earth- 
 quakes, 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 to- 
 gether ; and we follow the violent floods, remember- 
 ing 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 anget 
 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 an 
 
V. ; ix. 8— X. 4-] THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD. 49 
 
 sobered by the awe of some of the most profound 
 moral phenomena of Hfe. 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 recog- 
 nize 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 im- 
 possible 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. I — 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 every- 
 thing 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 
 
 VOL. I. 4 
 
50 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 con- 
 demning 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. i — 4). 
 
 I. 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 
 
v.; ix. 8— X. 4.] THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD. 51 
 
 the wh^le 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 : * The bricks are fallen, but we 
 will build with hewn stones; t the sycamores are cut down, 
 but we voill 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 bejore and the Philistines behind; and they 
 devour Israel with open mouth. What that had been for 
 appalling suddenness this was for lingering and harass- 
 ing — 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. 
 
 3. War and Defeat (ix. 13 — 17). — The next con- 
 sequent 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 
 
 * Read past tenses, as in the margin of Revised Version, for all the 
 future tens::s, or better, the historical present, down to the end of the 
 chapter. 
 
 t 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. 
 
52 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 of war is that it falls net uprn its authors, that its 
 victims are not statesmen, but the beauty of a country's 
 j'outh, 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 aw ful 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 meta- 
 phors 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 
 
v.; ix. 8-x. 4] THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD. 53 
 
 brother. We have had modern instances of all this ; 
 these scenes form a true description of some days of the 
 French RevoJut'on, 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." * 
 
 5. The Threat of Captivity (x. i — 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 
 
 • King Lear, act iv., so. 2. 
 
54 THE Book of isaiam. 
 
 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 un- 
 drooping arm with a ftag 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 aiTows are sharpened, 
 and all their boivs bent; their horses' hoofs are like the flint, 
 and their ivhfcls like the ivhirlivind ; a roar have they like 
 the lion's, and they roar like young lions ; yea, they grovul 
 and grasp the prey, and carry it off, and there is none to 
 deliver. And they growl upon him that day like the growl- 
 ing 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 jnys ; 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 
 
V. ; ix. 8— X. 4.] THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD. 55 
 
 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 XL, 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 sycamores 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 
 
56 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 afQiction that a character like his could be brought 
 to repentance, ... to humihty, which is the parent of 
 true love, and that love in him could be purified. Hence 
 the melancholy close of that tragedy." * 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. 
 
 * 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 connec- 
 tion 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, 
 
58 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 ot 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. 
 
 I. The Vision (vv. i — 4). 
 Several years, then, Isaiah looks back and says, In 
 
vi.j ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION. 59 
 
 tlic 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 dispen- 
 sation of liberty he would have been applauded as a 
 
6o THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 brave Protestant, vindicating the right of every wor- 
 shipper of God to approach Him without the inter- 
 vention 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 enfran- 
 chisement 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 
 
vi.] ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION. fti 
 
 careless optimism of a prosperous and proud people, 
 who entered upon their reHgious services without awe, 
 trampling the courts of the Lord, and used them Iil<e 
 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 — S), the estab- 
 lishment of Israel at the head of the nations, to be 
 immediately attained at his own word (v. 5) and with- 
 out 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 in- 
 sistence 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 com- 
 
62 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 promises of her politics, and especially of Grd'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. I — 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 vin- 
 dicated 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 holi- 
 ness 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 
 
vi.] ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION. 63 
 
 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."* 
 
 Around (not above, as in the English version) were 
 ranged the hovering courtiers, of what shape and appear- 
 ance 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 un- 
 
 ♦ Browning's "Christmas Eve." 
 
64 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 usually 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 Testa- 
 ment, 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 Ihe 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 ivhom, 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? (l Sam. vi. 20). 
 He is the Utter Contrast of man : / ant God, and not 
 man, tlie Holy One in the midst of thee (Hosea xi. 9). 
 He is the Exalted and Sublime : Thus saith the high 
 and lofty One that iuhabiteth eternity, whose name is 
 Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place (Ivii. 15). 
 Generally speaking, then, holiness is equivalent to 
 separateness, sublimity — in fact, just to that loftiness 
 or exaltation which Isaiah has already so oftei 
 reiterated as the principal attribute of God. In thei 
 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 
 
VI. ] ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION. 65 
 
 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 genei ation. It is no scholastic 
 definition of Deity which the seraphim are giving. 
 Not for a moment is it to be supposed, that to that 
 VOL. I. S 
 
66 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 angehc revelation of the 
 holiness of God was intended for a generation, some ol 
 w hom were idol-worshippers, confounding the Godhead 
 with the work of their own hands or with natura' 
 objects, and none of whom were free from a confusiori 
 in principle of the Divine with the human and worldly 
 for which now sheer mental slovenhness, now a dul. 
 moral sense, and now positive pride was to blame 
 To worshippers who trampled the courts of the 
 Lord with the careless feet, and locked up the tempk 
 with the unabashed faces, of routine, the cry o 
 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 im- 
 pressible youth of the race first impelled man, bowing 
 low beneath the awful heavens, to name God by th( 
 name of the Holy. To men, again, careful of thf 
 legal forms of worship, but lawless and careless ii 
 their lives, the song of the seraphs revealed not th( 
 hard truth, against which they had already rubbec 
 conscience trite, that God's law was inexorable, but thi 
 fiery fact that His whole nature burned with wr£tl 
 towards sin. To men, once more, proud of thei 
 prestige and material prosperity, and presuming in thei 
 pride to take their own v.ay with God, and to employ 
 like Uzziah the exercises of religion for their owi 
 honour, this vision presented the real sovereignty o 
 God : the Lord Himself seated on a throne there — ^jus 
 where they felt only a theatre for the display of thei 
 pride, 01 machinery for the attainment of thei 
 private ends. Thus did the three-fold cry of th 
 
vi.] ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION. 67 
 
 angels meet the three-fold sinfulness of that genera- 
 tion 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-aggrandise- 
 ment. 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 worship- 
 pers 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 Hin^self As with worship, 
 so with morality. Holiness is secured not by cere- 
 monial, but by a reverence for a holy Being. We 
 shall nib our consciences trite against moral maxima 
 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 ami 
 religious law, of Church and sacrament, the reply i ; 
 
68 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 
 eaith but it is the glcry of God. The fulness of the 
 whole earth is His glory, is the proper gramrr.atical 
 rendering of the song. For Jehovah of hosts is net 
 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 
 hoiincss. 
 
vi.] ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION. 69 
 
 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 en- 
 counter 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. 
 
70 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 The form of the prophet's confession, mickanness oj 
 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 foi m 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 Jar 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 lis'.ening 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 
 
vi.] ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION. 71 
 
 hps^ 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 house- 
 hold 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 wa.'; 
 
72 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 
 
vi.] ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION. 73 
 
 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 
 Christianit}', 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 pre- 
 sented 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 religi- 
 ously 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 fore- 
 shadow 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 sym- 
 pathy 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 dis- 
 regard 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 betvveen two 
 beings in that position, intercourse by the far off and 
 
74 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 responsibihty 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 responsi- 
 bility, the regal power of initiative, the sustained 
 
vi.] ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION. 75 
 
 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 inspira- 
 tions. Put 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 hence- 
 forth no moment of grudging or disobedience. Esaias is 
 very hold, 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 nov/ 
 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 en- 
 couraged : — different dangers, with different sorts cf 
 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. 
 
76 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 
 Jie 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 
 
v!,] ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION. 77 
 
 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 
 hps 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 resigr.ation 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 en 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 cf 
 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 dis- 
 grace ful. God will have no drift-wood for His sacrifices, 
 no drilt-men for His ministers. Self-consecration is the 
 
78 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 dis- 
 couragement, 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 awful- 
 ness 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 
 
vi.] ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION. 79 
 
 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,* 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 per- 
 verse 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 spcaketh folly. 
 
 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 
 
 * Even Calvin, though in order to prove that Isaiah had bee.i 
 prophesying for some time before his inaugural vision, says that 
 his commission implies some years' actual experience of the obstinacy 
 of the people. 
 
8o THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 a forcible anticipation of the propliet's actual expe- 
 rience. There is more here than one man's experience. 
 Over and over again are these words quoted in the 
 Nevsr Testament, till we learn to find them true alwaj-s 
 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 expe- 
 rience. 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 com- 
 mission, 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 T^arablts, 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 hps 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. U 
 
ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION, 8i 
 
 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 com- 
 mand. 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 con- 
 viction of a long and patient ministry, is the great 
 trJth 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 turn- 
 ing 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 
 iiistory might imagine its Author to have been a Cynic 
 or Comedian, portraying for His own amusement the 
 ioss 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 xcpectancy. Let him 
 look closer, however, and he will perceive, not a comedy, 
 but a tragedy, for neither chance nor cruel sport is here 
 
 VOL. I. 6 
 
82 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 at work, but free will and the laws of habit, with retri- 
 bution 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 contradic- 
 tion, 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 misunder- • 
 stand 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 Misjudgements 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 hfe. 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 hfe is as often judgement as it 
 is salvation. When we perceive these things, we 
 understand that hfe 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 degene- 
 racy," that " the evil heart can assimilate good to itself 
 :-nd 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 w hirh is aflbrded by the preaching of the 
 Gospel of God. God's Word, as Christ reminds us 
 
vi.] ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION. 83 
 
 does not fall on virgin soil ; it falls on soil already hold- 
 ing 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 Jail 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 deter- 
 mined 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 appren- 
 ticeship. He has seen the Lord high and lifteJ 
 up. His lips have been touched by the coal from oil 
 the altar. His first feeling is that nothing can with- 
 stand that power, nothing gainsay this inspiration. Is 
 he a Nehemiah, and the hand of the Lord has been 
 
84 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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, con- 
 secrated 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 reconstruc- 
 tion, 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 hke 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 experi- 
 ence 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 hig 
 
vi.l ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION. 85 
 
 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 representa- 
 tion 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 v/as the 
 faUing 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 
 
S6 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 solemnly bound themselves to pursue unshaken the path we had 
 known at the outset to be choked with sorrows ; the distrust I de- 
 tected 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 Hve 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 ex- 
 istence. 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 con- 
 sume 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," 
 
VI.] ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION. 87 
 
 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 cumula- 
 tive 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 conse- 
 quence is neither the promise of success nor the as- 
 surance 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. 
 
88 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 The meanirg 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 attain- 
 
vi.l ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION. 89 
 
 ment of the margin of a long period of judgement and 
 struggle, and then he passes from our sight, and no 
 man linoweth his sepulchre unto this day. As abruptly 
 as this vision closes with the announcement of the 
 remnant, so abruptly does Isaiah disappear on the 
 I'ulfilment of the announcement — some forty years sub- 
 faequent 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 afQiction that pass ; and these shall not 
 be averted by the fact that He is the national God, 
 and they His worshippers. Of this afQiction 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 — 
 
go THE BOOK OF tSAIAH. 
 
 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. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE WORLD IN ISAIAH'S pAY AND ISRAEL'S GOD. 
 
 735-730 B.C. 
 
 UP to this point we have been acquainted with 
 Isaiah as a prophet of general principles, preach- 
 ing 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 
 
92 THE BOOR OF tSAlAtt. 
 
 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 con- 
 version 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 
 
ISAIAH'S WORLD AND ISRAEL'S GOD. 93 
 
 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 Assj^ia 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 ccnteits between these two 
 
94 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 during the whole of Isaiah's day, which kept Egypt 
 from being an effective force in the pohtics 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 
 Phcenicians. 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 offen- 
 sive only in trade, were by their wealth and maritime 
 advantages capable of offering at once a stronger attrac- 
 tion 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 Judahand 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 
 
rSAIAH'S WORLD AND ISRAEL'S GOD. 95 
 
 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 move- 
 ments 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 turn- 
 
96 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 ing 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 rest- 
 lessness 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 fooHsh 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 perio- 
 dical 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.,* 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. 
 
 * The Pul of 2 Ki. gs xv. 19 and the Tiglath-pileser of 2 Kings xvi. 
 are the same, 
 
ISAIAH'S WORLD AND ISRAEL'S GOD. 97 
 
 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 execu- 
 tion by Rome : its relentlessness, impetus and myste- 
 rious 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 tramphng 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. 
 
 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 
 VOL. I. 7 
 
98 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 rest- 
 lessness 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 gcds, 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. 
 
ISAIAH'S WORLD AND ISRAEL'S GOD. 99 
 
 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 reh- 
 gious 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, there- 
 fore will I sacrifice to them, that they may help me 
 (2 Chron. xxviii. 23). Rehgion 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 poUtical 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 rehgion. But beneath the cloak of religious 
 scrupulousness and false reverence,* there was in Ahaz 
 the same selfish fear for the safety of his crown and his 
 
 * Isa. vii. 12. 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 dynasty, as those who best knew the English monarch 
 tell us, was the real cause of his ceaseless intrigue and 
 stupid obstinacy. 
 
 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 con- 
 flicts of nations, aided by deities as doubtfully matched 
 as themselves, they perceived all things working to- 
 gether 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 terri- 
 tory; 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 per- 
 formed 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 
 
tSAIAH'S WORLD AND ISRAEL'S GOD. loi 
 
 the prophets bold]y tojk 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 ol 
 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 move- 
 ments 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 every- 
 where 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 righ- 
 teousness ; and of one part of that Providence he 
 had already received conviction — A remnant shall 
 
<0i THE BOOK OP ISAIAH. 
 
 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. i — 8. 
 
 735 — 732 B.C. 
 
 THIS section of the book of Isaiah (vii. — ix. 7) con- 
 sists of a number of separate" prophecies uttered 
 during a period of at least three years : 735 — 732 B.C. 
 ^y 735 Ahaz had ascended the throne ; Tiglath- 
 pileser had been occupied in the far east for two years. 
 Takiilg 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 
 
104 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 Jeru- 
 salem. 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. I — 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 imder- 
 stand these seemingly contradictory utterances, which 
 it thoroughly explains. Let us now begin at the begin- 
 ning 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. 
 
vii.— IX., 8.] RING, AND MESSIAH. loj 
 
 I. The King (chap. vii.). 
 And it came to pass in the days of Ahaz, the son of 
 Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king ofjudah, 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 intro- 
 duction. The narrative proper begins in verse 2, with 
 the efi'ect 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 Jeru- 
 salem. 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 ex- 
 pected for the prophecies he had already uttered. Taking 
 with him, as a summary of them, his boy with the name 
 Shear-Jashub — A-rctnnant-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 
 3'our eyes open and your heart still ; fear not, neither be 
 faint-hearted , for the fierce an^cr 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 il 
 come to pass. Of whom are you afraid ? Look those 
 
io6 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 foes of yours in the face. The head of Syria is Damascus, 
 and Damascus'' head is Resin : is he worth fearing ? 
 The head of Ephraim is Samaria, and Samaria's head ts 
 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. 1/ ye will not believe, surely ye 
 shall not be established* 
 
 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 com- 
 bination 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 ex- 
 pected to put its mind in the attitude of those of Isaiah's 
 
 * 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. 
 
vii.— Ix., 8.] KING AND MESSIAH. I07 
 
 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 pro- 
 duced ; 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 mag- 
 nified ; the intelligence and judgement are dwarfed. 
 
lo8 THE BOOK Of ISAIAH. 
 
 Just the same after its kind is life to tlie man or tribe, 
 wlio believe, tliat tlie 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 pro- 
 vidences, 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 hfe has a central authority, that God is 
 supreme, and they will fling their prejudices and super- 
 stitions to the winds, now no more needed than the anti- 
 quated 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 Sj'ria 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 mmd 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 
 
5.] KING AND MESSIAH. 109 
 
 heads, and in his consternation at their appearance pre- 
 pares 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,* apart alto- 
 gether 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.f 
 
 * Page 96. 
 
 f Physics and Politics (International Scientific Series), pp. 75 
 ff. One of the finest modern illustrations of the connection be- 
 tween 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 vsrhich 
 he gives about meeting it stand well in contrast to the haste and rash 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 eifect 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 at- 
 tributed 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 sovereigntj' and man's duty of obedience 
 as any prophet that ever prt ached 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 
 neither without character, or (which is the same thing) 
 of whose character we are ignorant. Fate is God 
 minus character, and fatalism is the characterless con- 
 dition to which belief in such a God reduces man. 
 History presents it to our view amid the most 
 
 proposals of philanthropists at home, and are evidently due to his 
 conviction that the slave Iradc, like everything else in the v^orld, is in 
 the hands of God, and so may be calmly studied and wisely check- 
 mated. Gordon's ktters make ^ery clear how much of his shrew dn^ ss 
 in dealing with men was due to the same source. It is instructive 
 to observe throughout, how his comp'ete resignation to the will of God 
 and his perfect obedience deli\ ered him from prejudices and partialities, 
 from distiactions and desires, that make sober judgement impossible 
 in other men. 
 
i.] KING AND MESSIAH. 
 
 diverse surroundings. The Greek mind, so free 
 and sunny, was bewildered and benumbed by belief 
 in an inscrutable Nemesis. In the East how fre- 
 quently 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 inor- 
 dinately 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 extreiie 
 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 bhndly inter- 
 preted 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 histor}', 
 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 experiment- 
 ally 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 BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 loving- 
 kindness 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 be- 
 fore 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 
 
vii.— ix., 8.] KING AND MESSIAH. 113 
 
 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 Ahas, 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;* or as the rending of the altar 
 which the man of God brought to pass to convict the 
 sullen Jeroboam;! or ^s the regress of the shadow 
 on the sun-dial, which Isaiah himself gave in assurance 
 of recovery to the sick Hezekiah. % Such signs are 
 offered only to weak or prejudiced persons. The 
 
 * I Sam. xii. 17. \ I Kings xiii. 3. J Chap, xxxviii. 
 
 vol,. I, 3 
 
114 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 — __ 
 
 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 under- 
 stand ; 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 shuf- 
 flers, playing fast and loose with God as well as men. 
 Hear ye now, O house of David. Is it a small thing for 
 yon 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. 
 
 In order to follow intelligently the rest of Isaiah's 
 addsess, 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 determina- 
 tion 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 
 
vii.-ix., 8.1 KING AND MESSIAH. 115 
 
 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 assurr.nce of the swift over- 
 throw 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 j'ears 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 pre- 
 sented httle difficulty but for the name of the Child — 
 Immanuel. Erase that, and the passage rends forcibly 
 enough. Before a crrtain Child, whose birth is vaguely 
 
Ii6 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 but so] mnly intimated in the near future, shall have 
 come t' years of discretion, the results of the choice 
 of Ahsz shall be manifest. Judah shall be devastated, 
 and he-r 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 hteratures, too, we have felt 
 the pathos of realizing the future results of crime and 
 the kngth to which disaster lingers, by their effect 
 upon \he lives of another generation : — 
 
 "The child that is unborn shall rue 
 The hunting of that day 1 " 
 
 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 
 Qow of time and the return of its revenges, about 
 whom we are told neither how he shall behave him- 
 self 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 
 
vii.— ix., 8.] King AND MESSIAH. 117 
 
 at this juncture, we cannot forget that it fell from 
 Isaiah's lips on hearts which cherishLcJ 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 priva- 
 tion, 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 desola- 
 tion 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. 
 
u8 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 But even if it were to prove too fine a point, to identify 
 Immanuel witli 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 representa- 
 tive 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. 
 
vii,-ix., 8.] PEOPLE AND CHURCH. 119 
 
 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 contem- 
 porary. In chap. viii. ver. I, 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. I — 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. What- 
 ever 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 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 po; ular 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 tho.se 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 mean- 
 time 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 
 tpoil 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 sin face of this eighth chapter. 
 
v/u.— IX., 8.] PEOPLE AND CHURCH. t2i 
 
 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 shoidd not walk in the ivay 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 achieve- 
 ments, 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 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 Sliiloah, that go softly, and rejoice in Rezin 
 and Remaliah's son. 
 
 It was natural, that when the people of Judah con- 
 trasted 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 
 rharpar, 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 
 
vli.— ix., 8.] PEOPLE AND CHURCH. 123 
 
 water. It was called The Shiloah—coiiduit 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 
 
tM THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 horses, fenced cities and broad streams, and tlieir 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 over- 
 flow 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 situa- 
 tion, He remains the one certain alliance, the one real 
 fear. Say ye not, A conspiracy, concerning all whereof 
 
vii.— ix., 8.] PEOPLE AND CHURCH. 125 
 
 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." * 
 
 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 
 
 Ewald. 
 
126 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 appear- 
 ance 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." * 
 
 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^ among my disciples. 
 And I will wait on Jehoiah, who hideth His face from 
 
 * Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, p. 275. 
 
 f English Version, "law," but not the law of Moses. Isaiah refers 
 to the word that has come by himself. 
 
!.] PEOPLE AND CHURCH. 127 
 
 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. 
 
 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 aftfer 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 incontrol- 
 lable 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, carry- 
 ing 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 
 
128 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 Zebidon and the land of Naphtali, by the 
 sea beyond fordan, 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 downivards 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 
 
vii.— ix. 8.] PEOPLE AND CHURCH. 129 
 
 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. l) ; 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 shifted. For a mutilated, we see a multi- 
 plied, 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 
 shoidder, 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 tunmlt, 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 re- 
 deemed and established in peace under a Godhke King, 
 
 VOL. I. 9 
 
130 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 Gcd'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 pro- 
 phesying at which the Messiah becomes the 
 most conspicuous figure on his horizon. Let us talie 
 advantage of it, to gather into one statement all that the 
 prophet told his generation concerning that exalted and 
 mysterious Person.* 
 
 When Isaiah began to prophesy, there was current 
 among the people of Judahthe expectation of a glorious 
 King. How far the expectation was defined it is im- 
 possible 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 
 
 * The Messiah, or Anoitited, is used in the Old Testament of many 
 agents of God: highpiiest (Lev. iv. 3); ministers of the Word 
 (Ps. cv. 15); Cyrus (Isa. xlv. i); but mostly of God's king, actual 
 (l Sam. xxiv. 7), or expected (Dan. ix. 25). So it became in Jewisii 
 theology the technical term for the coming King and the Caj ia:u 
 of salvation. 
 
132 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 indis- 
 pensable 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 in- 
 
THE MESSIAH. 133 
 
 violable ; 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 estab- 
 lishment 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 iden- 
 tified 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 Imn.anuel 
 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 
 
134 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 Isp.iah 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 neglect- 
 ing that in which really lay the significance of the sign 
 that he offered. 
 
 Ahaz by his wilfulness has made a Substitute neces- 
 sary. 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 pro- 
 phecy, when Israel went into exile ; but the conception 
 
THE MESSIAH. 135 
 
 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 Suf- 
 ferer 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 devasta- 
 tion. 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 person- 
 ality 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 dis- 
 placement 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 
 
136 THE BOOK. OF ISAIAH. 
 
 actually achieved, they hail all at once as the Hero o 
 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-Coun- 
 sellor, 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 ab- 
 solutely Divine Person in view. One of the most 
 distinguished and deliberate of Old Testament scholars 
 declares that " the Deliverer whom Isaiah promises is 
 nothing less than a God in the metaphysical sense of 
 the word. The names as a whole correspond to the 
 predicate ^eo?."* 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 con- 
 ception 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 
 
 * Schultz, A. T. Theologie, pp. 726, 727. 
 
THE MESSIAH. 13? 
 
 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 SL-cond 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 Nebuchad- 
 nezzar. We should hesitate, therefore, to understand 
 by these names "a God in the metaphysical sense 
 of the word." 
 
 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 nulhfied 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,* 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 
 
 Prophets of Israel, p. 306. 
 
138 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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. 
 
 There is a third argument in the same direction, the 
 force of which we appreciate only when we come to 
 discover ho"W 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. i — 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.* The second passage, xxxii. iff., 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 bcaitty, 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 
 
 * 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. 
 
THE MESSIAH. 139 
 
 Jehovah, and Judah and Israel were threatened with 
 c.implete devastation. There is a repetition when 
 ilezekiah has come to the throne. But in the re- 
 maining seventeen years, except perliaps 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 soli- 
 tary 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, extra- 
 ordinarily 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 
 
140 THE BOOR OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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. Be- 
 sides, 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. 
 
 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. Im- 
 manuel'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 
 
THE MESSIAH. 141 
 
 many years after his death. So that had Immanuel 
 been born in the next twenty-five years after the an- 
 nouncement 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 ex- 
 hausted 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 pro- 
 phecy discredited by contemporary history, argues a 
 profound belief in its moral meaning and eternal 
 significance; and it is this boldness, in face of disap- 
 pointment 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 pcej. 
 
142 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 seal 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 w ith 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 
 
THE MESSIAH. 143 
 
 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." * 
 
 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 
 
 * Stanton : The Jewish and Christian Messiah. 
 
144 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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, be- 
 side 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 repre- 
 sentations 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 Testa- 
 ment 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 
 S ARGON, 727—705 B.C. 
 
 VOL. 1, 
 
Isaiah : — 
 
 xxviii. 725 B.C. 
 
 X. 5 — 34. 721 B.C. 
 
 xi., xii. About 720 B.C. ? 
 
 XX. 711 B.C. 
 
 xxi. I — 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 — 1 1): Is not Samaria 
 as Damascus ? . . . Shall I not, as I have done unto 
 Samaria and h^r 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*), 
 then an event is here described as past and over which 
 
 • Delitzsch, who fancies that the fall of Samaria is a completed 
 affair only in the vision of the prophet, not in reality. 
 
148 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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, Peliah, was slain by a conspiracy of his 
 own subjects; and Hoshea, the ringleader, who suc- 
 ceeded, wiUingly 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 popula- 
 tion 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 ^- 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. 
 
 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 
 
 2 Kings xvii. 5. 
 
Book it., 727—705 b.c. 149 
 
 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. S — 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. i — 1 1, 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 hiU, 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. $ — 34, makes us the bolder to take 
 
ISO THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 Jeru- 
 salem 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 cir- 
 cumstance, 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. I — 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 
 
152 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 certainly 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 cove- 
 nants with them. Scorners of religion and righteous- 
 ness, 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 
 lo 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. i — 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 
 
Jtxviii.j GOD'S COMMONPLACE. 153 
 
 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 — unsta'ned 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 tempta- 
 tion 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 
 
154 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 possi- 
 bilities 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 
 
xxviii.] GOD'S COMMONPLACE. I55 
 
 like themselves, who had survived and overcome by 
 the Spirit of God. Here we perceive the ethical possi- 
 bilities, 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 1 
 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 f Are we school-children, that he treats us with 
 his endless platitudes and repetitions — precept upon 
 
156 THE BOOK OF tSAIAtt. 
 
 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 mocli 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."* 
 
 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 bar- 
 barians 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 rne 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 
 simphcity 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 I By 
 
 * Ewald. The original runs thus : " Ki tsav la-tsav, tsav la-tsav, 
 qav la-qav, qav la-qav; z'eir sham z'eir sham." 
 
xxviii.] GOD'S COMMONPLACE. 157 
 
 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 know- 
 ledge, 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 grass- 
 
IS8 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 hopper 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 brougLt 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 (w. 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. Diplo- 
 macy 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 
 
xxviii.] GOD'S COMMONPLACE. 159 
 
 wi'ih 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 pf-ecious 
 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 " 1 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 
 
i6o THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 Judah. It flashes an aspect of hopeless uneasiness 
 over the whole political situation. However the}) 
 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, nc 
 political arrangement, nothing short of faith, of abso- 
 lute reliance on that bare foundation-stone laid ir 
 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 deet 
 — strange is this deed of His, and to bring to pass Hit 
 act — strange is His act. 
 
 Now, therefore, play no more the scorner, lest your bandi 
 be made tight, for a consumption, and that determined 
 have I heard ^^om the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, upon thi 
 whole earth. This finishes the matter. Possibility o: 
 alliance there is for sane men nowhere in this work 
 of Western Asia, so evidently near convulsion. Onl} 
 the foundation-stone in Zion shall be left. Cling to that 
 
 When the pedantic members of the General Assembl} 
 of the Kirk of Scotland, in the year 1650, were clinging 
 with all the grip of their hard logic, but with very littk 
 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 officei 
 King Charles II., Cromwell, then encamped at Mussel- 
 burgh, sent them that letter in which the famous 
 sentence occurs : " I beseech you in the bowels o: 
 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 tc 
 some a word of Judgement ; that they may fall back- 
 ward, and be broken, and be snared, and be taken 
 There may be a spiritual fulness, which the world may 
 
xxviii.] GOD'S COMMOhPLACE. l6l 
 
 call drunkenness ; as in the second Chapter of the Acts. 
 There may be, as well, a carnal confidence upon mis- 
 understood 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 confede- 
 rated 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." * 
 
 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 endeavour- 
 ing 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 him- 
 self in it. Both, too, were covenants with Death and Hell ; 
 for if the attempt of the Scots to secure Charles II. 
 
 * Cromwell's Letlers and Speeches^ Letter qxxxvi. 
 VOL. I. U 
 
l62 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 un- 
 righteousness 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 1 " Cromwell's was Isaiah's 
 own, "The Lord of hosts 1 " However logical, religious 
 and sincere theirs might be, it was at the best a 
 scheme of men too narrow for events, and fatallj 
 compromised by its association with Charles II. Bui 
 Cromwell's battle-cry required only a moderately sin- 
 cere faith from those who adopted it, to ensure then 
 victory. For to them it meant just what it had meant 
 to Isaiah, loyalty to a Divine providence, supreme ir 
 righteousness, the willingness to be guided by events 
 interpreting them by no tr^ditipn or scheme, but onlv 
 
xxviii.] GOD'S COMMONPLACE. 163 
 
 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 th*e 
 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 bar- 
 gains 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 possi- 
 
i64 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 bilities 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 rehgious 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, 
 
xvilLJ GOD'S COMMONPLACE. 165 
 
 IV. The Almighty the All-methodical (vv. 23 — 29). 
 The patience of faith, which Isaiah has so nobly 
 )reached, he now proceeds to vindicate by reason. But 
 he vindication implies that his audience are already in 
 mother mood. From confidence in their clever diplo- 
 nacy, heedless of the fact that God has His own purposes 
 :oncerning them, they have swung round to despair 
 )efore His judgements. Their despair, however, is 
 lue to the same fault as their careless confidence — 
 he forgetfulness that God works by counsel and 
 Tiethod. Even a calamity, so universal and extreme as 
 ;hat, of whose certainty the prophet has now convinced 
 ;hem, has its measure and its term. To persuade the 
 :rushed and superstitious Jews of this, Isaiah employs 
 1 parable. " You know,'' he says, "the husbandman. 
 Have you ever seen him keep on harrowing and break- 
 ng the clods of his land for mere sport, and without 
 'arther intention ? Does not the harrowing time lead 
 ;o the sowing time ? Or again, when he threshes his 
 :rops, does he thresh for ever ? Is threshing the end 
 le has in view ? Look, how he varies the rigour of his 
 nstrument by the kind of plant he threshes. For 
 delicate plants, like fitches and cummin, he does not 
 jse the threshing sledge with the sharp teeth, or the 
 umbering roller, but the fitches are beaten out with a 
 "itajf and the cummin with a rod. And in the case of 
 bread corn, which needs his roller and horses, he does 
 lot use these upon it till it is all crushed to dust." 
 The application of this parable is very evident. If 
 he husbandman be so methodical and careful, shall 
 ;he 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, 
 Dught we not to trust God to have the same inten- 
 
l66 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 tions 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 shap- 
 ing life, to imagine that He has any. In days of suffer- 
 ing, 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 \\z.v& furtherance or salvation for their end. 
 
 We have said this is one of the finest prophecies of 
 Isaiah. His pohtical 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 instru- 
 
;xviii.] GOD'S COMMONPLACE. 167 
 
 ment to punish the unrighteousness of Judah. If the 
 memy 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 
 he same message he has delivered to the men of 
 ferusalem. 
 
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 
 Salnianassar IV. was marching on Samaria, had 
 explained to the poUticians of Jerusalem how entirely 
 the Assyrian host was in the hand of Jehovah for the 
 punishment of Samaria and the punishment and purifi- 
 cation 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 
 
;— 34-] ATHEISM OF FORCE AND FEAR. l6g 
 
 Dmise ! What can possibly prevent Sargon from 
 iking Zion as Samaria, and carrying her people away 
 the track of the northern tribes to captivity ? 
 There was a very fallacious human reason, and there 
 IS a very sound Divine one. 
 
 The fallacious human reason was the alliance which 
 laz had made with Assyria. In what state that alliance 
 w was, does not clearly appear, but the most 
 timist of the Assyrian party at Jerusalem could not, 
 :er all that had happened, be feeling quite comfortable 
 out it. The Assyrian was as unscrupulous as them- 
 Ives. There was too much impetus in the rush of 
 3 northern floods to respect a tiny province like 
 dah, treaty or no treaty. Besides, Sargon had as 
 od reason to suspect Jerusalem of intriguing with 
 ;ypt, as he had against , Samaria or the Philistine 
 ies ; and the Assyrian kings had already shown their 
 waning of the covenant with Ahaz by stripping Judah 
 enormous tribute. 
 
 So Isaiah discounts in this prophecy Judah's treaty 
 th Assyria. He speaks as if nothing was hkely to pre- 
 nt the Assyrian's immediate march upon Jerusalem, 
 s puts into Sargon's mouth the intention of this, and 
 ikes him boast of the ease with which it can be 
 complished (vv. 7 — 1 1). In the end of the prophecy 
 even describes the probable itinerary of the invader 
 )m the borders of Judah to his arrival on the heights, 
 er against the Holy Cit}' (vv. 27 last clause to 32).* 
 Cometh up from the North the Destroyer. 
 
 '■ It will be noticed that in the above version a different reading 
 adopted from the meaningless clause at the end of verse 27 in 
 English version, out of which a proper heading for the subsequent 
 lerary has been obtained by Robertson Smith {Journal of Philo- 
 y, 1884, p. 62). 
 
I70 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 He is come upon Ai ; marcheth through Migron; a 
 Miclimash musters his baggage. 
 
 They have passed through the Pass; "Let Geba 6i 
 our bivouac." 
 
 Terror-struck is Ramah ; Gtbeah of Saul hath fled. 
 
 Make shrill thy voice, O daughter of Gallim I Listen 
 Laishah I Answer her, Anathoth ! 
 
 In mad flight is Madmenah; the dwellers in Gebin 
 gather their stuff to flee. 
 
 This very day he halteth at Nob ; he waveth his ham 
 at the Mount of the Daughter of Zion, the Hill <j 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 This is not actual fact ; but it is vision of what mai 
 take place to-day or to-morrow. For there is nothing 
 — not even that miserable treaty — to prevent such ; 
 violation of Jewish territory, within which, it ought t( 
 be kept in mind, lie all the places named by the prophet 
 
 But the invasion of Judah and the arrival of th( 
 Assyrian on the heights over against Jerusalem doei 
 not mean that the Holy City and the shrine of Jehoval 
 of hosts are to be destroyed ; does not mean that al 
 the prophecies of Isaiah about the security of this rally 
 irg-place for the remnant of God's people are to bi 
 annulled, and Israel annihilated. For just at thi 
 moment of the Assyrian's triumph, when he brandishe: 
 his hand over Jerusalem, as if he would harry it like ; 
 bird's nest, Isaiah beholds him struck down, and crasl 
 like the fall of a whole Lebanon of cedars (w. 33, 34). 
 
 Behold the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, lopping the topmoi 
 boughs loith a sudden crash, 
 
 And the high ones of stature hewn down, and the loft 
 are brought low ! 
 
 Yea, He moweth down the thickets of the forest wit 
 iron, and Lebanon by a Mighty One falleth. 
 
S— 34-] ATHEISM OF FORCE AND FEAR. 171 
 
 All this is poetry. We are not to suppose that the 
 rophet actually expected the Assyrian to take the route, 
 hich he has laid down for him with so much detail. As a 
 atter of fact, Sargon did not advance across the Jewish 
 on tier, but turned away by the coast-land of Philistia 
 I meet his enemy of Egypt, whom he defeated at 
 afia, and then went home to Nineveh, leaving Judah 
 one. And, although some twenty years later the 
 ssyrian did appear before Jerusalem, as threatening 
 i Isaiah describes, and was cut down in as sudden and 
 iraculous a manner, yet it was not by the itinerary 
 iaiah here marked for him that he came, but in quite 
 lother direction : from the south-west. What Isaiah 
 lerely insists upon is that there is nothing in that 
 retched treaty of Ahaz — that fallacious human reason 
 -to keep Sargon from overrunning Judah to the very 
 alls of Jerusalem, but that, even though he does so, 
 lere is a most sure Divine reason for the Holy City 
 ;maining inviolate. 
 
 The Assyrian expected to take Jerusalem. But he 
 ; not his own master. Though he knows it not, and 
 is only instinct is that of destruction (ver. 7), he 
 ; the rod in God's hand. And when God shall have 
 sed him for the needed punishment of Judah, then will 
 lod visit upon him his arrogance and brutality. This 
 lan, who says he will exploit the whole earth as 
 e harries a bird's nest (ver. 14), who believes 
 1 nothing but himself, saying. By the strength of my 
 md I have done it, and by my wisdom, for I am prudent, 
 
 but the instrument of God, and all his boasting is 
 lat of the axe against him that heweth therewith and of 
 \e saw against him that wieldeth it. As if, says the 
 rophet, with a scorn still fresh for those who make 
 laterial force the ultimate power in the universe — As 
 
17^ THE BOOK OF" ISAIaU. 
 
 if a rod should shake them that lift it up, or as if a stajj 
 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 al 
 another time cower in abject fear before it ! IVIust 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 ! Ir 
 the midst of denunciation the prophet's stern voice breaks 
 into the promise of this later hope (vv. 24 — 27a) ; and af 
 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 circum- 
 scribed. Each nation, as Isaiah tells us, had walked in 
 
5—34-] ATHEISM OF FORCE AND FEAR. 173 
 
 e name of its god, and limited his power and pre- 
 sijn to its own life and territory. We do not 
 ame the peoples for this. Their conception of God 
 IS narrow, because their life was narrow, and the\- 
 nfined the power of their deity to their own border- 
 icause, in fact, their thoughts seldom strayed beyond. 
 Lit now the barriers, that had so long enclosed 
 ankind in narrow circles, were being broken down, 
 en's thoughts travelled through the breaches, and 
 arned that outside their fatherland there lay the 
 orld. Their lives thereupon widened immensely, but 
 eir theologies stood still. They felt the great forces 
 hich shook the world, but their gods remained the 
 me petty, provincial deities. Then came this great 
 ssyrian power, hurtling through the nations, laughing 
 
 their gods as idols, boasting that it was by his own 
 rength he overcame them, and to simple eyes making 
 )od his boast as he harried the whole earth like a 
 rd's nest. No wonder that men's hearts were 
 •awn from the unseen spirituahties to this very visible 
 ■utality 1 No wonder all real faith in the gods seemed 
 
 be dying out, and that men made it the business of 
 eir lives to seek peace with this world-force, that was 
 irrying everything, including the gods themselves, 
 ;fore it ! Mankind was in danger of practical 
 heism : of placing, as Isaiah tells us, the ultimate 
 ith which belongs to a righteous God in this brute 
 rce : of substituting embassies for prayers, tribute 
 r sacrifice, and the tricks and compromises of 
 plomacy for the endeavour to live a holy and 
 ghteous life. Behold, what questions were at issue : 
 lestions that have come up again and again in the 
 story of human thought, and that are tugging at us 
 -day harder than ever 1 — whether the visible, sensible 
 
174 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 forces of the universe, that break so rudely in upon oui 
 priinitive theologies, are what we men have to make 
 our peace with, or whether there is behind them a 
 Beinj^^, 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 Hke 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 pre- 
 cisely 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 itsell 
 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 ever^ 
 material force the world exhibits is nothing but sub- 
 ordinate to Him. Brute force cannot be anything bu! 
 an instrument, -an axe, a saw, something essentiall}! 
 piechanical and in need of an arm to lift it. Postu- 
 
S-34-] ATHEISM OF FORCE AND FEAR. »7S 
 
 ite a supreme and righteous Ruler of the world, and 
 ou not only have all its movements explained, but 
 lay rest assured, that it shall only be permitted to 
 xecute justice and purify men. The world cannot 
 revent their salvation, if God have willed this." 
 
 Isaiah's problem was thus the fundamental one 
 etween faith and atheism ; but we must notice that 
 
 did not arise theoretically, nor did he meet it by 
 n abstract proposition. This fundamental religious 
 uestion — whether men are to trust in the visible 
 )rces of the world or in the invisible God — came up as 
 
 bit of practical politics. It was not to Isaiah a 
 hilosophical or theological question. It was an affair 
 1 the foreign policy of Judah. 
 
 Except to a few thinkers, the question between 
 laterialism and faith never does present itself as one 
 f abstract argument. To the mass of men it is always 
 question of practical life. Statesmen meet it in their 
 lolicies, private persons in the conduct of their fortunes, 
 'ew of us trouble our heads about an intellectual 
 theism, but the temptations to practical atheism abound 
 nto us all day by day. Materialism never presents 
 :self as a mere ism; it always takes some concrete 
 3rm. Our Assyria may be the world in Christ's sense, 
 hat flood of successful, heartless, unscrupulous, scornful 
 orces which burst on our innocence, with their chal- 
 ;nge to make terms and pay tribute, or go down 
 traightway in the struggle for existence. Beside their 
 rank and forceful demands, how commonplace and 
 rrelevant do the simple precepts of rehgion often seem ; 
 nd how the great brazen laugh of the world seems to 
 ileach the beauty out of purity and honour ! According 
 D our temper, we either cower before its insolence, which 
 ng that character and energy pf struggle and religious 
 
176 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 peace are impossible against it ; and that is the Atheisn 
 of Fear, with which Isaiah charged tlie men of Jerusalem 
 when they were paral3'sed before Assyria. Or we seel 
 to ensure ourselves against disaster by alliance wit! 
 the world. We make ourselves one with it, its subject: 
 and imitators. We absorb the world's temper, get tc 
 believe in nothing but success, regard men only as thej 
 can be useful to us, and think so exclusively of our- 
 selves as to lose the faculty of imagining about us anj 
 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 dis- 
 play 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 w hich 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 
 
S— 34-] ATHEISM OF FORCE AND FEAR. 177 
 
 oyhood, pretty much as the primitive beliefs of Israel 
 Afindled before the arrogant face of Assyria. The 
 Iternative confronts them either to retain, with a 
 arrowed and fearful heart, their old conceptions of 
 iod, or to find their enthusiasm in studying, and their 
 uty in relating themselves to, the forces of nature 
 lone. If this be the only alternative, there can be no 
 oubt but that most men will take the latter course. 
 Ve ought as little to wonder at men of to-day abandon- 
 ig certain theologies and forms of religion for a down- 
 Lght naturalism — for the study of powers that appeal 
 
 much to the curiosity and reverence of man — as we 
 .'onder at the poor Jews of the eighth century before 
 Ihrist forsaking their provincial conceptions of God 
 s a tribal Deity for homage to this great Assyrian, who 
 andled the nations and their gods as his playthings. 
 )Ut is such the only alternative ? Is there no higher 
 nd sovereign conception of God, in which even these 
 atural forces may find their explanation and term ? 
 saiah found such a conception for his problem, and his 
 roblem was very similar to ours. Beneath his idea of 
 iod, exalted and spiritual, even the imperial Assyrian, 
 
 1 all his arrogance, fell subordinate and serviceable, 
 'he prophet's faith never wavered, and in the end was 
 indicated by history. Shall we not at least attempt 
 is method of solution ? We could not do better than 
 y taking his factors. Isaiah got a God more powerful 
 lan Assyria, by simply exalting the old God of his 
 ation in righteousness. This Hebrew was saved from 
 le terrible conclusion, that the selfish, cruel force which 
 1 his day carried all before it was the highest power 
 1 life, simply by believing righteousness to be more 
 xalted still. But have twenty-five centuries made any 
 iiange upon this power, by which Isaiah interpreted 
 
 VOL. I. 12 
 
178 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 history and overcame the world? Is righteousness less 
 sovereign now than then, or was conscience more im- 
 perative when it spoke in Hebrew than when it speaks 
 in Enghsh ? 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 any- 
 thing in earth or heaven is character, and the adora- 
 tion of a holy and loving will makes more for " victory 
 and law" than the discipKne 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 Judsean 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 re- 
 gained. And, thirdly (vv. 9 — 16), there is the 
 
I So THE BOOK OF ISA I AH. 
 
 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.* 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. 
 
 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 
 
 • The authenticity of this hymn has been called in question. 
 
xi., xii.] THE SPIRIT OF GOD. i8i 
 
 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 lime. 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 th?ir oppression. The Prince-of- 
 the-f~our-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 imsdom 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. Bat it is only as Judge and Ruler that Isaiah 
 
i82 THE BOOK OF 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 govern- 
 ment 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.* 
 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 landf 
 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. 
 
 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 grov/ 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 
 
 * 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). 
 
 f Perhaps for land— carets — we ought, with Lagarde, to read tyrant — 
 carits. 
 
xi-, xii] THE SPIRIT OF CUD. 183 
 
 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 applica- 
 tion 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 under- 
 standing 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 atmo- 
 sphere into which we are born. But from this Christ 
 alone of men was.free. He was His own atmosphere, 
 
1^4 THE BOOK Of ISAIAH. 
 
 drawing breath in the fear of the Lord. Of Him alone 
 is it lecorded, that, though Hving 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 aimosphere shall be 
 
XI., xii.] THE SPJliir OF GOD. 1S5 
 
 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 Jioliness in tlie 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 pas- 
 sage on the Third Person of the Trinity. If the texts 
 in the book of Revelation (chaps, i. 4 ; iii. I ; iv. 5 ; 
 V. 6) upon the Seven Spirits of God were not them- 
 selves 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 
 
i86 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 righteous- 
 ness to the king's son, while there stand on either side 
 of him the figures of Wirdom and Prophecy.* Henry 
 III.'s order of knighthood, " Du Saint Esprit," was re- 
 stricted 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 ex- 
 tended and motionless." Which may be as much legend 
 as we have the heart to make it, but nevertheless 
 
 * Didron, Christian Iconography, Engl, trans., i., 432. 
 
xi., xii.J THE SPIRIT OF GOD. 187 
 
 remains a sure proof of the association, by discerning 
 medisevals who could read their Scriptures, of the 
 Holy Spirit with the decisiveness and rigorous justice 
 of Isaiah's " mirror for magistrates."* 
 
 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 fre- 
 quency with which the Dove is seen descending upon 
 the heads of miraculously learned persons, or presiding 
 at discussions, or hovering over groups of figures repre- 
 senting the sciences.! 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 
 
 * Didron, Christian Iconography, Engl, trans., i., 426. 
 f See Didron for numerous interesting instances of this. 
 
THE BOOtC OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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. 
 
 III. The Redemption of Nature (xi. 6-9). 
 
 But Isaiah will not be satisfied with the establish- 
 ment of a stiong government in the land and the 
 redemption of human society from chaos. He prophe- 
 sies 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 
 
xi., xii.] THE SPIRIT OF GOD. 189 
 
 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 bene- 
 fits of this will be shared by the brute and unintelligent 
 creation. And, perhaps, there is no finSr contrast in the 
 Scriptures than here, where beside so majestic a de- 
 scription of the intellectual faculties of humanity Isaiah 
 places so charming a picture of the docility and sport- 
 fulness 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 in- 
 security and terror, that they cause in regions where 
 they abound. A modern seer of the times of re- 
 generation 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 civilisa- 
 tion, 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 rhetoriz- 
 ing or allegorizing — above which literary forms it 
 
190 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 war- 
 fare 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 regenera- 
 tion, and prophesies of adders and lizards as the play- 
 things 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 pro- 
 phet 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 
 
XI., xii.] THE SPIRIT OF GOD. 191 
 
 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 sym- 
 pathy 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 tS man's 
 sin, and shall onl}' 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, 
 
,92 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 manatees and hawks. " Quadrupeds and birds which 
 have seldom been, disturbed by man dread him no more 
 than do our EngHsh birds the cows or horses grazing 
 in the fields."* 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 hnes of Burns to the field-mouse gather 
 up the cause of all this in a fashion very similar to the 
 Bible's. 
 
 " 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 feliow-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 ph3'sician, 
 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 expeclation 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 
 
 * Darwin, Variaiion of Animals and Plants under Domestication. 
 pp. 20, 21. 
 
xi.. xii.l THE SPIRIT OF GOD. 193 
 
 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.* " 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." 
 
 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 re- 
 sponsibility 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.t 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 
 
 • Galton, quoted by Darwin. 
 t Isa. Ixiii. 13, 14; Hos. xi. 4. 
 VOL. I. 13 
 
194 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 who abuse the lower animals sin very grievously against 
 God ; men who neglect them lose some of the religious 
 possibilities of Hfe. 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 
 
 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 hohness. 
 
 IV. The Return and Sovereignty of Israel 
 (xi. lO — 1 6). 
 
 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 exul- 
 tation, will be to swoop down upon their cousins Edom, 
 Moab and Ammon, and their neighbours the Philistines. 
 
xi., xii.] THE SPIRIT OF GOD. 195 
 
 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 cap- 
 tivity 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 representa- 
 tions, which the first half of the book of Isaiah contains, 
 of the return from exile. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 DRIFTING TO EGYPT. 
 Isaiah xx. ; xxi, i — lo; xxxviii. ; xxxix 
 (720—705 B.C.). 
 
 FROM 720, when chap. xi. may have been pub- 
 lished, 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. 
 I — 10, Oracle of the Wilderness of the Sea, which 
 announces the fall of Babylon. There has been con- 
 siderable debate about the authorship of this oracle 
 but Cheyne, mainly following Dr. Kleinert, gives 
 substantial reasons for leaving it with Isaiah. We post- 
 pone 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. i — 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. 
 
XX., xxi. 1— 10.] DRIFTING TO EGYPT. 197 
 
 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 every- 
 where 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. 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 71 1> "^'^^ local 
 and abortive ; the second, in 705, was universal, and 
 for a time entirely destroyed the Assyrian supremacy. 
 The centre of the Explosion of 7 1 1 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 laman, 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."* 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. 
 S — 34. Some day Assyriology may give us proof 
 of this supposition. We are without it just now. 
 
 * Records of the Past, vii., 40. 
 
XX., xxi. i-io.] DRIFTING TO EGYPT. 199 
 
 Sargon speaks no word of invading Judah, and the 
 only part of the book of Isaiah that unmistakeably 
 refers to this time is the picturesque narrative of 
 chap. XX. 
 
 In this we are told that in the year the Tartan, the 
 Assyiian commander-in-chief, came to Ashdod when 
 Sargon king of Assyria tent 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: — //; that time Jehovah had 
 spoken by the hand of Isaiali 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 Phihstia, Judah, 
 Edom and Moab, dwelling by the sea " *] shall say in 
 that day, Behold, such is our expectation, whither we had 
 
 • Cheyne. 
 
THE BOOIi OF ISAIAH. 
 
 fled for help to deliver ourselves from the king of 
 Assyria, and hoiv shall we escape — we ? 
 
 This parade of Isaiah for three years, unfrocked and 
 barefoot, is another instance of that habit on which we 
 remaiked in connection with chap. viii. I : 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 per- 
 sistent 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 dis- 
 appearance of Sargon to another part of his empire 
 where there was trouble, gave the Egyptians audacity 
 to continue their intrigues against him.* 
 
 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 
 
 W. R. Smitli, Prophets of Israel, p. 282. 
 
)tJt., xxi. 1— 10.] DRIFTING To EOYPt. 201 
 
 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 
 llezekiah was glad of them, and showed them the house oj 
 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 Hezckiah 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 fiom 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 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 cap- 
 tivity 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. i — lO. 
 
 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 expect- 
 ing 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 
 
XX., xxi. I— 10.] DRIFTING TO EGYPT. 203 
 
 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 pas- 
 sage 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 fehovah 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 oji 
 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 happi- 
 ness 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, 
 
204 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 the products of mountains and valleys 1 " 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 IN- 
 TRIGUES AND ORACLES ON 
 FOREIGN NATIONS, 705—702 B.C. 
 
Isaiah : — 
 
 xxix. About 703. 
 
 XXX. A little later. 
 
 xxxi. • „ „ 
 
 xxxii. I — 8. 
 
 xxxii. 9 — 20. Date uncertain. 
 
 xiv. 28 — xxi. 736 — 70a 
 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 Senna- 
 cherib's accession to the Assyrian throne, and 70 1» 
 when his army suddenly disappeared from before 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 They fall into three groups : — 
 
 1. Chaps, xxix. — -xxxii., deaUng 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 Senna- 
 cherib'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 neigh- 
 bourhood. 
 
 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 
 
2o8 THE BOOK OF ISALIH. 
 
 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 XIL 
 
 ARIEL, ARIEL 
 
 Isaiah xxix. (about 7°3 b.c.). 
 
 IN 70s 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 liad consolidated, broke into 
 rebellion, and down to the borders of Egypt cities and 
 tribes declared themselves again independent. Senna- 
 cherib 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 pro- 
 phecies in chaps, xxix. — xxxii. are forward to condemn 
 the alliance with Egypt and the irreligious politics of 
 which it was the fruit. 
 
 VOL, I, 14 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 Meso- 
 potamia 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 c bscure oracle, but its obscurity is 
 designed. Isaiah was deahng with a people, in whom 
 political security and religious formalism had stifled 
 both reason and conscience. He sought to rouse them 
 
:.] ARIEL, ARIEL. 
 
 by a startling message in' a mysterious form. He 
 addressed the city by an enigma : — 
 
 Ho! Art- El, Art- El ! City David beleaguered ! Add 
 a year to a year, let the feasts run their round, then will I 
 bring straitnesf, upon Ari-El, and there shall be moaning 
 and bemoaning,* and yet she shall be unto Me as an 
 Ari-El. 
 
 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. l, 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 
 
 * Cheyne. 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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. i) 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 tike 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 o/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 
 
xxix.] ARIEL, ARIEL. 213 
 
 definite prediction, and in its essentials was fulfilled. 
 In the end Jerusalem was invested by Sennacherib, anil 
 reduced to sore straits, when very suddenly — it would 
 appear from other records, in a single night — the 
 beleaguering force disappeared. This actually hap- 
 pened; 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, earth- 
 quake 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 con- 
 spicuous 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 
 
214 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 the distinction we have just made. To him poHtical 
 prudence was part of religion. The Lord of hosts is for 
 a spirit of judgement to Iiiiii 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 them- 
 selves 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. / 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 
 
ARIEL, ARIEL. 215 
 
 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 rehgious 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 unmis- 
 takeable inspiration, the influence upon the prophet's 
 
2i6 THE BOOK OF JSAIAlt. 
 
 knowledge of affairs of two powerful religious con- 
 victions, 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 tiieir 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 knoiveth 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 
 
XXIX.] ARIEL, ARIEL. ifj 
 
 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 GoJ's own hand is 
 in it. What the people had ceased to attribute to 
 Jehovah was ordinary intelligence ; they had virtually 
 iaid, 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 f 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; there- 
 fore 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 astonish- 
 ment's sake is the wonder to be done. For blessing and 
 morality shall it be : to cure the deaf and blind ; to give 
 
2i8 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 coun- 
 tenance blanch. So unworthy hitherto have this stupid 
 people been of so great ancestors ! Bitt 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 inter- 
 ruptions and convulsions, but social mercies and moral 
 providences. The quickening of conscience, the dis- 
 persion 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 
 
xxix.] ARIEL, ARIEL. 219 
 
 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 seeih us f 
 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 
 
420 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 ail 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 acknow- 
 ledgment of God's hand in history ; the admiration and 
 eifort 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 Ufe ! 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 1 read I " * 
 
 ■• Browning's Christmas Evt. 
 
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 warn- 
 ing 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 im- 
 possible 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 con- 
 duct is fear, whether uneasiness or panic, force may 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 denounc- 
 ing it. His condemnation is twofold. The negotia- 
 tions 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 re- 
 gained part of his power. Some years ensued of uncer- 
 tainty as to who was the real ruler of Egypt. 
 
xxx.J POLITICS AND FAITH. 223 
 
 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. i — 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 
 
224 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 and putting to it another which describes Egyptiar 
 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, thai 
 is her character ; for Egypt helpeth in vain and to nt 
 purpose. 
 
 Knowing how sometimes the fate of a Government is 
 affected by a happy speech or epigram, we can under- 
 stand the effect of this cry upon the politicians of Jeru- 
 salem. 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 imagi- 
 nation with the folly of an Egyptian alliance, walking 
 unfrocked and barefoot three years for a sign andaportent 
 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 j'ears ago from court to market-place on the 
 question of Ephraim and Damascus.* 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 depen- 
 
 Chap. viii. X (p. 119). 
 
xxN.] POLITICS AND FAITH. a25 
 
 dent 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 pohtics, you must first regenerate 
 the people ; and it is no use to inveigh against a sense- 
 less 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 Govern- 
 ment 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. 
 
 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 pre- 
 vaihng 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 
 ivill 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 
 
 VOL. I. 15 
 
IHE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 "Rahab"! It was a natural Nemesis, that a peop'e 
 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 him- 
 self 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 \\ hat God 
 thinks about their own condition (vv. 12 — 14), then to 
 
XXX.] POLITICS AND FAITH. 227 
 
 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 pas- 
 sages 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 perverscness 
 and crookedness, and lean thereon, therefore this iniquiiy 
 shall be to you as a breach ready to fall, bu/^n'i/g 
 out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at 
 an instant. This iniquiiy, of course, is the embass}- 
 to Egypt. But that, as we have seen, is only the 
 
228 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 v/ill 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 voe flee ; wherefore ye shall flee : and upon 
 the swijt will we ride; wherefore swift shall be Ihry thai 
 pursue you I One thousand at the rebuke of one — at the 
 rebuke of five shall ye Jlee : till ye be lejt as a bare pole 
 on (he top of a mountain, and as a standard on an hill. 
 
XXX.] POLITICS AND FAITH. 229 
 
 And therefore will the Lord wait that He may be gracious 
 unto you, and therefore ivill 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 fehovah 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 wisdcm. 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 ? 
 
230 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 — 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 pohcy 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 (xx;:i. 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 
 
XXX.] POLITICS AND FAITH. 231 
 
 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. 1 10). 
 
 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 shall 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 
 
234 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 con- 
 stantly translated " Law " in our version, but is, in the 
 Prophets at least, more nearly equivalent to " instruc- 
 tion," or to our modern term " revelation " (of. 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 loath- 
 some (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 mar- 
 vellous 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 cr blood that an exhausted and 
 penitent people thirst after. But as they have been 
 
XXX.] POLITICS AND FAITH. ^33 
 
 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 shall 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. A ltd the oxen 
 and the young asses that till the ground shall eat savoury 
 provender, wmttowed 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, 
 
234 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 only require a litlle analysis to open a most instructi\e 
 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 oj 
 Jehovah cometh from afar — burning His anger and awful 
 the uplifting smoke; fits 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 pur- 
 pose 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 
 
x>L.-L.] POLITICS AND FAITH. 235 
 
 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 con- 
 science 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 judge- 
 ment of the Lord, the tossing only of His careful sieve, 
 in the wild and cruel waves ! We may not be poets like 
 
236 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 
 5ible to spell it out articulately : The Lord, the Lord, 
 a God merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abun- 
 dant 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 Igypt 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 pur- 
 suit of the baffled Assyrian. The music of the verses 
 is crashing. And the Lord shall cause the peal* 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 
 
 • So Dr. B. Davis, quoted by Cheyne. 
 
XXX.] POLITICS AND FAITH. 237 
 
 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 inform- 
 ation 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."* 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. 
 
 We postpone remarks on Isaiah's sense of the fierce- 
 ness of the Divine righteousness till we reach his even 
 finer expression of it in chap, xxxiii. 
 
 * So Bredenkamp in his recent commentary on Isaiah, 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 THREE TRUTHS ABOUT GOD. 
 Isaiah xxxi. (about 702 B,a). 
 
 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 chmax, 
 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. i — 3). 
 
 We must suppose the negotiations with Egypt to 
 have taken for the moment a favourable turn, and the 
 
xxxi.] THREE TRUTHS ABOUT GOD. 239 
 
 Statesmen who advocated them to be congratulat;ng them- 
 selves 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 loise, and will bring evil, and 
 loill 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 
 
240 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 occa- 
 sions 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 
 onl/ 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 cere- 
 monial 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. Foot's, says the Psalmist, are 
 afflicied when they draw near unto the gates of death ; 
 then, only then, do they cry unto tne Lord in their trouble. 
 
xxxi.] THREE TRUTHS ABOUT GOD. 241 
 
 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 
 fills 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 poUticians 
 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 he required of thee. 
 The Jewish politicians pride themselves on their 
 wisdom ; Yet God also is wise, says Isaiah signifi- 
 
 VOL. J. 16 
 
242 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH 
 
 cartly. 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 Vifere 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 patch- 
 work 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 hclpcth shall stumlilc, 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 
 
xxxi.] THREE TRUTHS ABOUT GOD. 243 
 
 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 pro- 
 vidences. 
 
 For thus saith Jehovah unto me: Like as when the 
 lion growleth, and the young lion over his prey, if a mob of 
 shepherds he called forth against him, from their voice he 
 will not shrink in dismay, nor for their noise abase him- 
 self; 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 Hon with his 
 claws in the prey ! But horror plaj's the part of a good 
 emphasis ; while if we look into the figure, we shall feel 
 our horror change to appreciation. There is some- 
 thing majestic in that picture of the Hon 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 
 
244 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 with their treaties and mihtary 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 o 
 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 pai t 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 oi 
 
xxxi.] THREE TRUTHS ABOUT GOD. US 
 
 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, tharj on the weak benevo- 
 lences 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. S). 
 
 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 
 
246 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 that droop nervously towards the nest over her young. 
 A hawk is in the slcy, 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 vi^as 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 gene- 
 rosity, 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 httle 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 
 
xxxi.] THREE TRUTHS ABOUT GOD. 247 
 
 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 1 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 
 DISCRIMINA TE CHAR A CTER. 
 
 Isaiah xxxii. I — 8 (about 702 B.a ?). 
 
 THE Assyrians being thus disposed of, Isaiah turns 
 to a prospect, on which we have scarcely heard 
 him speak thcie 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 
 
Xxxii. 1—8.] A MAN. 24<j 
 
 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 pro- 
 phetic 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 pro- 
 phecy is not a vision of society glorified, but of society 
 established and reformed, with its foundation firmly 
 settled (ver. i), 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. I 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 
 
250 THE BOOK Of ISAIAH. 
 
 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. i), 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 con- 
 cerning 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 what- 
 soever features he might foresee in its perfect develop- 
 mnt, 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. I 
 laid down the foundation for social hfe, 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 ilie icnipcsl, as rivers of water 
 in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary 
 land. After just government (vtr. i) great characters 
 
xxxii. I— S.J A MAN. 251 
 
 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 indivi- 
 dual 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. 
 
 I. 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. 
 
254 THE BOOK OF Isaiah. 
 
 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 lee- 
 ward 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 driit 
 had again space to grow, the same thing happened ; and 
 the hero this time was Abraham. He laid his back to 
 
xxxii. 1—8.] A MAN. 253 
 
 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 confi- 
 dence 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 them- 
 selves 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 
 
25+ THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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. 
 
xxxii. 1—8.] A MAN. 255 
 
 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 indi- 
 vidual 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 after- 
 wards named; and the rest were so curbed that no 
 civilised society suffered them to pass from its con- 
 straint, 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, 
 
256 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 feel to the core. Of Jesus the believer can truly sa] 
 that life on this side of Him is very different from lif< 
 on that. Temptations keep far away from the heart tha 
 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 guilt} 
 fear. 
 
 3. But there is not only a philosophy of historj 
 and a gospel in this promise of a man. There is i 
 great duty and ideal for every one. If this prophecj 
 distinctly reaches forward to Jesus Christ as its onlj 
 perfect fulfilment, the vagueness of its expressior 
 permits of its application to all, and through Him its 
 fulfilment by all becomes a possibility. Now each 01 
 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 oui 
 neighbours the knowledge and infection of sin, in keep- 
 ing 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 then 
 from the east wind of pitiless prejudice, quarrel or con- 
 troversy ; in stopping the unclean and bitter drifts 01 
 scandal and gossip. How many lives have lost theii 
 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 theii 
 doors, nor the prodigal stop there. And again, as 
 there are a number of men and women who fall ir 
 struggling for virtue simply because they never see 1! 
 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. Ol 
 
xxxii. 1-8.] A MAN 257 
 
 the late Clerk Maxwell it was said, " He made faith 
 in goodness easy to other men." A man shall be as 
 streams of loater in a desert place. 
 
 U. 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 poli- 
 tics, 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. i)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 cars of them that hear shall be pricked up. The con- 
 text 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 
 
 17 
 
258 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 the previous clause) to speak plain things. Startlinqly 
 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 libera 
 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 iha faded cr 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 liter &\\y 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 successftd man. To this Isaiah 
 fitly opposes a name, wrongly rendered in our version 
 churl, but corrected in the margin to crafty — the fraudu- 
 lent, 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 t\\e fortunate, 
 nor canonise him as successful, who has gotten his wealth 
 by underhand means. The ivorthless character shall no 
 more be called princely, nor the knave hailed as the success- 
 ful. But men's characters shall stand out true in their 
 
xxxii. 1—8.] A MAN. 259 
 
 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 per- 
 son, 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 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 con\entions; and in this history 
 bears him out. The abolition of slavery, the recognition 
 of the essential nobility of labour, the abolition of in- 
 fanticide, 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 sarne 
 method. In many directions it is still a false conven- 
 tionalism, — sometimes the relic of barbarism, sometimes 
 the fruit of civilisation,— that blocks the way. The 
 
26o THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 savage notions which cbstruct 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 dis- 
 graceful 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 Phcedo : "To use 
 words wrongly and indefinitely is not merely an error 
 in itself; it also creates evil in the soul."* What 
 noxious misconceptions, what mistaken ideals of life, are 
 due to the abuse of these four words alone : " noble," 
 "gentleman," "honour" and "Chiistian"! 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 
 
 * Cf. further with this passage Y. J. Chuich, Trial mid Death cf 
 Socratr-^, Introd, xii. ri. 
 
xxxii. 1—8.] A MAN. 261 
 
 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. 
 
 We must not forget, however, Isaiah's chief means 
 for the abolition of this conventionalism and the substi- 
 tution 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 dic- 
 tionaries or to restore to our words their original mean- 
 ings 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.* 
 
 * Cf, with the fifth and sixth verses of chap, xxxii. the forcible 
 passage in the introduction to Carlyle's CrotnweU's Letters, beginning, 
 " Sure enough, in the Heroic Century, as in the Unheroic, Icnaves 
 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 lias 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 w hich 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 — ^ii, as he dees 
 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 post- 
 ponement of the Assyrian invasion with that confidence 
 and stability upon righteousness which the Spirit of 
 God can alone create. The prophecy, too, has the 
 
xxxii. 9— 20.] ISAIAH TO WOMEN. 263 
 
 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. i : 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 pro- 
 phecies, 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 
 oi their sex. Ye women that are at ease, rise up, ami 
 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 
 
264 THE BOOK OF IS AT AH. 
 
 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 restfulncss, 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 possibihty 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 founda- 
 tion." 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 
 
xxxii. 9—20.] ISAIAH fO WOMEN. 265 
 
 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, declar- 
 ing 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 moun- 
 tain of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush tlie 
 needy, which say inito their lords, Bring and let us drink. 
 Tlie Lord feliovah 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 
 ve 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, in- 
 solence, brutality, or hysterical violence to which it will 
 not lead. Such women are known, as Amos pictured 
 
266 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 ser- 
 vants 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 care- 
 less 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 tlicm 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 
 
xxxii. 9—20.] ISAIAH TO WOMEN. 267 
 
 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 careful- 
 ness 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.*- 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 ? 
 
 So does all Scripture declare, in harmony with the 
 oracle of Isaiah, that thoughtlessness and easy content- 
 ment with things as they be, are the besetting sins of 
 woman. But her glory is discretion. 
 
 n. 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 
 
 * Cf. Newman, Oxford University Sermons, xv. 
 
2G8 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 inviola- 
 bility 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 oj 
 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- lun inous 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. 1 5). Righteous- 
 
xxxii. 9—20.] ISAIAH TO WOMEN. 269 
 
 ness 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 in- 
 dispensably, 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 righteous- 
 ness. The wilderness shall become a fruitful field, and 
 what is to-day a fruitful f eld shall be couukd as a forest. 
 That this proverb, used by Isaiah more than once, is 
 not merely a rnetaphor 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 habita- 
 tion, and in sure dwellings, and in quiet resting-places. 
 
270 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 . . . Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters, that sent 
 forth the feet of the ox and the ass ! 
 
 There is not a prophecy more characteristic of Isaiah 
 It unf Ids what for him were the two essential am 
 equal contents of the will of God : a secure land and ; 
 lighteous people, the fertility of nature and the purit; 
 of society. But in those years (705 — 702) he die 
 not forget that something must come between him an( 
 that paradise. Across the very middle of his visioi 
 of felicity there dashes a cruel storm. In the gaj 
 indicated above Isaiah wrote, But it shall hail it 
 the downfall of the forest, and the city shall be utterl 
 laid low. A hailstorm between the promise and fulfil 
 ment of summer ! Isaiah could only mean the Assyria: 
 invasion, which was now lowering so dark. Before i 
 bursts we must follow him to the survey which h< 
 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 ex- 
 hilaration 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 him- 
 self among a series of prophecies obscure in themselves 
 and without obvious relation to one another. The sub- 
 jects 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 
 
272 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 represen- 
 tative 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. ORACLt FOR pHiLisTiA. Warning 
 to PhiJistia not to rejoice because one Assyrian king is 
 
ISAIAH TO THE FOREIGN NATIONS. 273 
 
 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 
 Judsean, 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 origin- 
 ally 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 c^me under the cloud of Senna- 
 cherib'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 0/ the daughter of Zion (xvi. i) ; 
 for an appeal to Zion to shelter the outcasts of Moab 
 and to take up her cause : Bring counsel, make a decision, 
 
 VOL. I, i§ 
 
I 
 274 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 make thy shadow as the night in the midst of the noon- 
 day ; 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 sanctu- 
 ary (ver. 12) — a very remarkable admission about the 
 worship of another god than Jehovah. 
 
 4. xvii. I — II. 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 ^^6 and 732. 
 
 5. xvii. 12 — 14. Untitled. The crash of the peoples ' 
 upon Jerusalem and their dispersion. This magni- 
 ficent piece of sound, which we analyse below, is 
 usually understood of Sennacherib's rush upon Jeru- 
 salem. 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, aud 
 ye shall be broken in pieces; and give ear, all ye of the 
 distances of the earth : gird yourselves, and ye shall be 
 
ISAIAH TO THE FOREIGN NATIONS. 275 
 
 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 mes- 
 sengers 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 pro- 
 phecies. 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 authen- 
 ticity 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 
 
276 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 nar- 
 rative 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. I — 10. Oracle for the Wilderness of the 
 Sea, announcing but lamenting the fall of Babylon. 
 Probably 709. See pp. 202, 203. 
 
 10. xxi. II, 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 ? * 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, 
 
 * Our translation, though picturesque, is misleading. The 
 voire 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 last- 
 ing terribly long. 
 
ISAIAH TO The foreigm nations. 477 
 
 give them an answer later on, if they will come back. 
 Date uncertain, perhaps between 704 and 701. 
 
 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 w.-iste 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 — 
 
 I. Ah ! the booming of the peoples, the multitudes, like 
 the booming of the seas they boom; and the rushing of the 
 
278 THE BOOK Of ISAIAH. 
 
 nations, like the rushing of mighty waters they rush ; 
 nations, like the rushing of many waters they rush. 
 But He rebukcth it, and it jleeth 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 he 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). 
 
 I. 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 Egvpt 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 
 
ISAIAH TO THE FOREIGN NATIONS. 279 
 
 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 
 
28o THE BOOlt OF IsAlAH. 
 
 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, 
 
tSAIAH TO THE FOREIGN NATIONS. 281 
 
 for he displays a knowledge of their several countries 
 and ways of life that is full and accurate. The agri- 
 cultural 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 i'l 
 the eighteenth chapter ? — "Ah ! the land of the rustling of 
 wings, which borders on the rivers of Ciish, which sendetli 
 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, n 
 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 ex- 
 panses of sea ! what fleets of ships ! what floating loads 
 
282 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 of grain ! what concourse of merchants moving on stately 
 wharves beneath high warehouses ! 
 
 Yet these are only segments of horizons, and per- 
 haps 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. 1 3 the sibilants predominate ; and before the 
 sharp rebuke of the Lord the great, booming sound of 
 ver. 12 scatters out into a long yish-shd '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 
 
ISAIAH TO THE FOREIGN NATIONS. 283 
 
 language nothing need be added upon the prophet's 
 view of the pohtics 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 represent- 
 ative 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 Phihstines. Stricken with panic at the Assyrian ad- 
 vance, 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. 
 
284 The book of isaiah. 
 
 This then was Isaiah's Interim-Answer to the Nations 
 — Zion at least is secure for tlie 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). 
 Eg3'pt'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 tribu- 
 tary 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, 
 
ISAIAH TO THE FOREIGN NATIONS. 2S5 
 
 but that his God would vindicate His purposes upon 
 empires lilce 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 pro- 
 claimed 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 ex- 
 pressed 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 
 
286 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 mis- 
 fortunes, 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 Jeru- 
 salem. 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 
 
ISAIAH TO THE FOREIGN NATIONS. 287 
 
 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 fehovah 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 reHgion 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, re- 
 presented 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 Phcenician 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 
 Phcenician commerce. The ambition of her kings, 
 who had in that century pushed south to the Mediter- 
 ranean, was to found a commercial empire. The 
 mercenary spirit, as we learn from prophets earlier 
 than Isaiah, had begun also to leavep the life of the 
 
xxlii.] TYRE; OR, THE MERCENARY SPIRIT. 289 
 
 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 imagi- 
 nation, as well as a criticism of the temper of commerce 
 from the standpoint of the religion of the God of right- 
 eousness. 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 httle 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, 
 
 VOL. I. 19 
 
290 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 con- 
 structed 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 Gocd 
 Hope. From the coasts of Britain to those of North- 
 west 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 archi- 
 pelago, 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 ha)-vcst 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 con- 
 stitution 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 
 
xxiii.] TYRE; OR, THE MERCENARY SPIRIT. 291 
 
 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 oj 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 conscious- 
 ness 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 
 
292 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 con- 
 sumption 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, 
 
xxiii.] TYREj OR, THE MERCENARY SPIRIT. 293 
 
 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, argosieb 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 jruitfiil 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 oj 
 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 hke 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 constitu- 
 tion, 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 
 
294 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 Phcenicia, 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 prophe- 
 sies 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 innovaticns with cries of detrac- 
 tion 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 
 theimmediate dutyof frankly recognising greatness wher- 
 
xxiii.] TYRE; OR, THE MERCENARY SPIRIT. 295 
 
 ever 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 temp- 
 tations and degradations of trade, until we have realised 
 the indispensableness of trade and its capacity for disci- 
 plining and exalting its ministers. The only way to cor- 
 rect 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 dis- 
 covered the world-forces, commerce has built thereon 
 the most powerful of our modern empires. Its exi- 
 gencies compel peace ; its resources are the sinews oi 
 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 
 
296 THE Book of isaiaM. 
 
 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 honour- 
 able of the earth. 
 
 Therefore let all merchants and their apprentices 
 believe, " Here is something worth putting our man- 
 hood 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 
 
xxiii.j TYRli.; uR, The mehcexaHy spirit. 297 
 
 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 abandon- 
 ing 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 pros- 
 titutes 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 literalnesswas Isaiah's harlot-curse fulfilled. 
 
 What is true of Phoenicia may become true of Britain, 
 
298 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 vam delusion upon this subject 1 It 
 is often imagined in our day that if a man seek atone- 
 ment 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 de- 
 votion 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 
 
xxiii.] TYRE; Oli, THE MERCENARY SPIRIT. 299 
 
 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 ware- 
 house 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 manu- 
 factories, 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 disappear- 
 ance 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 
 
THE BOOR Of ISAIAH. 
 
 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 gene- 
 rosity and wisdom of this passage are the more striking 
 when we remember the extremity of unrelieved denun- 
 ciation to which other great teachers of religion have 
 allowed themselves to be hurled bj' 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 Rehgion's most sincere and profitable handmaids. 
 
BOOK IV. 
 
 JERUSALEM AND SENNACHERIB, 701 B.C. 
 
Isaiah : — 
 
 xxxvi. I. Eorly in 701. 
 
 i. II > 
 
 xxU. II I 
 
 xxxiii. A little later, 
 
 xxxvi. 2— xxxvii, ,, ,, 
 
 xxxviii. — xxxix. Date uncertain. 
 
BOOK IV, 
 
 INTO this fourth book we put all the rest of the pro- 
 phecies 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. 1. 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. 
 
 I. 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 
 
304 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 keeping of Hezekiah. To this invasion refer Isa. i., 
 xxii. and the first verse of xxxvi.: Now it came to pass 
 in the fourteenth* 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. I. 
 
 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 
 
 * It is confusing to'find tiiis date attaciied 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 iwenty-fourih for 
 fourteenth. But in any case this date is confusing. 
 
BOOK IV., 701 B.C. 305 
 
 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. 
 
 VOL. I. 
 
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 1 alf a century Zion has been pre- 
 paring 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 
 
i. and xxii.] AT THE LOWEST EBB. 307 
 
 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 re- 
 demption 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 
 starthng of all Isaiah's prophecies. In it "we can 
 discern precipices." Beneath our eyes, long Hfted by the 
 prophet to behold a future stretching very far forth, this 
 chapter suddenly yawns, a pit of blackness. For utter- 
 ness of despair and the absolute sentence which it passes 
 on the citizens of Zion we have had nothing Hke it 
 from Isaiah since the evil days of Ahaz. The historical 
 portions of the Bible which cover this period are not cleft 
 
3o8 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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.* Yet if we put the Hebre.w 
 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. 
 
 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 for- 
 midable 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 Hke 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 splen- 
 dour 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 Phihstine cities of 
 Beth-dagon, Joppa, Barka and Azor, all of thcr.i 
 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 
 
 * Records of the Past, i. 33 ff. vii. ; Schrader's Cuneiform Inscrip- 
 tions and the Old Testament (Whitehouse's translaticn"', 
 
1. andxxii.] AT THE LOWEST EBB. 309 
 
 here Sennacherib had so good a reason for anger, that 
 the inhabitants, expecting no mercy at his hands, pre- 
 pared 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."* Before Ekron was reduced, however, the 
 Egyptian army arrived in Pliilistia, and Sennacherib 
 had to abandon the siege for these arch-enemies. He 
 defeated them in the neighbourhood, at Eltekeh, re- 
 turned to Ekron, and complet'ed its siege. Then, while 
 he himself advanced southwards in pursuit of the 
 Egyptians, he detached a corps, which, marching east- 
 wards 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 — suk, 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."t 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 Nineveii. 
 
 * Records of the Past, i. 38 ; vii. 62. 
 t Ibid., i., 40; Schrader, i., 286. 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 fortifica- 
 tions, 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 rem- 
 nants 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 sus- 
 pended, 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. 
 
i. and xxil] AT THE LOWEST EBB. 31 1 
 
 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 fehovah of hosts had left unto us a very small 
 remnant, we should have been as Sodom, we should have 
 been like unto Gomorrah. * 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 1 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 
 
 * Chap. i. 7—9. 
 
312 THE BOOK Of ISAIAH. 
 
 are sharp, and all their bows bent; their horses' hoofs 
 shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirl- 
 wind; 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. 
 
 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, appre- 
 hension 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 them- 
 selves 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. Ii — 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.* He had continued to 
 
 * See p. 238. 
 
i. and xxii.] AT THE LOWEST EBB. 313 
 
 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. 
 
 We are aware what happened. Egypt was beaten 
 at Eltekeh ; the alliance was stamped a failure ; Jeru- 
 salem'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 
 
314 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 aikth 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 
 ailelh thee now that thou art wholly gone up to the house- 
 tops — we see him standing at his door watching this 
 ghastly holiday — 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 chief s 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 daiigliter of my people. 
 
 Urge not your mad holiday upon me 1 For a day 
 of discomfture and of breaking and of perplexity hath 
 the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, in the valley of vision, a 
 
L and xxii.] AT THE LOWEST EBB. 315 
 
 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 : disap- 
 pointment at the eleventh hour; the sense of a being 
 trampleda.nd 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 rampari 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 — 8a). 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 in- 
 spected and increased, and the suburban waters brought 
 within them (vv. 9 — i la). 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 
 
3i6 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 them. In that day did the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, call to 
 weeping, and to moitrning, 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 forgivenesg. 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 
 uith 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 
 
i. andxxii.] AT THE LOWEST EBB. 317 
 
 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 tirsf, 
 which sees ahead nothing but destruction for the State 
 (vv. I — 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, fehovah 
 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 shalt 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 
 
3i8 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 formulas he uses are perhaps the official ones custom- 
 ary 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 oj 
 Hilkiah; and I will clothe him with thy robe, and with 
 thy girdle will I strengthen him, and thine administra- 
 tion will I give into his hand, and he shall be for 
 a father to the inhabitant of Jerusalem and to the 
 house of fudah. 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 ham- 
 mering out of his place. This very year we find 
 Eliakim in Shebna's post,* 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 
 
 * Isa. xxxvi. 3, 
 
i. andxxii.] AT THE LOWEST EBB. 319 
 
 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 con- 
 trasted 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 doivn shall be cut the burden that was 
 upon it, for Jehovah hath spoken. 
 
 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 imagi- 
 nation 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 teen delivered within a few months of each other 
 — which this chapter seeks to expound. 
 
 In spite of her collapse, as pictured in chap, xxii., Jeru- 
 salem 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 
 
xxii] THE TURN OF THE TIDE. 321 
 
 Jerusalem. He tells us how closely he invested Jerusa- 
 lem, 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"* to him when he was at some distance from Jeru- 
 salem. 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, / have offended; 
 retmn 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 kin^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 oj Assyria.\ It was 
 indeed a sore submission, when even the Temple of the 
 Loi-d 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 
 
 * Schrader, Cuneiform Inscriptions, O.T., i.i p. 286. 
 
 t 2 Kings xviji. 13 — 16. Here closes a paragraph. Ver. 17 begins 
 to describe what Sennacherib did, in spite of Hezekiah's sub- 
 mission. 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. 
 VOL. I. 21 
 
322 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 tlic virgin, the daughter 
 of Zion. 
 
 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 1 when 
 this came, your religion collapsed. Your abounding 
 wickedness, I said, could only close in your ruin and de- 
 sertion by God. But one promise I kept steadfast : that 
 Jerusalem would not fall ; and to your penitence, when- 
 ever 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." 
 
xxii.] THE TURN OF THE TIDE. 323 
 
 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 Senna- 
 cherib, 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 with- 
 out 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. 
 'I his 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 
 
324 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 the treaty he had made with Hezekiah. He may have 
 lelt 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 rehgion, a 
 campaign to be entered upon, not with Pharaoh's 
 support and the strength of Egyptian chariots, but 
 with God Himself as an allj' — of which it could be 
 said to Judah, Thy nghteonsness 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 
 
xxii.] THE TURN OF THE TIDE. 325 
 
 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 Hke 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 ivhcnever 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 
 ivith justice and righteousness. And there shall be stability 
 of thy times, wealth 0/ salvation, wisdom and knowledge ; 
 tlie fear of Jehovah, it shall be his treasure (xxxiii. i — 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. 
 
326 THE BOOK Of ISAIAH. 
 
 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 * 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 turn- 
 ing 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 f urged from you till ye 
 
 * Didron, Christian Iconography, fig. 52. 
 
xxii.] THE TURN OF THE TIDE. 327 
 
 die, saith the Lord, Jehovah of hosts (xxii. 14) — he 
 swings round on his promise of a Uttle 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 the-ir 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. 
 
 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 
 
328 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 un- 
 conditioned 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 
 
xxii.] THE TURN OF THE TIDE. 329 
 
 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 Jeru- 
 salem. 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 per- 
 fidious 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 dissi- 
 pated 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 
 
330 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 re- 
 ceiveth, 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. 
 
33^ THE BOOK OF ISAIAti. 
 
 The opening verses of chap, xxxiii. fit the very 
 moment of the crisis, as if Isaiali 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 thoii wast not spoiled, thou treacherous dealer, 
 and they did not deal treacherously with thee ! When 
 thou ceasest to spoil, thou shall 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 Senna- 
 cherib (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 dis- 
 heartening 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 Mysetf; now will I be exalted. Ye shall con- 
 ceive 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 
 
xxxiii.] OUR GOD A CONSUMING FIRE. 333 
 
 conduit of the tipper pool, ivith 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 lie that counted ? 
 luhere is he that weighed the tribute ? where is he that 
 counted the towers ? Thou shalt 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 * 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 ivhereof shah 
 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 
 
 * Chap, xxxvii. 
 
334 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 shall pass upon it. Without sign of battle, God shall 
 be our refuge and our strength. It was that mar- 
 vellous 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 imagina- 
 tions 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 hcly 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 every- 
 thing to us : fehovah is our Judge ; Jehovah is our Law- 
 giver; Jehovah is our King : He will save us. 
 
 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 j'ears the prophet had been preaching to 
 the Jews his gospel, God-ivith-us ; but they never 
 awakened to the reality of the Divine presence till they 
 saw it in the dispersion of the Assyrian army. Then 
 
xxxiii.] OUR GOD A CONSUMING FIRE. 335 
 
 God became real to them (ver. 14). The justice of God, 
 preached so long by Isaiah, had always seemed some- 
 thing 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 famihar with Isaiah's fundamental God-with- 
 us, and how it was spoken not for mercy only, but for 
 judgement (chap. viii.). If God-ivith-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 indig- 
 nation, a tongue as a devouring fire, and in the over- 
 flowing stream which finally issued from it the hot 
 
336 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 breath of the Almighty. These are unforgettable de- 
 scriptions of the ceaseless activity of Divine righteous- 
 ness 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 every- 
 thing is clear. The fiery element is filling all the 
 interstices, that were blank to us before, and beating 
 upon the soHd 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 
 
xxxiii.] OUR GOD A CONSUMING FIRE. 337 
 
 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 fehovah, like a stream of brimstone, doth 
 kindle it.* 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. 
 
 Isaiah's Vision of Fire suggests two thoughts to us. 
 
 I. 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 
 
 * Chaps, iv. 4 ; xxx. 33. 
 VOL. I. 22 
 
J38 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 righteous- 
 ness of God — God ivitli 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 neverthe- 
 less not consumed. Let us lay it to heart — Isaiah has 
 
xxxiii.] OUR GOD A CONSUMING FIRE. 339 
 
 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 Hfe was a burn- 
 ing. 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 rephes, "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 de- 
 pression 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 hfe 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 
 
34° THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 deny the reality of the struggle for existence, or that 
 its results are enormous. We struggle with each other, 
 and affect ^ach 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 righteous- 
 ness 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 
 
xxxiii.] OUk GOD A CONSUMING FIRE. 341 
 
 only now and then a glimpse of the decisions of right- 
 eousness, 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 every- 
 where, 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 ever- 
 lasting 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 con- 
 suming, 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 command- 
 ing 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 
 
342 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 in- 
 habited him, and became the predominant part of h;m, 
 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 know- 
 ledge 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 hnes 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 Jeru- 
 salem 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 pro- 
 phesying 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 eliminate 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, de- 
 livering upon faith the subtle arguments of the worldly 
 
344 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 temper ; and as strikingly, while all official religion and 
 power of State stand helpless against them, these argu- 
 ments 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 ever- 
 lasting 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 help- 
 less to bring faiih 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 stead- 
 fastness 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 pohtical 
 officer attached to the Assyrian army, which was com- 
 
xxxvi.] THE RABHUAKEtl. 343 
 
 manded, 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 repre- 
 sented 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 con- 
 queror's contempt for them, the Rabshakeh is the 
 product of a victorious empire like the Assyrian, or, 
 say, like the British. Our servi<:es 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 Bis- 
 marck. 
 
 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 
 
340 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 takt n 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, address- 
 ing 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 knowfrom the annals of Sennacherib that his custom- 
 ary policy, to seduce the popuhaions of a hostile State 
 
xxxvi.] THE RABSHAKEH. 347 
 
 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 enjoy- 
 ment. 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 thecommon 
 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 fehovah 
 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 ot 
 culture still sometimes treat barbarians, first scornfully 
 
34^ THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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, strut- 
 ting 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 high- 
 landers by exhibiting how much he was aware of the life 
 behind their thick walls and silent faces, for the khi^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 expert- 
 ness 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 ! Sup- 
 pose 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 man- 
 kind'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 
 
xxxvi.] THE RABSHAKEH. 349 
 
 Gentiles shall come to it, and from it new civilisations 
 take their laws ; while thou and all thy parapher- 
 nalia 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 clever- 
 ness 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 fight- 
 ing 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 1 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 
 
35° 
 
 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 
 P.abshakeh'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 Rab- 
 shakeh, Ernest R^nan, 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 impressive- 
 ness 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 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 con- 
 science to serve Him, and has spoken to us in plain ex- 
 planation 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 pro- 
 mise 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 
 
xxxvi.] THE RABSHAKEH. 351 
 
 secret ; she can at least expose the fallacy of their 
 sensuous promises of an untroubled life. No man, who 
 ternpts us from a good conscience with God in the dis- 
 cipline 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 Rdnan, 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 
 Gbd, as we have aforetime seen Him in the sanctuary. 
 The land, in which the tempter promises a life undis- 
 turbed 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 Rab- 
 shakeh to Renan, let us hft 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 con- 
 sider 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 saj' for 
 herself? Have this people of so long Divine inspira- 
 tion 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 
 sorgs 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 
 
xxxvii.] THIS IS THE VICTORY .... OUR FAITH. 353 
 
 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 mis- 
 carriage. 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. Words- 
 worth 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 out- 
 ward fact there is no life for these beautiful conceptions 
 of the soul. Do we really believe in the Father- 
 hood 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 
 
 VOL. I. 23 
 
354 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 civiHsation all Christianity, with its eighteen hun- 
 dred 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 death- 
 bed 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 im- 
 mortality ; and yet where within our sight have these 
 ever passed to the birth of fact ? * Death is a great 
 miscarriage. The children have come to the birth, and 
 there is not strength to bring them forth. 
 
 And yet within the horizon of this life at least — the 
 latter part of the difficulty we postpone to another 
 chapter— /aZ/A 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 
 
 " Cf. Browning's La Saisiaz. 
 
xxxvii.] THIS IS THE VICTORY .... OUR FAITH. 355 
 
 Isaiah made accurate prediction of the city's speedy 
 rehef 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 cam- 
 paign against the Moors in Spain, from which he was 
 suddenly and unseasonably hastened north on a dis- 
 astrous retreat by news of the revolt of the Saxons.* 
 In the vast Assyrian territories rebellions were con- 
 stantly occurring, that demanded the swift appearance 
 of the king himself; and God's Spirit, to whose inspira- 
 tion Isaiah traced all political perception, suggested 
 to him the possibility of one of thtse. 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 
 
 *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. Biit,'), 
 
3S6 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 : / 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 Jeru- 
 salem'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. 
 
 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 
 
ixxvii.] THIS IS THE VICTORY .... OUR FAITH. 357 
 
 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 oj 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 utter- 
 ances 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 e3'es. 
 
 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 
 
358 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 adJed 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 70 1 it has been 
 impossible, with the Assyrians in the land, to sow the 
 seed, and the Jews have been dependent on the pre- 
 carious 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 tliese 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 seal 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 
 
xxxv-il.] THIS IS THE VICTORY .... OUR FAITH. 359 
 
 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 Rabs!.akeh had re- 
 turned 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 Ixxvi., 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 riv:.ls in this campaign, 
 Judah and Egypt, should contain independent remi- 
 niscences of so sudden and miraculous a disaster to his 
 
360 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 Sen- 
 nacherib 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 
 
xxxvii.] THIS IS THE VICTORY .... OUR FAITH. 361 
 
 to Napoleon's professed reason for his sudden abandon- 
 ment of his Spanish campaign and his quick return to 
 Paris in 1 808. 
 
 The neighbourhood in which the Assyrian army 
 suffered this great disaster * was notorious in an- 
 tiquity 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."! 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 
 
 * The statement of the Egyptian legend, that it was from a point 
 in the neighbourhood of Pelusium that Sennacherib's army com- 
 menced 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), 
 
 •)• Gibbon, Decline and Fall, xliii. 
 
362 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 equalled by the turning-points of other historical cam- 
 paigns. 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 [812, 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." * 
 
 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 inva- 
 sions 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. f 
 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. 
 
 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 
 
 • Arnold, Lectures on Modem History, 177, quoted by Stanley, 
 t Gibbon, xlii. ; lix. 
 
xxxvii.] THIS IS THE VICTORY .... OUR FAITH. 363 
 
 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 Deliver- 
 ance : 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 bap- 
 tism of Israel in spiritual religion, the grace of which 
 was never wholly undone. 
 
 NevertheLss, 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 uncom- 
 
364 THE BOOK OF ISAIAti. 
 
 was 
 
 promising puritanism it had displaced: that it 
 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 dehverance of Jerusalem and the peace of Judah 
 under Hezekiah. But swiftly as the ruling temper 
 in England changed after Cromwell's death, and Puri- 
 tanism 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 be- 
 come substantive, was violently put to death by the son 
 of Hezekiah. It is said that he was sawn asunder.* 
 
 The parallel, which we are pursuing, does not, how- 
 ever, close here. " As soon,'' says an English historian, 
 " as the wild orgy of the Restoration was over, men began 
 
 * Heb. xi. 
 
xxxvii.] THIS IS THE VICTORY .... OUR FAITH. 365 
 
 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 where- 
 with 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 charac- 
 teristics 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 Thermo- 
 pylae, 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 
 
^56 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 admira- 
 tion 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 pohtical 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 ex- 
 pressed, from the local associations and merely national 
 victories, with which even Isaiah had been forced to iden- 
 tify them. The destruction of Jerusalem by the heaihen 
 formed a large part of Christ's prediction of the inmie- 
 diate 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 
 
xxxvii.] THIS IS THE VICTORY . . . . OUR FAITH. 367 
 
 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 quiet- 
 ness and in confidence is their strength. Nothing could 
 more emphatically prove the loftiness of Isaiah's teach- 
 ing 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 kaiah 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 Egj'pt. Once he named them together as 
 equally the Lord's instruments upon Judah (vii. 18), 
 
ISAIAH'S PREDICTIONS. 369 
 
 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 con- 
 viction, 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 71 1, did not in the least induce Isaiah 
 to relax either of his two convictions. Judah he pro- 
 claimed 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 pro- 
 phet 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. i, 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 con- 
 voL. I. 24 
 
37° THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 viction 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. II, 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. i — 8; 
 XXX. 19 — 26; xxxi. I, 4, s). 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 sen- 
 tence 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 hope- 
 less, that she shall not fall (xxxvii.). 
 
 4. Now, with regard to the method of Jerusalem's 
 deliverance, Isaiah has uniformly described this as hap- 
 pening not by human battle. From the beginning he 
 said that Israel should be deHvered in the last extremity 
 
ISAIAH'S PREDICTIONS. 371 
 
 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 0/ the Lord's arm, by the voice 
 of the Lord, through a judgement that shall be liker 
 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, Senna- 
 cherib, 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 inconsist- 
 encies in the prediction, are entirely limited to those 
 of Isaich's convictions which we have called political, 
 and which the prophet evidently gathered from his 
 observation of political circumstances as these developed 
 
372 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 pro- 
 phecies 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 intel- 
 lectual 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 rehgious 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 
 
ISAIAH'S PREDICTIONS. 373 
 
 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, \he.se. 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 Him- 
 self: 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 advan- 
 
374 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 tage 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 pro- 
 phets' 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 deliver- 
 ance, 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. i 
 and 2 Kings xx. i 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, 
 
376 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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.* 
 
 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 
 
 * Isa. xxxviii., xxxix., lias 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. 
 
Xxxvtii.; xxxix.] AN OLD TESTAMENT SICK-BED. 3?7 
 
 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 feMowship 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. 
 
378 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 I. 
 
 In those days Hesekiah became sick unto death. They 
 were critical days for Judah — no son born to the king 
 (2 Kings xxi. i), the work of reformation in Judah not 
 yet consolidated, the big world tossing in revolution all 
 around. Under God, everything depended on an ex- 
 perienced 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, Ali, now, Jehovah, remember, I beseech Thee, howl 
 have 'cvalked 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 
 
xxxviii.; xxxix.] AN OLD TESTAMENT SICK-BED. 379 
 
 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 pro- 
 gress 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 whic!i 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 
 
38o THE BOOK OP ISAIAIl. 
 
 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 pro- 
 phesies 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 
 
xxxviii.; xxxix.] AN OLD TESTAMENT SICK-BED. 381 
 
 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 new- 
 born 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. 
 / 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 Himselj 
 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 
 
-82 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 
 liftmi^. In this lay the head and glory of Hezekiah's 
 expeiiLUce. 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 for- 
 giveness — 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 — / 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. 
 
xxxviii. ; xxxix.] AN OLD TESTAMENT SICK-BED. 383 
 
 This is the effect which every great sorrow and strug- 
 gle has upon a noble soul. Come to the streets of the 
 living. Who are these, whom we can so easily distin- 
 guish irom 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 vait 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 o 
 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 polite- 
 ness 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 o 
 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 
 
384 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 found these for us to remain true to our memories of 
 them. The hardest duty of Hfe 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 hfe. 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, 
 / 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 rest- 
 less 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 or 
 
xxxviii.; xxxix.] AN OLD TESTAMENT SICK-BED. 385 
 
 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 judge- 
 ments deliver me, good Lord." 
 
 II. 
 
 So far then Hezekiah is an example and warning to 
 us aU. 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 death- 
 wards, 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. / 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 
 
 VOL. I. 25 
 
386 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 makes life worth living. With such an existence be- 
 yond, to die to life here was to Hezekiah like as when 
 a weaver rolls up the finished web. IVIy 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 allow- 
 ance for a man dying prematurely in the midst of his 
 
xxxviiL; xxxix.] AN OLD TESTAMENT SICK-BED. 387 
 
 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 contem- 
 plate 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 pure- 
 ness of our faith and the richness of our imagination 
 of immortality differ so much from his. That fact is 
 
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 dini 
 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 
 errors, 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 cul- 
 minates — 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 indi\idual stands strangely out 
 against the perpetual glory and peace assured to the 
 community. And it suggests this question : Had 
 
390 
 
 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 philo- 
 sophical — 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 vine- 
 yard, the men ofjudah 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. i). 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 
 
HAD ISAIAH A GOSPEL FOR THE INDIVIDUAL? 391 
 
 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 per- 
 sonal and particularly individual matter — the forgive- 
 ness 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 : — 
 
 I. Isaiah himself had passed through a powerfully 
 individual experience. He had not only felt the soli- 
 darity of the people's sin — / dwell among a people of un- 
 clean lips — ^he had first felt his own particular guilt : / 
 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, fehovah 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 
 
392 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 Philip- 
 pian 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 re- 
 ligious reform occupied with an attention to individual 
 interests, which necessarily would not obtain the perma- 
 nent record of his pubhc 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 sub- 
 ordinate. The history of the East is the annals of 
 personahties; 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. 
 
MAD ISAIAH A GOSPEL I'OR THE INDIl^WVALt 393 
 
 At first only the rigorous virtues of the ruler are attri- 
 buted to Him (chap. xi. i 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 ? 
 
394 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 Was Isaiah's silence on the immortality of the indi- 
 vidual 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 Resur- 
 rection ; and even to-day, after twelve centuries of 
 Moslem influence, their descendants in the centre of 
 Arabia, according to the most recent authority,* 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 civihsation 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 unsub- 
 stantial and hopeless existence. Good and evil, strong 
 and weak, pious and infidel, alike became shades, joy- 
 less 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 
 
 * Doughty's Arabia Deserta : Travelsni Northern Arabia, 1876 — 1878. 
 
HAD ISAIAH A GOSPEL FOR THE INDIVIDUAL? 39S 
 
 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-for- 
 saken 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. 
 
 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 
 
396 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 have assisted the Hebrew mind to an assurance of 
 heaven. 
 
 But further in his favourite gospel of the Reasonable- 
 ness OF God — that God does not work fruitlessly, nor 
 create and cultivate with a view to judgement and de- 
 struction — Isaiah was furnishing an argument for per- 
 sonal immortality', the force of which has not been ex- 
 hausted. In a recent work on The Destiny of Man * the 
 philosophic author maintains the reasonableness of the 
 Divine methods as a ground of belief both in the con- 
 tinued 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 per- 
 manent 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." 
 
 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 
 
 * By Professor Fiske. 
 
HAD ISAIAH A GOSPEL FOR THE INDIVIDUAL? 397 
 
 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 rich- 
 ness 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. 83 
 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. I — 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 depopu- 
 lated country. With these altered circumstances come 
 another temper and new doctrine. The horizon is 
 you I, 36 
 
402 ^ THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 resur- 
 rection, 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 over- 
 look, 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 
 
BOOK V. 403 
 
 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 pro- 
 phecies, 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 argu- 
 ment that has not been fairly met by those who deny 
 the Isaianic authorship of chap?, 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 believ- 
 ing Isaiah to have been hkely 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-exile authorship (see pp. 429 ff.). 
 
404 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 Another argument against attributing these pro- 
 phecies 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, 
 gathei ed 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 independ- 
 ence 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 xii. 12 — xiv. 23 (date uncertain). 
 
 THIS double oracle is against the City (xjii. 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 ap- 
 pointed 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 
 
4o6 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 saying, This is my day; as with every dawn comes 
 some ore'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 oj 
 Jehovah is near ; as destruction from the Destructive 
 does it come. Very savage and quite universal is its 
 punishment. Every human heart mclieth. Countless 
 faces, white with terror, light up its darkness like 
 flames. Sinners are /o 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. l) comes the religious 
 reason of so much convulsion : For Jehovah will have 
 cmipassion 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 asso- 
 ciate 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 
 
xii. I2-X1V. 23.] BABYLON AND LUCIFER. 407 
 
 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 s\mbol the enemy of 
 God and the stronghold of darkness. But we post- 
 pone 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 
 
4o8 THE BOOK OF ISAIAM. 
 
 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 heed- 
 less 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 opposi- 
 tion 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 nCLESsary. The 
 word mashal, by which this ( de is entitled, means 
 
xli. 12— xiv. 23.] Babylon and lucifer. 409 
 
 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 de- 
 pends 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 distin- 
 guished 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 some- 
 times too short, the shorter too long, variations to which 
 a rude chant could readily adapt itself. But the alter- 
 nation 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. 
 
410 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 reso- 
 lutely 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.* 
 
 For this purpose he employs the idea of the Under- 
 world 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,t 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 con- 
 sciousness and passion only sufficient to greet the 
 
 * "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., ii., 466.) 
 
 t P. 447 a 
 
xii. 12— xiv. 23-] BABYLON AND LUCIFER. 411 
 
 arrival of the new-comer and express satiric wonder at 
 his fall (ver. 9). With the arrogance of the Babyloni.tn 
 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.^ 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 tor- 
 ment. 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, f 
 
 Thus, by the help of only a few fragments from the 
 popular mythology, the sacred satirist achieves his 
 
 ♦ 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. 
 
 f 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 
 
4t2 THE BOOK OP ISAIAH. 
 
 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 
 
 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.). 
 
Kii. 12— xiv. 23.J BABYLON AND LUCIFER. 413 
 
 Hebrew satire, and it forms the irony and the rigour 
 of the following ode.* 
 
 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 g^ 
 down to the stones of the pit should be transferred from 
 ver. 19 to ver. 20. 
 
 And thou shall lift up this proverb upon the King of 
 Babylon, and shall say, — 
 
 L 
 
 Ah 1 stilled is the tyrant, 
 
 And stilled is the fury 1 
 Broke hath Jehovah the rod of the wicke<^ 
 
 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 lor 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 1 
 Lifteth erect from their thrones 
 
 All kings of peoples. 
 
 * Readers will remember a parallel to this ode in Carlyle's famous 
 chapter on Louii the Unforgotten. No modern has rivalled Carlyle 
 in his inheritance of this satire, except it be he whom Carlyle called 
 " that lew blackguard Heine," 
 
414 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 10. All of them answer and say to thee, — 
 
 " Thou, too, made flaccid like us, 
 
 To US' hast been levelled I 
 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 assemblj'. 
 
 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 1 
 
 IV. 
 
 Who see thee at thee are gazing ; 
 
 Upon they 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 Ls loosed not 
 
 (Each of them) homeward. 
 All kings of peoples, yes all, 
 
 Are lying in their state ; 
 But thou 1 thou art llung from thy grave, 
 
 Like a stick that is loathsome. 
 Beshrouded with slain, the pierced of the swcrd 
 
 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- 
 
12 -xiv. 23.] BABYLON AND LUCIFER. 415 
 
 Shall not be mentioned for aye 
 
 Seed of the wicked ! 
 Set for his children a shambles, 
 
 For guilt of their fathers I 
 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 1 
 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 impossibiUty. 
 For what does he get from it but a weary and un- 
 intelligent 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.* 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 
 
 * 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 Jrom Ihe 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. 
 
xxiv.] THE MATERIAL EFFECTS OF SIN.' 417 
 
 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. 
 
 With the verj' 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 intro- 
 duced 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 hke 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 
 
 VOL. I. 27 
 
4i8 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 right- 
 eousness 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 savo 
 everything that He had made; and, behold, it was very good. 
 
xxiv.] THE MATERIAL EFFECTS OF SIN. 419 
 
 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 destruc- 
 tion 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 
 
4ZO THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 fixed- 
 ness 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, per- 
 haps, 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 fsllen out of the covenant relation with God an 
 
xxiv.] THE Material effects of sin. 421 
 
 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 cove- 
 nant grace ? The world is also. Does man fall ? So 
 does the world, becoming with him profane. The con- 
 sequence 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 in- 
 destructible 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 novf, 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 com- 
 mitted to the flames. At such a crisis as the confla- 
 gration 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 pro- 
 visional 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 visible- 
 ness and locality of the Divine majesty, a place where 
 the. people of God may gather to bless His holy name. 
 
422 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 sur- 
 roundings 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, com- 
 plicating 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 
 
xxiv.] THE MATERIAL EFFECTS OF SIN. 423 
 
 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 signa- 
 ture, and will mark the strongest faces with the sad 
 symptoms of that mental break-down, for which unre- 
 strained 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 
 shall surely die, God connects this other : Cursed ts 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 iii 
 business, then every bit of wealth he gathers is a con- 
 firmation of the motives and tempers in which he con- 
 ducted 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 dis- 
 honesty 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 
 
424 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 itahcs : 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 accumu- 
 lation of propel ty is the result of certain customs, habits 
 and laws. In its own powerful interest property per- 
 petuates 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 pre- 
 decessor 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 
 
).] THE MATERIAL EFFECtS UF SiN. 4^5 
 
 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 enervat- 
 ing. 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 
 
426 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH 
 
 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 defray 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 cir- 
 cumstances, 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 
 
xxiv.] THE MATERIAL EFFECTS OF SIN. 427 
 
 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 evan- 
 gelic 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 miay con- 
 tinue into his new life, they are experienced by him 
 no rriore as the just penalties of an angry God, but 
 as the loving, sanctifying chastisements of his Father 
 in heaven. 
 
CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 GOnS 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 con- 
 tradict 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.* 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.! Then, secondly, through these verses 
 
 *The mention of Moab (xxv. 10, ll) is also consistent with a pre- 
 exilic date, but does not necebsarily imply it. 
 
 '\ E.g., xxv. 6 — 8, lO, II ; xxvii. lO, II, 9, 12, 13. 
 
XXV — xxvii.] GOD'S POOR. 429 
 
 which point to a pre-exilic date there are woven, 
 almost inextricably, phrases of actual exile : expres- 
 sions of the sense of living on a level and in contact 
 with the heathen (xxvi. 9, lO); 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 re- 
 population 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. 
 
 This bare statement of the allusions of the prophecy 
 will give the ordinary reader some idea of the difficul- 
 ties 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 im- 
 mediate 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 
 
430 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 sup- 
 ported by either of two possible interpretations of 
 that difficult verse xxvii. lO: 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 ; 
 
XXV.— xxvii.] GOD\S POOR. 43I 
 
 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 unmis- 
 takable 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 conserva- 
 tive 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 evan- 
 gelical prophecy. In their experience of religion, their 
 characterisations of God's people, their expressions of 
 taith, their missionary hopes and hopes of immortality, 
 
432 THK BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 con- 
 tinued 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 : peer and needy ; but in the original 
 they are three. In chap. xxv. 4 : Thou hast been a 
 
XXV.— xxvii.] GOD'S POOR. 433 
 
 stronghold to the poor and a stronghold to the needy, poor 
 renders a Hebrew word, "dal," literally wavering, 
 tottering, infirm, then slender or lean, then poor in 
 fortune and estate ; needy literally renders the Hebrew 
 " 'ebhySn/' Latin egenus. In chap. xxvi. 6 : the foot of 
 the poor and the steps of the needy, needy renders " dal," 
 while poor renders '"ani," a passive iovca^forced, 
 afflicted, oppressed, then wretched, whether under per- 
 secution, 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 afQicting 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 un- 
 fortunate ; the earliest Greeks regarded beggars as 
 the peculiar proteges of Heaven. Greek philosophy 
 developed a capacity for enriching the soul in mis- 
 fortune ; Stoicism gave imperishable proof of how 
 bravely a man could hold poverty and pain to be things 
 indifferent, and how much gain from such inc^lifference 
 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 
 
 VOL. I. 28 
 
434 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 sensi- 
 tive nerves of the Hebrew ? 
 
 Let us see how this conscience was developed. In 
 the East poverty scarcely ever means physical dis- 
 advantage 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, i^gain, 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 im.agined, 
 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 un- 
 fortunate 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 subgtance, 
 he grows poor in spirit. It was by developing, with the 
 
XXV.— xxvii.] GOD'S POOR. 435 
 
 aid of God's Spirit, this quicli conscience and this deep 
 desire for God, wliich in tlie East are the very soul ol 
 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 ex- 
 pression 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 
 
436 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 fresh from Himself a poet's soul into "the day biggin'" 
 of an Ayrshire ploughman, what a revelation we re- 
 ceived 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 in- 
 different. 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 
 
XXV.— xxvii.] GOD'S POOR. 437 
 
 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. i — 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 j udgement is to come 
 when the Lord shall destroy the two Leviathans and the 
 great Dragon of the west (xxvii. i). It is followed by the 
 restoration of Israel to the state in which Isaiah (chap 
 V. I ) sang so sweetly of her. A pleasant vineyard, sing ye of 
 
438 THE. BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 : / 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 seise hold of My strength; let hint 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 men- 
 tion 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 
 m.other Rebekah's womb, Israel and Edom were at either 
 open war or burned towards each other with a hate, which 
 was the more intense for wanting opportunities of grati- 
 fication. 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 
 
XXV.— xxvii.] GOD'S POOR. 439 
 
 attended their invasions of Edom, and Jewish psalms of 
 vengeance are never more flagrant than vs^lien they touch 
 the name of the children of Esau. The only gentle 
 utterance of the Old Testament upon Israel's here- 
 ditary foe is a comfortless enigma. Isaiah's Oracle for 
 Dttmah (xxii. 1 1 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, ambigu- 
 ous 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 sell- 
 ing 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 call- 
 ing 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 
 
440 THE BOOK OF ISAJAH. 
 
 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 chal- 
 lenges 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.* Chap. xxxv. opens with a pro- 
 spect 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 
 
 * Even at the risk of incurring Canon Cheyne's charge of "ineradi- 
 cable 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 con- 
 dition of Israel after the return ; " but vv. 4 and lo are undoubtedly 
 addressed to Jews still in exile and undelivered. 
 
xJtv.— xxvii.j GOD'S POOH. 44I 
 
 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 
 jackaVs 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 high- 
 way, 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 high- 
 way 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, 
 vea 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 ever- 
 lasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall overtake 
 gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. 
 4. So Israel was to come home. But to Israel 
 
442 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 ihey shall say in that 
 day, Lo, this is our God: we have waited for Hun, 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 coun- 
 trymen 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 ban- 
 quet oj 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 
 
XXV.— xxvii.] GOD'S POOR. 443 
 
 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 en- 
 joyed, the possession of these only makes more painful 
 the shortness of Hfe itself. This hfe 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,* from 
 which there is no return ? 
 
 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 con- 
 nection 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." 
 
 * H.'jsekiah's expression for death, xxxviii. 12, 
 
xxvi. 14—19.] THE RESURRECTION. 44S 
 
 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 sub- 
 ject 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 desiroyest 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 visi- 
 tation 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 esta- 
 blished 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.* In face of The Trouble 
 
 • 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. Bredcnkamp suggests 
 that the persons meant are themselves the dead. Jehovah has glori- 
 fied the Church on earth ; but the dead below are still in trouble, and 
 pour out prayers (Virgil's " preces fundunt," JEneid, vi., 55), beneath this 
 punishment which God causes to pass on all men (ver, 14). Breden- 
 kamp bases this exegesis chiefly on the word for " prayer," which means 
 chirping or whispering, a kind of voice imputed to the shades by the 
 
446 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 onlj' resource. Israel's feelings in pre- 
 sence 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 be/ore 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 ivith 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 accom- 
 plished upon it in our return, our restoration and our 
 enjoyment of Thy presence — we make not the earth sal- 
 vation, neither are the inhabitants- of the world' born.* 
 
 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 
 
 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 incan- 
 tation. I therefore have felt compelled to understand it as used in 
 this passage of the living, whose only resource in face of death — Coa's 
 distipline par excellence— is to pour out incantations. If it be objected 
 'hat the prophet would scarcely parallel the ordinary incantations on 
 -.er.aif of the dead with supplications to Jehovah, the answer is that 
 he is talking poetically or popularly. 
 
 * English version, /nto.'j ; •>., like our expression for the birth of 
 animals, dropped. 
 
xxvi. 14—19.] THE RESURRECTION. 447 
 
 sound, ver. 19 peals forth the promise of the resurrec- 
 tion — 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 ! ray 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 rum, and only the 
 sepulchres of ages standing grim and steadfast, she 
 addressed some despairing double of herself; and 
 secondly speaking q/" 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* 
 
 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 dint; 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 
 
 * Technical Hebrew word for the inhabitants of the underworld- 
 Ms shades. 
 
448 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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.* 
 
 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 sint. 
 
 * Extrccted from the Assyrian Descent of Istar to Hades (Dr. 
 Jeremirs' German translation, p. ii, and Records of the Past, i., 145). 
 
sxvi. 14—19.] THE RESURRECTION. 449 
 
 whidi 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* 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 ! 
 
 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 them- 
 selves 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 ex- 
 pounded. 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 
 
 * Cf. James i. 17. 
 VOL. I. 29 
 
450 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 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 repop\ilation of 
 the holy territory. A restoration of the State or com- 
 munity 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 bringcth doivn 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 
 
xxvi. 14—19-] THE RESURRECTION. 451 
 
 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 resurrec- 
 tion. 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, / 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 I'eturn 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 
 da}' which is an article of the Christian faith — if any 
 one should bring this objection, then let Iiim 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 de- 
 scribed the restoration of the people, whom exile had 
 
452 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. 
 
 Starved with a famine of ordinances, to a feast in Zton 
 of jat 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— ^/;e 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 ofi 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, a)id He shall save us; this is Jehovah : we 
 have waited for Him ; ive will rejoice and be glad in His 
 salvation. Thus over all doubts, and in spite of uni- 
 versal human experience, the prophet depends for 
 immortality on God Himself. In chap. xxvi. 3 our 
 version beautifully renders, Tliou wilt keep him in 
 perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Tht^e, because he 
 triisteth 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 rightecus- 
 ness, by the love Thou hast vouchsafed, we lift our- 
 selves 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 Isaiah. Date b.c. 
 
 Chapters of the 
 Exposition. 
 
 i. . . . 
 
 701 
 
 I., XIX., p. 311 ff. 
 
 ii.-iv. . , 
 
 740-735 
 
 II. 
 
 V. . . • 
 
 735 
 
 III. 
 
 vi. . • 
 
 740; vviitten 735 
 
 727 IV., XXVI., 391 f. 
 
 vii.-ix. 7 , , 
 
 734-732 
 
 VI. 
 
 vii. 14 ff. . 
 
 734 
 
 vn. 133 
 
 viii. . . , 
 
 734-733 . 1 
 
 VII. 135 
 
 ix. 1-7 . . , 
 
 732 . . 
 
 VII. 136 
 
 ix. 8-x. 4 
 
 735 
 
 III. 47ff. 
 
 ^. 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-J2 
 
 705 
 
 XVII. 272 
 
 xv.-xvi. 12 . 
 
 ? 
 
 XVII. 273 
 
 xvi. 13, 14 . 
 
 711 or 704? . 
 
 XVII. 273 
 
 xvii. i-ii 
 
 HetHcen 736 and 
 
 ?32 XVII. 274 
 
 xvii. 12-14 • 
 
 ? 
 
 XVII. 274, 277, 281 f. 
 
 xviii. . , 
 
 711 or towards 70 
 
 I? XVII. 275 
 
 xix. . , 
 
 703 iir r.fter 700? 
 
 XVII. 275, 278. 284 lif. 
 
 XX. . • 
 
 711-709 
 
 XI. 198-200, XVII. 276 
 
 xxi. i-ro , 
 
 Probably 709 
 
 XI. 2CI, XVII. 276 
 
 xxi. II, 12 . , 
 
 IJeluct:!! 704 and ' 
 
 roi 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 . a 
 
 VIII. 149 
 
 xxix.-xxxii. . , 
 
 • 
 
 p. 207 
 
454 
 
 INDEX TO CHAPS, t.— XXXIX. 
 
 Chapters of Isaiah. 
 xxix. 
 
 Date b.c. 
 About 703 . 
 
 Chapters of the 
 Exposition. 
 XII. 
 
 XXX. 
 
 
 About 702 . 
 
 XIII. 
 
 xxxi. . 
 
 
 About 702 . 
 
 XIV. 
 
 xxxii. 1-8 , 
 
 
 About 702? . 
 
 XV. 
 
 xxxii. 9-20 • 
 
 
 Date uncerlaia 
 
 XVI. 
 
 xxxiii. . , 
 xxxiv. . 
 
 
 701 
 ? 
 
 XX., XXI., 207, 304 
 XXIX. 438 fif. 
 
 XXXV. . 
 
 
 ? • • 
 
 XXIX. 440 f. 
 
 xxxvi. I 
 
 
 701 
 
 303 f. 
 
 xxxvi. 2-xxxvii. 
 
 
 701 .. , 
 
 303 f- 
 
 xxxvi. 2-22 . 
 
 
 701 
 
 XXII. 303 £ 
 
 xxxvii. . 
 
 
 701 .. . 
 
 xxin. 
 
 xxxviii. -xxxix. 
 
 
 Date uncertain 
 
 XXV. 304 
 
 xxxviii. 
 xxxix. . 
 
 
 
 XXVI. 393 
 
 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, 
 An.hropomorphism, 144. 
 A.-abia, 277. 
 jvram, 94, 103 ff. 
 Ashdod, 198. 
 Assyria and Assyrians, 53, 92 f., 
 
 95i 97> '°3 (■) 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 cha- 
 racter, 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, 
 
 Kkron, 308 f. 
 
 Eliakim, 317. 
 
 Ethiopia, 93, 222, 275. 
 
 Faith, moral results of, 106 f., 163 
 f. ; power to shape history, 
 109, 352 ff. 
 
 Fatalism, no. 
 
 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, 636. 
 
 Holy Spirit, 185—188. 
 
 Immanuel, 102, 115, 124 ff., 133 ff. 
 
 Immortality, 385 ff., 394 ff., 410, 
 444 ff- 
 
 Individual, the, and the com- 
 munity, 389 ff. 
 
 Inspiration, 123 ff., 213, 372. 
 
 Isaiah: apprenticeship, 19; youth, 
 21, 59; a son of Jerusalem, 
 22 ; threefold vision, 23 — 25 ; 
 idealist, 25; realist, 27 ; pro- 
 phet, 30 ; patriotism, a con- 
 science 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 ol 
 Israel, lOI, 284, 2S8 ; no 
 fatalist, no; habit of appeal- 
 ing to the people, 119; saved 
 from the popular drift, 121 ; 
 scorn, 127 ; sanity, 109, 154 f., 
 166, 300; comp. with Crom- 
 well, 160 ff., 220; self-control, 
 166; regard for animals, 190; 
 walks stripped for a siga 
 
4S6 
 
 INDEX OF SUBJECTS. 
 
 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 fif., 169 f., 211 f , 
 231 f., 243, 867 f, 279, 
 Book IV., passim. 
 
 "King Lear," 49, 55. 
 
 Land question, 41 flf. 
 Language, abuse of, 260. 
 
 Maher-shalal-hash-baz, 120. 
 Mazzini, 84—86. 
 Merodach-baladan, 200, 376. 
 Messiah, 89, 90, 115 if., 129, 131 — 
 
 144, 180 ff., 249. 
 Moab, 94, 273. 
 Monotheism, moral and political 
 
 advantages, 108 — no; growth 
 
 in Israel, 357, 363. 
 
 Name of the Lord, 233 ff. 
 
 Nature, fourfold use of by the 
 prophets, 16 i. ; redemption 
 of, 188 ; destruction of, 417 ff. 
 
 Palestine, 92. 
 
 People, the, ultimately respon- 
 sible, 119, 198, 224 ff. 
 Philistines, 94, 272. 
 
 PhcEnicia, 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, loi, 126, 
 
 129, a.n<i passifn. 
 Resurrection, 387, 444 ff. 
 Return from exile, 195, 401 ff., 
 
 429, 440 f., 450. 
 Righteousness, Isaiah's doctrine 
 
 of, 344 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 £ 
 
 Uzziah, 59 f., 98. 
 
 War, 51. 
 
 Women, Isaiah to, 262, 
 
 Wrath of God, 47 f., 55. 
 
REV. DR. ALEXANDER BRUCE'S WORKS. 
 
 THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS. 
 
 By Alexander Balmain Bruce, D.D., Author of "The Parabolic 
 
 Teaching of Christ." Svo, cloth. $2.50. 
 
 This work, tliough constructed on a different method, may be regarded as a corn- 
 pan on to my work on The Parabolic Teaching of Christ, published a few -years 
 ago. In the Fifth and Sixth Lectures I have considered from my point of view, at 
 considerable length, a large number of the miraculous narratives, and made observa- 
 tions on nearly the whole of the narratives of this character contained in the Gospels. 
 My object in these portions of the work is not to expound homiletically the wholt 
 narrative in which a miracle is recorded, but to inquire whether the event recorded be 
 indeed a miracle, 
 
 " // nvill take rank ai once among the standard treatises upon its always impor- 
 tant and engrossing thetne. It is an elaborate study — the fruit of -wide -reaching and 
 profound research and patient reflection. The res^dt of these studies is that the 
 volume is a powerful defense of the -miracles as an essential feature of the religion of 
 Christ, It is a cause of congratulation to the "whole Christian public that so valuable 
 course of lectures has been given to the whole world in so available shape," — Boston 
 
 CONGREGATIONALIST. 
 
 "An exhaustive discussion of the New Testament Miracles, The topics are 
 candidly, lucidly, and very ably considered. The volume is a rich addition to our 
 apologetic literature, which every Biblical student will desire to add to his library."- 
 2xon^s Herald. 
 
 The Parabolic Teaching of Christ. 
 
 A Systematic and Critical Study of the Parables of our Lord. By Rev. 
 Prof. A. B. Bruce, D.D. i vol., 8vo, cloth, 527 pp. Price, I2.50. 
 
 *'A work which will at once take its place as a classic on the Parables of our Sa- 
 viour. No ministershould think of doing without it." — American Presbyterian Review. 
 
 American Literary Churchman says : '* We recommend this book with the most 
 confident earnestness. It is a book to be bought and kept : it has both depth and 
 breadth and minute accuracy ; it has a living sympathy with the teaching of the Para- 
 bles and with the spirit of the Master." 
 
 ENGLISH NOTICES. 
 
 " Prof. Bruce brings to his task the learning and the liberal and finely sympathetic 
 spirit which are the best gifts of an expositor of Scripture. His treatment of his subject 
 is vigorous and original, and he avoids the capital mistake of overlaying his exegesis 
 with a mass of other men's views." — Spectator. 
 
 ■' The studies of the Parables ar^ thorough, scholarly, suggestive and practical. 
 Fulhiess of discussion, reverence of treatment, and sobriety of judgment, mainly char- 
 acterize this work." — Christian World. ,. . . . , 
 
 "Each Parable is most thoughtfully worked out, and muchnew light is thus thrown 
 on the difficulties which surround many of these beautiful and suggestive examples of 
 Divine teaching." — Clergymen* s Magazine. 
 
 "This volume has only to be known to be welcomed, not by students alone, but by 
 all earnest students ol Christ's oracles. On no subject has Dr. Bruce spoken more 
 wisely than on the question why Jesus spoke in parables. The one end the author sets 
 before himself is, to find out what our Lord really meant. And this he does with a 
 
 clearness and fullness worthy of all praise. Familiar as we are with some oJ 
 the best and most popular works on the Parables, we do not know any to 
 which we could look for so much aid In our search after the very meaning 
 which Christ wouia nave us find in His vior&.s."—Noncm/armist. 
 
 Copies sent by mail, postpnhl, on receipt of price. 
 
 A. 0. ARMSTRONG & SON, 714 Broadway, New York, 
 
 5 
 
STANDARD RELIGIOUS WORKS. 
 
 IS THERE SALVATION AFTER DEATH? 
 
 A Treatise on the Gospel in the Intermediate State, 
 
 By E. p. Morris, D.D., LL.D., Professor in Lane Theological Sem- 
 inary, Cincinnati. Crown 8vo, cloth, $1.25. 2d Edition. 
 
 M. v. Obserzier %3Lys\ "The various views are stated with fairness and precision, 
 the specific passages of Scripture, bearing upon the subject, are carefully considered, 
 as well as the general testimony of Scripture in relation to it. We commend the 
 volume to ministers and teachers." 
 
 N. Y. Evangelist : " Clear in -method and cogent in argutnent, it is saturated 
 throughout nvtth the large literature 0/ its subject, zs/ree/roin all acerbity and un- 
 fairness, and is loyalto God's Word as the final test 0/ Christian truth. It will settle 
 doubt and confirm faith" 
 
 THE HUMILIATION OF CHRIST 
 
 In its Physical, Ethical, and Official Aspects. 
 
 (Being the Sixth of the Cunningham Lectures.) By Rev. A. B. Bruce, 
 D.D. Octavo, cloth, gilt top, $2.50. Uniform with the same 
 author's "Parabolic Teaching of Christ," and "Miraculous 
 Element in the Gospels." 
 
 " These lectures are luell worthy of the r.ame they bear, and of their precursors 
 in the series: and the hook in which they arej>ublished, -with ample notes and refer- 
 ences, luill he valuable to theologians, supplying a want in the literature of the subject, 
 and containing many fruitful germs of thought. Dr. Bruce' s style is uniformly 
 clear and vigorous, and this book has the rare advantage of being at once stimulating 
 and satisfying to the mind in a high degree. He has given us a book that will really 
 
 advance the theological understanding of the great truth that forms its subject " 
 
 British and Foreign Evangelical Review. 
 
 The English Churchman says : " The title of the book gives but a faint concep- 
 tion of the value and wealth of its contents Dr. Brace's work is really one 
 
 of exceptional value: and no one can read it without perceptible gain in theoloEical 
 knowledge." 
 
 BY REV. DR. A. B. BRUCE. 
 
 THE TRAINING OF THE TWELVE, 
 
 Or, PASSAGES OUT OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 Exhibiting the twelve Disciples of Jesus under Discipline for the Apostle- 
 ship. Uniform with same Author's "The Humiliation of Christ," 
 &c. Octavo, nearly 600 pages, cloth, gilt top, $2.50. 
 
 "A really great book on an important, large, and attractive subject— a book full of 
 loving, wholesome profound thoughts about the fundamentals of Christian faith and 
 practice. — British and Foreign Evangelical Review. 
 
 ■• Full of suggestion and savour. It should be the companion of the minister, for the 
 theme is particularly related to himself, and he would find it a very pleasant and wofA- 
 ^h\ii comp!imon."—Spurgeon's Sivard and Trowel. 
 
 ■' A more wise scholarly, and more helpful work has not been published for many 
 years past. — Ivesleyan Magazine. ' 
 
 Copies sent by mail, post-paid, on receipt of price, by 
 
 A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON, 714 Broadway, New York. 
 4 
 
DR. WM. M. TAYLOR'S LATEST WORK. 
 
 THE PARABLES OF OUR SAVIOUR. 
 
 Expounded and Illustrated. By Wm. M. Taylor, D.D., LL.D. 
 Uniform with same author's *^ Limitations of Life^' and *' Contrary 
 Winds,'' and other Sermons. Crown 8vo, cloth. $1.75. net. 
 
 " To Archbuhop Trench, who more than any other English writer has brought 
 patristic lore to bear upon the illustration of the parables^ every later author -must 
 express his peculiar obligations: but the recent "works of Pr^. Bruce and Goebel 
 have broken, new ground m this department, and viy aim has been to turn their fruit- 
 ful suggestions to good homiletical account. The little vols, if Dr. Dad's — only the 
 first -f "which was in my hands when th. se discourses zuere pj-epared — are full of 
 richest nuggets; and th? Expositions of William Arnot are characteriz-d by the 
 masculine sense, rich Christian experience, and striking illustrations for which he 
 was so remarkable. But the present wo^k, tvhile indebted in different respects to all 
 these authors* will be found to be in others independent of them all." — From Author's 
 Preface. 
 
 N, y. Observer says : " Dr. Taylor shows in this work his large acquaintance 
 with this portion of religious literature. A better book for the study, the Sunday 
 school, and the Christian has not been issued this season." 
 
 Methodist Recorder : "Dr. Taylor's style is clear and strong, ana fie brings out 
 with great distinctness the leading thoughts contained in each parable. It will be read 
 with pleasure and profit by thoughtful Christians. The volume is one of more than 
 ordinary richness." 
 
 Cincinnati Herald and Presbyter : "They are rich in truth, simple and plain in 
 style, and give evidence of ripe scholarship. They are suitable for all classes of read- 
 ers, and cannot be read without profit." 
 
 JLuthera?i Quarterly: "They are clear and direct in style, abound inapt itlus 
 nations, are textually faithful, and breathe a devout and scholarly spirit." 
 
 Christian World : ' ' One cannot help but be struck with the fact, as he reads these 
 discourses, that the author has brought to bear on their exposition an acute and yet 
 wonderfully practical mind." 
 
 Christian Leader : "Recent research has opened up great wealth of fresh lore, 
 bearing upon the suggestions of the parables, and these Dr. Taylor has not only 
 mastered, but assimilated." 
 
 Congregationalist : "The whole series is characterized in a remarkable degree 
 by strong common sense and a shrewd insight into human nature and needs, as well as 
 by the loyal purpose to lead men and women to God." 
 
 NEW WORK BY REV. W. M. TAYLOR, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 JOHN KNOX. 
 
 With a fine Steel Portrait. Engraved by Holl, from a Painting in the 
 possession of Lord Somerville. i2mo, cloth. $1.25. net- 
 
 This work gives a vivid, comprehensive and accurate account of the life and work 
 of the great Scottish Reformer. It includes a careful and well ordered summary of the 
 career of Knox in England^ as that has been brought to light by the recent investiga- 
 tions of Lorimer and others. Particular attention has been given to the course 01 
 events in Scotland during the last thirteen years of the Reformer's^ life, and his inter- 
 views with Queen Mary, as well as his work h\ the reconstruction of the Scottish 
 Church, are described with fullness of detail and independence of judgment. The story 
 is admirably told, the interest being maintained from first to last, so that the bonJi 
 win be at once delightful to the young and instructive to those of maturer years. 
 
 Copies sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of price. 
 
Contrary Winds and Other Sermons. 
 
 Crown Zvo Volume, Cloth. $1.75 net. j^d Edition. 
 
 " This work touches on numerous phases of life and thought and 
 experience, showing that the author has h'ved through a vast deal and 
 has been made the richer and stronger by it. It leaves the impression 
 of wisdom that comes from actual experience, dealing with life rather 
 than speculations, and so comes home to the heart and conscience. It 
 SHOWS A WIDE RANGE OF READING AND CLOSE GRAPPLE WITH THE 
 DIFFICULT PROBLEMS OF OUR TIME. Such preaching is tonic and in- 
 vigorating. It strengthens the heart and fortifies the will to overcome 
 trials and conquer temptations and achieve victory." — N. V. C/irisiian 
 al Work. 
 
 The Congregationalist says : "Its variety of theme and the never- 
 failing intellectual power which it illustrates, the author's reverent posi- 
 tiveness of faith, his broad and intimate knowledge of human nature, 
 and the richness of his personal spiritual ex])eriences — never obtruded 
 but always underlying his words — render it a volume of rare and precious 
 value to the Christian believer, and A capital specimen of manly, 
 BUSINESS-LIKE DISCUSSION TO ALL OTHERS WHO CARE TO READ 
 
 WHAT A Christian has to say for his religion." 
 
 N. Y. Churchman: "Sermons practical in their nature, full of 
 deep thought and wise counsel. They will have as they deserve a wide 
 circulation. 
 
 Now Ready— 4th Edition of 
 
 THE LIMITATIONS OF LIFE 
 
 AND OTHER SERMONS. 
 
 By WM. M. TAYLOR, D.D. 
 
 With a Fine Portrait on Steel by Ritchie. Crown 8vo 
 Vol., Extra Cloth, $1.75. net. 
 
 "In variety of theme, in clearness and penetration of vision, in 
 distinctness of aim, in intensity of purpose, in energy and well-directed 
 effort, etc., this volume is perhaps without its equal in the language." 
 
 — The Scotsman. 
 
 Providence Journal : " The directness, earnestness, descriptive and 
 illustrative power of the preacher, and his rare gift for touching the con- 
 science and the heart, are fully exemplified in these eloquent discourses." 
 
 iV. Y. Evangelist: "They have the noble simplicity and clearness 
 of the truth itself, and which, fixing the attention of the reader from the 
 beginning, holds it to the end. It is impossible to read them without 
 the constant sense of the personality of the author." 
 
 Copies sent on receipt of price, post-paid. 
 
REV. PR, HEWRY B, SWITH'S WORKS, 
 
 systemofchristian theology 
 
 By Henry B. Smith, D.D., LL.D. Edited by Wm. S. Karr, D.D. 
 Octavo vol. 650 pages. Cloth. (3d Edition.) I3.50. 
 
 "The importance of this publication can hardly be 
 over-estimated. Dr. Smith, while living, exerted an 
 influence on Christian thought second to that of no 
 one In this country. And to-day his opinions and ut- 
 terances on points of Christian doctrine are quoted as 
 of the highest authority." 
 
 *' We hazard little in saying that Prof. Smith's ' System of Christian Theology ' will 
 take its place at once in the very foremost rank of the great American treatises on 
 dogmatics. It is in.a peculiar sense representative in its combination of keen analytical, 
 philosophic power and vivid perception of the imperative wants of the human heart. 
 . . . The book, as a whole, is a monument of profound Christian thought. No one 
 could have composed it who was not impressed, as Prof. Smith was, with the supreme 
 dignity and value of the science to which the best years of his life were devoted, and at 
 the same time with the infinite possibilities of that sphere of divine knowledge into 
 which this science aims to penetrate." — N. V. Evangelist. 
 
 The Herald and Presbyter says : "There is no part of this work that is not a valu- 
 able addition to the theological literature of the subject which it treats. The whole 
 volume is a product of theological ability of the very first order, and of wide and thor- 
 ough scholarship. . . . Its style is clear and sparkling. In those portions of the 
 work in which the theme is elahorated, it rises to heights of real eloquence. , . . 
 We have been given an elaborate theological treatise, which must take a place abreast 
 of the ablest treatises in divinity to be found in our language." 
 
 INTRODUCTION TO CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY— LECTURES ON 
 APOLOGETICS. By Henry B. Smith, D.D. Edited by Wm. 
 S. Karr, D.D. 2 vols, in one. Price reduced to $1.50. 
 " As these two works properly belong together, it has been thought 
 
 advisable to publish them as one volume, giving the author's complete 
 
 survey of the field, as well as his earlier and later treatment of some of 
 
 the subjects." 
 
 " No teacher in this country, and few anywhere, had a more thorough acquaintance 
 with this large and abstruse subject, and with its enormous literature, His severe and 
 carefully trained logical faculty, his cool and dispassionate judgment, his extensive 
 learning, and his nervous and transparent style, lend to this, as to all his other produc- 
 tions a profound interest and a peculiar charm. It will be an invaluable manual, not 
 only 'to the professional student, but to every thoughtful reader who seeks to justify the 
 ■ways of God to man."— N. Y. Tribune. 
 
 HENRY BOYNTON SMITH— His Life and Work. Edited by his 
 Wife. With a fine Portrait on steel by Ritchie. Octavo vol., 
 cloth. $2.50. 
 
 This Memoir of the lamented Prof. Smith gives a faithful picture of 
 his character and public career. The story is deeply mteresting, and 
 while it fully justifies his reputation as one of the most accomplished 
 scholars and theologians, it also shows him to have been a man of very 
 rare personal attractions. tt- j 
 
 NY. Observer ■ "Dr. Smith's life was full of incident and adventure. His education 
 wa-, splendid. Foreign travel in youth broadened his view, enlarged h.s acquamtancc 
 with universities, with men, books, and life. The brightest mtellects discerned his grenl- 
 ness. As a pastir, preacher, teacher, lecturer and professor, as a reviewer and editor 
 he always made the mark of a first-rate workman domg everything well The loving 
 hand of the wife has fitly held out to the eyes of the world, and bound up " *'= bund e 
 such evidence of his greatness and worth, that the present generation and pos^^^^^^^ 
 know something of what the Church lo st when this light w ent out before eventide. 
 
 Copies sent on receipt of pnce, postpaid. 
 
 A. C, ARMSTRONG & SON, 714 Broadway, New York. 
 
 13 
 
A DICTIONARY OF RELIC80US SUBJECTS. 
 
 CLASSIFIED GEMS OF THOUGHT 
 
 FROM THE GREAT WRITERS AND PREACHERS OF ALL AGES. 
 
 In convenient fonn for use as a Dictionary of Ready Reference on 
 Religious Subjects. Edited by Rev. F. B. Proctor, supervised 
 in proof by Principal Henry Wace, D.D., both of King's College, 
 London. Royal octavo volume, 850 pages, including a full index of 
 32 pages. Strongly bound in cloth, $5.50 ; in half morocco, $6.50. 
 
 A Ready Means of Comparing Views (Critical 
 and Suggestive) with the Great Writers of All 
 Ages. Treating Upward of 3,000 Subjects. 
 
 OCCUPYING A FIELD COVERED BY NO OTHER PUBLICATION. 
 
 A thoroughly critical and suggestive classification of the best religious 
 thought — ancient and Tnodern — including also, as a special feature, pas- 
 sages remarkable for lucidity in the treatment of difficult themes. 
 
 As a ready means of comparing views with eminent writers and 
 preachers on a wide range of subjects, it occupies a field entirely its own. 
 Upward of 3,000 sitbjects {in alphabetical order) appear in the list of 
 titles, and among the large number of authorities quoted are many not 
 readily accessible in other forms. 
 
 The plan adopted in the preparation of the work adds much to its 
 utility in securing just the ends desired. Each important subject receives 
 careful analysis at the hands of the author, afld the citations are so placed 
 as to develop each phase of the subject separately. In this way the best 
 thought of many writers is applied directly to the elucidation of the great 
 problems of the day, and in a form to be available for immediate use. 
 
 ENGLISH NOTICES OF THIS WORK. 
 
 "Incomparably one of the most useful books of the kind recently published." 
 — Noncoufortn ist. 
 
 "One of the best of the many collections of choice literary extracts now in circula- 
 tion. It is not a book of anecdotes, but a casket filled with gems of thought." — Prim- 
 itive Methodist. 
 
 " It contains innumerable quotations from authors and divines of all ages. . . . 
 To preachers whose libraries are limited, or who are too much occupied for extensive 
 reading, these 'Gems' will prove invaluable." — Christian World Pulpit. 
 
 "This book of thoughts and pregnant sayings asks for a place as a book of refer- 
 ence, which may be opened anywhere and at any time, that it may furnish a train of 
 thought, and help to elucidate and interpret that Word which is able to make us wise 
 unto salvation. ^Ve think it will not ask in vain." — The Rock. 
 
 " No one supplied with ' Gems of Thought' should be guilty of a dry sermon." — 
 Ecclesiastical Gazette. 
 
 "Ministers are sure to value it, and find it ofgreat service in their work."— TV/nr 
 Freeman. 
 
 " Entitled to very high praise. . . . The selections are for the most part admir- 
 able, . , , It is likely to prove one of the most useful volumes that has been issued 
 from the press for some time," — The Commonwealth. 
 
 CoMes sent by mail, postpaid^ on receipt of price. 
 
BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE. 
 
 TALKS WITH YOUNG MEN. 
 
 By J. Thain Davidson. i2mo, in handsome cloth binding, illuminated 
 cover. Price, $1.25. 
 
 " These talks are direct, practical and pungent, such as young men like to hear, 
 rhey are crowded with points tif counsel and direction ; they will be invaluable to any 
 young man, and all so plainly and forcibly told, and so fully illustrated, that one can but 
 pursue the reading of them to the end. The graphic descriptions of human nature, and 
 sharp laying open of motive in worldly and selfish living, show an unusually keen 
 sense of observation and understanding of the human heart. It should have a wide 
 circulation." — N. V. Evangelist. 
 
 Rev. Mr. SPURGEON says : " The author gives young men fine 
 advice — full of grace and thought — enlivened by story and proverb, fresh 
 with sympathy, and on fire with zeal. These short talks are just what 
 they should be, and all that they further need is to be largely distributed 
 among the crowds of our advancing manhood, jo BEGIN TO READ IS 
 TO BE BOUND TO CONTINUE; THE TALKS ARE SO SENSIBLE 
 THAT NO ONE WISHES TO SILENCE THE TALKER-BY LAYING 
 ASIDE THE BOOK." 
 
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 readers wherever it is known. The talks are fervent and SIBECI AP- 
 PEALS TO THE HEABT. THE STTLE IS ANIMATED AND PICITJB- 
 ESQUE. ANJD THE BOOK WILL BE BEAD BY ALL WHO BTHT II." 
 
 Ey the same Author. 
 
 FOREWARNED-FOREARMED. 
 
 In cloth. Uniform with " Talks With Young Men " i2mo. $1.25. 
 
 Methodist Recorder : " To young men we would specially recommend this useful, 
 earnest, and interesting book. They will find themselves not preached to, but talked 
 with, and that they have in Mr. Davidson a friend wise, tender and true. Fathers 
 could not do better than place this excellent volume in the hands of their sons at once." 
 
 DR. DAVIDSON'S NEW BOOK FOR YOUNG MEN. 
 
 THE CITY YOUTH. 
 
 Uniform with " Talks With Young Men." i2mo, cloth. $1.25. 
 
 It has been the Author*s aim, in the preparation of this book, to supply a genial 
 and useful Friend^ who will talk cheerily yet seriously to the new-comer, and put 
 him on his guard against the moral dangers by which he is certain to be beset. 
 
 THE CHURCHETTE: 
 
 A Year's Sermons and Parables for the Young. 
 By the Rev. J. R. Howatt. Uniform with " Talks With Young Men." 
 Cloth. $1.25. 
 Literary IVortd : "Short, simple, cheery, colloquial, imaginative, impressive, the 
 sermons yield abundant evidence that, as he says, his ' aim has been to speak to chil- 
 dren in the sunshine.* There is also a freshness, not to say an originality, about the 
 subjects selected and their treatment, which gives a special charm to the book." 
 
DR. DAVIDSON'S NEW BOOK for the YOUNG 
 
 SURE TO SUCCEED. 
 
 i2mo volume, handsomely bound, illuminated cloth. Price, $1.25 
 
 CONTENTS: 
 
 The Secret of a Successful Life. 
 
 What is Man ? 
 
 Art Thou in Health ? 
 
 Physical Recreation. 
 
 The Body to be Cared for. 
 
 Strong in Divine Grace. 
 
 Giants in these Days. 
 
 Doing Exploits. 
 
 Fighting the Lion. 
 
 The Way to Prosper. 
 
 Why not Confess Christ? 
 
 A Smooth Road, but a Fatal 
 
 Ending. 
 Four Anchors out of the Stern. 
 A Choice Young Man. 
 The Model Christian. 
 Sobriety of Mind. 
 Right Hearts and Tight Hands. 
 Our Father's Business. 
 The Secret of Strength. 
 Our Duty to God and Man. 
 
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 this volume to all who are interested in promoting the welfare of young 
 men. Tlie counsel it gives is infused with so much common sense and prac- 
 tical wisdom, that it must command the respect, if not the hearty assent, 
 of every young man to whom it comes. " 
 
 Christian Herald: "A book full of sound advice to young men, 
 showing that the most successful life in the world without Christ is only 
 failure." 
 
 Phila. Presbyterian : ' ' The eminent author recognizes the needs of the 
 body as well as of the soul, and shows himself in sympathy with the aims 
 and ambitions of the young. His style is clear, and the arguments are so 
 true that they cannot fail of conviction." 
 
 Journal and Messenger : " A father may well put this work into the- 
 hands of his son; and committees should make a note of it for 
 
 their SUNDAY-SCHOOL LIBRARIES." 
 
 Baltimore Baptist : " We should be glad to see this book in the hands 
 of every young man in the land. Good would result." 
 
 iV. V. Witness : "Any one desirous of awakening in a young man as- 
 pirations to a nobler plane of living, will do well to give him this book.'' 
 
 Zion's Herald: "Practical, plain-spoken addresses to young men. 
 They are written in an easy and interesting, yet forcible and pungent, 
 style, and convey wholesome truths which all young men would do well to 
 follow." 
 
 Copies sent by mail on receipt of price. 
 
 A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON, 714 Broadway, New York. 
 
-^<:fZ^ '-'^5^