_GOD: A SACRAMENT._
ISAIAH xl. 12-31.
Such are the Four Voices which herald the day of Israel's redemption.
They are scarcely silent, before the Sun Himself uprises, and horizon
after horizon of His empire is displayed to the eyes of His starved
and waiting people. From the prologue of the prophecy, in ch. xl.
1-11, we advance to the presentation, in chs. xl. 12-xli., of its
primary and governing truth--the sovereignty and omnipotence of God,
the God of Israel.
We may well call this truth the sun of the new day which Israel is
about to enter. For as it is the sun which makes the day, and not the
day which reveals the sun; so it is God, supreme and almighty, who
interprets, predicts and controls His people's history, and not their
history, which, in its gradual evolution, is to make God's sovereignty
and omnipotence manifest to their experience. Let us clearly understand
this. The prophecy, which we are about to follow, is an argument not
so much from history to God as from God to history. Israel already
have their God; and it is because He is what He is, and what they
ought to know Him to be,[42] that they are bidden believe that their
future shall take a certain course. The prophet begins with God,
and everything follows from God. All that in these chapters lends
light or force, all that interprets the history of to-day and fills
to-morrow with hope, fact and promise alike, the captivity of Israel,
the appearance of Cyrus, the fall of Babylon, Israel's redemption, the
extension of their mission to the ends of the earth, the conversion
of the Gentiles, the equipment, discipline and triumph of the Servant
Himself,--we may even say the expanded geography of our prophet, the
countries which for the first time emerge from the distant west within
the vision of a Hebrew seer,--all are due to that primary truth about
God with which we are now presented. It is God's sovereignty which
brings such far-off things into the interest of Israel; it is God's
omnipotence which renders such impossible things practical. And as
with the subjects, so with the style of the following chapters. The
prophet's style is throughout the effect of his perfect and brilliant
monotheism. It is the thought of God which everywhere kindles his
imagination. His most splendid passages are those, in which he soars
to some lofty vision of the Divine glory in creation or history; while
his frequent sarcasm and ridicule owe their effectiveness to the sudden
scorn, with which, from such a view, scattering epigrams the while,
he sweeps down upon the heathen's poor images, or Israel's grudging
thoughts of his God. The breadth and the force of his imagination, the
sweep of his rhetoric, the intensity of his scorn, may all be traced
to his sense of God's sovereignty, and are the signs to us of how
absolutely he was possessed by this as his main and governing truth.
This, then, being the sun of Israel's coming day, we may call what
we find in ch. xl. 11-xli. the sunrise--the full revelation and
uprising on our sight of this original gospel of the prophet. It is
addressed to two classes of men; in ch. xl. 12-31 to Israel, but
in ch. xli. (for the greater part, at least) to the Gentiles. In
dealing with these two classes the prophet makes a great difference.
To Israel he presents their God, as it were, in sacrament; but to
the Gentiles he urges God's claims in challenge and argument. It is
to the past that he summons Israel, and to what they ought to know
already about their God; it is to the future, to history yet unmade,
that he proposes to the Gentiles they should together appeal, in
order to see whether his God or their gods are the true Deity. In
this chapter we shall deal with the first of these--God in sacrament.
* * * * *
The fact is familiar to all, that the Old Testament nowhere feels the
necessity of proving the existence of God. That would have been a proof
unintelligible to those to whom its prophets addressed themselves. In
the time when the Old Testament came to him, man as little doubted the
existence of God as he doubted his own life. But as life sometimes
burned low, needing replenishment, so faith would grow despondent and
morbid, needing to be led away from objects which only starved it, or
produced, as idolatry did, the veriest delirium of a religion. A man
had to get his faith lifted from the thoughts of his own mind and the
works of his own hand, to be borne upon and nourished by the works of
God,--to kindle with the sunrise, to broaden out by the sight of the
firmament, to deepen as he faced the spaces of night,--and win calmness
and strength to think life into order as he looked forth upon the
marshalled hosts of heaven, having all the time no doubt that the God
who created and guided these was his God. Therefore, when psalmist or
prophet calls Israel to lift their eyes to the hills, or to behold how
the heavens declare the glory of God, or to listen to that unbroken
tradition, which day passes to day and night to night, of the knowledge
of the Creator, it is not proofs to doubting minds which he offers: it
is spiritual nourishment to hungry souls. These are not arguments--they
are sacraments. When we Christians go to the Lord's Supper, we go not
to have the Lord proved to us, but to feed upon a life and a love
of whose existence we are past all doubt. Our sacrament fills all
the mouths by which needy faith is fed--such as outward sight, and
imagination, and memory, and wonder, and love. Now very much what the
Lord's Supper is to us for fellowship with God and feeding upon Him,
that were the glory of the heavens, and the everlasting hills, and the
depth of the sea, and the vision of the stars to the Hebrews. They were
the sacraments of God. By them faith was fed, and the spirit of man
entered into the enjoyment of God, whose existence indeed he had never
doubted, but whom he had lost, forgotten, or misunderstood.
Now it is as such a minister of sacrament to God's starved and
disheartened people that our prophet appears in ch. xl. 12-31.
There were three elements in Israel's starvation. Firstly, for nearly
fifty years they had been deprived of the accustomed ordinances
of religion. Temple and altar had perished; the common praise and
the national religious fellowship were impossible; the traditional
symbols of the faith lay far out of sight; there was at best only
a precarious ministry of the Word. But, in the second place, this
famine of the Word and of Sacraments was aggravated by the fact that
history had gone against the people. To the baser minds among them,
always ready to grant their allegiance to success, this could only
mean that the gods of the heathen had triumphed over Jehovah. It is
little wonder that such experience, assisted by the presentation,
at every turn in their ways, of idols and a splendid idol-worship,
the fashion and delight of the populations through whom they were
mixed, should have tempted many Jews to feed their starved hearts at
the shrines of their conquerors' gods. But the result could only be
the further atrophy of their religious nature. It has been held as a
reason for the worship of idols that they excite the affection and
imagination of the worshipper. They do no such thing: they starve
and they stunt these. The image reacts upon the imagination, infects
it with its own narrowness and poverty, till man's noblest creative
faculty becomes the slave of its own poor toy. But, thirdly, if the
loftier spirits in Israel refused to believe that Jehovah, exalted
in righteousness, could be less than the brutal deities whom Babylon
vaunted over Him, they were flung back upon the sorrowful conviction
that their God had cast them off; that He had retreated from the
patronage of so unworthy a people into the veiled depths of His own
nature. Then upon that heaven, from which no answer came to those
who were once its favourites, they cast we can scarcely tell what
reflection of their own weary and spiritless estate. As, standing
over a city by night, you will see the majestic darkness above
stained and distorted into shapes of pain or wrath by the upcast
of the city's broken, murky lights, so many of the nobler exiles
saw upon the blank, unanswering heaven a horrible mirage of their
own trouble and fear. Their weariness said, He is weary; the ruin
of their national life reflected itself as the frustration of His
purposes; their accusing conscience saw the darkness of His counsel
relieved only by streaks of wrath.
But none of these tendencies in Israel went so far as to deny that
there was a God, or even to doubt His existence. This, as we have
said, was nowhere yet the temptation of mankind. When the Jew lapsed
from that true faith, which we have seen his nation carry into
exile, he fell into one of the two tempers just described--devotion
to false gods in the shape of idols, or despondency consequent upon
false notions of the true God. It is against these tempers, one after
another, that ch. xl. 12-31 is directed. And so we understand why,
though the prophet is here declaring the basis and spring of all
his subsequent prophecy, he does not adopt the method of abstract
argument. He is not treating with men, who have had no true knowledge
of God in the past, or whose intellect questions God's reality. He
is treating with men, who have a national heritage of truth about
God, but they have forgotten it; who have hearts full of religious
affection, but it has been betrayed; who have a devout imagination,
but it has been starved; who have hopes, but they are faint unto
death. He will recall to them their heritage, rally their shrinking
convictions by the courage of his own faith, feed their hunger after
righteousness[43] by a new hope set to noble music, and display to
the imagination that has been stunted by so long looking upon the
face of idols the wide horizons of Divine glory in earth and heaven.
His style corresponds to his purpose. He does not syllogize; he
exhorts, recalls and convicts by assertion. The passage is a series
of questions, rallies and promises. _Have ye not known? have ye not
heard?_ is his chief note. Instead of arranging facts in history or
nature as in themselves a proof for God, he mentions them only by way
of provoking inward recollections. His sharp questions are as hooks
to draw from his hearers' hearts their timid and starved convictions,
that he may nourish these upon the sacramental glories of nature and
of history.
Such a purpose and style trust little to method, and it would
be useless to search for any strict division of strophes in the
passage.[44] The following, however, is a manifest division of subject,
according to the two tempers to which the prophet had to appeal. Verses
12 to 25, and perhaps 26, are addressed to the idolatrous Jews. But in
26 there is a transition to the despair of the nobler hearts in Israel,
who, though they continued to believe in the One True God, imagined
that He had abandoned them; and to such vv. 27 to 31 are undoubtedly
addressed. The different treatment accorded to the two classes is
striking. The former of these the prophet does not call by any title of
the people of God; with the latter he pleads by a dear double name that
he may win them through every recollection of their gracious past,
_Jacob_ and _Israel_ (ver. 27). Challenge and sarcasm are his style
with the idolaters, his language clashing out in bursts too loud and
rapid sometimes for the grammar, as in ver. 24; but with the despondent
his way is gentle persuasiveness, with music that swells and brightens
steadily, passing without a break from the minor key of pleading to the
major of glorious promise.
1. AGAINST THE IDOLATERS. A couple of sarcastic sentences upon
idols and their manufacture (vv. 19, 20) stand between two majestic
declarations of God's glory in nature and in history (vv. 12-17
and 21-24). It is an appeal from the worshippers' images to their
imagination. _Who hath measured in his hollow hand the waters, and
heaven ruled off with a span? Or caught in a tierce the dust of the
earth, and weighed in scales mountains, and hills in a balance?
Who hath directed the spirit of Jehovah, and as man of His counsel
hath helped Him to know? With whom took He counsel, that such an
one informed Him and taught Him in the orthodox path, and taught
Him knowledge and helped Him to know the way of intelligence?_ The
term translated _orthodox path_ is literally _path of ordinance or
judgement, the regular path_, and is doubtless to be taken along
with its parallel, _way of intelligence_, as a conventional phrase
of education, which the prophet employed to make his sarcasm the
stronger. _Lo nations! as a drop from a bucket, and like dust in
a balance, are they reckoned. Lo the Isles!_[45] _as a trifle He
lifteth. And Lebanon is by no means enough for burning, nor its
brute-life enough for an offering. All the nations are as nothing
before Him, as spent and as waste are they reckoned for Him._
When he has thus soared enough, as on an archangel's wings, he swoops
with one rapid question down from the height of his imagination upon
the images.
_To whom then will ye liken God, and what likeness will ye range by
Him?_
_The image! A smith cast it, and a smelter plates it with gold, and
smelts silver chains. He that is straitened for an offering--he
chooseth a tree that does not rot, seeks to him a cunning carver to
set up an image that will not totter._[46]
The image shrivels up in face of that imagination; the idol is
abolished by laughter. There is here, and for almost the first time
in history, the same intellectual intolerance of images, the same
burning sense of the unreasonableness of their worship, which has
marked all monotheists, and turned even the meekest of their kind
into fierce scorners and satirists--Elijah, Mohammed, Luther, and
Knox.[47] We hear this laughter from them all. Sometimes it may sound
truculent or even brutal, but let us remember what is behind it. When
we hear it condemned--as, in the interests of art and imagination,
its puritan outbursts have often been condemned--as a barbarian
incapacity to sympathise with the æsthetic instincts of man, or to
appreciate the influence of a beautiful and elevating cult, we can
reply that it was the imagination itself which often inspired both
the laughter at, and the breaking of, images, and that, because the
iconoclast had a loftier vision of God than the image-maker, he has,
on the whole, more really furthered the progress of art than the
artist whose works he has destroyed. It is certain, for instance,
that no one would exchange the beauties of the prophecy now before
us, with its sublime imaginations of God, for all the beauty of all
the idols of Babylonia which it consigned to destruction. And we dare
to say the same of two other epochs, when the uncompromising zeal of
monotheists crushed to the dust the fruits of centuries of Christian
art. The Koran is not often appealed to as a model of poetry, but
it contains passages whose imagination of God, broad as the horizon
of the desert of its birth, and swift and clear as the desert dawn,
may be regarded as infinitely more than compensation--from a purely
artistic point of view--for the countless works of Christian ritual
and imagery which it inspired the rude cavalry of the desert to
trample beneath the hoofs of their horses. And again, if we are to
blame the Reformers of Western Christendom for the cruelty with which
they lifted their hammers against the carved work of the sanctuary,
do not let us forget how much of the spirit of the best modern art
is to be traced to their more spiritual and lofty conceptions of
God. No one will question how much Milton's imagination owed to his
Protestantism, or how much Carlyle's dramatic genius was the result
of his Puritan faith. But it is to the spirit of the Reformation,
as it liberated the worshipper's soul from bondage to artificial
and ecclesiastical symbols of the Deity, that we may also ascribe
a large part of the force of that movement towards Nature and the
imagination of God in His creation which inspired, for example,
Wordsworth's poetry, and those visual sacraments of rainbow, storm,
and dawn to which Browning so often lifts our souls from their
dissatisfaction with ritual or with argument.
From his sarcasm on the idols our prophet returns to his task of
drawing forth Israel's memory and imagination. _Have ye not known?
Have ye not heard? Hath it not been told you from the beginning?
Have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth? He that is
enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its dwellers are before
Him as grasshoppers; who stretcheth as a fine veil the heavens, and
spreadeth them like a dwelling tent_--that is, as easily as if they
were not even a pavilion or marquee, but only a humble dwelling
tent. _He who bringeth great men to nothing, the judges of the earth
He maketh as waste. Yea, they were not planted; yea, they were not
sown; yea, their root had not struck in the earth, but_ immediately
_He blew upon them and they withered, and a whirlwind like stubble
carried them away. To whom, then, will ye liken Me, that I may match
with him? saith the Holy One._ But this time it is not necessary to
suggest the idols; they were dissolved by that previous burst of
laughter. Therefore, the prophet turns to the other class in Israel
with whom he has to deal.
2. TO THE DESPAIRERS OF THE LORD. From history we pass back to nature
in ver. 26, which forms a transition, the language growing steadier
from the impetuosity of the address to the idolaters to the serene
music of the second part. Enough rebuke has the prophet made. As he
now lifts his people's vision to the stars, it is not to shame their
idols, but to feed their hearts. _Lift up on high your eyes and see!
Who hath created these? Who leads forth by number their host, and all
of them calleth by name, by abundance of might, for He is powerful in
strength, not one is amissing._ Under such a night, that veils the
confusion of earth only to bring forth all the majesty and order of
heaven, we feel a moment's pause. Then as the expanding eyes of the
exiles gaze upon the infinite power above, the prophet goes on. _Why
then sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel? Hidden is my way
from Jehovah, and from my God my right hath passed._
Why does the prophet point his people to the stars? Because he is
among Israel on that vast Babylonian plain, from whose crowded and
confused populations, struggling upon one monotonous level, there
is no escape for the heart but to the stars. Think of that plain
when Nebuchadrezzar was its tyrant; of the countless families of
men torn from their far homes and crushed through one another upon
its surface; of the ancient liberties that were trampled in that
servitude, of the languages that were stifled in that Babel, of the
many patriotisms set to sigh themselves out into the tyrant's mud and
mortar. Ah heaven! was there a God in thee, that one man could thus
crush nations in his vat, as men crushed shell-fish in those days,
to dye his imperial purple? Was there any Providence above, that
he could tear peoples from the lands and seas, where their various
gifts and offices for humanity had been developed, and press them
to his selfish and monotonous servitude? In that medley of nations,
all upon one level of captivity, Israel was just as lost as the most
insignificant tribe; her history severed, her worship impossible,
her very language threatened with decay. No wonder, that from the
stifling crowd and desperate flatness of it all she cried, _Hidden is
my way from Jehovah, and from my God my right hath passed._
But from the flatness and the crowd the stars are visible; and it was
upon the stars that the prophet bade his people feed their hearts.
There were order and unfailing guidance; _for the greatness of His
might not one is missing_. And He is your God. Just as visible as those
countless stars are, one by one, in the dark heavens, to your eyes
looking up, so your lives and fortunes are to His eyes looking down
on this Babel of peoples. _He gathereth the outcasts of Israel....
He telleth the number of the stars._[48] And so the prophet goes on
earnestly to plead: _Hast thou not known? Hast thou not heard? that
an everlasting God is Jehovah, Creator of the ends of the earth.
He fainteth not, neither is weary. There is no searching of His
understanding. Giver to the weary of strength! And upon him that is
of no might, He lavisheth power. Even youths may faint and be weary,
and young men utterly fall; but they who hope in Jehovah shall renew
strength, put forth pinions like eagles, run and not weary, walk and
not faint._ Listen, ears, not for the sake of yourselves only, though
the music is incomparably sweet! Listen for the sake of the starved
hearts below, to whom you carry the sacraments of hope, whom you lift
to feed upon the clear symbols of God's omnipotence and unfailing grace.
This chapter began with the assurance to the heart of Israel of their
God's will to redeem and restore them. It closes with bidding the
people take hope in God. Let us again emphasize--for we cannot do so
too often, if we are to keep ourselves from certain errors of to-day
on the subject of Revelation--the nature of this prophecy. It is not
a reading-off of history; it is a call from God. No deed has yet been
done pointing towards the certainty of Israel's redemption; it is not
from facts writ large on the life of their day, that the prophet bids
the captives read their Divine discharge. That discharge he brings from
God; he bids them find the promise and the warrant of it in their God's
character, in their own convictions of what that character is. In order
to revive those convictions, he does, it is true, appeal to certain
facts, but these facts are not the facts of contemporary history which
might reveal to any clear eye, that the current and the drift of
politics was setting towards the redemption of Israel. They are facts
of nature and facts of general providence, which, as we have said, like
sacraments evidence God's power to the pious heart, feed it with the
assurance of His grace, and bid it hope in His word, though history
should seem to be working quite the other way.
This instance of the method of revelation does not justify two
opinions, which prevail at the present day regarding prophecy. In
the first place, it proves to us, that those are wrong who, too
much infected by the modern temper to judge accurately writers so
unsophisticated, describe prophecy as if it were merely a philosophy
of history, by which the prophets deduced from their observation of
the course of events their idea of God and their forecast of His
purposes. The prophets had indeed to do with history; they argued
from it, and they appealed to it. The history that was past was full
of God's condescension to men, and shone like Nature's self with
sacramental signs of His power and will: the history that was future
was to be His supreme tribunal, and to afford the vindication of the
word they claimed to have brought from Him. But still all this--their
trust in history and their use of it--was something secondary in
the prophetic method. With them God Himself was first; they came
forth from His presence, as they describe it, with the knowledge
of His will gained through the communion of their spirits with His
Spirit. If they then appealed to past history, it was to illustrate
their message; or to future, it was for vindication of this. But God
Himself was the Source and Author of it; and therefore, before they
had facts beneath their eyes to corroborate their promises, they
appealed to the people, like our prophet in ch. xl., to _wait on
Jehovah_. The day might not yet have dawned so as to let them read
the signs of the times. But in the darkness they _hoped in Jehovah_,
and borrowed for their starved hearts from the stars above, or other
sacrament, some assurance of His unfailing power.
Jehovah, then, was the source of the prophets' word: His character
was its pledge. The prophets were not mere readers from history, but
speakers from God.
But the testimony of our chapter to all this enables us also to
arrest an opinion about Revelation, which has too hurriedly run off
with some Christians, and to qualify it. In the inevitable recoil
from the scholastic view of revelation as wholly a series of laws and
dogmas and predictions, a number of writers on the subject have of
late defined Revelation as a chain of historical acts, through which
God uttered His character and will to men. According to this view,
Revelation is God manifesting Himself in history, and the Bible is
the record of this historical process. Now, while it is true that
the Bible is, to a large extent, the annals and interpretation of
the great and small events of a nation's history--of its separation
from the rest of mankind, its miraculous deliverances, its growth,
its defeats and humiliations, its reforms and its institutions; in
all of which God manifested His character and will--yet the Bible
also records a revelation, which preceded these historical deeds;
a revelation the theatre of which was not the national experience,
but the consciousness of the individual; which was recognised and
welcomed by choice souls in the secret of their own spiritual life,
before it was realised and observed in outward fact; which was
uttered by the prophet's voice and accepted by the people's trust in
the dark and the stillness, before the day of the Lord had dawned
or there was light to see His purposes at work. In a word, God's
revelation to men was very often made clear in their subjective
consciousness, before it became manifest in the history about them.
And, for ourselves, let us remember that to this day true religion is
as independent of facts as it was with the prophet. True religion is a
conviction of the character of God, and a resting upon that alone for
salvation. We need nothing more to begin with; and everything else, in
our experience and fortune, helps us only in so far as it makes that
primary conviction more clear and certain. Darkness may be over us, and
we lonely and starved beneath it. We may be destitute of experience to
support our faith; we may be able to discover nothing in life about us
making in the direction of our hopes. Still, let _us wait on the Lord_.
It is by bare trust in Him, that we _renew our strength, put forth
wings like eagles, run and not weary, walk and not faint_.
_Put forth wings--run--walk!_ Is the order correct? Hope swerves from
the edge of so descending a promise, which seems only to repeat
the falling course of nature--that droop, we all know, from short
ambitions, through temporary impulsiveness, to the old commonplace
and routine. Soaring, running, walking--and is not the next stage, a
cynic might ask, standing still?
On the contrary, it is a natural and a true climax, rising from the
easier to the more difficult, from the ideal to the real, from dream to
duty, from what can only be the rare occasions of life to what must be
life's usual and abiding experience. History followed this course. Did
the prophet, as he promised, think of what should really prove to be
the fortune of his people during the next few years?--the great flight
of hope, on which we see them rising in their psalms of redemption as
on the wings of an eagle; the zeal and liberality of preparation for
departure from Babylon; the first rush at the Return; and then the long
tramp, day after day, with the slow caravan, at the pace of its most
heavily-laden beasts of burden, when _they shall walk and not faint_
should indeed seem to them the sweetest part of their God's promise.
Or was it the far longer perspective of Israel's history that bade
the prophet follow this descending scale? The spirit of prophecy
was with himself to soar higher than ever before, reaching by truly
eagle-flight to a vision of the immediate consummation of Israel's
glory: the Isles waiting for Jehovah, the Holy City radiant in His
rising, and open with all her gates to the thronging nations; the
true religion flashing from Zion across the world, and the wealth
of the world pouring back upon Zion. And some have wondered, and
some scoff, that after this vision there should follow centuries of
imperceptible progress--five-and-a-half centuries of preparation
for the coming of the Promised Servant; and then--Israel, indeed
gone forth over the world, but only in small groups, living upon
the grudged and fitful tolerance of the great centres of Gentile
civilisation. The prophet surely anticipates all this, when he
places the _walking_ after the _soaring_ and the _running_. When he
says last, and most impressively, of his people's fortunes, that
they _shall walk and not faint_, he has perhaps just those long
centuries in view, when, instead of a nation of enthusiasts taking
humanity by storm, we see small bands of pioneers pushing their way
from city to city by the slow methods of ancient travel,--Damascus,
Antioch, Tarsus, Iconium, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth and
Rome,--everywhere that Paul and the missionaries of the Cross found
a pulpit and a congregation ready for the Gospel; toiling from day
to day at their own trades, serving the alien for wages, here and
there founding a synagogue, now and then completing a version of
their Scriptures, oftentimes achieving martyrdom, but ever living a
pure and a testifying life in face of the heathen, with the passion
of these prophecies at their hearts. It was certainly for such
centuries and such men that the word was written, _they shall walk
and not faint_. This persistence under persecution, this monotonous
drilling of themselves in school and synagogue, this slow progress
without prize or praise along the common highways of the world and
by the world's ordinary means of livelihood, was a greater proof of
indomitableness than even the rapture which filled their hearts on
the golden eve of the Return, under the full diapason of prophecy.
And so must it ever be. First the ideal, and then the rush at it with
passionate eyes, and then the daily trudge onward, when its splendour
has faded from the view, but is all the more closely wrapped round
the heart. For glorious as it is to rise to some great consummation
on wings of dream and song, glorious as it is, also, to bend that
impetus a little lower and take some practical crisis of life by
storm, an even greater proof of our religion and of the help our God
can give us is the lifelong tramp of earth's common surface, without
fresh wings of dream, or the excitement of rivalry, or the attraction
of reward, but with the head cool, and the face forward, and every
footfall upon firm ground. Let hope rejoice in a promise, which does
not go off into the air, but leaves us upon solid earth; and let
us hold to a religion, which, while it exults in being the secret
of enthusiasm and the inspiration of heroism, is daring and Divine
enough to find its climax in the commonplace.
FOOTNOTES:
[42] See xl. 21, _Have ye not known?_
[43] That is in the sense, in which our prophet uses the word, of
salvation. See Ch. XIV. of this volume.
[44] Some intention of division undoubtedly appears. Notice the
double refrain, _To whom will ye liken_, etc., of vv. 18 and 25;
and then at equal distance from either occurrence of this challenge
the appeal, _Dost thou not know_, etc., vv. 21 and 28. But though
these signs of a strict division appear, the rest is submerged by
the strong flood of feeling which rushes too deep and rapid for any
hard-and-fast embankments.
[45] See p. 109.
[46] If an idol leant over or fell that was the very worst of omens;
_cf._ the case of Dagon.
[47] When John Knox was a prisoner in France, "the officers brought
to him a painted board, which they called Our Lady, and commanded
him to kiss it. They violently thrust it into his face, and put it
betwixt his hands, who, seeing the extremity, took the idol, and
advisedly looking about, he cast it into the river, and said, 'Let
Our Lady now save herself; she is light enough; let her learn to
swim!' After that was no Scotsman urged with that idolatry."--Knox,
_History of the Reformation_.
[48] Psalm cxlvii.