5. Such, then, is the New Testament reflection of the Prophecy of the

Servant of the Lord, both as People and Person. Like all physical

reflections, this moral one may be said, on the whole, to stand

reverse to its original. In Isa. xl.-lxvi. the Servant is People

first, Person second. But in the New Testament--except for a faint

and scarcely articulate application to Israel in the beginning of

the gospels--the Servant is Person first and People afterwards. The

Divine Ideal which our prophet saw narrowing down from the Nation

to an Individual, was owned and realised by Christ. But in Him it

was not exhausted. With added warmth and light, with a new power of

expansion, it passed through Him to fire the hearts and enlist the

wills of an infinitely greater people than the Israel for whom it

was originally designed. With this witness, then, of history to the

prophecies of the Servant, our way in expounding and applying them is

clear. Jesus Christ is their perfect fulfilment and illustration. But

we who are His Church are to find in them our ideal and duty,--our

duty to God and to the world. In this, as in so many other matters,

the unfulfilled prophecy of Israel is the conscience of Christianity.

FOOTNOTES:

[160] _Cf._ _The Jewish Interpreters on Isa. liii._, Driver and

Neubauer, Oxford, 1877. Abravanel, who himself takes ch. liii. in a

national sense, admits, after giving the Christian interpretation,

that "in fact Jonathan ben Uziel, 'the Targumist,' applied it to the

Messiah, who was still to come, and this is likewise the opinion of

the wise in many of their Midrashim." And R. Moscheh al Shech, of

the sixteenth century, says: "See, our masters have with one voice

held as established and handed down, that here it is King Messiah

who is spoken of." (Both these passages quoted by Bredenkamp in his

commentary, p. 307.)

[161] Isa. lix. 5.

[162] _Id._ vi. 13; ix. 18; x. 17, 34; xlvii. 14.

[163] _Id._ xxi. 10; xxviii. 27; xl. 24; xli. 15 ff.

[164] _Id._ i. 31; xlvii. 14.

[165] Isa. lviii. 7.

[166] Undoubtedly taken from Isa. liii.

[167] _Cf._ with the Greek version of Isa. l. 4-7, Luke xviii. 31,

32; Matt. xxvi. 67.

[168] In Isa. xl.-lxvi. the Septuagint translates the Hebrew for

Servant by one or other of two words--παις and δουλος. Παις is used in

xli. 8; xlii. 1; xliv. 1 ff.; xliv. 21; xlv. 4; xlix. 6; l. 10; lii.

13. But δουλος is used in xlviii. 20; xlix. 3 and 5. In the Acts it is

παις that is used of Christ: "An apostle is never called παις (but only

δουλος) Θεου" (Meyer). But David is called παις (Acts iv. 25).

[169] Acts iii. 13, 26; iv. 27-30.

[170] Acts iii. 14; vii. 52.

[171] Acts viii. 30 ff.

[172] 1 Peter i. 19; ii. 22, 23; iii. 18.

[173] Rom. xv. 20 f.; 2 Cor. v. 21.

[174] Acts xiii. 47, after Isa. xlix. 6.

[175] Isa. l. 8, and Rom. viii. 33, 34.

[176] 2 Tim. ii. 24. We may note, also, how Paul in Eph. vi. takes

the armour with which God is clothed in Isa. lix. 17, breastplate

and helmet, and equips the individual Christian with them; and how,

in the same passage, he takes for the Christian from Isa. xl. the

Messiah's girdle of truth and the _sword of the Spirit,--he shall

smite the land with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his

lips shall he slay the wicked_.

CHAPTER XVIII.

_THE SERVICE OF GOD AND MAN._

ISAIAH xlii. 1-7.

We now understand, whom to regard as the Servant of the Lord. The

Service of God was a commission to witness and prophesy for God upon

earth, made out at first in the name of the entire nation Israel.

When their unfitness as a whole became apparent, it was delegated to

a portion of them. But as there were added to its duties of prophecy,

those of martyrdom and atonement for the sins of the people, our

prophet, it would seem, saw it focussed in the person of an individual.

In history Jesus Christ has fulfilled this commission both in its

national and in its personal aspects. He realised the ideal of

the prophet-people. He sacrificed Himself and made atonement for

the sins of men. But having illustrated the service of God in the

world, Christ did not exhaust it. He returned it to His people, a

more clamant conscience than ever, and He also gave them grace to

fulfil its demands. Through Christ the original destination of these

prophecies becomes, as Paul saw, their ultimate destination as well.

That Israel refused this Service or failed in it only leaves it more

clearly to us as duty; that Jesus fulfilled it not only confirms that

duty, but adds hope and courage to discharge it.

Although the terms of this Service were published nearly two thousand

five hundred years ago, in a petty dialect that is now dead, to a

helpless tribe of captives in a world, whose civilisation has long

sunk to ruin, yet these terms are so free of all that is provincial

or antique, they are so adapted to the lasting needs of humanity,

they are so universal in their scope, they are so instinct with

that love which never faileth, though prophecies fail and tongues

cease, that they come home to heart and conscience to-day with as

much tenderness and authority as ever. The first programme of these

terms is given in ch. xlii. 1-7. The authorised English version is

one of unapproachable beauty, but its emphasis and rhythm are not

the emphasis and rhythm of the original, and it has missed one at

least of the striking points of the Hebrew. The following version,

which makes no attempt at elegance, is almost literal, follows the

same order as the original that it may reproduce the same emphasis,

and, as far as English can, repeats the original rhythm. The point,

which it rescues from the neglect of the Authorised Version, is this,

that the verbs used of the Servant in ver. 4, _He shall not fade nor

break_, are the same as are used of the wick and the reed in ver. 3.

_Lo, My Servant! I hold by him;_

_My Chosen! Well-pleased is My soul!_

_I have set My Spirit upon him;_

_Law to the Nations he brings forth._

_He cries not, nor lifts up,_[177]

_Nor lets his voice be heard in the street.

Reed_ that is _broken he breaks not off,_

_Wick_ that is _fading he does not quench:_

_Faithfully brings he forth Law._

_He shall not fade neither break,_

_Till he have set in the Earth_[178] _Law;_

_And for his teaching the Isles are waiting._

_Thus saith the God, Jehovah,_

_Creator of the heavens that stretched them forth,_

_Spreader of Earth and her produce,_

_Giver of breath to the people upon her,_

_And of spirit to them that walk therein:_

_I, Jehovah, have called thee in righteousness,_

_To grasp thee fast by thy hand, and to keep thee,_

_And to set thee for a covenant of the People,_

_For a light of the Nations:_

_To open blind eyes,_

_To bring forth from durance the captive,_

_From prison the dwellers in darkness._

I. THE CONSCIENCE OF SERVICE.

As several of these lines indicate, this is a Service to Man, but what

we must first fasten upon is that before being a Service to Man it is

a Service for God. _Behold, My Servant_, says God's commission very

emphatically. And throughout the prophecy the Servant is presented as

chosen of God, inspired of God, equipped of God, God's creature, God's

instrument; useful only because he is used, influential because he is

influenced, victorious because he is obedient; learning the methods

of his work by daily wakefulness to God's voice, a good speaker only

because he is first a good listener; with no strength or courage but

what God lends, and achieving all for God's glory. Notice how strongly

it is said that God _holds by him, grasps him by the hand_. We shall

see that his Service is as sympathetic and comprehensive a purpose

for humanity as was ever dreamed in any thought or dared in any life.

Whether we consider its tenderness for individuals, or the universalism

of its hope for the world, or its gentle appreciation of all human

effort and aspiration, or its conscience of mankind's chief evil,

or the utterness of its self-sacrifice in order to redeem men,--we

shall own it to be a programme of human duty, and a prophecy of human

destiny, to which the growing experience of our race has been able to

add nothing that is essential. But the Service becomes all that to man,

because it first takes all that from God. Not only is the Servant's

sense of duty to all humanity just the conscience of God's universal

sovereignty,--for it is a remarkable and never-to-be-forgotten fact,

that Israel recognised their God's right to the whole world, before

they felt their own duty to mankind,--but the Servant's character

and methods are the reflection of the Divine. Feature by feature

the Servant corresponds to His Lord. His patience is but sympathy

with Jehovah's righteousness,--_I will uphold thee with the right

hand of My righteousness_. His gentleness with the unprofitable and

the unlovely--_He breaks not off the broken reed nor quenches the

flickering wick_--is but the temper of _the everlasting God, who giveth

power to the faint, and to them that have no might He increaseth

strength_. His labour and passion and agony, even they have been

anticipated in the Divine nature, for _the LORD stirreth up seal like

a man of war; He saith, I will cry out like a travailing woman_. In no

detail is the Servant above his Master. His character is not original,

but is the impress of his God's: _I have put My spirit upon him_.

There are many in our day, who deny this indebtedness of the human

character to the Divine, and in the Service of Man would have us turn

our backs upon God. Positivists, while admitting that the earliest

enthusiasm of the individual for his race did originate in the love

of a Divine Being, assert nevertheless that we have grown away from

this illusory motive; and that in the example of humanity itself we

may find all the requisite impulse to serve it. The philosophy of

history, which the extreme Socialists have put forward, is even more

explicit. According to them, mankind was disturbed in a primitive,

tribal socialism--or service of each other--by the rise of spiritual

religion, which drew the individual away from his kind and absorbed

him in selfish relations to God. Such a stage, represented by the

Hebrew and Christian faiths, and by the individualist political

economy which has run concurrent with the later developments of

Christianity, was (so these Socialists admit) perhaps necessary for

temporary discipline and culture, like the land of Egypt to starved

Jacob's children; but like Egypt, when it turned out to be the house

of bondage, the individualist economy and religion are now to be

abandoned for the original land of promise,--Socialism once more, but

universal instead of tribal as of old. Out of this analogy, which is

such Socialists' own, Sinai and the Ten Commandments are, of course,

omitted. We are to march back to freedom without a God, and settle

down to love and serve each other by administration.

But can we turn our backs on God, without hurting man? The natural

history of philanthropy would seem to say that we cannot. This

prophecy is one of its witnesses. Earliest ideal as it is, of a

universal service of mankind, it starts in its obligation from

the universal Sovereignty of God; it starts in every one of its

affections from some affection of the Divine character. And we have

not grown away from the need of its everlasting sources. Cut off

God from the Service of man, and the long habit and inherent beauty

of that Service may perpetuate its customs for a few generations;

but the inevitable call must come to subject conduct to the altered

intellectual conditions, and in the absence of God every man's ideal

shall surely turn from, How can I serve my neighbour? to, How can I

make my neighbour serve me? As our prophet reminds us in his vivid

contrast between Israel, the Servant of the Lord, and Babylon, _who

saith in her heart: I am, and there is none beside me_, there are

ultimately but two alternative lords of the human will, God and

Self. If we revolt from the Authority and Example of the One, we

shall surely become subject, in the long run, to the ignorance, the

short-sightedness, the pedantry, the cruelty of the other. These

words are used advisedly. With no sense of the sacredness of every

human life as created in the image of God, and with no example of an

Infinite Mercy before them, men would leave to perish all that was

weak, or, from the limited point of view of a single community or

generation, unprofitable. Some Positivists and those Socialists, who

do not include God in the society they seek to establish, admit that

they expect something like that to follow from their denial of God.

In certain Positivist proposals for the reform of charity, we are

told that the ideal scheme of social relief would be the one which

limited itself to persons judged to be of use to the community as a

whole; that is, that in their succour of the weak, their bounty to

the poor, and their care of the young, society should be guided, not

by the eternal laws of justice and of mercy, but by the opinions of

the representatives of the public for the time being and by their

standard of utility to the commonwealth. Your atheist-Socialist is

still more frank. In the state, which he sees rising after he has got

rid of Christianity, he would suppress, he tells us, all who preached

such a thing as the fear of the future life, and he would not repeat

the present exceptional legislation for the protection of women and

children, for whom, he whines, far too much has been recently done in

comparison with what has been enacted for the protection of men.[179]

These are, of course, but vain things which the heathen imagine

(and some of us have an ideal of socialism very different from the

godlessness which has usurped the noble name), but they serve to

illustrate what clever men, who have thrown off all belief in God,

will bring themselves to hope for: a society utterly Babylonian,

without pity or patience,--if it were possible for these eternal

graces to die out of any human community,--subject to the opinion of

pedants, whose tender mercies would be far more fatal to the weak and

poor than the present indifference of the rich; seriously fettering

liberty of conscience and destitute of chivalry. It may be that our

Positivist critics are right, and that the interests of humanity

have suffered in Christian times from the prevalence of too selfish

and introspective a religion; but whether our religion has looked

too intensely inward or not, we cannot, it is certain, do without a

religion that looks steadily up, owning the discipline of Divine Law

and the Example of an Infinite Mercy and Longsuffering.

But, though we had never heard of Positivism or of the Socialism

that denies God, our age, with its popular and public habits, would

still require this example of Service, which our prophecy enforces:

it is an age so charged with the instincts of work, with the ambition

to be useful, with the fashion of altruism; but so empty of the

sense of God, of reverence, discipline and prayer. We do not need

to learn philanthropy,--the thing is in the air; but we do need to

be taught that philanthropy demands a theology both for its purity

and its effectiveness. When philanthropy has become, what it is

so much to-day, the contest of rival politicians, the ambition of

every demagogue, who can get his head above the crowd, the fitful

self-indulgence of weak hearts, the opportunity of vain theorists,

and for all a temptation to work with lawless means for selfish

ends,--it is time to remember that the Service of Man is first of

all a great Service for God. This faith alone can keep us from the

wilfulness, the crotchets and the insubordination, which spoil so

many well-intentioned to their kind, and so wofully break up the

ranks of progress. Humility is the first need of the philanthropist

of to-day: humility, discipline and the sense of proportion; and

these are qualities, which only faith in God and the conscience of

law are known to bestow upon the human heart. It is the fear of God

that will best preserve us from making our philanthropy the mere

flattery of the popular appetite. To keep us utterly patient with

men we need to think of God's patience with ourselves. While to us

all there come calls to sacrifice, which our fellow-men may so

little deserve from us, and against which our self-culture can plead

so many reasons, that unless God's will and example were before us,

the calls would never be obeyed. In short, to be most useful in this

life it is necessary to feel that we are used. Look at Christ. To Him

philanthropy was no mere habit and spontaneous affection; even for

that great heart the love of man had to be enforced by the compulsion

of the will of God. The busy days of healing and teaching had between

them long nights of lonely prayer; and the Son of God did not pass to

His supreme self-sacrifice for men till after the struggle with, and

the submission to, His Father's will in Gethsemane.

II. THE SUBSTANCE OF SERVICE.

The substance of the Servant's work is stated in one word, uttered

thrice in emphatic positions. _Judgement for the nations shall he bring

forth.... According to truth shall he bring forth judgement.... He

shall not flag nor break, till he set in the earth_[180] _judgement._

The English word _judgement_ is a natural but misleading translation

of the original, and we must dismiss at once the idea of judicial

sentence, which it suggests. The Hebrew is "mishpat," which means,

among other things, either a single statute, or the complete body of

law which God gave Israel by Moses, at once their creed and their

code; or, perhaps, also the abstract quality of justice or right.

We rendered it as the latter in Isa. i.-xxxix. But, as will be seen

from the note below,[181] when used in Isa. xl.-lxvi. without the

article, as here, it is the "mishpat" of Jehovah,--not so much

the actual body of statutes given to Israel, as the principles

of _right_ or _justice_ which they enforce. In one passage it is

given in parallel to the civic virtues _righteousness_, _truth_,

_uprightness_, but--as its etymology compared with theirs shows

us--it is these viewed not in their character as virtues, but in

their obligation as ordained by God. Hence, _duty_ to Jehovah as

inseparable from His religion (Ewald), _religion_ as the law of

life (Delitzsch), _the law_ (Cheyne, who admirably compares the

Arabic ed-Dîn) are all good renderings. Professor Davidson gives

the fullest exposition. "It can scarcely," he says, "be rendered

'religion' in the modern sense, it is the equity and civil right

which is the result of the true religion of Jehovah; and though

comprehended under religion in the Old Testament sense, is rather,

according to our conceptions, religion applied in civil life. Of

old the religious unit was the state, and the life of the state was

the expression of its religion. Morality was law or custom, and

both reposed upon God. A condition of thought such as now prevails,

where morality is based on independent grounds, whether natural law

or the principles inherent in the mind apart from religion, did not

then exist. What the prophet means by 'bringing forth right' is

explained in another passage, where it is said that Jehovah's 'arms

shall judge the peoples,' and that the 'isles shall wait for His arm'

(ch. li. 5). 'Judgment' is that pervading of life by the principles

of equity and humanity which is the immediate effect of the true

religion of Jehovah."[182] In short, "mishpat" is not only the civic

righteousness and justice, to which it is made parallel in our

prophecy, but it is these with God behind them. On the one hand it is

conterminous with national virtue, on the other it is the ordinance

and will of God.

This, then, is the burden of the Servant's work, to pervade and

instruct every nation's life on earth with the righteousness and

piety that are ordained of God. _He shall not flag nor break, till he

have set in the earth Law_,--till in every nation justice, humanity

and worship are established as the law of God. We have seen that

the Servant is in this passage still some aspect or shape of the

people,--the people who are not a people, but scattered among the

brickfields of Babylonia, a horde of captives. When we keep that in

mind, two or three things come home to us about this task of theirs.

First, it is no mere effort at proselytism. It is not an ambition

to Judaise the world. The national consciousness and provincial

habits, which cling about so many of the prophecies of Israel's

relation to the world, have dropped from this one, and the nation's

mission is identified with the establishment of law, the diffusion

of light, the relief of suffering. _I will give thee for a light

to the nations: to open blind eyes, to bring out from durance the

bound, from the prison the dwellers in darkness._[183] Again, it is

no mere office of preaching, to which the Servant's commission is

limited, no mere inculcation of articles of belief. But we have here

the same rich, broad idea of religion, identifying it with the whole

national life, which we found so often illustrated by Isaiah, and

which is one of the beneficial results to religion of God's choice

for Himself of a nation as a whole.[184] What such a Service has to

give the world, is not merely testimony to the truth, nor fresh views

of it, nor artistic methods of teaching it; but social life under

its obligation, the public conscience of it, the long tradition and

habit of it, the breed--what the prophets call the _seed_--of it. To

establish true religion as the constitution, national duty, and regular

practice of every people under the sun, in all the details of order,

cleanliness, justice, purity and mercy, in which it had been applied

to themselves,--such was the Service and the Destiny of Israel. And

the marvel of so universal and political an ideal was, that it came

not to a people in the front ranks of civilisation or of empire,

but to a people that at the time had not even a political shape for

themselves,--a mere herd of captives, despised and rejected of men.

When we realise this, we understand that they never would have dared to

think of it, or to speak of it to one another, unless they had believed

it to be the purpose and will of Almighty God for them; unless they had

recognised it, not only as a service desirable and true in itself, and,

needed also by humanity, but withal as His "mishpat," His _judgement_

or _law_, who by His bare word can bring all things to pass. But before

we see how strongly He impressed them with this, that His creative

force was in their mission, let us turn to the methods by which He

commanded them to achieve it,--methods corresponding to its purely

spiritual and universal character.

III. THE TEMPER OF SERVICE.

1. _He shall not cry, nor lift up,

Nor make his voice to be heard in the street._

There is nothing more characteristic of our prophecy than its belief

in the power of speech, its exultation in the music and spell of

the human voice. It opens with a chorus of high calls: none are so

lovely to it as heralds, or so musical as watchmen when they lift up

the voice; it sets the preaching of glad tidings before the people

as their national ideal; eloquence it describes as a sharp sword

leaping from God's scabbard. The Servant of the Lord is trained in

style of speech; his words are as pointed arrows; he has the mouth of

the learned, a voice to command obedience. The prophet's own tones

are superb: nowhere else does the short sententiousness of Hebrew

roll out into such long, sonorous periods. He uses speech in every

style: for comfort, for bitter controversy, in clear proclamation,

in deep-throated denunciation: _Call with the throat_, _spare not_,

_lift up the voice like a trumpet_. His constant key-notes are,

_speak a word_, _lift up the voice with strength_, _sing_, _publish_,

_declare_. In fact, there is no use to which the human voice has ever

been put in the Service of Man, for comfort's sake, or for justice,

or for liberty, for the diffusion of knowledge or for the scattering

of music, which our prophet does not enlist and urge upon his people.

When, then, he says of the Servant that _he shall not cry, nor lift

up, nor make his voice to be heard in the street_, he cannot be

referring to the means and art of the Service, but rather to the

tone and character of the Servant. Each of the triplet of verbs he

uses shows us this. The first one, translated _cry_, is not the cry

or call of the herald voice in ch. xl., the high, clear Kārā; it

is ssa`aḳ, a sharper word with a choke in the centre of it meaning

_to scream_, especially under excitement. Then _to lift up_ is the

exact equivalent of our "to be loud." And if we were seeking to

translate into Hebrew our phrase "to advertise oneself," we could

not find a closer expression for it than to _make his voice be

heard in the street_. To be "screamy," to be "loud," to "advertise

oneself,"--these modern expressions for vices that were ancient as

well as modern render the exact force of the verse. Such the Servant

of God will not be nor do. He is at once too strong, too meek and

too practical. That God is with him, _holding him fast_, keeps him

calm and unhysterical; that he is but God's instrument keeps him

humble and quiet; and that his heart is in his work keeps him from

advertising himself at its expense. It is perhaps especially for the

last of these reasons that Matthew (in his twelfth chapter) quotes

this passage of our Lord. Jesus had been disturbed in His labours

of healing by the disputatious Pharisees. He had answered them,

and then withdrawn from their neighbourhood. Many sick were brought

after Him to His privacy, and He healed them all. But _He charged

them that they should not make Him known; that it might be fulfilled

which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying, Behold, My Servant

... he shall not strive, nor cry aloud, neither shall any one hear

his voice in the streets._ Now this cannot be, what some carelessly

take it for, an example against controversy or debate of all kinds,

for Jesus had Himself just been debating; nor can it be meant as

an absolute forbidding of all publishing of good works, for Christ

has shown us, on other occasions, that such advertisement is good.

The difficulty is explained, by what we have seen to explain other

perplexing actions of our Lord, His intensely practical spirit.

The work to be done determined everything. When it made argument

necessary, as that same day it had done in the synagogue, then our

Lord entered on argument: He did not only heal the man with the

withered hand, but He made him the text of a sermon. But when talking

about His work hindered it, provoked the Pharisees to come near with

their questions, and took up His time and strength in disputes with

them, then for the work's sake He forbade talk about it. We have

no trace of evidence that Christ forbade this advertisement also

for His own sake,--as a temptation to Himself and fraught with evil

effects upon His feelings. We know that it is for this reason we

have to shun it. Even though we are quite guiltless of contributing

to such publication ourselves, and it is the work of generous and

well-meaning friends, it still becomes a very great danger to us.

For it is apt to fever us and exhaust our nervous force, even when

it does not turn our heads with its praise,--to distract us and to

draw us more and more into the enervating habit of paying attention

to popular opinion. Therefore, as a man values his efficiency in the

Service of Man, he will not _make himself to be heard in the street_.

There is an amount of _making to be heard_ which is absolutely

necessary for the work's sake; but there is also an amount which can

be indulged in only at the work's expense. Present-day philanthropy,

even with the best intentions, suffers from this over-publicity, and

its besetting sins are "loudness" and hysteria.

What, then, shall tell us how far we can go? What shall teach us

how to be eloquent without screaming, clear without being loud,

impressive without wasting our strength in seeking to make an

impression? These questions bring us back to what we started with, as

the indispensable requisite for Service--some guiding and religious

principles behind even the kindliest and steadiest tempers. For many

things in the Service of Man no exact rules will avail; neither

logic nor bye-laws of administration can teach us to observe the

uncertain and constantly varying degree of duty, which they demand.

Tact for that is bestowed only by the influence of lofty principles

working from above. This is a case in point. What rules of logic

or "directions of the superior authority" can, in the Service of

Man, distinguish for us between excitement and earnestness, bluster

and eloquence, energy and mere self-advertisement; on whose subtle

differences the whole success of the service must turn. Only the

discipline of faith, only the sense of God, can help us here. The

practical temper by itself will not help us. To be busy but gives

us too great self-importance; and hard work often serves only to

bring out the combative instincts. To know that we are His Servants

shall keep us meek; that we are held fast by His hand shall keep us

calm; that His great laws are not abrogated shall keep us sane. When

for our lowliest and most commonplace kinds of service we think no

religion is required, let us remember the solemn introduction of the

evangelist to his story of the foot-washing. _Jesus knowing that the

Father had given all things into His hands, and that He came forth

from God and goeth unto God, riseth from supper, and layeth aside His

garments; and He took a towel, and girded Himself; then He poureth

water into the bason, and began to wash His disciples' feet._

2. But to meekness and discipline the Servant adds gentleness.

_Reed that is broken he breaks not off,_

_Wick that is fading he does not quench;_

_Faithfully brings he forth law._

The force of the last of these three lines is, of course,

qualificative and conditional. It is set as a guard against the abuse

of the first two, and means that though the Servant in dealing with

men is to be solicitous about their weakness, yet the interests of

religion shall in no way suffer. Mercy shall be practised, but so

that truth is not compromised.

The original application of the verse is thus finely stated by

Professor Davidson: "This is the singularly humane and compassionate

view the Prophet takes of the Gentiles,--they are bruised reeds

and expiring flames.... What the prophet may refer to is the human

virtues, expiring among the nations, but not yet dead; the sense of

God, debased by idolatries, but not extinct; the consciousness in

the individual soul of its own worth and its capacities, and the

glimmering ideal of a true life and a worthy activity almost crushed

out by the grinding tyranny of rulers and the miseries entailed by

their ambitions--this flickering light the Servant shall feed and

blow into a flame.[185]... It is the future relation of the 'people'

Israel to other peoples that he describes. The thought which has now

taken possession of statesmen of the higher class, that the point

of contact between nation and nation need not be the sword, that

the advantage of one people is not the loss of another but the gain

of mankind, that the land where freedom has grown to maturity and

is worshipped in her virgin serenity and loveliness should nurse

the new-born babe in other homes, and that the strange powers of

the mind of man and the subtle activities of his hand should not be

repressed but fostered in every people, in order that the product may

be poured into the general lap of the race--this idea is supposed to

be due to Christianity. And, immediately, it is; but it is older than

Christianity. It is found in this Prophet. And it is not new in him,

for a Prophet, presumably a century and a half his senior, had said:

_The remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many peoples as a dew

from the Lord, as showers upon the grass_ (Micah v. 7)."[186]

But while this national reference may be the one originally meant,

the splendid vagueness of the metaphor forbids us to be content

with it, or with any solitary application. For the two clauses are

as the eyes of the All-Pitiful Father, that rest wherever on this

broad earth there is any life, though it be so low as to be conscious

only through pain or doubt; they are as the healing palms of Jesus

stretched over the multitudes to bless and gather to Himself the

weary and the poor in spirit. We contrast our miserable ruin of

character, our feeble sparks of desire after holiness, with the

life, which Christ demands and has promised, and in despair we tell

ourselves, this can never become that. But it is precisely this that

Christ has come to lift to that. The first chapter of the Sermon on

the Mount closes with the awful command, _Be ye perfect, as your

Father in Heaven is perfect_; but we work our way back through

the chapter, and we come to this, _Blessed are they that hunger

and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled_; and to

this, _Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom

of heaven._ Such is Christ's treatment of the bruised reed and the

smoking flax. Let us not despair. There is only one kind of men,

for whom it has no gospel,--the dead and they who are steeped in

worldliness, who have forgotten what the pain of a sore conscience

is, and are strangers to humility and aspiration. But for all who

know their life, were it only through their pain or their doubt, were

it only in the despair of what they feel to be a last struggle with

temptation, were it only in contrition for their sin or in shame

for their uselessness, this text has hope. _Reed that is broken he

breaketh not off, wick that is fading he doth not quench._

This objective sense of the Servant's temper must always be the first

for us to understand. For more than he was, we are, mortal, ready

ourselves to _break and to fade_. But having experienced the grace,

let us show the same in our service to others. Let us understand

that we are sent forth like the great Servant of God, that man _may

have life, and have it more abundantly_. We need resolutely and

with pious obstinacy to set this temper before us, for it is not

natural to our hearts. Even the best of us, in the excitement of

our work, forget to think of anything except of making our mark, or

of getting the better of what we are at work upon. When work grows

hard, the combative instincts waken within us, till we look upon the

characters God has given us to mould as enemies to be fought. We are

passionate to convince men, to overcome them with an argument, to

wring the confession from them that we are right and they wrong. Now

Christ our Master must have seen in every man He met a very great

deal more to be fought and extirpated than we can possibly see in

one another. Yet He largely left that alone, and addressed Himself

rather to the sparks of nobility He found, and fostered these to a

strong life, which from within overcame the badness of the man,--the

badness which opposition from the outside would but have beaten into

harder obduracy. We must ever remember that we are not warriors but

artists,--artists after the fashion of Jesus Christ, who came not

to condemn life because it was imperfect, but to build life up to

the image of God. So He sends us to be artists; as it is written,

_He gave some apostles, and some prophets, and some pastors and

teachers_. For what end? For convincing men, for telling them what

fools they mostly are, for crushing them in the inquisition of their

own conscience, for getting the better of them in argument?--no, not

for these combative purposes at all, but for fostering and artistic

ones: _for the perfecting of the saints, for the building up of the

body of Christ; till we all come unto a full grown man, unto the

measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ_.

He who, in his Service of Man, practises such a temper towards the

breaking and the fading, shall never himself break or fade, as this

prophecy implies when it uses the same verbs in verses _three_ and

_four_. For he who is loyal to life shall find life generous to him;

he who is careful of weakness shall never want for strength.

IV. THE POWER BEHIND SERVICE.

There only remains now to emphasize the power that is behind Service.

It is, say verses _five_ and _six_, the Creative Power of God.

_Thus saith The God, Jehovah,_

_Creator of the heavens, that stretched them forth,_

_Spreader of the earth and her produce,_

_Giver of breath to the people upon her,_

_And of spirit to them that walk thereon,_

_I Jehovah have called thee in righteousness,_

_That I may grasp thee by thy hand, and keep thee._

Majestic confirmation of the call to Service! based upon the

fundamental granite of this whole prophecy, which here crops out into

a noble peak, firm station for the Servant, and point for prospect

of all the future. It is our easy fault to read these words of the

Creator as the utterance of mere ceremonial commonplace, blast of

trumpets at the going forth of a hero, scenery for his stage, the

pomp of nature summoned to assist at the presentation of God's

elect before the world. Yet not for splendour were they spoken, but

for bare faith's sake. God's Servant has been sent forth, weak and

gentle, with quiet methods and to very slow effects. _He shall not

cry, nor lift up, nor make his voice to be heard in the streets._

What chance has such, our service, in the ways of the world, where

to be forceful and selfish, to bluster and battle, is to survive

and overcome! So we speak, and the panic ambition rises to fight

the world with its own weapons, and to employ the kinds of debate,

advertisement and competition by which the world goes forward. For

this, the Creator calls to us, and marshals His powers before our

eyes. We thought there were but two things,--our own silence and the

world's noise. There are three, and the world's noise is only an

interruption between the other two. Across it deep calleth unto deep;

the immeasurable processes of creation cry to the feeble convictions

of truth in our hearts, We are one. Creation is the certificate that

no moral effort is a forlorn hope. When God, after repeating His

results in creation, adds, I have called thee in _righteousness_,

He means that there is some consistency between His processes in

creation, rational and immense as they are, and those poor efforts

He calls on our weakness to make, which look so foolish in face of

the world. Behind every moral effort there is, He says, Creative

force. Right and Might are ultimately one. Paul sums up the force of

the passage, when, after speaking of the success of his ministry, he

gives as its reason that the God of Creation and of Grace are the

same. _Therefore seeing we have received this ministry we faint not.

For God, who hath commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath

shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of God in

the face of Jesus Christ._

The spiritual Service of Man, then, has creative forces behind it; work

for God upon the hearts and characters of others has creative force

behind it. And nature is the seal and the sacrament of this. Let our

souls, therefore, dilate with her prospects. Let our impatience study

her reasonableness and her laws. Let our weak wills feel the rush of

her tides. For the power that is in her, and the faithful pursuance

of purposes to their ends, are the power and the character that work

behind each witness of our conscience, each effort of our heart for

others. Not less strong than she, not less calm, not less certain of

success, shall prove the moral Service of Man.

FOOTNOTES:

[177] The English equivalent is, _nor is loud_.

[178] This time with the article, so not _the land_ of Judah only,

but _the Earth_.

[179] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_.

[180] This time "arets" with the article. So not the _land_ of Judah

only but the world.

[181] The following are the four main meanings of "mishpat" in Isa.

xl.-lxvi.: 1. In a general sense, a legal process, xli. 1, _let us

come together to the judgement_, or _the law_ (with the article),

_cf._ l. 8, _man of my judgement_, _i.e._, my fellow-at-law, my

adversary; liii. 8, oppression and _judgement_, _i.e._, a judgement

which was oppressive, a legal injustice. 2. A person's _cause_ or

_right_, xl. 27, xlix. 4. 3. _Ordinance_ instituted by Jehovah

for the life and worship of His people, lviii. 2, _ordinances_ of

righteousness, _i.e._, either canonical _laws_, or ordinances by

observing which the people would make themselves righteous. 4. In

general, the sum of the laws given by Jehovah to Israel, _the Law_,

lviii. 2, _Law_ of their God; li. 4, Jehovah says _My Law_ (Rev. Ver.

_judgement_), parallel to "Torah" or Revelation (Rev. Ver. _law_).

Then absolutely, without the article or Jehovah's name attached,

xlii. 1, 3, 4. In lvi. 1 parallel to righteousness; lix. 14 parallel

to righteousness, truth and uprightness. In fact, in this last use,

while represented as equivalent to civic morality, it is this, not as

viewed in its character, _right_, _upright_, but in its obligation as

ordained by God: _morality_ as _His Law_. The absence of the article

may either mean what it means in the case of _people_ and _land_,

_i.e._, the _Law_, too much of a proper name to need the article, or

it may be an attempt to abstract the quality of the Law; and if so

mishpat is equal to _justice_.

[182] _Expositor_, second series, vol. viii., p. 364.

[183] This might, of course, only mean what the Servant had to do for

his captive countrymen. But coming as it does after the _light of

nations_, it seems natural to take it in its wider and more spiritual

sense.

[184] See ch. xv. of this volume.

[185] _Expositor_, second series, viii., pp. 364, 365, 366.

[186] _Ibid._, p. 366.

CHAPTER XIX.

_PROPHET AND MARTYR._

ISAIAH xlix. 1-9; l. 4-11.

The second great passage upon the Servant of the Lord is ch. xlix.

1-9, and the third is ch. l. 4-11. In both of these the servant

himself speaks; in both he speaks as prophet; while in the second

he tells us that his prophecy leads him on to martyrdom. The two

passages may, therefore, be taken together.

Before we examine their contents, let us look for a moment at the

way in which they are woven into the rest of the text. As we have

seen, ch. xlix. begins a new section of the prophecy, in so far

that with it the prophet leaves Babylon and Cyrus behind him, and

ceases to speak of the contrast between God and the idols. But,

still, ch. xlix. is linked to ch. xlviii. In leading up to its

climax,--the summons to Israel to depart from Babylon,--ch. xlviii.

does not forget that Israel is delivered from Babylon in order to be

the Servant of Jehovah: _say ye, Jehovah hath redeemed His Servant

Jacob_. It is this service, which ch. xlix. carries forward from the

opportunity, and the call, to go forth from Babylon, with which ch.

xlviii. closes. That opportunity, though real, does not at all mean

that Israel's redemption is complete. There were many moral reasons

which prevented the whole nation from taking full advantage of the

political freedom offered them by Cyrus. Although the true Israel,

that part of the nation which has the conscience of service, has

shaken itself free from the temptation as well as from the tyranny

of Babel, and now sees the world before it as the theatre of its

operations,--ver. 1, _Hearken, ye isles, unto Me; and listen, ye

peoples, from far_,--it has still, before it can address itself to

that universal mission, to exhort, rouse and extricate the rest of

its nation, _saying to the bounden, Go forth; and to them that are

in darkness, Show yourselves_ (ver. 9). Ch. xlix., therefore, is

the natural development of ch. xlviii. There is certainly a little

interval of time implied between the two--the time during which it

became apparent that the opportunity to leave Babylon would not be

taken advantage of by all Israel, and that the nation's redemption

must be a moral as well as a political one. But ch. xlix. 1-9 comes

out of chs. xl.-xlviii., and it is impossible to believe that in it

we are not still under the influence of the same author.

A similar coherence is apparent if we look to the other end of ch.

xlix. 1-9. Here it is evident that Jehovah's commission to the Servant

concludes with ver. 9_a_; but then its closing words, _Say to the

bound, Go forth; to them that are in darkness, Show yourselves_, start

fresh thoughts about the redeemed on their way back (vv. 9_b_-13); and

these thoughts naturally lead on to a picture of Jerusalem imagining

herself forsaken, and amazed by the appearance of so many of her

children before her (vv. 14-21). Promises to her and to them follow in

due sequence down to ch. l. 3, when the Servant resumes his soliloquy

about himself, but abruptly, and in no apparent connection with what

immediately precedes. His soliloquy ceases in ver. 9, and another

voice, probably that of God Himself, urges obedience to the Servant

(ver. 10), and judgement to the sinners in Israel (ver. 11); and ch.

li. is an address to the spiritual Israel, and to Jerusalem, with

thoughts much the same as those uttered in xlix. 14-l. 3.

In face of these facts, and taking into consideration the dramatic

form in which the whole prophecy is cast, we find ourselves unable

to say that there is anything which is incompatible with a single

authorship, or which makes it impossible for the two passages on the

Servant to have originally sprung, each at the place at which it now

stands, from the progress of the prophet's thoughts.[187]

* * * * *

Babylon is left behind, and the way of the Lord is prepared in the

desert. Israel have once more the title-deeds to their own land, and

Zion looms in sight. Yet with their face to home, and their heart

upon freedom, the voice of this people, or at least of the better

half of this people, rises first upon the conscience of their duty to

the rest of mankind.

_Hearken, O Isles, unto Me;_

_And listen, O Peoples, from far!_

_From the womb Jehovah hath called me,_

_From my mother's midst mentioned my name._[188]

_And He set my mouth like a sharp sword,_

_In the shadow of His hand did He hide me;_

_Yea, He made me a pointed arrow,_

_In His quiver He laid me in store,_

_And said to me, My Servant art thou,_

_Israel, in whom I shall break into glory.

And I--I said, In vain have I laboured,_

_For waste and for wind my strength have I spent!_

_Surely my right's with Jehovah,_

_And the meed of my work with my God!_

_But now, saith Jehovah--_

_Moulding me from the womb to be His own Servant,_

_To turn again Jacob towards Him,_

_And that Israel be not destroyed._[189]

_And I am of honour in the eyes of Jehovah,_

_And my God is my strength!_

_And He saith,_

_'Tis too light for thy being My Servant,_

_To raise up the tribes of Jacob,_

_Or gather the survivors of Israel._

_So I will set thee a light of the Nations,_

_To be My salvation to the end of the earth._

_Thus saith Jehovah,_

_Israel's Redeemer, his Holy,_

_To_ this _mockery of a life, abhorrence of a nation, servant

of tyrants,_[190]

_Kings shall behold and shall stand up,_

_Princes shall also do homage,_

_For the sake of Jehovah, who shows Himself faithful,_

_Holy of Israel, and thou art His chosen.

Thus saith Jehovah,_

_In a favourable time I have given thee answer,_

_In the day of salvation have helped thee,_

_To keep thee, to give thee for covenant of the people,_

_To raise up the land,_

_To give back the heirs to the desolate heirdoms,_

_Saying to the bounden, Go forth!_

_To them that are in darkness, Appear!_

"Who is so blind as not to perceive that the consciousness of the

Servant here is only a mirror in which the history of Israel is

reflected--first, in its original call and design that Jehovah

should be glorified in it; second, in the long delay and apparent

failure of the design; and, thirdly, as the design is now in the

present juncture of circumstances and concurrence of events about

to be realized?"[191] Yes: but it is Israel's calling, native

insufficiency, and present duty, as owned by only a part of the

people, which, though named by the national name (ver. 3), feels

itself standing over against the bulk of the nation, whose redemption

it is called to work out (vv. 8 and 9) before it takes up its

world-wide service. We have already sufficiently discussed this

distinction of the Servant from the whole nation, as well as the

distinction of the moral work he has to effect in Israel's redemption

from Babylon, from the political enfranchisement of the nation, which

is the work of Cyrus. Let us, then, at once address ourselves to the

main features of his consciousness of his mission to mankind. We

shall find these features to be three. The Servant owns for his chief

end the glory of God; and he feels that he has to glorify God in two

ways--by Speech, and by Suffering.

I. THE SERVANT GLORIFIES GOD.

_He did say to me, My servant art thou,

Israel, in whom I shall break into glory._

The Hebrew verb, which the Authorised Version translates _will be

glorified_, means to _burst forth_, _become visible_, break like the

dawn into splendour. This is the scriptural sense of Glory. Glory

is God become visible. As we put it in Volume I.,[192] glory is the

expression of holiness, as beauty is the expression of health. But,

in order to become visible, the Absolute and Holy God needs mortal

man. We have felt something like a paradox in these prophecies.

Nowhere else is God lifted up so absolute, and so able to effect

all by His mere will and word; yet nowhere else is a human agency

and service so strongly asserted as indispensable to the Divine

purpose. But this is no more a paradox, than the fact that physical

light needs some material in which to become visible. Light is

never revealed of itself, but always when shining from, or burning

in, something else. To be seen, light requires a surface that will

reflect, or a substance that will consume. And so, to _break into

glory_, God requires something outside Himself. A responsive portion

of humanity is indispensable to Him,--a people who will reflect Him

and spend itself for Him. Man is the mirror and the wick of the

Divine. God is glorified in man's character and witness,--these are

His mirror; and in man's sacrifice,--that is His wick.

And so we meet again the central truth of our prophecy, that in order

to serve men it is necessary first to be used of God. We must place

ourselves at the disposal of the Divine, we must let God shine on

us and kindle us, and break into glory through us, before we can

hope either to comfort mankind or to set them on fire. It is true

that ideas very different from this prevail among the ranks of the

servants of humanity in our day. A large part of our most serious

literature professes for "its main bearing this conclusion, that

the fellowship between man and man, which has been the principle of

development, social and moral, is not dependent upon conceptions of

what is not man, and that the idea of God, so far as it has been

a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely

human."[193] But such theories are possible only so long as the

still unexhausted influence of religion upon society continues to

supply human nature, directly or indirectly, with a virtue which

may be plausibly claimed for human nature's own original product.

Let religion be entirely withdrawn, and the question, Whence comes

virtue? will be answered by virtue ceasing to come at all. The savage

imagines that it is the burning-glass which sets the bush on fire,

and as long as the sun is shining it may be impossible to convince

him that he is wrong; but a dull day will teach even his mind that

the glass can do nothing without the sun upon it. And so, though men

may talk glibly against God, while society still shines in the light

of His countenance, yet, if they and society resolutely withdraw

themselves from that light, they shall certainly lose every heat and

lustre of the spirit which is indispensable for social service.[194]

On this the ancient Greek was at one with the ancient Hebrew.

_Enthusiasm_ is just _God breaking into glory_ through a human life.

Here lies the secret of the buoyancy and "freshness of the earlier

world," whether pagan or Hebrew, and by this may be understood the

depression and pessimism which infects modern society. They had God

in their blood, and we are anæmic. _But I, I said, I have laboured in

vain; for waste and for wind have I spent my strength._ We must all

say that, if our last word is _our strength_. But let this not be our

last word. Let us remember the sufficient answer: _Surely my right is

with the Lord, and the meed of my work with my God_. We are set, not

in our own strength or for our own advantage, but with the hand of

God upon us, and that the Divine life may _break into glory_ through

our life. Carlyle said, and it was almost his last testimony, "The

older I grow, and I am now on the brink of eternity, the more comes

back to me the first sentence of the catechism, which I learned when

a child, and the fuller does its meaning grow--'What is the chief end

of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever.'"

* * * * *

It was said above, that, as light breaks to visibleness either from a

mirror or a wick, so God _breaks to glory_ either from the witness of

men,--that is His mirror,--or from their sacrifice--that is His wick.

Of both of these ways of glorifying God is the Servant conscious. His

service is Speech and Sacrifice, Prophecy and Martyrdom.

II. THE SERVANT AS PROPHET.

Concerning his service of Speech, the Servant speaks in these two

passages--ch. xlix. 2 and l. 4-5:

_He set my mouth like a sharp sword,_

_In the shadow of His hand did He hide me,_

_And made me a pointed arrow;_

_In His quiver He laid me in store._

_My Lord Jehovah hath given me_

_The tongue of the learners,_

_To know how to succour the weary with words._

_He wakeneth morning by morning, He wakeneth mine ear_

_To hear as the learners._

_My Lord Jehovah hath opened mine ear._

_I was not rebellious,_

_Nor turned away backward._

At the bidding of our latest prophet we have become suspicious of

the power of speech, and the goddess of eloquence walks, as it

were, under surveillance among us. Carlyle reiterated, "All speech

and rumour is short-lived, foolish, untrue. Genuine work alone is

eternal. The talent of silence is our fundamental one. The dumb

nations are the builders of the world." Under such doctrine some have

grown intolerant of words, and the ideal of to-day tends to become

the practical man rather than the prophet. Yet, as somebody has

said, Carlyle makes us dissatisfied with preaching only by preaching

himself; and you have but to read him with attention to discover that

his disgust with human speech is consistent with an immense reverence

for the voice as an instrument of service to humanity. "The tongue

of man," he says, "is a sacred organ. Man himself is definable in

philosophy as an 'Incarnate Word;' the Word not there, you have no

man there either, but a Phantasm instead."

Let us examine our own experience upon the merits of this debate

between Silence and Speech in the service of man. Though beginning

low, it will help us quickly to the height of the experience of the

Prophet Nation, who, with nought else for the world but the voice

that was in them, accomplished the greatest service that the world

has ever received from her children.

One thing is certain,--that Speech has not the monopoly of falsehood

or of any other presumptuous sin. Silence does not only mean

ignorance,--by some supposed to be the heaviest sin of which Silence

can be guilty,--but many things far worse than ignorance, like

unreadiness, and cowardice, and falsehood, and treason, and base

consent to what is evil. No man can look back on his past life, however

lowly or limited his sphere may have been, and fail to see that not

once or twice his supreme duty was a word, and his guilt was not to

have spoken it. We all have known the shame of being straitened in

prayer or praise; the shame of being, through our cowardice to bear

witness, traitors to the truth; the shame of being too timid to say No

to the tempter, and speak out the brave reasons of which the heart was

full; the shame of finding ourselves incapable of uttering the word

that would have kept a soul from taking the wrong turning in life; the

shame, when truth, clearness and authority were required from us, of

being able only to stammer or to mince or to rant. To have been dumb

before the ignorant or the dying, before a questioning child or before

the tempter,--this, the frequent experience of our common life, is

enough to justify Carlyle when he said, "If the Word is not there, you

have no man there either, but a Phantasm instead."

Now, when we look within ourselves we see the reason of this. We

perceive that the one fact, which amid the mystery and chaos of our

inner life gives certainty and light, is a fact which is a Voice.

Our nature may be wrecked and dissipated, but conscience is always

left; or in ignorance and gloom, but conscience is always audible; or

with all the faculties strong and assertive, yet conscience is still

unquestionably queen,--and conscience is a Voice. It is a still, small

voice, which is the surest thing in man, and the noblest; which makes

all the difference in his life; which lies at the back and beginning

of all his character and conduct. And the most indispensable, and the

grandest service, therefore, which a man can do his fellow-men, is

to get back to this voice, and make himself its mouthpiece and its

prophet. What work is possible till the word be spoken? Did ever order

come to social life before there was first uttered the command, in

which men felt the articulation and enforcement of the ultimate voice

within themselves? Discipline and instruction and energy have not

appeared without speech going before them. Knowledge and faith and hope

do not dawn of themselves; they travel, as light issued forth in the

beginning, upon the pulses of the speaking breath.

It was the greatness of Israel to be conscious of their call as a

nation to this fundamental service of humanity. Believing in the

Word of God as the original source of all things,--_In the beginning

God said, Let there be light; and there was light_,--they had the

conscience, that, as it had been in the physical world, so must it

always be in the moral. Men were to be served and their lives to be

moulded by the Word. God was to be glorified by letting His Word break

through the life and the lips of men. There was in the Old Testament,

it is true, a triple ideal of manhood: _prophet_, _priest and king_.

But the greatest of these was the prophet, for king and priest had to

be prophets too. Eloquence was a royal virtue,--with persuasion, the

power of command and swift judgement. Among the seven spirits of the

Lord which Isaiah sees descending in the King-to-Come is the spirit

of counsel, and he afterwards adds of the King: _He shall smite the

earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall

he slay the wicked_. Similarly, the priests had originally been the

ministers, not so much of sacrifice, as of the revealed Word of God.

And now the new and high ideal of priesthood, the laying down of one's

life a sacrifice for God and for the people, was not the mere imitation

of the animal victim required by the priestly law, but was the natural

development of the prophetic experience. It was (as we shall presently

see) the prophet, who, in his inevitable sufferings on behalf of the

truth he uttered, developed that consciousness of sacrifice for others,

in which the loftiest priesthood consists. Prophecy, therefore, the

Service of Men by the Word of God, was for Israel the highest and

most essential of all service. It was the individual's and it was

the nation's ideal. As there was no true king and no true priest, so

there was no true man, without the Word. _Would to God_, said Moses,

_that all the Lord's people were prophets_. And in our prophecy Israel

exclaims: _Listen, O Isles, unto me; and hearken, ye peoples from far.

He hath made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of His hand

hath He hid me._

At first it seems a forlorn hope thus to challenge the attention of

the world in the dialect of one of its most obscure provinces,--a

dialect, too, that was already ceasing to be spoken even there. But

the fact only serves more forcibly to emphasize the belief of these

prophets, that the word committed to what they must have known to

be a dying language was the Word of God Himself,--bound to render

immortal the tongue in which it was spoken, bound to re-echo to the

ends of the earth, bound to touch the conscience and commend itself

to the reason of universal humanity. We have already seen, and will

again see, how our prophet insists upon the creative and omnipotent

power of God's Word; so we need not dwell longer on this instance

of his faith. Let us look rather at what he expresses as Israel's

preparation for the teaching of it.

To him the discipline and qualification of the prophet nation--and

that means, of every Servant of God--in the high office of the Word,

are threefold.

1. First, he lays down the supreme condition of Prophecy, that

behind the Voice there must be the Life. Before he speaks of his

gifts of Speech, the Servant emphasizes his peculiar and consecrated

life. _From the womb Jehovah called me, from my mother's midst

mentioned my name._ Now, as we all know, Israel's message to the

world was largely Israel's life. The Old Testament is not a set of

dogmas, nor a philosophy, nor a vision; but a history, the record

of a providence, the testimony of experience, the utterances called

forth by historical occasions from a life conscious of the purpose

for which God has called it and set it apart through the ages. But

these words, which the prophet nation uses, were first used of an

individual prophet. Like so much else in "Second Isaiah," we find a

suggestion of them in the call of Jeremiah. _Before I formed thee

in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth from the

womb I consecrated thee: I have appointed thee a prophet unto the

nations._[195] A prophet is not a voice only. A prophet is a life

behind a voice. He who would speak for God must have lived for God.

According to the profound insight of the Old Testament, speech is

not the expression of a few thoughts of a man, but the utterance of

his whole life. A man blossoms through his lips;[196] and no man is

a prophet, whose word is not the virtue and the flower of a gracious

and a consecrated life.

2. The second discipline of the prophet is the Art of Speech. _He hath

made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of His hand hath He

hid me: He hath made me a polished shaft, in His quiver hath He laid

me in store._ It is very evident, that in these words the Servant does

not only recount technical qualifications, but a moral discipline as

well. The edge and brilliance of his speech are stated as the effect

of solitude, but of a solitude that was at the same time a nearness

to God. Now solitude is a great school of eloquence. In speaking of

the Semitic race, of which Israel was part, we pointed out that,

prophet-race of the world as it has proved, it sprang from the desert,

and nearly all its branches have inherited the desert's clear and

august style of speech; for, in the leisure and serene air of the

desert, men speak as they speak nowhere else. But Israel speaks of a

solitude, that was the shadow of God's hand, and the fastness of God's

quiver; a seclusion, which, to the desert's art of eloquence, added a

special inspiration by God, and a special concentration upon His main

purpose in the world. The desert sword felt the grasp of God; He laid

the Semitic shaft in store for a unique end.[197]

3. But in ch. l., vv. 4-5, the Servant unfolds the most beautiful and

true understanding of the Secret of Prophecy, that ever was unfolded

in any literature,--worth quoting again by us, if so we may get it by

heart.

_My Lord Jehovah hath given me_

_The tongue of the learners,_

_To know how to succour the weary with words._

_He wakeneth, morning by morning He wakeneth mine ear_

_To hear as the learners._

_My Lord Jehovah hath opened mine ear,_

_I was not rebellious,_

_Nor turned away backward._

The prophet, say these beautiful lines, learns his speech, as the

little child does, by listening. Grace is poured upon the lips

through the open ear. It is the lesson of our Lord's Ephphatha. When

He took the deaf man with the impediment in his speech aside from

the multitude privately, He said unto him, not, Be loosed, but, _Be

opened; and_ first _his ears were opened, and_ then the _bond of his

tongue was loosed, and he spake plain_. To speak, then, the prophet

must listen; but mark to what he must listen! The secret of his

eloquence lies not in the hearing of thunder, nor in the knowledge of

mysteries, but in a daily wakefulness to the lessons and experience

of common life. _Morning by morning He openeth mine ear._ This is

very characteristic of Hebrew prophecy and Hebrew wisdom, which

listened for the truth of God in the voices of each day, drew their

parables from things the rising sun lights up to every wakeful eye,

and were, in the bulk of their doctrine, the virtues, needed day

by day, of justice, temperance and mercy, and in the bulk of their

judgements the results of everyday observation and experience. The

strength of the Old Testament lies in this its realism, its daily

vigilance and experience of life. It is its contact with life--the

life, not of the yesterday of its speakers, but of their to-day--that

makes its voice so fresh and helpful to the weary. He whose ear is

daily open to the music of his current life will always find himself

in possession of words that refresh and stimulate.

But serviceable speech needs more than attentiveness and experience.

Having gained the truth, the prophet must be obedient and loyal to

it. Yet obedience and loyalty to the truth are the beginnings of

martyrdom, of which the Servant now goes on to speak as the natural

and immediate consequence of his prophecy.

III. THE SERVANT AS MARTYR.

The classes of men, who suffer physical ill-usage at the hands of

their fellow-men, may roughly be described as three,--the Military

Enemy, the Criminal, and the Prophet; and of these three we have

only to read history to know that the Prophet fares by far the

worst. However fatal men's treatment of their enemies in war or of

their criminals may be, it is, nevertheless, subject to a certain

order, code of honour or principle of justice. But in all ages

the Prophet has been the target for the most licentious spite and

cruelty; for torture, indecency and filth past belief. Although our

own civilisation has outlived the system of physical punishment

for speech, we even yet see philosophers and statesmen, who have

used no weapons but exposition and persuasion, treated by their

opponents--who would speak of a foreign enemy with respect--with

execration, gross epithets, vile abuse and insults, that the

offenders would not pour upon a criminal. If we have this under

our own eyes, let us think how the Prophet must have fared before

humanity learned to meet speech by speech. Because men attacked it,

not with the sword of the invader or with the knife of the assassin,

but with words, therefore (till not very long ago) society let

loose upon them the foulest indignities and most horrible torments.

Socrates' valour as a soldier did not save him from the malicious

slander, the false witness, the unjust trial and the poison,

with which the Athenians answered his speech against themselves.

Even Hypatia's womanhood did not awe the mob from tearing her to

pieces for her teaching. This unique and invariable experience of

the Prophet is summed up and clenched in the name Martyr. Martyr

originally meant a _witness or witness-bearer_, but now it is the

synonym for every shame and suffering which the cruel ingenuity of

men's black hearts can devise for those they hate. A Book of Battles

is horrible enough, but at least valour and honour have kept down

in it the baser passions. A Newgate Chronicle is ugly enough, but

there at least is discipline and an hospital. You have got to go to

a Book of Martyrs to see to what sourness, wickedness, malignity,

pitilessness and ferocity men's hearts can lend themselves. There is

something in the mere utterance of truth, that rouses the very devil

in the hearts of many men.

Thus it had always been in Israel, nation not only of prophets, but

of the slayers of prophets. According to Christ, prophet-slaying

was the ineradicable habit of Israel. _Ye are the sons of them that

slew the prophets.... O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killer of prophets

and stoner of them that are sent unto her!_ To them who bare it the

word of Jehovah had always been _a reproach_: cause of estrangement,

indignities, torments, and sometimes of death. Up to the time of our

prophet there had been the following notable sufferers for the Word:

Elijah; Micaiah the son of Imlah; Isaiah, if the story be true that

he was slain by Manasseh; but nearer, more lonely and more heroic

than all, Jeremiah, a _laughing-stock_ and _mockery_, _reviled_,

_smitten_, fettered, and condemned to death. In words which recall

the experience of so many individual Israelites, and most of which

were used by Jeremiah of himself, the Servant of Jehovah describes

his martyrdom in immediate consequence from his prophecy.

_And I--I was not rebellious,_

_Nor turned away backward._

_My back I have given to the smiters,_

_And my cheek to tormenters;_

_My face I hid not from insults and spitting._

These are not national sufferings. They are no reflection of the hard

usage which the captive Israel suffered from Babylon. They are the

reflection of the reproach and pains, which, for the sake of God's

word, individual Israelites more than once experienced from their own

nation. But if individual experience, and not national, formed the

original of this picture of the Servant as Martyr, then surely we

have in this another strong reason against the objection to recognise

in the Servant at last an individual. It may be, of course, that

for the moment our prophet feels that this frequent experience of

individuals in Israel is to be realised by the faithful Israel, as a

whole, in their treatment by the rest of their cruel and unspiritual

countrymen. But the very fact that individuals have previously

fulfilled this martyrdom in the history of Israel, surely makes it

possible for our prophet to foresee, that the Servant, who is to

fulfil it again, shall also be an individual.

But, returning from this slight digression on the person of the Servant

to his fate, let us emphasize again, that his sufferings came to him as

the result of his prophesying. The Servant's sufferings are not penal,

they are not yet felt to be vicarious. They are simply the reward with

which obdurate Israel met all her prophets, the inevitable martyrdom

which followed on the uttering of God's Word. And in this the Servant's

experience forms an exact counterpart to that of our Lord. For to

Christ also reproach and agony and death--whatever higher meaning they

evolved--came as the result of His Word. The fact that Jesus suffered

as our great High Priest must not make us forget, that His sufferings

fell upon Him because He was a Prophet. He argued explicitly He must

suffer, because so suffered the prophets before Him. He put Himself

in the line of the martyrs: as they had killed the servants, He said,

so would they kill the Son. Thus it happened. His enemies sought _to

entangle Him in His talk_: it was for His talk they brought Him to

trial. Each torment and indignity which the Prophet-Servant relates,

Jesus suffered to the letter. They put Him to shame and insulted

Him;[198] His helpless hands were bound; they spat in His face and

smote Him with their palms; they mocked and they reviled Him; scourged

Him again; teased and tormented Him; hung Him between thieves; and

to the last the ribald jests went up, not only from the soldiers and

the rabble, but from the learned and the religious authorities as

well, to whom His fault had been that He preached another word than

their own. The literal fulfilments of our prophecy are striking, but

the main fulfilment, of which they are only incidents, is, that like

the Servant, our Lord suffered directly as a Prophet. He enforced and

He submitted to the essential obligation, which lies upon the true

Prophet, of suffering for the Word's sake. Let us remember to carry

this over with us to our final study of the Suffering Servant as the

expiation for sin.

In the meantime, we have to conclude the Servant's appearance as

Martyr in ch. l. He has accepted his martyrdom; but he feels it is

not the end with him. God will bring him through, and vindicate him

in the eyes of the world. For the world, in their usual way, will say

that because he gives them a new truth he must be wrong, and because

he suffers he is surely guilty and cursed before God. But he will not

let himself be confounded, for God is his help and advocate.

_But my Lord Jehovah shall help me;_

_Therefore, I let not myself be rebuffed:

Therefore, I set my face like a flint,_

_And know that I shall not be shamed._

_Near is my Justifier; who will dispute with me?_

_Let us stand up together!_

_Who is mine adversary?_[199]

_Let him draw near me._

_Lo! my Lord Jehovah shall help me;_

_Who is he that condemns me?_

_Lo! like a garment all of them rot;_

_The moth doth devour them._

These lines, in which the Holy Servant, the Martyr of the Word,

defies the world and asserts that God shall vindicate his innocence,

are taken by Paul and used to assert the justification, which every

believer enjoys through faith in the sufferings of Him, who was

indeed the Holy Servant of God.[200]

The last two verses of ch. l. are somewhat difficult. The first of them

still speaks of the Servant,[201] and distinguishes him--a distinction

we must note and emphasize--from the God-fearing in Israel.

_Who is among you that feareth Jehovah,_

_That hearkens the voice of His Servant,_

_That walks in dark places,_

_And light he has none?_

_Let him trust in the name of Jehovah,_

_And lean on his God._

That is, every pious believer in Israel is to take the Servant for an

example; for the Servant in distress _leans upon his God_. And so

Paul's application of the Servant's words to the individual believer is

a correct one. But if our prophet is able to think of the Servant as an

example to the individual Israelite, that surely is a thought not very

far from the conception of the Servant himself as an individual.

If ver. 10 is addressed to the pious in Israel, ver. 11 would seem to

turn with a last word--as the last words of the discourses in Second

Isaiah so often turn--to the wicked in Israel.

_Lo! all you, players with fire,_[202]

_That gird you with firebrands!_

_Walk in the light of your fire,_

_In the firebrands ye kindled._

_This from my hand shall be yours;_

_Ye shall lie down in sorrow._

It is very difficult to know, who are meant by this warning. An old

and almost forgotten interpretation is, that the prophet meant those

exiles who played with the fires of political revolution, instead of

abiding the deliverance of the Lord. But there is now current among

exegetes the more general interpretation that these incendiaries are

the revilers and abusers of the Servant within Israel: for so the

Psalms speak of the slingers of burning words at the righteous. We

must notice, however, that the metaphor stands over against those in

Israel who _walk in dark places and have no light_. In contrast to

that kind of life, this may be the kind that coruscates with vanity,

flashes with pride, or burns and scorches with its evil passions.

We have a similar name for such a life. We call it a display of

fireworks. The prophet tells them, who depend on nothing but their

own false fires, how transient these are, how quickly quenched.

But is it not weird, that on our prophet's stage, however brilliantly

its centre shines with figures of heroes and deeds of salvation, there

should always be this dark, lurid background of evil and accursed men?

FOOTNOTES:

[187] This, of course, goes against Prof. Briggs's theory of the

composition of Isa. xl.-lxvi. out of two poems (see p. 18).

[188] This line is full of the letter m.

[189] This is as the text is written; but the Massoretic reading

gives, _that Israel to Him may be gathered_.

[190] So it seems best to give the sense of this difficult line, but

most translators render _despised of soul_, or _thoroughly despised_,

_abhorred by peoples_, or _by a people_, etc. The word for _despised_

is used elsewhere only in ch. liii. 3.

[191] Prof. A. B. Davidson, _Expositor_, Second Series, viii., 441.

[192] Page 68.

[193] So George Eliot wrote of her own writings shortly before her

death. See _Life_, iii., 245.

[194] Lady Ponsonby, to whom George Eliot wrote the letter quoted

above, confessed that, with the disappearance of religious faith from

her soul, there vanished also the power of interest in, and of pity

for, her kind.

[195] Jer. i. 5.

[196] See vol. i., p. 70.

[197] See p. 240 f.

[198] How all their meanness, how all the sense of shame from which

He suffered, breaks forth in these words: _Are ye come out as against

a robber?_

[199] Literally, _lord of my cause_; my adversary or opponent at law.

[200] Epistle to the Romans, viii., 31 ff.

[201] Though Cheyne takes _His Servant_ in ver. 10 to be, not the

Servant, but the prophet.

[202] _Kindlers of fire_ is the literal rendering. But the word is

not the common word to kindle, and is here used of wanton fireraising.

CHAPTER XX.

_THE SUFFERING SERVANT._

ISAIAH lii. 13-liii.

We are now arrived at the last of the passages on the Servant of the

Lord. It is known to Christendom as the Fifty-third of Isaiah, but

its verses have, unfortunately, been divided between two chapters,

lii. 13-15 and liii. Before we attempt the interpretation of this

high and solemn passage of Revelation, let us look at its position in

our prophecy, and examine its structure.

The peculiarities of the style and of the vocabulary of ch. lii.

13-liii., along with the fact, that, if it be omitted, the prophecies

on either side readily flow together, have led some critics to

suppose it to be an insertion, borrowed from an earlier writer.[203]

The style--broken, sobbing and recurrent--is certainly a change from

the forward, flowing sentences, on which we have been carried up till

now, and there are a number of words that we find quite new to us.

Yet surely both style and words are fully accounted for by the novel

and tragic nature of the subject, to which the prophet has brought

us: regret and remorse, though they speak through the same lips as

hope and the assurance of salvation, must necessarily do so with a

very different accent and set of terms. Criticism surely overreaches

itself, when it suggests that a writer, so versatile and dramatic as

our prophet, could not have written ch. lii. 13-liii. along with,

say, ch. xl. or ch. lii. 1-12 or ch. liv. We might as well be asked

to assign to different authors Hamlet's soliloquy, and the King's

conversation, in the same play, with the ambassadors from Norway. To

aver that if ch. lii. 13-liii. were left out, no one who had not seen

it would miss it, so closely does ch. liv. follow on to ch. lii. 12,

is to aver what means nothing. In any dramatic work you may leave

out the finest passage,--from a Greek tragedy its grandest chorus,

or from a play of Shakespeare's the hero's soliloquy,--without

seeming, to eyes that have not seen what you have done, to have

disturbed the connection of the whole. Observe the juncture in our

prophecy at which this last passage on the Servant appears. It is

one exactly the same as that at which another great passage on the

Servant was inserted (ch. xlix. 1-9), viz., just after a call to

the people to seize the redemption achieved for them and to come

forth from Babylon. It is the kind of climax or pause in their tale,

which dramatic writers of all kinds employ for the solemn utterance

of principles lying at the back, or transcending the scope, of the

events of which they treat. To say the least, it is surely more

probable that our prophet himself employed so natural an opportunity

to give expression to his highest truths about the Servant, than

that some one else took his work, broke up another already extant

work on the Servant and thrust the pieces of the latter into the

former. Moreover, we shall find many of the ideas, as well as of the

phrases, of ch. lii. 13-liii. to be essentially the same as some we

have already encountered in our prophecy.[204]

There is then no evidence that this singular prophecy ever stood apart

from its present context, or that it was written by another writer than

the prophet, by whom we have hitherto found ourselves conducted. On

the contrary, while it has links with what goes before it, we see good

reasons, why the prophet should choose just this moment for uttering

its unique and transcendent contents, as well as why he should employ

in it a style and a vocabulary, so different from his usual.

Turning now to the structure of ch. lii. 13-liii., we observe that,

as arranged in the Canon, there are fifteen verses in the prophecy.

These fifteen verses fall into five strophes of three verses each,

as printed by the Revised English Version. When set in their own

original lines, however, the strophes appear, not of equal, but of

increasing length. As will be seen from the version given below, the

first (ch. lii. 13-15) has nine lines, the second (ch. liii. 1-3) has

ten lines, the third (vv. 4-6) has eleven lines, the fourth (vv. 7-9)

thirteen lines, the fifth (vv. 10-12) fourteen lines. This increase

would be absolutely regular, if, in the fourth strophe, we made

either the first two lines one, or the last two one, and if in the

fifth again we ran the first two lines together,--changes which the

metre allows and some translators have adopted. But, in either case,

we perceive a regular increase from strophe to strophe, that is not

only one of the many marks with which this most artistic of poems has

been elaborated, but gives the reader the very solemn impression of

a truth that is ever gathering more of human life into itself, and

sweeping forward with fuller and more resistless volume.

Each strophe, it is well to notice, begins with one word or two

words which summarise the meaning of the whole strophe and form a

title for it. Thus, after the opening exclamation _Behold_, the

words _My Servant shall prosper_ form, as we shall see, not only a

summary of the first strophe, in which his ultimate exaltation is

described, but the theme of the whole prophecy. Strophe ii. begins

_Who hath believed_, and accordingly in this strophe the unbelief

and thoughtlessness of them who saw the Servant without feeling

the meaning of his suffering is confessed. _Surely our sicknesses_

fitly entitles strophe iii., in which the people describe how the

Servant in his suffering was their substitute. _Oppressed yet he

humbled himself_ is the headline of strophe iv., and that strophe

deals with the humility and innocence of the Servant in contrast to

the injustice accorded him. While the headline of strophe v., _But

Jehovah had purposed_, brings us back to the main theme of the poem,

that behind men's treatment of the Servant is God's holy will; which

theme is elaborated and brought to its conclusion in strophe v. These

opening and entitling words of each strophe are printed, in the

following translation, in larger type than the rest.

As in the rest of Hebrew poetry, so here, the measure is neither

regular nor smooth, and does not depend on rhyme. Yet there is an

amount of assonance, which at times approaches to rhyme. Much of the

meaning of the poem depends on the use of the personal pronouns--_we_

and _he_ stand contrasted to each other--and it is these coming in a

lengthened form at the end of many of the lines that suggest to the

ear something like rhyme. For instance, in liii. 5, 6, the second

and third verses of the third strophe, two of the lines run out on

the bisyllable -ênū, two on înu, and two on the word lānū, while the

third has ênu, not at the end, but in the middle; in each case, the

pronominal suffix of the first person plural. We transcribe these

lines to show the effect of this.

W^ehu' m^eholal mipp^esha'ênū

M^edhukka' me`ăwōnōthênū

Mūṣar sh^elōmēnū `alaw

Ubhahăbhurātho nirpa'-lānū

Kullānū kass-ss'on ta`înū

'îsh l^edharko panînū

Wa Jahweh hiphgî`a bô 'eth-`awon kullānū.

This is the strophe in which the assonance comes oftenest to rhyme;

but in strophe i. êhū ends two lines, and in strophe ii. it ends

three. These and other assonants occur also at the beginning and in

the middle of lines. We must remember that in all the cases quoted

it is the personal pronouns, which give the assonance,--the personal

pronouns on which so much of the meaning of the poem turns; and

that, therefore, the parallelism primarily intended by the writer is

one rather of meaning than of sound. The pair of lines, parallel in

meaning, though not in sound, which forms so large a part of Hebrew

poetry, is used throughout this poem; but the use of it is varied

and elaborated to a unique degree. The very same words and phrases

are repeated, and placed on points, from which they seem to call to

each other; as, for instance, the double _many_ in strophe i., the

_of us all_ in strophe iii., and _nor opened he his mouth_ in strophe

iv. The ideas are very few and very simple; the words _he_, _we_,

_his_, _ours_, _see_, _hear_, _know_, _bear_, _sickness_, _strike_,

_stroke_, and _many_ form, with prepositions and particles, the

bulk of the prophecy. It will be evident how singularly suitable

this recurrence is for the expression of reproach, and of sorrowful

recollection. It is the nature of grief and remorse to harp upon the

one dear form, the one most vivid pain. The finest instance of this

repetition is verse 6, with its opening keynote "kullanu"--_of us all

like sheep went astray_, with its close on that keynote _guilt of us

all_, "kullanu." But throughout notes are repeated, and bars recur,

expressive of what was done to the Servant, or what the Servant did

for man, which seem in their recurrence to say, You cannot hear too

much of me: I am the very Gospel. A peculiar sadness is lent to the

music by the letters h and l in "holie" and "hehelie," the word for

sickness or ailing (ailing is the English equivalent in sense and

sound), which happens so often in the poem. The new words, which

have been brought to vary this recurrence of a few simple features,

are mostly of a sombre type. The heavier letters throng the lines:

grievous _bs_ and _ms_ are multiplied, and syllables with long vowels

before _m_ and _w_. But the words sob as well as tramp; and here and

there one has a wrench and one a cry in it.

Most wonderful and mysterious of all is the spectral fashion in which

the prophecy presents its Hero. He is named only in the first line

and once again: elsewhere He is spoken of as He. We never hear or

see Himself. But all the more solemnly is He there: a shadow upon

countless faces, a grievous memory on the hearts of the speakers. He

so haunts all we see and all we hear, that we feel it is not Art, but

Conscience, that speaks of Him.

Here is now the prophecy itself, rendered into English quite

literally, except for a conjunction here and there, and, as far as

possible, in the rhythm of the original. A few necessary notes on

difficult words and phrases are given.

I.

lii. 13: _Behold, my Servant shall prosper,_[205]

_Shall rise, be lift up, be exceedingly high._[206]

_Like as they that were astonied before thee were many,_

_--So marred from a man's was his visage,_

_And his form from the children of men!--_

_So shall the nations he startles_[207] _be many,_

_Before him shall kings shut their mouths._

_For that which had never been told them they see,_

_And what they had heard not, they have to consider._

II.

_Who gave believing to that which we heard,_[208]

_And the arm of Jehovah to whom was it bared?_

_For he sprang like a sapling before Him,_[209]

_As a root from the ground that is parched;_

_He had no form nor beauty that we should regard him,_

_Nor aspect that we should desire him._

_Despised and rejected of men,_

_Man of pains and familiar with ailing,_

_And as one we do cover the face from,_

_Despised, and we did not esteem him._

III.

_Surely our ailments he bore,_

_And our pains he did take for his burden._[210]

_But we--we accounted him stricken,_

_Smitten of God and degraded._[211]

_Yet he--he was pierced for crimes that were ours,_[212]

_He was crushed for guilt that was ours,_[212]

_The chastisement of our peace was upon him,_

_By his stripes healing is ours._[212]

_Of us all_[213] _like to sheep went astray,_

_Every man to his way we did turn,_

_And Jehovah made light upon him_

_The guilt of us all._

IV.

_Oppressed, he did humble himself,_

_Nor opened his mouth--_

_As a lamb to the slaughter is led,_

_As a sheep 'fore her shearers is dumb--_

_Nor opened his mouth._

_By tyranny and law was he taken;_[214]

_And of his age who reflected,_

_That he was wrenched_[215] _from the land of the living,_

_For My people's transgressions the stroke was on him?_

_So they made with the wicked his grave,_

_Yea, with the felon_[216] _his tomb._

_Though never harm had he done,_

_Neither was guile in his mouth._

V.

_But Jehovah had purposed to bruise him,_

_Had laid on him sickness;

So_[217] _if his life should offer guilt offering,_

_A seed he should see, he should lengthen his days._

_And the purpose of Jehovah by his hand should prosper,_

_From the travail of his soul shall he see,_[218]

_By his knowledge be satisfied._

_My Servant, the Righteous, righteousness wins he for many,_

_And their guilt he takes for his load._

_Therefore I set him a share with the great,_[219]

_Yea, with the strong shall he share the spoil:_

_Because that he poured out his life unto death,_

_Let himself with transgressors be reckoned;_

_Yea, he the sin of the many hath borne,_

_And for the transgressors he interposes._

Let us now take up the interpretation strophe by strophe.

I. Ch. lii. 13-15. When last our eyes were directed to the Servant,

he was in suffering unexplained and unvindicated (ch. l. 4-6).

His sufferings seemed to have fallen upon him as the consequence

of his fidelity to the Word committed to him; the Prophet had

inevitably become the Martyr. Further than this his sufferings were

not explained, and the Servant was left in them, calling upon God

indeed, and sure that God would hear and vindicate him, but as yet

unanswered by word of God or word of man.

It is these words, words both of God and of man, which are given in

Isaiah ch. lii. 13-liii. The Sufferer is explained and vindicated,

first by God in the first strophe, ch. lii. 13-15, and then by the

Conscience of Men, His own people, in the second and third (liii.

1-6); and then, as it appears, the Divine Voice, or the Prophet

speaking for it, resumes in strophes iv. and v., and concludes in a

strain similar to strophe i.

God's explanation and vindication of the Sufferer is, then, given in

the first strophe. It is summed up in the first line, and in one very

pregnant word. Jeremiah had said of the Messiah, _He shall reign as

a King and deal wisely_ or _prosper_;[220] and so God says here of

the Servant, _Behold he shall deal wisely_ or _prosper_. The Hebrew

verb does not get full expression in any English one. In rendering

it _shall deal wisely_ or _prudently_ our translators undoubtedly

touch the quick of it. For it is originally a mental process or

quality: _has insight_, _understands_, _is farseeing_. But then it

also includes the effect of this--_understands so as to get on_,

_deals wisely so as to succeed_, _is practical_ both in his way of

working and in being sure of his end. Ewald has found an almost exact

equivalent in German, "hat Geschick;" for Geschick means both _skill_

or _address_ and _fate_ or _destiny_. The Hebrew verb is the most

practical in the whole language, for this is precisely the point

which the prophecy seeks to bring out about the Servant's sufferings.

They are practical. He is practical in them. He endures them, not for

their own sake, but for some practical end of which he is aware and

to which they must assuredly bring him. His failure to convince men

by his word, the pain and spite which seem to be his only wage, are

not the last of him, but the beginning and the way to what is higher.

So _shall he rise and be lift up and be very high_. The suffering,

which in ch. l. seemed to be the Servant's misfortune, is here seen

as his wisdom which shall issue in his glory.

But of themselves men do not see this, and they need to be convinced.

Pain, the blessed means of God, is man's abhorrence and perplexity.

All along the history of the world the Sufferer has been the

astonishment and stumbling-block of humanity. The barbarian gets rid

of him; he is the first difficulty with which every young literature

wrestles; to the end he remains the problem of philosophy and the

sore test of faith. It is not native to men to see meaning or profit

in the Sufferer; they are staggered by him, they see no reason or

promise in him. So did men receive this unique Sufferer, this Servant

of Jehovah. _The many were astonied at him; his visage was so marred

more than men, and his form than the children of men._ But his life

is to teach them the opposite of their impressions, and to bring them

out of their perplexity into reverence before the revealed purpose of

God in the Sufferer. _As they that were astonied at thee were many,

so shall the nations he startles be many; kings shall shut their

mouths at him, for that which was not told them they see, and that

which they have heard not they have to consider_,--viz., the triumph

and influence to which the Servant was consciously led through

suffering. There may be some reflection here of the way in which the

Gentiles regarded the Suffering Israel, but the reference is vague,

and perhaps purposely so.

The first strophe, then, gives us just the general theme. In contrast

to human experience God reveals in His Servant that suffering is

fruitful, that sacrifice is practical. Pain, in God's service, shall

lead to glory.

II. Ch. liii. 1-3. God never speaks but in man He wakens conscience,

and the second strophe of the prophecy (along with the third)

is the answer of conscience to God. Penitent men, looking back

from the light of the Servant's exaltation to the time when his

humiliation was before their eyes, say, "Yes: what God has said

is true of us. We were the deaf and the indifferent. We heard,

but _who_ of us _believed what we heard, and to whom was the

arm of the Lord_--His purpose, the hand He had in the Servant's

sufferings--_revealed_?"[221]

Who are these penitent speakers? Some critics have held them to be

the heathen, more have said that they are Israel. But none have

pointed out that the writer gives himself no trouble to define them,

but seems more anxious to impress us with their consciousness of

their moral relation to the Servant. On the whole, it would appear

that it is Israel, whom the prophet has in mind as the speakers of

vv. 1-6. For, besides the fact that the Old Testament knows nothing

of a bearing by Israel of the sins of the Gentiles, it is expressly

said in ver. 8, that the sins for which the Servant was stricken

were the sins of _my people_; which people must be the same as the

speakers, for they own in vv. 4-6 that the Servant bore their sins.

For these and other reasons the mass of Christian critics at the

present day are probably right when they assume that Israel are the

speakers in vv. 1-6;[222] but the reader must beware of allowing

his attention to be lost in questions of that kind. The art of the

poem seems intentionally to leave vague the national relation of the

speakers to the Servant, in order the more impressively to bring out

their moral attitude towards him. There is an utter disappearance of

all lines of separation between Jew and Gentile,--both in the first

strophe, where, although Gentile names are used, Jews may yet be

meant to be included, and in the rest of the poem,--as if the writer

wished us to feel that all men stood over against that solitary

Servant in a common indifference to his suffering and a common

conscience of the guilt he bears. In short, it is no historical

situation, such as some critics seem anxious to fasten him down upon,

that the prophet reflects; but a certain moral situation, ideal in

so far as it was not yet realised,--the state of the quickened human

conscience over against a certain Human Suffering, in which, having

ignored it at the time, that conscience now realises that the purpose

of God was at work.

In vv. 2 and 3 the penitent speakers give us the reasons of their

disregard of the Servant in the days of his suffering. In these

reasons there is nothing peculiar to Israel, and no special

experience of Jewish history is reflected by the terms in which

they are conveyed. They are the confession, in general language, of

an universal human habit,--the habit of letting the eye cheat the

heart and conscience, of allowing the aspect of suffering to blind

us to its meaning; of forgetting in our sense of the ugliness and

helplessness of pain, that it has a motive, a future and a God. It

took ages to wean mankind from those native feelings of aversion

and resentment, which caused them at first to abandon or destroy

their sick. And, even now, scorn for the weak and incredulity in the

heroism or in the profitableness of suffering are strong in the best

of us. We judge by looks; we are hurried by the physical impression,

which the sufferer makes on us, or by our pride that we are not as

he is, into peremptory and harsh judgements upon him. Every day

we allow the dulness of poverty, the ugliness of disease, the

unprofitableness of misfortune, the ludicrousness of failure, to keep

back conscience from discovering to us our share of responsibility

for them, and to repel our hearts from that sympathy and patience

with them, which along with conscience would assuredly discover to us

their place in God's Providence and their special significance for

ourselves. It is this original sin of man, of which these penitent

speakers own themselves guilty.

But no one is ever permitted to rest with a physical or intellectual

impression of suffering. The race, the individual, has always been

forced by conscience to the task of finding a moral reason for pain;

and nothing so marks man's progress as the successive solutions he

has attempted to this problem. The speakers, therefore, proceed in

the next part of their confession, strophe iii., to tell us what they

first falsely accounted the moral reason of the Servant's suffering

and what they afterwards found to be the truth.

III. liii. 4-6. The earliest and most common moral judgement, which

men pass upon pain, is that which is implied in its name--that it is

penal. A man suffers because God is angry with him and has stricken

him. So Job's friends judged him, and so these speakers tell us they

had at first judged the Servant. _We had accounted him stricken,

smitten of God and afflicted_,--_stricken_, that is, with a plague

of sickness, as Job was, for the simile of the sick man is still

kept up; _smitten of God and degraded_ or _humbled_, for it seemed

to them that God's hand was in the Servant's sickness, to punish and

disgrace him for his own sins. But now they know they were wrong. The

hand of God was indeed upon the Servant, and the reason was sin; yet

the sin was not his, but theirs. _Surely our sicknesses he bore,

and our pains he took as his burden. He was pierced for iniquities

that were ours. He was crushed for crimes that were ours._ Strictly

interpreted, these verses mean no more than that the Servant was

involved in the consequences of his people's sins. The verbs _bore_

and _made his burden_ are indeed taken by some to mean necessarily,

removal or expiation; but in themselves, as is clear from their

application to Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the whole of the generation

of Exile, they mean no more than implication in the reproach and

the punishment of the people's sins.[223] Nevertheless, as we have

explained in a note below, it is really impossible to separate the

suffering of a Servant, who has been announced as practical and

prosperous in his suffering, from the end for which it is endured. We

cannot separate the Servant's bearing of the people's guilt from his

removal of it. And, indeed, this practical end of his passion springs

forth, past all doubt, from the rest of the strophe, which declares

that the Servant's sufferings are not only vicarious but redemptive.

_The discipline of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we

are healed._ Translators agree that _discipline of our peace_ must

mean discipline which procures our peace. The peace, the healing,

is ours, in consequence of the chastisement and the scourging that

was his. The next verse gives us the obverse and complement of the

same thought. The pain was his in consequence of the sin that was

ours. _All we like sheep had gone astray, and the Lord laid on him

the iniquity of us all_,--literally _iniquity_, but inclusive of its

guilt and consequences. Nothing could be plainer than these words.

The speakers confess, that they know that the Servant's suffering was

both vicarious and redemptive.[224]

But how did they get this knowledge? They do not describe any special

means by which it came to them. They state this high and novel truth

simply as the last step in a process of their consciousness. At first

they were bewildered by the Servant's suffering; then they thought

it contemptible, thus passing upon it an intellectual judgement;

then, forced to seek a moral reason for it, they accounted it as

penal and due to the Servant for his own sins; then they recognised

that its penalty was vicarious, that the Servant was suffering for

them; and finally, they knew that it was redemptive, the means of

their own healing and peace. This is a natural climax, a logical

and moral progress of thought. The last two steps are stated simply

as facts of experience following on other facts. Now our prophet

usually publishes the truths, with which he is charged, as the very

words of God, introducing them with a solemn and authoritative

_Thus saith Jehovah._ But this novel and supreme truth of vicarious

and redemptive suffering, this passion and virtue which crowns the

Servant's office, is introduced to us, not by the mouth of God, but

by the lips of penitent men; not as an oracle, but as a confession;

not as the commission of Divine authority laid beforehand upon the

Servant like his other duties, but as the conviction of the human

conscience after the Servant has been lifted up before it. In short,

by this unusual turn of his art, the prophet seeks to teach us, that

vicarious suffering is not a dogmatic, but an experimental truth. The

substitution of the Servant for the guilty people, and the redemptive

force of that substitution, are no arbitrary doctrine, for which God

requires from man a mere intellectual assent; they are no such formal

institution of religion as mental indolence and superstition delight

to have prepared for their mechanical adherence: but substitutive

suffering is a great living fact of human experience, whose outward

features are not more evident to men's eyes than its inner meaning

is appreciable by their conscience, and of irresistible effect upon

their whole moral nature.

Is this lesson of our prophet's art not needed? Men have always been

apt to think of vicarious suffering, and of its function in their

salvation, as something above and apart from their moral nature, with a

value known only to God and not calculable in the terms of conscience

or of man's moral experience; nay, rather as something that conflicts

with man's ideas of morality and justice. Whereas both the fact and

the virtue of vicarious suffering come upon us all, as these speakers

describe the vicarious sufferings of the Servant to have come upon

them, as a part of inevitable experience. If it be natural, as we saw,

for men to be bewildered by the first sight of suffering, to scorn it

as futile and to count it the fault of the sufferer himself, it is

equally natural and inevitable that these first and hasty theories

should be dispelled by the longer experience of life and the more

thorough working of conscience. The stricken are not always bearing

their own sin. "Suffering is the minister of justice. This is true in

part, yet it also is inadequate to explain the facts. Of all the sorrow

which befalls humanity, how small a part falls upon the specially

guilty; how much seems rather to seek out the good! We might almost

ask whether it is not weakness rather than wrong that is punished in

this world."[225] In every nation, in every family, the innocent suffer

for the guilty. Vicarious suffering is not arbitrary or accidental;

it comes with our growth; it is of the very nature of things. It is

that part of the Service of Man, to which we are all born, and of the

reality of which we daily grow more aware.

But even more than its necessity life teaches us its virtue.

Vicarious suffering is not a curse. It is Service--Service for God.

It proves a power where every other moral force has failed. By it men

are redeemed, on whom justice and their proper punishment have been

able to effect nothing. Why this should be is very intelligible. We

are not so capable of measuring the physical or moral results of our

actions upon our own characters or in our own fortunes as we are upon

the lives of others; nor do we so awaken to the guilt and heinousness

of our sin as when it reaches and implicates lives, which were not

partners with us in it. Moreover, while a man's punishment is apt to

give him an excuse for saying, I have expiated my sin myself, and so

to leave him self-satisfied and with nothing for which to be grateful

or obliged to a higher will; or while it may make him reckless or

plunge him into despair; so, on the contrary, when he recognises that

others feel the pain of his sin and have come under its weight, then

shame is quickly born within him, and pity and every other passion

that can melt a hard heart. If, moreover, the others who bear his

sin do so voluntarily and for love's sake, then how quickly on the

back of shame and pity does gratitude rise, and the sense of debt

and of constraint to their will! For all these very intelligible

reasons, vicarious suffering has been a powerful redemptive force in

the experience of the race. Both the fact of its beneficence and the

moral reasons for this are clear enough to lift us above a question,

which sometimes gives trouble regarding it,--the question of its

justice. Such a question is futile about any service for man, which

succeeds as this does where all others have failed, and which proves

itself so much in harmony with man's moral nature. But the last shred

of objection to the justice of vicarious suffering is surely removed

when the sufferer is voluntary as well as vicarious. And, in truth,

human experience feels that it has found its highest and its holiest

fact in the love that, being innocent itself, stoops to bear its

fellows' sins,--not only the anxiety and reproach of them, but even

the cost and the curse of them. _Greater love hath no man than this,

that a man lay down his life for his friends_; and greater Service

can no man do to man, than to serve them in this way.

Now in this universal human experience of the inevitableness and

the virtue of vicarious suffering, Israel had been deeply baptized.

The nation had been _served_ by suffering in all the ways we have

just described. Beginning with the belief that all righteousness

prospered, Israel had come to see the righteous afflicted in her

midst; the best Israelites had set their minds to the problem, and

learned to believe, at least, that such affliction was of God's

will,--part of His Providence, and not an interruption to it. Israel,

too, knew the moral solidarity of a people: that citizens share each

other's sorrows, and that one generation rolls over its guilt upon

the next. Frequently had the whole nation been spared for a pious

remnant's sake; and in the Exile, while all the people were formally

afflicted by God, it was but a portion of them whose conscience was

quick to the meaning of the chastisement, and of them alone, in their

submissive and intelligent sufferance of the Lord's wrath, could the

opening gospel of the prophecy be spoken, that they _had accomplished

their warfare, and had received of the Lord's hand double for all

their sins_. But still more vivid than these collective substitutes

for the people were the individuals, who, at different points in

Israel's history, had stood forth and taken up as their own the

nation's conscience and stooped to bear the nation's curse. Far away

back, a Moses had offered himself for destruction, if for his sake

God would spare his sinful and thoughtless countrymen. In a psalm of

the Exile it is remembered that,

_He said, that He would destroy them,

Had not Moses His chosen stood before Him in the breach,

To turn away His wrath, lest He should destroy._[226]

And Jeremiah, not by a single heroic resolve, but by the slow agony

and martyrdom of a long life, had taken Jerusalem's sin upon his own

heart, had felt himself forsaken of God, and had voluntarily shared

his city's doom, while his generation, unconscious of their guilt and

blind to their fate, despised him and esteemed him not. And Ezekiel,

who is Jeremiah's far-off reflection, who could only do in symbol

what Jeremiah did in reality, was commanded to lie on his side for

days, and so _bear the guilt_ of his people.[227]

But in Israel's experience it was not only the human Servant who

served the nation by suffering, for God Himself had come down to

_carry_ His distressed and accursed people, and _to load Himself with

them_. Our prophet uses the same two verbs of Jehovah as are used of

the Servant.[228] Like the Servant, too, God _was afflicted in all

their affliction_; and His love towards them was expended in passion

and agony for their sins. Vicarious suffering was not only human, it

was Divine.

Was it very wonderful that a people with such an experience, and

with such examples, both human and Divine, should at last be led

to the thought of One Sufferer, who would exhibit in Himself all

the meaning, and procure for His people all the virtue, of that

vicarious reproach and sorrow, which a long line of their martyrs

had illustrated, and which God had revealed as the passion of His

own love? If they had had every example that could fit them to

understand the power of such a sufferer, they had also every reason

to feel their need of Him. For the Exile had not healed the nation;

it had been for the most of them an illustration of that evil effect

of punishment to which we alluded above. Penal servitude in Babylon

had but hardened Israel. _God poured on him the fury of anger, and

the strength of battle: it set him on fire round about, yet he knew

not; and it burned him, yet he laid it not to heart._[229] What the

Exile, then, had failed to do, when it brought upon the people their

own sins, the Servant, taking these sins upon himself, would surely

effect. The people, whom the Exile had only hardened, his vicarious

suffering should strike into penitence and lift to peace.

IV. Ch. liii. 7-9. It is probable that with ver. 6 the penitent

people have ceased speaking, and that the parable is now taken up

by the prophet himself. The voice of God, which uttered the first

strophe, does not seem to resume till ver. 11.

If strophe iii. confessed that it was for the people's sins the

Servant suffered, strophe iv. declares that he himself was sinless,

and yet silently submitted to all which injustice laid upon him.

Now Silence under Suffering is a strange thing in the Old

Testament--a thing absolutely new. No other Old Testament personage

could stay dumb under pain, but immediately broke into one of two

voices,--voice of guilt or voice of doubt. In the Old Testament the

sufferer is always either confessing his guilt to God, or, when

he feels no guilt, challenging God in argument. David, Hezekiah,

Jeremiah, Job, and the nameless martyred and moribund of the Psalms,

all strive and are loud under pain. Why was this Servant the unique

and solitary instance of silence under suffering? Because he had a

secret which they had not. It had been said of him: _My Servant shall

deal wisely_ or _intelligently_, shall know what he is about. He had

no guilt of his own, no doubts of his God. But he was conscious of

the end God had in his pain, an end not to be served in any other

way, and with all his heart he had given himself to it. It was not

punishment he was enduring; it was not the throes of the birth

into higher experience, which he was feeling: it was a Service he

was performing,--a service laid on him by God, a service for man's

redemption, a service sure of results and of glory. Therefore _as a

lamb to the slaughter is led, and as a sheep before her shearers is

dumb, he opened not his mouth_.

The next two verses (8, 9) describe how the Servant's Passion was

fulfilled. The figure of a sick man was changed in ver. 5 to that of

a punished one, and the punishment we now see carried on to death.

The two verses are difficult, the readings and renderings of most of

the words being very various. But the sense is clear. The Servant's

death was accomplished, not on some far hill top by a stroke out of

heaven, but in the forms of human law and by men's hands. It was

a judicial murder. _By tyranny and by judgement_,--that is, by a

forced and tyrannous judgement,--_he was taken_. To this abuse of

law the next verse adds the indifference of public opinion: _and

as for his contemporaries, who of them reflected that he was cut

off from_, or _cut down in, the land of the living_,--that in spite

of the form of law that condemned him he was a murdered man,--that

_for the transgression of my people the stroke was his_? So, having

conceived him to have been lawfully put to death, they consistently

gave him a convict's grave: _they made his grave with the wicked, and

he was with the felon in his death_, though--and on this the strophe

emphatically ends--he was an innocent man, _he had done no harm,

neither was guile in his mouth_.

Premature sickness and the miscarriage of justice,--these to

Orientals are the two outstanding misfortunes of the individual's

life. Take the Psalter, set aside its complaints of the horrors of

war and of invasion, and you will find almost all the rest of its

sighs rising either from sickness or from the sense of injustice.

These were the classic forms of individual suffering in the age and

civilisation to which our prophet belonged, and it was natural,

therefore, that when he was describing an Ideal or Representative

Sufferer, he should fill in his picture with both of them. If we

remember this,[230] we shall feel no incongruity in the sudden change

of the hero from a sick man to a convict, and back again in ver. 10

from a convict to a sick man. Nor, if we remember this, shall we feel

disposed to listen to those interpreters, who hold that the basis of

this prophecy was the account of an actual historical martyrdom. Had

such been the case the prophet would surely have held throughout to

one or the other of the two forms of suffering. His sufferer would

have been either a leper or a convict, but hardly both. No doubt the

details in vv. 8 and 9 are so realistic that they might well be the

features of an actual miscarriage of justice; but the like happened

too frequently in the Ancient East for such verses to be necessarily

any one man's portrait. Perverted justice was the curse of the

individual's life,--perverted justice and that stolid, fatalistic

apathy of Oriental public opinion, which would probably regard such

a sufferer as suffering for his sins the just vengeance of heaven,

though the minister of this vengeance was a tyrant and its means were

perjury and murder. _Who of his generation reflected that for the

transgression of my people the stroke was on him!_