BOOK IV.

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THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE

EDITED BY THE REV.

SIR W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.

_Editor of "The Expositor," etc._

THE BOOK OF ISAIAH

BY THE REV.

GEORGE ADAM SMITH, M.A.

_VOLUME 1._

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LONDON. MCMX

THE

BOOK OF ISAIAH

BY THE REV.

GEORGE ADAM SMITH, M.A., D.D.

_Professor of Hebrew in the Free Church College, Glasgow_

_IN TWO VOLUMES_

VOL. I.--ISAIAH I.-XXXIX.

_TWENTIETH EDITION_

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LONDON. MCMX

_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ltd., London and Aylesbury._

CONTENTS.

PAGE

INTRODUCTION ix

TABLE OF DATES xvi

BOOK I.

_ISAIAH'S PREFACE AND PROPHECIES TO

THE DEATH OF AHAZ_, 727 B.C.

CHAP.

I. ISAIAH'S PREFACE--THE ARGUMENT OF THE LORD. 3

ISAIAH i.

II. THE THREE JERUSALEMS 19

ISAIAH ii.-iv. 740-735 B.C.

III. THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD 35

ISAIAH v.; ix. 8-x. 4. 735 B.C.

IV. ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION 57

ISAIAH vi. 740. WRITTEN 735 OR 727 B.C. (?).

V. THE WORLD IN ISAIAH'S DAY AND ISRAEL'S GOD 91

WITH A MAP.

VI. KING AND MESSIAH; PEOPLE AND CHURCH 103

ISAIAH vii.-ix. 1-8. 735-732 B.C.

VII. THE MESSIAH 131

BOOK II.

_PROPHECIES FROM THE ACCESSION OF HEZEKIAH

TO THE DEATH OF SARGON_,

727-705 B.C.

VIII. GOD'S COMMONPLACE 151

ISAIAH xxviii. ABOUT 725 B.C.

IX. ATHEISM OF FORCE AND ATHEISM OF FEAR 168

ISAIAH x. 5-34. ABOUT 721 B.C.

X. THE SPIRIT OF GOD IN MAN AND THE ANIMALS 179

ISAIAH xi.; xii. ABOUT 720 B.C. (?).

XI. DRIFTING TO EGYPT, 720-705 B.C. 196

ISAIAH xx. (711 B.C.); xxi. 1-10 (710 B.C.); xxxviii.; xxxix.

BOOK III.

_ORATIONS ON INTRIGUES WITH EGYPT_,

_AND ORACLES ON FOREIGN NATIONS_,

705-702 B.C.

XII. ARIEL, ARIEL 209

ISAIAH xxix. ABOUT 703 B.C.

XIII. POLITICS AND FAITH 221

ISAIAH xxx. ABOUT 702 B.C.

XIV. THREE TRUTHS ABOUT GOD 238

ISAIAH xxxi. ABOUT 702 B.C.

XV. A MAN; OR, CHARACTER AND THE CAPACITY TO

DISCRIMINATE CHARACTER 248

ISAIAH xxxii. 1-8. ABOUT 702 B.C. (?).

XVI. ISAIAH TO WOMEN 262

ISAIAH xxxii. 9-20. DATE UNCERTAIN.

XVII. ISAIAH TO THE FOREIGN NATIONS 271

ISAIAH xiv. 24-xxi.; xxiii. VARIOUS DATES.

XVIII. TYRE; OR, THE MERCENARY SPIRIT 288

ISAIAH xxiii. 702 B.C.

BOOK IV.

_JERUSALEM AND SENNACHERIB, 701 B.C._

XIX. AT THE LOWEST EBB 306

ISAIAH i.; xxii. Early in 701 B.C.

XX. THE TURN OF THE TIDE: MORAL EFFECTS OF FORGIVENESS 320

ISAIAH xxii.; xxxiii. LATER IN 701 B.C.

XXI. OUR GOD A CONSUMING FIRE 331

ISAIAH xxxiii.

XXII. THE RABSHAKEH; OR, LAST TRIALS OF FAITH 343

ISAIAH xxxvi. 701 B.C.

XXIII. THIS IS THE VICTORY ... OUR FAITH 352

ISAIAH xxxvii. 701 B.C.

XXIV. A REVIEW OF ISAIAH'S PREDICTIONS CONCERNING

THE DELIVERANCE OF JERUSALEM 368

XXV. AN OLD TESTAMENT BELIEVER'S SICK-BED; OR, THE

DIFFERENCE CHRIST HAS MADE 375

ISAIAH xxxviii.; xxxix. DATE UNCERTAIN.

XXVI. HAD ISAIAH A GOSPEL FOR THE INDIVIDUAL? 389

BOOK V.

_PROPHECIES NOT RELATING TO ISAIAH'S

TIME._

XXVII. BABYLON AND LUCIFER 405

ISAIAH xii. 12-xiv. 23. DATE UNKNOWN.

XXVIII. THE EFFECT OF SIN ON OUR MATERIAL SURROUNDINGS 416

ISAIAH xxiv. DATE UNKNOWN.

XXIX. GOD'S POOR 428

ISAIAH xxv.-xxvii.; xxxiv.; xxxv. DATES UNKNOWN.

XXX. THE RESURRECTION 444

ISAIAH xxvi.; xxvii.

INDEX OF CHAPTERS 453

INDEX OF SUBJECTS 455

INTRODUCTION.

As the following Exposition of the Book of Isaiah does not observe the

canonical arrangement of the chapters, a short introduction is necessary

upon the plan which has been adopted.

The size and the many obscurities of the Book of Isaiah have limited the

common use of it in the English tongue to single conspicuous passages,

the very brilliance of which has cast their context and original

circumstance into deeper shade. The intensity of the gratitude with

which men have seized upon the more evangelical passages of Isaiah, as

well as the attention which apologists for Christianity have too

partially paid to his intimations of the Messiah, has confirmed the

neglect of the rest of the Book. But we might as well expect to receive

an adequate conception of a great statesman's policy from the epigrams

and perorations of his speeches as to appreciate the message, which God

has sent to the world through the Book of Isaiah, from a few lectures on

isolated, and often dislocated, texts. No book of the Bible is less

susceptible of treatment apart from the history out of which it sprang

than the Book of Isaiah; and it may be added, that in the Old Testament

at least there is none which, when set in its original circumstance and

methodically considered as a whole, appeals with greater power to the

modern conscience. Patiently to learn how these great prophecies were

suggested by, and first met, the actual occasions of human life, is

vividly to hear them speaking home to life still.

I have, therefore, designed an arrangement which embraces all the

prophecies, but treats them in chronological order. I will endeavour to

render their contents in terms which appeal to the modern conscience;

but, in order to be successful, such an endeavour presupposes the

exposition of them in relation to the history which gave them birth. In

these volumes, therefore, narrative and historical exposition will take

precedence of practical application.

Every one knows that the Book of Isaiah breaks into two parts between

chaps. xxxix. and xl. Vol. I. of this Exposition covers chaps. i.-xxxix.

Vol. II. will treat of chaps. xl.-lxvi. Again, within chaps. i.-xxxix.

another division is apparent. The most of these chapters evidently bear

upon events within Isaiah's own career, but some imply historical

circumstances that did not arise till long after he had passed away. Of

the five books into which I have divided Vol. I., the first four contain

the prophecies relating to Isaiah's time (740-701 B.C.), and the fifth

the prophecies which refer to later events (chaps. xiii.-xiv. 23;

xxiv.-xxvii.; xxxiv.; xxxv.).

The prophecies, whose subjects fall within Isaiah's times, I have taken

in chronological order, with one exception. This exception is chap. i.,

which, although it published near the end of the prophet's life, I treat

of first, because, from its position as well as its character, it is

evidently intended as a preface to the whole book. The difficulty of

grouping the rest of Isaiah's oracles and orations is great. The plan I

have adopted is not perfect, but convenient. Isaiah's prophesying was

determined chiefly by _four_ Assyrian invasions of Palestine: the first,

in 734-732 B.C., by Tiglath-pileser II., while Ahaz was on the throne;

the second by Salmanassar and Sargon in 725-720, during which Samaria

fell in 721; the third by Sargon, 712-710; the fourth by Sennacherib in

701, which last three occurred while Hezekiah was king of Judah. But

outside the Assyrian invasions there were three other cardinal dates in

Isaiah's life: 740, his call to be a prophet; 727, the death of Ahaz,

his enemy, and the accession of his pupil, Hezekiah; and 705, the death

of Sargon, for Sargon's death led to the rebellion of the Syrian States,

and it was this rebellion which brought on Sennacherib's invasion.

Taking all these dates into consideration, I have placed in Book I. all

the prophecies of Isaiah from his call in 740 to the death of Ahaz in

727; they lead up to and illustrate Tiglath-pileser's invasion; they

cover what I have ventured to call the prophet's apprenticeship, during

which the theatre of his vision was mainly the internal life of his

people, but he gained also his first outlook upon the world beyond. Book

II. deals with the prophecies from the accession of Hezekiah in 727 to

the death of Sargon in 705--a long period, but few prophecies, covering

both Salmanassar's and Sargon's campaigns. Book III. is filled with the

prophecies from 705 to 702, a numerous group, called forth from Isaiah

by the rebellion and political activity in Palestine consequent on

Sargon's death and preliminary to Sennacherib's arrival. Book IV.

contains the prophecies which refer to Sennacherib's actual invasion of

Judah and siege of Jerusalem, in 701.

Of course, any chronological arrangement of Isaiah's prophecies must be

largely provisional. Only some of the chapters are fixed to dates past

possibility of doubt. The Assyriology which has helped us with these

must yield further results before the controversies can be settled that

exist with regard to the rest. I have explained in the course of the

Exposition my reasons for the order which I have followed, and need only

say here that I am still more uncertain about the generally received

dates of chaps x. 5-xi., xvii. 12-14 and xxxii. The religious problems,

however, were so much the same during the whole of Isaiah's career that

uncertainties of date, _if they are confined to the limits of that

career_, make little difference to the exposition of the book.

Isaiah's doctrines, being so closely connected with the life of his day,

come up for statement at many points of the narrative, in which this

Exposition chiefly consists. But here and there I have inserted chapters

dealing summarily with more important topics, such as The World in

Isaiah's Day; The Messiah; Isaiah's Power of Prediction, with its

evidence on the character of Inspiration; and the question, Had Isaiah a

Gospel for the Individual? A short index will guide the student to

Isaiah's teaching on other important points of theology and life, such

as holiness, forgiveness, monotheism, immortality, the Holy Spirit, etc.

Treating Isaiah's prophecies chronologically as I have done, I have

followed a method which put me on the look-out for any traces of

development that his doctrine might exhibit. I have recorded these as

they occur, but it may be useful to collect them here. In chaps. ii.-iv.

we have the struggle of the apprentice prophet's thoughts from the easy

religious optimism of his generation, through unrelieved convictions of

judgement for the whole people, to his final vision of the Divine

salvation of a remnant. Again, chap. vii. following on chaps. ii.-vi.

proves that Isaiah's belief in the Divine righteousness preceded, and

was the parent of, his belief in the Divine sovereignty. Again, his

successive pictures of the Messiah grow in contents, and become more

spiritual. And again, he only gradually arrived at a clear view of the

siege and deliverance of Jerusalem. One other fact of the same kind has

impressed me since I wrote the exposition of chap. i. I have there

stated that it is plain that Isaiah's conscience was perfect just

because it consisted of two complementary parts: one of God the

infinitely High, exalted in righteousness, far above the thoughts of His

people, and the other of God the infinitely Near, concerned and jealous

for all the practical details of their life. I ought to have added that

Isaiah was more under the influence of the former in his earlier years,

but that as he grew older and took a larger share in the politics of

Judah it was the latter view of God, to which he most frequently gave

expression. Signs of a development like these may be fairly used to

correct or support the evidence which Assyriology affords for

determining the chronological order of the chapters.

But these signs of development are more valuable for the proof they give

that the Book of Isaiah contains the experience and testimony of a real

life: a life that learned and suffered and grew, and at last triumphed.

There is not a single word about the prophet's birth or childhood, or

fortune, or personal appearance, or even of his death. But between

silence on his origin and silence on his end--and perhaps all the more

impressively because of these clouds by which it is bounded--there

shines the record of Isaiah's spiritual life and of the unfaltering

career which this sustained,--clear and whole, from his commission by

God in the secret experience of his own heart to his vindication in

God's supreme tribunal of history. It is not only one of the greatest,

but one of the most finished and intelligible, lives in history. My main

purpose in expounding the book is to enable English readers, not only to

follow its course, but to feel, and to be elevated by, its Divine

inspiration.

I may state that this Exposition is based upon a close study of the

Hebrew text of Isaiah, and that the translations are throughout my own,

except in one or two cases where I have quoted from the revised English

version.

With regard to the Revised Version of Isaiah, which I have had

opportunities of thoroughly testing, I would like to say that my sense

of the immense service which it renders to English readers of the Bible

is only exceeded by my wonder that the Revisers have not gone just a

very little farther, and adopted one or two simple contrivances which

are in the line of their own improvements and would have greatly

increased our large debt to them. For instance, why did they not make

plain by inverted commas such undoubted interruptions of the prophet's

own speech as that of the drunkards in chap. xxviii. 9, 10? Not to know

that these verses are spoken in mockery of Isaiah, a mockery to which he

replies in vv. 10-13, is to miss the meaning of the whole passage.

Again, when they printed Job and the Psalms in metrical form, as well as

the Hymn of Hezekiah, why did they not do the same with other poetical

passages of Isaiah, particularly the great Ode on the King of Babylon in

chap. xiv.? This is utterly spoiled in the form in which the Revisers

have printed it. What English reader would guess that it was as much a

piece of metre as any of the Psalms? Again, why have they so

consistently rendered by the misleading word "judgement" a Hebrew term

that no doubt sometimes means an act of doom, but far oftener the

abstract quality of justice? It is such defects, along with a frequent

failure to mark the proper emphasis in a sentence, that have led me to

substitute a more literal version of my own.

I have not thought it necessary to discuss the question of the

chronology of the period. This has been done so often and so recently.

See Robertson Smith's _Prophets of Israel_, pp. 145, 402, 413, Driver's

_Isaiah_, p. 12, or any good commentary.

I append a chronological table, and an index to the canonical chapters

will be found before the index of subjects. The publishers have added a

map of Isaiah's world in illustration of chap. v.

TABLE OF DATES.

B.C.

745. Tiglath-pileser II. ascends the Assyrian Throne.

740. Uzziah dies. Jotham becomes sole King of Judah. Isaiah's

Inaugural Vision (Isa. vi.).

735. Jotham dies. Ahaz succeeds. League of Syria and Northern

Israel against Judah.

734-732. Syrian Campaign of Tiglath-pileser II. Siege and Capture

of Damascus. Invasion of Israel. Captivity of Zebulon,

Naphtali and Galilee (Isa. ix. 1). Ahaz visits Damascus.

727. Salmanassar IV. succeeds Tiglath-pileser II. Hezekiah succeeds

Ahaz (or in 725?).

725. Salmanassar marches on Syria.

722 or 721. Sargon succeeds Salmanassar. Capture of Samaria.

Captivity of all Northern Israel.

720 or 719. Sargon defeats Egypt at Rafia.

711. Sargon invades Syria (Isa. xx.). Capture of Ashdod.

709. Sargon takes Babylon from Merodach-baladan.

705. Murder of Sargon. Sennacherib succeeds.

701. Sennacherib invades Syria. Capture of Coast Towns. Siege

of Ekron and Battle of Eltekeh. Invasion of Judah. Submission

of Hezekiah. Jerusalem spared. Return of

Assyrians with the Rabshakeh to Jerusalem, while Sennacherib's

Army marches on Egypt. Disaster to Sennacherib's

Army near Pelusium. Disappearance of Assyrians from

before Jerusalem--all happening in this order.

697 or 696. Death of Hezekiah. Manasseh succeeds.

681. Death of Sennacherib.

607. Fall of Nineveh and Assyria. Babylon supreme. Jeremiah.

599. First Deportation of Jews to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar.

588. Jerusalem destroyed. Second Deportation of Jews.

538. Cyrus captures Babylon. First Return of Jewish Exiles, under

Zerubbabel, happens soon after.

458. Second Return of Jewish Exiles, under Ezra.

BOOK I

_PREFACE AND PROPHECIES TO THE DEATH OF AHAZ_,

727 B.C.

ISAIAH: i. THE PREFACE.

" ii.-iv. 740-735 B.C.

" v., ix. 8-x. 4. 735 B.C.

" vi. About 735 B.C.

" vii.-ix. 7. 734-732 B.C.

CHAPTER I.

_THE ARGUMENT OF THE LORD AND ITS CONCLUSION._

ISAIAH i.--HIS GENERAL PREFACE.

The first chapter of the Book of Isaiah owes its position not to its

date, but to its character. It was published late in the prophet's life.

The seventh verse describes the land as overrun by foreign soldiery, and

such a calamity befell Judah only in the last two of the four reigns

over which the first verse extends Isaiah's prophesying. In the reign of

Ahaz, Judah was invaded by Syria and Northern Israel, and some have

dated chapter i. from the year of that invasion, 734 B.C. In the reign

again of Hezekiah some have imagined, in order to account for the

chapter, a swarming of neighbouring tribes upon Judah; and Mr. Cheyne,

to whom regarding the history of Isaiah's time we ought to listen with

the greatest deference, has supposed an Assyrian invasion in 711, under

Sargon. But hardly of this, and certainly not of that, have we adequate

evidence, and the only other invasion of Judah in Isaiah's lifetime took

place under Sennacherib, in 701. For many reasons this Assyrian invasion

is to be preferred to that by Syria and Ephraim in 734 as the occasion

of this prophecy. But there is really no need to be determined on the

point. The prophecy has been lifted out of its original circumstance

and placed in the front of the book, perhaps by Isaiah himself, as a

general introduction to his collected pieces. It owes its position, as

we have said, to its character. It is a clear, complete statement of the

points which were at issue between the Lord and His own all the time

Isaiah was the Lord's prophet. It is the most representative of Isaiah's

prophecies, a summary, perhaps better than any other single chapter of

the Old Testament, of the substance of prophetic doctrine, and a very

vivid illustration of the prophetic spirit and method. We propose to

treat it here as introductory to the main subjects and lines of Isaiah's

teaching, leaving its historical references till we arrive in due course

at the probable year of its origin, 701 B.C.[1]

[1] See p. 343.

* * * * *

Isaiah's preface is in the form of a Trial or Assize. Ewald calls it

"The Great Arraignment." There are all the actors in a judicial process.

It is a Crown case, and God is at once Plaintiff and Judge. He delivers

both the Complaint in the beginning (vv. 2, 3) and the Sentence in the

end. The Assessors are Heaven and Earth, whom the Lord's herald invokes

to hear the Lord's plea (ver. 2). The people of Judah are the

Defendants. The charge against them is one of brutish, ingrate

stupidity, breaking out into rebellion. The Witness is the prophet

himself, whose evidence on the guilt of his people consists in

recounting the misery that has overtaken their land (vv. 4-9), along

with their civic injustice and social cruelty--sins of the upper and

ruling classes (vv. 10, 17, 21-23). The people's Plea-in-defence,

laborious worship and multiplied sacrifice, is repelled and exposed (vv.

10-17). And the Trial is concluded--_Come now, let us bring our

reasoning to a close, saith the Lord_--by God's offer of pardon to a

people thoroughly convicted (ver. 18). On which follow the Conditions of

the Future: happiness is sternly made dependent on repentance and

righteousness (vv. 19, 20). And a supplementary oracle is given (vv.

24-31), announcing a time of affliction, through which the nation shall

pass as through a furnace; rebels and sinners shall be consumed, but God

will redeem Zion, and with her a remnant of the people.

That is the plan of the chapter--a Trial at Law. Though it disappears

under the exceeding weight of thought the prophet builds upon it, do not

let us pass hurriedly from it, as if it were only a scaffolding.

That God should argue at all is the magnificent truth on which our

attention must fasten, before we inquire what the argument is about. God

reasons with man--that is the first article of religion according to

Isaiah. Revelation is not magical, but rational and moral. Religion is

reasonable intercourse between one intelligent Being and another. God

works upon man first through conscience.

Over against the prophetic view of religion sprawls and reeks in this

same chapter the popular--religion as smoky sacrifice, assiduous

worship, and ritual. The people to whom the chapter was addressed were

not idolaters.[2] Hezekiah's reformation was over. Judah worshipped her

own God, whom the prophet introduces not as for the first time, but by

Judah's own familiar names for Him--Jehovah, Jehovah of Hosts, the Holy

One of Israel, the Mighty One, or Hero, of Israel. In this hour of

extreme danger the people are waiting on Jehovah with great pains and

cost of sacrifice. They pray, they sacrifice, they solemnize to

perfection. But they do not _know_, they do not _consider_; this is the

burden of their offence. To use a better word, they do not _think_. They

are God's grown-up children (ver. 2)--_children_, that is to say, like

the son of the parable, with native instincts for their God, and _grown

up_--that is to say, with reason and conscience developed. But they use

neither, stupider than very beasts. _Israel doth not know, my people

doth not consider._ In all their worship conscience is asleep, and they

are drenched in wickedness. Isaiah puts their life in an

epigram--_wickedness and worship: I cannot away_, saith the Lord, _with

wickedness and worship_ (ver. 13).

[2] At least those to whom the first twenty-three verses were addressed.

There is distinct blame of worshipping in the groves of Asherah in the

appended oracle (vv. 24-31), which is proof that this oracle was given

at an earlier period than the rest of the chapter--a fair instance of

the very great difficulty we have in determining the dates of the

various prophecies of Isaiah.

But the pressure and stimulus of the prophecy lie in this, that although

the people have silenced conscience and are steeped in a stupidity worse

than ox or ass, God will not leave them alone. He forces Himself upon

them; He compels them to think. In the order and calmness of nature

(ver. 2), apart from catastrophe nor seeking to influence by any

miracle, God speaks to men by the reasonable words of His prophet.

Before He will publish salvation or intimate disaster He must rouse and

startle conscience. His controversy precedes alike His peace and His

judgements. An awakened conscience is His prophet's first demand. Before

religion can be prayer, or sacrifice, or any acceptable worship, it must

be a _reasoning together_ with God.

That is what mean the arrival of the Lord, and the opening of the

assize, and the call to know and consider. It is the terrible necessity

which comes back upon men, however engrossed or drugged they may be, to

pass their lives in moral judgement before themselves; a debate to which

there is never any closure, in which forgotten things will not be

forgotten, but a man "is compelled to repeat to himself things he

desires to be silent about, and to listen to what he does not wish to

hear, ... yielding to that mysterious power which says to him, Think.

One can no more prevent the mind from returning to an idea than the sea

from returning to a shore. With the sailor this is called the tide; with

the guilty it is called remorse. God upheaves the soul as well as the

ocean."[3] Upon that ever-returning and resistless tide Hebrew prophecy,

with its Divine freight of truth and comfort, rides into the lives of

men. This first chapter of Isaiah is just the parable of the awful

compulsion to think which men call conscience. The stupidest of

generations, formal and fat-hearted, are forced to consider and to

reason. The Lord's court and controversy are opened, and men are whipped

into them from His Temple and His altar.

[3] _Les Misérables_: "a Tempest in a Brain."

For even religion and religiousness, the common man's commonest refuge

from conscience--not only in Isaiah's time--cannot exempt from this

writ. Would we be judged by our moments of worship, by our

_temple-treading_, which is Hebrew for church-going, by the wealth of

our sacrifice, by our ecclesiastical position? This chapter drags us out

before the austerity and incorruptibleness of Nature. The assessors of

the Lord are not the Temple nor the Law, but Heaven and Earth--not

ecclesiastical conventions, but the grand moral fundamentals of the

universe, purity, order and obedience to God. Religiousness, however,

is not the only refuge from which we shall find Isaiah startling men

with the trumpet of the Lord's assize. He is equally intolerant of the

indulgent silence and compromises of the world, that give men courage to

say, We are no worse than others. Men's lives, it is a constant truth of

his, have to be argued out not with the world, but with God. If a man

will be silent upon shameful and uncomfortable things, he cannot. His

thoughts are not his own; God will think them for him as God thinks them

here for unthinking Israel. Nor are the practical and intellectual

distractions of a busy life any refuge from conscience. When the

politicians of Judah seek escape from judgement by plunging into deeper

intrigue and a more bustling policy, Isaiah is fond of pointing out to

them that they are only forcing judgement nearer. They do but sharpen on

other objects the thoughts whose edge must some day turn upon

themselves.

What is this questioning nothing holds away, nothing stills, and nothing

wears out? It is the voice of God Himself, and its insistence is

therefore as irresistible as its effect is universal. That is not mere

rhetoric which opens the Lord's controversy: _Hear, O heavens, and give

ear, O earth, for the Lord hath spoken_. All the world changes to the

man in whom conscience lifts up her voice, and to the guilty Nature

seems attentive and aware. Conscience compels heaven and earth to act as

her assessors, because she is the voice, and they the creatures, of God.

This leads us to emphasize another feature of the prophecy.

We have called this chapter a trial-at-law; but it is far more a

_personal_ than a legal controversy; of the formally forensic there is

very little about it. Some theologies and many preachers have attempted

the conviction of the human conscience by the technicalities of a system

of law, or by appealing to this or that historical covenant, or by the

obligations of an intricate and burdensome morality. This is not

Isaiah's way. His generation is here judged by no system of law or

ancient covenants, but by a living Person and by His treatment of

them--a Person who is a Friend and a Father. It is not Judah and the law

that are confronted; it is Judah and Jehovah. There is no contrast

between the life of this generation and some glorious estate from which

they or their forefathers have fallen; but they are made to hear the

voice of a living and present God: _I have nourished and brought up

children, and they have rebelled against Me_. Isaiah begins where Saul

of Tarsus began, who, though he afterwards elaborated with wealth of

detail the awful indictment of the abstract law against man, had never

been able to do so but for that first confronting with the Personal

Deity, _Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?_ Isaiah's ministry started

from the vision of the Lord; and it was no covenant or theory, but the

Lord Himself, who remained the prophet's conscience to the end.

But though the living God is Isaiah's one explanation of conscience, it

is God in two aspects, the moral effects of which are opposite, yet

complementary. In conscience men are defective by forgetting either the

sublime or the practical, but Isaiah's strength is to do justice to

both. With him God is first the infinitely High, and then equally the

infinitely Near. _The Lord is exalted in righteousness!_ yes, and

sublimely above the people's vulgar identifications of His will with

their own safety and success, but likewise concerned with every detail

of their politics and social behaviour, not to be relegated to the

Temple, where they were wont to confine Him, but by His prophet

descending to their markets and councils, with His own opinion of their

policies, interfering in their intrigues, meeting Ahaz at the conduit of

the upper pool in the highway of the fuller's field, and fastening _eyes

of glory_ on every pin and point of the dress of the daughters of Zion.

He is no merely transcendent God. Though He be the High and Holy One, He

will discuss each habit of the people, and argue upon its merits every

one of their policies. His constant cry to them is _Come and let us

reason together_, and to hear it is to have a conscience. Indeed, Isaiah

lays more stress on this intellectual side of the moral sense than on

the other, and the frequency with which in this chapter he employs the

expressions _know_, and _consider_, and _reason_, is characteristic of

all his prophesying. Even the most superficial reader must notice how

much this prophet's doctrine of conscience and repentance harmonizes

with the _metanoia_ of New Testament preaching.

This doctrine, that God has an interest in every detail of practical

life and will argue it out with men, led Isaiah to a revelation of God

quite peculiar to himself. For the Psalmist it is enough that his soul

_come to God, the living God_. It is enough for other prophets to awe

the hearts of their generations by revealing _the Holy One_; but Isaiah,

with his intensely practical genius, and sorely tried by the stupid

inconsistency of his people, bends himself to make them understand that

God is at least a _reasonable_ Being. Do not, his constant cry is, and

he puts it sometimes in almost as many words--do not act as if there

were a Fool on the throne of the universe, which you virtually do when

you take these meaningless forms of worship as your only intercourse

with Him, and beside them practise your rank iniquities, as if He did

not see nor care. We need not here do more than mention the passages in

which, sometimes by a word, Isaiah stings and startles self-conscious

politicians and sinners beetle-blind in sin, with the sense that God

Himself takes an interest in their deeds and has His own working-plans

for their life. On the land question in Judah (v. 9): _In mine ears,

saith the Lord of hosts_. When the people were paralyzed by calamity, as

if it had no meaning or term (xxviii. 29): _This also cometh forth from

the Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in counsel and excellent in

effectual working_. Again, when they were panic-stricken, and madly

sought by foolish ways their own salvation (xxx. 18): _For the Lord is a

God of judgement--i.e._, of principle, method, law, with His own way and

time for doing things--_blessed are all they that wait for Him_. And

again, when politicians were carried away by the cleverness and success

of their own schemes (xxxi. 2): _Yet He also is wise_, or clever. It was

only a personal application of this Divine attribute when Isaiah heard

the word of the Lord give him the minutest directions for his own

practice--as, for instance, at what exact point he was to meet Ahaz

(vii. 3); or that he was to take a board and write upon it in the vulgar

character (viii. 1); or that he was to strip frock and sandals, and walk

without them for three years (xx). Where common men feel conscience only

as something vague and inarticulate, a flavour, a sting, a foreboding,

the obligation of work, the constraint of affection, Isaiah heard the

word of the Lord, clear and decisive on matters of policy, and definite

even to the details of method and style.

Isaiah's conscience, then, was perfect, because it was two-fold: _God is

holy; God is practical_. If there be the glory, the purity as of fire,

of His Presence to overawe, there is His unceasing inspection of us,

there is His interest in the smallest details of our life, there are His

fixed laws, from regard for all of which no amount of religious

sensibility may relieve us. Neither of these halves of conscience can

endure by itself. If we forget the first we may be prudent and for a

time clever, but will also grow self-righteous, and in time

self-righteousness means stupidity too. If we forget the second we may

be very devotional, but cannot escape becoming blindly and

inconsistently immoral. Hypocrisy is the result either way, whether we

forget how high God is or whether we forget how near.

To these two great articles of conscience, however--God is high and God

is near--the Bible adds a greater third, God is Love. This is the

uniqueness and glory of the Bible's interpretation of conscience. Other

writings may equal it in enforcing the sovereignty and detailing the

minutely practical bearings of conscience: the Bible alone tells man how

much of conscience is nothing but God's love. It is a doctrine as

plainly laid down as the doctrine about chastisement, though not half so

much recognised--_Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth_. What is true of

the material pains and penalties of life is equally true of the inward

convictions, frets, threats and fears, which will not leave stupid man

alone. To men with their obscure sense of shame, and restlessness, and

servitude to sin the Bible plainly says, "You are able to sin because

you have turned your back to the love of God; you are unhappy because

you do not take that love to your heart; the bitterness of your remorse

is that it is love against which you are ungrateful." Conscience is not

the Lord's persecution, but His jealous pleading, and not the fierceness

of His anger, but the reproach of His love. This is the Bible's doctrine

throughout, and it is not absent from the chapter we are considering.

Love gets the first word even in the indictment of this austere assize:

_I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled

against Me_. Conscience is already a Father's voice: the recollection,

as it is in the parable of the prodigal, of a Father's mercy; the

reproach, as it is with Christ's lamentation over Jerusalem, of outraged

love. We shall find not a few passages in Isaiah, which prove that he

was in harmony with all revelation upon this point, that conscience is

the reproach of the love of God.

But when that understanding of conscience breaks out in a sinner's heart

forgiveness cannot be far away. Certainly penitence is at hand. And

therefore, because of all books the Bible is the only one which

interprets conscience as the love of God, so is it the only one that can

combine His pardon with His reproach, and as Isaiah now does in a single

verse, proclaim His free forgiveness as the conclusion of His bitter

quarrel. _Come, let us bring our reasoning to a close, saith the_ LORD.

_Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though

they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool._ Our version, _Come,

and let us reason together_, gives no meaning here. So plain an offer of

pardon is not reasoning together; it is bringing reasoning to an end; it

is the settlement of a dispute that has been in progress. Therefore we

translate, with Mr. Cheyne, _Let us bring our reasoning to an end_. And

how pardon can be the end and logical conclusion of conscience is clear

to us, who have seen how much of conscience is love, and that the

Lord's controversy is the reproach of His Father's heart, and His

jealousy to make His own consider all His way of mercy towards them.

But the prophet does not leave conscience alone with its personal and

inward results. He rouses it to its social applications. The sins with

which the Jews are charged in this charge of the Lord are public sins.

The whole people is indicted, but it is the judges, princes and

counsellors who are denounced. Judah's disasters, which she seeks to

meet by worship, are due to civic faults, bribery, corruption of

justice, indifference to the rights of the poor and the friendless.

Conscience with Isaiah is not what it is with so much of the religion of

to-day, a _cul de sac_, into which the Lord chases a man and shuts him

up to Himself, but it is a thoroughfare by which the Lord drives the man

out upon the world and its manifold need of him. There is little

dissection and less study of individual character with Isaiah. He has no

time for it. Life is too much about him, and his God too much interested

in life. What may be called the more personal sins--drunkenness, vanity

of dress, thoughtlessness, want of faith in God and patience to wait for

Him--are to Isaiah more social than individual symptoms, and it is for

their public and political effects that he mentions them. Forgiveness is

no end in itself, but the opportunity of social service; not a sanctuary

in which Isaiah leaves men to sing its praises or form doctrines of it,

but a gateway through which he leads God's people upon the world with

the cry that rises from him here: _Seek justice, relieve the oppressed,

judge the fatherless, plead for the widow_.

Before we pass from this form in which Isaiah figures religion we must

deal with a suggestion it raises. No modern mind can come into this

ancient court of the LORD's controversy without taking advantage of its

open forms to put a question regarding the rights of man there. That God

should descend to argue with men, what licence does this give to men? If

religion be reasonable controversy of this kind, what is the place of

doubt in it? Is not doubt man's side of the argument? Has he not also

questions to put--the Almighty from his side to arraign? For God has

Himself here put man on a level with Him, saying, _Come, and let us

reason together_.

A temper of this kind, though not strange to the Old Testament, lies

beyond the horizon of Isaiah. The only challenge of the Almighty which

in any of his prophecies he reports as rising from his own countrymen is

the bravado of certain drunkards (chaps. v. and xxviii.). Here and

elsewhere it is the very opposite temper from honest doubt which he

indicts--the temper that _does not know_, that _does not consider_.

Ritualism and sensualism are to Isaiah equally false, because equally

unthinking. The formalist and the fleshly he classes together, because

of their stupidity. What does it matter whether a man's conscience and

intellect be stifled in his own fat or under the clothes with which he

dresses himself? They are stifled, and that is the main thing. To the

formalist Isaiah says, _Israel doth not know, my people doth not

consider_; to the fleshly (chap. v.), _My people are gone into captivity

for want of knowledge._ But _knowing_ and _considering_ are just that of

which doubt, in its modern sense, is the abundance, and not the defect.

The mobility of mind, the curiosity, the moral sensitiveness, the hunger

that is not satisfied with the chaff of formal and unreal answers, the

spirit to find out truth for one's self, wrestling with God--this is the

very temper Isaiah would have welcomed in a people whose sluggishness

of reason was as justly blamed by him as the grossness of their moral

sense. And if revelation be of the form in which Isaiah so prominently

sets it, and the whole Bible bears him out in this--if revelation be

this argumentative and reasonable process, then human doubt has its part

in revelation. It is, indeed, man's side of the argument, and as history

shows, has often helped to the elucidation of the points at issue.

Merely intellectual scepticism, however, is not within Isaiah's horizon.

He would never have employed (nor would any other prophet) our modern

habits of doubt, except as he employs these intellectual terms, _to

know_ and _to consider_--viz., as instruments of moral search and

conviction. Had he lived now he would have been found among those few

great prophets who use the resources of the human intellect to expose

the moral state of humanity; who, like Shakespeare and Hugo, turn man's

detective and reflective processes upon his own conduct; who make

himself stand at the bar of his conscience. And truly to have doubt of

everything in heaven and earth, and never to doubt one's self, is to be

guilty of as stiff and stupid a piece of self-righteousness as the

religious formalists whom Isaiah exposes. But the moral of the chapter

is plainly what we have shown it to be, that a man cannot stifle doubt

and debate about his own heart or treatment of God; whatever else he

thinks about and judges, he cannot help judging himself.

_Note on the Place of Nature in the Argument of the Lord._--The office

which the Bible assigns to Nature in the controversy of God with man is

fourfold--Assessor, Witness, Man's Fellow-Convict, and Doomster or

Executioner. Taking these backward:--1. Scripture frequently exhibits

Nature as the _doomster of the Lord_. Nature has a terrible power of

flashing back from her vaster surfaces the guilty impressions of man's

heart; at the last day her thunders shall peal the doom of the wicked,

and her fire devour them. In those prophecies of the book of Isaiah

which relate to his own time this use is not made of Nature, unless it

be in his very earliest prophecy in chap. ii., and in his references to

the earthquake (v. 25). To Isaiah the sentences and scourges of God are

political and historical, the threats and arms of Assyria. He employs

the violences of Nature only as metaphors for Assyrian rage and force.

But he often promises fertility as the effect of the Lord's pardon, and

when the prophets are writing about Nature, it is difficult to say

whether they are to be understood literally or poetically. But, at any

rate, there is much larger use made of physical catastrophes and

convulsions in those other prophecies which do not relate to Isaiah's

own time, and are now generally thought not to be his. Compare chaps.

xiii. and xiv. 2. The representation of the earth as the

_fellow-convict_ of guilty man, sharing his curse, is very vivid in

Isaiah xxiv.-xxvii. In the prophecies relating to his own time Isaiah,

of course, identifies the troubles that afflict the land with the sin of

the people, of Judah. But these are due to political causes--viz., the

Assyrian invasion. 3. In the Lord's court of judgement the prophets

sometimes employ Nature as _a witness_ against man, as, for instance,

the prophet Micah (vi. 1, _ff_). Nature is full of associations; the

enduring mountains have memories from old, they have been constant

witnesses of the dealing of God with His people. 4. Or lastly, Nature

may be used as the great _assessor_ of the conscience, sitting to

expound the principles on which God governs life. This is Isaiah's

favourite use of Nature. He employs her to corroborate his statement of

the Divine law and illustrate the ways of God to men, as in the end of

chap. xxviii., and no doubt in the opening verse of this chapter.

CHAPTER II.

_THE THREE JERUSALEMS._

ISAIAH ii.-iv. (740-735 B.C.).

After the general introduction, in chap. i., to the prophecies of

Isaiah, there comes another portion of the book, of greater length, but

nearly as distinct as the first. It covers four chapters, the second to

the sixth, all of them dating from the same earliest period of Isaiah's

ministry, before 735 B.C. They deal with exactly the same subjects, but

they differ greatly in form. One section (chaps. ii.-iv.) consists of a

number of short utterances--evidently not all spoken at the same time,

for they conflict with one another--a series of consecutive prophecies,

that probably represent the stages of conviction through which Isaiah

passed in his prophetic apprenticeship; a second section (chap. v.) is a

careful and artistic restatement, in parable and oration, of the truths

he has thus attained; while a third section (chap. vi.) is narrative,

probably written subsequently to the first two, but describing an

inspiration and official call, which must have preceded them both. The

more one examines chaps. ii.-vi., and finds that they but express the

same truths in different forms, the more one is confirmed in some such

view of them as this, which, it is believed, the following exposition

will justify. Chaps. v. and vi. are twin appendices to the long summary

in ii.-iv.: chap. v. a public vindication and enforcement of the results

of that summary, chap. vi. a private vindication to the prophet's heart

of the very same truths, by a return to the secret moment of their

original inspiration. We may assign 735 B.C., just before or just after

the accession of Ahaz, as the date of the latest of these prophecies.

The following is their historical setting.

For more than half a century the kingdom of Judah, under two powerful

and righteous monarchs, had enjoyed the greatest prosperity. Uzziah

strengthened the borders, extended the supremacy and vastly increased

the resources of his little State, which, it is well to remember, was in

its own size not larger than three average Scottish counties. He won

back for Judah the port of Elath on the Red Sea, built a navy, and

restored the commerce with the far East, which Solomon began. He

overcame, in battle or by the mere terror of his name, the neighbouring

nations--the Philistines that dwelt in cities, and the wandering tribes

of desert Arabs. The Ammonites brought him gifts. With the wealth, which

the East by tribute or by commerce poured into his little principality,

Uzziah fortified his borders and his capital, undertook large works of

husbandry and irrigation, organized a powerful standing army, and

supplied it with a siege artillery capable of slinging arrows and

stones. _His name spread far abroad, for he was marvellously helped till

he was strong._ His son Jotham (740-735 B.C.) continued his father's

policy with nearly all his father's success. He built cities and

castles, quelled a rebellion among his tributaries, and caused their

riches to flow faster still into Jerusalem. But while Jotham bequeathed

to his country a sure defence and great wealth, and to his people a

strong spirit and prestige among the nations, he left another bequest,

which robbed these of their value--the son who succeeded him. In 735

Jotham died and Ahaz became king. He was very young, and stepped to the

throne from the hareem. He brought to the direction of the government

the petulant will of a spoiled child, the mind of an intriguing and

superstitious woman. It was when the national policy felt the paralysis

consequent on these that Isaiah published at least the later part of the

prophecies now marked off as chaps. ii.-iv. of his book. _My people_, he

cries--_my people! children are their oppressors, and women rule over

them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy

the way of thy paths._

Isaiah had been born into the flourishing nation while Uzziah was king.

The great events of that monarch's reign were his education, the still

grander hopes they prompted the passion of his virgin fancy. He must

have absorbed as the very temper of his youth this national

consciousness which swelled so proudly in Judah under Uzziah. But the

accession of such a king as Ahaz, while it was sure to let loose the

passions and follies fostered by a period of rapid increase in luxury,

could not fail to afford to Judah's enemies the long-deferred

opportunity of attacking her. It was an hour both of the manifestation

of sin and of the judgement of sin--an hour in which, while the majesty

of Judah, sustained through two great reigns, was about to disappear in

the follies of a third, the majesty of Judah's God should become more

conspicuous than ever. Of this Isaiah had been privately conscious, as

we shall see, for five years. _In the year that king Uzziah died_

(740), the young Jew _saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and

lifted up_. Startled into prophetic consciousness by the awful contrast

between an earthly majesty that had so long fascinated men, but now sank

into a leper's grave, and the heavenly, which rose sovereign and

everlasting above it, Isaiah had gone on to receive conviction of his

people's sin and certain punishment. With the accession of Ahaz, five

years later, his own political experience was so far developed as to

permit of his expressing in their exact historical effects the awful

principles of which he had received foreboding when Uzziah died. What we

find in chaps. ii.-iv. is a record of the struggle of his mind towards

this expression; it is the summary, as we have already said, of Isaiah's

apprenticeship.

_The word that Isaiah, the son of Amoz, saw concerning Judah and

Jerusalem._ We do not know anything of Isaiah's family or of the details

of his upbringing. He was a member of some family of Jerusalem, and in

intimate relations with the Court. It has been believed that he was of

royal blood, but it matters little whether this be true or not. A spirit

so wise and masterful as his did not need social rank to fit it for that

intimacy with princes which has doubtless suggested the legend of his

royal descent. What does matter is Isaiah's citizenship in Jerusalem,

for this colours all his prophecy. More than Athens to Demosthenes, Rome

to Juvenal, Florence to Dante, is Jerusalem to Isaiah. She is his

immediate and ultimate regard, the centre and return of all his

thoughts, the hinge of the history of his time, the one thing worth

preserving amidst its disasters, the summit of those brilliant hopes

with which he fills the future. He has traced for us the main features

of her position and some of the lines of her construction, many of the

great figures of her streets, the fashions of her women, the arrival of

embassies, the effect of rumours. He has painted her aspect in triumph,

in siege, in famine and in earthquake; war filling her valleys with

chariots, and again nature rolling tides of fruitfulness up to her

gates; her moods of worship and panic and profligacy--till we see them

all as clearly as the shadow following the sunshine and the breeze

across the cornfields of our own summers.

If he takes wider observation of mankind, Jerusalem is his watch-tower.

It is for her defence he battles through fifty years of statesmanship,

and all his prophecy may be said to travail in anguish for her new

birth. He was never away from her walls, but not even the psalms of the

captives by the rivers of Babylon, with the desire of exile upon them,

exhibit more beauty and pathos than the lamentations which Isaiah poured

upon Jerusalem's sufferings or the visions in which he described her

future solemnity and peace.

It is not with surprise, therefore, that we find the first prophecies of

Isaiah directed upon his mother city: _The word that Isaiah the son of

Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem._ There is little about Judah in

these chapters: the country forms but a fringe to the capital.

Before we look into the subject of the prophecy, however, a short

digression is necessary on the manner in which it is presented to us. It

is not a reasoned composition or argument we have here; it is a vision,

it is the word which Isaiah _saw_. The expression is vague, often abused

and in need of defining. Vision is not employed here to express any

magical display before the eyes of the prophet of the very words which

he was to speak to the people, or any communication to his thoughts by

dream or ecstasy. They are higher qualities of "vision" which these

chapters unfold. There is, first of all, the power of forming an ideal,

of seeing and describing a thing in the fulfilment of all the promise

that is in it. But these prophecies are much more remarkable for two

other powers of inward vision, to which we give the names of insight and

intuition--insight into human character, intuition of Divine

principles--_clear knowledge of what man is and how God will act_--a

keen discrimination of the present state of affairs in Judah, and

unreasoned conviction of moral truth and the Divine will. The original

meaning of the Hebrew word _saw_, which is used in the title to this

series, is to cleave, or split; then to see into, to see through, to get

down beneath the surface of things and discover their real nature. And

what characterizes the bulk of these visions is _penetrativeness_, the

keenness of a man who will not be deceived by an outward show that he

delights to hold up to our scorn, but who has a conscience for the inner

worth of things and for their future consequences. To lay stress on the

moral meaning of the prophet's vision is not to grudge, but to emphasize

its inspiration by God. Of that inspiration Isaiah was himself assured.

It was God's Spirit that enabled him to see thus keenly; for he saw

things keenly, not only as men count moral keenness, but as God Himself

sees them, in their value in His sight and in their attractiveness for

His love and pity. In this prophecy there occurs a striking

expression--_the eyes of the glory of God_. It was the vision of the

Almighty Searcher and Judge, burning through man's pretence, with which

the prophet felt himself endowed. This then was the second element in

his vision--to penetrate men's hearts as God Himself penetrated them,

and constantly, without squint or blur, to see right from wrong in their

eternal difference. And the third element is the intuition of God's

will, the perception of what line of action He will take. This last, of

course, forms the distinct prerogative of Hebrew prophecy, that power of

vision which is its climax; the moral situation being clear, to see then

how God will act upon it.

Under these three powers of vision Jerusalem, the prophet's city, is

presented to us--Jerusalem in three lights, really three Jerusalems.

First, there is flashed out (chap. ii. 2-5) a vision of the ideal city,

Jerusalem idealized and glorified. Then comes (ii. 6-iv. 1) a very

realistic picture, a picture of the actual Jerusalem. And lastly at the

close of the prophecy (iv. 2-6) we have a vision of Jerusalem as she

shall be after God has taken her in hand--very different indeed from the

ideal with which the prophet began. Here are three successive motives or

phases of prophecy, which, as we have said, in all probability summarize

the early ministry of Isaiah, and present him to us _first_ as the

idealist or visionary, _second_ as the realist or critic, and _third_ as

the prophet proper or revealer of God's actual will.

I. THE IDEALIST (ii. 1-5).

All men who have shown our race how great things are possible have had

their inspiration in dreaming of the impossible. Reformers, who at death

were content to have lived for the moving forward but one inch of some

of their fellow-men, began by believing themselves able to lift the

whole world at once. Isaiah was no exception to this human fashion. His

first vision was that of a Utopia, and his first belief that his

countrymen would immediately realize it. He lifts up to us a very grand

picture of a vast commonwealth centred in Jerusalem. Some think he

borrowed it from an older prophet; Micah has it also; it may have been

the ideal of the age. But, at any rate, if we are not to take verse 5 in

scorn, Isaiah accepted this as his own. _And it shall come to pass in

the last days, that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be

established in the top of the mountains, and exalted above the hills,

and all nations shall flow unto it._ The prophet's own Jerusalem shall

be the light of the world, the school and temple of the earth, the seat

of the judgement of the Lord, when He shall reign over the nations, and

all mankind shall dwell in peace beneath Him. It is a glorious destiny,

and as its light shines from the far-off horizon, _the latter days_, in

which the prophet sees it, what wonder that he is possessed and cries

aloud, _O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the

LORD!_ It seems to the young prophet's hopeful heart as if at once that

ideal would be realized, as if by his own word he could lift his people

to its fulfilment.

But that is impossible, and Isaiah perceives so as soon as he turns from

the far-off horizon to the city at his feet, as soon as he leaves

to-morrow alone and deals with to-day. The next verses of the

chapter--from verse 6 onwards--stand in strong contrast to those which

have described Israel's ideal. There Zion is full of the law and

Jerusalem of the word of the Lord, the one religion flowing over from

this centre upon the world. Here into the actual Jerusalem they have

brought all sorts of foreign worship and heathen prophets; _they are

replenished from the East, and are soothsayers like the Philistines, and

strike hands with the children of strangers_. There all nations come to

worship at Jerusalem; here her thought and faith are scattered over the

idolatries of all nations. The ideal Jerusalem is full of spiritual

blessings, the actual of the spoils of trade. There the swords are beat

into ploughshares and the spears into pruning-hooks; here are vast and

novel armaments, horses and chariots. There the Lord alone is

worshipped; here the city is crowded with idols. The real Jerusalem

could not possibly be more different from the ideal, nor its inhabitants

as they are from what their prophet had confidently called on them to

be.

II. THE REALIST (ii. 6-iv. 1).

Therefore Isaiah's attitude and tone suddenly change. The visionary

becomes a realist, the enthusiast a cynic, the seer of the glorious city

of God the prophet of God's judgement. The recoil is absolute in style,

temper and thought, down to the very figures of speech which he uses.

Before, Isaiah had seen, as it were, a lifting process at work,

_Jerusalem in the top of the mountains, and exalted above the hills_.

Now he beholds nothing but depression. _For the day of the LORD of hosts

shall be upon every one that is proud and haughty, upon all that is

lifted up, and it shall be brought low, and the Lord alone shall be

exalted in that day._ Nothing in the great civilization, which he had

formerly glorified, is worth preserving. The high towers, fenced walls,

ships of Tarshish, treasures and armour must all perish, even the hills

lifted by his imagination shall be bowed down, and _the LORD alone be

exalted in that day_. This recoil reaches its extreme in the last verse

of the chapter. The prophet, who had believed so much in man as to think

possible an immediate commonwealth of nations, believes in man now so

little that he does not hold him worth preserving: _Cease ye from man,

whose breath is in his nostrils; for wherein is he to be accounted of?_

Attached to this general denunciation are some satiric descriptions, in

the third chapter, of the anarchy, to which society in Jerusalem is fast

being reduced under its childish and effeminate king. The scorn of these

passages is scathing; _the eyes of the glory of God_ burn through every

rank, fashion and ornament in the town. King and court are not spared;

the elders and princes are rigorously denounced. But by far the most

striking effort of the prophet's boldness is his prediction of the

overthrow of Jerusalem itself (ver. 8). What it cost Isaiah to utter and

the people to hear we can only partly measure. To his own passionate

patriotism it must have felt like treason, to the blind optimism of the

popular religion it doubtless appeared the rankest heresy--to aver that

the holy city, inviolate and almost unthreatened since the day David

brought to her the ark of the Lord, and destined by the voice of her

prophets, including Isaiah himself, to be established upon the tops of

the mountains, was now to fall into ruin. But Isaiah's conscience

overcomes his sense of consistency, and he who has just proclaimed the

eternal glory of Jerusalem is provoked by his knowledge of her citizens'

sins to recall his words and intimate her destruction. It may have been,

that Isaiah was partly emboldened to so novel a threat, by his knowledge

of the preparations which Syria and Israel were already making for the

invasion of Judah. The prospect of Jerusalem, as the centre of a vast

empire subject to Jehovah, however natural it was under a successful

ruler like Uzziah, became, of course, unreal when every one of Uzziah's

and Jotham's tributaries had risen in revolt against their successor,

Ahaz. But of these outward movements Isaiah tells us nothing. He is

wholly engrossed with Judah's sin. It is his growing acquaintance with

the corruption of his fellow-countrymen that has turned his back on the

ideal city of his opening ministry, and changed him into a prophet of

Jerusalem's ruin. _Their tongue and their doings are against the Lord,

to provoke the eyes of His glory._ Judge, prophet and elder, all the

upper ranks and useful guides of the people, must perish. It is a sign

of the degradation to which society shall be reduced, when Isaiah with

keen sarcasm pictures the despairing people choosing a certain man to be

their ruler because he alone has a coat to his back! (iii. 6).

With increased scorn Isaiah turns lastly upon the women of Jerusalem

(iii. 16-iv. 2), and here perhaps the change which has passed over him

since his opening prophecy is most striking. One likes to think of how

the citizens of Jerusalem took this alteration in their prophet's

temper. We know how popular so optimist a prophecy as that of the

mountain of the Lord's house must have been, and can imagine how men and

women loved the young face, bright with a far-off light, and the dream

of an ideal that had no quarrel with the present. "But what a change is

this that has come over him, who speaks not of to-morrow, but of to-day,

who has brought his gaze from those distant horizons to our streets, who

stares every man in the face (iii. 9), and makes the women feel that no

pin and trimming, no ring and bracelet, escape his notice! Our loved

prophet has become an impudent scorner!" Ah, men and women of Jerusalem,

beware of those eyes! _The glory of God_ is burning in them; they see

you through and through, and they tell us that all your armour and the

_show of your countenance_, and your foreign fashions are as nothing,

for there are corrupt hearts below. This is your judgement, that

_instead of sweet spices there shall be rottenness, and instead of a

girdle a rope, and instead of well-set hair baldness, and instead of a

stomacher a girding of sackcloth, and branding instead of beauty_. _Thy

men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war. And her gates

shall lament and mourn, and she shall be desolate and sit upon the

ground!_

This was the climax of the prophet's judgement. If the salt have lost

its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for

nothing but to be cast out and trodden under foot. If the women are

corrupt the state is moribund.

III. _The Prophet of the Lord_ (iv. 2-6).

Is there, then, no hope for Jerusalem? Yes, but not where the prophet

sought it at first, in herself, and not in the way he offered it--by the

mere presentation of an ideal. There is hope, there is more--there is

certain salvation in the Lord, but it only comes after judgement.

Contrast that opening picture of the new Jerusalem with this closing

one, and we shall find their difference to lie in two things. There the

city is more prominent than the Lord, here the Lord is more prominent

than the city; there no word of judgement, here judgement sternly

emphasized as the indispensable way towards the blessed future. A more

vivid sense of the Person of Jehovah Himself, a deep conviction of the

necessity of chastisement: these are what Isaiah has gained during his

early ministry, without losing hope or heart for the future. The bliss

shall come only when the Lord shall _have washed away the filth of the

daughters of Zion, and shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the

midst thereof by the spirit of judgement and the spirit of burning_. It

is a corollary of all this that the participants of that future shall be

many fewer than in the first vision of the prophet. The process of

judgement must weed men out, and in place of all nations coming to

Jerusalem, to share its peace and glory, the prophet can speak now only

of Israel--and only of a remnant of Israel. _The escaped of Israel, the

left in Zion, and he that remaineth in Jerusalem._ This is a great

change in Isaiah's ideal, from the supremacy of Israel over all nations

to the bare survival of a remnant of his people.

* * * * *

Is there not in this threefold vision a parallel and example for our own

civilisation and our thoughts about it? All work and wisdom begin in

dreams. We must see our Utopias before we start to build our stone and

lime cities.

"It takes a soul

To move a body; it takes a high-souled man

To move the masses even to a cleaner stye;

It takes the ideal to blow an inch inside

The dust of the actual."

But the light of our ideals dawns upon us only to show how poor by

nature are the mortals who are called to accomplish them. The ideal

rises still as to Isaiah only to exhibit the poverty of the real. When

we lift our eyes from the hills of vision, and rest them on our

fellow-men, hope and enthusiasm die out of us. Isaiah's disappointment

is that of every one who brings down his gaze from the clouds to the

streets. Be our ideal ever so desirable, be we ever so persuaded of its

facility, the moment we attempt to apply it we shall be undeceived.

Society cannot be regenerated all at once. There is an expression which

Isaiah emphasizes in his motive of cynicism: _The show of their

countenance doth witness against them._ It tells us that when he called

his countrymen to turn to the light he lifted upon them he saw nothing

but the exhibition of their sin made plain. When we bring light to a

cavern whose inhabitants have lost their eyes by the darkness, the light

does not make them see; we have to give them eyes again. Even so no

vision or theory of a perfect state--the mistake which all young

reformers make--can regenerate society. It will only reveal social

corruption, and sicken the heart of the reformer himself. For the

possession of a great ideal does not mean, as so many fondly imagine,

work accomplished; it means work revealed--work revealed so vast, often

so impossible, that faith and hope die down, and the enthusiast of

yesterday becomes the cynic of to-morrow. _Cease ye from man, whose

breath is in his nostrils, for wherein is he to be accounted?_ In this

despair, through which every worker for God and man must pass, many a

warm heart has grown cold, many an intellect become paralyzed. There is

but one way of escape, and that is Isaiah's. It is to believe in God

Himself; it is to believe that He is at work, that His purposes to man

are saving purposes, and that with Him there is an inexhaustible source

of mercy and virtue. So from the blackest pessimism shall arise new hope

and faith, as from beneath Isaiah's darkest verses that glorious passage

suddenly bursts like uncontrollable spring from the very feet of winter.

_For that day shall the spring of the LORD be beautiful and glorious,

and the fruit of the land shall be excellent and comely for them that

are escaped of Israel._ This is all it is possible to say. There must be

a future for man, because God loves him, and God reigns. That future can

be reached only through judgement, because God is righteous.

To put it another way: All of us who live to work for our fellow-men or

who hope to lift them higher by our word begin with our own visions of a

great future. These visions, though our youth lends to them an original

generosity and enthusiasm, are, like Isaiah's, largely borrowed. The

progressive instincts of the age into which we are born and the mellow

skies of prosperity combine with our own ardour to make our ideal one of

splendour. Persuaded of its facility, we turn to real life to apply it.

A few years pass. We not only find mankind too stubborn to be forced

into our moulds, but we gradually become aware of Another Moulder at

work upon our subject, and we stand aside in awe to watch His

operations. Human desires and national ideals are not always fulfilled;

philosophic theories are discredited by the evolution of fact. Uzziah

does not reign for ever; the sceptre falls to Ahaz: progress is checked,

and the summer of prosperity draws to an end. Under duller skies

ungilded judgement comes to view, cruel and inexorable, crushing even

the peaks on which we built our future, yet purifying men and giving

earnest of a better future, too. And so life, that mocked the control of

our puny fingers, bends groaning to the weight of an Almighty Hand. God

also, we perceive as we face facts honestly, has His ideal for men; and

though He works so slowly towards His end that our restless eyes are too

impatient to follow His order, He yet reveals all that shall be to the

humbled heart and the soul emptied of its own visions. Awed and

chastened, we look back from His Presence to our old ideals. We are

still able to recognize their grandeur and generous hope for men. But we

see now how utterly unconnected they are with the present--castles in

the air, with no ladders to them from the earth. And even if they were

accessible, still to our eyes, purged by gazing on God's own ways, they

would no more appear desirable. Look back on Isaiah's early ideal from

the light of his second vision of the future. For all its grandeur, that

picture of Jerusalem is not wholly attractive. Is there not much

national arrogance in it? Is it not just the imperfectly idealized

reflection of an age of material prosperity such as that of Uzziah's

was? Pride is in it, a false optimism, the highest good to be reached

without moral conflict. But here is the language of pity, rescue with

difficulty, rest only after sore struggle and stripping, salvation by

the bare arm of God. So do our imaginations for our own future or for

that of the race always contrast with what He Himself has in store for

us, promised freely out of His great grace to our unworthy hearts, yet

granted in the end only to those who pass towards it through discipline,

tribulation and fire.

* * * * *

This, then, was Isaiah's apprenticeship, and its net result was to leave

him with the remnant for his ideal: the remnant and Jerusalem secured as

its rallying-point.

CHAPTER III.

_THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD, OR TRUE PATRIOTISM THE CONSCIENCE OF OUR

COUNTRY'S SINS._

ISAIAH v.; ix. 8-x. 4 (735 _B.C._).

The prophecy contained in these chapters belongs, as we have seen, to

the same early period of Isaiah's career as chapters ii.-iv., about the

time when Ahaz ascended the throne after the long and successful reigns

of his father and grandfather, when the kingdom of Judah seemed girt

with strength and filled with wealth, but the men were corrupt and the

women careless, and the earnest of approaching judgement was already

given in the incapacity of the weak and woman-ridden king. Yet although

this new prophecy issues from the same circumstances as its

predecessors, it implies these circumstances a little more developed.

The same social evils are treated, but by a hand with a firmer grasp of

them. The same principles are emphasized--the righteousness of Jehovah

and His activity in judgement--but the form of judgement of which Isaiah

had spoken before in general terms looms nearer, and before the end of

the prophecy we get a view at close quarters of the Assyrian ranks.

Besides, opposition has arisen to the prophet's teaching. We saw that

the obscurities and inconsistencies of chapters ii.-iv. are due to the

fact that that prophecy represents several stages of experience through

which Isaiah passed before he gained his final convictions. But his

countrymen, it appears, have now had time to turn on these convictions

and call them in question: it is necessary for Isaiah to vindicate them.

The difference, then, between these two sets of prophecies, dealing with

the same things, is that in the former (chapters ii.-iv.), we have the

obscure and tortuous path of a conviction struggling to light in the

prophet's own experience; here, in chapter v., we have its careful array

in the light and before the people.

The point of Isaiah's teaching against which opposition was directed was

of course its main point, that God was about to abandon Judah. This must

have appeared to the popular religion of the day as the rankest heresy.

To the Jews the honour of Jehovah was bound up with the inviolability of

Jerusalem and the prosperity of Judah. But Isaiah knew Jehovah to be

infinitely more concerned for the purity of His people than for their

prosperity. He had seen the LORD _exalted in righteousness_ above those

national and earthly interests, with which vulgar men exclusively

identified His will. Did the people appeal to the long time Jehovah had

graciously led them for proof that He would not abandon them now? To

Isaiah that gracious leading was but for righteousness' sake, and that

God might make His own a holy people. Their history, so full of the

favours of the Almighty, did not teach Isaiah as it did the common

prophets of his time, the lesson of Israel's political security, but the

far different one of their religious responsibility. To him it only

meant what Amos had already put in those startling words, _You only have

I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will visit upon

you all your iniquities_. Now Isaiah delivered this doctrine at a time

when it brought him the hostility of men's passions as well as of their

opinions. Judah was arming for war. Syria and Ephraim were marching upon

her. To threaten his country with ruin in such an hour was to run the

risk of suffering from popular fury as a traitor as well as from

priestly prejudice as a heretic. The strain of the moment is felt in the

strenuousness of the prophecy. Chapter v., with its appendix, exhibits

more grasp and method than its predecessors. Its literary form is

finished, its feeling clear. There is a tenderness in the beginning of

it, an inexorableness in the end and an eagerness all through, which

stamp the chapter as Isaiah's final appeal to his countrymen at this

period of his career.

The chapter is a noble piece of patriotism--one of the noblest of a race

who, although for the greater part of their history without a

fatherland, have contributed more brilliantly than perhaps any other to

the literature of patriotism, and that simply because, as Isaiah here

illustrates, patriotism was to their prophets identical with religious

privilege and responsibility. Isaiah carries this to its bitter end.

Other patriots have wept to sing their country's woes; Isaiah's burden

is his people's guilt. To others an invasion of their fatherland by its

enemies has been the motive to rouse by song or speech their countrymen

to repel it. Isaiah also hears the tramp of the invader; but to him is

permitted no ardour of defence, and his message to his countrymen is

that they must succumb, for the invasion is irresistible and of the very

judgement of God. How much it cost the prophet to deliver such a message

we may see from those few verses of it in which his heart is not

altogether silenced by his conscience. The sweet description of Judah

as a vineyard, and the touching accents that break through the roll of

denunciation with such phrases as _My people are gone away into

captivity unawares_, tell us how the prophet's love of country is

struggling with his duty to a righteous God. The course of feeling

throughout the prophecy is very striking. The tenderness of the opening

lyric seems ready to flow into gentle pleading with the whole people.

But as the prophet turns to particular classes and their sins his mood

changes to indignation, the voice settles down to judgement; till when

it issues upon that clear statement of the coming of the Northern hosts

every trace of emotion has left it, and the sentences ring out as

unfaltering as the tramp of the armies they describe.

I. THE PARABLE OF THE VINEYARD (v. 1-7).

Isaiah adopts the resource of every misunderstood and unpopular teacher,

and seeks to turn the flank of his people's prejudices by an attack in

parable on their sympathies. Did they stubbornly believe it impossible

for God to abandon a State He had so long and so carefully fostered? Let

them judge from an analogous case in which they were all experts. In a

picture of great beauty Isaiah describes a vineyard upon one of the

sunny promontories visible from Jerusalem. Every care had been given it

of which an experienced vine-dresser could think, but it brought forth

only wild grapes. The vine-dresser himself is introduced, and appeals to

the men of Judah and Jerusalem to judge between him and his vineyard. He

gets their assent that all had been done which could be done, and

fortified with that resolves to abandon the vineyard. _I will lay it

waste; it shall not be pruned nor digged, but there shall come up briers

and thorns._ Then the stratagem comes out, the speaker drops the tones

of a human cultivator, and in the omnipotence of the Lord of heaven he

is heard to say, _I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain

upon it_. This diversion upon their sympathies having succeeded, the

prophet scarcely needs to charge the people's prejudices in face. His

point has been evidently carried. _For the vineyard of Jehovah of hosts

is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant; and He

looked for judgement, but behold oppression, for righteousness, but

behold a cry._

The lesson enforced by Isaiah is just this, that in a people's

civilization there lie the deepest responsibilities, for that is neither

more nor less than their cultivation by God; and the question for a

people is not how secure does this render them, nor what does it count

for glory, but how far is it rising towards the intentions of its

Author? Does it produce those fruits of righteousness for which alone

God cares to set apart and cultivate the peoples? On this depends the

question whether the civilization is secure, as well as the right of the

people to enjoy and feel proud of it. There cannot be true patriotism

without sensitiveness to this, for however rich be the elements that

compose the patriot's temper, as piety towards the past, ardour of

service for the present, love of liberty, delight in natural beauty and

gratitude for Divine favour, so rich a temper will grow rancid without

the salt of conscience; and the richer the temper is, the greater must

be the proportion of that salt. All prophets and poets of patriotism

have been moralists and satirists as well. From Demosthenes to

Tourgenieff, from Dante to Mazzini, from Milton to Russell Lowell, from

Burns to Heine, one cannot recall any great patriot who has not known

how to use the scourge as well as the trumpet. Many opportunities will

present themselves to us of illustrating Isaiah's orations by the

letters and speeches of Cromwell, who of moderns most resembles the

statesman-prophet of Judah; but nowhere does the resemblance become so

close as when we lay a prophecy like this of Jehovah's vineyard by the

side of the speeches in which the Lord Protector exhorted the Commons of

England, although it was the hour of his and their triumph, to address

themselves to their sins.

So, then, the patriotism of all great men has carried a conscience for

their country's sins. But while this is always more or less a burden to

the true patriot, there are certain periods in which his care for his

country ought to be this predominantly, and need be little else. In a

period like our own, for instance, of political security and fashionable

religion, what need is there in patriotic displays of any other kind?

but how much for patriotism of this kind--of men who will uncover the

secret sins, however loathsome, and declare the hypocrisies, however

powerful, of the social life of the people! These are the patriots we

need in times of peace; and as it is more difficult to rouse a torpid

people to their sins than to lead a roused one against their enemies,

and harder to face a whole people with the support only of conscience

than to defy many nations if you but have your own at your back, so

these patriots of peace are more to be honoured than those of war. But

there is one kind of patriotism more arduous and honourable still. It is

that which Isaiah displays here, who cannot add to his conscience hope

or even pity, who must hail his country's enemies for his country's

good, and recite the long roll of God's favours to his nation only to

emphasize the justice of His abandonment of them.

II. THE WILD GRAPES OF JUDAH (v. 8-24).

The _wild grapes_ which Isaiah saw in the vineyard of the Lord he

catalogues in a series of Woes (vv. 8-24), fruits all of them of love of

money and love of wine. They are abuse of the soil (8-10, 17[4]), a

giddy luxury which has taken to drink (11-16), a moral blindness and

headlong audacity of sin which habitual avarice and drunkenness soon

develop (18-21), and, again, a greed of drink and money--men's

perversion of their strength to wine, and of their opportunities of

justice to the taking of bribes (22-24). These are the features of

corrupt civilization not only in Judah, and the voice that deplores them

cannot speak without rousing others very clamant to the modern

conscience. It is with remarkable persistence that in every civilization

the two main passions of the human heart, love of wealth and love of

pleasure, the instinct to gather and the instinct to squander, have

sought precisely these two forms denounced by Isaiah in which to work

their social havoc--appropriation of the soil and indulgence in strong

drink. Every civilized community develops sooner or later its

land-question and its liquor-question. "Questions" they are called by

the superficial opinion that all difficulties may be overcome by the

cleverness of men; yet problems through which there cries for remedy so

vast a proportion of our poverty, crime and madness, are something worse

than "questions." They are huge sins, and require not merely the

statesman's wit, but all the penitence and zeal of which a nation's

conscience is capable. It is in this that the force of Isaiah's

treatment lies. We feel he is not facing questions of State, but sins of

men. He has nothing to tell us of what he considers the best system of

land tenure, but he enforces the principle that in the ease with which

land may be absorbed by one person the natural covetousness of the human

heart has a terrible opportunity for working ruin upon society. _Woe

unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there

be no room, and ye be made to dwell alone in the midst of the land._ We

know from Micah that the actual process which Isaiah condemns was

carried out with the most cruel evictions and disinheritances. Isaiah

does not touch on its methods, but exposes its effects on the

country--depopulation and barrenness,--and emphasizes its religious

significance. _Of a truth many houses shall be desolate, even great and

fair, without an inhabitant. For ten acres of vineyard shall yield one

bath, and a homer of seed shall yield but an ephah.... Then shall

lambs feed as in their pasture, and strangers shall devour the ruins of

the fat ones--i.e._, of the luxurious landowners (9, 10, 17. See note

on previous page). And in one of those elliptic statements by which he

often startles us with the sudden sense that God Himself is acquainted

with all our affairs, and takes His own interest in them, Isaiah adds,

"All this was whispered to me by Jehovah: _In mine ears--the LORD of

hosts_" (ver. 9).

[4] Ewald happily suggests that verse 17 has dropped out of, and should

be restored to, its proper position at the end of the first "woe," where

it contributes to the development of the meaning far more than from

where it stands in the text.

During recent agitations in our own country one has often seen the "land

laws of the Bible" held forth by some thoughtless demagogue as models

for land tenure among ourselves; as if a system which worked well with a

small tribe in a land they had all entered on equal footing, and where

there was no opportunity for the industry of the people except in

pasture and tillage, could possibly be applicable to a vastly larger and

more complex population, with different traditions and very different

social circumstances. Isaiah says nothing about the peculiar land _laws_

of his people. He lays down principles, and these are principles valid

in every civilization. God has made the land, not to feed the pride of

the few, but the natural hunger of the many, and it is His will that the

most be got out of a country's soil for the people of the country.

Whatever be the system of land-tenure--and while all are more or less

liable to abuse, it is the duty of a people to agitate for that which

will be least liable--if it is taken advantage of by individuals to

satisfy their own cupidity, then God will take account of them. There is

a responsibility which the State cannot enforce, and the neglect of

which cannot be punished by any earthly law, but all the more will God

see to it. A nation's treatment of their land is not always prominent as

a question which demands the attention of public reformers; but it

ceaselessly has interest for God, who ever holds individuals to answer

for it. The land-question is ultimately a religious question. For the

management of their land the whole nation is responsible to God, but

especially those who own or manage estates. This is a sacred office.

When one not only remembers the nature of land--how it is an element of

life, so that if a man abuse the soil it is as if he poisoned the air or

darkened the heavens--but appreciates also the multitude of personal

relations which the landowner or factor holds in his hand--the peace of

homes, the continuity of local traditions, the physical health, the

social fearlessness and frankness, and the thousand delicate

associations which their habitations entwine about the hearts of

men--one feels that to all who possess or manage land is granted an

opportunity of patriotism and piety open to few, a ministry less

honourable and sacred than none other committed by God to man for his

fellow-men.

After the land-sin Isaiah hurls his second Woe upon the drink-sin, and

it is a heavier woe than the first. With fatal persistence the luxury of

every civilization has taken to drink; and of all the indictments

brought by moralists against nations, that which they reserve for

drunkenness is, as here, the most heavily weighted. The crusade against

drink is not the novel thing that many imagine who observe only its late

revival among ourselves. In ancient times there was scarcely a State in

which prohibitive legislation of the most stringent kind was not

attempted, and generally carried out with a thoroughness more possible

under despots than where, as with us, the slow consent of public opinion

is necessary. A horror of strong drink has in every age possessed those

who from their position as magistrates or prophets have been able to

follow for any distance the drifts of social life. Isaiah exposes as

powerfully as ever any of them did in what the peculiar fatality of

drinking lies. Wine is a mocker by nothing more than by the moral

incredulity which it produces, enabling men to hide from themselves the

spiritual and material effects of over-indulgence in it. No one who has

had to do with persons slowly falling from moderate to immoderate

drinking can mistake Isaiah's meaning when he says, _They regard not the

work of the LORD; neither have they considered the operation of His

hands_. Nothing kills the conscience like steady drinking to a little

excess; and religion, even while the conscience is alive, acts on it

only as an opiate. It is not, however, with the symptoms of drink in

individuals so much as with its aggregate effects on the nation that

Isaiah is concerned. So prevalent is excessive drinking, so entwined

with the social customs of the country and many powerful interests, that

it is extremely difficult to rouse public opinion to its effects. And

_so they go into captivity for lack of knowledge_. Temperance reformers

are often blamed for the strength of their language, but they may

shelter themselves behind Isaiah. As he pictures it, the national

destruction caused by drink is complete. It is nothing less than the

people's _captivity_, and we know what that meant to an Israelite. It

affects all classes: _Their honourable men are famished, and their

multitude parched with thirst.... The mean man is bowed down, and the

great man is humbled._ But the want and ruin of this earth are not

enough to describe it. The appetite of hell itself has to be enlarged to

suffice for the consumption of the spoils of strong drink. _Therefore

hell hath enlarged her desire and opened her mouth without measure; and

their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth

among them, descend into it._ The very appetite of hell has to be

enlarged! Does it not truly seem as if the wild and wanton waste of

drink were preventable, as if it were not, as many are ready to sneer,

the inevitable evil of men's hearts choosing this form of issue, but a

superfluous audacity of sin, which the devil himself did not desire or

tempt men to? It is this feeling of the infernal gratuitousness of most

of the drink-evil--the conviction that here hell would be quiet if only

she were not stirred up by the extraordinarily wanton provocatives that

society and the State offer to excessive drinking--which compels

temperance reformers at the present day to isolate drunkenness and make

it the object of a special crusade. Isaiah's strong figure has lost none

of its strength to-day. When our judges tell us from the bench that

nine-tenths of pauperism and crime are caused by drink, and our

physicians that if only irregular tippling were abolished half the

current sickness of the land would cease, and our statesmen that the

ravages of strong drink are equal to those of the historical scourges of

war, famine and pestilence combined, surely to swallow such a glut of

spoil _the appetite of hell must have been_ still more enlarged, _and

the mouth of hell made_ yet _wider_.

The next three Woes are upon different aggravations of that moral

perversity which the prophet has already traced to strong drink. In the

first of these it is better to read, _draw punishment near with cords of

vanity_, than _draw iniquity_. Then we have a striking antithesis--the

drunkards mocking Isaiah over their cups with the challenge, as if it

would not be taken up, _Let Jehovah make speed, and hasten His work of

judgement, that we may see it_, while all the time they themselves were

dragging that judgement near, _as with cart-ropes_, by their persistent

diligence in evil. This figure of sinners jeering at the approach of a

calamity while they actually wear the harness of its carriage is very

striking. But the Jews are not only unconscious of judgement, they are

confused as to the very principles of morality: _Who call evil good, and

good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put

bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!_

In his fifth Woe the prophet attacks a disposition to which his scorn

gives no peace throughout his ministry. If these sensualists had only

confined themselves to their sensuality they might have been left alone;

but with that intellectual bravado which is equally born with "Dutch

courage" of drink, they interfered in the conduct of the State, and

prepared arrogant policies of alliance and war that were the distress of

the sober-minded prophet all his days. _Woe unto them that are wise in

their own eyes and prudent in their own sight._

In his last Woe Isaiah returns to the drinking habits of the upper

classes, from which it would appear that among the judges even of Judah

there were "six-bottle men." They sustained their extravagance by

subsidies, which we trust were unknown to the mighty men of wine who

once filled the seats of justice in our own country. _They justify the

wicked for a bribe, and take away the righteousness of the righteous

from him._ All these sinners, dead through their rejection of the law of

Jehovah of hosts and the word of the Holy One of Israel, shall be like

to the stubble, fit only for burning, and their blossom as the dust of

the rotten tree.

III. THE ANGER OF THE LORD (v. 25; ix. 8-x. 4; v. 26-30).

This indictment of the various sins of the people occupies the whole of

the second part of the oration. But a third part is now added, in which

the prophet catalogues the judgements of the Lord upon them, each of

these closing with the weird refrain, _For all this His anger is not

turned away, but His hand is stretched out still_. The complete

catalogue is usually obtained by inserting between the 25th and 26th

verses of chapter v. the long passage from chapter ix., ver. 8, to

chapter x., ver. 4. It is quite true that as far as chapter v. itself is

concerned it does not need this insertion; but ix. 8-x. 4 is decidedly

out of place where it now lies. Its paragraphs end with the same refrain

as closes v. 25, which forms, besides, a natural introduction to them,

while v. 26-30 form as natural a conclusion. The latter verses describe

an Assyrian invasion, and it was always in an Assyrian invasion that

Isaiah foresaw the final calamity of Judah. We may, then, subject to

further light on the exceedingly obscure subject of the arrangement of

Isaiah's prophecies, follow some of the leading critics, and place ix.

8-x. 4 between verses 25-26 of chapter v.; and the more we examine them

the more we shall be satisfied with our arrangement, for strung together

in this order they form one of the most impressive series of scenes

which even an Isaiah has given us.

From these scenes Isaiah has spared nothing that is terrible in history

or nature, and it is not one of the least of the arguments for putting

them together that their intensity increases to a climax. Earthquakes,

armed raids, a great battle and the slaughter of a people; prairie and

forest fires, civil strife and the famine fever, that feeds upon itself;

another battle-field, with its cringing groups of captives and heaps of

slain; the resistless tide of a great invasion; and then, for final

prospect, a desolate land by the sound of a hungry sea, and the light is

darkened in the clouds thereof. The elements of nature and the elemental

passions of man have been let loose together; and we follow the violent

floods, remembering that it is sin which has burst the gates of the

universe, and given the tides of hell full course through it. Over the

storm and battle there comes booming like the storm-bell the awful

refrain, _For all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is

stretched out still._ It is poetry of the highest order, but in him who

reads it with a conscience mere literary sensations are sobered by the

awe of some of the most profound moral phenomena of life. The

persistence of Divine wrath, the long-lingering effects of sin in a

nation's history, man's abuse of sorrow and his defiance of an angry

Providence, are the elements of this great drama. Those who are familiar

with _King Lear_, will recognize these elements, and observe how

similarly the ways of Providence and the conduct of men are represented

there and here.

What Isaiah unfolds, then, is a series of calamities that have overtaken

the people of Israel. It is impossible for us to identify every one of

them with a particular event in Israel's history otherwise known to us.

Some it is not difficult to recognize; but the prophet passes in a

perplexing way from Judah to Ephraim and Ephraim to Judah, and in one

case, where he represents Samaria as attacked by Syria and the

Philistines, he goes back to a period at some distance from his own.

There are also passages, as for instance x. 1-4, in which we are unable

to decide whether he describes a present punishment or threatens a

future one. But his moral purpose, at least, is plain. He will show how

often Jehovah has already spoken to His people by calamity, and because

they have remained hardened under these warnings, how there now remains

possible only the last, worst blow of an Assyrian invasion. Isaiah is

justifying his threat of so unprecedented and extreme a punishment for

God's people as overthrow by this Northern people, who had just appeared

upon Judah's political horizon. God, he tells Israel, has tried

everything short of this, and it has failed; now only this remains, and

this shall not fail. The prophet's purpose, therefore, being not an

accurate historical recital, but moral impressiveness, he gives us a

more or less ideal description of former calamities, mentioning only so

much as to allow us to recognize here and there that it is actual facts

which he uses for his purpose of condemning Israel to captivity, and

vindicating Israel's God in bringing that captivity near. The passage

thus forms a parallel to that in Amos, with its similar refrain: _Yet ye

have not returned unto Me, saith the Lord_ (Amos iv. 6-12), and only

goes farther than that earlier prophecy in indicating that the

instruments of the Lord's final judgement are to be the Assyrians.

Five great calamities, says Isaiah, have fallen on Israel and left them

hardened: 1st, earthquake (v. 25); 2nd, loss of territory (ix. 8-12);

3rd, war and a decisive defeat (ix. 13-17); 4th, internal anarchy (ix.

18-21); 5th, the near prospect of captivity (x. 1-4).

1. THE EARTHQUAKE (v. 25).--Amos closes his series with an earthquake;

Isaiah begins with one. It may be the same convulsion they describe, or

may not. Although the skirts of Palestine both to the east and west

frequently tremble to these disturbances, an earthquake in Palestine

itself, up on the high central ridge of the land, is very rare. Isaiah

vividly describes its awful simplicity and suddenness. _The Lord

stretched forth His hand and smote, and the hills shook, and their

carcases were like offal in the midst of the streets._ More words are

not needed, because there was nothing more to describe. The Lord lifted

His hand; the hills seemed for a moment to topple over, and when the

living recovered from the shock there lay the dead, flung like refuse

about the streets.

2. THE LOSS OF TERRITORY (ix. 8-21).--So awful a calamity, in which the

dying did not die out of sight nor fall huddled together on some far off

battle-field, but the whole land was strewn with her slain, ought to

have left indelible impression on the people. But it did not. The Lord's

own word had been in it for Jacob and Israel (ix. 8), _that the people

might know, even Ephraim and the inhabitants of Samaria_. But unhumbled

they turned in the stoutness of their hearts, saying, when the

earthquake had passed:[5] _The bricks are fallen, but we will build with

hewn stones;[6] the sycomores are cut down, but we will change them into

cedars_. Calamity did not make this people thoughtful; they felt God

only to endeavour to forget Him. Therefore He visited them the second

time. They did not feel the Lord shaking their land, so He sent their

enemies to steal it from them: _the Syrians before and the Philistines

behind; and they devour Israel with open mouth_. What that had been for

appalling suddenness this was for lingering and harassing--guerilla

warfare, armed raids, the land eaten away bit by bit. _Yet the people do

not return unto Him that smote them, neither seek they the LORD of

hosts._

[5] Read past tenses, as in the margin of Revised Version, for all the

future tenses, or better, the historical present, down to the end of the

chapter.

[6] It is part of the argument for connecting ix. 8 with v. 25 that this

phrase would be very natural after the earthquake described in v. 25.

3. WAR AND DEFEAT (ix. 13-17).--The next consequent calamity passed from

the land to the people themselves. A great battle is described, in which

the nation is dismembered in one day. War and its horrors are told, and

the apparent want of Divine pity and discrimination which they imply is

explained. Israel has been led into these disasters by the folly of

their leaders, whom Isaiah therefore singles out for blame. _For they

that lead these people cause them to err, and they that are led of them

are destroyed._ But the real horror of war is that it falls not upon

its authors, that its victims are not statesmen, but the beauty of a

country's youth, the helplessness of the widow and orphan. Some question

seems to have been stirred by this in Isaiah's heart. He asks, Why does

the Lord not rejoice in the young men of His people? Why has He no pity

for widow and orphan, that He thus sacrifices them to the sin of the

rulers? It is because the whole nation shares the ruler's guilt; _every

one is an hypocrite and an evil-doer, and every mouth speaketh folly_.

As ruler so people, is a truth Isaiah frequently asserts, but never with

such grimness as here. War brings out, as nothing else does, the

solidarity of a people in guilt.

4. INTERNAL ANARCHY (ix. 18-21).--Even yet the people did not repent;

their calamities only drove them to further wickedness. The prophet's

eyes are opened to the awful fact that God's wrath is but the blast that

fans men's hot sins to flame. This is one of those two or three awful

scenes in history, in the conflagration of which we cannot tell what is

human sin and what Divine judgement. There is a panic wickedness, sin

spreading like mania, as if men were possessed by supernatural powers.

The physical metaphors of the prophet are evident: a forest or prairie

fire, and the consequent famine, whose fevered victims feed upon

themselves. And no less evident are the political facts which the

prophet employs these metaphors to describe. It is the anarchy which has

beset more than one corrupt and unfortunate people, when their

misleaders have been overthrown: the anarchy in which each faction seeks

to slaughter out the rest. Jealousy and distrust awake the lust for

blood, rage seizes the people as fire the forest, _and no man spareth

his brother_. We have had modern instances of all this; these scenes

form a true description of some days of the French Revolution, and are

even a truer description of the civil war that broke out in Paris after

her late siege.

"If that the heavens do not their visible spirits

Send quickly down to tame these vile offences,

'T will come,

Humanity must perforce prey on itself

Like monsters of the deep."[7]

[7] _King Lear_, act iv., sc. 2.

5. THE THREAT OF CAPTIVITY (x. 1-4).--Turning now from the past, and

from the fate of Samaria, with which it would appear he has been more

particularly engaged, the prophet addresses his own countrymen in Judah,

and paints the future for them. It is not a future in which there is any

hope. The day of their visitation also will surely come, and the prophet

sees it close in the darkest night of which a Jewish heart could

think--the night of captivity. Where, he asks his unjust

countrymen--where _will ye then flee for help? and where will you leave

your glory_? Cringing among the captives, lying dead beneath heaps of

dead--that is to be your fate, who will have turned so often and then so

finally from God. When exactly the prophet thus warned his countrymen of

captivity we do not know, but the warning, though so real, produced

neither penitence in men nor pity in God. _For all this His anger is not

turned away, but His hand is stretched out still._

6. THE ASSYRIAN INVASION (v. 26-30).--The prophet is, therefore, free to

explain that cloud which has appeared far away on the northern horizon.

God's hand of judgement is still uplifted over Judah, and it is that

hand which summons the cloud. The Assyrians are coming in answer to

God's signal, and they are coming as a flood, to leave nothing but ruin

and distress behind them. No description by Isaiah is more majestic than

this one, in which Jehovah, who has exhausted every nearer means of

converting His people, lifts His undrooping arm with a _flag to the

nations that are far off, and hisses_ or whistles _for them from the end

of the earth_. _And, behold, they come with speed, swiftly: there is no

weary one nor straggler among them; none slumbers nor sleeps; nor loosed

is the girdle of his loins, nor broken the latchet of his shoes; whose

arrows are sharpened, and all their bows bent; their horses' hoofs are

like the flint, and their wheels like the whirlwind; a roar have they

like the lion's, and they roar like young lions; yea, they growl and

grasp the prey, and carry it off, and there is none to deliver. And they

growl upon him that day like the growling of the sea; and if one looks

to the land, behold, dark and distress, and the light is darkened in the

cloudy heaven._

Thus Isaiah leaves Judah to await her doom. But the tones of his weird

refrain awaken in our hearts some thoughts which will not let his

message go from us just yet.

It will ever be a question, whether men abuse more their sorrows or

their joys; but no earnest soul can doubt, which of these abuses is the

more fatal. To sin in the one case is to yield to a temptation; to sin

in the other is to resist a Divine grace. Sorrow is God's last message

to man; it is God speaking in emphasis. He who abuses it shows that he

can shut his ears when God speaks loudest. Therefore heartlessness or

impenitence after sorrow is more dangerous than intemperance in joy; its

results are always more tragic. Now Isaiah points out that men's abuse

of sorrow is twofold. Men abuse sorrow by mistaking it, and they abuse

sorrow by defying it.

Men abuse sorrow by mistaking it, when they see in it nothing but a

penal or expiatory force. To many men sorrow is what his devotions were

to Louis XI., which having religiously performed, he felt the more brave

to sin. So with the Samaritans, who said in the stoutness of their

hearts, _The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones;

the sycomores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars._ To

speak in this way is happy, but heathenish. It is to call sorrow "bad

luck;" it is to hear no voice of God in it, saying, "Be pure; be humble;

lean upon Me." This disposition springs from a vulgar conception of God,

as of a Being of no permanence in character, easily irritated but

relieved by a burst of passion, smartly punishing His people and then

leaving them to themselves. It is a temper which says, "God is angry,

let us wait a little; God is appeased, let us go ahead again." Over

against such vulgar views of a Deity with a temper Isaiah unveils the

awful majesty of God in holy wrath: _For all this His anger is not

turned away, but His hand is stretched out still_. How grim and savage

does it appear to our eyes till we understand the thoughts of the

sinners to whom it was revealed! God cannot dispel the cowardly thought,

that He is anxious only to punish, except by letting His heavy hand

abide till it purify also. The permanence of God's wrath is thus an

ennobling, not a stupefying doctrine.

Men also abuse sorrow by defying it, but the end of this is madness. "It

forms the greater part of the tragedy of _King Lear_, that the aged

monarch, though he has given his throne away, retains his imperiousness

of heart, and continues to exhibit a senseless, if sometimes

picturesque, pride and selfishness in face of misfortune. Even when he

is overthrown he must still command; he fights against the very

elements; he is determined to be at least the master of his own

sufferings and destiny. But for this the necessary powers fail him; his

life thus disordered terminates in madness. It was only by such an

affliction that a character like his could be brought to repentance, ...

to humility, which is the parent of true love, and that love in him

could be purified. Hence the melancholy close of that tragedy."[8] As

Shakespeare has dealt with the king, so Isaiah with the people; he also

shows us sorrow when it is defied bringing forth madness. On so impious

a height man's brain grows dizzy, and he falls into that terrible abyss

which is not, as some imagine, hell, but God's last purgatory.

Shakespeare brings shattered Lear out of it, and Isaiah has a remnant of

the people to save.

[8] Ulrici: _Shakespeare's Dramatic Art_.

CHAPTER IV.

_ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION._

ISAIAH vi. (740 B.C.; WRITTEN 735? OR 725?).

It has been already remarked that in chapter vi. we should find no other

truths than those which have been unfolded in chapters ii.-v.: the Lord

exalted in righteousness, the coming of a terrible judgement from Him

upon Judah, and the survival of a bare remnant of the people. But

chapter vi. treats the same subjects with a difference. In chapters

ii.-iv. they gradually appear and grow to clearness in connection with

the circumstances of Judah's history; in chapter v. they are formally

and rhetorically vindicated; in chapter vi. we are led back to the

secret and solemn moments of their first inspiration in the prophet's

own soul. It may be asked why chapter vi. comes last and not first in

this series, and why in an exposition, attempting to deal, as far as

possible, chronologically with Isaiah's prophecies, his call should not

form the subject of the first chapter. The answer is simple, and throws

a flood of light upon the chapter. In all probability chapter vi. was

written after its predecessors, and what Isaiah has put into it is not

only what happened in the earliest moments of his prophetic life, but

that spelt out and emphasized by his experience since. The ideal

character of the narrative, and its date some years after the events

which it relates, are now generally admitted. Of course the narrative is

all fact. No one will believe that he, whose glance penetrated with such

keenness the character of men and movements, looked with dimmer eye into

his own heart. It is the spiritual process which the prophet actually

passed through before the opening of his ministry. But it is that,

developed by subsequent experience, and presented to us in the language

of outward vision. Isaiah had been some years a prophet, long enough to

make clear that prophecy was not to be for him what it had been for his

predecessors in Israel, a series of detached inspirations and occasional

missions, with short responsibilities, but a work for life, a profession

and a career, with all that this means of postponement, failure, and

fluctuation of popular feeling. Success had not come so rapidly as the

prophet in his original enthusiasm had looked for, and his preaching had

effected little upon the people. Therefore he would go back to the

beginning, remind himself of that to which God had really called him,

and vindicate the results of his ministry, at which people scoffed and

his own heart grew sometimes sick. In chapter vi. Isaiah acts as his own

remembrancer. If we keep in mind, that this chapter, describing Isaiah's

call and consecration to the prophetic office, was written by a man who

felt that office to be the burden of a lifetime, and who had to explain

its nature and vindicate its results to his own soul--grown somewhat

uncertain, it may be, of her original inspiration--we shall find light

upon features of the chapter that are otherwise most obscure.

1. THE VISION (vv. 1-4).

Several years, then, Isaiah looks back and says, _In the year King

Uzziah died._ There is more than a date given here; there is a great

contrast suggested. Prophecy does not chronicle by time, but by

experiences, and we have here, as it seems, the cardinal experience of a

prophet's life.

All men knew of that glorious reign with the ghastly end--fifty years of

royalty, and then a lazar-house. There had been no king like this one

since Solomon; never, since the son of David brought the Queen of Sheba

to his feet, had the national pride stood so high or the nation's dream

of sovereignty touched such remote borders. The people's admiration

invested Uzziah with all the graces of the ideal monarch. The chronicler

of Judah tells us _that God helped him and made him to prosper, and his

name spread far abroad, and he was marvellously helped till he was

strong_; he with the double name--Azariah, Jehovah-his-Helper; Uzziah,

Jehovah-his-Strength. How this glory fell upon the fancy of the future

prophet, and dyed it deep, we may imagine from those marvellous colours,

with which in later years he painted the king in his beauty. Think of

the boy, the boy that was to be an Isaiah, the boy with the germs of

this great prophecy in his heart--think of him and such a hero as this

to shine upon him, and we may conceive how his whole nature opened out

beneath that sun of royalty and absorbed its light.

Suddenly the glory was eclipsed, and Jerusalem learned that she had seen

her king for the last time: _The Lord smote the king so that he was a

leper unto the day of his death, and dwelt in a several house, and he

was cut off from the house of the Lord._ Uzziah had gone into the

temple, and attempted with his own hands to burn incense. Under a later

dispensation of liberty he would have been applauded as a brave

Protestant, vindicating the right of every worshipper of God to approach

Him without the intervention of a special priesthood. Under the earlier

dispensation of law his act could be regarded only as one of

presumption, the expression of a worldly and irreverent temper, which

ignored the infinite distance between God and man. It was followed, as

sins of wilfulness in religion were always followed under the old

covenant, by swift disaster. Uzziah suffered as Saul, Uzzah, Nadab and

Abihu did. The wrath, with which he burst out on the opposing priests,

brought on, or made evident as it is believed to have done in other

cases, an attack of leprosy. The white spot stood out unmistakeably from

the flushed forehead, and he was thrust from the temple--_yea, himself

also hasted to go out_.

We can imagine how such a judgement, the moral of which must have been

plain to all, affected the most sensitive heart in Jerusalem. Isaiah's

imagination was darkened, but he tells us that the crisis was the

enfranchisement of his faith. _In the year King Uzziah died_--it is as

if a veil had dropped, and the prophet saw beyond what it had hidden,

_the Lord sitting on a throne high and lifted up_. That it is no mere

date Isaiah means, but a spiritual contrast which he is anxious to

impress upon us, is made clear by his emphasis of the rank and not the

name of God. It is _the Lord sitting upon a throne--the Lord_

absolutely, set over against the human prince. The simple antithesis

seems to speak of the passing away of the young man's hero-worship and

the dawn of his faith; and so interpreted, this first verse of chapter

vi. is only a concise summary of that development of religious

experience which we have traced through chapters ii.-iv. Had Isaiah ever

been subject to the religious temper of his time, the careless optimism

of a prosperous and proud people, who entered upon their religious

services without awe, _trampling the courts of the Lord_, and used them

like Uzziah, for their _own honour_, who felt religion to be an easy

thing, and dismissed from it all thoughts of judgement and feelings of

penitence--if ever Isaiah had been subject to that temper, then once for

all he was redeemed by this stroke upon Uzziah. And, as we have seen,

there is every reason to believe that Isaiah did at first share the too

easy public religion of his youth. That early vision of his (ii. 2-5),

the establishment of Israel at the head of the nations, to be

immediately attained at his own word (v. 5) and without preliminary

purification, was it not simply a less gross form of the king's own

religious presumption? Uzziah's fatal act was the expression of the

besetting sin of his people, and in that sin Isaiah himself had been a

partaker. _I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a

people of unclean lips._ In the person of their monarch the temper of

the whole Jewish nation had come to judgement. Seeking the ends of

religion by his own way, and ignoring the way God had appointed, Uzziah

at the very moment of his insistence was hurled back and stamped

unclean. The prophet's eyes were opened. The king sank into a leper's

grave, but before Isaiah's vision the Divine majesty arose in all its

loftiness. _I saw the Lord high and lifted up._ We already know what

Isaiah means by these terms. He has used them of God's supremacy in

righteousness above the low moral standards of men, of God's occupation

of a far higher throne than that of the national deity of Judah, of

God's infinite superiority to Israel's vulgar identification of His

purposes with her material prosperity or His honour with the

compromises of her politics, and especially of God's seat as their

Judge over a people, who sought in their religion only satisfaction for

their pride and love of ease.

From this contrast the whole vision expands as follows.

Under the mistaken idea that what Isaiah describes is the temple in

Jerusalem, it has been remarked, that the place of his vision is

wonderful in the case of one who set so little store by ceremonial

worship. This, however, to which our prophet looks is no house built

with hands, but Jehovah's own heavenly _palace_ (ver. 1--not _temple_);

only Isaiah describes it in terms of the Jerusalem temple which was its

symbol. It was natural that the temple should furnish Isaiah not only

with the framework of his vision, but also with the platform from which

he saw it. For it was in the temple that Uzziah's sin was sinned and

God's holiness vindicated upon him. It was in the temple that, when

Isaiah beheld the scrupulous religiousness of the people, the contrast

of that with their evil lives struck him, and he summed it up in the

epigram _wickedness and worship_ (i. 13). It was in the temple, in

short, that the prophet's conscience had been most roused, and just

where the conscience is most roused there is the vision of God to be

expected. Very probably it was while brooding over Uzziah's judgement on

the scene of its occurrence that Isaiah beheld his vision. Yet for all

the vision contained the temple itself was too narrow. The truth which

was to be revealed to Isaiah, the holiness of God, demanded a wider

stage and the breaking down of those partitions, which, while they had

been designed to impress God's presence on the worshipper, had only

succeeded in veiling Him. So while the seer keeps his station on the

threshold of the earthly building, soon to feel it rock beneath his

feet, as heaven's praise bursts like thunder on the earth, and while his

immediate neighbourhood remains the same familiar _house_, all beyond is

glorified. The veil of the temple falls away, and everything behind it.

No ark nor mercy-seat is visible, but a throne and a court--the palace

of God in heaven, as we have it also pictured in the eleventh and

twenty-ninth Psalms. The Royal Presence is everywhere. Isaiah describes

no face, only a Presence and a Session: _the Lord sitting on a throne,

and His skirts filled the palace_.

"No face; only the sight

Of a sweepy garment vast and white

With a hem that I could recognize."[9]

[9] Browning's "Christmas Eve."

_Around_ (not _above_, as in the English version) were ranged the

hovering courtiers, of what shape and appearance we know not, except

that they veiled their faces and their feet before the awful

Holiness,--all wings and voice, perfect readinesses of praise and

service. The prophet heard them chant in antiphon, like the temple

choirs of priests. And the one choir cried out, _Holy, holy, holy is

Jehovah of hosts_; and the other responded, _The whole earth is full of

His glory_.

It is by the familiar name Jehovah of hosts--the proper name of Israel's

national God--that the prophet hears the choirs of heaven address the

Divine Presence. But what they ascribe to the Deity is exactly what

Israel will not ascribe, and the revelation they make of His nature is

the contradiction of Israel's thoughts concerning Him.

What, in the first place, is HOLINESS? We attach this term to a definite

standard of morality or an unusually impressive fulness of character.

To our minds it is associated with very positive forces, as of comfort

and conviction--perhaps because we take our ideas of it from the active

operations of the Holy Ghost. The original force of the term _holiness_,

however, was not positive but negative, and throughout the Old

Testament, whatever modifications its meaning undergoes, it retains a

negative flavour. The Hebrew word for holiness springs from a root which

means _to set apart, make distinct, put at a distance from_. When God is

described as the Holy One in the Old Testament it is generally with the

purpose of withdrawing Him from some presumption of men upon His majesty

or of negativing their unworthy thoughts of Him. The Holy One is the

Incomparable: _To whom, then, will ye liken Me, that I should be equal

to him? saith the Holy One_ (xl. 25). He is the Unapproachable: _Who is

able to stand before Jehovah, this holy God?_ (1 Sam. vi. 20). He is the

Utter Contrast of man: _I am God, and not man, the Holy One in the midst

of thee_ (Hosea xi. 9). He is the Exalted and Sublime: _Thus saith the

high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell

in the high and holy place_ (lvii. 15). Generally speaking, then,

holiness is equivalent to separateness, sublimity--in fact, just to that

loftiness or exaltation which Isaiah has already so often reiterated as

the principal attribute of God. In their thrice-repeated _Holy_ the

seraphs are only telling more emphatically to the prophet's ears what

his eyes have already seen, _the Lord high and lifted up_. Better

expression could not be found for the full idea of Godhead. This little

word _Holy_ radiates heaven's own breadth of meaning. Within its

fundamental idea--distance or difference from man--what spaces are

there not for every attribute of Godhead to flash? If the Holy One be

originally He who is distinct from man and man's thoughts, and who

impresses man from the beginning with the awful sublimity of the

contrast in which He stands to him, how naturally may holiness come to

cover not only that moral purity and intolerance of sin to which we now

more strictly apply the term, but those metaphysical conceptions as

well, which we gather up under the name "supernatural," and so finally,

by lifting the Divine nature away from the change and vanity of this

world, and emphasizing God's independence of all beside Himself, become

the fittest expression we have for Him as the Infinite and

Self-existent. Thus the word _holy_ appeals in turn to each of the three

great faculties of man's nature, by which he can be religiously

exercised--his conscience, his affections, his reason; it covers the

impressions which God makes on man as a sinner, on man as a worshipper,

on man as a thinker. The Holy One is not only the Sinless and

Sin-abhorring, but the Sublime and the Absolute too.

But while we recognize the exhaustiveness of the series of ideas about

the Divine Nature, which develop from the root meaning of holiness, and

to express which the word _holy_ is variously used throughout the

Scriptures, we must not, if we are to appreciate the use of the word on

this occasion, miss the motive of recoil which starts them all. If we

would hear what Isaiah heard in the seraphs' song, we must distinguish

in the three-fold ascription of holiness the intensity of recoil from

the confused religious views and low moral temper of the prophet's

generation. It is no scholastic definition of Deity which the seraphim

are giving. Not for a moment is it to be supposed that to that age,

whose representative is listening to them, they are attempting to convey

an idea of the Trinity. Their thrice-uttered _Holy_ is not theological

accuracy, but religious emphasis. This angelic revelation of the

holiness of God was intended for a generation, some of whom were

idol-worshippers, confounding the Godhead with the work of their own

hands or with natural objects, and none of whom were free from a

confusion in principle of the Divine with the human and worldly, for

which now sheer mental slovenliness, now a dull moral sense, and now

positive pride was to blame. To worshippers who _trampled_ the courts of

the Lord with the careless feet, and looked up the temple with the

unabashed faces, of routine, the cry of the seraphs, as they veiled

their faces and their feet, travailed to restore that shuddering sense

of the sublimity of the Divine Presence, which in the impressible youth

of the race first impelled man, bowing low beneath the awful heavens, to

name God by the name of the Holy. To men, again, careful of the legal

forms of worship, but lawless and careless in their lives, the song of

the seraphs revealed not the hard truth, against which they had already

rubbed conscience trite, that God's law was inexorable, but the fiery

fact that His whole nature burned with wrath towards sin. To men, once

more, proud of their prestige and material prosperity, and presuming in

their pride to take their own way with God, and to employ like Uzziah

the exercises of religion for their own honour, this vision presented

the real sovereignty of God: the Lord Himself seated on a throne

_there_--just where they felt only a theatre for the display of their

pride, or machinery for the attainment of their private ends. Thus did

the three-fold cry of the angels meet the three-fold sinfulness of that

generation of men.

But the first line of the seraph's song serves more than a temporary

end. The Trisagion rings, and has need to ring, for ever down the

Church. Everywhere and at all times these are the three besetting sins

of religious people--callousness in worship, carelessness in life, and

the temper which employs the forms of religion simply for

self-indulgence or self-aggrandisement. These sins are induced by the

same habit of contentment with mere form; they can be corrected only by

the vision of the Personal Presence who is behind all form. Our

organization, ritual, law and sacrament--we must be able to see them

fall away, as Isaiah saw the sanctuary itself disappear, before God

Himself, if we are to remain heartily moral and fervently religious. The

Church of God has to learn that no mere multiplication of forms, nor a

more æsthetic arrangement of them, will redeem her worshippers from

callousness. Callousness is but the shell which the feelings develop in

self-defence when left by the sluggish and impenetrative soul to beat

upon the hard outsides of form. And nothing will fuse this shell of

callousness but that ardent flame, which is kindled at the touching of

the Divine and human spirits, when forms have fallen away and the soul

beholds with open face the Eternal Himself. As with worship, so with

morality. Holiness is secured not by ceremonial, but by a reverence for

a holy Being. We shall rub our consciences trite against moral maxims or

religious rites. It is the effluence of a Presence, which alone can

create in us, and keep in us, a clean heart. And if any object that we

thus make light of ritual and religious law, of Church and sacrament,

the reply is obvious. Ritual and sacrament are to the living God but as

the wick of a candle to the light thereof. They are given to reveal Him,

and the process is not perfect unless they themselves perish from the

thoughts to which they convey Him. If God is not felt to be present, as

Isaiah felt Him to be, to the exclusion of all forms, then these will be

certain to be employed, as Uzziah employed them, for the sake of the

only other spiritual being of whom the worshipper is conscious--himself.

Unless we are able to forget our ritual in spiritual communion with the

very God, and to become unconscious of our organization in devout

consciousness of our personal relation to Him, then ritual will be only

a means of sensuous indulgence, organization only a machinery for

selfish or sectarian ends. The vision of God--this is the one thing

needful for worship and for conduct.

But while the one verse of the antiphon reiterates what Jehovah of hosts

is in Himself, the other describes what He is in revelation. _The whole

earth is full of His glory._ Glory is the correlative of holiness. Glory

is that in which holiness comes to expression. Glory is the expression

of holiness, as beauty is the expression of health. If holiness be as

deep as we have seen, so varied then will glory be. There is nothing in

the earth but it is the glory of God. _The fulness of the whole earth is

His glory_, is the proper grammatical rendering of the song. For Jehovah

of hosts is not the God only of Israel, but the Maker of heaven and

earth, and not the victory of Israel alone, but the wealth and the

beauty of all the world is His glory. So universal an ascription of

glory is the proper parallel to that of absolute Godhead, which is

implied in holiness.

II. THE CALL (vv. 4-8).

Thus, then, Isaiah, standing on earth, on the place of a great sin, with

the conscience of his people's evil in his heart, and himself not

without the feeling of guilt, looked into heaven, and beholding the

glory of God, heard also with what pure praise and readiness of service

the heavenly hosts surround His throne. No wonder the prophet felt the

polluted threshold rock beneath him, or that as where fire and water

mingle there should be the rising of a great smoke. For the smoke

described is not, as some have imagined, that of acceptable incense,

thick billows swelling through the temple to express the completion and

satisfaction of the seraphs' worship; but it is the mist which ever

arises where holiness and sin touch each other. It has been described

both as the obscurity that envelops a weak mind in presence of a truth

too great for it, and the darkness that falls upon a diseased eye when

exposed to the mid-day sun. These are only analogies, and may mislead

us. What Isaiah actually felt was the dim-eyed shame, the distraction,

the embarrassment, the blinding shock of a personal encounter with One

whom he was utterly unfit to meet. For this was a personal encounter. We

have spelt out the revelation sentence by sentence in gradual argument;

but Isaiah did not reach it through argument or brooding. It was not to

the prophet what it is to his expositors, a pregnant thought, that his

intellect might gradually unfold, but a Personal Presence, which

apprehended and overwhelmed him. God and he were there face to face.

_Then said I, Woe is me, for I am undone, because a man unclean of lips

am I, and in the midst of a people unclean of lips do I dwell; for the

King, Jehovah of hosts, mine eyes have beheld._

The form of the prophet's confession, _uncleanness of lips_, will not

surprise us as far as he makes it for himself. As with the disease of

the body, so with the sin of the soul; each often gathers to one point

of pain. Every man, though wholly sinful by nature, has his own

particular consciousness of guilt. Isaiah being a prophet felt his

mortal weakness most upon his lips. The inclusion of the people,

however, along with himself under this form of guilt, suggests a wider

interpretation of it. The lips are, as it were, the blossom of a man.

_Grace is poured upon thy lips, therefore God hath blessed thee for

ever. If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, able to

bridle the whole body also._ It is in the blossom of a plant that the

plant's defects become conspicuous; it is when all a man's faculties

combine for the complex and delicate office of expression that any fault

which is in him will come to the surface. Isaiah had been listening to

the perfect praise of sinless beings, and it brought into startling

relief the defects of his own people's worship. Unclean of lips these

were indeed when brought against that heavenly choir. Their social and

political sin--sin of heart and home and market--came to a head in their

worship, and what should have been the blossom of their life fell to the

ground like a rotten leaf beneath the stainless beauty of the seraphs'

praise.

While the prophet thus passionately gathered his guilt upon his lips, a

sacrament was preparing on which God concentrated His mercy to meet it.

Sacrament and lips, applied mercy and presented sin, now come together.

_Then flew unto me one of the seraphim, and in his hand a glowing

stone--with tongs had he taken it off the altar--and he touched my mouth

and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips, and so thy iniquity passeth

away and thy sin is atoned for._

The idea of this function is very evident, and a scholar who has said

that it "would perhaps be quite intelligible to the contemporaries of

the prophet, but is undoubtedly obscure to us," appears to have said

just the reverse of what is right; for so simple a process of atonement

leaves out the most characteristic details of the Jewish ritual of

sacrifice, while it anticipates in an unmistakeable manner the essence

of the Christian sacrament. In a scene of expiation laid under the old

covenant, we are struck by the absence of oblation or sacrificial act on

the part of the sinner himself. There is here no victim slain, no blood

sprinkled; an altar is only parenthetically suggested, and even then in

its simplest form, of a hearth on which the Divine fire is continually

burning. The _glowing stone_, not _live coal_ as in the English version,

was no part of the temple furniture, but the ordinary means of conveying

heat or applying fire in the various purposes of household life. There

was, it is true, a carrying of fire in some of the temple services, as,

for example, on the great Day of Atonement, but then it was effected by

a small grate filled with living embers. In the household, on the other

hand, when cakes had to be baked, or milk boiled, or water warmed, or in

fifty similar applications of fire, a glowing stone taken from off the

hearth was the invariable instrument. It is this swift and simple

domestic process which Isaiah now sees substituted for the slow and

intricate ceremonial of the temple--a seraph with a glowing stone in his

hand, _with tongs had he taken it off the altar_. And yet the prophet

feels this only as a more direct expression of the very same idea, with

which the elaborate ritual was inspired--for which the victim was

slain, and the flesh consumed in fire, and the blood sprinkled. Isaiah

desires nothing else, and receives no more, than the ceremonial law was

intended to assure to the sinner--pardon of his sin and reconciliation

to God. But our prophet will have conviction of these immediately, and

with a force which the ordinary ritual is incapable of expressing. The

feelings of this Jew are too intense and spiritual to be satisfied with

the slow pageant of the earthly temple, whose performances to a man in

his horror could only have appeared so indifferent and far away from

himself as not to be really his own nor to effect what he passionately

desired. Instead therefore of laying his guilt in the shape of some

victim on the altar, Isaiah, with a keener sense of its inseparableness

from himself, presents it to God upon his own lips. Instead of being

satisfied with beholding the fire of God consume it on another body than

his own, at a distance from himself, he feels that fire visit the very

threshold of his nature, where he has gathered the guilt, and consume it

there. The whole secret of this startling nonconformity to the law, on

the very floor of the temple, is that for a man who has penetrated to

the presence of God the legal forms are left far behind, and he stands

face to face with the truth by which they are inspired. In that Divine

Presence Isaiah is his own altar; he acts his guilt in his own person,

and so he feels the expiatory fire come to his very self directly from

the heavenly hearth. It is a replica of the fifty-first Psalm: _For Thou

delightest not in sacrifice, else would I give it; Thou hast no pleasure

in burnt offering._ The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. This is

my sacrifice, my sense of guilt gathered here upon my lips: my _broken

and contrite heart_, who feel myself undone before Thee, _Lord, Thou

wilt not despise_.

It has always been remarked as one of the most powerful proofs of the

originality and Divine force of Christianity, that from man's worship of

God, and especially from those parts in which the forgiveness of sin is

sought and assured, it did away with the necessity of a physical rite of

sacrifice; that it broke the universal and immemorial habit by which man

presented to God a material offering for the guilt of his soul. By

remembering this fact we may measure the religious significance of the

scene we now contemplate. Nearly eight centuries before there was

accomplished upon Calvary that Divine Sacrifice for sin, which abrogated

a rite of expiation, hitherto universally adopted by the conscience of

humanity, we find a Jew, in the dispensation where such a rite was most

religiously enforced, trembling under the conviction of sin, and upon a

floor crowded with suggestions of physical sacrifice; yet the only

sacrifice he offers is the purely spiritual one of confession. It is

most notable. Look at it from a human point of view, and we can estimate

Isaiah's immense spiritual originality; look at it from a Divine, and we

cannot help perceiving a distinct foreshadow of what was to take place

by the blood of Jesus under the new covenant. To this man, as to some

others of his dispensation, whose experience our Christian sympathy

recognizes so readily in the Psalms, there was granted aforetime

boldness to enter into the holiest. For this is the explanation of

Isaiah's marvellous disregard of the temple ritual. It is all behind

him. This man has passed within the veil. Forms are all behind him, and

he is face to face with God. But between two beings in that position,

intercourse by the far off and uncertain signals of sacrifice is

inconceivable. It can only take place by the simple unfolding of the

heart. It must be rational, intelligent and by speech. When man is at

such close quarters with God what sacrifice is possible but the

sacrifice of the lips? Form for the Divine reply there must be some, for

even Christianity has its sacraments, but like them this sacrament is of

the very simplest form, and like them it is accompanied by the

explanatory word. As Christ under the new covenant took bread and wine,

and made the homely action of feeding upon them the sign and seal to His

disciples of the forgiveness of their sins, so His angel under the old

and sterner covenant took the more severe, but as simple and domestic

form of fire to express the same to His prophet. And we do well to

emphasize that the experimental value of this sacrament of fire is

bestowed by the word attached to it. It is not a dumb sacrament, with a

magical efficacy. But the prophet's mind is persuaded and his conscience

set at peace by the intelligible words of the minister of the sacrament.

Isaiah's sin being taken away, he is able to discern the voice of God

Himself. It is in the most beautiful accordance with what has already

happened that he hears this not as command, but request, and answers not

of compulsion, but of freedom. _And I heard the voice of the Lord

saying, Whom shall I send? and who will go for us? And I said, Here am

I; send me._ What spiritual understanding alike of the will of God and

the responsibility of man, what evangelic liberty and boldness, are

here! Here we touch the spring of that high flight Isaiah takes both in

prophecy and in active service for the State. Here we have the secret of

the filial freedom, the life-long sense of responsibility, the regal

power of initiative, the sustained and unfaltering career, which

distinguish Isaiah among the ministers of the old covenant, and stamp

him prophet by the heart and for the life, as many of them are only by

the office and for the occasion. Other prophets are the servants of the

God of heaven; Isaiah stands next the Son Himself. On others the hand of

the Lord is laid in irresistible compulsion; the greatest of them are

often ignorant, by turns headstrong and craven, deserving correction,

and generally in need of supplementary calls and inspirations. But of

such scourges and such doles Isaiah's royal career is absolutely without

a trace. His course, begun in freedom, is pursued without hesitation or

anxiety; begun in utter self-sacrifice, it knows henceforth no moment of

grudging or disobedience. _Esaias is very bold_, because he is so free

and so fully devoted. In the presence of mind with which he meets each

sudden change of politics during that bewildering half-century of

Judah's history, we seem to hear his calm voice repeating its first,

_Here am I_. Presence of mind he always had. The kaleidoscope shifts: it

is now Egyptian intrigue, now Assyrian force; now a false king requiring

threat of displacement by God's own hero, now a true king, but helpless

and in need of consolation; now a rebellious people to be condemned, and

now an oppressed and penitent one to be encouraged:--different dangers,

with different sorts of salvation possible, obliging the prophet to

promise different futures, and to say things inconsistent with what he

had already said. Yet Isaiah never hesitates; he can always say, _Here

am I_. We hear that voice again in the spontaneousness and versatility

of his style. Isaiah is one of the great kings of literature, with every

variety of style under his sway, passing with perfect readiness, as

subject or occasion calls, from one to another of the tones of a

superbly endowed nature. Everywhere this man impresses us with his

personality, with the wealth of his nature and the perfection of his

control of it. But the personality is consecrated. The _Here am I_ is

followed by the _send me_. And its health, harmony and boldness, are

derived, Isaiah being his own witness, from this early sense of pardon

and purification at the Divine hands. Isaiah is indeed a king and a

priest unto God--a king with all his powers at his own command, a priest

with them all consecrated to the service of Heaven.

One cannot pass away from these verses without observing the plain

answer which they give to the question, What is a call to the ministry

of God? In these days of dust and distraction, full of party cries, with

so many side issues of doctrine and duty presenting themselves, and the

solid attractions of so many other services insensibly leading men to

look for the same sort of attractiveness in the ministry, it may prove a

relief to some to ponder the simple elements of Isaiah's call to be a

professional and life-long prophet. Isaiah got no "call" in our

conventional sense of the word, no compulsion that he must go, no

articulate voice describing him as the sort of man needed for the work,

nor any of those similar "calls" which sluggish and craven spirits so

often desire to relieve them of the responsibility or the strenuous

effort needed in deciding for a profession which their conscience will

not permit them to refuse. Isaiah got no such call. After passing

through the fundamental religious experiences of forgiveness and

cleansing, which are in every case the indispensable premises of life

with God, Isaiah was left to himself. No direct summons was addressed

to him, no compulsion was laid on him; but he heard the voice of God

asking generally for messengers, and he on his own responsibility

answered it for himself in particular. He heard from the Divine lips of

the Divine need for messengers, and he was immediately full of the mind

that he was the man for the mission, and of the heart to give himself to

it. So great an example cannot be too closely studied by candidates for

the ministry in our own day. Sacrifice is not the half-sleepy,

half-reluctant submission to the force of circumstance or opinion, in

which shape it is so often travestied among us, but the resolute

self-surrender and willing resignation of a free and reasonable soul.

There are many in our day who look for an irresistible compulsion into

the ministry of the Church; sensitive as they are to the material bias

by which men roll off into other professions, they pray for something of

a similar kind to prevail with them in this direction also. There are

men who pass into the ministry by social pressure or the opinion of the

circles they belong to, and there are men who adopt the profession

simply because it is on the line of least resistance. From which false

beginnings rise the spent force, the premature stoppages, the stagnancy,

the aimlessness and heartlessness, which are the scandals of the

professional ministry and the weakness of the Christian Church in our

day. Men who drift into the ministry, as it is certain so many do,

become mere ecclesiastical flotsam and jetsam, incapable of giving

carriage to any soul across the waters of this life, uncertain of their

own arrival anywhere, and of all the waste of their generation, the most

patent and disgraceful. God will have no drift-wood for His sacrifices,

no drift-men for His ministers. Self-consecration is the beginning of

His service, and a sense of our own freedom and our own responsibility

is an indispensable element in the act of self-consecration. _We_--not

God--have to make the decision. We are not to be dead, but living,

sacrifices, and everything which renders us less than fully alive both

mars at the time the sincerity of our surrender and reacts for evil upon

the whole of our subsequent ministry.

III. THE COMMISSION (vv. 9-13).

A heart so resolutely devoted as we have seen Isaiah's to be was surely

prepared against any degree of discouragement, but probably never did

man receive so awful a commission as he describes himself to have done.

Not that we are to suppose that this fell upon Isaiah all at once, in

the suddenness and distinctness with which he here records it. Our sense

of its awfulness will only be increased when we realize that Isaiah

became aware of it, not in the shock of a single discovery, sufficiently

great to have carried its own anæsthetic along with it, but through a

prolonged process of disillusion, and at the pain of those repeated

disappointments, which are all the more painful that none singly is

great enough to stupefy. It is just at this point of our chapter, that

we feel most the need of supposing it to have been written some years

after the consecration of Isaiah, when his experience had grown long

enough to articulate the dim forebodings of that solemn moment. _Go and

say to this people, Hearing, hear ye, but understand not; seeing, see

ye, but know not. Make fat the heart of this people, and its ears make

heavy, and its eyes smear, lest it see with its eyes, and hear with its

ears, and its heart understand, and it turn again and be healed._ No

prophet, we may be sure, would be asked by God to go and tell his

audiences that in so many words, at the beginning of his career. It is

only by experience that a man understands that kind of a commission,[10]

and for the required experience Isaiah had not long to wait after

entering on his ministry. Ahaz himself, in whose death-year it is

supposed by many that Isaiah wrote this account of his consecration--the

conduct of Ahaz himself was sufficient to have brought out the

convictions of the prophet's heart in this startling form, in which he

has stated his commission. By the word of the Lord and an offer of a

sign from Him, Isaiah did make fat that monarch's heart and smear his

eyes. And perverse as the rulers of Judah were in the examples and

policies they set, the people were as blindly bent on following them to

destruction. _Every one_, said Isaiah, when he must have been for some

time a prophet--_every one is a hypocrite and an evildoer, and every

mouth speaketh folly_.

[10] Even Calvin, though in order to prove that Isaiah had been

prophesying for some time before his inaugural vision, says that his

commission implies some years' actual experience of the obstinacy of the

people.

But if that clear, bitter way of putting the matter can have come to

Isaiah only with the experience of some years, why does he place it upon

the lips of God, as they give him his commission? Because Isaiah is

stating not merely his own singular experience, but a truth always true

of the preaching of the word of God, and of which no prophet at the time

of his consecration to that ministry can be without at least a

foreboding. We have not exhausted the meaning of this awful commission

when we say that it is only a forcible anticipation of the prophet's

actual experience. There is more here than one man's experience. Over

and over again are these words quoted in the New Testament, till we

learn to find them true always and everywhere that the Word of God is

preached to men,--the description of what would seem to be its necessary

effect upon many souls. Both Jesus and Paul use Isaiah's commission of

themselves. They do so like Isaiah at an advanced stage in their

ministry, when the shock of misunderstanding and rejection has been

repeatedly felt, but then not solely as an apt description of their own

experience. They quote God's words to Isaiah as a prophecy fulfilled in

their own case--that is to say, as the statement of a great principle or

truth of which their own ministry is only another instance. Their own

disappointments have roused them to the fact, that this is always an

effect of the word of God upon numbers of men--to deaden their spiritual

faculties. While Matthew and the book of Acts adopt the milder Greek

version of Isaiah's commission, John gives a rendering that is even

stronger than the original. _He hath blinded_, he says of God Himself,

_their eyes and hardened their hearts, lest they should see with their

eyes and perceive with their hearts_. In Mark's narrative Christ says

that He speaks to them that are outside in parables, _for the purpose

that seeing they may see, and not perceive, and hearing they may hear,

and not understand, lest haply they should turn again and it should be

forgiven them_. We may suspect, in an utterance so strange to the lips

of the Lord of salvation, merely the irony of His baffled love. But it

is rather the statement of what He believed to be the necessary effect

of a ministry like His own. It marks the direction, not of His desire,

but of natural sequence.

With these instances we can go back to Isaiah and understand why he

should have described the bitter fruits of experience as an imperative

laid upon him by God. _Make fat the heart of this people, and its ears

make heavy, and its eyes do thou smear._ It is the fashion of the

prophet's grammar, when it would state a principle or necessary effect,

to put it in the form of a command. What God expresses to Isaiah so

imperatively as almost to take our breath away; what Christ uttered with

such abruptness that we ask, Does He speak in irony? what Paul laid down

as the conviction of a long and patient ministry, is the great truth

that the Word of God has not only a saving power, but that even in its

gentlest pleadings and its purest Gospel, even by the mouth of Him who

came, not to condemn, but to save the world, it has a power that is

judicial and condemnatory.

It is frequently remarked by us as perhaps the most deplorable fact of

our experience, that there exists in human nature an accursed facility

for turning God's gifts to precisely the opposite ends from those for

which He gave them. So common is man's misunderstanding of the plainest

signs, and so frequent his abuse of the most evident favours of Heaven,

that a spectator of the drama of human history might imagine its Author

to have been a Cynic or Comedian, portraying for His own amusement the

loss of the erring at the very moment of what might have been their

recovery, the frustration of love at the point of its greatest warmth

and expectancy. Let him look closer, however, and he will perceive, not

a comedy, but a tragedy, for neither chance nor cruel sport is here at

work, but free will and the laws of habit, with retribution and penalty.

These actors are not puppets in the hand of a Power that moves them at

will; each of them plays his own part, and the abuse and contradiction,

of which he is guilty, are but the prerogative of his freedom. They are

free beings who thus reject the gift of Divine assistance, and so

piteously misunderstand Divine truth. Look closer still, and you will

see that the way they talk, the impression they accept of God's

goodness, the effect of His judgements upon them, is determined not at

the moment of their choice, and not by a single act of their will, but

by the whole tenor of their previous life. In the sudden flash of some

gift or opportunity, men reveal the stuff of which they are made, the

disposition they have bred in themselves. Opportunity in human life is

as often judgement as it is salvation. When we perceive these things, we

understand that life is not a comedy, where chance governs or

incongruous situations are invented by an Almighty Satirist for his own

sport, but a tragedy, with all tragedy's pathetic elements of royal

wills contending in freedom with each other, of men's wills clashing

with God's: men the makers of their own destinies, and Nemesis not

directing, but following their actions. We go back to the very

fundamentals of our nature on this dread question. To understand what

has been called "a great law in human degeneracy," that "the evil heart

can assimilate good to itself and convert it to its nature," we must

understand what free will means, and take into account the terrible

influence of habit.

Now there is no more conspicuous instance of this law, than that which

is afforded by the preaching of the Gospel of God. God's Word, as Christ

reminds us, does not fall on virgin soil; it falls on soil already

holding other seed. When a preacher stands up with the Word of God in a

great congregation, vast as Scripture warrants us for believing his

power to be, his is not the only power that is operative. Each man

present has a life behind that hour and place, lying away in the

darkness, silent and dead as far as the congregation are concerned, but

in his own heart as vivid and loud as the voice of the preacher, though

he be preaching never so forcibly. The prophet is not the only power in

the delivery of God's Word, nor is the Holy Spirit the only power. That

would make all preaching of the Word a mere display. But the Bible

represents it as a strife. And now it is said of men themselves that

they harden their hearts against the Word, and now--because such

hardening is the result of previous sinning, and has therefore a

judicial character--that God hardens their hearts. _Simon, Simon_, said

Christ to a face that spread out to His own all the ardour of worship,

_Satan is desiring to have you, but I have prayed that your faith fail

not_. God sends His Word into our hearts; the Mediator stands by, and

prays that it make us His own. But there are other factors in the

operation, and the result depends on our own will; it depends on our own

will, and it is dreadfully determined by our habits.

Now this is one of the first facts to which a young reformer or prophet

awakes. Such an awakening is a necessary element in his education and

apprenticeship. He has seen the Lord high and lifted up. His lips have

been touched by the coal from off the altar. His first feeling is that

nothing can withstand that power, nothing gainsay this inspiration. Is

he a Nehemiah, and the hand of the Lord has been mighty upon him? Then

he feels that he has but to tell his fellows of it to make them as

enthusiastic in the Lord's work as himself. Is he a Mazzini, aflame from

his boyhood with aspirations for his country, consecrated from his birth

to the cause of duty? Then he leaps with joy upon his mission; he has

but to show himself, to speak, to lead the way, and his country is free.

Is he--to descend to a lower degree of prophecy--a Fourier, sensitive

more than most to how anarchic society is, and righteously eager to

settle it upon stable foundations? Then he draws his plans for

reconstruction, he projects his phalanges and phalansteres, and believes

that he has solved the social problem. Is he--to come back to the

heights--an Isaiah, with the Word of God in him like fire? Then he sees

his vision of the perfect state; he thinks to lift his people to it by a

word. _O house of Jacob_, he says, _come ye, and let us walk in the

light of the Lord_!

For all of whom the next necessary stage of experience is one of

disappointment, with the hard commission, _Make the heart of this people

fat_. They must learn that, if God has caught themselves young, and when

it was possible to make them entirely His own, the human race to whom He

sends them is old, too old for them to effect much upon the mass of it

beyond the hardening and perpetuation of evil. Fourier finds that to

produce his perfect State he would need to re-create mankind, to cut

down the tree to the very roots, and begin again. After the first rush

of patriotic fervour, which carried so many of his countrymen with him,

Mazzini discovers himself in "a moral desert," confesses that the

struggle to liberate his fatherland, which has only quickened him to

further devotion in so great a cause, has been productive of scepticism

in his followers, and has left them withered and hardened of heart,

whom it had found so capable of heroic impulses. He tells us how they

upbraided and scorned him, left him in exile, and returned to their

homes, from which they had set out with vows to die for their country,

doubting now whether there was anything at all worth living or dying for

outside themselves. Mazzini's description of the first passage of his

career is invaluable for the light which it throws upon this commission

of Isaiah. History does not contain a more dramatic representation of

the entirely opposite effects of the same Divine movement upon different

natures. While the first efforts for the liberty of Italy materialized

the greater number of his countrymen, whom Mazzini had persuaded to

embark upon it, the failure and their consequent defection only served

to strip this heroic soul of the last rags of selfishness, and

consecrate it more utterly to the will of God and the duty that lay

before it.

A few sentences from the confessions of the Italian patriot may be

quoted, with benefit to our appreciation of what the Hebrew prophet must

have passed through.

"It was the tempest of doubt, which I believe all who devote their

lives to a great enterprise, yet have not dried and withered up

their soul--like Robespierre--beneath some barren intellectual

formula, but have retained a loving heart, are doomed, once at

least, to battle through. My heart was overflowing with and greedy

of affection, as fresh and eager to unfold to joy as in the days

when sustained by my mother's smile, as full of fervid hope for

others, at least, if not for myself. But during these fatal months

there darkened round me such a hurricane of sorrow, disillusion and

deception as to bring before my eyes, in all its ghastly nakedness,

a foreshadowing of the old age of my soul, solitary in a desert

world, wherein no comfort in the struggle was vouchsafed to me. It

was not only the overthrow for an indefinite period of every

Italian hope, ... it was the falling to pieces of that moral

edifice of faith and love from which alone I had derived strength

for the combat; the scepticism I saw arising round me on every

side; the failure of faith in those who had solemnly bound

themselves to pursue unshaken the path we had known at the outset

to be choked with sorrows; the distrust I detected in those most

dear to me, as to the motives and intentions which sustained and

urged me onward in the evidently unequal struggle.... When I felt

that I was indeed alone in the world, I drew back in terror at the

void before me. There, in that moral desert, doubt came upon me.

Perhaps I was wrong, and the world right? Perhaps my idea was

indeed a dream?... One morning I awoke to find my mind tranquil and

my spirit calmed, as one who has passed through a great danger. The

first thought that passed across my spirit was, _Your sufferings

are the temptations of egotism, and arise from a misconception of

life_.... I perceived that although every instinct of my heart

rebelled against that fatal and ignoble definition of life which

makes it to be a _search after happiness_, yet I had not completely

freed myself from the dominating influence exercised by it upon the

age.... I had been unable to realize the true ideal of love--love

without earthly hope.... Life is a mission, duty therefore its

highest law. From the idea of God I descended to faith in a mission

and its logical consequence--duty the supreme rule of life; and

having reached that faith, I swore to myself that nothing in this

world should again make me doubt or forsake it. It was, as Dante

says, passing through martyrdom to peace--'a forced and desperate

peace.' I do not deny, for I fraternized with sorrow, and wrapped

myself in it as in a mantle; but yet it was peace, for I learned to

suffer without rebellion, and to live calmly and in harmony with my

own spirit. I reverently bless God the Father for what consolations

of affection--I can conceive of no other--He has vouchsafed to me

in my later years; and in them I gather strength to struggle with

the occasional return of weariness of existence. But even were

these consolations denied me, I believe I should still be what I

am. Whether the sun shine with the serene splendour of an Italian

noon, or the leaden, corpse-like hue of the northern mist be above

us, I cannot see that it changes our duty. God dwells above the

earthly heaven, and the holy stars of faith and the future still

shine within our souls, even though their light consume itself

unreflected as the sepulchral lamp."

Such sentences are the best commentary we can offer on our text. The

cases of the Hebrew and Italian prophets are wonderfully alike. We who

have read Isaiah's fifth chapter know how his heart also was

"overflowing with and greedy of affection," and in the second and third

chapters we have seen "the hurricane of sorrow, disillusion and

deception darken round him." "The falling to pieces of the moral edifice

of faith and love," "scepticism rising on every side," "failure of faith

in those who had solemnly bound themselves," "distrust detected in those

most dear to me"--and all felt by the prophet as the effect of the

sacred movement God had inspired him to begin:--how exact a counterpart

it is to the cumulative process of brutalizing which Isaiah heard God

lay upon him, with the imperative _Make the heart of this people fat!_

In such a morally blind, deaf and dead-hearted world Isaiah's faith was

indeed "to consume itself unreflected like the sepulchral lamp." The

glimpse into his heart given us by Mazzini enables us to realize with

what terror Isaiah faced such a void. _O Lord, how long?_ This, too,

breathes the air of "a forced and desperate peace," the spirit of one

who, having realized life as a mission, has made the much more rare

recognition that the logical consequence is neither the promise of

success nor the assurance of sympathy, but simply the acceptance of

duty, with whatever results and under whatever skies it pleases God to

bring over him.

_Until cities fall into ruin without an inhabitant,

And houses without a man,

And the land be left desolately waste,

And Jehovah have removed man far away,

And great be the desert in the midst of the land;

And still if there be a tenth in it,

Even it shall be again for consuming.

Like the terebinth, and like the oak,

Whose stock when they are felled remaineth in them,

The holy seed shall be its stock._

The meaning of these words is too plain to require exposition, but we

can hardly over-emphasize them. This is to be Isaiah's one text

throughout his career. "Judgement shall pass through; a remnant shall

remain." All the politics of his day, the movement of the world's

forces, the devastation of the holy land, the first captivities of the

holy people, the reiterated defeats and disappointments of the next

fifty years--all shall be clear and tolerable to Isaiah as the

fulfilling of the sentence to which he listened in such "forced and

desperate peace" on the day of his consecration. He has had the worst

branded into him; henceforth no man nor thing may trouble him. He has

seen the worst, and knows there is a beginning beyond. So when the

wickedness of Judah and the violence of Assyria alike seem most

unrestrained--Assyria most bent on destroying Judah, and Judah least

worthy to live--Isaiah will yet cling to this, that a remnant must

remain. All his prophecies will be variations of this text; it is the

key to his apparent paradoxes. He will proclaim the Assyrians to be

God's instrument, yet devote them to destruction. He will hail their

advance on Judah, and yet as exultingly mark its limit, because of the

determination in which he asked the question, _O Lord, how long?_ and

the clearness with which he understood the _until_, that came in answer

to it. Every prediction he makes, every turn he seeks to give to the

practical politics of Judah, are simply due to his grasp of these two

facts--a withering and repeated devastation, in the end a bare survival.

He has, indeed, prophecies which travel farther; occasionally he is

permitted to indulge in visions of a new dispensation. Like Moses, he

climbs his Pisgah, but he is like Moses also in this, that his lifetime

is exhausted with the attainment of the margin of a long period of

judgement and struggle, and then he passes from our sight, and no man

knoweth his sepulchre unto this day. As abruptly as this vision closes

with the announcement of _the remnant_, so abruptly does Isaiah

disappear on the fulfilment of the announcement--some forty years

subsequent to this vision--in the sudden rescue of the holy seed from

the grasp of Sennacherib.

* * * * *

We have now finished the first period of Isaiah's career. Let us

catalogue what are his leading doctrines up to this point. High above a

very sinful people, and beyond all their conceptions of Him, Jehovah,

the national God, rises holy, exalted in righteousness. From such a God

to such a people it can only be judgement and affliction that pass; and

these shall not be averted by the fact that He is the national God, and

they His worshippers. Of this affliction the Assyrians gathering far off

upon the horizon are evidently to be the instruments. The affliction

shall be very sweeping; again and again shall it come; but the Lord will

finally save a remnant of His people. Three elements compose this

preaching--a very keen and practical conscience of sin; an overpowering

vision of God, in whose immediate intimacy the prophet believes himself

to be; and a very sharp perception of the politics of the day.

One question rises. In this part of Isaiah's ministry there is no trace

of that Figure whom we chiefly identify with his preaching, the Messiah.

Let us have patience; it is not time for him; but the following is his

connection with the prophet's present doctrines.

Isaiah's great result at present is the certainty of a remnant. That

remnant will require two things--they will require a rallying-point,

and they will require a leader. Henceforth Isaiah's prophesying will be

bent to one or other of these. The two grand purposes of his word and

work will be, for the sake of the remnant, the inviolateness of Zion,

and the coming of the Messiah. The former he has, indeed, already

intimated (chap. iv.); the latter is now to share with it his hope and

eloquence.

[Illustration: (Map) Isaiah's World]

CHAPTER V.

_THE WORLD IN ISAIAH'S DAY AND ISRAEL'S GOD._

735-730 B.C.

Up to this point we have been acquainted with Isaiah as a prophet of

general principles, preaching to his countrymen the elements of

righteousness and judgement, and tracing the main lines of fate along

which their evil conduct was rapidly forcing them. We are now to observe

him applying these principles to the executive politics of the time, and

following Judah's conduct to the issues he had predicted for it in the

world outside herself. Hitherto he has been concerned with the inner

morals of Jewish society; he is now to engage himself with the effect of

these on the fortunes of the Jewish State. In his seventh chapter Isaiah

begins that career of practical statesmanship, which not only made him

"the greatest political power in Israel since David," but placed him,

far above his importance to his own people, upon a position of influence

over all ages. To this eminence Isaiah was raised, as we shall see, by

two things. First, there was the occasion of his times, for he lived at

a juncture at which the vision of the _World_, as distinguished from the

_Nation_, opened to his people's eyes. Second, he had the faith which

enabled him to realize the government of the World by the One God, whom

he has already beheld exalted and sovereign within the Nation. In the

Nation we have seen Isaiah led to emphasize very absolutely the

righteousness of God; applying this to the whole World, he is now to

speak as the prophet of what we call Providence. He has seen Jehovah

ruling in righteousness in Judah; he is now to take possession of the

nations of the World in Jehovah's name. But we mistake Isaiah if we

think it is any abstract doctrine of providence which he is about to

inculcate. For him God's providence has in the meantime but one end: the

preservation of a remnant of the holy people. Afterwards we shall find

him expecting besides, the conversion of the whole World to faith in

Israel's God.

The World in Isaiah's day was practically Western Asia. History had not

long dawned upon Europe; over Western Asia it was still noon. Draw a

line from the Caspian to the mouth of the Persian Gulf; between that

line and another crossing the Levant to the west of Cyprus, and

continuing along the Libyan border of Egypt, lay the highest forms of

religion and civilisation which our race had by that period achieved.

This was the World on which Isaiah looked out from Jerusalem, the

furthest borders of which he has described in his prophecies, and in the

political history of which he illustrated his great principles. How was

it composed?

There were, first of all, at either end of it, north-east and

south-west, the two great empires of ASSYRIA and EGYPT, in many respects

wonderful counterparts of each other. No one will understand the history

of Palestine, who has not grasped its geographical position relative to

these similar empires. Syria, shut up between the Mediterranean sea and

the Arabian desert, has its outlets north and south into two great

river-plains, each of them ending in a delta. Territories of that kind

exert a double force on the world with which they are connected, now

drawing across their boundaries the hungry races of neighbouring

highlands and deserts, and again sending them forth, compact and

resistless armies. This double action summarises the histories of both

Egypt and Assyria from the earliest times to the period which we are now

treating, and was the cause of the constant circulation, by which, as

the Bible bears witness, the life of Syria was stirred from the Tower of

Babel downwards. Mesopotamia and the Nile valley drew races as beggars

to their rich pasture grounds, only to send them forth in subsequent

centuries as conquerors. The century of Isaiah fell in a period of

forward movement. Assyria and Egypt were afraid to leave each other in

peace; and the wealth of Phoenicia, grown large enough to excite their

cupidity, lay between them. In each of these empires, however, there was

something to hamper this aggressive impulse. Neither Assyria nor Egypt

was a homogeneous State. The valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile were,

each of them the home of two nations. Beside Assyria lay Babylonia, once

Assyria's mistress, and now of all the Assyrian provinces by far the

hardest to hold in subjection, although it lay the nearest to home. In

Isaiah's time, when an Assyrian monarch is unable to come into

Palestine, Babylon is generally the reason; and it is by intriguing with

Babylon that a king of Judah attempts to keep Assyria away from his own

neighbourhood. But Babylon only delayed the Assyrian conquest. In Egypt,

on the other hand, power was more equally balanced between the hardier

people up the Nile and the wealthier people down the Nile--between the

Ethiopians and the Egyptians proper. It was the repeated and undecisive

contests between these two during the whole of Isaiah's day, which kept

Egypt from being an effective force in the politics of Western Asia. In

Isaiah's day no Egyptian army advanced more than a few leagues beyond

its own frontier.

Next in this world of Western Asia come the PHOENICIANS. We may say

that they connected Egypt and Assyria, for although Phoenicia proper

meant only the hundred and fifty miles of coast between Carmel and the

bay of Antioch, the Phoenicians had large colonies on the delta of the

Nile and trading posts upon the Euphrates. They were gathered into

independent but more or less confederate cities, the chief of them Tyre

and Sidon; which, while they attempted the offensive only in trade, were

by their wealth and maritime advantages capable of offering at once a

stronger attraction and a more stubborn resistance to the Assyrian arms,

than any other power of the time. Between Phoenicia proper and the

mouths of the Nile, the coast was held by groups of PHILISTINE cities,

whose nearness to Egypt rather than their own strength was the source of

a frequent audacity against Assyria, and the reason why they appear in

the history of this period oftener than any other State as the object of

Assyrian campaigns.

Behind Phoenicia and the Philistines lay a number of inland

territories: the sister-States of Judah and Northern Israel, with their

cousins Edom, Moab, and Aram or Syria. Of which JUDAH and ISRAEL were

together about the size of Wales; EDOM a mountain range the size and

shape of Cornwall; MOAB, on its north, a broken tableland, about a

Devonshire; and ARAM, or SYRIA, a territory round Damascus, of uncertain

size, but considerable enough to have resisted Assyria for a hundred and

twenty years. Beyond Aram, again, to the north, lay the smaller State of

HAMATH, in the mouth of the pass between the Lebanons, with nothing

from it to the Euphrates. And then, hovering upon the east of these

settled States, were a variety of more or less NOMADIC TRIBES, whose

refuges were the vast deserts of which so large a part of Western Asia

consists.

Here was a world, with some of its constituents wedged pretty firmly by

mutual pressure, but in the main broken and restless--a political

surface that was always changing. The whole was subject to the movements

of the two empires at its extremes. One of them could not move without

sending a thrill through to the borders of the other. The approximate

distances were these:--from Egypt's border to Jerusalem, about one

hundred miles; from Jerusalem to Samaria, forty-five; from Samaria to

Damascus, one hundred and fifteen; from Damascus to Hamath, one hundred

and thirty; and from Hamath to the Euphrates, one hundred; in all from

the border of Egypt to the border of Assyria four hundred and ninety

English statute miles. The main line of war and traffic, coming up from

Egypt, kept the coast to the plain of Esdraelon, which it crossed

towards Damascus, travelling by the north of the sea of Galilee, _the

way of the sea_. Northern Israel was bound to fall an early prey to

armies, whose easiest path thus traversed her richest provinces. Judah,

on the other hand, occupied a position so elevated and apart, that it

was likely to be the last that either Assyria or Egypt would achieve in

their subjugation of the States between them.

Thus, then, Western Asia spread itself out in Isaiah's day. Let us take

one more rapid glance across it. Assyria to the north, powerful and on

the offensive, but hampered by Babylon; Egypt on the south, weakened and

in reserve; all the cities and States between turning their faces

desperately northwards, but each with an ear bent back for the promises

of the laggard southern power, and occasionally supported by its

subsidies; Hamath, their advanced guard at the mouth of the pass between

the Lebanons, looking out towards the Euphrates; Tyre and Sidon

attractive to the Assyrian king, whose policy is ultimately commercial,

by their wealth, both they and the Philistine cities obstructing his

path by the coast to his great rival of Egypt; Israel bulwarked against

Assyria by Hamath and Damascus, but in danger, as soon as they fall, of

seeing her richest provinces overrun; Judah unlikely in the general

restlessness to retain her hold upon Edom, but within her own borders

tolerably secure, neither lying in the Assyrian's path to Egypt, nor

wealthy enough to attract him out of it; safe, therefore, in the

neutrality which Isaiah ceaselessly urges her to preserve, and in danger

of suction into the whirlpool of the approach of the two empires only

through the foolish desire of her rulers to secure an utterly

unnecessary alliance with the one or the other of them.

For a hundred and twenty years before the advent of Isaiah, the annals

of the Assyrian kings record periodical campaigns against the cities of

"the land of the west," but these isolated incursions were followed by

no permanent results. In 745, however, five years before King Uzziah

died, a soldier ascended the throne of Assyria, under the title of

Tiglath-pileser II.,[11] who was determined to achieve the conquest of

the whole world and its organization as his empire. Where his armies

came, it was not simply to chastise or demand tribute, but to annex

countries, carry away their populations and exploit their resources. It

was no longer kings who were threatened; peoples found themselves in

danger of extinction. This terrible purpose of the Assyrian was pursued

with vast means and the utmost ferocity. He has been called the Roman of

the East, and up to a certain degree we may imagine his policy by

remembering all that is familiar to us of its execution by Rome: its

relentlessness, impetus and mysterious action from one centre; the

discipline, the speed, the strange appearance, of his armies. But there

was an Oriental savagery about Assyria, from which Rome was free. The

Assyrian kings moved in the power of their brutish and stormy gods--gods

that were in the shape of bulls and had the wings as of the tempest. The

annals of these kings, in which they describe their campaigns, are full

of talk about trampling down their enemies; about showering tempests of

clubs upon them, and raining a deluge of arrows; about overwhelming

them, and sweeping them off the face of the land, and strewing them like

chaff on the sea; about chariots with scythes, and wheels clogged with

blood; about great baskets stuffed with the salted heads of their foes.

It is a mixture of the Roman and Red Indian.

[11] The Pul of 2 Kings xv. 19 and the Tiglath-pileser of 2 Kings xvi.

are the same.

Picture the effect of the onward movement of such a force upon the

imaginations and policies of those little States that clustered round

Judah and Israel. Settling their own immemorial feuds, they sought

alliance with one another against this common foe. Tribes, that for

centuries had stained their borders with one another's blood, came

together in unions, the only reason for which was that their common fear

had grown stronger than their mutual hate. Now and then a king would be

found unwilling to enter such an alliance or eager to withdraw from it,

in the hope of securing by his exceptional conduct the favour of the

Assyrian, whom he sought further to ingratiate by voluntary tribute. The

shifting attitudes of the petty kings towards Assyria bewilder the

reader of the Assyrian annals. The foes of one year are the tributaries

of the next; the State, that has called for help this campaign, appears

as the rebel of that. In 742, Uzziah of Judah is cursed by

Tiglath-pileser as an arch-enemy; Samaria and Damascus are recorded as

faithful tributaries. Seven years later Ahaz of Judah offers tribute to

the Assyrian king, and Damascus and Samaria are invaded by the Assyrian

armies. What a world it was, and what politics! A world of petty clans,

with no idea of a common humanity, and with no motive for union except

fear; politics without a noble thought or long purpose in them, the

politics of peoples at bay--the last flicker of dying nationalities,--

_stumps of smoking firebrands_, as Isaiah described two of them.

When we turn to the little we know of the religions of these tribes, we

find nothing to arrest their restlessness or broaden their thoughts.

These nations had their religions, and called on their gods, but their

gods were made in their own image, their religion was the reflex of

their life. Each of them employed, rather than worshipped, its deity. No

nation believed in its god except as one among many, with his

sovereignty limited to its own territory, and his ability to help it

conditioned by the power of the other gods, against whose peoples he was

fighting. There was no belief in "Providence," no idea of unity or of

progress in history, no place in these religions for the great

world-force that was advancing upon their peoples.

From this condemnation we cannot except the people of Jehovah. It is

undeniable that the mass of them occupied at this time pretty much the

same low religious level as their neighbours. We have already seen

(chap. i.) their mean estimate of what God required from themselves;

with that corresponded their view of His position towards the world. To

the majority of the Israelites their God was but one out of many, with

His own battles to fight and have fought for Him, a Patron sometimes to

be ashamed of, and by no means a Saviour in whom to place an absolute

trust. When Ahaz is beaten by Syria, he says: _Because the gods of the

kings of Syria helped them, therefore will I sacrifice to them, that

they may help me_ (2 Chron. xxviii. 23). Religion to Ahaz was only

another kind of diplomacy. He was not a fanatic, but a diplomat, who

made his son to pass through the fire to Moloch, and burnt incense in

the high places and on the hills, and under every green tree. He was

more a political than a religious eclectic, who brought back the pattern

of the Damascus altar to Jerusalem. The Temple, in which Isaiah saw the

Lord high and lifted up, became under Ahaz, and by the help of the

priesthood, the shelter of various idols; in every corner of Jerusalem

altars were erected to other gods. This religious hospitality was the

outcome neither of imagination nor of liberal thought; it was prompted

only by political fear. Ahaz has been mistaken in the same way as

Charles I. was--for a bigot, and one who subjected the welfare of his

kingdom to a superstitious regard for religion. But beneath the cloak of

religious scrupulousness and false reverence,[12] there was in Ahaz the

same selfish fear for the safety of his crown and his dynasty, as those

who best knew the English monarch tell us, was the real cause of his

ceaseless intrigue and stupid obstinacy.

[12] Isa. vii. 12.

Now that we have surveyed this world, its politics and its religion, we

can estimate the strength and originality of the Hebrew prophets. Where

others saw the conflicts of nations, aided by deities as doubtfully

matched as themselves, they perceived all things working together by the

will of one supreme God and serving His ends of righteousness. It would

be wrong to say, that before the eighth century the Hebrew conception of

God had been simply that of a national deity, for this would be to

ignore the remarkable emphasis placed by the Hebrews from very early

times upon Jehovah's righteousness. But till the eighth century the

horizon of the Hebrew mind had been the border of their territory; the

historical theatre on which it saw God working was the national life.

Now, however, the Hebrews were drawn into the world; they felt movements

of which their own history was but an eddy; they saw the advance of

forces against which their own armies, though inspired by Jehovah, had

no chance of material success. The perspective was entirely changed;

their native land took to most of them the aspect of a petty and

worthless province, their God the rank of a mere provincial deity; they

refused the waters of Shiloah, that go softly, and rejoiced in the glory

of the king of Assyria, the king of the great River and the hosts that

moved with the strength of its floods. It was at this moment that the

prophets of Israel performed their supreme religious service. While Ahaz

and the mass of the people illustrated the impotence of the popular

religion, by admitting to an equal place in the national temple the gods

of their victorious foes, the prophets boldly took possession of the

whole world in the name of Jehovah of hosts, and exalted Him to the

throne of the supreme Providence. Now they could do this only by

emphasizing and developing the element of righteousness in the old

conception of Him. This attribute of Jehovah took absolute possession of

the prophets; and in the strength of its inspiration they were enabled,

at a time when it would have been the sheerest folly to promise Israel

victory against a foe like Assyria, to asseverate that even that supreme

world-power was in the hand of Jehovah, and that He must be trusted to

lead up all the movements of which the Assyrians were the main force to

the ends He had so plainly revealed to His chosen Israel. Even before

Isaiah's time such principles had been proclaimed by Amos and Hosea, but

it was Isaiah, who both gave to them their loftiest expression, and

applied them with the utmost detail and persistence to the practical

politics of Judah. We have seen him, in the preliminary stages of his

ministry under Uzziah and Jotham, reaching most exalted convictions of

the righteousness of Jehovah, as contrasted with the people's view of

their God's "nationalism." But we are now to follow him boldly applying

this faith--won within the life of Judah, won, as he tells us, by the

personal inspiration of Judah's God--to the problems and movements of

the whole world as they bear upon Israel's fate. The God, who is supreme

in Judah through righteousness, cannot but be supreme everywhere else,

for there is nothing in the world higher than righteousness. Isaiah's

faith in a Divine Providence is a close corollary to his faith in

Jehovah's righteousness; and of one part of that Providence he had

already received conviction--_A remnant shall remain_. Ahaz may crowd

Jerusalem with foreign altars and idols, so as to be able to say: "We

have with us, on our side, Moloch and Chemosh and Rimmon and the gods of

Damascus and Assyria." Isaiah, in the face of this folly, lifts up his

simple gospel: "Immanu-El. We have with us, in our own Jehovah of hosts,

El, the one supreme God, Ruler of heaven and earth."

CHAPTER VI.

_KING AND MESSIAH; PEOPLE AND CHURCH._

ISAIAH vii., viii., ix. 1-8.

735-732 B.C.

This section of the book of Isaiah (vii.-ix. 7) consists of a number of

separate prophecies uttered during a period of at least three years:

735-732 B.C. By 735 Ahaz had ascended the throne; Tiglath-pileser had

been occupied in the far east for two years. Taking advantage of the

weakness of the former and the distance of the latter, Rezin, king of

Damascus, and Pekah, king of Samaria, planned an invasion of Judah. It

was a venture they would not have dared had Uzziah been alive. While

Rezin marched down the east of the Jordan and overturned the Jewish

supremacy in Edom, Pekah threw himself into Judah, defeated the armies

of Ahaz in one great battle, and besieged Jerusalem, with the object of

deposing Ahaz and setting a Syrian, Ben-Tabeel, in his stead.

Simultaneously the Philistines attacked Judah from the south-west. The

motive of the confederates was in all probability anger with Ahaz for

refusing to enter with them into a Pan-Syrian alliance against Assyria.

In his distress Ahaz appealed to Tiglath-pileser, and the Assyrian

swiftly responded. In 734--it must have been less than a year since Ahaz

was attacked--the hosts of the north had overrun Samaria and swept as

far south as the cities of the Philistines. Then, withdrawing his troops

again, Tiglath-pileser left Hoshea as his vassal on Pekah's throne, and

sending the population of Israel east of the Jordan into distant

captivity, completed a two years' siege of Damascus (734-732) by its

capture. At Damascus Ahaz met the conqueror, and having paid him

tribute, took out a further policy of insurance in the altar-pattern,

which he brought back with him to Jerusalem. Such were the three years,

whose rapid changes unfolded themselves in parallel with these

prophecies of Isaiah. The details are not given by the prophet, but we

must keep in touch with them while we listen to him. Especially must we

remember their central point, _the decision of Ahaz to call in the help

of Assyria_, a decision which affected the whole course of politics for

the next thirty years. Some of the oracles of this section were plainly

delivered by Isaiah before that event, and simply seek to inspire Ahaz

with a courage which should feel Assyrian help to be needless; others,

again, imply that Ahaz has already called in the Assyrian: they taunt

him with hankering after foreign strength, and depict the woes which the

Assyrian will bring upon the land; while others (for example, the

passage ix. 1-7) mean that the Assyrian has already come, and that the

Galilean provinces of Israel have been depopulated, and promise a

Deliverer. If we do not keep in mind the decision of Ahaz, we shall not

understand these seemingly contradictory utterances, which it thoroughly

explains. Let us now begin at the beginning of chapter vii. It opens

with a bare statement, by way of title, of the invasion of Judah and the

futile result; and then proceeds to tell us how Isaiah acted from the

first rumour of the confederacy onward.

I. THE KING (chap. vii.).

_And it came to pass in the days of Ahaz, the son of Jotham, the son of

Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezin, the king of Syria, and Pekah, the son

of Remaliah, king of Israel, went up to Jerusalem to war against it, but

could not prevail against it._ This is a summary of the whole adventure

and issue of the war, given by way of introduction. The narrative proper

begins in verse 2, with the effect of the first news of the league upon

Ahaz and his people. Their hearts were moved, like the trees of the

forest before the wind. The league was aimed so evidently against the

two things most essential to the national existence and the honour of

Jehovah; the dynasty of David, namely, and the inviolability of

Jerusalem. Judah had frequently before suffered the loss of her

territory; never till now were the throne and city of David in actual

peril. But that, which bent both king and people by its novel terror,

was the test Isaiah expected for the prophecies he had already uttered.

Taking with him, as a summary of them, his boy with the name

Shear-Jashub--_A-remnant-shall-return_--Isaiah faced Ahaz and his court

in the midst of their preparation for the siege. They were

examining--but more in panic than in prudence--the water supply of the

city, when Isaiah delivered to them a message from the Lord, which may

be paraphrased as follows: _Take heed and be quiet_, keep your eyes open

and your heart still; _fear not, neither be faint-hearted, for the

fierce anger of Rezin and Remaliah's son_. They have no power to set you

on fire. They are _but stumps of expiring firebrands_, almost burnt out.

While you wisely look after your water supply, do so in hope. This

purpose of deposing you is vain. _Thus saith the Lord Jehovah: It shall

not stand, neither shall it come to pass._ Of whom are you afraid? Look

those foes of yours in the face. _The head of Syria is Damascus, and

Damascus' head is Rezin_: is he worth fearing? _The head of Ephraim is

Samaria, and Samaria's head is Remaliah's son_: is he worth fearing?

Within a few years they will certainly be destroyed. But whatever

estimate you make of your foes, whatever their future may be, for

yourself have faith in God; for you that is the essential thing. _If ye

will not believe, surely ye shall not be established._[13]

[13] There is a play upon words here, which may be reproduced in English

by the help of a North-England term: If ye have not _faith_, ye cannot

have _staith_.

This paraphrase seeks to bring out the meaning of a passage confessedly

obscure. It seems as if we had only bits of Isaiah's speech to Ahaz and

must supply the gaps. No one need hesitate, however, to recognize the

conspicuous personal qualities--the combination of political sagacity

with religious fear, of common-sense and courage rooted in faith. In a

word, this is what Isaiah will say to the king, clever in his alliances,

religious and secular, and busy about his material defences: "Take unto

you the shield of faith. You have lost your head among all these things.

Hold it up like a man behind that shield; take a rational view of

affairs. Rate your enemies at their proper value. But for this you must

believe in God. Faith in Him is the essential condition of a calm mind

and a rational appreciation of affairs."

It is, no doubt, difficult for us to realize that the truth which Isaiah

thus enforced on King Ahaz--the government of the world and human

history by one supreme God--was ever a truth of which the race stood in

ignorance. A generation like ours cannot be expected to put its mind in

the attitude of those of Isaiah's contemporaries who believed in the

real existence of many gods with limited sovereignties. To us, who are

full of the instincts of Divine Providence and of the presence in

history of law and progress, it is extremely hard even to admit the

fact--far less fully to realize what it means--that our race had ever to

receive these truths as fresh additions to their stock of intellectual

ideas. Yet, without prejudice to the claims of earlier prophets, this

may be confidently affirmed: that Isaiah where we now meet him stood on

one side believing in one supreme God, Lord of heaven and earth, and his

generation stood on the other side, believing that there were many gods.

Isaiah, however, does not pose as the discoverer of the truth he

preaches; he does not present it as a new revelation, nor put it in a

formula. He takes it for granted, and proceeds to bring its moral

influence to bear. He will infect men with his own utter conviction of

it, in order that he may strengthen their character and guide them by

paths of safety. His speech to Ahaz is an exhibition of the moral and

rational effects of believing in Providence. Ahaz is a sample of the

_character_ polytheism produced; the state of mind and heart to which

Isaiah exhorts him is that induced by belief in one righteous and

almighty God. We can make the contrast clear to ourselves by a very

definite figure.

The difference, which is made to the character and habits of men if the

country they live in has a powerful government or not, is well known. If

there be no such central authority, it is a case of every man's hand

against his neighbour. Men walk armed to the teeth. A constant attitude

of fear and suspicion warps the whole nature. The passions are excited

and magnified; the intelligence and judgement are dwarfed. Just the

same after its kind is life to the man or tribe, who believe, that the

world in which they dwell and the life they share with others have no

central authority. They walk armed with prejudices, superstitions and

selfishnesses. They create, like Ahaz, their own providences, and still,

like him, feel insecure. Everything is exaggerated by them; in each evil

there lurks to their imagination unlimited hostility. They are without

breadth of view or length of patience. But let men believe that life has

a central authority, that God is supreme, and they will fling their

prejudices and superstitions to the winds, now no more needed than the

antiquated fortresses and weapons by which our forefathers, in days when

the government was weak, were forced to defend their private interests.

When we know that God reigns, how quiet and free it makes us! When

things and men are part of His scheme and working out His ends, when we

understand that they are not monsters but ministers, how reasonably we

can look at them! Were we afraid of Syria and Ephraim? Why, the head of

Syria is this fellow Rezin, the head of Ephraim this son of Remaliah!

They cannot last long; God's engine stands behind to smite them. By the

reasonable government of God, let us be reasonable! Let us take heed and

be quiet. Have faith in God, and to faith will come her proper

consequent of commonsense.

For the higher a man looks, the farther he sees: to us that is the

practical lesson of these first nine verses of the seventh chapter. The

very gesture of faith bestows upon the mind a breadth of view. The man,

who lifts his face to God in heaven, is he whose eyes sweep

simultaneously the farthest prospect of earth, and bring to him a sense

of the proportion of things. Ahaz, facing his nearest enemies, does not

see over their heads, and in his consternation at their appearance

prepares to embark upon any policy that suggests itself, even though it

be so rash as the summoning of the Assyrian. Isaiah, on the other hand,

with his vision fixed on God as the Governor of the world, is enabled to

overlook the dust that darkens Judah's frontier, to see behind it the

inevitable advance of the Assyrians, and to be assured that, whether

Ahaz calls them to his quarrel or no, they will very soon of their own

motion overwhelm both of his enemies. From these _two smoking

firebrands_ there is then no real danger. But from the Assyrian, if once

Judah entangle herself in his toils, there is the most extreme danger.

Isaiah's advice is therefore not mere religious quietism; it is prudent

policy. It is the best political advice that could have been offered at

that crisis, as we have already been able to gather from a survey of the

geographical and political dispositions of Western Asia,[14] apart

altogether from religious considerations. But to Isaiah the calmness

requisite for this sagacity sprang from his faith. Mr. Bagehot might

have appealed to Isaiah's whole policy in illustration of what he has so

well described as the military and political benefits of religion.

Monotheism is of advantage to men not only by reason of "the high

concentration of steady feeling" which it produces, but also for the

mental calmness and sagacity, which surely spring from a pure and vivid

conviction that the Lord reigneth.[15]

[14] Page 96.

[15] _Physics and Politics_ (International Scientific Series), pp. 75

ff. One of the finest modern illustrations of the connection between

faith and common-sense is found in the _Letters of General Gordon to His

Sister_. Gordon's coolness in face of the slave trade, the just survey

he makes of it, and the sensible advice which he gives about meeting it

stand well in contrast to the haste and rash proposals of

philanthropists at home, and are evidently due to his conviction that

the slave trade, like everything else in the world, is in the hands of

God, and so may be calmly studied and wisely checkmated. Gordon's

letters make very clear how much of his shrewdness in dealing with men

was due to the same source. It is instructive to observe throughout, how

his complete resignation to the will of God and his perfect obedience

delivered him from prejudices and partialities, from distractions and

desires, that make sober judgement impossible in other men.

One other thing it is well we should emphasize, before we pass from

Isaiah's speech to Ahaz. Nothing can be plainer than that Isaiah, though

advocating so absolutely a quiescent belief in God, _is no fatalist_.

Now other prophets there have been, insisting just as absolutely as

Isaiah upon resignation to God the supreme, and the evident practical

effect of their doctrine of the Divine sovereignty has been to make

their followers, not shrewd political observers, but blind and apathetic

fatalists. The difference between them and Isaiah has lain in the kind

of character, which they and he have respectively attributed to the

Deity, before exalting Him to the throne of absolute power and resigning

themselves to His will. Isaiah, though as disciplined a believer in

God's sovereignty and man's duty of obedience as any prophet that ever

preached these doctrines, was preserved from the fatalism to which they

so often lead by the conviction he had previously received of God's

righteousness. Fatalism means resignation to fate, and fate means an

omnipotence either without character, or (which is the same thing) of

whose character we are ignorant. Fate is God _minus_ character, and

fatalism is the characterless condition to which belief in such a God

reduces man. History presents it to our view amid the most diverse

surroundings. The Greek mind, so free and sunny, was bewildered and

benumbed by belief in an inscrutable Nemesis. In the East how frequently

is a temper of apathy or despair bred in men, to whom God is nothing but

a despot! Even within Christianity we have had fanatics, so inordinately

possessed with belief in God's sovereignty of election, to the exclusion

of all other Divine truths, as to profess themselves, with impious

audacity, willing to be damned for His glory. Such instances are enough

to prove to us the extreme danger of making the sovereignty of God the

_first_ article of our creed. It is not safe for men to exalt a deity to

the throne of the supreme providence, till they are certified of his

character. The vision of mere power intoxicates and brutalizes, no less

when it is hallowed by the name of religion, than when, as in modern

materialism, it is blindly interpreted as physical force. Only the

people who have first learned to know their Deity intimately in the

private matters of life, where heart touches heart, and the delicate

arguments of conscience are not overborne by the presence of vast

natural forces or the intricate movements of the world's history, can be

trusted afterwards to enter these larger theatres of religion, without

risk of losing their faith, their sensibility or their conscience.

The whole course of revelation has been bent upon this: to render men

familiarly and experimentally acquainted with the character of God,

before laying upon them the duty of homage to His creative power or

submission to His will. In the Old Testament God is the Friend, the

Guide, the Redeemer of men, or ever He is their Monarch and Lawgiver.

The Divine name which the Hebrew sees _excellent through all the earth_

is the name that he has learned to know at home as _Jehovah, our Lord_

(Ps. viii.). Jehovah trains His people to trust His personal troth and

lovingkindness within their own courts, before He tests their allegiance

and discipline upon the high places of the world. And when, amid the

strange terrors of these and the novel magnitudes with which Israel,

facing the world, had to reckon, the people lost their presence of mind,

His elegy over them was, _My people are destroyed for lack of

knowledge._ Even when their temple is full and their sacrifices of

homage to His power most frequent, it is still their want of moral

acquaintance with Himself of which He complains: _Israel doth not know;

My people doth not consider._ What else was the tragedy in which Jewish

history closed, than just the failure to perceive this lesson: that to

have and to communicate the knowledge of the Almighty's character is of

infinitely more value than the attempt to vindicate in any outward

fashion Jehovah's supremacy over the world? This latter, this forlorn,

hope was what Israel exhausted the evening of their day in attempting.

The former--to communicate to the lives and philosophies of mankind a

knowledge of the Divine heart and will, gained throughout a history of

unique grace and miracle--was the destiny which they resigned to the

followers of the crucified Messiah.

For under the New Testament this also is the method of revelation. What

our King desires before He ascends the throne of the world is that the

world should know Him; and so He comes down among us, to be heard, and

seen, and handled of us, that our hearts may learn His heart and know

His love, unbewildered by His majesty. And for our part, when we

ascribe to our King the glory and the dominion, it is as unto Him that

loved us and washed us from our sins in His blood. For the chief thing

for individuals, as for nations, is not to believe that God reigneth so

much as to know what kind of God He is who reigneth.

* * * * *

But Ahaz would not be persuaded. He had a policy of his own, and was

determined to pursue it. He insisted on appealing to Assyria. Before he

did so, Isaiah made one more attempt on his obduracy. With a vehemence,

which reveals how critical he felt the king's decision to be, the

prophet returned as if this time the very voice of Jehovah. _And Jehovah

spake to Ahaz, saying, Ask thee a sign of Jehovah thy God; ask it either

in Sheol below or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask,

neither will I tempt the Lord._

Isaiah's offer of a sign was one which the prophets of Israel used to

make when some crisis demanded the immediate acceptance of their word by

men, and men were more than usually hard to convince--a miracle such as

the thunder that Samuel called out of a clear sky to impress Israel with

God's opinion of their folly in asking for a king;[16] or as the rending

of the altar which the man of God brought to pass to convict the sullen

Jeroboam;[17] or as the regress of the shadow on the sun-dial, which

Isaiah himself gave in assurance of recovery to the sick Hezekiah.[18]

Such signs are offered only to weak or prejudiced persons. The most

real faith, as Isaiah himself tells us, is unforced, the purest natures

those which need no signs and wonders. But there are certain crises at

which faith must be immediately forced, and Ahaz stood now at such a

crisis; and there are certain characters who, unable to read a writ from

the court of conscience and reason, must be served with one from a

court--even though it be inferior--whose language they understand; and

Ahaz was such a character. Isaiah knew his man, and prepared a pretty

dilemma for him. By offering him whatever sign he chose to ask, Isaiah

knew that the king would be committed before his own honour and the

public conscience to refrain from calling in the Assyrians, and so Judah

would be saved; or if the king refused the sign, the refusal would

unmask him. Ahaz refused, and at once Isaiah denounced him and all his

house. They were mere shufflers, playing fast and loose with God as well

as men. _Hear ye now, O house of David. Is it a small thing for you to

weary men, that ye must weary my God also?_ You have evaded God;

therefore God Himself will take you in hand: _the Lord Himself shall

give you a sign_.

[16] 1 Sam. xii. 17.

[17] 1 Kings xiii. 3.

[18] Chap. xxxviii.

In order to follow intelligently the rest of Isaiah's address, we must

clearly understand how the sign which he now promises differs in nature

from the sign he had implored Ahaz to select, of whatever sort he may

have expected that selection to be. The king's determination to call in

Assyria has come between. Therefore, while the sign Isaiah first offered

upon the spot was intended for an immediate pledge that God would

establish Ahaz, if only he did not appeal to the foreigner, the sign

Isaiah now offers shall come as a future proof of how criminal and

disastrous the appeal to the foreigner has been. The first sign would

have been an earnest of salvation; the second is to be an exposure of

the fatal evil of Ahaz's choice. The first would have given some

assurance of the swift overthrow of Ephraim and Syria; the second shall

be some painful illustration of the fact that not only Syria and

Ephraim, but Judah herself, shall be overwhelmed by the advance of the

northern power. This second sign is one, therefore, which only time can

bring round. Isaiah identifies it with a life not yet born.

A Child, he says, shall shortly be born to whom his mother shall give

the name Immanu-El--_God-with-us_. By the time this Child comes to years

of discretion, _he shall eat butter and honey_. Isaiah then explains the

riddle. He does not, however, explain who the mother is, having

described her vaguely as _a_ or _the young woman of marriageable age_;

for that is not necessary to the sign, which is to consist in the

Child's own experience. To this latter he limits his explanation. Butter

and honey are the food of privation, the food of a people, whose land,

depopulated by the enemy, has been turned into pasture. Before this

Child shall arrive at years of discretion not only shall Syria and

Ephraim be laid waste, but the Lord Himself will have laid waste Judah.

_Jehovah shall bring upon thee, and upon thy people and upon thy

father's house days, that have not come, from the day that Ephraim

departed from Judah; even the king of Assyria._ Nothing more is said of

Immanuel, but the rest of the chapter is taken up with the details of

Judah's devastation.

Now this sign and its explanation would have presented little difficulty

but for the name of the Child--Immanuel. Erase that, and the passage

reads forcibly enough. Before a certain Child, whose birth is vaguely

but solemnly intimated in the near future, shall have come to years of

discretion, the results of the choice of Ahaz shall be manifest. Judah

shall be devastated, and her people have sunk to the most rudimentary

means of living. All this is plain. It is a form which Isaiah used more

than once to measure the near future. And in other literatures, too, we

have felt the pathos of realizing the future results of crime and the

length to which disaster lingers, by their effect upon the lives of

another generation:--

"The child that is unborn shall rue

The hunting of that day!"

But why call the Child Immanuel? The name is evidently part of the sign,

and has to be explained in connection with it. Why call a Child

_God-with-us_ who is not going to act greatly or to be highly honoured,

who is only going to suffer, for whom to come to years of intelligence

shall only be to come to a sense of his country's disaster and his

people's poverty? This Child who is used so pathetically to measure the

flow of time and the return of its revenges, about whom we are told

neither how he shall behave himself in the period of privation, nor

whether he shall survive it--why is he called Immanuel? or why, being

called Immanuel, has he so sordid a fate to contrast with so splendid a

name?

It seems to the present expositor quite impossible to dissociate so

solemn an announcement by Jehovah to the house of David of the birth of

a Child, so highly named, from that expectation of the coming of a

glorious Prince which was current in this royal family since the days of

its founder. Mysterious and abrupt as the intimation of Immanuel's birth

may seem to us at this juncture, we cannot forget that it fell from

Isaiah's lips on hearts which cherished as their dearest hope the

appearance of a glorious descendant of David, and were just now the more

sensitive to this hope that both David's city and David's dynasty were

in peril. Could Ahaz possibly understand by Immanuel any other child

than that Prince whose coming was the inalienable hope of his house? But

if we are right in supposing that Ahaz made this identification, or had

even the dimmest presage of it, then we understand the full force of the

sign. Ahaz by his unbelief had not only disestablished himself (ver. 9):

he had mortgaged the hope of Israel. In the flood of disaster, which his

fatal resolution would bring upon the land, it mattered little what was

to happen to himself. Isaiah does not trouble now to mention any penalty

for Ahaz. But his resolve's exceeding pregnancy of peril is borne home

to the king by the assurance that it will devastate all the golden

future, and must disinherit the promised King. The Child, who is

Israel's hope, is born; he receives the Divine name, and that is all of

salvation or glory suggested. He grows up not to a throne or the majesty

which the seventy-second Psalm pictures--the offerings of Sheba's and

Seba's kings, the corn of his land shaking like the fruit of Lebanon,

while they of the city flourish like the grass of the earth--but to the

food of privation, to the sight of his country razed by his enemies into

one vast common fit only for pasture, to loneliness and suffering. Amid

the general desolation his figure vanishes from our sight, and only his

name remains to haunt, with its infinite melancholy of what might have

been, the thorn-choked vineyards and grass-grown courts of Judah.

But even if it were to prove too fine a point, to identify Immanuel with

the promised Messiah of David's house, and we had to fall back on some

vaguer theory of him, finding him to be a personification,--either a

representative of the coming generation of God's people, or a type of

the promised to-morrow,--the moral effect of the sign would remain the

same; and it is with this alone that we have here to do. Be this an

individual, or a generation, or an age,--by the Name bestowed upon it,

it was to have been a glorious, God-inhabited age, generation, or

individual, and Ahaz has prematurely spoiled everything about it but the

Name. The future shall be like a boy cursed by his fathers, brought into

the world with glorious rights that are stamped in his title, but only

to find his kingdom and estates no longer in existence, and all the

circumstances dissipated, in which he might have realized the glorious

meaning of his name. Type of innocent suffering, he is born to an empty

title, his name the vestige of a great opportunity, the ironical

monument of an irreparable crime.

If Ahaz had any conscience left, we can imagine the effect of this upon

him. To be punished for sin in one's own body and fortune, this is sore

enough; but to see heaven itself blackened and all the gracious future

frustrate, this is unspeakably terrible.

Ahaz is thus the Judas of the Old Testament, if that conception of

Judas' character be the right one which makes his wilful desire to bring

about the kingdom of God in his own violent fashion the motive of his

betrayal of Jesus. Of his own obduracy Ahaz has betrayed the Messiah and

Deliverer of his people. The assurance of this betrayal is the sign of

his obduracy, a signal and terrible proof of his irretrievable sin in

calling upon the Assyrians. The king has been found wanting.

II. THE PEOPLE (chap. viii.).

The king has been found wanting; but Isaiah will appeal to the people.

Chap. viii. is a collection of addresses to them, as chap. vii. was an

expostulation with their sovereign. The two chapters are contemporary.

In chap. viii. ver. 1, the narrative goes back upon itself, and returns

to the situation as it was before Ahaz made his final resolution of

reliance on Assyria. Vv. 1-4 of chap. viii. imply that the Assyrian has

not yet been summoned by Ahaz to his assistance, and therefore run

parallel to chap. vii. vv. 3-9; but chap. viii. ver. 5 and following

verses sketch the evils that are to come upon Judah and Israel,

consequent upon the arrival of the Assyrians in Palestine, in answer to

the appeal of Ahaz. These evils for land and nation are threatened as

absolutely to the people, as they had been to the king. And then the

people are thrown over (viii. 14), as the king had been; and Isaiah

limits himself to his disciples (ver. 16)--the _remnant_ that was

foretold in chap. vi.

This appeal from monarch to people is one of the most characteristic

features of Isaiah's ministry. Whatever be the matter committed to him,

Isaiah is not allowed to rest till he has brought it home to the popular

conscience; and however much he may be able to charge national disaster

upon the folly of politicians or the obduracy of a king, it is the

people whom he holds ultimately responsible. The statesman, according to

Isaiah, cannot rise far above the level of his generation; the people

set the fashion to their most autocratic rulers. This instinct for the

popular conscience, this belief in the moral solidarity of a nation and

their governors, was the motive of the most picturesque passages in

Isaiah's career, and inspired some of the keenest epigrams in which he

conveyed the Divine truth. We have here a case in illustration. Isaiah

had met Ahaz and his court _at the conduit of the upper pool, in the

highway of the fuller's field_, preparing for the expected siege of the

city, and had delivered to them the Lord's message not to fear, for that

Syria-Ephraim would certainly be destroyed. But that was not enough. It

was now laid upon the prophet to make public and popular advertisement

of the same truth.

Isaiah was told to take a large, smooth board, and write thereon in the

character used by the common people--_with the pen of a man_--as if it

were the title to a prophecy, the compound word "Maher-shalal-hash-baz."

This was not only an intelligibly written, but a significantly sonorous,

word--one of those popular cries in which the liveliest sensations are

struck forth by the crowded, clashing letters, full to the dullest ears

of rumours of war: _speed-spoil-hurry-prey_. The interpretation of it

was postponed, the prophet meantime taking two faithful witnesses to its

publication. In a little a son was born to Isaiah, and to this child he

transferred the noisy name. Then its explanation was given. The double

word was the alarm of a couple of invasions. _Before the boy shall have

knowledge to cry, My father, my mother, the riches of Damascus and the

spoil of Samaria shall be carried away before the king of Assyria._ So

far nothing was told the people that had not been told their king; only

the time of the overthrow of their two enemies was fixed with greater

precision. At the most in a year, Damascus and Samaria would have

fallen. The ground was already vibrating to the footfall of the northern

hosts.

The rapid political changes, which ensued in Palestine, are reflected on

the broken surface of this eighth chapter. We shall not understand

these abrupt and dislocated oracles, uttered at short intervals during

the two years of the Assyrian campaign, unless we realize that northern

shadow passing and repassing over Judah and Israel, and the quick

alternations of pride and penitence in the peoples beneath it. We need

not try to thread the verses on any line of thought. Logical connection

among them there is none. Let us at once get down into the currents of

popular feeling, in which Isaiah, having left Ahaz, is now labouring,

and casting forth these cries.

It is a period of powerful currents, a people wholly in drift, and the

strongest man of them arrested only by a firm pressure of the Lord's

hand. _For Jehovah spake thus to me with a strong hand, and instructed

me, that I should not walk in the way of this people._ The character of

the popular movement, _the way of this people_, which nearly lifted

Isaiah off his feet, is evident. It is that into which every nation

drifts, who have just been loosened from a primitive faith in God, and

by fear or ambition have been brought under the fascination of the great

world. On the one hand, such a generation is apt to seek the security of

its outward life in things materially large and splendid, to despise as

paltry its old religious forms, national aspirations and achievements,

and be very desirous to follow foreign fashion and rival foreign wealth.

On the other hand, the religious spirit of such an age, withdrawn from

its legitimate objects, seeks satisfaction in petty and puerile

practices, demeaning itself spiritually, in a way that absurdly

contrasts with the grandeur of its material ambitions. Such a stage in

the life of a people has its analogy in the growth of the individual,

when the boy, new to the world, by affecting the grandest companions

and models, assumes an ambitious manner, with contempt for his former

circumstances, yet inwardly remains credulous, timid and liable to

panic. Isaiah reveals that it was such a stage, which both the kingdoms

of Israel had now reached. _This people hath refused the waters of

Shiloah, that go softly, and rejoice in Rezin and Remaliah's son._

It was natural, that when the people of Judah contrasted their own

estate with that of Assyria, or even of Damascus, they should despise

themselves. For what was Judah? A petty principality, no larger than

three of our own counties. And what was Jerusalem? A mere mountain

village, some sixty or seventy acres of barren rock, cut into tongues by

three insignificant valleys, down which there sometimes struggled tiny

threads of water, though the beds were oftener dry, giving the town a

withered and squalid look--no great river to nourish, ennoble or

protect. What were such a country and capital to compare with the empire

of Assyria?--the empire of the two rivers, whose powerful streams washed

the ramparts, wharves, and palace stairs of mighty cities! What was

Jerusalem even to the capital of Rezin? Were not Abana and Pharpar,

rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel, let alone

these waterless wâdys, whose bleached beds made the Jewish capital so

squalid? It was the Assyrian's vast water system--canals, embankments,

sluices, and the wealth of water moving through them--that most

impressed the poor Jew, whose streams failed him in summer, and who had

to treasure up his scanty stores of rainwater in the cisterns, with

which the rocky surface of his territory is still so thickly indented.

There had, indeed, been at Jerusalem some attempt to conduct water. It

was called _The Shiloah_--_conduit_ or _aqueduct_, literally _emissary_

in the old sense of the word--a rough, narrow tunnel of some thousand

feet in length, hewn through the living rock from the only considerable

spring on the east side of Jerusalem, to a reservoir within the walls.

To this day _The Shiloah_ presents itself as not by any means a

first-class piece of engineering. Ahaz had either just made the tunnel

or repaired it; but if the water went no faster than it travels now, the

results were indeed ridiculous. Well might _this people despise the

waters of the Shiloah, that go trickling_, when they thought upon the

rivers of Damascus or the broad streams of Mesopotamia. Certainly it was

enough to dry up the patriotism of the Judean, if he was capable of

appreciating only material value, to look upon this bare, riverless

capital, with its bungled aqueduct and trickling water supply. On merely

material grounds, Judah was about the last country at that time, in

which her inhabitants might be expected to show pride or confidence.

But woe to the people, whose attachment to their land is based upon its

material advantages, who have lost their sense for those spiritual

presences, from an appreciation of which springs all true love of

country, with warrior's courage in her defence and statesman's faith in

her destiny! The greatest calamity, which can befall any people, is to

forfeit their enthusiasm for the soil, on which their history has been

achieved and their hearths and altars lie, by suffering their faith in

the presence of God, of which these are but the tokens, to pass away.

With this loss Isaiah now reproaches Judah. The people are utterly

materialized; their delights have been in gold and silver, chariots and

horses, fenced cities and broad streams, and their faith has now

followed their delights. But these things to which they flee will only

prove their destruction. The great foreign river, whose waters they

covet, will overflow them: _even the king of Assyria and all his glory,

and he shall come up over all his channels and go over all his banks;

and he shall sweep onward into Judah; he shall overflow and pass

through; he shall reach even to the neck; and the stretching out of his

wings shall fill the breadth of thy land, O Immanuel_, thou who art

_God-with-us_. At the sound of the Name, which floats in upon the floods

of invasion like the Ark on the waters of old, Isaiah pulls together his

distraught faith in his country, and forgetting her faults, flings

defiance at her foes. _Associate yourselves, ye peoples, and ye shall be

broken in pieces; and give ear, all ye of far-off countries, gird

yourselves, and ye shall be broken in pieces. Take counsel together, and

it shall be brought to nought; speak the word, and it shall not stand:

for Immanu-El_--"With us is God." The challenge was made good. The

prophet's faith prevailed over the people's materialism, and Jerusalem

remained inviolable till Isaiah's death.

Meantime the Assyrian came on. But the infatuated people of Judah

continued to tremble rather before the doomed conspirators, Rezin and

Pekah. It must have been a time of huge excitement. The prophet tells us

how he was steadied by the pressure of the Lord's hand, and how, being

steadied, the meaning of the word "Immanuel" was opened out to him.

_God-with-us_ is the one great fact of life. Amid all the possible

alliances and all the possible fears of a complex political situation,

He remains the one certain alliance, the one real fear. _Say ye not, A

conspiracy, concerning all whereof this people say, A conspiracy;

neither fear ye their fear, nor be in dread thereof. Jehovah of hosts,

Him shall ye sanctify; and let Him be your fear, and let Him be your

dread._ God is the one great fact of life, but what a double-edged

fact--_a sanctuary to all who put their trust in Him, but a rock of

offence to both houses of Israel!_ The figure is very picturesque. An

altar, a common stone on steps, one of those which covered the land in

large numbers--it is easy to see what a double purpose that might serve.

What a joy the sight would be to the weary wanderer or refugee who

sought it, what a comfort as he leant his weariness upon it, and knew he

was safe! But those who were flying over the land, not seeking Jehovah,

not knowing indeed what they sought, blind and panic-stricken--for them

what could that altar do but trip them up like any other common rock in

their way? "In fact, Divine justice is something which is either

observed, desired, or attained, and is then man's weal, or, on the other

hand, is overlooked, rejected, or sought after in a wild, unintelligent

spirit, and only in the hour of need, and is then their lasting

ruin."[19]

[19] Ewald.

The Assyrian came on, and the temper of the Jews grew worse. Samaria was

indeed doomed from the first, but for some time Isaiah had been

excepting Judah from a judgement for which the guilt of Northern Israel

was certainly riper. He foresaw, of course, that the impetus of invasion

might sweep the Assyrians into Judah, but he had triumphed in this: that

Judah was Immanuel's land, and that all who arrayed themselves against

her must certainly come to nought. But now his ideas have changed, as

Judah has persisted in evil. He knows now that God is for a

stumbling-block to _both_ houses of Israel; nay, that upon Jerusalem

herself He will fall as a gin and a snare. Only for a little group of

individuals, separate from both States, and gathered round the prophet

and the word of God given to him, is salvation certain. People, as well

as king, have been found wanting. There remains only this _remnant_.

Isaiah then at last sees his _remnant_. But the point we have reached is

significant for more than the fulfilment of his expectations. This is

the first appearance in history of a religious community, apart from the

forms of domestic or national life. "Till then no one had dreamed of a

fellowship of faith dissociated from all national forms, bound together

by faith in the Divine word alone. It was the birth of a new era in

religion, for it was the birth of the conception of the Church, the

first step in the emancipation of spiritual religion from the forms of

political life."[20]

[20] Robertson Smith, _Prophets of Israel_, p. 275.

The plan of the seventh and eighth chapters is now fully disclosed. As

the king for his unworthiness has to give place to the Messiah, so the

nation for theirs have to give place to the Church. In the seventh

chapter the king was found wanting, and the Messiah promised. In the

eighth chapter the people are found wanting; and the prophet, turning

from them, proceeds to form the Church among those who accept the Word,

which king and people have refused. _Bind thou up the testimony, and

seal the teaching[21] among my disciples. And I will wait on Jehovah,

who hideth His face from the house of Jacob, and I will look for Him.

Behold, I and the children Jehovah hath given me are for signs and

wonders in Israel from Jehovah of hosts, Him that dwelleth in Mount

Zion._

[21] English Version, "law," but not the law of Moses. Isaiah refers to

the word that has come by himself.

This, then, is the situation: revelation concluded, the Church formed

upon it, and the nation abandoned. But is that situation final? The

words just quoted betray the prophet's hope that it is not. He says: _I

will wait._ He says again: The LORD is only _hiding His face from the

house of Jacob_. I will expect again the shining of His countenance. I

will hope for Divine grace and the nation being once more conterminous.

The rest of the section (to ix. 7) is the development of this hope,

which stirs in the prophet's heart after he has closed the record of

revelation.

The darkness deepened across Israel. The Assyrian had come. The northern

floods kept surging among the little States of Palestine, and none knew

what might be left standing. We can well understand Isaiah pausing, as

he did, in face of such rapid and incontrollable movements. When

Tiglath-pileser swept over the plain of Esdraelon, casting down the king

of Samaria and the Philistine cities, and then swept back again,

carrying off upon his ebb the populations east of the Jordan, it looked

very like as if both the houses of Israel should fall. In their panic,

the people betook themselves to morbid forms of religion; and at first

Isaiah was obliged to quench the hope and pity he had betrayed for them

in indignation at the utter contrariety of their religious practices to

the word of God. There can be no Divine grace for the people as long as

they _seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto the wizards

that chirp and that mutter_. For such a disposition the prophet has

nothing but scorn, _Should not a people seek unto their God? On behalf

of the living should they seek unto the dead?_ They must come back to

the prophet's own word before hope may dawn. _To the revelation and the

testimony! If they speak not according to this word, surely there is no

morning for them._

The night, however, grew too awful for scorn. There had been no part of

the land so given to the idolatrous practices, which the prophet

scathed, as _the land of Zebulon and the land of Naphtali, by the sea

beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles_. But all the horrors of

captivity had now fallen upon it, and it had received at the Lord's hand

double for all its sins. The night had been torn enough by lightning;

was there no dawn? The darkness of these provinces fills the prophet's

silenced thoughts. He sees a people _hardly bestead and hungry, fretting

themselves, cursing their king_, who had betrayed them, _and their God_,

who had abandoned them, _turning their faces upwards_ to heaven and

_downwards_ to the sacred soil from which they were being dragged, _but,

behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish; and into thick

darkness they are driven away_. It is a murky picture, yet through the

smoke of it we are able to discern a weird procession of Israelites

departing into captivity. We date it, therefore, about 732 B.C., the

night of Israel's first great captivity. The shock and the pity of this

rouse the prophet's great heart. He cannot continue to say that there is

no morning for those benighted provinces. He will venture a great hope

for their people.

Over how many months the crowded verses, viii. 21-ix. 7, must be spread,

it is useless now to inquire--whether the revulsion they mark arose all

at once in the prophet's mind, or hope grew gradually brighter as the

smoke of war died away on Israel's northern frontier during 731 B.C. It

is enough that we can mark the change. The prophet's tones pass from

sarcasm to pity (viii. 20, 21); from pity to hope (viii. 22-ix. 1); from

hope to triumph in the vision of salvation actually achieved (ix. 2).

_The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that

dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, on them hath the light

shined._ For a mutilated, we see a multiplied, nation; for the fret of

hunger and the curses of defeat, we hear the joy of harvest and of spoil

after victory. _For the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his

shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, Thou hast broken as in the day of

Midian._ War has rolled away for ever over that northern horizon, and

all the relics of war in the land are swept together into the fire. _For

all the armour of the armed man in the tumult, and the garments rolled

in blood, shall even be for burning, and for fuel of fire._ In the

midday splendour of this peace, which, after the fashion of Hebrew

prophecy, is described as already realized, Isaiah hails the Author of

it all in that gracious and marvellous Child whose birth he had already

intimated, Heir to the throne of David, but entitled by a fourfold name,

too generous, perhaps, for a mere mortal, _Wonderful-Counsellor_,

_Hero-God_, _Father-Everlasting_, _Prince-of-peace_, who shall redeem

the realms of his great forerunner and maintain _Israel with justice and

righteousness from henceforth, even for ever_.

When, finally, the prophet inquires what has led his thoughts through

this rapid change from satisfaction (chap. viii. 16) with the salvation

of a small _remnant_ of believers in the word of God--a little kernel of

patience in the midst of a godless and abandoned people--to the daring

vision of a whole nation redeemed and established in peace under a

Godlike King, he says: _The zeal of the Lord of hosts hath performed

this._

_The zeal_, translates our English version, but no one English word will

give it. It is that mixture of hot honour and affection to which

"jealousy" in its good sense comes near. It is that overflow of the love

that cannot keep still, which, when men think God has surely done all He

will or can do for an ungrateful race, visits them in their distress,

and carries them forward into unconceived dispensations of grace and

glory. It is the Spirit of God, which yearns after the lost, speaks to

the self-despairing of hope, and surprises rebel and prophet alike with

new revelations of love. We have our systems representing God's work up

to the limits of our experience, and we settle upon them; but the

Almighty is ever greater than His promise or than His revelation of

Himself.

CHAPTER VII.

_THE MESSIAH._

We have now reached that point of Isaiah's prophesying at which the

Messiah becomes the most conspicuous figure on his horizon. Let us take

advantage of it, to gather into one statement all that the prophet told

his generation concerning that exalted and mysterious Person.[22]

[22] The Messiah, or _Anointed_, is used in the Old Testament of many

agents of God: high-priest (Lev. iv. 3); ministers of the Word (Ps. cv.

15); Cyrus (Isa. xlv. 1); but mostly of God's king, actual (1 Sam. xxiv.

7), or expected (Dan. ix. 25). So it became in Jewish theology the

technical term for the coming King and the Captain of salvation.

When Isaiah began to prophesy, there was current among the people of

Judah the expectation of a glorious King. How far the expectation was

defined it is impossible to ascertain; but this at least is historically

certain. A promise had been made to David (2 Sam. vii. 4-17) by which

the permanence of his dynasty was assured. His offspring, it was said,

should succeed him, yet eternity was promised not to any individual

descendant, but to the dynasty. Prophets earlier than Isaiah emphasized

this establishment of the house of David, even in the days of Israel's

greatest distress; but they said nothing of a single monarch with whom

the fortunes of the house were to be identified. It is clear, however,

even without the evidence of the Messianic Psalms, that the hope of such

a hero was quick in Israel. Besides the documentary proof of David's own

last words (2 Sam. xxiii.), there is the manifest impossibility of

dreaming of an ideal kingdom apart from the ideal king. Orientals, and

especially Orientals of that period, were incapable of realizing the

triumph of an idea or an institution without connecting it with a

personality. So that we may be perfectly sure, that when Isaiah began to

prophesy the people not only counted upon the continuance of David's

dynasty, as they counted upon the presence of Jehovah Himself, but were

familiar with the ideal of a monarch, and lived in hope of its

realization.

In the first stage of his prophecy, it is remarkable, Isaiah makes no

use of this tradition, although he gives more than one representation of

Israel's future in which it might naturally have appeared. No word is

spoken of a Messiah even in the awful conversation, in which Isaiah

received from the Eternal the fundamentals of his teaching. The only

hope there permitted to him is the survival of a bare, leaderless few of

the people, or, to use his own word, _a stump_, with no sign of a

prominent sprout upon it. In connection, however, with the survival of a

remnant, as we have said on chap. vi. (p. 89), it is plain that there

were two indispensable conditions, which the prophet could not help

having to state sooner or later. Indeed, one of them he had mentioned

already. It was indispensable that the people should have a leader, and

that they should have a rallying-point. They must have their King, and

they must have their City. Every reader of Isaiah knows that it is on

these two themes the prophet rises to the height of his

eloquence--Jerusalem shall remain inviolable; a glorious King shall be

given unto her. But it has not been so generally remarked, that Isaiah

is far more concerned and consistent about the secure city than about

the ideal monarch. From first to last the establishment and peace of

Jerusalem are never out of his thoughts, but he speaks only now and then

of the King to come. Through long periods of his ministry, though

frequently describing the blessed future, he is silent about the

Messiah, and even sometimes so groups the inhabitants of that future, as

to leave no room for Him among them. Indeed, the silences of Isaiah upon

this Person are as remarkable as the brilliant passages, in which he

paints His endowments and His work.

If we consider the moment, chosen by Isaiah for announcing the Messiah

and adding his seal to the national belief in the advent of a glorious

Son of David, we find some significance in the fact that it was a

moment, when the throne of David was unworthily filled and David's

dynasty was for the first time seriously threatened. It is impossible to

dissociate the birth of a boy called _Immanuel_, and afterwards so

closely identified with the fortunes of the whole land (vii. 8), from

the public expectation of a King of glory; and critics are almost

unanimous in recognizing Immanuel again in the Prince-of-the-Four-Names

in chap. ix. Immanuel, therefore, is the Messiah, the promised King of

Israel. But Isaiah makes his own first intimation of Him, not when the

throne was worthily filled by an Uzziah or a Jotham, but when a fool and

traitor to God abused its power, and the foreign conspiracy to set up a

Syrian prince in Jerusalem imperilled the whole dynasty. Perhaps we

ought not to overlook the fact, that Isaiah does not here designate

Immanuel as a descendant of David. The vagueness with which the mother

is described has given rise to a vast amount of speculation as to what

particular person the prophet meant by her. But may not Isaiah's

vagueness be the only intention he had in mentioning a mother at all?

The whole house of David shared at that moment the sin of the king (vii.

13); and it is not presuming too much upon the freedom of our prophet to

suppose, that he shook himself loose from the tradition, which entailed

the Messiah upon the royal family of Judah, and at least left it an open

question, whether Immanuel might not, in consequence of their sin,

spring from some other stock.

It is, however, far less with the origin, than with the experience, of

Immanuel that Isaiah is concerned; and those who embark upon curious

inquiries, as to who exactly the mother might be, are busying themselves

with what the prophet had no interest in, while neglecting that in which

really lay the significance of the sign that he offered.

Ahaz by his wilfulness has made a Substitute necessary. But Isaiah is

far more taken up with this: that he has actually mortgaged the

prospects of that Substitute. The Messiah comes, but the wilfulness of

Ahaz has rendered His reign impossible. He, whose advent has hitherto

not been foretold except as the beginning of an era of prosperity, and

whose person has not been painted but with honour and power, is

represented as a helpless and innocent Sufferer--His prospects

dissipated by the sins of others, and Himself born only to share His

people's indigence (p. 115). Such a representation of the Hero's fate is

of the very highest interest. We are accustomed to associate the

conception of a suffering Messiah only with a much later development of

prophecy, when Israel went into exile; but the conception meets us

already here. It is another proof that _Esaias is very bold_. He calls

his Messiah Immanuel, and yet dares to present Him as nothing but a

Sufferer--a Sufferer for the sins of others. Born only to suffer with

His people, who should have inherited their throne--that is Isaiah's

first doctrine of the Messiah.

Through the rest of the prophecies published during the Syro-Ephraitic

troubles the Sufferer is slowly transformed into a Deliverer. The stages

of this transformation are obscure. In chap. viii. Immanuel is no more

defined than in chap. vii. He is still only a Name of hope upon an

unbroken prospect of devastation. _The stretching out of his

wings_--_i.e._, the floods of the Assyrian--_shall fill the breadth of

Thy land, O Immanuel_. But this time that the prophet utters the Name,

he feels inspired by new courage. He grasps at Immanuel as the pledge of

ultimate salvation. Let the enemies of Judah work their worst; it shall

be in vain, _for Immanuel, God is with us_. And then, to our

astonishment, while Isaiah is telling us how he arrived at the

convictions embodied in this Name, the personality of Immanuel fades

away altogether, and Jehovah of hosts Himself is set forth as the sole

sanctuary of those who fear Him. There is indeed a double displacement

here. Immanuel dissolves in two directions. As a Refuge, He is displaced

by Jehovah; as a Sufferer and a Symbol of the sufferings of the land, by

a little community of disciples, the first embodiment of the Church, who

now, with Isaiah, can do nothing except wait for the Lord (pp. 124-126).

Then, when the prophet's yearning thoughts, that will not rest upon so

dark a closure, struggle once more, and struggling pass from despair to

pity, and from pity to hope, and from hope to triumph in a salvation

actually achieved, they hail all at once as the Hero of it the Son whose

birth was promised. With an emphasis, which vividly reveals the sense of

exhaustion in the living generation and the conviction that only

something fresh, and sent straight from God Himself, can now avail

Israel, the prophet cries: _Unto us a Child is born; unto us a Son is

given_. The Messiah appears in a glory that floods His origin out of

sight. We cannot see whether He springs from the house of David; but

_the government is to be upon His shoulder_, and He shall reign _on

David's throne with righteousness for ever_. His title shall be

fourfold: _Wonderful-Counsellor_, _God-Hero_, _Father-Everlasting_,

_Prince-of-Peace_.

These Four Names do certainly not invite us to grudge them meaning, and

they have been claimed as incontrovertible proofs, that the prophet had

an absolutely Divine Person in view. Some distinguished scholars insist

that the promised Deliverer is nothing less than a God in the

metaphysical sense of the word.[23] There are serious reasons, however,

which make us doubt this conclusion, and, though we firmly hold that

Jesus Christ was God, prevent us from recognizing these names as

prophecies of His Divinity. Two of the names are capable of being used

of an earthly monarch: _Wonderful-Counsellor_ and _Prince-of-Peace_,

which are, within the range of human virtue, in evident contrast to

Ahaz, at once foolish in the conception of his policy and warlike in its

results. It will be more difficult to get Western minds to see how

_Father-Everlasting_ may be applied to a mere man, but the ascription of

eternity is not unusual in Oriental titles, and in the Old Testament is

sometimes rendered to things that perish. When Hebrews speak of any one

as everlasting, that does not necessarily imply Divinity. The second

name, which we render _God-Hero_, is, it is true, used of Jehovah

Himself in the very next chapter to this, but in the plural it is also

used of men by Ezekiel (xxxii. 21). The part of it translated _God_ is a

frequent name of the Divine Being in the Old Testament, but literally

means only _mighty_, and is by Ezekiel (xxxi. 11) applied to

Nebuchadnezzar. We should hesitate, therefore, to understand by these

names "a God in the metaphysical sense of the word."

[23] I regret very much that in previous editions I should have

erroneously imputed this opinion to Dr. Hermann Schultz--through a

mistranslation of his words on pp. 726, 727 of his _A. T. Theologie_.

We fall back with greater confidence on other arguments of a more

general kind, which apply to all Isaiah's prophecies of the Messiah. If

Isaiah had one revelation rather than another to make, it was the

revelation of the unity of God. Against king and people, who crowded

their temple with the shrines of many deities, Isaiah presented Jehovah

as the one only God. It would simply have nullified the force of his

message, and confused the generation to which he brought it, if either

he or they had conceived of the Messiah, with the conceiving of

Christian theology, as a separate Divine personality.

Again, as Mr. Robertson Smith has very clearly explained,[24] the

functions assigned by Isaiah to the King of the future are simply the

ordinary duties of the monarchy, for which He is equipped by the

indwelling of that Spirit of God, that makes all wise men wise and

valorous men valorous. "We believe in a Divine and eternal Saviour,

because the work of salvation as we understand it in the light of the

New Testament is essentially different from the work of the wisest and

best earthly king." But such an earthly king's work is all Isaiah looks

for. So that, so far from its being derogatory to Christ to grudge the

sense of Divinity to these names, it is a fact that the more spiritual

our notions are of the saving work of Jesus, the less inclined shall we

be to claim the prophecies of Isaiah in proof of His Deity.

[24] _Prophets of Israel_, p. 306.

There is a third argument in the same direction, the force of which we

appreciate only when we come to discover how very little from this point

onwards Isaiah had to say about the promised king. In chaps. i.-xxxix.

only three other passages are interpreted as describing the Messiah. The

first of these, xi. 1-5, dating perhaps from about 720, when Hezekiah

was king, tells us, for the first and only time by Isaiah's lips, that

the Messiah is to be a scion of David's house, and confirms what we have

said: that His duties, however perfectly they were to be discharged,

were the usual duties of Judah's monarchy.[25] The second passage,

xxxii. 1 ff., which dates probably from after 705, when Hezekiah was

still king, is, if indeed it refers at all to the Messiah, a still

fainter, though sweeter, echo of previous descriptions. While the third

passage, xxxiii. 17: _Thou shalt see thy king in his beauty_, does not

refer to the Messiah at all, but to Hezekiah, then prostrate and in

sackcloth, with Assyria thundering at the gate of Jerusalem (701). The

mass of Isaiah's predictions of the Messiah thus fall within the reign

of Ahaz, and just at the point at which Ahaz proved an unworthy

representative of Jehovah, and Judah and Israel were threatened with

complete devastation. There is a repetition when Hezekiah has come to

the throne. But in the remaining seventeen years, except perhaps for one

allusion, Isaiah is silent on the ideal king, although he continued

throughout that time to unfold pictures of the blessed future which

contained every other Messianic feature, and the realization of which he

placed where he had placed his Prince-of-the-Four-Names--in connection,

that is, with the approaching defeat of the Assyrians. Ignoring the

Messiah, during these years Isaiah lays all the stress of his prophecy

on the inviolability of Jerusalem; and while he promises the recovery of

the actually reigning monarch from the distress of the Assyrian

invasion,--as if that were what the people chiefly desired to see, and

not a brighter, stronger substitute,--he hails Jehovah Himself, in

solitary and undeputed sovereignty, as Judge, Lawgiver, Monarch and

Saviour (xxxiii. 22). Between Hezekiah, thus restored to his beauty, and

Jehovah's own presence, there is surely no room left for another royal

personage. But these very facts--that Isaiah felt most compelled to

predict an ideal king when the actual king was unworthy, and that, on

the contrary, when the reigning king proved worthy, approximating to the

ideal, Isaiah felt no need for another, and indeed in his prophecies

left no room for another--form surely a powerful proof that the king he

expected was not a supernatural being, but a human personality,

extraordinarily endowed by God, one of the descendants of David by

ordinary succession, but fulfilling the ideal which his forerunners had

missed. Even if we allow that the four names contain among them the

predicate of Divinity, we must not overlook the fact that the Prince is

only called by them. It is not that _He is_, but that He shall be

called, _Wonderful-Counsellor_, _God-Hero_, _Father-Everlasting_,

_Prince-of-Peace_. Nowhere is there a dogmatic statement that He is

Divine. Besides, it is inconceivable that if Isaiah, the prophet of the

unity of God, had at any time a second Divine Person in his hope, he

should have afterwards remained so silent about Him. To interpret the

ascription of the Four Names as a conscious definition of Divinity, at

all like the Christian conception of Jesus Christ, is to render the

silence of Isaiah's later life and the silence of subsequent prophets

utterly inexplicable.

[25] See further on this passage pp. 180-183. As is there pointed out,

while these passages on the Messiah are indeed infrequent and

unconnected, there is a very evident progress through them of Isaiah's

conception of his Hero's character.

On these grounds, then, we decline to believe that Isaiah saw in the

king of the future "a God in the metaphysical sense of the word." Just

because we know the proofs of the Divinity of Jesus to be so spiritual,

do we feel the uselessness of looking for them to prophecies, that

manifestly describe purely earthly and civil functions.

But such a conclusion by no means shuts us out from tracing a relation

between these prophecies and the appearance of Jesus. The fact, that

Isaiah allowed them to go down to posterity, proves that he himself did

not count them to have been exhausted in Hezekiah. And this fact of

their preservation is ever so much the more significant, that their

literal truth was discredited by events. Isaiah had evidently foretold

the birth and bitter youth of Immanuel for the _near_ future. Immanuel's

childhood was to begin with the devastation of Ephraim and Syria, and to

be passed in circumstances consequent on the devastation of Judah, which

was to follow close upon that of her two enemies. But although Ephraim

and Syria were immediately spoiled, as Isaiah foresaw, Judah lay in

peace all the reign of Ahaz and many years after his death. So that had

Immanuel been born in the next twenty-five years after the announcement

of His birth, He would not have found in His own land the circumstances

which Isaiah foretold as the discipline of His boyhood. Isaiah's

forecast of Judah's fate was, therefore, falsified by events. That the

prophet or his disciples should have allowed it to remain, is proof that

they believed it to have contents, which the history they had lived

through neither exhausted nor discredited. In the prophecies of the

Messiah there was something ideal, which was as permanent and valid for

the future as the prophecy of the Remnant or that of the visible majesty

of Jehovah. If the attachment, at which the prophet aimed when he

launched these prophecies on the stream of time, was denied them by

their own age, that did not mean their submersion, but only their

freedom to float further down the future and seek attachment there.

This boldness, to entrust to future ages a prophecy discredited by

contemporary history, argues a profound belief in its moral meaning and

eternal significance; and it is this boldness, in face of disappointment

continued from generation to generation in Israel, that constitutes the

uniqueness of the Messianic hope among that people. To sublimate this

permanent meaning of the prophecies from the contemporary material, with

which it is mixed, is not difficult. Isaiah foretells his Prince on the

supposition that certain things are fulfilled. When the people are

reduced to the last extreme, when there is no more a king to rally or to

rule them, when the land is in captivity, when revelation is closed,

when, in despair of the darkness of the Lord's face, men have taken to

them that have familiar spirits and wizards that peep and mutter, then,

in that last sinful, hopeless estate of man, a Deliverer shall appear.

_The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform it._ This is the first

article of Isaiah's Messianic creed, and stands back behind the Messiah

and all Messianic blessings, their exhaustless origin. Whatsoever man's

sin and darkness be, the Almighty lives, and His zeal is infinite.

Therefore it is a fact eternally true, that whatsoever Deliverer His

people need and can receive shall be sent to them, and shall be styled

by whatsoever names their hearts can best appreciate. Titles shall be

given Him to attract their hope and their homage, and not a definition

of His nature, of which their theological vocabulary would be incapable.

This is the vital kernel of Messianic prophecy in Isaiah. The _zeal of

the Lord_, kindling the dark thoughts of the prophet as he broods over

his people's need of salvation, suddenly makes a Saviour

visible--visible just as He is needed there and then. Isaiah hears Him

hailed by titles that satisfy the particular wants of the age, and

express men's thoughts as far up the idea of salvation and majesty as

they of that age can rise. But the prophet has also perceived that sin

and disaster will so accumulate before the Messiah comes, that, though

innocent, He shall have to bear tribulation and pass to His prime

through suffering. No one with open mind can deny, that in this moderate

estimate of the prophet's meaning there is a very great deal of the

essence of the Gospel as it has been fulfilled in the personal

consciousness and saving work of Jesus Christ,--as much of that essence,

indeed, as it was possible to communicate to so early a generation, and

one whose religious needs were so largely what we call temporal. But if

we grant this, and if at the same time we appreciate the uniqueness of

such a hope as this of Israel, then surely it must be allowed to have

the appearance of a special preparation for Christ's life and work; and

so, to use very moderate words which have been applied to Messianic

prophecy in general, it may be taken "as a proof of its true connection

with the Gospel dispensation as part of one grand scheme in the counsels

of Providence."[26]

[26] Stanton: _The Jewish and Christian Messiah_.

* * * * *

Men do not ask when they drink of a streamlet high up on the hills, "Is

this going to be a great river?" They are satisfied if it is water

enough to quench their thirst. And so it was enough for Old Testament

believers if they found in Isaiah's prophecy of a Deliverer--as they did

find--what satisfied their own religious needs, without convincing them

to what volumes it should swell. But this does not mean that in using

these Old Testament prophecies we Christians should limit our enjoyment

of them to the measure of the generation to whom they were addressed. To

have known Christ must make the predictions of the Messiah different to

a man. You cannot bring so infinite an ocean of blessing into historic

connection with these generous, expansive intimations of the Old

Testament without its passing into them. If we may use a rough figure,

the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament are tidal rivers. They not

only run, as we have seen, to their sea, which is Christ; they feel His

reflex influence. It is not enough for a Christian to have followed the

historical direction of the prophecies, or to have proved their

connection with the New Testament as parts of one Divine harmony. Forced

back by the fulness of meaning to which he has found their courses

open, he returns to find the savour of the New Testament upon them, and

that where he descended shallow and tortuous channels, with all the

difficulties of historical exploration, he is borne back on full tides

of worship. To use the appropriate words of Isaiah, _the Lord is with

him there, a place of broad rivers and streams_.

With all this, however, we must not forget that, beside these prophecies

of a great earthly ruler, there runs another stream of desire and

promise, in which we see a much stronger premonition of the fact that a

Divine Being shall some day dwell among men. We mean the Scriptures in

which it is foretold that Jehovah Himself shall visibly visit Jerusalem.

This line of prophecy, taken along with the powerful anthropomorphic

representations of God,--astonishing in a people like the Jews, who so

abhorred the making of an image of the Deity upon the likeness of

anything in heaven and earth,--we hold to be the proper Old Testament

instinct that the Divine should take human form and tabernacle amongst

men. But this side of our subject--the relation of the anthropomorphism

of the Old Testament to the Incarnation--we postpone till we come to the

second part of the book of Isaiah, in which the anthropomorphic figures

are more frequent and daring than they are here.

BOOK II.

_PROPHECIES FROM THE ACCESSION OF HEZEKIAH TO THE DEATH OF SARGON,

727-705_ B.C.

ISAIAH:--

xxviii. 725 B.C.

x. 5-34. 721 B.C.

xi., xii. About 720 B.C.?

xx. 711 B.C.

xxi. 1-10. 710 B.C.

xxxviii., xxxix. Between 712 and 705 B.C.

BOOK II.

The prophecies with which we have been engaged (chaps. ii.-x. 4) fall

either before or during the great Assyrian invasion of Syria, undertaken

in 734-732 by Tiglath-pileser II., at the invitation of King Ahaz.

Nobody has any doubt about that. But when we ask what prophecies of

Isaiah come next in chronological order, we raise a storm of answers. We

are no longer on the sure ground we have been enjoying.

Under the canonical arrangement the next prophecy is "The Woe upon the

Assyrian" (x. 5-34). In the course of this the Assyrian is made to boast

of having overthrown Samaria (vv. 9-11): _Is not Samaria as Damascus?...

Shall I not, as I have done unto Samaria and her idols, so do to

Jerusalem and her idols?_ If _Samaria_ mean the capital city of Northern

Israel--and the name is never used in these parts of Scripture for

anything else--and if the prophet be quoting a boast which the Assyrian

was actually in a position to make, and not merely imagining a boast,

which he would be likely to make some years afterwards (an entirely

improbable view, though held by one great scholar[27]), then an event is

here described as past and over which did not happen during

Tiglath-pileser's campaign, nor indeed till twelve years after it.

Tiglath-pileser did not require to besiege Samaria in the campaign of

734-732. The king, Pekah, was slain by a conspiracy of his own subjects;

and Hoshea, the ringleader, who succeeded, willingly purchased the

stability of a usurped throne by homage and tribute to the king of

kings. So Tiglath-pileser went home again, satisfied to have punished

Israel by carrying away with him the population of Galilee. During his

reign there was no further appearance of the Assyrians in Palestine, but

at his death in 727 Hoshea, after the fashion of Assyrian vassals when

the throne at Nineveh changed occupants, attempted to throw off the yoke

of the new king, Salmanassar IV. Along with the Phoenician and

Philistine cities, Hoshea negotiated an alliance with So, or Seve, the

Ethiopian, a usurper who had just succeeded in establishing his

supremacy over the land of the Pharaohs. In a year Salmanassar marched

south upon the rebels. He took Hoshea prisoner on the borders of his

territory (725), but, not content, as his predecessor had been, with the

submission of the king, _he came up throughout all the land, and went up

to Samaria, and besieged it three years_.[28] He did not live to see the

end of the siege, and Samaria was taken in 722 by Sargon, his successor.

Sargon overthrew the kingdom and uprooted the people. The northern

tribes were carried away into a captivity, from which as tribes they

never returned.

[27] Delitzsch, who fancies that the fall of Samaria is a completed

affair only in the vision of the prophet, not in reality.

[28] 2 Kings xvii. 5.

It was evidently this complete overthrow of Samaria by Sargon in

722-721, which Isaiah had behind him when he wrote x. 9-11. We must,

therefore, date the prophecy after 721, when nothing was left as a

bulwark between Judah and the Assyrian. We do so with reluctance. There

is much in x. 5-34 which suits the circumstances of Tiglath-pileser's

invasion. There are phrases and catch-words coinciding with those in

vii.-ix. 7; and the whole oration is simply a more elaborate expression

of that defiance of Assyria, which inspires such of the previous

prophecies as viii. 9, 10. Besides, with the exception of Samaria, all

the names in the Assyrian's boastful catalogue--Carchemish, Calno,

Arpad, Hamath and Damascus--might as justly have been vaunted by the

lips of Tiglath-pileser as by those of Sargon. But in spite of these

things, which seem to vindicate the close relation of x. 5-34 to the

prophecies which precede it in the canon, the mention of Samaria as

being already destroyed justifies us in divorcing it from them. While

they remain dated from before 732, we place it subsequent to 722.

Was Isaiah, then, silent these ten years? Is there no prophecy lying

farther on in his book that treats of Samaria as still standing? Besides

an address to the fallen Damascus in xvii. 1-11, which we shall take

later with the rest of Isaiah's oracles on foreign states, there is one

large prophecy, chap. xxviii., which opens with a description of the

magnates of Samaria lolling in drunken security on their vine-crowned

hill, but God's storms are ready to break. Samaria has not yet fallen,

but is threatened and shall fall soon. The first part of chap. xxviii.

can only refer to the year, in which Salmanassar advanced upon

Samaria--726 or 725. There is nothing in the rest of it to corroborate

this date; but the fact, that there are several turns of thought and

speech very similar to turns of thought and speech in x. 5-34, makes us

the bolder to take away xxviii. from its present connection with

xxix.-xxxii., and place it just before x. 5-34.

Here then is our next group of prophecies, all dating from the first

seven years of the reign of Hezekiah: xxviii., a warning addressed to

the politicians of Jerusalem from the impending fate of those of Samaria

(date 725); x. 5-34, a woe upon the Assyrian (date about 720),

describing his boasts and his progress in conquest till his sudden crash

by the walls of Jerusalem; xi., of date uncertain, for it reflects no

historical circumstance, but standing in such artistic contrast to x.

that the two must be treated together; and xii., a hymn of salvation,

which forms a fitting conclusion to xi. With these we shall take the few

fragments of the book of Isaiah which belong to the fifteen years

720-705, and are as straws to show how Judah all that time was drifting

down to alliance with Egypt--xx., xxi. 1-10, and xxxviii.-xxxix. This

will bring us to 705, and the beginning of a new series of prophecies,

the richest of Isaiah's life, and the subject of our third book.

CHAPTER VIII.

_GOD'S COMMONPLACE._

ISAIAH xxviii. (ABOUT 725 B.C.)

The twenty-eighth chapter of the Book of Isaiah is one of the greatest

of his prophecies. It is distinguished by that regal versatility of

style, which places its author at the head of Hebrew writers. Keen

analyses of character, realistic contrasts between sin and judgement,

clever retorts and epigrams, rapids of scorn, and "a spate" of

judgement, but for final issue a placid stream of argument banked by

sweet parable--such are the literary charms of the chapter, which

derives its moral grandeur from the force with which its currents set

towards faith and reason, as together the salvation of states,

politicians and private men. The style mirrors life about ourselves, and

still tastes fresh to thirsty men. The truths are relevant to every day

in which luxury and intemperance abound, in which there are eyes too

fevered by sin to see beauty in simple purity, and minds so surfeited

with knowledge or intoxicated with their own cleverness, that they call

the maxims of moral reason commonplace and scorn religious instruction

as food for babes.

Some time when the big, black cloud was gathering again on the north,

Isaiah raised his voice to the magnates of Jerusalem: "Lift your heads

from your wine-bowls; look north. The sunshine is still on Samaria, and

your fellow-drinkers there are revelling in security. But the storm

creeps up behind. They shall certainty perish soon; even you cannot help

seeing that. Let it scare you, for their sin is yours, and that storm

will not exhaust itself on Samaria. Do not think that your clever

policies, alliance with Egypt or the treaty with Assyria herself, shall

save you. Men are never saved from death and hell by making covenants

with them. Scorners of religion and righteousness, except ye cease being

sceptical and drunken, and come back from your diplomacy to faith and

reason, ye shall not be saved! This destruction that looms is going to

cover the whole earth. So stop your running to and fro across it in

search of alliances. _He that believeth shall not make haste._ Stay at

home and trust in the God of Zion, for Zion is the one thing that shall

survive." In the parable, which closes the prophecy, Isaiah offers some

relief to this dark prospect: "Do not think of God as a mere

disaster-monger, maker of terrors for men. He has a plan, even in

catastrophe, and this deluge, which looks like destruction for all of

us, has its method, term and fruits, just as much as the husbandman's

harrowing of the earth or threshing of the corn."

The chapter with this argument falls into four divisions.

I. THE WARNING FROM SAMARIA (vv. 1-6).

They had always been hard drinkers in North Israel. Fifty years before,

Amos flashed judgement on those who trusted in the mount of Samaria,

_lolling upon their couches and gulping their wine out of basons_, women

as well as men. Upon these same drunkards of Ephraim, now soaked and

_stunned with wine_, Isaiah fastens his Woe. Sunny the sky and balmy the

air in which they lie, stretched upon flowers by the heads of their fat

valleys--a land that tempts its inhabitants with the security of

perpetual summer. But God's swift storm drives up the valley--hail, rain

and violent streams from every gorge. Flowers, wreaths and pampered

bodies are trampled in the mire. The glory of sunny Ephraim is as the

first ripe fig a man findeth, and _while it is yet in his hand, he

eateth it up_. But while drunken magnates and the flowers of a rich land

are swept away, there is a residue who can and do abide even that storm,

to whom the Lord Himself shall be for a crown, _a spirit of justice to

him that sitteth for justice, and for strength to them that turn back

the battle at the gate_.

Isaiah's intention is manifest, and his effort a great one. It is to rob

passion of its magic and change men's temptations to their disgusts, by

exhibiting how squalid passion shows beneath disaster, and how

gloriously purity shines surviving it. It is to strip luxury and

indulgence of their attractiveness by drenching them with the storm of

judgement, and then not to leave them stunned, but to rouse in them a

moral admiration and envy by the presentation of certain grand survivals

of the storm--unstained justice and victorious valour. Isaiah first

sweeps the atmosphere, hot from infective passion, with the cold tempest

from the north. Then in the clear shining after rain he points to two

figures, which have preserved through temptation and disaster, and now

lift against a smiling sky, the ideal that those corrupt judges and

drunken warriors have dragged into the mire--_him that sitteth for

justice and him that turneth back the battle at the gate_. The escape

from sensuality, this passage suggests, is two-fold. There is the

exposure to nature where God's judgements sweep their irresistible way;

and then from the despair, which the unrelieved spectacle of judgement

produces, there is the recovery to moral effort through the admiration

of those purities and heroisms, that by God's Spirit have survived.

When God has put a conscience into the art or literature of any

generation, they have followed this method of Isaiah, but not always to

the healthy end which he reaches. To show the slaves of Circe the

physical disaster impending--which you must begin by doing if you are to

impress their brutalized minds--is not enough. The lesson of Tennyson's

"Vision of Sin" and of Arnold's "New Sirens," that night and frost,

decay and death, come down at last on pampered sense, is necessary, but

not enough. Who stops there remains a defective and morbid moralist.

When you have made the sensual shiver before the disease that inevitably

awaits them, you must go on to show that there are men who have the

secret of surviving the most terrible judgements of God, and lift their

figures calm and victorious against the storm-washed sky. Preach the

depravity of men, but never apart from the possibilities that remain in

them. It is Isaiah's health as a moralist that he combines the two. No

prophet ever threatened judgement more inexorable and complete than he.

Yet he never failed to tell the sinner, how possible it was for him to

be different. If it were necessary to crush men in the mud, Isaiah would

not leave them there with the hearts of swine. But he put conscience in

them, and the envy of what was pure, and the admiration of what was

victorious. Even as they wallowed, he pointed them to the figures of

men like themselves, who had survived and overcome by the Spirit of

God. Here we perceive the ethical possibilities, that lay in his

fundamental doctrine of a remnant. Isaiah never crushed men beneath the

fear of judgement, without revealing to them the possibility and beauty

of victorious virtue. Had we lived in those great days, what a help he

had been to us--what a help he may be still!--not only firm to declare

that the wages of sin is death, but careful to effect that our

humiliation shall not be despair, and that even when we feel our shame

and irretrievableness the most, we shall have the opportunity to behold

our humanity crowned and seated on the throne from which we had fallen,

our humanity driving back the battle from the gate against which we had

been hopelessly driven! That seventh verse sounds like a trumpet in the

ears of enervated and despairing men.

II. GOD'S COMMONPLACE (vv. 7-13).

But Isaiah has cast his pearls before swine. The men of Jerusalem, whom

he addresses, are too deep in sensuality to be roused by his noble

words. _Even priest and prophet stagger through strong drink_; and the

class that should have been the conscience of the city, responding

immediately to the word of God, _reel in vision and stumble in

judgement_. They turn upon Isaiah's earnest message with tipsy men's

insolence. Verses 9 and 10 should be within inverted commas, for they

are the mocking reply of drunkards over their cups. _Whom is he going to

teach knowledge, and upon whom is he trying to force "the Message,"_ as

he calls it? _Them that are weaned from the milk and drawn from the

breasts?_ Are we school-children, that he treats us with his endless

platitudes and repetitions--_precept upon precept and precept upon

precept, line upon line and line upon line, here a little and there a

little?_ So did these bibulous prophets, priests and politicians mock

Isaiah's messages of judgement, wagging their heads in mimicry of his

simple, earnest tones. "We must conceive the abrupt, intentionally

short, reiterated and almost childish words of verse 10 as spoken in

mimicry, with a mocking motion of the head, and in a childish,

stammering, taunting tone."[29]

[29] Ewald. The original runs thus: "Ki tsav la-tsav, tsav la-tsav qav

la-qav, qav la-qav; z'eir sham z'eir sham."

But Isaiah turns upon them with their own words: "You call me,

Stammerer! I tell you that God, Who speaks through me, and Whom in me

you mock, will one day speak again to you in a tongue that shall indeed

sound stammering to you. When those far-off barbarians have reached your

walls, and over them taunt you in uncouth tones, then shall you hear how

God can stammer. For these shall be the very voice of Him, and as He

threatens you with captivity it shall be your bitterness to remember how

by me He once offered you _a rest and refreshing_, which you refused. I

tell you more. God will not only speak in words, but in deeds, and then

truly your nickname for His message shall be fulfilled to you. Then

shall the word of the Lord be unto you _precept upon precept, precept

upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a

little_. For God shall speak with the terrible simplicity and slowness

of deeds, with the gradual growth of fate, with the monotonous stages of

decay, till step by step you _go, and stumble backward, and be broken,

and snared, and taken_. You have scorned my instruction as monosyllables

fit for children! By irritating monosyllables of gradual penalty shall

God instruct you the second time."

This is not only a very clever and cynical retort, but the statement of

a moral principle. We gather from Isaiah that God speaks twice to men,

first in words and then by deeds, but both times very simply and

plainly. And if men deride and abuse the simplicity of the former, if

they ignore moral and religious truths because they are elementary, and

rebel against the quiet reiteration of simple voices, with which God

sees it most healthy to conduct their education, then they shall be

stunned by the commonplace pertinacity, with which the effects of their

insolence work themselves out in life. God's ways with men are mostly

commonplace; that is the hardest lesson we have to learn. The tongue of

conscience speaks like the tongue of time, prevailingly by ticks and

moments; not in undue excitement of soul and body, not in the stirring

up of our passions nor by enlisting our ambitions, not in thunder nor in

startling visions, but by everyday precepts of faithfulness, honour and

purity, to which conscience has to rise unwinged by fancy or ambition,

and dreadfully weighted with the dreariness of life. If we, carried away

upon the rushing interests of the world, and with our appetite spoiled

by the wealth and piquancy of intellectual knowledge, despise the simple

monitions of conscience and Scripture, as uninteresting and childish,

this is the risk we run,--that God will speak to us in another, and this

time unshirkable, kind of commonplace. What that is we shall understand,

when a career of dissipation or unscrupulous ambition has bereft life of

all interest and joy, when one enthusiasm after another grows dull, and

one pleasure after another tasteless, when all the little things of life

preach to us of judgement, and _the grasshopper becometh a burden_, and

we, slowly descending through the drab and monotony of decay, suffer the

last great commonplace, death. There can be no greater irony than for

the soul, which has sinned by too greedily seeking for sensation, to

find sensation absent even from the judgements she has brought upon

herself. Poor Heine's _Confessions_ acknowledge, at once with the

appreciation of an artist and the pain of a victim, the satire, with

which the Almighty inflicts, in the way that Isaiah describes, His

penalties upon sins of sense.

III. COVENANTS WITH DEATH AND HELL (vv. 14-22).

To Isaiah's threats of destruction, the politicians of Jerusalem

replied, We have bought destruction off! They meant some treaty with a

foreign power. Diplomacy is always obscure, and at that distance its

details are buried for us in impenetrable darkness. But we may safely

conclude that it was either the treaty of Ahaz with Assyria, or some

counter-treaty executed with Egypt since this power began again to rise

into pretentiousness, or more probably still it was a secret agreement

with the southern power, while the open treaty with the northern was yet

in force. Isaiah, from the way in which he speaks, seems to have been in

ignorance of all, except that the politician's boast was an unhallowed,

underhand intrigue, accomplished by much swindling and false conceit of

cleverness. This wretched subterfuge Isaiah exposes in some of the most

powerful sentences he ever uttered. A faithless diplomacy was never more

thoroughly laid bare, in its miserable mixture of political pedantry and

falsehood.

_Therefore hear the word of Jehovah, ye men of scorn, rulers of this

people, which is in Jerusalem!_

_Because ye have said, We have entered into a covenant with Death, and

with Hell have we made a bargain; the "Overflowing Scourge,"_ a current

phrase of Isaiah's which they fling back in his teeth, _when it passeth

along, shall not come unto us, for we have set lies as our refuge, and

in falsehood have we hidden ourselves_ [the prophet's penetrating scorn

drags up into their boast the secret conscience of their hearts, that

after all lies did form the basis of this political arrangement],

_therefore thus saith the Lord Jehovah: Behold, I lay in Zion for

foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner-stone of sure

foundation; he that believeth shall not make haste._ No need of swift

couriers to Egypt, and fret and fever of poor political brains in

Jerusalem! The word _make haste_ is onomatopoetic, like our _fuss_, and,

if fuss may be applied to the conduct of high affairs of state, its

exact equivalent in meaning.

_And I will set justice for a line, and righteousness for a plummet, and

hail shall sweep away the subterfuge of lies, and the secrecy shall

waters overflow. And cancelled shall be your covenant with Death, and

your bargain with Hell shall not stand._

"_The Overflowing Scourge_," indeed! _When it passeth over, then ye

shall be unto it for trampling. As often as it passeth over, it shall

take you away, for morning by morning shall it pass over, by day and by

night. Then shall it be sheer terror to realize "the Message"!_ Too late

then for anything else. Had you realized "the Message" now, what rest

and refreshing! But then only terror.

_For the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself upon it, and

the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in it._ This proverb

seems to be struck out of the prophet by the belief of the politicians,

that they are creating a stable and restful policy for Judah. It

flashes an aspect of hopeless uneasiness over the whole political

situation. However they make their bed, with Egypt's or Assyria's help,

they shall not find it comfortable. No cleverness of theirs can create a

satisfactory condition of affairs, no political arrangement, nothing

short of faith, of absolute reliance on that bare foundation-stone laid

in Zion,--God's assurance that Jerusalem is inviolable.

_For Jehovah shall arise as on Mount Peratsim; He shall be stirred as in

the valley of Gibeon, to do His deed--strange is this deed of His, and

to bring to pass His act--strange is His act._

_Now, therefore, play no more the scorner, lest your bands be made

tight, for a consumption, and that determined, have I heard from the

Lord, Jehovah of hosts, upon the whole earth._ This finishes the matter.

Possibility of alliance there is for sane men nowhere in this world of

Western Asia, so evidently near convulsion. Only the foundation-stone in

Zion shall be left. Cling to that!

When the pedantic members of the General Assembly of the Kirk of

Scotland, in the year 1650, were clinging with all the grip of their

hard logic, but with very little heart, to the "Divine right of kings,"

and attempting an impossible state, whose statute-book was to be the

Westminster Confession, and its chief executive officer King Charles

II., Cromwell, then encamped at Musselburgh, sent them that letter in

which the famous sentence occurs: "I beseech you in the bowels of

Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken. Precept may be upon

precept, line may be upon line," he goes on to say, "and yet the Word of

the Lord may be to some a word of Judgement; that they may fall

backward, and be broken, and be snared, and be taken! There may be a

spiritual fulness, which the world may call drunkenness; as in the

second Chapter of the _Acts_. There may be, as well, a carnal confidence

upon misunderstood and misapplied precepts, which may be called

spiritual drunkenness. There may be a _Covenant_ made with Death and

Hell! I will not say yours was so. But judge if such things have a

politic aim: To avoid the overflowing scourge; or, To accomplish worldly

interests? And if therein you have confederated with wicked and carnal

men, and have respect for them, or otherwise have drawn them in to

associate with us, Whether this be a covenant of God and spiritual?

Bethink yourselves; we hope we do.

"I pray you read the Twenty-eighth of Isaiah, from the fifth to the

fifteenth verse. And do not scorn to know that it is the Spirit that

quickens and giveth life."[30]

[30] _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_, Letter cxxxvi.

Cromwell, as we have said, is the best commentator Isaiah has ever had,

and that by an instinct born, not only of the same faith, but of

experience in tackling similar sorts of character. In this letter he is

dealing, like Isaiah, with stubborn pedants, who are endeavouring to

fasten the national fortunes upon a Procrustean policy. The diplomacy of

Jerusalem was very clever; the Covenanting ecclesiasticism of Edinburgh

was logical and consistent. But a Jewish alliance with Assyria and the

attempt of Scotsmen to force their covenant upon the whole United

Kingdom were equally sheer impossibilities. In either case _the bed was

shorter than that a man could stretch himself on it, and the covering

narrower than that he could wrap himself in it_. Both, too, were

covenants with Death and Hell; for if the attempt of the Scots to secure

Charles II. by the Covenant was free from the falsehood of Jewish

diplomacy, it was fatally certain if successful to have led to the

subversion of their highest religious interests; and history has proved

that Cromwell was no more than just in applying to it the strong

expressions, which Isaiah uses of Judah's ominous treaties with the

unscrupulous heathen. Over against so pedantic an idea, as that of

forcing the life of the three nations into the mould of the one

Covenant, and so fatal a folly as the attempt to commit the interests of

religion to the keeping of the dissolute and perjured king, Cromwell

stands in his great toleration of everything but unrighteousness and his

strong conviction of three truths:--that the religious life of Great

Britain and Ireland was too rich and varied for the Covenant: that

national and religious interests so complicated and precious could be

decided only upon the plainest principles of faith and justice: and

that, tested by these principles, Charles II. and his crew were as

utterly without worth to the nation and as pregnant with destruction, as

Isaiah felt Assyria and Egypt to be to Judah. The battle-cries of the

two parties at Dunbar are significant of the spiritual difference

between them. That of the Scots was "The Covenant!" Cromwell's was

Isaiah's own, "The Lord of hosts!" However logical, religious and

sincere theirs might be, it was at the best a scheme of men too narrow

for events, and fatally compromised by its association with Charles II.

But Cromwell's battle-cry required only a moderately sincere faith from

those who adopted it, to ensure their victory. For to them it meant just

what it had meant to Isaiah, loyalty to a Divine providence, supreme in

righteousness, the willingness to be guided by events, interpreting them

by no tradition or scheme, but only by conscience. He who understands

this will be able to see which side was right in that strange civil war,

where both so sincerely claimed to be Scriptural.

It may be wondered why we spend so much argument on comparing the

attempt to force Charles II. into the Solemn League and Covenant with

the impious treaty of Judah with the heathen. But the argument has not

been wasted, if it have shown how even sincere and religious men may

make covenants with death, and even Church creeds and constitutions

become beds too short that a man may lie upon them, coverings narrower

than that he can wrap himself in them. Not once or twice has it happened

that an old and hallowed constitution has become, in the providence of

God, unfit for the larger life of a people or of a Church, and yet is

clung to by parties in that Church or people from motives of theological

pedantry or ecclesiastical cowardice. Sooner or later a crisis is sure

to arrive, in which the defective creed has to match itself against some

interest of justice; and then endless compromises have to be

entertained, that discover themselves perilously like _bargains with

hell_. If we of this generation have to make a public application of the

twenty-eighth chapter of Isaiah, it lies in this direction. There are

few things, to which his famous proverb of the short bed can be applied

more aptly, than to the attempt to fasten down the religious life and

thought of the present age too rigorously upon a creed of the fashion of

two or three hundred years ago.

But Isaiah's words have wider application. Short of faith as he

exemplified it, there is no possibility for the spirit of man to be free

from uneasiness. It is so all along the scale of human endeavour. No

power of patience or of hope is his, who cannot imagine possibilities

of truth outside his own opinions, nor trust a justice larger than his

private rights. It is here very often that the real test of our faith

meets us. If we seek to fit life solely to the conception of our

privileges, if in the preaching of our opinions no mystery of higher

truth awe us at least into reverence and caution; then, whatever

religious creeds we profess, we are not men of faith, but shall surely

inherit the bitterness and turmoil that are the portion of unbelievers.

If we make it the chief aim of our politics to drive cheap bargains for

our trade or to be consistent to party or class interests; if we trim

our conscience to popular opinion; if we sell our honesty in business or

our love in marriage, that we may be comfortable in the world; then,

however firmly we be established in reputation or in welfare, we have

given our spiritual nature a support utterly inadequate to its needs,

and we shall never find rest. Sooner or later, a man must feel the pinch

of having cut his life short of the demands of conscience. Only a

generous loyalty to her decrees will leave him freedom of heart and room

for his arm to swing. Nor will any philosophy, however comprehensive,

nor poetic fancy, however elastic, be able without the complement of

faith to arrange, to account for, or to console us for, the actual facts

of experience. It is only belief in the God of Isaiah, a true and loving

God, omnipotent Ruler of our life, that can bring us peace. There was

never a sorrow, that did not find explanation in that, never a tired

thought, that would not cling to it. There are no interests so scattered

nor energies so far-reaching that there is not return and rest for them

under the shadow of His wings. _He that believeth shall not make haste._

_Be still_, says a psalm of the same date as Isaiah--_Be still, and know

that I am God_.

IV. THE ALMIGHTY THE ALL-METHODICAL (vv. 23-29).

The patience of faith, which Isaiah has so nobly preached, he now

proceeds to vindicate by reason. But the vindication implies that his

audience are already in another mood. From confidence in their clever

diplomacy, heedless of the fact that God has His own purposes concerning

them, they have swung round to despair before His judgements. Their

despair, however, is due to the same fault as their careless

confidence--the forgetfulness that God works by counsel and method. Even

a calamity, so universal and extreme as that, of whose certainty the

prophet has now convinced them, has its measure and its term. To

persuade the crushed and superstitious Jews of this, Isaiah employs a

parable. "You know," he says, "the husbandman. Have you ever seen him

keep on _harrowing and breaking the clods of his land_ for mere sport,

and without farther intention? Does not the harrowing time lead to the

sowing time? Or again, when he threshes his crops, does he thresh for

ever? Is threshing the end he has in view? Look, how he varies the

rigour of his instrument by the kind of plant he threshes. For delicate

plants, like fitches and cummin, he does not use the _threshing sledge_

with the sharp teeth, or the lumbering _roller, but the fitches are

beaten out with a staff and the cummin with a rod_. And in the case of

_bread corn_, which needs _his roller and horses_, he does not use these

upon it till it is all _crushed to dust_." The application of this

parable is very evident. If the husbandman be so methodical and careful,

shall the God who taught him not also be so? If the violent treatment of

land and fruits be so measured and adapted for their greater

fruitfulness and purity, ought we not to trust God to have the same

intentions in His violent treatment of His people? Isaiah here returns

to his fundamental gospel: that the Almighty is the All-methodical, too.

Men forget this. In their times of activity they think God indifferent;

they are too occupied with their own schemes for shaping life, to

imagine that He has any. In days of suffering, again, when disaster

bursts, they conceive of God only as force and vengeance. Yet, says

Isaiah, _Jehovah of hosts is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in that

sort of wisdom which causes things to succeed_. This last word of the

chapter is very expressive. It literally means _furtherance, help,

salvation_, and then _the true wisdom or insight which ensures these:

the wisdom which carries things through_. It splendidly sums up Isaiah's

gospel to the Jews, cowering like dogs before the coming calamity: God

is not mere force or vengeance. His judgements are not chaos. But _He is

wonderful in counsel_, and all His ways have _furtherance_ or

_salvation_ for their end.

We have said this is one of the finest prophecies of Isaiah. His

political foresight was admirable, when he alone of his countrymen

predicted the visitation of Assyria upon Judah. But now, when all are

convinced of it, how still more wonderful does he seem facing that novel

disaster, with the whole world's force behind it, and declaring its

limit. He has not the temptation, so strong in prophets of judgement, to

be a mere disaster-monger, and leave judgement on the horizon

unrelieved. Nor is he afraid, as other predicters of evil have been, of

the monster he has summoned to the land. The secret of this is that from

the first he predicted the Assyrian invasion, not out of any private

malice nor merely by superior political foresight, but because he

knew--and knew, as he tells us, by the inspiration of God's own

Spirit--that God required such an instrument to punish the

unrighteousness of Judah. If the enemy was summoned by God at the first,

surely till the last the enemy shall be in God's hand.

To this enemy we are now to see Isaiah turn with the same message he has

delivered to the men of Jerusalem.

CHAPTER IX.

_ATHEISM OF FORCE AND ATHEISM OF FEAR._

ISAIAH x. 5-34 (ABOUT 721 B.C.).

In chap. xxviii. Isaiah, speaking in the year 725 when Salmanassar IV.

was marching on Samaria, had explained to the politicians of Jerusalem

how entirely the Assyrian host was in the hand of Jehovah for the

punishment of Samaria and the punishment and purification of Judah. The

invasion which in that year loomed so awful was not unbridled force of

destruction, implying the utter annihilation of God's people, as

Damascus, Arpad and Hamath had been annihilated. It was Jehovah's

instrument for purifying His people, with its appointed term and its

glorious intentions of fruitfulness and peace.

In the tenth chapter Isaiah turns with this truth to defy the Assyrian

himself. It is four years later. Samaria has fallen. The judgement,

which the prophet spoke upon the luxurious capital, has been fulfilled.

All Ephraim is an Assyrian province. Judah stands for the first time

face to face with Assyria. From Samaria to the borders of Judah is not

quite two days' march, to the walls of Jerusalem a little over two. Now

shall the Jews be able to put to the test their prophet's promise! What

can possibly prevent Sargon from making Zion as Samaria, and carrying

her people away in the track of the northern tribes to captivity?

There was a very fallacious human reason, and there was a very sound

Divine one.

The fallacious human reason was the alliance which Ahaz had made with

Assyria. In what state that alliance now was, does not clearly appear,

but the most optimist of the Assyrian party at Jerusalem could not,

after all that had happened, be feeling quite comfortable about it. The

Assyrian was as unscrupulous as themselves. There was too much impetus

in the rush of his northern floods to respect a tiny province like

Judah, treaty or no treaty. Besides, Sargon had as good reason to

suspect Jerusalem of intriguing with Egypt, as he had against Samaria or

the Philistine cities; and the Assyrian kings had already shown their

meaning of the covenant with Ahaz by stripping Judah of enormous

tribute.

So Isaiah discounts in this prophecy Judah's treaty with Assyria. He

speaks as if nothing was likely to prevent the Assyrian's immediate

march upon Jerusalem. He puts into Sargon's mouth the intention of this,

and makes him boast of the ease with which it can be accomplished (vv.

7-11). In the end of the prophecy he even describes the probable

itinerary of the invader from the borders of Judah to his arrival on the

heights, over against the Holy City (vv. 27 last clause to 32).[31]

[31] It will be noticed that in the above version a different reading is

adopted from the meaningless clause at the end of verse 27 in the

English version, out of which a proper heading for the subsequent

itinerary has been obtained by Robertson Smith (_Journal of Philology_,

1884, p. 62).

_Cometh up from the North the Destroyer._

_He is come upon Ai; marcheth through Migron; at Michmash musters his

baggage._

_They have passed through the Pass; "Let Geba be our bivouac."_

_Terror-struck is Ramah; Gibeah of Saul hath fled._

_Make shrill thy voice, O daughter of Gallim! Listen, Laishah! Answer

her, Anathoth!_

_In mad flight is Madmenah; the dwellers in Gebim gather their stuff to

flee._

_This very day he halteth at Nob; he waveth his hand at the Mount of the

Daughter of Zion, the Hill of Jerusalem._

This is not actual fact; but it is vision of what may take place to-day

or to-morrow. For there is nothing--not even that miserable treaty--to

prevent such a violation of Jewish territory, within which, it ought to

be kept in mind, lie all the places named by the prophet.

But the invasion of Judah and the arrival of the Assyrian on the heights

over against Jerusalem does not mean that the Holy City and the shrine

of Jehovah of hosts are to be destroyed; does not mean that all the

prophecies of Isaiah about the security of this rallying-place for the

remnant of God's people are to be annulled, and Israel annihilated. For

just at the moment of the Assyrian's triumph, when he brandishes his

hand over Jerusalem, as if he would harry it like a bird's nest, Isaiah

beholds him struck down, and crash like the fall of a whole Lebanon of

cedars (vv. 33, 34).

_Behold the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, lopping the topmost boughs with a

sudden crash,_

_And the high ones of stature hewn down, and the lofty are brought low!_

_Yea, He moweth down the thickets of the forest with iron, and Lebanon

by a Mighty One falleth._

All this is poetry. We are not to suppose that the prophet actually

expected the Assyrian to take the route, which he has laid down for him

with so much detail. As a matter of fact, Sargon did not advance across

the Jewish frontier, but turned away by the coast-land of Philistia to

meet his enemy of Egypt, whom he defeated at Rafia, and then went home

to Nineveh, leaving Judah alone. And, although some twenty years later

the Assyrian did appear before Jerusalem, as threatening as Isaiah

describes, and was cut down in as sudden and miraculous a manner, yet it

was not by the itinerary Isaiah here marked for him that he came, but in

quite another direction: from the south-west. What Isaiah merely insists

upon is that there is nothing in that wretched treaty of Ahaz--that

fallacious _human_ reason--to keep Sargon from overrunning Judah to the

very walls of Jerusalem, but that, even though he does so, there is a

most sure _Divine_ reason for the Holy City remaining inviolate.

The Assyrian expected to take Jerusalem. But he is not his own master.

Though he knows it not, and his only instinct is that of destruction

(ver. 7), he is the rod in God's hand. And when God shall have used him

for the needed punishment of Judah, then will God visit upon him his

arrogance and brutality. This man, who says he will exploit the whole

earth as he harries a bird's nest (ver. 14), who believes in nothing but

himself, saying, _By the strength of my hand I have done it, and by my

wisdom, for I am prudent_, is but the instrument of God, and all his

boasting is that of _the axe against him that heweth therewith and of

the saw against him that wieldeth it_. _As if_, says the prophet, with a

scorn still fresh for those who make material force the ultimate power

in the universe--_As if a rod should shake them that lift it up, or as

if a staff should lift up him that is not wood_. By the way, Isaiah has

a word for his countrymen. What folly is theirs, who now put all their

trust in this world-force, and at another time cower in abject fear

before it! Must he again bid them look higher, and see that Assyria is

only the agent in God's work of first punishing the whole land, but

afterwards redeeming His people! In the midst of denunciation the

prophet's stern voice breaks into the promise of this later hope (vv.

24-27_a_); and at last the crash of the fallen Assyrian is scarcely

still, before Isaiah has begun to declare a most glorious future of

grace for Israel. But this carries us over into the eleventh chapter,

and we had better first of all gather up the lessons of the tenth.

This prophecy of Isaiah contains a great Gospel and two great Protests,

which the prophet was enabled to make in the strength of it: one against

the Atheism of Force, and one against the Atheism of Fear.

The Gospel of the chapter is just that which we have already emphasized

as the gospel _par excellence_ of Isaiah: the Lord exalted in

righteousness, God supreme over the supremest men and forces of the

world. But we now see it carried to a height of daring not reached

before. This was the first time that any man faced the sovereign force

of the world in the full sweep of victory, and told himself and his

fellow-men: "This is not travelling in the greatness of its own

strength, but is simply a dead, unconscious instrument in the hand of

God." Let us, at the cost of a little repetition, get at the heart of

this. We shall find it wonderfully modern.

Belief in God had hitherto been local and circumscribed. Each nation, as

Isaiah tells us, had walked in the name of its god, and limited his

power and prevision to its own life and territory. We do not blame the

peoples for this. Their conception of God was narrow, because their life

was narrow, and they confined the power of their deity to their own

borders because, in fact, their thoughts seldom strayed beyond. But now

the barriers, that had so long enclosed mankind in narrow circles, were

being broken down. Men's thoughts travelled through the breaches, and

learned that outside their fatherland there lay the world. Their lives

thereupon widened immensely, but their theologies stood still. They felt

the great forces which shook the world, but their gods remained the same

petty, provincial deities. Then came this great Assyrian power, hurtling

through the nations, laughing at their gods as idols, boasting that it

was by his own strength he overcame them, and to simple eyes making good

his boast as he harried the whole earth like a bird's nest. No wonder

that men's hearts were drawn from the unseen spiritualities to this very

visible brutality! No wonder all real faith in the gods seemed to be

dying out, and that men made it the business of their lives to seek

peace with this world-force, that was carrying everything, including the

gods themselves, before it! Mankind was in danger of practical atheism:

of placing, as Isaiah tells us, the ultimate faith which belongs to a

righteous God in this brute force: of substituting embassies for

prayers, tribute for sacrifice, and the tricks and compromises of

diplomacy for the endeavour to live a holy and righteous life. Behold,

what questions were at issue: questions that have come up again and

again in the history of human thought, and that are tugging at us to-day

harder than ever!--whether the visible, sensible forces of the

universe, that break so rudely in upon our primitive theologies, are

what we men have to make our peace with, or whether there is behind them

a Being, who wields them for purposes, far transcending them, of justice

and of love; whether, in short, we are to be materialists or believers

in God. It is the same old, ever-new debate. The factors of it have only

changed a little as we have become more learned. Where Isaiah felt the

Assyrians, we are confronted by the evolution of nature and history, and

the material forces into which it sometimes looks ominously like as if

these could be analysed. Everything that has come forcibly and

gloriously to the front of things, every drift that appears to dominate

history, all that asserts its claim on our wonder, and offers its own

simple and strong solution of our life--is our Assyria. It is precisely

now, as then, a rush of new powers across the horizon of our knowledge,

which makes the God, who was sufficient for the narrower knowledge of

yesterday, seem petty and old-fashioned to-day. This problem no

generation can escape, whose vision of the world has become wider than

that of its predecessors. But Isaiah's greatness lay in this: that it

was given to him to attack the problem the first time it presented

itself to humanity with any serious force, and that he applied to it the

only sure solution--a more lofty and spiritual view of God than the one

which it had found wanting. We may thus paraphrase his argument: "Give

me a God who is more than a national patron, give me a God who cares

only for righteousness, and I say that every material force the world

exhibits is nothing but subordinate to Him. Brute force cannot be

anything but an instrument, _an axe_, _a saw_, something essentially

mechanical and in need of an arm to lift it. Postulate a supreme and

righteous Ruler of the world, and you not only have all its movements

explained, but may rest assured, that it shall only be permitted to

execute justice and purify men. The world cannot prevent their

salvation, if God have willed this."

Isaiah's problem was thus the fundamental one between faith and atheism;

but we must notice that it did not arise theoretically, nor did he meet

it by an abstract proposition. This fundamental religious

question--whether men are to trust in the visible forces of the world or

in the invisible God--came up as a bit of practical politics. It was not

to Isaiah a philosophical or theological question. It was an affair in

the foreign policy of Judah.

Except to a few thinkers, the question between materialism and faith

never does present itself as one of abstract argument. To the mass of

men it is always a question of practical life. Statesmen meet it in

their policies, private persons in the conduct of their fortunes. Few of

us trouble our heads about an intellectual atheism, but the temptations

to practical atheism abound unto us all day by day. Materialism never

presents itself as a mere _ism_; it always takes some concrete form. Our

Assyria may be the world in Christ's sense, that flood of successful,

heartless, unscrupulous, scornful forces which burst on our innocence,

with their challenge to make terms and pay tribute, or go down

straightway in the struggle for existence. Beside their frank and

forceful demands, how commonplace and irrelevant do the simple precepts

of religion often seem; and how the great brazen laugh of the world

seems to bleach the beauty out of purity and honour! According to our

temper, we either cower before its insolence, whining that character and

energy of struggle and religious peace are impossible against it; and

that is the Atheism of Fear, with which Isaiah charged the men of

Jerusalem, when they were paralysed before Assyria. Or we seek to ensure

ourselves against disaster by alliance with the world. We make ourselves

one with it, its subjects and imitators. We absorb the world's temper,

get to believe in nothing but success, regard men only as they can be

useful to us, and think so exclusively of ourselves as to lose the

faculty of imagining about us any other right or need or pity. And all

that is the Atheism of Force, with which Isaiah charged the Assyrian. It

is useless to think, that we common men cannot possibly sin after the

grand manner of this imperial monster. In our measure we fatally can. In

this commercial age private persons very easily rise to a position of

influence, which gives almost as vast a stage for egotism to display

itself as the Assyrian boasted. But after all the human Ego needs very

little room to develop the possibilities of atheism that are in it. An

idol is an idol, whether you put it on a small or a large pedestal. A

little man with a little work may as easily stand between himself and

God, as an emperor with the world at his feet. Forgetfulness that he is

a servant, a trader on graciously entrusted capital--and then at the

best an unprofitable one--is not less sinful in a small egoist than in a

great one; it is only very much more ridiculous, than Isaiah, with his

scorn, has made it to appear in the Assyrian.

Or our Assyria may be the forces of nature, which have swept upon the

knowledge of this generation with the novelty and impetus, with which

the northern hosts burst across the horizon of Israel. Men to-day, in

the course of their education, become acquainted with laws and forces,

which dwarf the simpler theologies of their boyhood, pretty much as the

primitive beliefs of Israel dwindled before the arrogant face of

Assyria. The alternative confronts them either to retain, with a

narrowed and fearful heart, their old conceptions of God, or to find

their enthusiasm in studying, and their duty in relating themselves to,

the forces of nature alone. If this be the only alternative, there can

be no doubt but that most men will take the latter course. We ought as

little to wonder at men of to-day abandoning certain theologies and

forms of religion for a downright naturalism--for the study of powers

that appeal so much to the curiosity and reverence of man--as we wonder

at the poor Jews of the eighth century before Christ forsaking their

provincial conceptions of God as a tribal Deity for homage to this great

Assyrian, who handled the nations and their gods as his playthings. But

is such the only alternative? Is there no higher and sovereign

conception of God, in which even these natural forces may find their

explanation and term? Isaiah found such a conception for his problem,

and his problem was very similar to ours. Beneath his idea of God,

exalted and spiritual, even the imperial Assyrian, in all his arrogance,

fell subordinate and serviceable. The prophet's faith never wavered, and

in the end was vindicated by history. Shall we not at least attempt his

method of solution? We could not do better than by taking his factors.

Isaiah got a God more powerful than Assyria, by simply _exalting_ the

old God of his nation _in righteousness_. This Hebrew was saved from the

terrible conclusion, that the selfish, cruel force which in his day

carried all before it was the highest power in life, simply by believing

righteousness to be more exalted still. But have twenty-five centuries

made any change upon this power, by which Isaiah interpreted history

and overcame the world? Is righteousness less sovereign now than then,

or was conscience more imperative when it spoke in Hebrew than when it

speaks in English? Among the decrees of nature, at last interpreted for

us in all their scope and reiterated upon our imaginations by the ablest

men of the age, truth, purity and civic justice as confidently assert

their ultimate victory, as when they were threatened merely by the

arrogance of a human despot. The discipline of science and the glories

of the worship of nature are indeed justly vaunted over the childish and

narrow-minded ideas of God, that prevail in much of our average

Christianity. But more glorious than anything in earth or heaven is

character, and the adoration of a holy and loving will makes more for

"victory and law" than the discipline or the enthusiasm of science.

Therefore, if our conceptions of God are overwhelmed by what we know of

nature, let us seek to enlarge and spiritualize them. Let us insist, as

Isaiah did, upon His righteousness, until our God once more appear

indubitably supreme.

Otherwise we are left with the intolerable paradox, that truth and

honesty, patience and the love of man to man, are after all but the

playthings and victims of force; that, to adapt the words of Isaiah, the

rod really shakes him who lifts it up, and the staff is wielding that

which is not wood.

CHAPTER X.

_THE SPIRIT OF GOD IN MAN AND THE ANIMALS._

ISAIAH xi., xii. (ABOUT 720 B.C.?)

Beneath the crash of the Assyrian with which the tenth chapter closes,

we pass out into the eleventh upon a glorious prospect of Israel's

future. The Assyrian when he falls shall fall for ever like the cedars

of Lebanon, that send no fresh sprout forth from their broken stumps.

But out of the trunk of the Judæan oak, also brought down by these

terrible storms, Isaiah sees springing a fair and powerful Branch.

Assyria, he would tell us, has no future. Judah has a future, and at

first the prophet sees it in a scion of her royal house. The nation

shall be almost exterminated, the dynasty of David hewn to a stump; _yet

there shall spring a shoot from the stock of Jesse, and a branch from

his roots shall bear fruit_.

The picture of this future, which fills the eleventh chapter, is one of

the most extensive that Isaiah has drawn. Three great prospects are

unfolded in it: a prospect of mind, a prospect of nature and a prospect

of history. To begin with, there is (vv. 2-5) the geography of a royal

mind in its stretches of character, knowledge and achievement. We have

next (vv. 5-9) a vision of the restitution of nature, Paradise regained.

And, thirdly (vv. 9-16), there is the geography of Israel's redemption,

the coasts and highways along which the hosts of the dispersion sweep up

from captivity to a station of supremacy over the world. To this third

prospect chapter xii. forms a fitting conclusion, a hymn of praise in

the mouth of returning exiles.[32] The human mind, nature and history

are the three dimensions of life, and across them all the prophet tells

us that the Spirit of the Lord will fill the future with His marvels of

righteousness, wisdom and peace. He presents to us three great ideals:

the perfect indwelling of our humanity by the Spirit of God; the peace

and communion of all nature, covered with the knowledge of God; the

traversing of all history by the Divine purposes of redemption.

[32] The authenticity of this hymn has been called in question.

I. THE MESSIAH AND THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD (xi. 1-5).

The first form, in which Isaiah sees Israel's longed-for future

realised, is that which he so often exalts and makes glistering upon the

threshold of the future--the form of a king. It is a peculiarity, which

we cannot fail to remark about Isaiah's scattered representations of

this brilliant figure, that they have no connecting link. They do not

allude to one another, nor employ a common terminology, even the word

_king_ dropping out of some of them. The earliest of the series bestows

a name on the Messiah, which none of the others repeat, nor does Isaiah

say in any of them, This is He of whom I have spoken before. Perhaps the

disconnectedness of these oracles is as strong a proof as is necessary

of the view we have formed that throughout his ministry our prophet had

before him no distinct, identical individual, but rather an ideal of

virtue and kinghood, whose features varied according to the conditions

of the time. In this chapter Isaiah recalls nothing of Immanuel, or of

the Prince-of-the-Four-Names. Nevertheless (besides for the first time

deriving the Messiah from the house of David), he carries his

description forward to a stage which lies beyond and to some extent

implies his two previous portraits. Immanuel was only a Sufferer with

His people in the day of their oppression. The Prince-of-the-Four-Names

was the Redeemer of his people from their captivity, and stepped to his

throne not only after victory, but with the promise of a long and just

government shining from the titles by which He was proclaimed. But now

Isaiah not only speaks at length of this peaceful reign--a chronological

advance--but describes his hero so inwardly that we also feel a certain

spiritual advance. The Messiah is no more a mere experience, as Immanuel

was, nor only outward deed and promise, like the Prince-of-the-Four-Names,

but at last, and very strongly, _a character_. The second verse is the

definition of this character; the third describes the atmosphere in

which it lives. _And there shall rest upon him the Spirit of Jehovah,

the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might,

the spirit of knowledge and the fear of Jehovah; and he shall draw breath

in the fear of Jehovah_--in other words, ripeness but also sharpness of

mind; moral decision and heroic energy; piety in its two forms of

knowing the will of God and feeling the constraint to perform it. We

could not have a more concise summary of the strong elements of a ruling

mind. But it is only as Judge and Ruler that Isaiah cares here to think

of his hero. Nothing is said of the tender virtues, and we feel that the

prophet still stands in the days of the need of inflexible government

and purgation in Judah.

Dean Plumptre has plausibly suggested, that these verses may represent

the programme which Isaiah set before his pupil Hezekiah on his

accession to the charge of a nation, whom his weak predecessor had

suffered to lapse into such abuse of justice and laxity of morals.[33]

The acts of government described are all of a punitive and repressive

character. The hero speaks only to make the land tremble: _And He shall

smite the land[34] with the rod of His mouth_ [what need, after the

whispering, indecisive Ahaz!], _and with the breath of His lips shall He

slay the wicked_.

[33] Dean Plumptre notes the identity of the ethical terminology of this

passage with that of the book of Proverbs, and conjectures that the

additions to the original nucleus, chaps. x.-xxiv., and therefore the

whole form, of the book of Proverbs, may be due to the editorship of

Isaiah, and perhaps was the manual of ethics, on which he sought to

mould the character of Hezekiah (_Expositor_, series ii., v., p. 213).

[34] Perhaps for _land--'arets_--we ought, with Lagarde, to read

_tyrant--'arits_.

This, though a fuller and more ethical picture of the Messiah than even

the ninth chapter, is evidently wanting in many of the traits of a

perfect man. Isaiah has to grow in his conception of his Hero, and will

grow as the years go on, in tenderness. His thirty-second chapter is a

much richer, a more gracious and humane picture of the Messiah. There

the Victor of the ninth and righteous Judge of the eleventh chapters is

represented as _a Man_, who shall not only punish but protect, and not

only reign but inspire, who shall be life as well as victory and justice

to His people--_an hiding-place from the wind and a covert from the

tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great

rock in a weary land_.

A conception so limited to the qualifications of an earthly monarch, as

this of chap. xi., gives us no ground for departing from our previous

conclusion, that Isaiah had not a "supernatural" personality in his

view. The Christian Church, however, has not confined the application of

the passage to earthly kings and magistrates, but has seen its perfect

fulfilment in the indwelling of Christ's human nature by the Holy Ghost.

But it is remarkable, that for this exegesis she has not made use of the

most "supernatural" of the details of character here portrayed. If the

Old Testament has a phrase for sinlessness, that phrase occurs here, in

the beginning of the third verse. In the authorized English version it

is translated, _and shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of

the Lord_, and in the Revised Version, _His delight shall be in the fear

of the Lord_, and on the margin the literal meaning of _delight_ is

given as _scent_. But the phrase may as well mean, _He shall draw his

breath in the fear of the Lord_; and it is a great pity, that our

revisers have not even on the margin given to English readers any

suggestion of so picturesque, and probably so correct, a rendering. It

is a most expressive definition of sinlessness--sinlessness which was

the attribute of Christ alone. We, however purely intentioned we be, are

compassed about by an atmosphere of sin. We cannot help breathing what

now inflames our passions, now chills our warmest feelings, and makes

our throats incapable of honest testimony or glorious praise. As oxygen

to a dying fire, so the worldliness we breathe is to the sin within us.

We cannot help it; it is the atmosphere into which we are born. But from

this Christ alone of men was free. He was His own atmosphere, _drawing

breath in the fear of the Lord_. Of Him alone is it recorded, that,

though living in the world, He was never infected with the world's sin.

The blast of no man's cruelty ever kindled unholy wrath within His

breast; nor did men's unbelief carry to His soul its deadly chill. Not

even when He was led of the devil into the atmosphere of temptation, did

His heart throb with one rebellious ambition. Christ _drew breath in the

fear of the Lord_.

But draughts of this atmosphere are possible to us also, to whom the

Holy Spirit is granted. We too, who sicken with the tainted breath of

society, and see the characters of children about us fall away and the

hidden evil within leap to swift flame before the blasts of the

world--we too may, by Christ's grace, _draw breath_, like Him, _in the

fear of the Lord_. Recall some day when, leaving your close room and the

smoky city, you breasted the hills of God, and into opened lungs drew

deep draughts of the fresh air of heaven. What strength it gave your

body, and with what a glow of happiness your mind was filled! What that

is physically, Christ has made possible for us men morally. He has

revealed stretches and eminences of life, where, following in His

footsteps, we also shall draw for our breath the fear of God. This air

is inspired up every steep hill of effort, and upon all summits of

worship. In the most passion-haunted air, prayer will immediately bring

this atmosphere about a man, and on the wings of praise the poorest soul

may rise from the miasma of temptation, and sing forth her song into the

azure with as clear a throat as the lark's.

And what else is heaven to be, if not this? God, we are told, shall be

its Sun; but its atmosphere shall be His fear, _which is clean and

endureth for ever_. Heaven seems most real as a moral open-air, where

every breath is an inspiration, and every pulse a healthy joy, where no

thoughts from within us find breath but those of obedience and praise,

and all our passions and aspirations are of the will of God. He that

lives near to Christ, and by Christ often seeks God in prayer, may

create for himself even on earth such a heaven, _perfecting holiness in

the fear of God_.

II. THE SEVEN SPIRITS OF GOD (xi. 2, 3).

This passage, which suggests so much of Christ, is also for Christian

Theology and Art a classical passage on the Third Person of the Trinity.

If the texts in the book of Revelation (chaps. i. 4; iii. 1; iv. 5; v.

6) upon the Seven Spirits of God were not themselves founded on this

text of Isaiah, it is certain that the Church immediately began to

interpret them by its details. While there are only six spirits of God

named here--three pairs--yet, in order to complete the perfect number,

the exegesis of early Christianity sometimes added _the Spirit of the

Lord_ at the beginning of verse 2 as the central branch of a

seven-branched candlestick; or sometimes _the quick understanding in the

fear of the Lord_ in the beginning of verse 3 was attached as the

seventh branch. (Compare Zech. iv. 6.)

It is remarkable that there is almost no single text of Scripture, which

has more impressed itself upon Christian doctrine and symbol than this

second verse of the eleventh chapter, interpreted as a definition of the

Seven Spirits of God. In the theology, art and worship of the Middle

Ages it dominated the expression of the work of the Holy Ghost. First,

and most native to its origin, arose the employment of this text at the

coronation of kings and the fencing of tribunals of justice. What Isaiah

wrote for Hezekiah of Judah became the official prayer, song or ensample

of the earliest Christian kings in Europe. It is evidently the model of

that royal hymn--not by Charlemagne, as usually supposed, but by his

grandson Charles the Bald--the _Veni Creator Spiritus_. In a Greek

miniature of the tenth century, the Holy Spirit, as a dove, is seen

hovering over King David, who displays the prayer: _Give the king Thy

judgements, O God, and Thy righteousness to the king's son_, while there

stand on either side of him the figures of Wisdom and Prophecy.[35]

Henry III.'s order of knighthood, "Du Saint Esprit," was restricted to

political men, and particularly to magistrates. But perhaps the most

interesting identification of the Holy Spirit with the rigorous virtues

of our passage occurs in a story of St. Dunstan, who, just before mass

on the day of Pentecost, discovered that three coiners, who had been

sentenced to death, were being respited till the Festival of the Holy

Ghost should be over. "It shall not be thus," cried the indignant saint,

and gave orders for their immediate execution. There was remonstrance,

but he, no doubt with the eleventh of Isaiah in mind, insisted, and was

obeyed. "I now hope," he said, resuming the mass, "that God will be

pleased to accept the sacrifice I am about to offer." "Whereupon," says

the veracious _Acts of the Saints_, "a snow-white dove did, in the

vision of many, descend from heaven, and until the sacrifice was

completed remain above his head in silence, with wings extended and

motionless." Which may be as much legend as we have the heart to make

it, but nevertheless remains a sure proof of the association, by

discerning mediævals who could read their Scriptures, of the Holy Spirit

with the decisiveness and rigorous justice of Isaiah's "mirror for

magistrates."[36]

[35] Didron, _Christian Iconography_, Engl. trans., i., 432.

[36] Didron, _Christian Iconography_, Engl. trans., i., 426.

But the influence of our passage may be followed to that wider

definition of the Spirit's work, which made Him the Fountain of all

intelligence. The Spirits of the Lord mentioned by Isaiah are

prevailingly intellectual; and the mediæval Church, using the details of

this passage to interpret Christ's own intimation of the Paraclete as

the Spirit of truth,--remembering also the story of Pentecost, when the

Spirit bestowed the gifts of tongues, and the case of Stephen, who, in

the triumph of his eloquence and learning, was said to be full of the

Holy Ghost,--did regard, as Gregory of Tours expressly declared, the

Holy Spirit as the "God of the intellect more than of the heart." All

Councils were opened by a mass to the Holy Ghost, and few, who have

examined with care the windows of mediæval churches, will have failed to

be struck with the frequency with which the Dove is seen descending upon

the heads of miraculously learned persons, or presiding at discussions,

or hovering over groups of figures representing the sciences.[37] To the

mediæval Church, then, the Holy Spirit was the Author of the intellect,

more especially of the governing and political intellect; and there can

be little doubt, after a study of the variations of this doctrine, that

the first five verses of the eleventh of Isaiah formed upon it the

classical text of appeal. To Christians, who have been accustomed by the

use of the word _Comforter_ to associate the Spirit only with the

gentle and consoling influences of heaven, it may seem strange to find

His energy identified with the stern rigour of the magistrate. But in

its practical, intelligent and reasonable uses the mediæval doctrine is

greatly to be preferred, on grounds both of Scripture and common-sense,

to those two comparatively modern corruptions of it, one of which

emphasizes the Spirit's influence in the exclusive operation of the

grace of orders, and the other, driving to an opposite extreme,

dissipates it into the vaguest religiosity. It is one of the curiosities

of Christian theology, that a Divine influence, asserted by Scripture

and believed by the early Church to manifest itself in the successful

conduct of civil offices and the fulness of intellectual learning,

should in these latter days be so often set up in a sort of

"supernatural" opposition to practical wisdom and the results of

science. But we may go back to Isaiah for the same kind of correction on

this doctrine, as he has given us on the doctrine of faith; and while we

do not forget the richer meaning the New Testament bestows on the

operation of the Divine Spirit, we may learn from the Hebrew prophet to

seek the inspiration of the Holy Ghost in all the endeavours of science,

and not to forget that it is His guidance alone which enables us to

succeed in the conduct of our offices and fortunes.

[37] See Didron for numerous interesting instances of this.

III. THE REDEMPTION OF NATURE (xi. 6-9).

But Isaiah will not be satisfied with the establishment of a strong

government in the land and the redemption of human society from chaos.

He prophesies the redemption of all nature as well. It is one of those

errors, which distort both the poetry and truth of the Bible, to suppose

that by the bears, lions and reptiles which the prophet now sees tamed

in the time of the regeneration, he intends the violent human characters

which he so often attacks. When Isaiah here talks of the beasts, he

means the beasts. The passage is not allegorical, but direct, and forms

a parallel to the well-known passage in the eighth of Romans. Isaiah and

Paul, chief apostles of the two covenants, both interrupt their

magnificent odes upon the outpouring of the Spirit, to remind us that

the benefits of this will be shared by the brute and unintelligent

creation. And, perhaps, there is no finer contrast in the Scriptures

than here, where beside so majestic a description of the intellectual

faculties of humanity Isaiah places so charming a picture of the

docility and sportfulness of wild animals,--_And a little child shall

lead them_.

We, who live in countries, from which wild beasts have been

exterminated, cannot understand the insecurity and terror, that they

cause in regions where they abound. A modern seer of the times of

regeneration would leave the wild animals out of his vision. They do not

impress any more the human conscience or imagination. But they once did

so most terribly. The hostility between man and the beasts not only

formed once upon a time the chief material obstacle in the progress of

the race, but remains still to the religious thinker the most pathetic

portion of that groaning and travailing of all creation, which is so

heavy a burden on his heart. Isaiah, from his ancient point of view, is

in thorough accord with the order of civilisation, when he represents

the subjugation of wild animals as the first problem of man, after he

has established a strong government in the land. So far from rhetorizing

or allegorizing--above which literary forms it would appear to be

impossible for the appreciation of some of his commentators to follow

him--Isaiah is earnestly celebrating a very real moment in the laborious

progress of mankind. Isaiah stands where Hercules stood, and Theseus,

and Arthur when

"There grew great tracts of wilderness,

Wherein the beast was ever more and more,

But man was less and less till Arthur came.

And he drave

The heathen, and he slew the beast, and felled

The forest, and let in the sun, and made

Broad pathways for the hunter and the knight,

And so returned."

But Isaiah would solve the grim problem of the warfare between man and

his lower fellow-creatures in a very different way from that, of which

these heroes have set the example to humanity. Isaiah would not have the

wild beasts exterminated, but tamed. There our Western and modern

imagination may fail to follow him, especially when he includes reptiles

in the regeneration, and prophesies of adders and lizards as the

playthings of children. But surely there is no genial man, who has

watched the varied forms of life that sport in the Southern sunshine,

who will not sympathize with the prophet in his joyous vision. Upon a

warm spring day in Palestine, to sit upon the grass, beside some old

dyke or ruin with its face to the south, is indeed to obtain a rapturous

view of the wealth of life, with which the bountiful God has blessed and

made merry man's dwelling-place. How the lizards come and go among the

grey stones, and flash like jewels in the dust! And the timid snake

rippling quickly past through the grass, and the leisurely tortoise,

with his shiny back, and the chameleon, shivering into new colour as he

passes from twig to stone and stone to straw,--all the air the while

alive with the music of the cricket and the bee! You feel that the ideal

is not to destroy these pretty things as vermin. What a loss of colour

the lizards alone would imply! But, as Isaiah declares,--whom we may

imagine walking with his children up the steep vineyard paths, to watch

the creatures come and go upon the dry dykes on either hand,--the ideal

is to bring them into sympathy with ourselves, make pets of them and

playthings for children, who indeed stretch out their hands in joy to

the pretty toys. Why should we need to fight with, or destroy, any of

the happy life the Lord has created? Why have we this loathing to it,

and need to defend ourselves from it, when there is so much suffering we

could cure, and so much childlikeness we could amuse and be amused by,

and yet it will not let us near? To these questions there is not another

answer but the answer of the Bible: that this curse of conflict and

distrust between man and his fellow-creatures is due to man's sin, and

shall only be done away by man's redemption.

Nor is this Bible answer,--of which the book of Genesis gives us the one

end, and this text of Isaiah the other,--a mere pious opinion, which the

true history of man's dealing with wild beasts by extermination proves

to be impracticable. We may take on scientific authority a few facts as

hints from nature, that after all man is to blame for the wildness of

the beasts, and that through his sanctification they may be restored to

sympathy with himself. Charles Darwin says: "It deserves notice, that at

an extremely ancient period, when man first entered any country the

animals living there would have felt no instinctive or inherited fear of

him, and would consequently have been tamed far more easily than at

present." And he gives some very instructive facts in proof of this with

regard to dogs, antelopes, manatees and hawks. "Quadrupeds and birds

which have seldom been disturbed by man dread him no more than do our

English birds the cows or horses grazing in the fields."[38] Darwin's

details are peculiarly pathetic in their revelation of the brutes' utter

trustfulness in man, before they get to know him. Persons, who have had

to do with individual animals of a species that has never been

thoroughly tamed, are aware that the difficulty of training them lies in

convincing them of our sincerity and good-heartedness, and that when

this is got over they will learn almost any trick or habit. The

well-known lines of Burns to the field-mouse gather up the cause of all

this in a fashion very similar to the Bible's.

[38] Darwin, _Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication_, pp.

20, 21.

"I'm truly sorry man's dominion

Has broken nature's social union,

And justifies that ill opinion,

Which makes thee startle

At me, thy poor earth-born companion

And fellow-mortal."

How much the appeal of suffering animals to man--the look of a wounded

horse or dog with a meaning which speech would only spoil, the tales of

beasts of prey that in pain have turned to man as their physician, the

approach of the wildest birds in winter to our feet as their

Providence--how much all these prove Paul's saying that the _earnest

expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of

God_. And we have other signals, than those afforded by the pain and

pressure of the beasts themselves, of the time when they and man shall

sympathize. The natural history of many of our breeds of domesticated

animals teaches us the lesson that their growth in skill and

character--no one who has enjoyed the friendship of several dogs will

dispute the possibility of character in the lower animals--has been

proportionate to man's own. Though savages are fond of keeping and

taming animals, they fail to advance them to the stages of cunning and

discipline, which animals reach under the influence of civilised

man.[39] "No instance is on record," says Darwin, "of such dogs as

bloodhounds, spaniels or true greyhounds having been kept by savages;

they are the products of long-continued civilisation."

[39] Galton, quoted by Darwin.

These facts, if few, certainly bear in the direction of Isaiah's

prophecy, that not by extermination of the beasts, but by the influence

upon them of man's greater force of character, may that warfare be

brought to an end, of which man's sin, according to the Bible, is the

original cause.

The practical "uses" of such a passage of Scripture as this are plain.

Some of them are the awful responsibility of man's position as the

keystone of creation, the material effects of sin, and especially the

religiousness of our relation to the lower animals. More than once do

the Hebrew prophets liken the Almighty's dealings with man to merciful

man's dealings with his beasts.[40] Both Isaiah and Paul virtually

declare that man discharges to the lower creatures a mediatorial office.

To say so will of course seem an exaggeration to some people, but not to

those who, besides being grateful to remember what help in labour and

cheer in dreariness we owe our humble fellow-creatures, have been

fortunate enough to enjoy the affection and trust of a dumb friend. Men

who abuse the lower animals sin very grievously against God; men who

neglect them lose some of the religious possibilities of life. If it is

our business in life to have the charge of animals, we should magnify

our calling. Every coachman and carter ought to feel something of the

priest about him; he should think no amount of skill and patience too

heavy if it enables him to gain insight into the nature of creatures of

God, all of whose hope, by Scripture and his own experience, is towards

himself.

[40] Isa. lxiii. 13, 14; Hos. xi. 4.

Our relation to the lower animals is one of the three great relations of

our nature. For God our worship; for man our service; for the beasts our

providence, and according both to Isaiah and Paul, the mediation of our

holiness.

IV. THE RETURN AND SOVEREIGNTY OF ISRAEL (xi. 10-16).

In passing from the second to the third part of this prophecy, we cannot

but feel that we descend to a lower point of view and a less pure

atmosphere of spiritual ambition. Isaiah, who has just declared peace

between man and beast, finds that Judah must clear off certain scores

against her neighbours before there can be peace between man and man. It

is an interesting psychological study. The prophet, who has been able to

shake off man's primeval distrust and loathing of wild animals, cannot

divest himself of the political tempers of his age. He admits, indeed,

the reconciliation of Ephraim and Judah; but the first act of the

reconciled brethren, he prophesies with exultation, will be to _swoop

down upon_ their cousins Edom, Moab and Ammon, and their neighbours the

Philistines. We need not longer dwell on this remarkable limitation of

the prophet's spirit, except to point out that while Isaiah clearly saw

that Israel's own purity would not be perfected except by her political

debasement, he could not as yet perceive any way for the conversion of

the rest of the world except through Israel's political supremacy.

The prophet, however, is more occupied with an event preliminary to

Israel's sovereignty, namely the return from exile. His large and

emphatic assertions remind the not yet captive Judah through how much

captivity she has to pass before she can see the margin of the blessed

future which he has been describing to her. Isaiah's words imply a much

more general captivity than had taken place by the time he spoke them,

and we see that he is still keeping steadily in view that thorough

reduction of his people, to the prospect of which he was forced in his

inaugural vision. Judah has to be dispersed, even as Ephraim has been,

before the glories of this chapter shall be realized.

We postpone further treatment of this prophecy, along with the hymn

(chap. xii.), which is attached to it, to a separate chapter, dealing

with all the representations, which the first half of the book of Isaiah

contains, of the return from exile.

CHAPTER XI.

_DRIFTING TO EGYPT._

ISAIAH xx.; xxi. 1-10; xxxviii.; xxxix.

(720-705 B.C.).

From 720, when chap. xi. may have been published, to 705--or, by rough

reckoning, from the fortieth to the fifty-fifth year of Isaiah's

life--we cannot be sure that we have more than one prophecy from him;

but two narratives have found a place in his book which relate events

that must have taken place between 712 and 705. These narratives are

chap. xx.: How Isaiah Walked Stripped and Barefoot for a Sign against

Egypt, and chaps. xxxviii. and xxxix.: The Sickness of Hezekiah, with

the Hymn he wrote, and his Behaviour before the Envoys from Babylon. The

single prophecy belonging to this period is chap. xxi. 1-10, _Oracle of

the Wilderness of the Sea_, which announces the fall of Babylon. There

has been considerable debate about the authorship of this oracle, but

Cheyne, mainly following Dr. Kleinert, gives substantial reasons for

leaving it with Isaiah. We postpone the full exposition of chaps.

xxxviii., xxxix., to a later stage, as here it would only interrupt the

history. But we will make use of chaps. xx. and xxi. 1-10 in the course

of the following historical sketch, which is intended to connect the

first great period of Isaiah's prophesying, 740-720, with the second,

705-701.

All these fifteen years, 720-705, Jerusalem was drifting to the refuge

into which she plunged at the end of them--drifting to Egypt. Ahaz had

firmly bound his people to Assyria, and in his reign there was no talk

of an Egyptian alliance. But in 725, when the _overflowing scourge_ of

Assyrian invasion threatened to sweep into Judah as well as Samaria,

Isaiah's words give us some hint of a recoil in the politics of

Jerusalem towards the southern power. The _covenants with death and

hell_, which the men of scorn flaunted in his face as he harped on the

danger from Assyria, may only have been the old treaties with Assyria

herself, but the _falsehood and lies_ that went with them were most

probably intrigues with Egypt. Any Egyptian policy, however, that may

have formed in Jerusalem before 719, was entirely discredited by the

crushing defeat, which in that year Sargon inflicted upon the empire of

the Nile, almost on her own borders, at Rafia.

Years of quietness for Palestine followed this decisive battle. Sargon,

whose annals engraved on the great halls of Khorsabad enable us to read

the history of the period year by year, tells us that his next campaigns

were to the north of his empire, and till 711 he alludes to Palestine

only to say that tribute was coming in regularly, or to mention the

deportation to Hamath or Samaria of some tribe he had conquered far

away. Egypt, however, was everywhere busy among his feudatories.

Intrigue was Egypt's _forte_. She is always represented in Isaiah's

pages as the talkative power of many promises. Her fair speech was very

sweet to men groaning beneath the military pressure of Assyria. Her

splendid past, in conjunction with the largeness of her promise,

excited the popular imagination. Centres of her influence gathered in

every state. An Egyptian party formed in Jerusalem. Their intrigue

pushed mines in all directions, and before the century was out the

Assyrian peace in Western Asia was broken by two great Explosions. The

first of these, in 711, was local and abortive; the second, in 705, was

universal, and for a time entirely destroyed the Assyrian supremacy.

The centre of the Explosion of 711 was Ashdod, a city of the

Philistines. The king had suddenly refused to continue the Assyrian

tribute, and Sargon had put another king in his place. But the

people--in Ashdod, as everywhere else, it was the people who were

fascinated by Egypt--pulled down the Assyrian puppet and elevated Iaman,

a friend to Pharaoh. The other cities of the Philistines, with Moab,

Edom and Judah, were prepared by Egyptian promise to throw in their lot

with the rebels. Sargon gave them no time. "In the wrath of my heart, I

did not divide my army, and I did not diminish the ranks, but I marched

against Asdod with my warriors, who did not separate themselves from the

traces of my sandals. I besieged, I took, Asdod and Gunt-Asdodim.... I

then made again these towns. I placed the people whom my arm had

conquered. I put over them my lieutenant as governor. I considered them

like Assyrians, and they practised obedience."[41] It is upon this

campaign of Sargon that Mr. Cheyne argues for the invasion of Judah, to

which he assigns so many of Isaiah's prophecies, as, _e.g._, chaps. i.

and x. 5-34. Some day Assyriology may give us proof of this supposition.

We are without it just now. Sargon speaks no word of invading Judah,

and the only part of the book of Isaiah that unmistakably refers to this

time is the picturesque narrative of chap. xx.

[41] _Records of the Past_, vii., 40.

In this we are told that _in the year_ the _Tartan_, the Assyrian

commander-in-chief, _came to Ashdod when Sargon king of Assyria sent

him_ [that is to be supposed the year of the first revolt in Ashdod, to

which Sargon himself did not come], _and he fought against Ashdod and

took it:--in that time Jehovah had spoken by the hand of Isaiah the son

of Amoz, saying, Go and loose the sackcloth_, the prophet's robe, _from

off thy loins, and thy sandal strip from off thy foot; and he did so,

walking naked_, that is unfrocked, _and barefoot_. For Egyptian intrigue

was already busy; the temporary success of the Tartan at Ashdod did not

discourage it, and it needed a protest. _And Jehovah said, As My servant

Isaiah hath walked unfrocked and barefoot three years for a sign and a

portent against Egypt and against Ethiopia_ [note the double name, for

the country was now divided between two rulers, the secret of her

impotence to interfere forcibly in Palestine] _so shall the king of

Assyria lead away the captives of Egypt and exiles of Ethiopia, young

and old, stripped and barefoot, and with buttocks uncovered, to the

shame of Egypt. And they shall be dismayed and ashamed, because of

Ethiopia their expectation and because of Egypt their boast. And the

inhabitant of this coastland_ [that is, all Palestine, and a name for it

remarkably similar to the phrase used by Sargon, "the people of

Philistia, Judah, Edom and Moab, dwelling by the sea"[42]] _shall say in

that day, Behold, such is our expectation, whither we had fled for help

to deliver ourselves from the king of Assyria, and how shall we

escape--we?_

[42] Cheyne.

This parade of Isaiah for three years, unfrocked and barefoot, is

another instance of that habit on which we remarked in connection with

chap. viii. 1: the habit of finally carrying everything committed to him

before the bar of the whole nation. It was to the mass of the people God

said, _Come and let us reason together._ Let us not despise Isaiah in

his shirt any more than we do Diogenes in his tub, or with a lantern in

his hand, seeking for a man by its rays at noonday. He was bent on

startling the popular conscience, because he held it true that a

people's own morals have greater influence on their destinies than the

policies of their statesmen. But especially anxious was Isaiah, as we

shall again see from chap. xxxi., to bring this Egyptian policy home to

the popular conscience. Egypt was a big-mouthed, blustering power,

believed in by the mob: to expose her required public, picturesque and

persistent advertisement. So Isaiah continued his walk for three years.

The fall of Ashdod, left by Egypt to itself, did not disillusion the

Jews, and the rapid disappearance of Sargon to another part of his

empire where there was trouble, gave the Egyptians audacity to continue

their intrigues against him.[43]

[43] W. R. Smith, _Prophets of Israel_, p. 282.

Sargon's new trouble had broken out in Babylon, and was much more

serious than any revolt in Syria. Merodach Baladan, king of Chaldea, was

no ordinary vassal, but as dangerous a rival as Egypt. When he rose, it

meant a contest between Babylon and Nineveh for the sovereignty of the

world. He had long been preparing for war. He had an alliance with Elam,

and the tribes of Mesopotamia were prepared for his signal of revolt.

Among the charges brought against him by Sargon is that, "against the

will of the gods of Babylon, he had sent during twelve years

ambassadors." One of these embassies may have been that which came to

Hezekiah after his great sickness (chap. xxxix.). _And Hezekiah was glad

of them, and showed them the house of his spicery, the silver, and the

gold, and the spices, and the precious oil, and all the house of his

armour and all that was found in his treasures; there was nothing in his

house nor in all his dominion that Hezekiah showed them not._ Isaiah was

indignant. He had hitherto kept the king from formally closing with

Egypt; now he found him eager for an alliance with another of the powers

of man. But instead of predicting the captivity of Babylon, as he

predicted the captivity of Egypt, by the hand of Assyria, Isaiah

declared, according to chap. xxxix., that Babylon would some day take

Israel captive; and Hezekiah had to content himself with the prospect

that this calamity was not to happen in his time.

Isaiah's prediction of the exile of Israel to Babylon is a matter of

difficulty. The difficulty, however, is not that of conceiving how he

could have foreseen an event which took place more than a century later.

Even in 711 Babylon was not an unlikely competitor for the supremacy of

the nations. Sargon himself felt that it was a crisis to meet her. Very

little might have transferred the seat of power from the Tigris to the

Euphrates. What, therefore, more probable than that when Hezekiah

disclosed to these envoys the whole state of his resources, and excused

himself by saying _that they were come from a far country, even

Babylon_, Isaiah, seized by a strong sense of how near Babylon stood to

the throne of the nations, should laugh to scorn the excuse of

distance, and tell the king that his anxiety to secure an alliance had

only led him to place the temptation to rob him in the face of a power

that was certainly on the way to be able to do it? No, the difficulty is

not that the prophet foretold a captivity of the Jews in Babylon, but

that we cannot reconcile what he says of that captivity with his

intimation of the immediate destruction of Babylon, which has come down

to us in chap. xxi. 1-10.

In this prophecy Isaiah regards Babylon as he has been regarding

Egypt--certain to go down before Assyria, and therefore wholly

unprofitable to Judah. If the Jews still thought of returning to Egypt

when Sargon hurried back from completing her discomfiture in order to

beset Babylon, Isaiah would tell them it was no use. Assyria has brought

her full power to bear on the Babylonians; Elam and Media are with her.

He travails with pain for the result. Babylon is not expecting a siege;

but _preparing the table, eating and drinking_, when suddenly the cry

rings through her, "_Arise, ye princes; anoint the shield._ The enemy is

upon us." So terrible and so sudden a warrior is this Sargon! At his

words nations move; when he saith, _Go up, O Elam! Besiege, O Media!_ it

is done. And he falls upon his foes before their weapons are ready. Then

the prophet shrinks back from the result of his imagination of how it

happened--for that is too painful--upon the simple certainty, which God

revealed to him, that it must happen. As surely as Sargon's columns went

against Babylon, so surely must the message return that Babylon has

fallen. Isaiah puts it this way. The Lord bade him get on his

watchtower--that is his phrase for observing the signs of the times--and

speak whatever he saw. And he saw a military column on the march: _a

troop of horsemen by pairs, a troop of asses, a troop of camels_. It

passed him out of sight, _and he hearkened very diligently_ for news.

But none came. It was a long campaign. _And he cried like a lion_ for

impatience, _O my Lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower by day,

and am set in my ward every night_. Till at last, _behold, there came a

troop of men, horsemen in pairs, and_ now _one answered and said,

Fallen, fallen is Babylon, and all the images of her gods he hath broken

to the ground_. The meaning of this very elliptical passage is just

this: as surely as the prophet saw Sargon's columns go out against

Babylon, so sure was he of her fall. Turning to his Jerusalem, he says,

_My own threshed one, son of my floor, that which I have heard from

Jehovah of hosts, the God of Israel, have I declared unto you_. How

gladly would I have told you otherwise! But this is His message and His

will. Everything must go down before this Assyrian.

Sargon entered Babylon before the year was out, and with her conquest

established his fear once more down to the borders of Egypt. In his

lifetime neither Judah nor her neighbours attempted again to revolt. But

Egypt's intrigue did not cease. Her mines were once more laid, and the

feudatories of Assyria only waited for their favourite opportunity, a

change of tyrants on the throne at Nineveh. This came very soon. In the

fifteenth year of his reign, having finally established his empire,

Sargon inscribed on the palace at Khorsabad the following prayer to

Assur: "May it be that I, Sargon, who inhabit this palace, may be

preserved by destiny during long years for a long life, for the

happiness of my body, for the satisfaction of my heart, and may I arrive

to my end! May I accumulate in this palace immense treasures, the

booties of all countries, the products of mountains and valleys!" The

god did not hear. A few months later, in 705, Sargon was murdered; and

before Sennacherib, his successor, sat down on the throne, the whole of

Assyrian supremacy in the south-west of Asia went up in the air. It was

the second of the great Explosions we spoke of, and the rest of Isaiah's

prophecies are concerned with its results.

BOOK III.

ORATIONS ON THE EGYPTIAN INTRIGUES AND ORACLES ON FOREIGN NATIONS,

705-702 B.C.

ISAIAH:--

xxix. About 703.

xxx. A little later.

xxxi. " "

xxxii. 1-8. "

xxxii. 9-20. Date uncertain.

_______

xiv. 28-xxi. 736-702.

xxiii. About 703.

BOOK III.

We now enter the prophecies of Isaiah's old age, those which he

published after 705, when his ministry had lasted for at least

thirty-five years. They cover the years between 705, the date of

Sennacherib's accession to the Assyrian throne, and 701, when his army

suddenly disappeared from before Jerusalem.

They fall into three groups:--

1. Chaps. xxix.-xxxii., dealing with Jewish politics while Sennacherib

is still far from Palestine, 704-702, and having Egypt for their chief

interest, Assyria lowering in the background.

2. Chaps. xiv. 28-xxi. and xxiii., a group of oracles on foreign

nations, threatened, like Judah, by Assyria.

3. Chaps. i., xxii., and xxxiii., and the historical narrative in

xxxvi., and xxxvii., dealing with Sennacherib's invasion of Judah and

siege of Jerusalem in 701; Egypt and every foreign nation now fallen out

of sight, and the storm about the Holy City too thick for the prophet to

see beyond his immediate neighbourhood.

The _first and second_ of these groups--orations on the intrigues with

Egypt and oracles on the foreign nations--delivered while Sennacherib

was still far from Syria, form the subject of this Third Book of our

exposition.

The prophecies on the siege of Jerusalem are sufficiently numerous and

distinctive to be put by themselves, along with their appendix

(xxxviii., xxxix.), in our Fourth Book.

CHAPTER XII.

_ARIEL, ARIEL._

ISAIAH xxix. (about 703 B.C.).

In 705 Sargon, King of Assyria, was murdered, and Sennacherib, his

second son, succeeded him. Before the new ruler mounted the throne, the

vast empire, which his father had consolidated, broke into rebellion,

and down to the borders of Egypt cities and tribes declared themselves

again independent. Sennacherib attacked his problem with Assyrian

promptitude. There were two forces, to subdue which at the beginning

made the reduction of the rest certain: Assyria's vassal kingdom and

future rival for the supremacy of the world, Babylon; and her present

rival, Egypt. Sennacherib marched on Babylon first.

While he did so the smaller States prepared to resist him. Too small to

rely on their own resources, they looked to Egypt, and among others who

sought help in that quarter was Judah. There had always been, as we have

seen, an Egyptian party among the politicians of Jerusalem; and

Assyria's difficulties now naturally increased its influence. Most of

the prophecies in chaps. xxix.-xxxii. are forward to condemn the

alliance with Egypt and the irreligious politics of which it was the

fruit.

At the beginning, however, other facts claim Isaiah's attention. After

the first excitement, consequent on the threats of Sennacherib, the

politicians do not seem to have been specially active. Sennacherib found

the reduction of Babylon a harder task than he expected, and in the end

it turned out to be three years before he was free to march upon Syria.

As one winter after another left the work of the Assyrian army in

Mesopotamia still unfinished, the political tension in Judah must have

relaxed. The Government--for King Hezekiah seems at last to have been

brought round to believe in Egypt--pursued their negotiations no longer

with that decision and real patriotism, which the sense of near danger

rouses in even the most selfish and mistaken of politicians, but rather

with the heedlessness of principle, the desire to show their own

cleverness and the passion for intrigue which run riot among statesmen,

when danger is near enough to give an excuse for doing something, but

too far away to oblige anything to be done in earnest. Into this false

ease, and the meaningless, faithless politics, which swarmed in it,

Isaiah hurled his strong prophecy of chap. xxix. Before he exposes in

chaps. xxx., xxxi., the folly of trusting to Egypt in the hour of

danger, he has here the prior task of proving that hour to be near and

very terrible. It is but one instance of the ignorance and fickleness of

the people, that their prophet has first to rouse them to a sense of

their peril, and then to restrain their excitement under it from rushing

headlong for help to Egypt.

Chap. xxix. is an obscure oracle, but its obscurity is designed. Isaiah

was dealing with a people, in whom political security and religious

formalism had stifled both reason and conscience. He sought to rouse

them by a startling message in a mysterious form. He addressed the city

by an enigma:--

_Ho! Ari-El, Ari-El! City David beleaguered! Add a year to a year, let

the feasts run their round, then will I bring straitness upon Ari-El,

and there shall be moaning and bemoaning,[44] and yet she shall be unto

Me as an Ari-El._

[44] Cheyne.

The general bearing of this enigma became plain enough after the sore

siege and sudden deliverance of Jerusalem in 701. But we are unable to

make out one or two of its points. _Ari-El_ may mean either _The Lion of

God_ (2 Sam. xxiii. 20), or _The Hearth of God_ (Ezek. xliii. 15, 16).

If the same sense is to be given to the four utterances of the name,

then _God's-Lion_ suits better the description of ver. 4; but

_God's-Hearth_ seems suggested by the feminine pronoun in ver. 1, and is

a conception to which Isaiah returns in this same group of prophecies

(xxxi. 9). It is possible that this ambiguity was part of the prophet's

design; but if he uses the name in both senses, some of the force of his

enigma is lost to us. In any case, however, we get a picturesque form

for a plain meaning. In a year after the present year is out, says

Isaiah, God Himself will straiten the city, whose inhabitants are now so

careless, and she shall be full of mourning and lamentation.

Nevertheless in the end she shall be a true Ari-El: be it a true

_God's-Lion_, victor and hero; or a true _God's-Hearth_, His own

inviolate shrine and sanctuary.

The next few verses (3-8) expand this warning. In plain words, Jerusalem

is to undergo a siege. God Himself shall _encamp against thee--round

about_ reads our English version, but more probably, as with the change

of a letter, the Septuagint reads it--_like David_. If we take this

second reading, the reference to David in the enigma itself (ver. 1)

becomes clear. The prophet has a very startling message to deliver: that

God will besiege His own city, the city of David! Before God can make

her in truth His own, make her verify her name, He will have to

beleaguer and reduce her. For so novel and startling an intimation the

prophet pleads a precedent: "_City which David_ himself _beleaguered_!

Once before in thy history, ere the first time thou wast made God's own

hearth, thou hadst to be besieged. As then, so now. Before thou canst

again be a true Ari-El I must _beleaguer thee like David_." This reading

and interpretation gives to the enigma a reason and a force which it

does not otherwise possess.

Jerusalem, then, shall be reduced to the very dust, and whine and

whimper in it (like a sick _lion_, if this be the figure the prophet is

pursuing), when suddenly it is _the surge of_ her foes--literally _thy

strangers_--whom the prophet sees as _small dust, and as passing chaff

shall the surge of tyrants be; yea, it shall be in the twinkling of an

eye, suddenly_. _From Jehovah of hosts shall she be visited with thunder

and with earthquake and a great noise,--storm-wind, and tempest and the

flame of fire devouring. And it shall be as a dream, a vision of the

night, the surge of all the nations that war against Ariel, yea all that

war against her and her stronghold, and they that press in upon her. And

it shall be as if the hungry had been dreaming, and lo! he was eating;

but he hath awaked, and his soul is empty: and as if the thirsty had

been dreaming, and lo! he was drinking; but he hath awaked, and lo! he

is faint, and his soul is ravenous: thus shall be the surge of all the

nations that war against Mount Zion._ Now that is a very definite

prediction, and in its essentials was fulfilled. In the end Jerusalem

was invested by Sennacherib, and reduced to sore straits, when very

suddenly--it would appear from other records, in a single night--the

beleaguering force disappeared. This actually happened; and although the

main business of a prophet, as we now clearly understand, was not to

predict definite events, yet, since the result here predicted was one on

which Isaiah staked his prophetic reputation and pledged the honour of

Jehovah and the continuance of the true religion among men, it will be

profitable for us to look at it for a little.

Isaiah foretells a great event and some details. The event is a double

one: the reduction of Jerusalem to the direst straits by siege and her

deliverance by the sudden disappearance of the besieging army. The

details are that the siege will take place after a year (though the

prophet's statement of time is perhaps too vague to be treated as a

prediction), and that the deliverance will come as a great natural

convulsion--thunder, earthquake and fire--which it certainly did not do.

The double event, however, stripped of these details, did essentially

happen.

Now it is plain that any one with a considerable knowledge of the world

at that day must easily have been able to assert the probability of a

siege of Jerusalem by the mixed nations who composed Sennacherib's

armies. Isaiah's orations are full of proofs of his close acquaintance

with the peoples of the world, and Assyria, who was above them.

Moreover, his political advice, given at certain crises of Judah's

history, was conspicuous not only for its religiousness, but for what we

should call its "worldly-wisdom:" it was vindicated by events. Isaiah,

however, would not have understood the distinction we have just made.

To him political prudence was part of religion. _The LORD of hosts is

for a spirit of judgement to him that sitteth in judgement, and for

strength to them that turn back the battle to the gate._ Knowledge of

men, experience of nations, the mental strength which never forgets

history, and is quick to mark new movements as they rise, Isaiah would

have called the direct inspiration of God. And it was certainly these

qualities in this Hebrew, which provided him with the materials for his

prediction of the siege of Jerusalem.

But it has not been found that such talents by themselves enable

statesmen calmly to face the future, or clearly to predict it. Such

knowledge of the past, such vigilance for the present, by themselves

only embarrass, and often deceive. They are the materials for

prediction, but a ruling principle is required to arrange them. A

general may have a strong and well-drilled force under him, and a

miserably weak foe in front; but if the sun is not going to rise

to-morrow, if the laws of nature are not going to hold, his familiarity

with his soldiers and expertness in handling them will not give him

confidence to offer battle. He takes certain principles for granted, and

on these his soldiers become of use to him, and he makes his venture.

Even so Isaiah handled his mass of information by the grasp which he had

of certain principles, and his facts fell clear into order before his

confident eyes. He believed in the real government of God. _I also saw

the Lord sitting, high and lifted up._ He felt that God had even this

Assyria in His hands. He knew that all God's ends were righteousness,

and he was still of the conviction that Judah for her wickedness

required punishment at the Lord's hands. Grant these convictions to him

in the superhuman strength in which he tells us he was conscious of

receiving them from God, and it is easy to see how Isaiah could not help

predicting a speedy siege of Jerusalem, how he already beheld the

valleys around her bristling with barbarian spears.

The prediction of the sudden raising of this siege was the equally

natural corollary to another religious conviction, which held the

prophet with as much intensity, as that which possessed him with the

need of Judah's punishment. Isaiah never slacked his hold on the truth

that in the end God would save Zion, and keep her for Himself. Through

whatever destruction, a root and remnant of the Jewish people must

survive. Zion is impregnable because God is in her, and because her

inviolateness is necessary for the continuance of true religion in the

world. Therefore as confident as his prediction of the siege of

Jerusalem is Isaiah's prediction of her delivery. And while the prophet

wraps the fact in vague circumstance, while he masks, as it were, his

ignorance of how in detail it will actually take place by calling up a

great natural convulsion, yet he makes it abundantly clear--as, with his

religious convictions and his knowledge of the Assyrian power, he cannot

help doing--that the deliverance will be unexpected and unexplainable by

the natural circumstances of the Jews themselves, that it will be

evident as the immediate deed of God.

It is well for us to understand this. We shall get rid of the mechanical

idea of prophecy, according to which prophets made exact predictions of

fact by some particular and purely official endowment. We shall feel

that prediction of this kind was due to the most unmistakeable

inspiration, the influence upon the prophet's knowledge of affairs of

two powerful religious convictions, for which he himself was strongly

sure that he had the warrant of the Spirit of God.

Into the easy, selfish politics of Jerusalem, then, Isaiah sent this

thunderbolt, this definite prediction: that in a year or more Jerusalem

would be besieged and reduced to the direst straits. He tells us that it

simply dazed the people. They were like men suddenly startled from

sleep, who are too stupid to read a message pushed into their hands (vv.

9-12).

Then Isaiah gives God's own explanation of this stupidity. The cause of

it is simply religious formalism. _This people draw nigh unto Me with

their mouth, and with their lips do they honour Me, but their heart is

far from Me, and their fear of Me is a mere commandment of men, a thing

learned by rote._ This was what Israel called religion--bare ritual and

doctrine, a round of sacrifices and prayers in adherence to the

tradition of the fathers. But in life they never thought of God. It did

not occur to these citizens of Jerusalem that He cared about their

politics, their conduct of justice, or their discussions and bargains

with one another. Of these they said, taking their own way, _Who seeth

us, and who knoweth us?_ Only in the Temple did they feel God's fear,

and there merely in imitation of one another. None had an original

vision of God in real life; they learned other men's thoughts about Him,

and took other men's words upon their lips, while their heart was far

away. In fact, speaking words and listening to words had wearied the

spirit and stifled the conscience of them.

For such a disposition Isaiah says there is only one cure. It is a new

edition of his old gospel, that God speaks to us in facts, not forms.

Worship and a lifeless doctrine have demoralized this people. God shall

make Himself so felt in real life that even their dull senses shall not

be able to mistake Him. _Therefore, behold, I am proceeding to work

marvellously upon this people, a marvellous work and a wonder! and the

wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the cleverness of their

clever ones shall be obscured._ This is not the promise of what we call

a miracle. It is a historical event on the same theatre as the

politicians are showing their cleverness, but it shall put them all to

shame, and by its force make the dullest feel that God's own hand is in

it. What the people had ceased to attribute to Jehovah was ordinary

intelligence; they had virtually said, _He hath no understanding_. The

_marvellous work_, therefore, which He threatens shall be a work of

wisdom, not some convulsion of nature to cow their spirits, but a

wonderful political result, that shall shame their conceit of

cleverness, and teach them reverence for the will and skill of God. Are

the politicians trying to change the surface of the world, thinking that

they _are turning things upside down_, and supposing that they can keep

God out of account: _Who seeth us, and who knoweth us?_ God Himself is

the real Arranger and Politician. He will turn things upside down!

Compared with their attempt, how vast His results shall be! As if the

whole surface of the earth were altered, _Lebanon changed into

garden-land, and garden-land counted as forest_! But this, of course, is

metaphor. The intent of the miracle is to show that God hath

understanding; therefore it must be a work, the prudence and

intellectual force of which politicians can appreciate, and it shall

take place in their politics. But not for mere astonishment's sake is

_the wonder_ to be done. For blessing and morality shall it be: to cure

the deaf and blind; to give to the meek and the poor a new joy; to

confound the tyrant and the scorner; to make Israel worthy of God and

her own great fathers. _Therefore thus saith Jehovah to the house of

Jacob, He that redeemed Abraham: Not now ashamed shall Jacob be, and not

now shall his countenance blanch._ So unworthy hitherto have this stupid

people been of so great ancestors! _But now when his_ (Jacob's)

_children behold the work of My hand in the midst of him, they shall

hallow My name, yea, they shall hallow the Holy One of Jacob, and the

God of Israel shall they make their fear. They also that err in spirit

shall know understanding, and they that are unsettled shall learn to

accept doctrine_.

Such is the meaning of this strong chapter. It is instructive in two

ways.

_First_, it very clearly declares Isaiah's view of the method of God's

revelation. Isaiah says nothing of the Temple, the Shechinah, the Altar,

or the Scripture; but he points out how much the exclusive confinement

of religion to forms and texts has deadened the hearts of his countrymen

towards God. In your real life, he says to them, you are to seek, and

you shall find, Him. There He is evident in miracles,--not physical

interruptions and convulsions, but social mercies and moral providences.

The quickening of conscience, the dispersion of ignorance, poor men

awakening to the fact that God is with them, the overthrow of the social

tyrant, history's plain refutation of the atheist, the growth of civic

justice and charity--In these, said the Hebrew prophet to the Old

Testament believer, Behold your God!

Wherefore, _secondly_, we also are to look for God in events and deeds.

We are to know that nothing can compensate us for the loss of the open

vision of God's working in history and in life about us,--not ecstasy

of worship nor orthodoxy of doctrine. To confine our religion to these

latter things is to become dull towards God even in them, and to forget

Him everywhere else. And this is a fault of our day, just as it was of

Isaiah's. So much of our fear of God is conventional, orthodox and not

original, a trick caught from men's words or fashions, not a part of

ourselves, nor won, like all that is real in us, from contact with real

life. In our politics, in our conduct with men, in the struggle of our

own hearts for knowledge and for temperance, and in service--there we

are to learn to fear God. But there, and wherever else we are busy, self

comes too much in the way; we are fascinated with our own cleverness; we

ignore God, saying, _Who seeth us? who knoweth us?_ We get to expect Him

only in the Temple and on the Sabbath, and then only to influence our

emotions. But it is in deeds, and where we feel life most real, that we

are to look for Him. He makes Himself evident to us by wonderful works.

For these He has given us three theatres--the Bible, our country's

history, and for each man his own life.

We have to take the Bible, and especially the life of Christ, and to

tell ourselves that these wonderful events did really take place. In

Christ God did dwell; by Christ He spoke to man; man was converted,

redeemed, sanctified, beyond all doubt. These were real events. To be

convinced of their reality were worth a hundred prayers.

Then let us follow the example of the Hebrew prophets, and search the

history of our own people for the realities of God. Carlyle says in a

note to Cromwell's fourth speech to Parliament, that "the Bible of every

nation is its own history." This note is drawn from Carlyle by

Cromwell's frequent insistence, that we must ever be turning from forms

and rituals to study God's will and ways in history. And that speech of

Cromwell is perhaps the best sermon ever delivered on the subject of

this chapter. For he said: "What are all our histories but God

manifesting Himself, that He hath shaken, and tumbled down and trampled

upon everything that He hath not planted!" And again, speaking of our

own history, he said to the House of Commons: "We are a people with the

stamp of God upon us, ... whose appearances and providences among us

were not to be outmatched by any story." Truly this is national

religion:--the reverential acknowledgment of God's hand in history; the

admiration and effort of moral progress; the stirring of conscience when

we see wrong; the expectation, when evil abounds, that God will bring

justice and purity to us if we labour with Him for them.

But for each man there is the final duty of turning to himself.

"My soul repairs its fault

When, sharpening sense's hebetude,

She turns on my own life! So viewed,

No mere mote's breadth but teems immense

With witnessings of providence:

And woe to me if when I look

Upon that record, the sole book

Unsealed to me, I take no heed

Of any warning that I read!"[45]

[45] Browning's _Christmas Eve_.

CHAPTER XIII.

_POLITICS AND FAITH._

ISAIAH xxx. (ABOUT 702 B.C.).

This prophecy of Isaiah rises out of circumstances a little more

developed than those in which chap. xxix. was composed. Sennacherib is

still engaged with Babylon, and it seems that it will yet be long before

he marches his armies upon Syria. But Isaiah's warning has at last

roused the politicians of Judah from their carelessness. We need not

suppose that they believed all that Isaiah predicted about the dire

siege which Jerusalem should shortly undergo and her sudden deliverance

at the hand of the Lord. Without the two strong religious convictions,

in the strength of which, as we have seen, he made the prediction, it

was impossible to believe that this siege and deliverance must certainly

happen. But the politicians were at least startled into doing something.

They did not betake themselves to God, to whom it had been the purpose

of Isaiah's last oration to shut them up. They only flung themselves

with more haste into their intrigues with Egypt. But in truth haste and

business were all that was in their politics: these were devoid both of

intelligence and faith. Where the sole motive of conduct is fear,

whether uneasiness or panic, force may be displayed, but neither

sagacity nor any moral quality. This was the case with Judah's Egyptian

policy, and Isaiah now spends two chapters in denouncing it. His

condemnation is twofold. The negotiations with Egypt, he says, are bad

politics and bad religion; but the bad religion is the root and source

of the other. Yet while he vents all his scorn on the politics, he uses

pity and sweet persuasiveness when he comes to speak of the eternal

significance of the religion. The two chapters are also instructive,

beyond most others of the Old Testament, in the light they cast on

revelation--its scope and methods.

Isaiah begins with the bad politics. In order to understand how bad they

were, we must turn for a little to this Egypt, with whom Judah was now

seeking an alliance.

In our late campaign on the Upper Nile we heard a great deal of the

Mudir of Dongola. His province covers part of the ancient kingdom of

Ethiopia; and in Meirawi, the village whose name appeared in so many

telegrams, we can still discover Meroe, the capital of Ethiopia. Now in

Isaiah's day the king of Ethiopia was, what the Mudir of Dongola was at

the time of our war, an ambitious person of no small energy; and the

ruler of Egypt proper was, what the Khedive was, a person of little

influence or resource. Consequently there happened what might have

happened a few years ago but for the presence of the British army in

Egypt. The Ethiopian came down the Nile, defeated Pharaoh and burned him

alive. But he died, and his son died after him; and before their

successor could also come down the Nile, the legitimate heir to Pharaoh

had regained part of his power. Some years ensued of uncertainty as to

who was the real ruler of Egypt.

It was in this time of unsettlement that Judah sought Egypt's help. The

ignorance of the policy was manifest to all who were not blinded by fear

of Assyria or party feeling. To Isaiah the Egyptian alliance is a folly

and fatality that deserve all his scorn (vv. 1-8).

_Woe to the rebellious children, saith the Lord, executing a policy, but

it is not from Me; and weaving a web, but not of My spirit, that they

may heap sin upon sin; who set themselves on the way to go down to

Egypt, and at My mouth they have not inquired, to flee to the refuge of

Pharaoh, and to hide themselves in the shadow of Egypt. But the refuge

of Pharaoh shall be unto you for shame, and the hiding in the shadow of

Egypt for confusion!_ How can a broken Egypt help you? _When his princes

are at Zoan, and his ambassadors are come to Hanes, they shall all be

ashamed of a people that cannot profit them, that are not for help nor

for profit, but for shame, and also for reproach._

Then Isaiah pictures the useless caravan which Judah has sent with

tribute to Egypt, strings of asses and camels struggling through the

desert, _land of trouble and anguish_, amid lions and serpents, and all

for _a people that shall not profit them_ (ver. 6).

What tempted Judah to this profitless expenditure of time and money?

Egypt had a great reputation, and was a mighty promiser. Her brilliant

antiquity had given her a habit of generous promise, and dazzled other

nations into trusting her. Indeed, so full were Egyptian politics of

bluster and big language, that the Hebrews had a nickname for Egypt.

They called her Rahab--_Stormy-speech_, _Blusterer_, _Braggart_. It was

the term also for the crocodile, as being a _monster_, so that there was

a picturesqueness as well as moral aptness in the name. Ay, says Isaiah,

catching at the old name and putting to it another which describes

Egyptian helplessness and inactivity, I call her _Rahab Sit-still_,

_Braggart-that-sitteth-still_, _Stormy-speech Stay-at-home_. _Blustering

and inactivity, blustering and sitting still_, that is her character;

_for Egypt helpeth in vain and to no purpose_.

Knowing how sometimes the fate of a Government is affected by a happy

speech or epigram, we can understand the effect of this cry upon the

politicians of Jerusalem. But that he might impress it on the popular

imagination and memory as well, Isaiah wrote his epigram on a tablet,

and put it in a book. We must remind ourselves here of chap. xx., and

remember how it tells us that Isaiah had already some years before this

endeavoured to impress the popular imagination with the folly of an

Egyptian alliance, _walking unfrocked and barefoot three years for a

sign and a portent upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia_ (see p. 199).

So that already Isaiah had appealed from politicians to people on this

Egyptian question, just as he appealed thirty years ago from court to

market-place on the question of Ephraim and Damascus.[46] It is another

instance of that prophetic habit of his, on which we remarked in

expounding chap. viii.; and we must again emphasize the habit, for chap.

xxx. here swings round upon it. Whatever be the matter committed to him,

Isaiah is not allowed to rest till he brings it home to the popular

conscience; and however much he may be able to charge national disaster

upon the folly of politicians or the obduracy of a king, it is the

people whom he holds ultimately responsible. To Isaiah a nation's

politics are not arbitrary; they are not dependent on the will of kings

or the management of parties. They are the natural outcome of the

nation's character. What the people are, that will their politics be. If

you wish to reform the politics, you must first regenerate the people;

and it is no use to inveigh against a senseless policy, like this

Egyptian one, unless you go farther and expose the national temper which

has made it possible. A people's own morals have greater influence on

their destinies than their despots or legislators. Statesmen are what

the State makes them. No Government will attempt a policy for which the

nation behind it has not a conscience; and for the greater number of

errors committed by their rulers, the blame must be laid on the people's

own want of character or intelligence.

[46] Chap. viii. 1 (p. 119).

This is what Isaiah now drives home (xxx. 9 ff.). He tracks the bad

politics to their source in bad religion, the Egyptian policy to its

roots in the prevailing tempers of the people. The Egyptian policy was

doubly stamped. It was disobedience to the word of God; it was

satisfaction with falsehood. The statesmen of Judah shut their ears to

God's spoken word; they allowed themselves to be duped by the Egyptian

Pretence. But these, says Isaiah, are precisely the characteristics of

the whole Jewish people. _For it is a rebellious people, lying children,

children that will not hear the revelation of the LORD_. It was these

national failings--the want of virtues which are the very substance of a

nation: truth and reverence or obedience--that had culminated in the

senseless and suicidal alliance with Egypt. Isaiah fastens on their

falsehood first: _Which say to the seers, Ye shall not see, and to the

prophets, Ye shall not prophesy unto us right things; speak to us smooth

things: prophesy deceits_. No wonder such a character had been

fascinated by "Rahab"! It was a natural Nemesis, that a people who

desired from their teachers fair speech rather than true vision should

be betrayed by the confidence their statesmen placed in the Blusterer,

_that blustered and sat still_. Truth is what this people first require,

and therefore the _revelation of the LORD_ will in the first instance be

the revealing of the truth. Men who will strip pretence off the reality

of things; men who will call things by their right names, as Isaiah had

set himself to do; honest satirists and epigrammatists--these are the

bearers of God's revelation. For it is one of the means of Divine

salvation to call things by their right names, and here in God's

revelation also epigrams have their place. So much for truth.

But reverence is truth's other self, for reverence is simply loyalty to

the supremest truth. And it is against the truth that the Jews have

chiefly sinned. They had shut their eyes to Egypt's real character, but

that was a small sin beside this: that they turned their backs on the

greatest reality of all--God Himself. _Get you out of the way_, they

said to the prophets, _turn out of the path; keep quiet in our presence

about the Holy One of Israel_. Isaiah's effort rises to its culmination

when he seeks to restore the sense of this Reality to his people. His

spirit is kindled at the words _the Holy One of Israel_, and to the end

of chap. xxxi. leaps up in a series of brilliant and sometimes scorching

descriptions of the name, the majesty and the love of God. Isaiah is not

content to have used his power of revelation to unveil the political

truth about Egypt. He will make God Himself visible to this people.

Passionately does he proceed to enforce upon the Jews what God thinks

about their own condition (vv. 12-14), then to persuade them to rely

upon Him alone, and wait for the working of His reasonable laws (vv.

15-18). Rising higher, he purges with pity their eyes to see God's very

presence, their ears to hear His voice, their wounds to feel His touch

(vv. 19-26). Then he remembers the cloud of invasion on the horizon, and

bids them spell, in its uncouth masses, the articulate name of the Lord

(vv. 27-33). And he closes with another series of figures by which God's

wisdom, and His jealousy and His tenderness are made very bright to them

(chap. xxxi.).

These brilliant prophecies may not have been given all at the same time:

each is complete in itself. They do not all mention the negotiations

with Egypt, but they are all dark with the shadow of Assyria. Chap. xxx.

vv. 19-26 almost seem to have been written in a time of actual siege;

but vv. 27-33 represent Assyria still upon the horizon. In this,

however, these passages are fitly strung together: that they equally

strain to impress a blind and hardened people with the will, the majesty

and the love of God their Saviour.

I. THE BULGING WALL (vv. 12-14).

Starting from their unwillingness to listen to the voice of the Lord in

their Egyptian policy, Isaiah tells the people that if they refused to

hear His word for guidance, they must now listen to it for judgement.

_Wherefore thus saith the Holy One of Israel: Because ye look down on

this word, and trust in perverseness and crookedness, and lean thereon,

therefore this iniquity shall be to you as a breach ready to fall,

bulging out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an

instant._ _This iniquity_, of course, is the embassy to Egypt. But that,

as we have seen, is only the people's own evil character coming to a

head; and by the breaking of the wall, we are therefore to suppose that

the prophet means the collapse not only of this Egyptian policy, but of

the whole estate and substance of the Jewish people. It will not be your

enemy that will cause a breach in the nation, but your teeming iniquity

shall cause the breach--to wit, this Egyptian folly. Judah will burst

her bulwarks from the inside. You may build the strongest form of

government round a people, you may buttress it with foreign alliances,

but these shall simply prove occasions for the internal wickedness to

break forth. Your supposed buttresses will prove real breaches; and of

all your social structure there will not be left as much as will make

the fragments of a single home, not _a sherd_ big enough _to carry fire

from the hearth, or to hold water from the cistern_.

II. NOT ALLIANCES, BUT RELIANCE (vv. 15-18).

At this point, either Isaiah was stung by the demands of the politicians

for an alternative to their restless Egyptian policy which he condemned,

or more likely he rose, unaided by external influence, on the prophet's

native instinct to find some purely religious ground on which to base

his political advice. The result is one of the grandest of all his

oracles. _For thus saith the Lord Jehovah, the Holy One of Israel: In

returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence

shall be your strength; and ye would not. But ye said, No, for upon

horses will we flee; wherefore ye shall flee: and upon the swift will we

ride; wherefore swift shall be they that pursue you! One thousand at the

rebuke of one--at the rebuke of five shall ye flee: till ye be left as a

bare pole on the top of a mountain, and as a standard on an hill. And

therefore will the LORD wait that He may be gracious unto you, and

therefore will He hold aloof that He may have mercy upon you, for a God

of judgement is the LORD; blessed are all they that wait for Him._ The

words of this passage are their own interpretation and enforcement, all

but one; and as this one is obscure in its English guise, and the

passage really swings from it, we may devote a paragraph to its meaning.

_A God of judgement is the LORD_ is an unfortunately ambiguous

translation. We must not take _judgement_ here in our familiar sense of

the word. It is not a sudden deed of doom, but a long process of law. It

means _manner_, _method_, _design_, _order_, _system_, the ideas, in

short, which we sum up under the word "law." Just as we say of a man,

_He is a man of judgement_, and mean thereby not that by office he is a

doomster, but that by character he is a man of discernment and prudence,

so simply does Isaiah say here that _Jehovah is a God of judgement_, and

mean thereby not that He is One, whose habit is sudden and awful deeds

of penalty or salvation, but, on the contrary, that, having laid down

His lines according to righteousness and established His laws in wisdom,

He remains in His dealings with men consistent with these.

Now it is a great truth that the All-mighty and All-merciful is the

All-methodical too; and no religion is complete in its creed or healthy

in its influence, which does not insist equally on all these. It was

just the want of this third article of faith which perverted the souls

of the Jews in Isaiah's day, which (as we have seen under Chapter I.)

allowed them to make their worship so mechanical and material--for how

could they have been satisfied with mere forms if they had but once

conceived of God as having even ordinary intelligence?--and which

turned their political life into such a mass of intrigue, conceit and

falsehood, for how could they have dared to suppose that they would get

their own way, or have been so sure of their own cleverness, if only

they had had a glimpse of the perception, that God, the Ruler of the

world, had also His policy regarding them? They believed He was the

Mighty, they believed He was the Merciful, but because they forgot that

He was the Wise and the Worker by law, their faith in His might too

often turned into superstitious terror, their faith in His mercy

oscillated between the sleepy satisfaction that He was an indulgent God

and the fretful impatience that He was an indifferent one. Therefore

Isaiah persisted from first to last in this: that God worked by law;

that He had His plan for Judah, as well as these politicians; and, as we

shall shortly find him reminding them when intoxicated with their own

cleverness, _that He also is wise_ (xxxi. 2). Here by the same thought

he bids them be at peace, and upon the rushing tides of politics,

drawing them to that or the other mad venture, to swing by this anchor:

that God has His own law and time for everything. No man could bring the

charge of fatalism against such a policy of quietness. For it thrilled

with intelligent appreciation of the Divine method. When Isaiah said,

_In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and confidence

shall be your strength_, he did not ask his restless countrymen to yield

sullenly to an infinite force or to bow in stupidity beneath the

inscrutable will of an arbitrary despot, but to bring their conduct into

harmony with a reasonable and gracious plan, which might be read in the

historical events of the time, and was vindicated by the loftiest

religious convictions. Isaiah preached no submission to fate, but

reverence for an all-wise Ruler, whose method was plain to every

clear-sighted observer of the fortunes of the nations of the world, and

whose purpose could only be love and peace to His own people (cf. p.

110).

III. GOD'S TABLE IN THE MIDST OF THE ENEMIES (vv. 19-26).

This patient purpose of God Isaiah now proceeds to describe in its

details. Every line of his description has its loveliness, and is to be

separately appreciated. There is perhaps no fairer prospect from our

prophet's many windows. It is not argument nor a programme, but a series

of rapid glimpses, struck out by language, which often wants logical

connection, but never fails to make us see.

To begin with, one thing is sure: the continuance of the national

existence. Isaiah is true to his original vision--the survival of a

remnant. _For a people in Zion--there shall be abiding in Jerusalem._ So

the brief essential is flashed forth. _Thou shalt surely weep no more;

surely He will be gracious unto thee at the voice of thy crying; with

His hearing of thee He will answer thee._ Thus much of general promise

had been already given. Now upon the vagueness of the Lord's delay

Isaiah paints realistic details, only, however, that he may make more

vivid the real presence of the Lord. The siege shall surely come, with

its sorely concrete privations, but the _Lord_ will be there, equally

distinct. _And though the Lord give you the bread of penury and the

water of tribulation_--perhaps the technical name for siege

rations--_yet shall not thy Teacher hide Himself any more, but thine

eyes shall ever be seeing thy Teacher; and thine ears shall hear a word

behind thee, saying, This is the way: walk ye in it, when ye turn to the

right hand or when ye turn to the left._ Real, concrete sorrows, these

are they that make the heavenly Teacher real! It is linguistically

possible, and more in harmony with the rest of the passage, to turn

_teachers_, as the English version has it, into the singular, and to

render it by _Revealer_. The word is an active participle, "Moreh," from

the same verb as the noun "Torah," which is constantly translated "Law"

in our version, but is, in the Prophets at least, more nearly equivalent

to "instruction," or to our modern term "revelation" (cf. ver. 9).

Looking thus to the One Revealer, and hearkening to the One Voice, _the

lying and rebellious children_ shall at last be restored to that

capacity for truth and obedience the loss of which has been their ruin.

Devoted to the Holy One of Israel, they shall scatter their idols as

loathsome (ver. 22). But thereupon a wonder is to happen. As the

besieged people, conscious of the One Great Presence in the midst of

their encompassed city, cast their idols through the gates and over the

walls, a marvellous vision of space and light and fulness of fresh food

bursts upon their starved and straitened souls (ver. 23). Promise more

sympathetic was never uttered to a besieged and famished city. Mark that

all down the passage there is no mention of the noise or instruments of

battle. The prophet has not spoken of the besiegers, who they may be,

how they may come, nor of the fashion of their war, but only of the

effects of the siege on those within: confinement, scant and bitter

rations. And now he is almost wholly silent about the breaking up of the

investing army and the trail of their slaughter. No battle breaks this

siege, but a vision of openness and plenty dawns noiselessly over its

famine and closeness. It is not vengeance or blood that an exhausted and

penitent people thirst after. But as they have been caged in a

fortress, narrow, dark and stony, so they thirst for the sight of the

sower, and the drop of the rain on the broken, brown earth, and the

juicy corn, and the meadow for their cribbed cattle, and the noise of

brooks and waterfalls, and above and about it all fulness of light. _And

He shall give the rain of thy seed, that thou shalt sow the ground

withal, and bread, even the increase of the ground, and it shall be

juicy and fat; thy cattle shall feed that day in a broad meadow. And the

oxen and the young asses that till the ground shall eat savoury

provender, winnowed with the shovel and with the fan. And there shall be

upon every lofty mountain and upon every lifted hill rivers, streams of

water, in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall. And the

light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the

sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day that the

LORD bindeth up the hurt of His people and healeth the stroke of their

wound._ It is one of Isaiah's fairest visions, and he is very much to be

blamed who forces its beauty of nature into an allegory of spiritual

things. Here literally God spreads His people a table in the midst of

their enemies.

IV. THE NAME OF THE LORD (vv. 27-33).

But Isaiah lays down "the oaten pipe" and lifts again a brazen trumpet

to his lips. Between him and that sunny landscape of the future, of

whose pastoral details he has so sweetly sung, roll up now the uncouth

masses of the Assyrian invasion, not yet fully gathered, far less

broken. We are back in the present again, and the whole horizon is

clouded.

The passage does not look like one from which comfort or edification can

be derived, but it is of extreme interest. The first two verses, for

instance, only require a little analysis to open a most instructive

glimpse into the prophet's inner thoughts about the Assyrian progress,

and show us how they work towards the expression of its full meaning.

_Behold, the Name of Jehovah cometh from afar--burning His anger and

awful the uplifting smoke; His lips are full of wrath, and His tongue as

fire that devoureth; and His breath is as an overflowing torrent--even

unto the neck it reacheth--to shake the nations in a sieve of

destruction, and a bridle that leadeth astray on the jaws of the

peoples._

_The Name of Jehovah_ is the phrase the prophets use when they wish to

tell us of the personal presence of God. When we hear a name cried out,

we understand immediately that a person is there. So when the prophet

calls, _Behold, the Name of Jehovah_, in face of the prodigious advance

of Assyria, we understand that he has caught some intuition of God's

presence in that uplifting of the nations of the north at the word of

the great King and their resistless sweep southward upon Palestine. In

that movement God is personally present. The Divine presence Isaiah then

describes in curiously mingled metaphor, which proves how gradually it

was that he struggled to a knowledge of its purpose there. First of all

he describes the advance of Assyria as a thunderstorm, heavy clouds and

darting, devouring fire. His imagination pictures a great face of wrath.

The thick curtains of cloud as they roll over one another suggest the

heavy lips, and the lightnings the fiery tongue. Then the figure passes

from heaven to earth. The thunderstorm has burst, and becomes the

_mountain torrent_, which speedily _reaches the necks_ of those who are

caught in its bed. But then the prophet's conscience suggests something

more than sudden and sheer force in this invasion, and the _tossing_ of

the torrent naturally leads him to express this new element in the

figure of _a sieve_. His thought about the Assyrian flood thus passes

from one of simple force and rush to one of judgement and being well

kept in hand. He sees its ultimate check at Jerusalem, and so his last

figure of it is the figure of _a bridle_, or _lasso_, such as is thrown

upon the jaws of a wild animal when you wish to catch and tame him.

This gradual progress from the sense of sheer wild force, through that

of personal wrath, to discipline and sparing is very interesting. Vague

and chaotic that disaster rolled up the horizon upon Judah. _It cometh

from afar._ The politicians fled from it to their refuge behind the

Egyptian Pretence. But Isaiah bids them face it. The longer they look,

the more will conscience tell them that the unavoidable wrath of God is

in it; no blustering Rahab will be able to hide them from the anger of

the Face that lowers there. But let them look longer still, and the

unrelieved features of destruction will change to a hand that sifts and

checks, the torrent will become a sieve, and the disaster show itself

well held in by the power of their own God.

So wildly and impersonally still do the storms of sorrow and disaster

roll up the horizon on men's eyes, and we fly in vague terror from them

to our Egyptian refuges. So still does conscience tell us it is futile

to flee from the anger of God, and we crouch hopeless beneath the rush

of imaginations of unchecked wrath, blackening the heavens and turning

every path of life to a tossing torrent. May it then be granted us to

have some prophet at our side to bid us face our disaster once more, and

see the discipline and judgement of the Lord, the tossing only of His

careful sieve, in the wild and cruel waves! We may not be poets like

Isaiah nor able to put the processes of our faith into such splendid

metaphors as he, but faith is given us to follow the same course as his

thoughts did, and to struggle till she arrives at the consciousness of

God in the most uncouth judgements that darken her horizon--the

consciousness of God present not only to smite, but to sift, and in the

end to spare.

Of the angel who led Israel to the land of promise, God said, _My Name

is in him_. Our faith is not perfect till we can, like Isaiah, feel the

same of the blackest angel, the heaviest disaster, God can send us, and

be able to spell it out articulately: _The LORD, the LORD, a God

merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and

truth_.

For delivery, says Isaiah, shall come to the people of God in the

crisis, as sudden and as startling into song as the delivery from Egypt

was. _Ye shall have a song as in the night when a holy feast is kept,

and gladness of heart, as when one goeth with a pipe to come into the

mountain of the LORD, to the Rock of Israel._

After this interval of solemn gladness, the storm and fire break out

afresh, and rage again through the passage. But their direction is

reversed, and whereas they had been shown rolling up the horizon as

towards Judah, they are now shown rolling down the horizon in pursuit of

the baffled Assyrian. The music of the verses is crashing. _And the LORD

shall cause the peal[47] of His voice to be heard, and the lighting down

of His arm to be seen in the fury of anger, yea flame of devouring

fire--bursting and torrent and hailstones. For from the voice of the

LORD shall the Assyrian be scattered when He shall smite with the rod.

And every passage of the rod of fate which the LORD bringeth down upon

him shall be with tabrets and harps, and in battles of waving shall he

be fought against._ The meaning is obscure, but palpable. Probably the

verse describes the ritual of the sacrifice to Moloch, to which there is

no doubt the next verse alludes. To sympathize with the prophet's

figure, we need of course an amount of information about the details of

that ritual which we are very far from possessing. But Isaiah's meaning

is evidently this. The destruction of the Assyrian host will be liker a

holocaust than a battle, like one of those fatal sacrifices to Moloch

which are directed by the solemn waving of a staff, and accompanied by

the music, not of war, but of festival. _Battles of waving_ is a very

obscure phrase, but the word translated _waving_ is the technical term

for the waving of the victim before the sacrifice to signify its

dedication to the deity; "and these _battles of waving_ may perhaps have

taken place in the fashion in which single victims were thrown from one

spear to another till death ensued."[48] At all events, it is evident

that Isaiah means to suggest that the Assyrian dispersion is a religious

act, a solemn holocaust rather than one of this earth's ordinary

battles, and directed by Jehovah Himself from heaven. This becomes clear

enough in the next verse: _For a Topheth hath been set in order

beforehand; yea, for Moloch is it arranged; He hath made it deep and

broad; the pile thereof is fire and much wood; the breath of the LORD,

like a torrent of brimstone, shall kindle it_. So the Assyrian power was

in the end to go up in flame.

[47] So Dr. B. Davis, quoted by Cheyne.

[48] So Bredenkamp in his recent commentary on Isaiah.

We postpone remarks on Isaiah's sense of the fierceness of the Divine

righteousness till we reach his even finer expression of it in chap.

xxxiii.

CHAPTER XIV.

_THREE TRUTHS ABOUT GOD._

ISAIAH xxxi. (ABOUT 702 B.C.).

Chap. xxxi., which forms an appendage to chaps. xxix. and xxx., can

scarcely be reckoned among the more important prophecies of Isaiah. It

is a repetition of the principles which the prophet has already

proclaimed in connection with the faithless intrigues of Judah for an

alliance with Egypt, and it was published at a time when the statesmen

of Judah were further involved in these intrigues, when events were

moving faster, and the prophet had to speak with more hurried words.

Truths now familiar to us are expressed in less powerful language. But

the chapter has its own value; it is remarkable for three very unusual

descriptions of God, which govern the following exposition of it. They

rise in climax, enforcing three truths:--that in the government of life

we must take into account God's wisdom; we must be prepared to find many

of His providences grim and savage-looking; but we must also believe

that He is most tender and jealous for His people.

I. YET HE ALSO IS WISE (vv. 1-3).

We must suppose the negotiations with Egypt to have taken for the moment

a favourable turn, and the statesmen who advocated them to be

congratulating themselves upon some consequent addition to the fighting

strength of Judah. They could point to many chariots and a strong body

of cavalry in proof of their own wisdom and refutation of the prophet's

maxim, _In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength; in

returning and rest shall ye be saved_.

Isaiah simply answers their self-congratulation with the utterance of a

new Woe, and it is in this that the first of the three extraordinary

descriptions of God is placed. _Woe unto them that go down to Egypt for

help; upon horses do they stay, and trust in chariots because they are

many, and in horsemen because they are very strong: but they look not

unto the Holy One of Israel, and Jehovah they do not seek. Yet He also

is wise._ You have been clever and successful, but have you forgotten

that _God also is wise_, that He too has His policy, and acts reasonably

and consistently? You think you have been making history; but God also

works in history, and surely, to put it on the lowest ground, with as

much cleverness and persistence as you do. _Yet He also is wise, and

will bring evil, and will not call back His words, but will arise

against the house of the evil-doers, and against the help of them that

work iniquity._

This satire was the shaft best fitted to pierce the folly of the rulers

of Judah. Wisdom, a reasonable plan for their aims and prudence in

carrying it out, was the last thing they thought of associating with

God, whom they relegated to what they called their religion--their

temples, worship and poetry. When their emotions were stirred by solemn

services, or under great disaster, or in the hour of death, they

remembered God and it seemed natural to them that in these great

exceptions of life He should interfere; but in their politics and their

trade, in the common course and conduct of life, they ignored Him and

put their trust in their own wisdom. They limited God to the ceremonies

and exceptional occasions of life, when they looked for His glory or

miraculous assistance, but they never thought that in their ordinary

ways He had any interest or design.

The forgetfulness, against which Isaiah directs this shaft of satire, is

the besetting sin of very religious people, of very successful people,

and of very clever people.

It is the temptation of an ordinary Christian, church-going people, like

ourselves, with a religion so full of marvellous mercies, and so blessed

with regular opportunities of worship, to think of God only in

connection with these, and practically to ignore that along the far

greater stretches of life He has any interest or purpose regarding us.

Formally-religious people treat God as if He were simply a

constitutional sovereign, to step in at emergencies, and for the rest to

play a nominal and ceremonial part in the conduct of their lives.

Ignoring the Divine wisdom and ceaseless providence of God, and couching

their hearts upon easy views of His benevolence, they have no other

thought of Him, than as a philanthropic magician, whose power is

reserved to extricate men when they have got past helping themselves.

From the earliest times that way of regarding God has been prevalent,

and religious teachers have never failed to stigmatize it with the

hardest name for folly. _Fools_, says the Psalmist, _are afflicted when

they draw near unto the gates of death; then_, only then, _do they cry

unto the Lord in their trouble_. _Thou fool!_ says Christ of the man

who kept God out of the account of his life. God is not mocked, although

we ignore half His being and confine our religion to such facile views

of His nature. With this sarcasm, Isaiah reminds us that it is not a

Fool who is on the throne of the universe; yet is the Being whom the

imaginations of some men place there any better? O wise men, _God also

is wise_. Not by fits and starts of a benevolence similar to that of our

own foolish and inconsistent hearts does He work. Consistency, reason

and law are the methods of His action; and they apply closely,

irretrievably, to all of our life. Hath He promised evil? Then evil will

proceed. Let us believe that God keeps His word; that He is thoroughly

attentive to all we do; that His will concerns the whole of our life.

But the temptation to refuse to God even ordinary wisdom is also the

temptation of very successful and very clever people, such as these

Jewish politicians fancied themselves to be, or such as the Rich Fool in

the parable. They have overcome all they have matched themselves

against, and feel as if they were to be masters of their own future. Now

the Bible and the testimony of men invariably declare that God has one

way of meeting such fools--the way Isaiah suggests here. God meets them

with their own weapons; He outmatches them in their own fashion. In the

eighteenth Psalm it is written, _With the pure Thou wilt show Thyself

pure, and with the perverse Thou wilt show Thyself froward_. The Rich

Fool congratulates himself that his soul is his own; says God, _This

night thy soul shall be required of thee_. The Jewish politicians pride

themselves on their wisdom; _Yet God also is wise_, says Isaiah

significantly. After Moscow Napoleon is reported to have exclaimed,

"The Almighty is too strong for me." But perhaps the most striking

analogy to this satire of Isaiah is to be found in the "Confessions" of

that Jew, from whose living sepulchre we are so often startled with

weird echoes of the laughter of the ancient prophets of his race. When

Heine, Germany's greatest satirist, lay upon a bed to which his evil

living had brought him before his time, and the pride of art, which had

been, as he says, his god, was at last crushed, he tells us what it was

that crushed him. They were singing his songs in every street of his

native land, and his fame had gone out through the world, while he lay

an exile and paralysed upon his "mattress-grave." "Alas!" he cries, "the

irony of Heaven weighs heavily upon me. The great Author of the

universe, the celestial Aristophanes, wished to show me, the petty,

earthly, German Aristophanes, how my most trenchant satires are only

clumsy patchwork compared with His, and how immeasurably He excels me in

humour and colossal wit." That is just a soul writing in its own heart's

blood this terrible warning of Isaiah: _Yet God also is wise_.

_Yea, the Egyptians are men, and not God, and their horses flesh, and

not spirit; and when Jehovah shall stretch out His hand, both he that

helpeth shall stumble, and he that is holpen shall fall, and they all

shall perish together._

II. THE LION AND HIS PREY (ver. 4).

But notwithstanding what he has said about God destroying men who trust

in their own cleverness, Isaiah goes on to assert that God is always

ready to save what is worth saving. The people, the city, His own

city--God will save that. To express God's persistent grace towards

Jerusalem, Isaiah uses two figures borrowed from the beasts. Both of

them are truly Homeric, and fire the imagination at once; but the first

is not one we should have expected to find as a figure of the saving

grace of God. Yet Isaiah knows it is not enough for men to remember how

wise God always is. They need also to be reminded how grim and cruel He

must sometimes appear, even in His saving providences. _For thus saith

Jehovah unto me: Like as when the lion growleth, and the young lion over

his prey, if a mob of shepherds be called forth against him, from their

voice he will not shrink in dismay, nor for their noise abase himself;

so shall Jehovah of hosts come down to fight for Mount Zion and the hill

thereof._ A lion with a lamb in his claws, growling over it, while a

crowd of shepherds come up against him; afraid to go near enough to kill

him, they try to frighten him away by shouting at him. But he holds his

prey unshrinking.

It is a figure that startles at first. To liken God with a saving hold

upon His own to a wild lion with his claws in the prey! But horror plays

the part of a good emphasis; while if we look into the figure, we shall

feel our horror change to appreciation. There is something majestic in

that picture of the lion with the shouting shepherds, too afraid to

strike him. _He will not be dismayed at their voice, nor abase himself

for the noise of them._ Is it, after all, an unworthy figure of the

Divine Claimant for this city, who kept unceasing hold upon her after

His own manner, mysterious and lionlike to men, undisturbed by the

screams, formulas, and prayers of her mob of politicians and

treaty-mongers? For these are the _shepherds_ Isaiah means--sham

shepherds, the shrieking crew of politicians, with their treaties and

military display. God will save and carry Jerusalem His own way, paying

no heed to such. _He will not be dismayed at their voice, nor abase

Himself for the noise of them._

There is more than the unyielding persistency of Divine grace taught

here. There is that to begin with. God will never let go what He has

made His own: the souls He has redeemed from sin, the societies He has

redeemed from barbarism, the characters He has hold of, the lives He has

laid His hand upon. Persistency of saving grace--let us learn that

confidently in the parable. But that is only half of what it is meant to

teach. Look at the shepherds: shepherds shouting round a lion; why does

Isaiah put it that way, and not as David did--lions growling round a

brave shepherd, with the lamb in his arms? Because it so appeared then

in the life Isaiah was picturing, because it often looks the same in

real life still. These politicians--they seemed, they played the part

of, shepherds; and Jehovah, who persistently frustrated their plans for

the salvation of the State--He looked the lion, delivering Jerusalem to

destruction. And very often to men does this arrangement of the parts

repeat itself; and while human friends are anxious and energetic about

them, God Himself appears in providences more lionlike than shepherdly.

He grasps with the savage paw of death some one as dear to us as that

city was to Isaiah. He rends our body or soul or estate. And friends and

our own thoughts gather round the cruel bereavement or disaster with

remonstrance and complaint. Our hearts cry out, doing, like shepherds,

their best to scare by prayer and cries the foe they are too weak to

kill. We all know the scene, and how shabby and mean that mob of human

remonstrances looks in face of the great Foe, majestic though

inarticulate, that with sullen persistence carries off its prey. All we

can say in such times is that if it is God who is the lion, then it is

for the best. For _though He slay me, yet will I trust Him_; and, after

all, it is safer to rely on the mercies of God, lionlike though they be,

than on the weak benevolences and officious pities of the best of human

advisers. "Thy will be done"--let perfect reverence teach us to feel

that, even when providence seems as savage as men that day thought God's

will towards Jerusalem.

In addition then to remembering, when men seem by their cleverness and

success to rule life, that God is wiser and His plans more powerful than

theirs, we are not to forget, when men seem more anxious and merciful

than His dark providence, that for all their argument and action His

will shall not alter. But now we are to hear that this will, so hard and

mysterious, is as merciful and tender as a mother's.

III. THE MOTHER-BIRD AND HER NEST (ver. 5).

_As birds hovering, so will Jehovah of hosts cover Jerusalem, He will

cover and deliver it: He will pass over and preserve it._ At last we are

through dark providence, to the very heart of the Almighty. The meaning

is familiar from its natural simplicity and frequent use in Scripture.

Two features of it our version has not reproduced. The word _birds_

means the smaller kind of feathered creatures, and the word _hovering_

is feminine in the original: _As little mother-birds hovering, so will

Jehovah of hosts protect Jerusalem_. We have been watching in spring the

hedge where we know is a nest. Suddenly the mother-bird, who has been

sitting on a branch close by, flutters off her perch, passes backwards

and forwards, with flapping wings that droop nervously towards the nest

over her young. A hawk is in the sky, and till he disappears she will

hover--the incarnation of motherly anxiety. This is Isaiah's figure. His

native city, on which he poured so much of his heart in lyrics and

parables, was again in danger. Sennacherib was descending upon her; and

the pity of Isaiah's own heart for her, evil though she was, suggested

to him a motherhood of pity in the breast of God. The suggestion God

Himself approved. Centuries after, when He assumed our flesh and spoke

our language, when He put His love into parables lowly and familiar to

our affections, there were none of them more beautiful than that which

He uttered of this same city, weeping as He spake: _O Jerusalem,

Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a

hen gathereth her brood under her wings, and ye would not!_

With such fountains in Scripture, we need not, as some have done, exalt

the Virgin, or virtually make a fourth person in the Godhead, and that a

woman, in order to satisfy those natural longings of the heart which the

widespread worship of the mother of Jesus tells us are so peremptory.

For all fulness dwelleth in God Himself. Not only may we rejoice in that

pity and wise provision for our wants, in that pardon and generosity,

which we associate with the name of father, but also in the wakefulness,

the patience, the love, lovelier with fear, which make a mother's heart

so dear and indispensable. We cannot tell along what wakened nerve the

grace of God may reach our hearts; but Scripture has a medicine for

every pain. And if any feel their weakness as little children feel it,

let them know that the Spirit of God broods over them, as a mother over

her babe; and if any are in pain or anxiety, and there is no human

heart to suffer with them, let them know that as closely as a mother may

come to suffer with her child, and as sensitive as she is to its danger,

so sensitive is God Almighty to theirs, and that He gives them proof of

their preciousness to Him by suffering with them.

* * * * *

How these three descriptions meet the three failings of our faith! We

forget that God is ceaselessly at work in wisdom in our lives. We forget

that God must sometimes, even when He is saving us, seem lionlike and

cruel. We forget that "the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully

kind."

Having thus made vivid the presence of their Lord to the purged eyes of

His people, patient, powerful in order, wise in counsel, persistent in

grace, and, last of all, very tender, Isaiah concludes with a cry to the

people to turn to this Lord, from whom they have so deeply revolted. Let

them cast away their idols, and there shall be no fear of the result of

the Assyrian invasion. The Assyrian shall fall, not by the sword of man,

but the immediate stroke of God. _And his rock shall pass away by reason

of terror, and his princes shall be dismayed at the ensign, saith the

Lord, whose fire is in Zion, and His furnace in Jerusalem._ And so

Isaiah closes this series of prophecies on the keynote with which it

opened in the first verse of chap. xxix.: that Jerusalem is Ariel--_the

hearth and altar, the dwelling-place and sanctuary, of God_.

CHAPTER XV.

_A MAN: CHARACTER AND THE CAPACITY TO DISCRIMINATE CHARACTER._

ISAIAH xxxii. 1-8 (ABOUT 702 B.C.?).

The Assyrians being thus disposed of, Isaiah turns to a prospect, on

which we have scarcely heard him speak these twenty years, since Assyria

appeared on the frontier of Judah--the religious future and social

progress of his own people. This he paints in a small prophecy of eight

verses, the first eight of chap. xxxii.--verses 9-20 of that chapter

apparently springing from somewhat different conditions.

The first eight verses of chap. xxxii. belong to a class of prophecies

which we may call Isaiah's "escapes." Like St. Paul, Isaiah, when he has

finished some exposition of God's dealings with His people or argument

with the sinners among them, bursts upon an unencumbered vision of the

future, and with roused conscience, and voice resonant from long debate,

takes his loftiest flights of eloquence. In Isaiah's book we have

several of these visions, and each bears a character of its own

according to the sort of sinners from whom the prophet shook himself

loose to describe it and the kind of indignation that filled his heart

at the time. We have already seen, how in some of Isaiah's visions the

Messiah has the chief place, while from others He is altogether absent.

But here we come upon another inconsistency. Sometimes, as in chap. xi.,

Isaiah is content with nothing but a new dispensation--the entire

transformation of nature, when there shall be no more desert or storm,

but to the wild animals docility shall come, and among men an end to

sorrow, fraud and war. But again he limits his prophetic soul and

promises less. As if, overcome by the spectacle of the more clamant

needs and horrible vices of society, he had said, we must first get rid

of these, we must supply those, before we can begin to dream of heaven.

Such is Isaiah's feeling here. This prophecy is not a vision of society

glorified, but of society established and reformed, with its foundation

firmly settled (ver. 1), with its fountain forces in full operation

(ver. 2), and with an absolute check laid upon its worst habits, as, for

instance, the moral grossness, lying and pretence which the prophet has

been denouncing for several chapters (vv. 3-8). This moderation of the

prophecy brings it within the range of practical morals; while the

humanity of it, its freedom from Jewish or Oriental peculiarities,

renders it thoroughly modern. If every unfulfilled prophecy ought to be

an accusing conscience in the breast of the Christian Church, there will

be none more clamant and practical than this one. Its demands are

essential to the social interests of to-day.

In ver. 1 we have the presupposition of the whole prophecy: _Behold, in

righteousness shall a king reign, and princes--according to justice

shall they rule_. A just government is always the basis of Isaiah's

vision of the future. Here he defines it with greater abstractness than

he has been wont to do. It is remarkable, that a writer, whose pen has

already described the figure of the coming King so concretely and with

so much detail, should here content himself with a general promise of a

righteous government, regarding, as he seems to do, rather the office of

kinghood, than any single eminent occupier of it. That the prophet of

Immanuel, and still more the prophet of the Prince-of-the-Four-Names

(chap. ix. 7), and of the Son of Jesse (chap. xi. 1), should be able to

paint the ideal future, and speak of the just government that was to

prevail in it, without at the same time referring to his previous very

explicit promises of a royal Individual, is a fact which we cannot

overlook in support of the opinion we have expressed on pp. 180 and 181

concerning the object of Isaiah's Messianic hopes.

Nor is the vagueness of the first verse corrected by the terms of the

second: _And a man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind_, etc. We

have already spoken of this verse as an ethical advance upon Isaiah's

previous picture of the Messiah (see p. 182). But while, of course, the

Messiah was to Isaiah the ideal of human character, and therefore shared

whatsoever features he might foresee in its perfect development, it is

evident that in this verse Isaiah is not thinking of the Messiah alone

or particularly. When he says with such simplicity _a_ man, he means any

man, he means the ideal for every man. Having in ver. 1 laid down the

foundation for social life, he tells us in ver. 2 what the shelter and

fountain force of society are to be: not science nor material wealth,

but personal influence, the strength and freshness of the human

personality. _A man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind and a

covert from the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the

shadow of a great rock in a weary land._ After just government (ver. 1)

great characters are the prophet's first demand (ver. 2), and then (vv.

3-8) he will ask for the capacity to discriminate character. "Character

and the capacity to discriminate character" indeed summarizes this

prophecy.

I. A MAN (ver. 2).

Isaiah has described personal influence on so grand a scale that it is

not surprising that the Church has leapt to his words as a direct

prophecy of Jesus Christ. They are indeed a description of Him, out of

whose shadow advancing time has not been able to carry the children of

men, who has been the shelter and fertility of every generation since He

was lifted up, and to whom the affections of individual hearts never

rise higher than when they sing--

"Rock of ages, cleft for me,

Let me hide myself in Thee."

Such a rock was Christ indeed; but, in accordance with what we have said

above, the prophet here has no individual specially in his view, but is

rather laying down a general description of the influence of individual

character, of which Christ Jesus was the highest instance. Taken in this

sense, his famous words present us, _first_, with a philosophy of

history, at the heart of which there is, _secondly_, a great gospel, and

in the application of which there is, _thirdly_, a great ideal and duty

for ourselves.

1. Isaiah gives us in this verse a PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. Great men are

not the whole of life, but they are the condition of all the rest; if it

were not for the big men, the little ones could scarcely live. The first

requisites of religion and civilisation are outstanding characters.

In the East the following phenomenon is often observed. Where the desert

touches a river-valley or oasis, the sand is in a continual state of

drift from the wind, and it is this drift which is the real cause of the

barrenness of such portions of the desert at least as abut upon the

fertile land. For under the rain, or by infiltration of the river,

plants often spring up through the sand, and there is sometimes promise

of considerable fertility. It never lasts. Down comes the periodic

drift, and life is stunted or choked out. But set down a rock on the

sand, and see the difference its presence makes. After a few showers, to

the leeward side of this some blades will spring up; if you have

patience, you will see in time a garden. How has the boulder produced

this? Simply by arresting the drift.

Now that is exactly how great men benefit human life. A great man serves

his generation, serves the whole race, by arresting the drift. Deadly

forces, blind and fatal as the desert wind, sweep down human history. In

the beginning it was the dread of Nature, the cold blast which blows

from every quarter on the barbarian, and might have stunted men to

animals. But into some soul God breathed a great breath of freedom, and

the man defied Nature. Nature has had her revenge by burying the rebel

in oblivion. On the distant horizon of history we can see, merely in

some old legend, the evidence of his audacity. But the drift was

arrested; behind the event men took shelter, in the shelter grew free,

and learned to think out what the first great resister felt.

When history had left this rock behind, and the drift had again space to

grow, the same thing happened; and the hero this time was Abraham. He

laid his back to the practice of his forefathers, and lifting his brow

to heaven, was the first to worship the One Unseen God. Abraham

believed; and in the shadow of his faith, and sheltered by his example,

his descendants learned to believe too. To-day from within the three

great spiritual religions men look back to him as the father of the

faithful.

When Isaiah, while all his countrymen were rushing down the mad, steep

ways of politics, carried off by the only powers that were as yet known

in these ways, fear of death and greed to be on the side of the

strongest--when Isaiah stood still amid that panic rush, and uttered the

memorable words, _In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength;

in returning and rest shall ye be saved_, he stopped one of the most

dangerous drifts in history, and created in its despite a shelter for

those spiritual graces, which have always been the beauty of the State,

and are now coming to be recognized as its strength.

When, in the early critical days of the Church, that dark drift of

Jewish custom, which had overflown the barriers set to the old

dispensation, threatened to spread its barrenness upon the fields of the

Gentile world, already white to the harvest of Christ, and Peter and

Barnabas and all the Apostles were carried away by it, what was it that

saved Christianity? Under God, it was this: that Paul got up and, as he

tells us, withstood Peter to the face.

And, again, when the powers of the Roman Church and the Roman Empire,

checked for a little by the efforts which began the Reformation,

gathered themselves together and rose in one awful front of emperor,

cardinals, and princes at the Diet of Worms, what was it that stood fast

against that drift of centuries, and proved the rock, under whose

shelter men dared to read God's pure word again, and preach His Gospel?

It was the word of a lonely monk: "Here stand I. I cannot otherwise. So

help me, God."

So that Isaiah is right. A single man has been as _an hiding-place from

the wind and a covert from the tempest_. History is swept by drifts:

superstition, error, poisonous custom, dust-laden controversy. What has

saved humanity has been the upraising of some great man to resist those

drifts, to set his will, strong through faith, against the prevailing

tendency, and be the shelter of the weaker, but not less desirous, souls

of his brethren. "The history of what man has accomplished in the world

is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked there." Under

God, personal human power is the highest force, and God has ever used it

as His chief instrument.

2. But in this philosophy of history there is a GOSPEL. Isaiah's words

are not only man's ideal; they are God's promise, and that promise has

been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the most conspicuous

example--none others are near Him--of this personal influence in which

Isaiah places all the shelter and revival of society. God has set His

seal to the truth, that the greatest power in shaping human destiny is

man himself, by becoming one with man, by using a human soul to be the

Saviour of the race. _A man_, says Isaiah, _shall be as an hiding-place

from the wind, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land_; and the

Rock of ages was a Man. The world indeed knew that personal character

could go higher than all else in the world, but they never knew how high

till they saw Jesus Christ, or how often till they numbered His

followers.

This figure of a rock, a rock resisting drift, gives us some idea, not

only of the commanding influence of Christ's person, but of that special

office from which all the glory of His person and of His name arises:

that _He saves His people from their sins_.

For what is sin? Sin is simply the longest, heaviest drift in human

history. It arose in the beginning, and has carried everything before it

since. "The oldest custom of the race," it is the most powerful habit of

the individual. Men have reared against it government, education,

philosophy, system after system of religion. But sin overwhelmed them

all.

Only Christ resisted, and His resistance saves the world. Alone among

human lives presented to our view, that of Christ is sinless. What is so

prevalent in human nature that we cannot think of a human individual

without it never stained Christ's life. Sin was about Him; it was not

that He belonged to another sphere of things which lay above it. Sin was

about Him. He rose from its midst with the same frailty as other men,

encompassed by the same temptations; but where they rose to fall, He

rose to stand, and standing, became the world's Saviour. The great

tradition was broken; the drift was arrested. Sin never could be the

same again after the sinless manhood of Christ. The old world's sins and

cruel customs were shut out from the world that came after. Some of them

ceased so absolutely as scarcely to be afterwards named; and the rest

were so curbed that no civilised society suffered them to pass from its

constraint, and no public conscience tolerated them as natural or

necessary evils.

What the surface of the world's life bears so deeply, that does every

individual, who puts his trust in Jesus, feel to the core. Of Jesus the

believer can truly say that life on _this_ side of Him is very different

from life on _that_. Temptations keep far away from the heart that keeps

near to Christ. Under the shadow of our Rock, for us the evil of the

present loses all its suggestiveness, the evil of the past its awful

surge of habit and guilty fear.

3. But there is not only a philosophy of history and a gospel in this

promise of _a man_. There is a great DUTY and IDEAL for every one. If

this prophecy distinctly reaches forward to Jesus Christ as its only

perfect fulfilment, the vagueness of its expression permits of its

application to all, and through Him its fulfilment by all becomes a

possibility. Now each of us may be a rock, a shelter and a source of

fertility to the life around him in three modes of constant influence.

We can be like Christ, the Rock, in shutting out from our neighbours the

knowledge and infection of sin, in keeping our conversation so

unsuggestive and unprovocative of evil, that, though sin drift upon us,

it shall never drift through us. And we may be like Christ, the Rock, in

shutting out blame from other men; in sheltering them from the east wind

of pitiless prejudice, quarrel or controversy; in stopping the unclean

and bitter drifts of scandal and gossip. How many lives have lost their

fertility for the want of a little silence and a little shadow! Some

righteous people have a terribly north-eastern exposure; children do not

play about their doors, nor the prodigal stop there. And again, as there

are a number of men and women who fall in struggling for virtue simply

because they never see it successful in others, and the spectacle of one

pure, heroic character would be their salvation, here is another way in

which each servant of God may be a rock. Of the late Clerk Maxwell it

was said, "He made faith in goodness easy to other men." _A man shall be

as streams of water in a desert place._

II. CAPACITY TO DISTINGUISH CHARACTER (vv. 3-8).

But after the coming of this ideal, it is not paradise that is regained.

Paradise is farther off. We must have truth to begin with: truth and the

capacity to discriminate character. The sternness with which Isaiah thus

postpones his earlier vision shows us how sore his heart was about the

_lying_ temper of his people. We have heard him deploring the

fascination of their false minds by the Egyptian Pretence. Their

falseness, however, had not only shown itself in their foreign politics,

but in their treatment of one another, in their social fashions,

judgements and worships. In society there prevailed a want of moral

insight and of moral courage. At home also the Jews had failed to call

things by their right names (cf. p. 226). Therefore next in their future

Isaiah desires the cure of moral blindness, haste and cowardice (vv. 3,

4), with the explosion of all social lies (ver. 5). Men shall stand out

for what they are, whether they be bad--for the bad shall not be wanting

(vv. 6, 7)--or good (ver. 8). On righteous government (ver. 1) and

influence of strong men (ver. 2) must follow social truthfulness (vv.

3-8). Such is the line of the prophet's demands. The details of vv. 3-8

are exceedingly interesting.

_And not closed shall be the eyes of them that see, and the ears of them

that hear shall be pricked up._ The context makes it clear that this is

spoken, not of intellectual, but of moral, insight and alertness. _And

the heart of the hasty shall learn how to know, and the tongue of the

stammerer be quick_ (the verb is the same as the _hasty_ of the

previous clause) _to speak plain things_. _Startlingly plain

things_--for the word literally means _blinding-white_, and is so used

of the sun--_startlingly plain_, like that scorching epigram upon Egypt.

The morally rash and the morally timid are equal fathers of lies.

In illustration Isaiah takes the conventional abuse of certain moral

terms, exposes it and declares it shall cease: _The vile person shall no

more be called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful_. _Liberal_

and _bountiful_ were conventional names. The Hebrew word for _liberal_

originally meant exactly that--_open-hearted_, _generous_,

_magnanimous_. In the East it is the character which above all they call

princely. So like our words "noble" and "nobility," it became a term of

rank, _lord_ or _prince_, and was often applied to men who were not at

all great-hearted, but the very opposite--even to the _vile person_.

_Vile person_ is literally the _faded_ or the _exhausted_, whether

mentally or morally--the last kind of character that could be princely.

The other conventional term used by Isaiah refers to wealth rather than

rank. The Hebrew for _bountiful_ literally means _abundant_, a man

blessed with plenty, and is used in the Old Testament both for the rich

and the fortunate. Its nearest English equivalent is perhaps _the

successful man_. To this Isaiah fitly opposes a name, wrongly rendered

in our version _churl_, but corrected in the margin to _crafty_--_the

fraudulent_, _the knave_. When moral discrimination comes, says Isaiah,

men will not apply the term _princely_ to _worn-out_ characters, nor

grant them the social respect implied by the term. They will not call

the _fraudulent_ the _fortunate_, nor canonise him as successful, who

has gotten his wealth by underhand means. _The worthless character shall

no more be called princely, nor the knave hailed as the successful._ But

men's characters shall stand out true in their actions, and by their

fruits ye shall know them. In those magic days the heart shall come to

the lips, and its effects be unmistakeable. _For the worthless person,

worthlessness shall he speak_--what else can he?--_and his heart shall

do iniquity, to practise profaneness and to utter against the LORD rank

error, to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will cause the drink

of the thirsty to fail_. _The tools, too, of the knave_ (a play upon

words here--"Keli Kelav," _the knave his knives_) _are evil; he! low

tricks he deviseth to destroy the poor with words of falsehood, even

when the poor speaks justice_ (that is, has justice as well as poverty

to plead for him). _But the princely things deviseth, and he upon

princely things shall stand_--not upon conventional titles or rank, or

the respect of insincere hearts, but upon actual deeds of generosity and

sacrifice.

After great characters, then, what society needs is capacity to discern

character, and the chief obstacle in the way of this discernment is the

substitution of a conventional morality for a true morality, and of some

distinctions of man's making for the eternal difference which God has

set between right and wrong.

Human progress consists, according to Isaiah, of getting rid of these

conventions; and in this history bears him out. The abolition of

slavery, the recognition of the essential nobility of labour, the

abolition of infanticide, the emancipation of woman--all these are due

to the release of men's minds from purely conventional notions, and the

courageous application in their place of the fundamental laws of

righteousness and love. If progress is still to continue, it must be by

the same method. In many directions it is still a false

conventionalism,--sometimes the relic of barbarism, sometimes the fruit

of civilisation,--that blocks the way. The savage notions which

obstruct the enforcement of masculine purity have to be exposed. Nor

shall we ever get true commercial prosperity, or the sense of security

which is indispensable to that, till men begin to cease calling

transactions all right merely because they are the custom of the trade

and the means to which its members look for profits.

But, above all, as Isaiah tells us, we need to look to our use of

language. It is one of the standing necessities of pure science to

revise the terminology, to reserve for each object a special name, and

see that all men understand the same object by the same name. Otherwise

confusion comes in, and science is impossible. The necessity, though not

so faithfully recognized, is as imperative in morals. If we consider the

disgraceful mistakes in popular morals which have been produced by the

transference and degradation of names, we shall feel it to be a

religious duty to preserve for these their proper meaning. In the

interests of morality, we must not be careless in our use of moral

terms. As Socrates says in the _Phædo_: "To use words wrongly and

indefinitely is not merely an error in itself; it also creates evil in

the soul."[49] What noxious misconceptions, what mistaken ideals of

life, are due to the abuse of these four words alone: "noble,"

"gentleman," "honour" and "Christian"! By applying these, in flattery or

deceit, to persons unworthy of them, men have not only deprived them of

the virtue which originally the mere utterance of them was enough to

instil into the heart, but have sent forth to the world under their

attractiveness second-rate types of character and ideals. The word

"gentleman"! How the heart sickens as it thinks what a number of people

have been satisfied to aim at a shoddy and superficial life because it

was labelled with this gracious name. Conventionalism has deprived the

English language of some of its most powerful sermons by devoting terms

of singular moral expressiveness to do duty as mere labels upon

characters that are dead, or on ranks and offices, for the designation

of which mere cyphers might have sufficed.

[49] Cf. further with this passage F. J. Church, _Trial and Death of

Socrates_, Introd. xli. ff.

We must not forget, however, Isaiah's chief means for the abolition of

this conventionalism and the substitution of a true moral vision and

terminology. These results are to follow from the presence of the great

character, _A Man_, whom he has already lifted up. Conventionalism is

another of the drifts which that _Rock_ has to arrest. Setting ourselves

to revise our dictionaries or to restore to our words their original

meanings out of our memories is never enough. The rising of a

conspicuous character alone can dissipate the moral haze; the sense of

his influence will alone fill emptied forms with meaning. So Christ

Jesus judged and judges the world by His simple presence; men fall to

His right hand and to His left. He calls things by their right names,

and restores to each term of religion and morals its original ideal,

which the vulgar use of the world had worn away.[50]

[50] Cf. with the fifth and sixth verses of chap. xxxii. the forcible

passage in the introduction to Carlyle's _Cromwell's Letters_,

beginning, "Sure enough, in the Heroic Century, as in the Unheroic,

knaves and cowards ... were not wanting. But the question always

remains, Did they lie chained?" etc.

CHAPTER XVI.

_ISAIAH TO WOMEN._

ISAIAH xxxii. 9-20 (DATE UNCERTAIN).

The date of this prophecy, which has been appended to those spoken by

Isaiah during the Egyptian intrigues (704-702), is not certain. It is

addressed to women, and there is no reason why the prophet, when he was

upbraiding the men of Judah for their false optimism, should not also

have sought to awaken the conscience of their wives and daughters on

what is the besetting sin rather of women than of men. The chief

evidence for dissociating the prophecy from its immediate predecessors

is that it predicts, or apparently predicts (vv. 13-14), the ruin of

Jerusalem, whereas in these years Isaiah was careful to exempt the Holy

City from the fate which he saw falling on the rest of the land. But

otherwise the argument of the prophecy is almost exactly that of chaps.

xxix.-xxx. By using the same words when he blames the women for _ease_

and _carelessness_ in vv. 9-11, as he does when he promises _confidence_

and _quiet resting-places_ in vv. 17, 18, Isaiah makes clear that his

purpose is to contrast the false optimism of society during the

postponement of the Assyrian invasion with that confidence and stability

upon righteousness which the Spirit of God can alone create. The

prophecy, too, has the usual three stages: sin in the present,

judgement in the immediate future, and a state of blessedness in the

latter days. The near date at which judgement is threatened--_days

beyond a year_--ought to be compared with chap. xxix. 1: _Add ye a year

to a year; let the feasts come round_.

The new points are--that it is the women who are threatened, that

Jerusalem itself is pictured in ruin, and that the pouring out of the

Spirit is promised as the cause of the blessed future.

I. THE CHARGE TO THE WOMEN (vv. 9-12)

is especially interesting, not merely for its own terms, but because it

is only part of a treatment of women which runs through the whole of

Scripture.

Isaiah had already delivered against the women of Jerusalem a severe

diatribe (chap. iii.), the burden of which was their vanity and

haughtiness. With the satiric temper, which distinguishes his earlier

prophecies, he had mimicked their ogling and mincing gait, and described

pin by pin their fashions and ornaments, promising them instead of these

things _rottenness_ and _baldness_, and _a girdle of sackcloth and

branding for beauty_. But he has grown older, and penetrating below

their outward fashion and gait, he charges them with thoughtlessness as

the besetting sin of their sex. _Ye women that are at ease, rise up, and

hear my voice; ye careless daughters, give ear to my speech. For days

beyond a year shall ye be troubled, O careless women, for the vintage

shall fail; the ingathering shall not come. Tremble, ye women that are

at ease; be troubled, ye careless ones._ By a pair of epithets he

describes their fault; and almost thrice does he repeat the pair, as if

he would emphasize it past all doubt. The besetting sin of women, as he

dins into them, is ease; an ignorant and unthinking contentment with

things as they are; thoughtlessness with regard to the deeper mysteries

of life; disbelief in the possibility of change.

But Isaiah more than hints that these besetting sins of women are but

the defects of their virtues. The literal meaning of the two adjectives

he uses, _at ease_ and _careless_, is _restful_ and _trustful_.

Scripture throughout employs these words both in a good and a bad sense.

Isaiah does so himself in this very chapter (compare these verses with

vv. 17, 18). In the next chapter he describes the state of Jerusalem

after redemption as a state of _ease_ or _restfulness_, and we know that

he never ceased urging the people to _trustfulness_. For such truly

religious conditions he uses exactly the same names as for the shallow

optimism with which he now charges his countrywomen. And so doing, he

reminds us of an important law of character. The besetting sins of

either sex are its virtues prostituted. A man's greatest temptations

proceed from his strength; but the glory of the feminine nature is

repose, and trust is the strength of the feminine character, in which

very things, however, lies all the possibility of woman's degradation.

Woman's faith amounts at times to real intuition; but what risks are

attached to this prophetic power--of impatience, of contentment with the

first glance at things, "the inclination," as a great moralist has put

it, "to take too easily the knowledge of the problems of life, and to

rest content with what lies nearest her, instead of penetrating to a

deeper foundation." Women are full of indulgence and hope; but what

possibilities lie there of deception, false optimism, and want of that

anxiety which alone makes progress possible. Women are more inclined

than men to believe all things; but how certain is such a temper to

sacrifice the claims of truth and honour. Women are full of tact, the

just favourites of success, with infinite power to plead and please; but

if they are aware of this, how certain is such a self-consciousness to

produce negligence and the fatal sleep of the foolish virgins.

Scripture insists repeatedly on this truth of Isaiah's about the

besetting sin of women. The prophet Amos has engraved it in one of his

sharpest epigrams, declaring that thoughtlessness is capable of turning

women into very brutes, and their homes into desolate ruins: _Hear this

word, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria, which

oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say unto their lords,

Bring and let us drink. The Lord Jehovah hath sworn by His holiness

that, lo, the days shall come upon you that they shall take you away

with hooks, and your residue with fish-hooks, and ye shall go out at the

breaches, every one straight before her, and ye shall cast yourselves

into Harmon, saith Jehovah._ It is a cowherd's picture of women: a troop

of cows, heavy, heedless animals, trampling in their anxiety for food

upon every frail and lowly object in the way. There is a cowherd's

coarseness in it, but a prophet's insight into character. Not of

Jezebels, or Messalinas, or Lady-Macbeths is it spoken, but of the

ordinary matrons of Samaria. Thoughtlessness is able to make brutes out

of women of gentle nurture, with homes and a religion. For

thoughtlessness when joined to luxury or beauty plays with cruel

weapons. It means greed, arrogance, indifference to suffering,

wantonness, pride of conquest, dissimulation in love, and revenge for

little slights; and there is no waste, unkind sport, insolence,

brutality, or hysterical violence to which it will not lead. Such women

are known, as Amos pictured them, through many degrees of this

thoughtlessness: interrupters of conversation, an offence to the wise;

devourers of many of the little ones of God's creation for the sake of

their own ornament; tormentors of servants and subordinates for the sake

of their own ease; out of the enjoyment of power or for admiration's

sake breakers of hearts. And are not all such victims of thoughtlessness

best compared, with Amos, to a cow--an animal that rushes at its grass

careless of the many daisies and ferns it tramples, that will destroy

the beauty of a whole country lane for a few mouthfuls of herbage?

Thoughtlessness, says Amos--_and the Lord GOD hath sworn it by His

holiness_--is the very negation of womanhood, the ruin of homes.

But when we turn from the degradation of woman as thus exposed by the

prophets to her glory as lifted up in the New Testament, we find that

the same note is struck. Woman in the New Testament is gracious

according as she is thoughtful; she offends even when otherwise

beautiful by her feeling overpowering her thought. Martha spoils a most

estimable character by one moment of unthinking passion, in which she

accuses the Master of carelessness. Mary chooses the better part in

close attention to her Master's words. The Ten Virgins are divided into

five wise and five foolish. Paul seems to have been struck, as Isaiah

was, with the natural tendency of the female character, for the first

duty he lays upon the old women is to _teach the young women to think

discreetly_, and he repeats the injunction, putting it before chastity

and industry--_Teach them_, he says, _teach them discretion_ (Titus ii.

4, 5). In Mary herself, the mother of our Lord, we see two graces of

character, to the honour of which Scripture gives equal place--faith and

thoughtfulness. The few sentences, which are all that he devotes to

Mary's character, the Evangelist divides equally between these two. She

was called _blessed_ because she believed the word of the Lord. But

trustfulness did not mean in her, as in other women, neglect to think.

Twice, at an interval of twelve years, we are shown thoughtfulness and

carefulness of memory as the habitual grace of this first among women.

_Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. His mother

kept all these sayings in her heart._[51] What was Mary's glory was

other women's salvation. By her own logic the sufferer of Capernaum,

whom many physicians failed to benefit, found her cure; by her

persistent argument the Syrophenician woman received her daughter to

health again. And when our Lord met that flippant descendant of the

_kine of Bashan, that are in the mount of Samaria_, how did He treat her

that He might save her but by giving her matter to think about, by

speaking to her in riddles, by exploding her superficial knowledge, and

scattering her easy optimism?

[51] Cf. Newman, _Oxford University Sermons_, xv.

So does all Scripture declare, in harmony with the oracle of Isaiah,

that thoughtlessness and easy contentment with things as they be, are

the besetting sins of woman. But her glory is discretion.

II. The next new point in this prophecy is the

DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM (vv. 13-15).

_Upon the land of my people shall come up thorns and briers; yea, upon

all the houses of joy in the joyous city: for the palace shall be

forsaken; the populous city shall be deserted; Ophel and the Watch-tower

shall be for dens for ever, a joy of wild asses, a pasture of flocks._

The attempt has been made to confine this reference to the outskirts of

the sacred city, but it is hardly a just one. The prophet, though he

does not name the city, evidently means Jerusalem, and means the whole

of it. Some therefore deny the authenticity of the prophecy. Certainly

it is almost impossible to suppose, that so definite a sentence of ruin

can have been published at the same time as the assurances of

Jerusalem's inviolability in the preceding orations. But that does not

prevent the hypothesis that it was uttered by Isaiah at an earlier

period, when, as in chaps. ii. and iii., he did say extreme things about

the destruction of his city. It must be noticed, however, that Isaiah

speaks with some vagueness; that at the present moment he is not

concerned with any religious truth or will of the Almighty, but simply

desires to contrast the careless gaiety of the women of Jerusalem with

the fate hanging over them. How could he do this more forcibly than by

turning the streets and gardens of their delights into ruins and the

haunts of the wild ass, even though it should seem inconsistent with his

declaration that Zion was inviolable? Licence for a certain amount of

inconsistency is absolutely necessary in the case of a prophet who had

so many divers truths to utter to so many opposite interests and

tempers. Besides, at this time he had already reduced Jerusalem very low

(xxix. 4).

III. THE SPIRIT OUTPOURED (vv. 15-20).

The rest of the prophecy is luminous rather than lucid, full of suffused

rather than distinct meanings. The date of the future regeneration is

indefinite--another feature more in harmony with Isaiah's earlier

prophecies than his later. The cause of the blessing is the outpouring

of the Spirit of God (ver. 15). Righteousness and peace are to come to

earth by a distinct creative act of God. Isaiah adds his voice to the

invariable testimony of prophets and apostles, who, whether they speak

of society or the heart of individual man, place their hope in new life

from above by the Spirit of the living God. Victor Hugo says, "There are

no weeds in society, only bad cultivators;" and places all hope of

progress towards perfection in proper methods of social culture. These

are needed, as much as the corn, which will not spring from the sunshine

alone, requires the hand of the sower, and the harrow. And Isaiah, too,

speaks here of human conduct and effort as required to fill up the

blessedness of the future: righteousness and labour. But first, and

indispensably, he, with all the prophets, places the Spirit of God.

It appears that Isaiah looked for the fruits of the Spirit both as

material and moral. He bases the quiet resting-places and regular

labours of the future not on righteousness only, but on fertility and

righteousness. _The wilderness shall become a fruitful field_, and _what

is_ to-day _a fruitful field shall be counted as a forest_. That this

proverb, used by Isaiah more than once, is not merely a metaphor for the

moral revolution he describes in the next verse, is proved by his having

already declared the unfruitfulness of their soil as part of his

people's punishment. Fertility is promised for itself, and as the

accompaniment of moral bountifulness. _And there shall dwell in the

wilderness justice, and righteousness shall abide in the fruitful field.

And the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect, or

service, of righteousness, quietness and confidence for ever. And my

people shall abide in a peaceable habitation, and in sure dwellings, and

in quiet resting-places.... Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters,

that send forth the feet of the ox and the ass!_

There is not a prophecy more characteristic of Isaiah. It unfolds what

for him were the two essential and equal contents of the will of God: a

secure land and a righteous people, the fertility of nature and the

purity of society. But in those years (705-702) he did not forget that

something must come between him and that paradise. Across the very

middle of his vision of felicity there dashes a cruel storm. In the gap

indicated above Isaiah wrote, _But it shall hail in the downfall of the

forest, and the city shall be utterly laid low._ A hailstorm between the

promise and fulfilment of summer! Isaiah could only mean the Assyrian

invasion, which was now lowering so dark. Before it bursts we must

follow him to the survey which he made, during these years before the

siege of Jerusalem, of the foreign nations on whom, equally with

Jerusalem, that storm was to sweep.

CHAPTER XVII.

_ISAIAH TO THE FOREIGN NATIONS._

ISAIAH xiv. 24-32, xv.-xxi., and xxiii. (736-702 B.C.).

The centre of the Book of Isaiah (chaps. xiii. to xxiii.) is occupied by

a number of long and short prophecies which are a fertile source of

perplexity to the conscientious reader of the Bible. With the

exhilaration of one who traverses plain roads and beholds vast

prospects, he has passed through the opening chapters of the book as far

as the end of the twelfth; and he may look forward to enjoying a similar

experience when he reaches those other clear stretches of vision from

the twenty-fourth to the twenty-seventh and from the thirtieth to the

thirty-second. But here he loses himself among a series of prophecies

obscure in themselves and without obvious relation to one another. The

subjects of them are the nations, tribes and cities with which in

Isaiah's day, by war or treaty or common fear in face of the Assyrian

conquest, Judah was being brought into contact. There are none of the

familiar names of the land and tribes of Israel which meet the reader in

other obscure prophecies and lighten their darkness with the face of a

friend. The names and allusions are foreign, some of them the names of

tribes long since extinct, and of places which it is no more possible to

identify. It is a very jungle of prophecy, in which, without much

Gospel or geographical light, we have to grope our way, thankful for an

occasional gleam of the picturesque--a sandstorm in the desert, the

forsaken ruins of Babylon haunted by wild beasts, a view of Egypt's

canals or Phoenicia's harbours, a glimpse of an Arab raid or of a

grave Ethiopian embassy.

But in order to understand the Book of Isaiah, in order to understand

Isaiah himself in some of the largest of his activities and hopes, we

must traverse this thicket. It would be tedious and unprofitable to

search every corner of it. We propose, therefore, to give a list of the

various oracles, with their dates and titles, for the guidance of

Bible-readers, then to take three representative texts and gather the

meaning of all the oracles round them.

First, however, two of the prophecies must be put aside. The

twenty-second chapter does not refer to a foreign State, but to

Jerusalem itself; and the large prophecy which opens the series (chaps.

xiii.-xiv. 23) deals with the overthrow of Babylon in circumstances that

did not arise till long after Isaiah's time, and so falls to be

considered by us along with similar prophecies at the close of this

volume. (See Book V.)

All the rest of these chapters--xiv.-xxi. and xxiii.--refer to Isaiah's

own day. They were delivered by the prophet at various times throughout

his career; but the most of them evidently date from immediately after

the year 705, when, on the death of Sargon, there was a general

rebellion of the Assyrian vassals.

1. xiv. 24-27. OATH OF JEHOVAH that the Assyrian shall be broken.

Probable date, towards 701.

2. xiv. 28-32. ORACLE FOR PHILISTIA. Warning to Philistia not to rejoice

because one Assyrian king is dead, for a worse one shall arise: _Out of

the serpent's root shall come forth a basilisk_. Philistia shall be

melted away, but Zion shall stand. The inscription to this oracle (ver.

28) is not genuine. The oracle plainly speaks of the death and accession

of Assyrian, not Judæan, kings. It may be ascribed to 705, the date of

the death of Sargon and accession of Sennacherib. But some hold that it

refers to the previous change on the Assyrian throne--the death of

Salmanassar and the accession of Sargon.

3. xv.-xvi. 12. ORACLE FOR MOAB. A long prophecy against Moab. This

oracle, whether originally by himself at an earlier period of his life,

or more probably by an older prophet, Isaiah adopts and ratifies, and

intimates its immediate fulfilment, in xvi. 13, 14. _This is the word

which Jehovah spake concerning Moab long ago. But now Jehovah hath

spoken, saying, Within three years, as the years of an hireling, and the

glory of Moab shall be brought into contempt with all the great

multitude, and the remnant shall be very small and of no account._ The

dates both of the original publication of this prophecy and of its

reissue with the appendix are quite uncertain. The latter may fall about

711, when Moab was threatened by Sargon for complicity in the Ashdod

conspiracy (p. 198), or in 704, when, with other States, Moab came under

the cloud of Sennacherib's invasion. The main prophecy is remarkable for

its vivid picture of the disaster that has overtaken Moab and for the

sympathy with her which the Jewish prophet expresses; for the mention of

a _remnant_ of Moab; for the exhortation to her to send tribute in her

adversity _to the mount of the daughter of Zion_ (xvi. 1); for an appeal

to Zion to shelter the outcasts of Moab and to take up her cause: _Bring

counsel, make a decision, make thy shadow as the night in the midst of

the noonday; hide the outcasts, bewray not the wanderer_; for a

statement of the Messiah similar to those in chaps. ix. and xi.; and for

the offer to the oppressed Moabites of the security of Judah in

Messianic times (vv. 4, 5). But there is one great obstacle to this

prospect of Moab lying down in the shadow of Judah--Moab's arrogance.

_We have heard of the pride of Moab, that he is very proud_ (ver. 6, cf.

Jer. xlviii. 29, 42; Zeph. ii. 10), which pride shall not only keep this

country in ruin, but prevent the Moabites prevailing in prayer at their

own sanctuary (ver. 12)--a very remarkable admission about the worship

of another god than Jehovah.

4. xvii. 1-11. ORACLE FOR DAMASCUS. One of the earliest and most crisp

of Isaiah's prophecies. Of the time of Syria's and Ephraim's league

against Judah, somewhere between 736 and 732.

5. xvii. 12-14. UNTITLED. The crash of the peoples upon Jerusalem and

their dispersion. This magnificent piece of sound, which we analyse

below, is usually understood of Sennacherib's rush upon Jerusalem. Verse

14 is an accurate summary of the sudden break-up and "retreat from

Moscow" of his army. The Assyrian hosts are described as _nations_, as

they are elsewhere more than once by Isaiah (xxii. 6, xxix. 7). But in

all this there is no final reason for referring the oracle to

Sennacherib's invasion, and it may just as well be interpreted of

Isaiah's confidence of the defeat of Syria and Ephraim (734-723). Its

proximity to the oracle against Damascus would then be very natural, and

it would stand as a parallel prophecy to viii. 9: _Make an uproar, O ye

peoples, and ye shall be broken in pieces; and give ear, all ye of the

distances of the earth: gird yourselves, and ye shall be broken in

pieces; gird yourselves, and ye shall be broken in pieces_--a prophecy

which we know belongs to the period of the Syro-Ephraimitic league.

6. xviii. _Untitled._ An address to Ethiopia, _land of a rustling of

wings, land of many sails, whose messengers dart to and fro upon the

rivers in their skiffs of reed_. The prophet tells Ethiopia, cast into

excitement by the news of the Assyrian advance, how Jehovah is resting

quietly till the Assyrian be ripe for destruction. When the Ethiopians

shall see His sudden miracle, they shall send their tribute to Jehovah,

_to the place of the name of Jehovah of hosts, Mount Zion_. It is

difficult to know to which southward march of Assyria to ascribe this

prophecy--Sargon's or Sennacherib's? For at the time of both of these an

Ethiopian ruled Egypt.

7. xix. _Oracle for Egypt._ The first fifteen verses describe judgement

as ready to fall on the land of the Pharaohs. The last ten speak of the

religious results to Egypt of that judgement, and they form the most

universal and "missionary" of all Isaiah's prophecies. Although doubts

have been expressed of the Isaian authorship of the second half of this

chapter on the score of its universalism, as well as of its literary

style, which is judged to be "a pale reflection" of Isaiah's own, there

is no final reason for declining the credit of it to Isaiah, while there

are insuperable difficulties against relegating it to the late date

which is sometimes demanded for it. On the date and authenticity of this

prophecy, which are of great importance for the question of Isaiah's

"missionary" opinions, see Cheyne's introduction to the chapter and

Robertson Smith's notes in _The Prophets of Israel_ (p. 433). The latter

puts it in 703, during Sennacherib's advance upon the south. The former

suggests that the second half may have been written by the prophet much

later than the first, and justly says, "We can hardly imagine a more

'swan-like end' for the dying prophet."

8. xx. UNTITLED. Also upon Egypt, but in narrative and of an earlier

date than at least the latter half of xix. Tells how Isaiah walked naked

and barefoot in the streets of Jerusalem for a sign against Egypt and

against the help Judah hoped to get from her in the years 711-709, when

the Tartan, or Assyrian commander-in-chief, came south to subdue Ashdod.

See pp. 198-200.

9. xxi. 1-10. ORACLE FOR THE WILDERNESS OF THE SEA, announcing but

lamenting the fall of Babylon. Probably 709. See pp. 202, 203.

10. xxi. 11, 12. ORACLE FOR DUMAH. Dumah, or _Silence_--in Ps. xciv. 17,

cxv. 17, _the land of the silence of death_, the grave--is probably used

as an anagram for Edom and an enigmatic sign to the wise Edomites, in

their own fashion, of the kind of silence their land is lying under--the

silence of rapid decay. The prophet hears this silence at last broken by

a cry. Edom cannot bear the darkness any more. _Unto me one is calling

from Seir, Watchman, how much off the night? how much off the night?[52]

Said the watchman, Cometh the morning, and also the night: if ye will

inquire, inquire, come back again._ What other answer is possible for a

land on which the silence of decay seems to have settled down? He may,

however, give them an answer later on, if they will come back. Date

uncertain, perhaps between 704 and 701.

[52] Our translation, though picturesque, is misleading. The voice does

not inquire, "What of the night?" _i.e._, whether it be fair or foul

weather, but "How much of the night is passed?" literally "What from off

the night?" This brings out a pathos that our English version has

disguised. Edom feels that her night is lasting terribly long.

11. xxi. 13-17. ORACLE FOR ARABIA. From Edom the prophet passes to their

neighbours the Dedanites, travelling merchants. And as he saw night upon

Edom, so, by a play upon words, he speaks of evening upon Arabia: _in

the forest, in Arabia_, or with the same consonants, _in the evening_.

In the time of the insecurity of the Assyrian invasion the travelling

merchants have to go aside from their great trading roads _in the

evening to lodge in the thickets_. There they entertain fugitives, or

(for the sense is not quite clear) are themselves as fugitives

entertained. It is a picture of the _grievousness of war_, which was now

upon the world, flowing down even those distant, desert roads. But

things have not yet reached the worst. The fugitives are but the heralds

of armies, that _within a year_ shall waste the _children of Kedar_, for

Jehovah, the God of Israel, hath spoken it. So did the prophet of little

Jerusalem take possession of even the far deserts in the name of his

nation's God.

12. xxiii. ORACLE FOR TYRE. Elegy over its fall, probably as Sennacherib

came south upon it in 703 or 702. To be further considered by us (pp.

288 ff.).

* * * * *

These then are Isaiah's oracles for the Nations, who tremble, intrigue

and go down before the might of Assyria.

We have promised to gather the circumstances and meaning of these

prophecies round three representative texts. These are--

1. _Ah! the booming of the peoples, the multitudes, like the booming of

the seas they boom; and the rushing of the nations, like the rushing of

mighty waters they rush; nations, like the rushing of many waters they

rush. But He rebuketh it, and it fleeth afar off, and is chased like the

chaff on the mountains before the wind and like whirling dust before the

whirlwind_ (xvii. 12, 13).

2. _What then shall one answer the messengers of a nation? That Jehovah

hath founded Zion, and in her shall find refuge the afflicted of His

people_ (xiv. 32).

3. _In that day shall Israel be a third to Egypt and to Assyria, a

blessing in the midst of the earth, for that Jehovah of hosts hath

blessed them, saying, Blessed be My people Egypt, and the work of My

hands Assyria, and Mine inheritance Israel_ (xix. 24, 25).

1. The first of these texts shows all the prophet's prospect filled with

storm, the second of them the solitary rock and lighthouse in the midst

of the storm: Zion, his own watchtower and his people's refuge; while

the third of them, looking far into the future, tells us, as it were, of

the firm continent which shall rise out of the waters--Israel no longer

a solitary lighthouse, _but in that day shall Israel be a third to Egypt

and to Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth_. These three texts

give us a summary of the meaning of all Isaiah's obscure prophecies to

the foreign nations--a stormy ocean, a solitary rock in the midst of it,

and the new continent that shall rise out of the waters about the rock.

The restlessness of Western Asia beneath the Assyrian rule (from 719,

when Sargon's victory at Rafia extended that rule to the borders of

Egypt) found vent, as we saw (p. 198), in two great Explosions, for both

of which the mine was laid by Egyptian intrigue. The first Explosion

happened in 711, and was confined to Ashdod. The second took place on

Sargon's death in 705, and was universal. Till Sennacherib marched

south on Palestine in 701, there were all over Western Asia hurryings to

and fro, consultations and intrigues, embassies and engineerings from

Babylon to Meroe in far Ethiopia, and from the tents of Kedar to the

cities of the Philistines. For these Jerusalem the one inviolate capital

from the Euphrates to the river of Egypt, was the natural centre. And

the one far-seeing, steady-hearted man in Jerusalem was Isaiah. We have

already seen that there was enough within the city to occupy Isaiah's

attention, especially from 705 onward; but for Isaiah the walls of

Jerusalem, dear as they were and thronged with duty, neither limited his

sympathies nor marked the scope of the gospel he had to preach.

Jerusalem is simply his watchtower. His field--and this is the peculiar

glory of the prophet's later life--his field is the world.

How well fitted Jerusalem then was to be the world's watchtower, the

traveller may see to this day. The city lies upon the great central

ridge of Palestine, at an elevation of two thousand five hundred feet

above the level of the sea. If you ascend the hill behind the city, you

stand upon one of the great view-points of the earth. It is a forepost

of Asia. To the east rise the red hills of Moab and the uplands of

Gilead and Bashan, on to which wandering tribes of the Arabian deserts

beyond still push their foremost camps. Just beyond the horizon lie the

immemorial paths from Northern Syria into Arabia. Within a few hours'

walk along the same central ridge, and still within the territory of

Judah, you may see to the north, over a wilderness of blue hills,

Hermon's snowy crest; you know that Damascus is lying just beyond, and

that through it and round the base of Hermon swings one of the longest

of the old world's highways--the main caravan road from the Euphrates

to the Nile. Stand at gaze for a little, while down that road there

sweep into your mind thoughts of the great empire, whose troops and

commerce it used to carry. Then, bearing these thoughts with you, follow

the line of the road across the hills to the western coastland, and so

out upon the great Egyptian desert, where you may wait till it has

brought you imagination of the southern empire to which it travels.

Then, lifting your eyes a little further, let them sweep back again from

south to north, and you have the whole of the west, the new world, open

to you, across the fringe of yellow haze that marks the sands of the

Mediterranean. It is even now one of the most comprehensive prospects in

the world. But in Isaiah's day, when the world was smaller, the high

places of Judah either revealed or suggested the whole of it.

But Isaiah was more than a spectator of this vast theatre. He was an

actor upon it. The court of Judah, of which during Hezekiah's reign he

was the most prominent member, stood in more or less close connection

with the courts of all the kingdoms of Western Asia; and in those days

when the nations were busy with intrigue against their common enemy this

little highland town and fortress became a gathering place of peoples.

From Babylon, from far-off Ethiopia, from Edom, from Philistia, and no

doubt from many other places also, embassies came to King Hezekiah, or

to inquire of his prophet. The appearance of some of them lives for us

still in Isaiah's descriptions: _tall and shiny_ figures of Ethiopians

(xviii. 2), with whom we are able to identify the lithe, silky-skinned,

shining-black bodies of the present tribes of the Upper Nile. Now the

prophet must have talked much with these strangers, for he displays a

knowledge of their several countries and ways of life that is full and

accurate. The agricultural conditions of Egypt; her social ranks and her

industries (xix.); the harbours and markets of Tyre (xxiii.); the

caravans of the Arab nomads as in times of war they shun the open desert

and seek the thickets (xxi. 14)--Isaiah paints these for us with a vivid

realism. We see how this statesman of the least of States, this prophet

of a religion which was confessed over only a few square miles, was

aware of the wide world, and how he loved the life that filled it. They

are no mere geographical terms with which Isaiah thickly studs these

prophecies. He looks out upon, and paints for us, lands and cities

surging with men--their trades, their castes, their religions, their

besetting tempers and sins, their social structures and national

policies, all quick and bending to the breeze and the shadow of the

coming storm from the north.

We have said that in nothing is the regal power of our prophet's style

so manifest as in the vast horizons, which, by the use of a few words,

he calls up before us. Some of the finest of these revelations are made

in this part of his book, so obscure and unknown to most. Who can ever

forget those descriptions of Ethiopia in the eighteenth chapter?--"_Ah!

the land of the rustling of wings, which borders on the rivers of Cush,

which sendeth heralds on the sea, and in vessels of reed on the face of

the waters! Travel, fleet messengers, to a people lithe and shining, to

a nation feared from ever it began to be, a people strong, strong and

trampling, whose land the rivers divide_; or of Tyre in chapter

xxiii.?--"_And on great waters the seed of Shihor, the harvest of the

Nile, was her revenue; and she was the mart of nations._ What expanses

of sea! what fleets of ships! what floating loads of grain! what

concourse of merchants moving on stately wharves beneath high

warehouses!

Yet these are only segments of horizons, and perhaps the prophet reaches

the height of his power of expression in the first of the three texts,

which we have given as representative of his prophecies on foreign

nations (p. 278). Here three or four lines of marvellous sound repeat

the effect of the rage of the restless world as it rises, storms and

breaks upon the steadfast will of God. The phonetics of the passage are

wonderful. The general impression is that of a stormy ocean booming in

to the shore and then crashing itself out into one long hiss of spray

and foam upon its barriers. The details are noteworthy. In ver. 12 we

have thirteen heavy M-sounds, besides two heavy B's, to five N's, five

H's, and four sibilants. But in ver. 13 the sibilants predominate; and

before the sharp rebuke of the Lord the great, booming sound of ver. 12

scatters out into a long _yish-sh[=a] 'oon_. The occasional use of a

prolonged vowel amid so many hurrying consonants produces exactly the

effect now of the lift of a storm swell out at sea and now of the pause

of a great wave before it crashes on the shore. "_Ah, the booming of the

peoples, the multitudes, like the booming of the seas they boom; and the

rushing of the nations, like the rushing of the mighty waters they rush:

nations, like the rushing of many waters they rush. But He checketh

it_--a short, sharp word with a choke and a snort in it--_and it fleeth

far away, and is chased like chaff on mountains before wind, and like

swirling dust before a whirlwind_."

So did the rage of the world sound to Isaiah as it crashed into pieces

upon the steadfast providence of God. To those who can feel the force of

such language nothing need be added upon the prophet's view of the

politics of the outside world these twenty years, whether portions of it

threatened Judah in their own strength, or the whole power of storm that

was in it rose with the Assyrian, as in all his flood he rushed upon

Zion in the year 701.

2. But amid this storm Zion stands immovable. It is upon Zion that the

storm crashes itself into impotence. This becomes explicit in the second

of our representative texts: _What then shall one answer the messengers

of a nation? That Jehovah hath founded Zion, and in her shall find a

refuge the afflicted of His people_ (xiv. 32). This oracle was drawn

from Isaiah by an embassy of the Philistines. Stricken with panic at the

Assyrian advance, they had sent messengers to Jerusalem, as other tribes

did, with questions and proposals of defences, escapes and alliances.

They got their answer. Alliances are useless. Everything human is going

down. Here, here alone, is safety, because the LORD hath decreed it.

With what light and peace do Isaiah's words break out across that

unquiet, hungry sea! How they tell the world for the first time, and

have been telling it ever since, that, apart from all the struggle and

strife of history, there is a refuge and security of men, which God

Himself has assured. The troubled surface of life, nations heaving

uneasily, kings of Assyria and their armies carrying the world before

them--these are not all. The world and her powers are not all. Religion,

in the very teeth of life, builds her refuge for the afflicted.

The world seems wholly divided between force and fear. Isaiah says, It

is not true. Faith has her abiding citadel in the midst, a house of God,

which neither force can harm nor fear enter.

This then was Isaiah's Interim-Answer to the Nations--Zion at least is

secure for the people of Jehovah.

3. Isaiah could not remain content, however, with so narrow an

interim-answer: Zion at least is secure, whatever happens to the rest of

you. The world was there, and had to be dealt with and accounted

for--had even to be saved. As we have already seen, this was the problem

of Isaiah's generation; and to have shirked it would have meant the

failure of his faith to rank as universal.

Isaiah did not shirk it. He said boldly to his people, and to the

nations: "The faith we have covers this vaster life. Jehovah is not only

God of Israel. He rules the world." These prophecies to the foreign

nations are full of revelations of the sovereignty and providence of

God. The Assyrian may seem to be growing in glory; but Jehovah is

watching from the heavens, till he be ripe for cutting down (xviii. 4).

Egypt's statesmen may be perverse and wilful; but Jehovah of hosts

swingeth His hand against the land: _they shall tremble and shudder_

(xix. 16). Egypt shall obey His purposes (17). Confusion may reign for a

time, but a signal and a centre shall be lifted up, and the world gather

itself in order round the revealed will of God. The audacity of such a

claim for his God becomes more striking when we remember that Isaiah's

faith was not the faith of a majestic or a conquering people. When he

made his claim, Judah was still tributary to Assyria, a petty highland

principality, that could not hope to stand by material means against the

forces which had thrown down her more powerful neighbours. It was no

experience of success, no mere instinct of being on the side of fate,

which led Isaiah so resolutely to pronounce that not only should his

people be secure, but that his God would vindicate His purposes upon

empires like Egypt and Assyria. It was simply his sense that Jehovah was

exalted in righteousness. Therefore, while inside Judah only the remnant

that took the side of righteousness would be saved, outside Judah

wherever there was unrighteousness, it would be rebuked, and wherever

righteousness, it would be vindicated. This is the supremacy which

Isaiah proclaimed for Jehovah over the whole world.

How spiritual this faith of Isaiah was, is seen from the next step the

prophet took. Looking out on the troubled world, he did not merely

assert that his God ruled it, but he emphatically said, what was a far

more difficult thing to say, that it would all be consciously and

willingly God's. God rules this, not to restrain it only, but to make it

His own. The knowledge of Him, which is to-day our privilege, shall be

to-morrow the blessing of the whole world.

When we point to the Jewish desire, so often expressed in the Old

Testament, of making the whole world subject to Jehovah, we are told

that it is simply a proof of religious ambition and jealousy. We are

told that this wish to convert the world no more stamps the Jewish

religion as being a universal, and therefore presumably a Divine,

religion than the Mohammedans' zeal to force their tenets on men at the

point of the sword is a proof of the truth of Islam.

Now we need not be concerned to defend the Jewish religion in its every

particular, even as propounded by an Isaiah. It is an article of the

Christian creed that Judaism was a minor and imperfect dispensation,

where truth was only half revealed and virtue half developed. But at

least let us do the Jewish religion justice; and we shall never do it

justice till we pay attention to what its greatest prophets thought of

the outside world, how they sympathized with this, and _in what way_

they proposed to make it subject to their own faith.

_Firstly_ then, there is something in the very manner of Isaiah's

treatment of foreign nations, which causes the old charges of religious

exclusiveness to sink in our throats. Isaiah treats these foreigners at

least as men. Take his prophecies on Egypt or on Tyre or on

Babylon--nations which were the hereditary enemies of his nation--and

you find him speaking of their natural misfortunes, their social decays,

their national follies and disasters, with the same pity and with the

same purely moral considerations, with which he has treated his own

land. When news of those far-away sorrows comes to Jerusalem, it moves

this large-hearted prophet to mourning and tears. He breathes out to

distant lands elegies as beautiful as he has poured upon Jerusalem. He

shows as intelligent an interest in their social evolutions as he does

in those of the Jewish State. He gives a picture of the industry and

politics of Egypt as careful as his pictures of the fashions and

statecraft of Judah. In short, as you read his prophecies upon foreign

nations, you perceive that before the eyes of this man humanity, broken

and scattered in his days as it was, rose up one great whole, every part

of which was subject to the same laws of righteousness, and deserved

from the prophet of God the same love and pity. To some few tribes he

says decisively that they shall certainly be wiped out, but even them he

does not address in contempt or in hatred. The large empire of Egypt,

the great commercial power of Tyre, he speaks of in language of respect

and admiration; but that does not prevent him from putting the plain

issue to them which he put to his own countrymen: If you are

unrighteous, intemperate, impure--lying diplomats and dishonest rulers,

you shall certainly perish before Assyria. If you are righteous,

temperate, pure, if you do trust in truth and God, nothing can move you.

But, _secondly_, he, who thus treated all nations with the same strict

measures of justice and the same fulness of pity with which he treated

his own, was surely not far from extending to the world the religious

privileges, which he has so frequently identified with Jerusalem. In his

old age, at least Isaiah looked forward to the time when the particular

religious opportunities of the Jew should be the inheritance of

humanity. For their old oppressor Egypt, for their new enemy Assyria, he

anticipates the same experience and education, which has made Israel the

firstborn of God. Speaking to Egypt, Isaiah concludes a missionary

sermon, fit to take its place beside that which Paul uttered on the

Areopagus to the younger Greek civilisation, with the words, _In that

day shall Israel be a third to Egypt and to Assyria, a blessing in the

midst of the earth, for that Jehovah of hosts hath blessed them, saying,

Blessed be Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands and Israel

Mine inheritance_.

CHAPTER XVIII.

_TYRE; OR, THE MERCENARY SPIRIT._

ISAIAH xxiii. (702 B.C.).

The task, which was laid upon the religion of Israel while Isaiah was

its prophet, was the task, as we have often told ourselves, of facing

the world's forces, and of explaining how they were to be led captive

and contributory to the religion of the true God. And we have already

seen Isaiah accounting for the largest of these forces: the Assyrian.

But besides Assyria, that military empire, there was another power in

the world, also novel to Israel's experience and also in Isaiah's day

grown large enough to demand from Israel's faith explanation and

criticism. This was Commerce, represented by the Phoenicians, with

their chief seats at Tyre and Sidon, and their colonies across the seas.

Not even Egypt exercised such influence on Isaiah's generation as

Phoenicia did; and Phoenician influence, though less visible and

painful than Assyrian, was just as much more subtle and penetrating as

in these respects the influence of trade exceeds that of war. Assyria

herself was fascinated by the glories of Phoenician commerce. The

ambition of her kings, who had in that century pushed south to the

Mediterranean, was to found a commercial empire. The mercenary spirit,

as we learn from prophets earlier than Isaiah, had begun also to leaven

the life of the agricultural and shepherd tribes of Western Asia. For

good or for evil commerce had established itself as a moral force in the

world. Isaiah's chapter on Tyre is, therefore, of the greatest interest.

It contains the prophet's vision of commerce the first time commerce had

grown vast enough to impress his people's imagination, as well as a

criticism of the temper of commerce from the standpoint of the religion

of the God of righteousness. Whether as a historical study or a message

addressed to the mercantile tempers of our own day, the chapter is

worthy of close attention.

But we must first impress ourselves with the utter contrast between

Phoenicia and Judah in the matter of commercial experience, or we

shall not feel the full force of this excursion which the prophet of a

high, inland tribe of shepherds makes among the wharves and warehouses

of the great merchant city on the sea.

The Phoenician empire, it has often been remarked, presents a very

close analogy to that of Great Britain; but even more entirely than in

the case of Great Britain the glory of that empire was the wealth of its

trade, and the character of the people was the result of their

mercantile habits. A little strip of land, one hundred and forty miles

long, and never more than fifteen broad, with the sea upon one side and

the mountains upon the other, compelled its inhabitants to become miners

and seamen. The hills shut off the narrow coast from the continent to

which it belongs, and drove the increasing populations to seek their

destiny by way of the sea. These took to it kindly, for they had the

Semite's born instinct for trading. Planting their colonies all round

the Mediterranean, exploiting every mine within reach of the coastland,

establishing great trading depôts both on the Nile and the Euphrates,

with fleets that passed the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic and

the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb into the Indian Ocean, the Phoenicians

constructed a system of trade, which was not exceeded in range or

influence till, more than two thousand years later, Portugal made the

discovery of America and accomplished the passage of the Cape of Good

Hope. From the coasts of Britain to those of Northwest India, and

probably to Madagascar, was the extent of Phoenician credit and

currency. Their trade tapped river basins so far apart as those of the

Indus, the Euphrates, probably the Zambesi, the Nile, the Rhone, the

Guadalquivir. They built ships and harbours for the Pharaohs and for

Solomon. They carried Egyptian art and Babylonian knowledge to the

Grecian archipelago, and brought back the metals of Spain and Britain.

No wonder the prophet breaks into enthusiasm as he surveys Phoenician

enterprise! _And on great waters the seed of Shihor, the harvest of the

Nile, was her revenue; and she was the mart of nations._

But upon trade the Phoenicians had built an empire. At home their

political life enjoyed the freedom, energy and resources which are

supplied by long habits of an extended commerce with other peoples. The

constitution of the different Phoenician cities was not, as is

sometimes supposed, republican, but monarchical; and the land belonged

to the king. Yet the large number of wealthy families at once limited

the power of the throne, and saved the commonwealth from being dependent

upon the fortunes of a single dynasty. The colonies in close relation

with the mother country assured an empire with its life in better

circulation and with more reserve of power than either Egypt or

Assyria. Tyre and Sidon were frequently overthrown, but they rose again

oftener than the other great cities of antiquity, and were still places

of importance when Babylon and Nineveh lay in irreparable ruin. Besides

their native families of royal wealth and influence and their

flourishing colonies, each with its prince, these commercial States kept

foreign monarchs in their pay, and sometimes determined the fate of a

dynasty. Isaiah entitles Tyre _the giver of crowns, the maker of kings,

whose merchants are princes, and her traffickers are the honourable of

the earth_.

But trade with political results so splendid had an evil effect upon the

character and spiritual temper of the people. By the indiscriminating

ancients the Phoenicians were praised as inventors; the rudiments of

most of the arts and sciences, of the alphabet and of money have been

ascribed to them. But modern research has proved that of none of the

many elements of civilisation which they introduced to the West were

they the actual authors. The Phoenicians were simply carriers and

middlemen. In all time there is no instance of a nation so wholly given

over to buying and selling, who frequented even the battlefields of the

world that they might strip the dead and purchase the captive.

Phoenician history--though we must always do the people the justice to

remember that we have their history only in fragments--affords few signs

of the consciousness that there are things which a nation may strive

after for their own sake, and not for the money they bring in. The

world, which other peoples, still in the reverence of the religious

youth of the race, regarded as a house of prayer, the Phoenicians had

already turned into a den of thieves. They trafficked even with the

mysteries and intelligences; and their own religion is largely a

mixture of the religions of the other peoples, with whom they came into

contact. The national spirit was venal and mercenary--the heart of an

hireling, or, as Isaiah by a baser name describes it, the heart of _an

harlot_. There is not throughout history a more perfect incarnation of

the mercenary spirit than the Phoenician nation.

Now let us turn to the experience of the Jews, whose faith had to face

and account for this world-force.

The history of the Jews in Europe has so identified them with trade that

it is difficult for us to imagine a Jew free from its spirit or ignorant

of its methods. But the fact is that in the time of Isaiah Israel was as

little acquainted with commerce as it is possible for a civilised nation

to be. Israel's was an inland territory. Till Solomon's reign the people

had neither navy nor harbour. Their land was not abundant in materials

for trade--it contained almost no minerals, and did not produce a

greater supply of food than was necessary for the consumption of its

inhabitants. It is true that the ambition of Solomon had brought the

people within the temptations of commerce. He established trading

cities, annexed harbours and hired a navy. But even then, and again in

the reign of Uzziah, which reflects much of Solomon's commercial glory,

Israel traded by deputies, and the mass of the people remained innocent

of mercantile habits. Perhaps to moderns the most impressive proof of

how little Israel had to do with trade is to be found in their laws of

money-lending and of interest. The absolute prohibition which Moses

placed upon the charging of interest could only have been possible among

a people with the most insignificant commerce. To Isaiah himself

commerce must have appeared alien. Human life, as he pictures it, is

composed of war, politics and agriculture; his ideals for society are

those of the shepherd and the farmer. We moderns cannot dissociate the

future welfare of humanity from the triumphs of trade.

"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales."

But all Isaiah's future is full of gardens and busy fields, of

irrigating rivers and canals:--

_Until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness

become a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be counted for a

forest.... Blessed are ye, that sow beside all waters, that send forth

the feet of the ox and the ass._

_And He shall give the rain of thy seed, that thou shalt sow the ground

withal, and bread-corn, the increase of the ground; and it shall be

juicy and fat: in that day shall thy cattle feed in large pastures._

Conceive how trade looked to eyes which dwelt with enthusiasm upon

scenes like these! It must have seemed to blast the future, to disturb

the regularity of life with such violence as to shake religion herself!

With all our convictions of the benefits of trade, even we feel no

greater regret or alarm than when we observe the invasion by the rude

forces of trade of some scene of rural felicity: blackening of sky and

earth and stream; increasing complexity and entanglement of life;

enormous growth of new problems and temptations; strange knowledge,

ambitions and passions, that throb through life and strain the tissue of

its simple constitution, like novel engines, which shake the ground and

the strong walls, accustomed once to re-echo only the simple music of

the mill-wheel and the weaver's shuttle. Isaiah did not fear an invasion

of Judah by the habits and the machines of trade. There is no

foreboding in this chapter of the day when his own people were to take

the place of the Phoenicians as the commercial _harlots_ of the world,

and a Jew was to be synonymous with usurer and _publican_. Yet we may

employ our feelings to imagine his, and understand what this

prophet--seated in the sanctuary of a pastoral and agricultural tribe,

with its simple offerings of doves, and lambs and sheaves of corn,

telling how their homes, and fields and whole rustic manner of life were

subject to God--thought, and feared, and hoped of the vast commerce of

Phoenicia, wondering how it also should be sanctified to Jehovah.

First of all, Isaiah, as we might have expected from his large faith and

broad sympathies, accepts and acknowledges this great world-force. His

noble spirit shows neither timidity nor jealousy before it. Before his

view what an unblemished prospect of it spreads! His descriptions tell

more of his appreciation than long laudations would have done. He grows

enthusiastic upon the grandeur of Tyre; and even when he prophesies that

Assyria shall destroy it, it is with the feeling that such a destruction

is really a desecration, and as if there lived essential glory in great

commercial enterprise. Certainly from such a spirit we have much to

learn. How often has religion, when brought face to face with the new

forces of a generation--commerce, democracy or science--shown either a

base timidity or baser jealousy, and met the innovations with cries of

detraction or despair! Isaiah reads a lesson to the modern Church in the

preliminary spirit with which she should meet the novel experiences of

Providence. Whatever judgement may afterwards have to be passed, there

is the immediate duty of frankly recognising greatness wherever it may

occur. This is an essential principle, from the forgetfulness of which

modern religion has suffered much. Nothing is gained by attempting to

minimise new departures in the world's history; but everything is lost

if we sit down in fear of them. It is a duty we owe to ourselves, and a

worship which Providence demands from us, that we ungrudgingly

appreciate every magnitude of which history brings us the knowledge.

It is almost an unnecessary task to apply Isaiah's meaning to the

commerce of our own day. But let us not miss his example in this: that

the right to criticise the habits of trade and the ability to criticise

them healthily are alone won by a just appreciation of trade's

world-wide glory and serviceableness. There is no use preaching against

the venal spirit and manifold temptations and degradations of trade,

until we have realised the indispensableness of trade and its capacity

for disciplining and exalting its ministers. The only way to correct the

abuses of "the commercial spirit," against which many in our day are

loud with indiscriminate rebuke, is to impress its victims, having first

impressed yourself, with the opportunities and the ideals of commerce. A

thing is great partly by its traditions and partly by its

opportunities--partly by what it has accomplished and partly by the

doors of serviceableness of which it holds the key. By either of these

standards the magnitude of commerce is simply overwhelming. Having

discovered the world-forces, commerce has built thereon the most

powerful of our modern empires. Its exigencies compel peace; its

resources are the sinews of war. If it has not always preceded religion

and science in the conquest of the globe, it has shared with them their

triumphs. Commerce has recast the modern world, so that we hardly think

of the old national divisions in the greater social classes which have

been its direct creation. Commerce determines national policies; its

markets are among the schools of statesmen; its merchants _are_ still

_princes, and its traffickers the honourable of the earth_.

Therefore let all merchants and their apprentices believe, "Here is

something worth putting our manhood into, worth living for, not with our

brains only or our appetites, but with our conscience, with our

imagination, with every curiosity and sympathy of our nature. Here is a

calling with a healthy discipline, with a free spirit, with unrivalled

opportunities of service, with an ancient and essential dignity." The

reproach which is so largely imagined upon trade is the relic of a

barbarous age. Do not tolerate it, for under its shadow, as under other

artificial and unhealthy contempts of society, there are apt to grow up

those sordid and slavish tempers, which soon make men deserve the

reproach that was at first unjustly cast upon them. Dissipate the base

influence of this reproach by lifting the imagination upon the antiquity

and world-wide opportunities of trade--trade, _whose origin_, as Isaiah

so finely puts it, _is of ancient days; and her feet carry her afar off

to sojourn_.

So generous an appreciation of the grandeur of commerce does not prevent

Isaiah from exposing its besetting sin and degradation.

The vocation of a merchant differs from others in this, that there is no

inherent nor instinctive obligation in it to ends higher than those of

financial profit--emphasized in our days into the more dangerous

constraint of _immediate_ financial profit. No profession is of course

absolutely free from the risk of this servitude; but other professions

offer escapes, or at least mitigations, which are not possible to

nearly the same extent in trade. Artist, artisan, preacher and statesman

have ideals which generally act contrary to the compulsion of profit and

tend to create a nobility of mind strong enough to defy it. They have

given, so to speak, hostages to heaven--ideals of beauty, of accurate

scholarship or of moral influence, which they dare not risk by

abandoning themselves to the hunt for gain. But the calling of a

merchant is not thus safeguarded. It does not afford those visions,

those occasions of being caught away to the heavens, which are the

inherent glories of other lives. The habits of trade make this the first

thought--not what things of beauty are in themselves, not what men are

as brothers, not what life is as God's discipline, but what things of

beauty, and men and opportunities are worth to us--and in these times

what they are _immediately_ worth--as measured by money. In such an

absorption art, humanity, morals and religion become matters of growing

indifference.

To this spirit, which treats all things and men, high or low, as matters

simply of profit, Isaiah gives a very ugly name. We call it the

mercenary or venal spirit. Isaiah says it is the spirit of _the harlot_.

The history of Phoenicia justified his words. To-day we remember her

by nothing that is great, by nothing that is original. She left no art

nor literature, and her once brave and skilful populations degenerated

till we know them only as the slave-dealers, panders and prostitutes of

the Roman empire. If we desire to find Phoenicia's influence on the

religion of the world, we have to seek for it among the most sensual of

Greek myths and the abominable practices of Corinthian worship. With

such terrible literalness was Isaiah's harlot-curse fulfilled.

What is true of Phoenicia may become true of Britain, and what has

been seen on the large scale of a nation is exemplified every day in

individual lives. The man who is entirely eaten up with the zeal of gain

is no better than what Isaiah called Tyre. He has prostituted himself to

covetousness. If day and night our thoughts are of profit, and the

habit, so easily engendered in these times, of asking only, "What can I

make of this?" is allowed to grow upon us, it shall surely come to pass

that we are found sacrificing, like the poor unfortunate, the most

sacred of our endowments and affections for gain, demeaning our natures

at the feet of the world for the sake of the world's gold. A woman

sacrifices her purity for coin, and the world casts her out. But some

who would not touch her have sacrificed honour and love and pity for the

same base wage, and in God's sight are no better than she. Ah, how much

need is there for these bold, brutal standards of the Hebrew prophet to

correct our own social misappreciations!

Now for a very vain delusion upon this subject! It is often imagined in

our day that if a man seek atonement for the venal spirit through the

study of art, through the practice of philanthropy or through the

cultivation of religion, he shall surely find it. This is

false--plausible and often practised but utterly false. Unless a man see

and reverence beauty in the very workshop and office of his business,

unless he feel those whom he meets there, his employés and customers, as

his brethren, unless he keep his business methods free from fraud, and

honestly recognise his gains as a trust from the Lord, then no amount of

devotion elsewhere to the fine arts, nor perseverance in philanthropy,

nor fondness for the Church evinced by ever so large subscriptions, will

deliver him from the devil of mercenariness. That is a plea of _alibi_

that shall not prevail on the judgement day. He is only living a double

life, whereof his art, philanthropy or religion is the occasional and

dilettante portion, with not nearly so much influence on his character

as the other, his calling and business, in which he still sacrifices

love to gain. His real world--the world in which God set him, to buy and

sell indeed, but also to serve and glorify his God--he is treating only

as a big warehouse and exchange. And so much is this the case at the

present day, in spite of all the worship of art and religion which is

fashionable in mercantile circles, that we do not go too far when we say

that if Jesus were now to visit our large markets and manufactories, in

which the close intercourse of numbers of human persons renders the

opportunities of service and testimony to God so frequent, He would

scourge men from them, as He scourged the traffickers of the Temple, for

that they had forgotten that _here_ was their Father's house, where

their brethren had to be owned and helped, and their Father's glory

revealed to the world.

A nation with such a spirit was of course foredoomed to destruction.

Isaiah predicts the absolute disappearance of Tyre from the attention of

the world. _Tyre shall be forgotten seventy years._ _Then_, like some

poor unfortunate whose day of beauty is past, she shall in vain practise

her old advertisements on men. _After the end of seventy years it shall

be unto Tyre as in the song of the harlot: Take an harp, go about the

city, thou harlot that hast been forgotten; make sweet melody, sing many

songs, that thou mayest be remembered._

But Commerce is essential to the world. Tyre must revive; and the

prophet sees her revive as the minister of Religion, the purveyor of the

food of the servants of the Lord, and of the accessories of their

worship. It must be confessed, that we are not a little shocked when we

find Isaiah continuing to apply to Commerce his metaphor of a harlot,

even after Commerce has entered the service of the true religion. He

speaks of her wages being devoted to Jehovah, just in the same manner as

those of certain notorious women of heathen temples were devoted to the

idol of the temple. This is even against the directions of the Mosaic

law. Isaiah, however, was a poet; and in his flights we must not expect

him to carry the whole Law on his back. He was a poet, and probably no

analogy would have more vividly appealed to his Oriental audience. It

will be foolish to allow our natural prejudice against what we may feel

to be the unhealthiness of the metaphor to blind us to the magnificence

of the thought which he clothes in it.

All this is another proof of the sanity and far sight of our prophet.

Again we find that his conviction that judgement is coming does not

render his spirit morbid, nor disturb his eye for things of beauty and

profit in the world. Commerce, with all her faults, is essential, and

must endure, nay shall prove in the days to come Religion's most

profitable minister. The generosity and wisdom of this passage are the

more striking when we remember the extremity of unrelieved denunciation

to which other great teachers of religion have allowed themselves to be

hurled by their rage against the sins of trade. But Isaiah, in the

largest sense of the expression, is a man of the world--a man of the

world because God made the world and rules it. Yet even from his far

sight was hidden the length to which in the last days Commerce would

carry her services to man and God, proving as she has done, under the

flag of another Phoenicia, to all the extent of Isaiah's longing, one

of Religion's most sincere and profitable handmaids.

BOOK IV.

_JERUSALEM AND SENNACHERIB_, 701 B.C.

ISAIAH:--

xxxvi. 1. Early in 701.

i. " "

xxii. " "

xxxiii. A little later.

xxxvi. 2-xxxvii. " "

_______

xxxviii.-xxxix. Date uncertain.

BOOK IV.

Into this fourth book we put all the rest of the prophecies of the Book

of Isaiah, that have to do with the prophet's own time: chaps. i., xxii.

and xxxiii., with the narrative in xxxvi., xxxvii. All these refer to

the only Assyrian invasion of Judah and siege of Jerusalem: that

undertaken by Sennacherib in 701.

It is, however, right to remember once more, that many authorities

maintain that there were two Assyrian invasions of Judah--one by Sargon

in 711, the other by Sennacherib in 701--and that chaps. i. and xxii.

(as well as x. 5-34) belong to the former of these. The theory is

ingenious and tempting; but, in the silence of the Assyrian annals about

any invasion of Judah by Sargon, it is impossible to adopt it. And

although chaps. i. and xxii. differ very greatly in tone from chap.

xxxiii., yet to account for the difference it is not necessary to

suppose two different invasions, with a considerable period between

them. Virtually, as will appear in the course of our exposition,

Sennacherib's invasion of Judah was a double one.

1. The first time Sennacherib's army invaded Judah they took all the

fenced cities, and probably invested Jerusalem, but withdrew on payment

of tribute and the surrender of the _casus belli_, the Assyrian vassal

Padi, whom the Ekronites had deposed and given over to the keeping of

Hezekiah. To this invasion refer Isa. i., xxii. and the first verse of

xxxvi.: _Now it came to pass in the fourteenth[53] year of King Hezekiah

that Sennacherib, King of Assyria, came up against all the fenced cities

of Judah and took them._ This verse is the same as 2 Kings xviii. 13, to

which, however, there is added in vv. 14-16 an account of the tribute

sent by Hezekiah to Sennacherib at Lachish, that is not included in the

narrative in Isaiah. Compare 2 Chron. xxxii. 1.

[53] It is confusing to find this date attached to Sennacherib's

invasion of 701, unless, with one or two critics, we place Hezekiah's

accession in 715. But Hezekiah acceded in 728 or 727, and 701 would

therefore be his twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year. Mr. Cheyne, who

takes 727 as the year of Hezekiah's accession, gets out of the

difficulty by reading "Sargon" for "Sennacherib" in this verse and in 2

Kings xiii., and thus secures another reference to that invasion of

Judah, which he supposes to have taken place under Sargon between 712

and 710. By the change of a letter some would read _twenty-fourth_ for

_fourteenth_. But in any case this date is confusing.

2. But scarcely had the tribute been paid when Sennacherib, himself

advancing to meet Egypt, sent back upon Jerusalem a second army of

investment, with which was the Rabshakeh; and this was the army that so

mysteriously disappeared from the eyes of the besieged. To the

treacherous return of the Assyrians and the sudden deliverance of

Jerusalem from their grasp refer Isa. xxxiii., xxxvi. 2-xxxvii., with

the fuller and evidently original narrative in 2 Kings xviii. 17-xix.

Compare 2 Chron. xxxii. 9-23.

To the history of this double attempt upon Jerusalem in 701--xxxvi. and

xxxvii.--there has been appended in xxxviii. and xxxix. an account of

Hezekiah's illness and of an embassy to him from Babylon. These events

probably happened some years before Sennacherib's invasion. But it will

be most convenient for us to take them in the order in which they stand

in the canon. They will naturally lead us up to a question that it is

necessary we should discuss before taking leave of Isaiah--whether this

great prophet of the endurance of the kingdom of God upon earth had any

gospel for the individual who dropped away from it into death.