_THIS IS THE VICTORY.... OUR FAITH._
ISAIAH xxxvii. (701 B.C.).
Within the fortress of the faith there is only silence and
embarrassment. We pass from the Rabshakeh, posing outside the walls of
Zion, to Hezekiah, prostrate within them. We pass with the distracted
councillors, by the walls crowded with moody and silent soldiers, many
of them--if this be the meaning of the king's command that they should
not parley--only too ready to yield to the plausible infidel. We are
astonished. Has faith nothing to say for herself? Have this people of so
long Divine inspiration no habit of self-possession, no argument in
answer to the irrelevant attacks of their enemy? Where are the
traditions of Moses and Joshua, the songs of Deborah and David? Can men
walk about Zion, and their very footsteps on her walls ring out no
defiance?
Hezekiah's complaint reminds us that in this silence and distress we
have no occasional perplexity of faith, but her perpetual burden. Faith
is inarticulate because of her greatness. Faith is courageous and
imaginative; but can she convert her confidence and visions into fact?
Said Hezekiah, _This is a day of trouble, and rebuke and contumely, for
the children are come to the birth, and there is not strength to bring
them forth_. These words are not a mere metaphor for anguish. They are
the definition of a real miscarriage. In Isaiah's contemporaries faith
has at last engendered courage, zeal for God's house and strong
assurance of victory; but she, that has proved fertile to conceive and
carry these confidences, is powerless to bring them forth into real
life, to transform them to actual fact. Faith, complains Hezekiah, is
not the substance of things hoped for. At the moment when her subjective
assurances ought to be realized as facts, she is powerless to bring them
to the birth.
It is a miscarriage we are always deploring. Wordsworth has said,
"Through love, through hope, through faith's transcendent dower, we feel
that we are greater than we know." Yes, greater than we can articulate,
greater than we can tell to men like the Rabshakeh, even though he talk
the language of the Jews; and therefore, on the whole, it is best to be
silent in face of his argument. But greater also, we sometimes fear,
than we can realise to ourselves in actual character and victory. All
life thrills with the pangs of inability to bring the children of faith
to the birth of experience. The man, who has lost his faith or who takes
his faith easily, never knows, of course, this anguish of Hezekiah. But
the more we have fed on the promises of the Bible, the more that the
Spirit of God has engendered in our pure hearts assurances of justice
and of peace, the more we shall sometimes tremble with the fear that in
outward fact there is no life for these beautiful conceptions of the
soul. Do we really believe in the Fatherhood of God--believe in it till
it has changed us inwardly, and we carry a new sense of destiny, a new
conscience of justice, a new disgust of sin, a new pity for pain? Then
how full of the anguish of impotence must our souls feel when they
consciously survey one day of common life about us, or when we honestly
look back on a year of our own conduct! Does it not seem as if upon one
or two hideous streets in some centre of our civilisation all
Christianity, with its eighteen hundred years of promise and impetus,
had gone to wreck? Is God only for the imagination of man? Is there no
God outwardly to control and grant victory? Is He only a Voice, and not
the Creator? Is Christ only a Prophet, and not the King?
And then over these disappointments there faces us all the great
miscarriage itself--black, inevitable death. Hezekiah cried from despair
that the Divine assurance of the permanence of God's people in the world
was about to be wrecked on fact. But often by a deathbed we utter the
same lament about the individual's immortality. There is everything to
prove a future life except the fact of it within human experience. This
life is big with hopes, instincts, convictions of immortality; and yet
where within our sight have these ever passed to the birth of fact?[65]
Death is a great miscarriage. _The children have come to the birth, and
there is not strength to bring them forth._
[65] Cf. Browning's _La Saisiaz_.
And yet within the horizon of this life at least--the latter part of the
difficulty we postpone to another chapter--_faith is the substance of
things hoped for_, as Isaiah did now most brilliantly prove. For the
miracle of Jerusalem's deliverance, to which the narrative proceeds, was
not that by faith the prophet foretold it, but that by faith he did
actually himself succeed in bringing it to pass. The miracle, we say,
was not that Isaiah made accurate prediction of the city's speedy
relief from the Assyrian, but far more that upon his solitary
steadfastness, without aid of battle, he did carry her disheartened
citizens through this crisis of temptation, and kept them, though
silent, to their walls till the futile Assyrian drifted away. The
prediction, indeed, was not, although its terms appear exact, so very
marvellous for a prophet to make, who had Isaiah's religious conviction
that Jerusalem must survive and Isaiah's practical acquaintance with the
politics of the day. _Behold, I am setting in him a spirit; and he shall
hear a rumour, and shall return into his own land._ We may recall the
parallel case of Charlemagne in his campaign against the Moors in Spain,
from which he was suddenly and unseasonably hastened north on a
disastrous retreat by news of the revolt of the Saxons.[66] In the vast
Assyrian territories rebellions were constantly occurring, that demanded
the swift appearance of the king himself; and God's Spirit, to whose
inspiration Isaiah traced all political perception, suggested to him the
possibility of one of these. In the end, the Bible story implies that it
was not a rumour from some far-away quarter so much as a disaster here
in Syria, which compelled Sennacherib's "retreat from Moscow." But it
is possible that both causes were at work, and that as Napoleon offered
the receipt of news from Paris as his reason for hurriedly abandoning
the unfortunate Spanish campaign of 1808, so Sennacherib made the rumour
of some news from his capital or the north the occasion for turning his
troops from a theatre of war, where they had not met with unequivocal
success, and had at last been half destroyed by the plague. Isaiah's
further prediction of Sennacherib's death must also be taken in a
general sense, for it was not till twenty years later that the Assyrian
tyrant met this violent end: _I will cause him to fall by the sword in
his own land_. But do not let us waste our attention on the altogether
minor point of the prediction of Jerusalem's deliverance, when the great
wonder, of which the prediction is but an episode, lies lengthened and
manifest before us--that Isaiah, when all the defenders of Jerusalem
were distracted and her king prostrate, did by the single steadfastness
of his spirit sustain her inviolate, and procure for her people a safe
and glorious future.
[66] A still more striking analogy may be found in the case of Napoleon
I. when in the East in 1799. He had just achieved a small victory which
partly masked the previous failure of his campaign, when "Sir Sydney
Smith now contrived that he should receive a packet of journals, by
which he was informed of all that had passed recently in Europe and the
disasters that France had suffered. His resolution was immediately
taken. On August 22nd he wrote to Kleber announcing that he transferred
to him the command of the expedition, and that he himself would return
to Europe.... After carefully spreading false accounts of his
intentions, he set sail on the night of the same day" (Professor Seeley,
article "Napoleon" in the _Ency. Brit._).
The baffled Rabshakeh returned to his master, whom he found at Libnah,
_for he had heard that he had broken up from Lachish_. Sennacherib, the
narrative would seem to imply, did not trouble himself further about
Jerusalem till he learned that Tirhakah, the Ethiopian ruler of Egypt,
was marching to meet him with probably a stronger force than that which
Sennacherib had defeated at Eltekeh. Then, feeling the danger of leaving
so strong a fortress as Jerusalem in his rear, Sennacherib sent to
Hezekiah one more demand for surrender. Hezekiah spread his enemy's
letter before the Lord. His prayer that follows is remarkable for two
features, which enable us to see how pure and elevated a monotheism
God's Spirit had at last developed from the national faith of Israel.
The Being whom the king now seeks he addresses by the familiar name
_Jehovah of hosts, God of Israel_, and describes by the physical
figure--_who art enthroned upon the cherubim_. But he conceives of this
God with the utmost loftiness and purity, ascribing to Him not only
sovereignty and creatorship, but absolute singularity of Godhead. We
have but to compare Hezekiah's prayer with the utterances of his
predecessor Ahaz, to whom many gods were real, and none absolutely
sovereign, or with the utterances of Israelites far purer than Ahaz, to
whom the gods of the nations, though inferior to Jehovah, were yet real
existences, in order to mark the spiritual advance made by Israel under
Isaiah. It is a tribute to the prophet's force, which speaks volumes,
when the deputation from Hezekiah talk to him of _thy God_ (ver. 4). For
Isaiah by his ministry had made Israel's God to be new in Israel's eyes.
Hezekiah's lofty prayer drew forth through the prophet an answer from
Jehovah (vv. 21-32). This is one of the most brilliant of Isaiah's
oracles. It is full of much, with which we are now familiar: the triumph
of the inviolable fortress, _the virgin daughter of Zion_, and her scorn
of the arrogant foe; the prophet's appreciation of Asshur's power and
impetus, which only heightens his conviction that Asshur is but an
instrument in the hand of God; the old figure of the enemy's sudden
check as of a wild animal by hook and bridle; his inevitable retreat to
the north. But these familiar ideas are flung off with a terseness and
vivacity, which bear out the opinion that here we have a prophecy of
Isaiah, not revised and elaborated for subsequent publication, like the
rest of his book, but in its original form, struck quickly forth to meet
the city's sudden and urgent prayer.
The new feature of this prophecy is the sign added to it (ver. 30). This
sign reminds us of that which in opposite terms described to Ahaz the
devastation of Judah by the approaching Assyrians (chap. vii.). The wave
of Assyrian war is about to roll away again, and Judah to resume her
neglected agriculture, but not quite immediately. During this year of
701 it has been impossible, with the Assyrians in the land, to sow the
seed, and the Jews have been dependent on the precarious crop of what
had fallen from the harvest of the previous year and sown
itself--_saphîah_, or _aftergrowth_. Next year, it being now too late to
sow for next year's harvest, they must be content with the _shahîs--wild
corn, that which springs of itself. But the third year sow ye, and reap,
and plant vineyards and eat the fruit thereof._ Perhaps we ought not to
interpret these numbers literally. The use of three gives the statement
a formal and general aspect, as if the prophet only meant, It may be not
quite at once that we get rid of the Assyrians; but when they do go,
then they go for good, and you may till your land again without fear of
their return. Then rings out the old promise, so soon now to be
accomplished, about _the escaped_ and _the remnant_; and the great
pledge of the promise is once more repeated: _The zeal of Jehovah of
hosts will perform this_. With this exclamation, as in ix. 7, the
prophecy reaches a natural conclusion; and vv. 33-35 may have been
uttered by Isaiah a little later, when he was quite sure that the
Assyrian would not even attempt to repeat his abandoned blockade of
Jerusalem.
* * * * *
At last in a single night the deliverance miraculously came. It is
implied by the scattered accounts of those days of salvation, that an
Assyrian corps continued to sit before Jerusalem even after the
Rabshakeh had returned to the headquarters of Sennacherib. The
thirty-third of Isaiah, as well as those Psalms which celebrate the
Assyrian's disappearance from Judah, describe it as having taken place
from under the walls of Jerusalem and the astonished eyes of her
guardians. It was not, however, upon this force--perhaps little more
than a brigade of observation (xxxiii. 18)--that the calamity fell which
drove Sennacherib so suddenly from Syria. _And there went forth_ (_that
night_, adds the book of Kings) _the angel of Jehovah; and he smote in
the camp of Assyria one hundred and eighty-five thousand; and when the
camp arose in the morning, behold all of them were corpses, dead men.
And Sennacherib, King of Assyria, broke up, and returned and dwelt in
Nineveh._ Had this pestilence dispersed the camp that lay before
Jerusalem, and left beneath the walls so considerable a number of
corpses, the exclamations of surprise at the sudden disappearance of
Assyria, which occur in Isa. xxxiii. and in Psalms xlviii. and lxxvi.,
could hardly have failed to betray the fact. But these simply speak of
vague _trouble_ coming _upon them that were assembled about Zion_, and
of their swift decampment. The trouble was the news of the calamity,
whose victims were the main body of the Assyrian army, who had been
making for the borders of Egypt, but were now scattered northwards like
chaff.
For details of this disaster we look in vain, of course, to the Assyrian
annals, which only record Sennacherib's abrupt return to Nineveh. But it
is remarkable that the histories of both of his chief rivals in this
campaign, Judah and Egypt, should contain independent reminiscences of
so sudden and miraculous a disaster to his host. From Egyptian sources
there has come down through Herodotus (ii. 14), a story that a king of
Egypt, being deserted by the military caste, when "Sennacherib King of
the Arabs and Assyrians" invaded his country, entered his sanctuary and
appealed with weeping to his god; that the god appeared and cheered him,
that he raised an army of artisans and marched to meet Sennacherib in
Pelusium; that by night a multitude of field-mice ate up the quivers,
bow-strings and shield-straps of the Assyrians; and that, as these fled
on the morrow, very many of them fell. A stone statue of the king, adds
Herodotus, stood in the temple of Hephæstus, having a mouse in the hand.
Now, since the mouse was a symbol of sudden destruction, and even of the
plague, this story of Herodotus seems to be merely a picturesque form of
a tradition that pestilence broke out in the Assyrian camp. The parallel
with the Bible narrative is close. In both accounts it is a prayer of
the king that prevails. In both the Deity sends His agent--in the
grotesque Egyptian an army of mice, in the sublime Jewish His angel. In
both the effects are sudden, happening in a single night. From the
Assyrian side we have this corroboration: that Sennacherib did abruptly
return to Nineveh without taking Jerusalem or meeting with Tirhakah, and
that, though he reigned for twenty years more, he never again made a
Syrian campaign. Sennacherib's convenient story of his return may be
compared to the ambiguous account which Cæsar gives of his first
withdrawal from Britain, laying emphasis on the submission of the tribes
as his reason for a swift return to France--a return which was rather
due to the destruction of his fleet by storm and the consequent
uneasiness of his army. Or, as we have already said, Sennacherib's
account may be compared to Napoleon's professed reason for his sudden
abandonment of his Spanish campaign and his quick return to Paris in
1808.
The neighbourhood in which the Assyrian army suffered this great
disaster[67] was notorious in antiquity for its power of pestilence.
Making every allowance for the untutored imagination of the ancients, we
must admit the Serbonian bog, between Syria and Egypt, to have been a
place terrible for filth and miasma. The noxious vapours travelled far;
but the plagues, with which this swamp several times desolated the
world, were first engendered among the diseased and demoralised
populations, whose villages festered upon its margin. A Persian army was
decimated here in the middle of the fourth century before Christ. "The
fatal disease which depopulated the earth in the time of Justinian and
his successors first appeared in the neighbourhood of Pelusium, between
the Serbonian bog and the eastern channel of the Nile."[68] To the north
of the bog the Crusaders also suffered from the infection. It is,
therefore, very probable that the moral terror of this notorious
neighbourhood, as well as its malaria, acting upon an exhausted and
disappointed army in a devastated land, was the secondary cause in the
great disaster, by which the Almighty humbled the arrogance of Asshur.
The swiftness, with which Sennacherib's retreat is said to have begun,
has been equalled by the turning-points of other historical campaigns.
Alexander the Great's decision to withdraw from India was, after
victories as many as Sennacherib's, made in three days. Attila vanished
out of Italy as suddenly as Sennacherib, and from a motive less evident.
In the famous War of the Fosse the Meccan army broke off from their
siege of Mohammed in a single stormy night. Napoleon's career went back
upon itself with just as sharp a bend no less than thrice--in 1799, on
Sennacherib's own ground in Syria; in 1808, in Spain; and in 1812, when
he turned from Moscow upon "one memorable night of frost, in which
twenty thousand horses perished, and the strength of the French army was
utterly broken."[69]
[67] The statement of the Egyptian legend, that it was from a point in
the neighbourhood of Pelusium that Sennacherib's army commenced its
retreat, is not contradicted by anything in the Jewish records, which
leave the locality of the disaster very vague, but, on the contrary,
receives some support from what Isaiah expresses as at least the
intention of Sennacherib (chap. xxxvii. 25).
[68] Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_, xliii.
[69] Arnold, _Lectures on Modern History_, 177, quoted by Stanley.
The amount of the Assyrian loss is enormous, and implies of course a
much higher figure for the army which was vast enough to suffer it; but
here are some instances for comparison. In the early German invasions of
Italy whole armies and camps were swept away by the pestilential
climate. The losses of the First Crusade were over three hundred
thousand. The soldiers of the Third Crusade, upon the scene of
Sennacherib's war, were reckoned at more than half a million, and their
losses by disease alone at over one hundred thousand.[70] The Grand Army
of Napoleon entered Russia two hundred and fifty thousand, but came out,
having suffered no decisive defeat, only twelve thousand; on the retreat
from Moscow alone ninety thousand perished.
[70] Gibbon, xlii.; lix.
What we are concerned with, however, is neither the immediate occasion
nor the exact amount of Sennacherib's loss, but the bare fact, so
certainly established, that, having devastated Judah to the very walls
of Jerusalem, the Assyrian was compelled by some calamity apart from
human war to withdraw before the sacred city itself was taken. For this
was the essential part of Isaiah's prediction; upon this he had staked
the credit of the pure monotheism, whose prophet he was to the world. If
we keep before us these two simple certainties about the great
Deliverance: _first_, that it had been foretold by Jehovah's word, and
_second_, that it had been now achieved, despite all human probability,
by Jehovah's own arm, we shall understand the enormous spiritual
impression which it left upon Israel. The religion of the one supreme
God, supreme in might because supreme in righteousness, received a most
emphatic historical vindication, a signal and glorious triumph. Well
might Isaiah exclaim, on the morning of the night during which that
Assyrian host had drifted away from Jerusalem, _Jehovah is our Judge_;
_Jehovah is our Lawgiver_; _Jehovah is our King_: _He saveth us_. No
other god for the present had any chance in Judah. Idolatry was
discredited, not by the political victory of a puritan faction, not even
by the distinctive genius or valour of a nation, but by an evident act
of Providence, to which no human aid had been contributory. It was
nothing less than the baptism of Israel in spiritual religion, the grace
of which was never wholly undone.
Nevertheless, the story of Jehovah's triumph cannot be justly recounted
without including the reaction which followed upon it within the same
generation. Before twenty years had passed from the day, on which
Jerusalem, with the forty-sixth Psalm on her lips, sought with all her
heart the God of Isaiah, she relapsed into an idolatry, that wore only
this sign of the uncompromising puritanism it had displaced: that it
was gloomy, and filled with a sense of sin unknown to Israel's
idolatries previous to the age of Isaiah. The change would be almost
incomprehensible to us, who have realized the spiritual effects of
Sennacherib's disappearance, if we had not within our own history a
somewhat analogous experience. Puritanism was as gloriously accredited
by event and seemed to be as generally accepted by England under
Cromwell as faith in the spiritual religion of Isaiah was vindicated by
the deliverance of Jerusalem and the peace of Judah under Hezekiah. But
swiftly as the ruling temper in England changed after Cromwell's death,
and Puritanism was laid under the ban, and persecution and
licentiousness broke out, so quickly when Hezekiah died did Manasseh his
son--no change of dynasty here--_do evil in the sight of Jehovah, and
make Judah to sin, building again the high places and rearing up altars
for Baal and altars in the house of Jehovah, whereof Jehovah had said,
In Jerusalem will I put My name_. Idolatry was never so rampant in
Judah. _Moreover, Manasseh shed innocent blood till he filled Jerusalem
from one end to another._ It is in this carnage that tradition has
placed the death of Isaiah. He, who had been Judah's best counsellor
through five reigns, on whom the whole nation had gathered in the day of
her distress, and by whose faith her long-hoped-for salvation had at
last become substantive, was violently put to death by the son of
Hezekiah. It is said that he was _sawn asunder_.[71]
[71] Heb. xi.
The parallel, which we are pursuing, does not, however, close here. "As
soon," says an English historian, "as the wild orgy of the Restoration
was over, men began to see that nothing that was really worthy in the
work of Puritanism had been undone. The whole history of English
progress since the Restoration, on its moral and spiritual sides, has
been the history of Puritanism."
For the principles of Isaiah and their victory we may make a claim as
much larger than this claim, as Israel's influence on the world has been
greater than England's. Israel never wholly lost the grace of the
baptism wherewith she was baptized in 701. Even in her history there was
no event in which the unaided interposition of God was more conspicuous.
It is from an appreciation of the meaning of such a Providence that
Israel derives her character--that character which marks her off so
distinctively from her great rival in the education of the human race,
and endows her ministry with its peculiar value to the world. If we are
asked for the characteristics of the Hellenic genius, we point to the
august temples and images of beauty in which the wealth and art of man
have evolved in human features most glorious suggestions of divinity, or
we point to Thermopylæ, where human valour and devotion seem grander
even in unavailing sacrifice than the almighty Fate, that renders them
the prey of the barbarian. In Greece the human is greater than the
divine. But if we are asked to define the spirit of Israel, we remember
the worship which Isaiah has enjoined in his opening chapter, a worship
that dispenses even with temple and with sacrifice, but, from the first
strivings of conscience to the most certain enjoyment of peace, ascribes
all man's experience to the word of God. In contrast with Thermopylæ, we
recall Jerusalem's Deliverance, effected apart from human war by the
direct stroke of Heaven. In Judah man is great simply as he rests on
God. The rocks of Thermopylæ, how imperishably beautiful do they shine
to latest ages with the comradeship, the valour, the sacrificial blood
of human heroes! It is another beauty which Isaiah saw upon the bare,
dry rocks of Zion, and which has drawn to them the admiration of the
world. _There_, he said, _Jehovah is glory for us, a place of broad
rivers and streams_.
* * * * *
_In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence
is your strength._ How divine Isaiah's message is, may be proved by the
length of time mankind is taking to learn it. The remarkable thing is,
that he staked so lofty a principle, and the pure religion of which it
was the temper, upon a political result, that he staked them upon, and
vindicated them by, a purely local and material success--the relief of
Jerusalem from the infidel. Centuries passed, and Christ came. He did
not--for even He could not--preach a more spiritual religion than that
which He had committed to His greatest forerunner, but He released this
religion, and the temper of faith which Isaiah had so divinely
expressed, from the local associations and merely national victories,
with which even Isaiah had been forced to identify them. The destruction
of Jerusalem by the heathen formed a large part of Christ's prediction
of the immediate future; and He comforted the remnant of faith with
these words, to some of which Isaiah's lips had first given their
meaning: _Ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem worship
the Father. God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him
in spirit and in truth._
Again centuries passed--no less than eighteen from Isaiah--and we find
Christendom, though Christ had come between, returning to Isaiah's
superseded problem, and, while reviving its material conditions, unable
to apply to them the prophet's spiritual temper. The Christianity of
the Crusades fell back upon Isaiah's position without his spirit. Like
him, it staked the credit of religion upon the relief of the holy city
from the grasp of the infidel; but, in ghastly contrast to that pure
faith and serene confidence with which a single Jew maintained the
inviolateness of Mount Zion in the face of Assyria, with what pride and
fraud, with what blood and cruelty, with what impious invention of
miracle and parody of Divine testimony, did countless armies of
Christendom, excited by their most fervent prophets and blessed by their
high-priest, attempt in vain the recovery of Jerusalem from the Saracen!
The Crusades are a gigantic proof of how easy it is to adopt the
external forms of heroic ages, how difficult to repeat their inward
temper. We could not have more impressive witness borne to the fact that
humanity--though obedient to the orthodox Church, though led by the
strongest spirits of the age, though hallowed by the presence of its
greatest saints, though enduring all trials, though exhibiting an
unrivalled power of self-sacrifice and enthusiasm, though beautified by
courtesy and chivalry, and though doing and suffering all for Christ's
sake--may yet fail to understand the old precept that _in returning and
rest men are saved, in quietness and in confidence is their strength_.
Nothing could more emphatically prove the loftiness of Isaiah's teaching
than this failure of Christendom even to come within sight of it.
Have we learned this lesson yet? O God of Israel, God of Isaiah, in
returning to whom and resting upon whom alone we are saved, purge us of
self and of the pride of life, of the fever and the falsehood they
breed. Teach us that in quietness and in confidence is our strength.
Help us to be still and know that Thou art God.