XXVIII.

ISAIA H.

SAIAH stands out at once as the representative of his own age, and yet as a universal teacher of mankind. Whilst the other prophets of the period in which he

lived are known only to the bypaths of theology, in

the quaint texts of remote preachers, Isaiah is a household word everywhere. For the first time since Elisha we have a prophet of whose life and aspect we can be said to have any details. He was statesman as well as prophet. He lived not in the remote villages of Judah like Micah, or wandering over hill and dale like Elijah and Amos, but in the centre of all political life and activity. His whole thoughts take the color of Jerusalem. He is the first prophet specially attached to the capital and the court. He was, according to Jewish tradition, the cousin of Uzziah, his father Amoz being held to be a younger son of Joash. He wrote i Uzziah's life, and his first prophecies, beginning in the close of that reign, illustrate the reign of Jotham as well as of the three succeeding sovereigns. His individual and domestic life was a kind of impersonation of the prophetic office. His wife was a prophetess. According to a practice which seems to have prevailed throughout his career, as through that of his contemporary Hosea, he himself and his children all bear prophetic names: Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath given me are for a sign and a wonder in Israel from the Lord of hosts." He had a circle of disciples (Isa. viii. 16)—probably of prophets-in

whom his spirit was long continued. The length of his life, the grandeur of his social position, gave a force to what he said beyond what was possible in the fleeting addresses of the humbler prophets who had preceded him. There is a royal air in his attitude, in his movements, in the sweep of his vision, which commands attention. He was at once "great and faithful" in his "vision." Nothing escapes him in the events of his time. The older prophetic writings are worked up by him into his own words. He does not break with the past. He is not ashamed of building on the foundation of those who have gone before him. All that there is of general instruction in Joel, Micah or Amos is reproduced in Isaiah. But his style has its own marked peculiarity and novelty. The fierce, impassioned addresses of Joel and Nahum, the abrupt strokes, the contorted turns, of Hosea and Amos, give way to something more of a continuous flow, where stanza succeeds to stanza and canto to canto with almost a natural sequence. Full of imagery as is his poetry, it still has a simplicity which was at that time so rare as to provoke the satire of the more popular prophets. They, pushing to excess the nervous rhetoric of their predecessors, could not bear, as they expressed it, to be treated like children. "Whom shall he teach knowledge, and whom shall he make to understand doctrine? Them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts." Those constant recurrences of the general truths of spiritual religion, majestic in their plainness, seemed to them mere commonplace repetitions-" precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little." It is the universal complaint of the shallow, inflated rhetoricians of the professedly religious world against original genius and apostolic simplicity, the complaint of the babblers of Ephesus against St. John, the protest of all scholastic and pedantic systems against the freeness and the breadth of a greater than John or Isaiah. Such divine utterances have always appeared defective and unimpassioned and indefinite in the ears of

those who crave for wilder excitement and more elaborate systems, but have no less found, for that very reason, a sure response in the childlike, genuine, natural soul of every age.

The general objects of Isaiah's mission are best indicated in the account which he himself has left us of his call, or (as we should now describe it) his conversion to the prophetical office.

"In the year that King Uzziah died"-in the last year of that long reign of fifty-two years-as the life of the aged king, now on the verge of seventy, was drawing to its close in the retirement. of the house of lepers, the young Isaiah was, or in vision seemed to be, in the court of the temple. He stood at the gate of the porch and gazed straight into the holy place, and into the holy of holies itself. All the intervening obstacles were removed. The great gates of cedar-wood were thrown open, the manycolored veil that hung before the innermost sanctuary was drawn aside, and deep within was a throne as of a king, high and lifted up, towering as if into the sky. What was the form that sat thereon, here, as elsewhere, the Scripture forbears to describe. Only by outward and inferior images, as to us by secondary causes, could the Divine Essence be expressed. The long drapery of his train filled the temple, as "his glory fills the earth." Around the throne, as the cherubs on each side of the mercy-seat, as the guards round the king, with head and feet veiled, figures floated like flying serpents, themselves glowing with the glory of which they were a part, whilst vast wings enfolded their faces and their feet, and supported them in mid-air around the throne. From side to side went up a hymn of praise, which has since been incorporated in the worship of Christendom, and which expressed that He was there who bore the great name specially appropriated to the period of the Jewish monarchy and to the prophetical order "the Lord of hosts." The sound of their voices rang like thunder to the extremity of the temple. The pillars of the gateway trembled as if in another earthquake-shock, and the whole building within grew dark as with the smoke of a vast

sacrifice. It was a sight and sound which the youthful Isaiah recognized at once as the intimation of divinity. It was the revelation of the Divine Presence to him, as that of the burning bush to Moses, or of the still small voice to Elijah-the inevitable prelude to a prophetic mission, couched in the form most congenial to his own character and situation. To him, the royal prophet of Jerusalem, this manifestation of royal splendor was the almost necessary vesture in which the spiritual truth was to be clothed. All his own sins-we know not what they were— and the sins of his nation-as we know them from himself and the contemporary prophets-passed before him, and he said, "Woe is me, for I am lost, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell amongst a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts." On these defiled lips, therefore, the purifying touch was laid. From the flaming altar the flaming seraph brought a flaming coal. This was the creation, so to speak, of that marvelous style which has entranced the world—the burning furnace which warms, as with a central fire, every variety of his addresses. Then came the voice from the sanctuary, saying, "Whom shall I send? who will go for us ?" With unhesitating devotion the youth replied, "Here am I; send me." In the words that follow is represented the whole of the prophet's career. First, he is forewarned of the forlorn hopelessness of his mission. The louder and more earnest is his cry, the less will they hear and understand; the more clearly he sets the vision of truth before them, the less will they see. "Make the heart of this people gross, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted and healed." These mournful words, well known to us through their fivefold repetition in the New Testament as the description of the Jewish people in its latest stage of decay, were doubtless true in the highest degree of that wayward generation to which Isaiah was called to speak. His spirit sank within him, and he

asked, "O Lord, how long?" The reply unfolded at once the darker and the brighter side of the future. Not till successive invasions had wasted the cities-not till the houses had been left without a human being within them-not till the land had been desolate with desolation-would a better hope dawn; not till the invasions of Pekah and Sennacherib had done their work-not till ten out of the twelve tribes had been removed far away, and there should have been a great forsaking in the midst of the land —would he be relieved from the necessity of delivering his stern but fruitless warnings against the idolatry, the dullness, the injustice of his people. But widely spread and deeply seated as was the national corruption, there was still a sound portion left, which would live on and flourish. As the aged oak or terebinth of Palestine may be shattered and cut down to the very roots, and yet out of the withered stump a new shoot may spring forth and grow into a mighty and vigorous tree, so is the holy seed, the faithful few, of the chosen people. This is the true consolation of all ecclesiastical history. It is a thought which is but little recognized in its earlier and ruder stages, when the inward and outward are easily confounded together. But it is the very message of life to a more refined and complex age, and it was the key-note to the whole of Isaiah's prophecies. It had, indeed, been dimly indicated to Elijah, in the promise of the few who had not bowed the knee to Baal, and in the still small whisper which was greater than thunder, earthquake and fire. But in Isaiah's time it first, if we may say so, became a living doctrine of the Jewish Church, and through him an inheritance of the Christian Church. "A remnant-the remnant:" this was his watchword. "The remnant shall return." This was the truth constantly personified before him in the name of his eldest sona remnant of good in the mass of corruption, a remnant saved from the destructive invasions of Assyria, a burst of spring-time in the reformation of Hezekiah, and, far away in the distant future, a rod out of the stem, the worn-out stem, of Jesse-a