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 Phœnicia'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 Phœnicians, 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
Phœnicia did; and Phœnician 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 Phœnician 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
Phœnicia 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 Phœnician 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 Phœnicians
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 Phœnician 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 Phœnician
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 Phœnicians 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 Phœnician 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 Phœnicians 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 Phœnicians 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.
Phœnician 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 Phœnicians 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 Phœnician 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 Phœnicians 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
Phœnicia, 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 Phœnicia 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 Phœnicia'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 Phœnicia 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