5 of Hezekiah. Wild as he is in appearance, and terrible in his denunciations, there are in him, beyond any of the Lesser Prophets of this time, 'soul-stirring recollections, And hopes their bright reflections.' On him, first of the Prophets, the events of the past history crowd in vivid succession, even as we ourselves see them in the present sacred books,―Abraham and Jacob, the wonders of the Exodus, the interview of Balaam and Balak, the delightful stay of the pastoral tribes in the forests beyond the Jordan on the eve of the conquest. To him more distinctly than to any previous Prophet, comes the assurance that, in spite of all her calamities and her crimes, Jerusalem shall become the capital of a vast spiritual and intellectual empire, and that a mighty Conqueror shall shatter in pieces all the obstacles that close up the free energies of his people; that a Ruler shall come, even in his own time, who shall set all things right, and who, though having a past in the most ancient days, shall be born in the Prophet's own immediate neighbourhood, the small insignificant village of Bethlehem. He gives to the warlike cry of Joel a turn which henceforth becomes its authorised rendering; when, instead of a reign of war, he anticipates universal peace: They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and 'their spears into pruning hooks.' There will be a shepherd more royal even than David; 'universal than that of Solomon.' 10 8 9 a peace even more He trusts with unshaken faith in the gracious future which God has in store for his nation and for himself. Who is a "God like "Thee, pardoning iniquities, and passing by trans'gressions for the remnant of His heritage. He retaineth not 1 Micah vii. 20. 2 Ibid. vi. 4, vii. 15. Ibid. vi. 4, 5. Ibid. ii. 12, vii. 14. Ibid. iii. 1-4. • Ibid. ii. 13 (?). See Ewald, Propheten, p. 333. Micah v. 1–4. Ibid. iv. 2, comp. Joel iii. 10. Ibid. ii. 12, iv. 6, 8, v. 4, 5, vii. 14. 10 Ibid. iv. 3. 11 Ibid. vii. 18. Possibly in allu sion to his name Micaiah, who is as 'Jehovah?' See Dr. Pusey, Pref. p. 288. His anger for ever, because He delighteth in mercy. He will again have compassion upon us. He will subdue our ' iniquities; yea, Thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths ' of the sea.' And his last words are those which, centuries afterwards, were caught up by the aged Priest whose song unites the Old and New Testaments together. Thou wilt 'perform the truth to Jacob, and the mercy to Abraham, ' which Thou hast sworn ;' to send forth a second David, the mighty Child, whose unknown mother is already travailing for his birth. 6 1 Exactly contemporary with Micah-it is hard to say whether older or younger is a still greater Prophet, who stands Isaiah. out at once as the representative of his own age, and yet as a universal teacher of mankind. Whilst the other Prophets of this period are known only to the bypaths of theology, in the quaint texts of remote preachers, Isaiah is a household word everywhere. This is the first point in the history of the kingdom of Judah, where, as in common ecclesiastical history, we are able to measure the periods by the names rather of distinguished teachers than of Kings or ChiefPriests. In the earlier stages of the history of Judah there was no Prophet of magnitude equal to Jehoshaphat, or Jehoiada, or Uzziah. But in the period on which we now enter there is no King or Priest of magnitude equal to Isaiah, and he was succeeded by two others, only, if at all, inferior to himself, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. For the first time since Elisha we have a Prophet, of whose life and aspect we can be said to have any details. He was statesman as well as Prophet. He lived not in the remote villages of Judah like Micah, or wandering over hill and dale like Elijah and Amos, but in the centre of all political life and activity. His whole thoughts take the colour of Jerusalem. He is the first Pro 1 Micah vii. 18-20; Luke i. 72, 73. Ewald makes him to be younger, Dr. Pusey to be older. phet specially attached to the capital' and the court. He was, according to Jewish 2 tradition, the cousin of Uzziah, his father Amoz being held to be a younger son of Joash. He wrote Uzziah's life; and his first Prophecies, beginning in the close of that reign, illustrate the reign of Jotham, as well as of the three succeeding sovereigns. His individual and domestic life was a kind of impersonation of the Prophetic office. His wife was a 'Prophetess. According to a practice which seems to have prevailed throughout his career as through that of his contemporary Hosea, he himself and his children all bear Prophetic names: Behold I and the ' children whom the Lord hath given me are for a sign and a 'wonder in Israel from the Lord of Hosts.'5 He had a circle of 6 disciples, probably of Prophets, in whom his spirit was long continued. One such, unknown except through his 7writings, in all probability has, if so be, under the shadow of his name, exercised a still wider influence than Isaiah himself. Legends, apocryphal books, have gathered round him as round another Solomon or another Elijah. Of no other book of the Old Testament, except the Psalter, have the subsequent effects in the world been so marked, or the principles so fruitful of results for the future. In fact his appearance was a new step in the Prophetic dispensation. The length of his life, the grandeur of his social position, gave a force to what he said, beyond what was possible in the fleeting addresses of the humbler Prophets who had preceded him. There is a royal air in his attitude, in his movements, in the sweep of his vision, which commands attention. He was at once great and faithful' in his vision.' Nothing escapes him in the events of his time. The older Prophetic Ewald, Propheten, p. 168. 2 See the quotations in Gesenius, Jesaia, Einl. §1. 32 Chr. xxvi. 22. 4 Isa. viii. 3. 5 Isa. viii. 18. 6 Ibid. viii. 16. Ibid. xl.-lxvi. See Lecture XL 8 Ecclus. xlviii. 22. 6 writings are worked up by him into his own words. He does not break with the past. He is not ashamed of building on the foundation of those who have gone before him. All that there is of general instruction in Joel, Micah, or Amos, is reproduced in Isaiah. But his style has its own marked peculiarity and novelty. The fierce impassioned addresses of Joel and Nahum, the abrupt strokes, the contorted turns of Hosea and Amos, give way to something more of a continuous flow, where stanza succeeds to stanza, and canto to canto, with almost a natural sequence. Full of imagery as is his poetry, it still has a simplicity which was at that time so rare as to provoke the satire of the more popular Prophets. They, pushing to an excess the nervous rhetoric of their predecessors, could not bear, as they expressed it, to be treated like children. Whom shall he teach know'ledge, and whom shall he make to understand doctrine? Them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the 'breasts!' Those constant recurrences of the general truths of spiritual religion, majestic in their plainness, seemed to them mere commonplace repetitions; precept upon precept, pre'cept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little,' or as appears still more strongly in the original, tsav la-tsav-tsav la-tsav-kav la-kav-kav la'kav,—zeïr sham, zeïr sham.' It is the universal complaint of the shallow inflated rhetoricians of the professedly religious world against original genius and apostolic simplicity, the complaint of the babblers of Ephesus against S. John, the protest of all scholastic and pedantic systems against the freeness and the breadth of a Greater than John or Isaiah. Such divine utterances have always appeared defective, and unimpassioned, and indefinite, in the ears of those who crave for wilder excitement and more elaborate systems, but have no 1 II. 1 Isa. xxviii. 9-13 (Ewald). G G The call of less found, for that very reason, a sure response in the childlike, genuine, natural, soul of every age. The special objects of Isaiah's mission will appear as we pass through his history. But the general objects are best indicated in the account which he himself has left us of his call, or (as we should now describe it) his conversion, to the Prophetical office. 'In the year that King Uzziah died,' in the last year of that long reign of fifty-two years, as the life of the aged King, now on the verge of seventy, was drawing to its close in the retirement of the house of lepers, the young Isaiah was, or in vision seemed to be, in the court of the Temple. He stood at the gate of the porch, and gazed straight into the Holy Place, and into the Holy of Holies itself. All the intervening obstacles were removed. The great gates of cedar-wood were thrown open, the many-coloured veil that hung before the innermost sanctuary was drawn aside, and deep within was a throne as of a King, high and lifted up, towering as if into the sky. What was the form that sat thereon, here, as elsewhere, the Scripture forbears to describe. Only by outward and inferior images, as to us by secondary causes, could the Divine Essence be expressed. The long drapery of His train filled the Temple, as His glory fills the earth.' Around the throne, as the cherubs on each side of the mercyseat, as the guards round the King, with head and feet veiled, figures floated like flying serpents,2 themselves glowing with the glory of which they were a part, whilst vast wings enfolded their faces and their feet, and supported them in mid-air round the throne. From side to side 3 went up a hymn of praise, which has since been incorporated in the 1 Isa. vi. 2 Saraph. Compare the Brazen Serpent used at this time (2 Kings xviii. 4). The word saraph is used in Isaiah, and for the fiery serpents in the wilder ness (Num. xxi. 6; Deut. viii. 15), and is used nowhere else. Neither beginning till the other gave permission, as in the synagogues (Rashi, in Gesenius, Jesaia, p. 121). |