granted to Isaiah a revelation of Him who was the true divine King of Israel; and at the same time he gained a perception of the ultimate issues of Jehovah's dealings with the nation which enabled him to face the dark and threatening future with confidence and hope.

The spiritual truths impressed on the prophet's mind by this memorable experience are those which we shall see unfolded with singular clearness and constancy of purpose throughout his whole subsequent ministry. An exposition of these truths in their connexion will be attempted in a subsequent chapter, but it is necessary here to specify certain elements of the vision whose influence appears at all stages of Isaiah's career. Of these the first and most fundamental is an overwhelming sense of the majesty and holiness of Jehovah, the God of Israel. These aspects of the divine nature are prominent in nearly every page of his writings, and the prophet's sense of them is undoubtedly to be traced to that supreme moment of his spiritual history when his eyes saw the King, Jehovah of Hosts, and he shrank in terror from the contact of his holiness (ch. vi. 5). In the second place, Isaiah was then possessed by the consciousness of a life-long mission to be discharged in the service of the divine King as His messenger and spokesman to Israel. The alacrity with which he offers himself for this work, without knowing what it might involve, is a revelation of the ardent temperament of the man and contrasts strikingly with the hesitation displayed by another great prophet at a similar moment of his life (ch. vi. 8; cf. Jer. i. 6). But Isaiah further learned something of the nature and effects of the work to which he was thus consecrated. It is a gloomy and discouraging prospect that is disclosed to him,―a people so hardened in unbelief that the very abundance of his revelations and the urgency of his appeals will only render them more and more insensible to spiritual influences, while step by step the inevitable judgment is executed upon them until the existing nation of Israel has been utterly consumed (ch. vi. 9—13). And finally the vision contains a ray of hope in the promise of an indestructible remnant in Israel, a "holy seed" or spiritual kernel of the nation, which

shall survive the judgment and become the germ of the ideal people of God (v. 13). This last idea of the "Remnant," which is one of the most distinctive in Isaiah's teaching, was perhaps also the first to receive public expression; for it is embodied in the name of a son, Shěār-Fãshûb (=“ Remnant shall turn,”) who must have been born to the prophet very soon after his inaugural vision (see ch. vii. 3). The application of that and other principles in different situations will appear as we proceed to describe the various aspects of Isaiah's public work.

It is convenient to distinguish three periods of Isaiah's ministry, which, although very unequal in length, are marked each by some features peculiar to itself. i. The first period extends from the death of Uzziah to the beginning of the reign of Ahaz. ii. The second is the critical period of the SyroEphraimitic invasion, about 735. iii. The third is the time of the Assyrian domination, culminating in the invasion and deliverance of the year 7011.

i. The discourses commonly assigned to the first period are found in chs. ii.—iv., v. 1—24, ix. 8-x. 4+v. 25—30. If to these passages we add ch. i. (which, although certainly not written before the Syro-Ephraimitic war, may not improbably be assigned to that date, and may then be regarded as a final manifesto summing up the results of the first period of his work) we have a well-defined group of prophecies, with a general resemblance to the book of Amos and presenting a vivid picture of the earliest phase of Isaiah's ministry. Like Amos, the prophet appears here mainly as a preacher of national righteousness and of judgment to come. The two great themes which are the burden of his message are the sin of Israel and the certainty of national disaster through the agency of the Assyrians. It has been disputed which of these two intuitions was primary and which was secondary in the consciousness of the prophets; that is to say, whether it was their profound sense of national sin that led them to the conviction that a great judgment was inevitable, or whether their intuitive certainty of what was portended by the approach of Assyria opened their

1 Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, pp. 214, 422 (2nd Ed.).

eyes to the evidences of national corruption around them. The question, so formulated, hardly admits of an answer. What is peculiar to the prophets is the idea of God and of the moral order of the universe which enabled them to see the connexion between two sets of facts which to the prevalent religion of the time stood in no relation to one another. Knowing Jehovah as the absolutely Righteous One and the omnipotent Disposer of events they recognised His voice of anger in the thundering march of the Assyrians, and what they heard confirmed the verdict of their conscience on the moral condition of their people. In this respect Isaiah simply represents the attitude common to the prophets of the Assyrian period, and the two lines of thought which have been indicated are developed with equal power and earnestness in his earliest writings.

We have already seen that the social state of Judah was very similar to that of North Israel in the days of Amos, and Isaiah deals with the evils of the age in the spirit of his predecessor. If we may trust a probable arrangement of the discourses his criticism becomes more incisive and discriminating as time goes on. At first (in ch. ii.) his attention is directed to the outstanding evidences of ungodliness and worldly pride in the still prosperous country of Judah. Idolatry, superstition, trust in wealth and warlike resources-these familiar features of the nation's life are to the vision of the prophet purified by contact with the Holy One of Israel, so many symptoms of the irreligious spirit of his contemporaries. Somewhat later (ch. iii.) he touches on social evils, the oppression and injustice practised by the rich and powerful on the poor (vv. 9, 14, 15), and the luxurious fashions of the women of Jerusalem (vv. 16 ff.). In a still later prophecy (ch. v. 8—24) he comes to close quarters with the sins of action and of thought characteristic of the upper class, denouncing in a series of ". woes" their violations of the rights of property in the lawless extension of landed estates (8—10), their drinking festivities (11, 12, 22), their unjust judgments (23), and (coming to more spiritual sins) their heedlessness of Jehovah's working (12), mocking and defiant scepticism (19), and perversion of moral distinctions (20). In ch. i. we find an additional

echo of Amos in the exposure of the prevalent delusion that Jehovah could be propitiated by costly and elaborate ritual service without regard to the character and conduct of the worshippers (vv. 10-17). The corrective to this religious error is given in the parable of the vineyard (ch. v. 1—7, cf. iii. 14), which expresses the fundamental prophetic doctrine that Jehovah "looks for judgment...and righteousness" in the nation which He has chosen for His own. There is perhaps one respect in which Isaiah's treatment of national sins is more profound than that of Amos: he appears to trace all the manifestations of national corruption to a single source in the absence of a religious spirit, or the knowledge of God, in the men of his time. Here again we can perceive the influence of the vivid impression of the glory of God which he himself experienced at the moment of his call.

The descriptions of the coming judgment that occur in this cycle of prophecies exhibit all the qualities of Isaiah's powerful and versatile genius. His very earliest recorded utterance contains a sublime vision of the "day of Jehovah," as a day of earthquake and thunder, when "all that is proud and lofty" in nature or human civilisation shall be humbled before the glory of Jehovah's majesty (ch. ii. 12 ff.). Again he pictures Jehovah as appearing in person to judge the rulers of his people (iii. 14), or he sees Him standing with outstretched hand to smite the sinful kingdom of the North (ix. 12, 17 etc.). But Isaiah's strong sense of historic reality leads him to throw out more realistic descriptions of the judgment than these. Thus in ch. iii. 1–7 he conceives it as taking the shape of a period of revolutionary anarchy in the Judaean state, such as he had already witnessed in Ephraim (ix. 14 ff.). And although he does not yet mention the Assyrians by name, it is plain from v. 26—30 that he has them in view as the human instruments of Jehovah's vengeance on Israel.

The eschatological element of Isaiah's teaching, however, is as yet simple and undeveloped, although clearly present. He looks for a purification of the state from its base and worthless elements and a restoration of the best times of the old monarchy

(i. 24—26). The doctrine of the remnant is referred to in i. 27, as well as in the name of the prophet's son Shear-Jashub. Of the ideal age beyond the judgment we have two pictures in ii. 2—4 and iv. 2—6, although it is not quite certain that either of these passages belongs to Isaiah's spoken message of this period.

ii. (See chs. xvii. 1—11, vii., viii.; perhaps also ix. 1—7.) The second phase of Isaiah's ministry exhibits him in an entirely new character, that, namely, of a political adviser. In order to appreciate the importance of this fact we have only to look at the contrast which in this respect he presents to Amos and Hosea in the North. These prophets held the same fundamental convictions as Isaiah; they looked forward to a blessed future for Israel after the work of judgment was completed; yet their writings contain no hint of political direction for the leaders of the state. They take up a negative attitude towards the problems of statesmanship; and it must have seemed that the breach between Jehovah and His people was so absolute that no guidance or counsel could be obtained through the medium of the prophetic word. Now it is one of Isaiah's chief distinctions that he revived this political function of prophecy which had been in abeyance since the time of Elisha. Without descending from the high spiritual level to which prophecy had been raised by the work of Amos and Hosea, he was able from that standpoint to formulate a definite religious policy by which the nation might be safely guided through the dangers that lay immediately before it.

The fundamental maxims of Isaiah's statesmanship come first to light in the crisis of the Syro-Ephraimitic invasion, in the memorable interview with Ahaz, recorded in ch. vii. The prophet had already announced (in ch. xvii. 1—11) the issue of the ill-fated alliance between Syria and Ephraim. By its unbrotherly attack on Judah (see ch. ix. 21) the Northern Kingdom had but sealed its own doom; and both it and Syria must speedily fall a prey to the advancing Assyrians. He knew also that a brief respite would be granted to Judah; and it was with the view of securing that this interval should be taken advantage