Thus through the medium of the prophetic word the abstract doctrine of the divine sovereignty is translated into living and personal relations between Jehovah the King and Israel His kingdom. Similarly the supreme quality of holiness, or essential divinity, becomes a practical factor in religion through being brought to bear on Jehovah's relation to His people. He is, to use a favourite title of Isaiah's, "the Holy One of Israel1," i.e. the Holy Being who is the God of Israel. Here again Israel is conceived as the community within which Jehovah reveals Himself as He truly is, and by which His character as the Holy One is to be recognised, and exhibited to the world. The whole of Isaiah's conception of national religion is summed up in the phrase to "sanctify the Lord of Hosts" (viii. 13, xxix. 23); that is, to acknowledge and worship His Godhead, and to cherish towards Him the sentiment of fear and reverence which was impressed on the prophet's own mind by the revelation of His holiness.

The prophet's judgment on the actual state of the nation is but the application of these principles to the religious and social problems of his time. The conviction of an irreconcilable breach between Jehovah and His people, which he shares with all the great pre-Exilic prophets, springs from his first personal contact with the awful holiness of Israel's God. The immediate effect of the vision was to produce a sense, not merely of his own uncleanness, but of the uncleanness of the whole actual life of the nation. He then realised what it was to "dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips” (vi. 5); and when he returned to his place among men, with a conscience purified and quickened by what he had experienced, he had to bear witness of his fellowcountrymen that "their tongue and their doings were against Jehovah to provoke the eyes of His glory" (iii. 8). His own lips had been purged by contact with the fire which is the emblem of the divine holiness; but at the same time he learned

1 The phrase is almost limited to the book of Isaiah, forming one of the linguistic links between the two great divisions of the book. Elsewhere it occurs only in Ps. lxxi. 22, lxxviii. 41, lxxxix. 18; Jer. 1. 29, li. 5; and, in a somewhat different form, in Ezek. xxxix. 7. There is little doubt, therefore, that it was first introduced by Isaiah.

that the only fire which could cleanse the unholy nation was the fire of judgment, which was to consume the base and worthless elements of the state till only the indestructible remnant, the holy seed, remained (vi. 13; cf. iv. 4 f.).

Thus the sense of Jehovah's holiness has its counterpart in the conviction of Israel's actual uncleanness, and it is important to observe how every article in Isaiah's indictment of the nation runs back to this fundamental antithesis. The prevalent idolatry was a direct and open denial of His Godhead, a degrading of Him to the level of the "nonentities" of the heathen Pantheon. Religion, as conceived and practised by the people, was not the heart-felt recognition of His holy character; the homage rendered to Him was purely formal, a “human tradition learned by rote" (xxix. 13), a profuse and elaborate sacrificial ritual (i. 10-17). The grinding tyranny of the upper classes, joined as it was with corrupt administration of justice, was an abuse of the sacred trust delegated by the Holy King to the "elders and princes of His people" (iii. 13-15). Israel, the vineyard of Jehovah, is ravaged by those whom He had appointed to be its keepers, and when He "looked for judgment, behold bloodshed; and for righteousness, behold a cry" (v. 7). The religious indifference, the scepticism, the luxury, the dissipation, of the statesmen and nobles, all proceed from the same root of insensibility to the claims of Jehovah's holiness, or the reality of His divinity; and their pride in horses and chariots, in fortifications and armies, in skilled diplomacy and strong coalitions reveals their utter unbelief in the spiritual Power which rules the universe. In all these features of society the prophet reads the symptoms of a deep-seated national ungodliness and apostasy, of a people in veiled rebellion against its true Sovereign. "They have forsaken Jehovah, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel to anger; they have apostatised and gone backward" (i. 4). They are children in ungrateful and unnatural revolt against their Father (i. 2, xxx. 9). The alienation between Israel and its God is complete; Israel has forsaken Jehovah, and Jehovah has rejected His people (ii. 6).

There is one remarkable fact in Isaiah's ministry that reveals a darker view of Israel's spiritual condition than was expressed by any of his predecessors. He entered on his work in the full consciousness that the effect of his mission would be to seal the doom of his people (vi. 9 ff.). To many modern writers such a perception has seemed inconceivable in the case of a youthful prophet on the threshold of his public career; and it has been very generally held that this part of the vision is projected into the past from the disappointing experience of failure which came to the prophet some years later. But there is no justification for thus impugning the veracity of Isaiah's narrative. There is nothing incredible in the thought that in that supreme moment of inspiration the conviction was flashed into his mind that a revelation of Jehovah's holiness would be intolerable to the age in which he lived, so that the men he knew would be repelled and driven into deeper guilt and sin by every fresh disclosure of the mind and will of God. He saw, what perhaps no earlier teacher of Israel had seen, that the very clearness and fulness of the knowledge of God becomes a means of condemnation to men who have sunk so far that they love the darkness rather than the light. Thus while Amos speaks of a "famine of the word of the Lord" as the greatest calamity that could befal Israel, Isaiah grasps the deeper, though seemingly paradoxical truth, that a far more dangerous and testing experience lies in the exceeding abundance of the word of Jehovah, which is about to be vouchsafed to Israel1.

The profound truth of this intuition was repeatedly verified in Isaiah's prophetic experience, and more than once he falls back on it, tracing the impenetrable hardness of the people to a judicial visitation of Jehovah. He did so when he retired defeated from his contest with Ahaz and the nation in the time of the Syro-Ephraimitic war, which was probably the occasion of the first publication of the vision. In still stronger language he characterises the storm of opposition which was roused against him by his denunciation of the Egyptian alliance in the reign of Sennacherib. "They say to the prophets...get you out of the way,

1 Duhm.

turn aside out of the path, cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before us" (xxx. 11); and Isaiah ascribes their infatuation to the fact that "Jehovah has poured out on them a spirit of deep sleep, and closed their eyes and muffled their heads" (xxix. 10).

Isaiah has been called the "prophet of Faith"; and the designation would be accurate if he were not the prophet of so many great thoughts besides. The idea that faith must be the ruling principle of political action for Israel, and is the indispensable condition of national salvation, is one to which he always attached supreme importance. There are three memorable sayings of his in which this truth is embodied, and which enable us to understand in what sense he used that great word of religion. These are: "if ye will not believe, ye shall not be established" (vii. 9); "he that believeth shall not make haste" (xxviii. 16,—see note on the verse); "in returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength" (xxx. 15). These utterances seem to carry us into the very heart of Isaiah's teaching, for they express that which was deepest in his own spiritual life. To him revelation was an articulate personal word from the living God, the Holy One whom he had seen in vision; and he received it with the unhesitating confidence due to a Being of infinite wisdom and power, declaring His purpose in absolute faithfulness and truth. Isaiah believed and therefore he spoke. And knowing thus by experience what it was to live by faith, he dared to ask of statesmen groping their way blindly in a difficult and intricate situation, not seeing for themselves the work of Jehovah nor the operation of His hands, that they too should exercise the same virtue of implicit trust in the God whose sovereign will was made known to them in the prophetic word. There is no manifestation of loyalty to the Divine King on which the prophet lays greater stress than this. The capacity for faith in this sense becomes the measure and test of the nation's religious state; its refusal to believe is the final evidence that it is beyond the possibility of political salvation. Even when the fate of the people as a whole is sealed by the unbelief of its rulers, faith

remains as the principle of individual religion for those who separate themselves from the sin of their generation. The spiritual community which Isaiah saw forming itself within the physical Israel was constituted by faith in his prophetic message, and when he says of himself that he will "wait for Jehovah" (viii. 17), he expresses at the same time the attitude of those who were his disciples. When in a later prophecy (xxviii. 16) he speaks of the foundation of God's kingdom as already laid in Zion and promises safety to "him that believeth," he clearly means that the impending judgment has no terrors for him who takes his stand on the sure word of Revelation.

III. MESSIANIC IDEALS.

For the germ of Isaiah's eschatology we must go back once more to his inaugural vision, and the idea of the "remnant," which led to so many fruitful developments in the course of his ministry. The knowledge that a spiritual kernel of the nation would survive the successive waves of judgment was constantly present to the prophet's mind, and led his thoughts forward to an ideal age in which that remnant should blossom out into the perfect kingdom of the Lord. His writings abound in glowing pictures of the glorious day towards which events are ripening. The general conception is that of a new and final order of things, in which Zion, as the seat of God's kingdom of righteousness and peace, is the centre of light and blessing for the nations, and all nature becomes subservient to the needs of humanity. The representation includes features which are to our minds supernatural, although on the whole it may be said that (except in iv. 2—6) nature is merely idealised, through its evils being eliminated and its beneficent powers indefinitely enhanced. The later pictures especially (xxix. ff.) are bathed in an atmosphere of idyllic peace and happiness, the simple joys of rural life affording apparently to the aged prophet the best emblem of the perfect felicity reserved for the true people of Jehovah. For along with this line of thought there always goes the prophecy of a transformation of the national character. The