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of that society which seemed on the point of perishing then and has seemed often utterly to perish since, reconciled with the most dismal facts which the prophet saw or could not see; the king victorious through suffering and bringing life out of death, being the key to that riddle and to all riddles past present and to come.

These hints and observations I hope to draw out in two or three lectures upon the different sections of this great prophecy. In the mean time I would fix your thoughts upon the passage which has suggested them. We have been hearing of a vision. Does that word sound as if it belonged to times which we have left far behind, as if it pointed to something fantastical and incredible? Oh! if there were no such visions, brethren, what an utterly dark and weary and unintelligible place this world would be! How completely we should be given up to the emptiest phantoms, to the basest worship of phantoms! What mere shows and mockeries would the state and ceremonial of kings, the debates of legislators, the yearnings and struggles of people become! How truly would the earth be what it seemed to the worn-out misanthropical libertine, "A stage, and all the men and women merely players." A thousand times we have been all tempted to think it so. The same painted scenery, the same shifting pageants, the same unreal words spoken through different masks by counterfeit voices, the same plots which seem never to be unravelled, what does it all mean? How do men endure the ceaseless change, the dull monotony? Satirists and keen observers of the world's follies have asked this question again and again. The best man may often doubt what he should reply. But he hears a voice saying to him, ‘Try to be true thyself; resist the powers which are tempting

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HOW THEY MAY COME TO US.

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thee to go through thy acts, common or sacred, as if thou wert a mere machine; hold fast thy faith that God is and is working when thou seest least of His working, and when the world seems most to be going on without Him; assure thyself that there is an order in the universe when all its movements seem most disorderly. So will the things around thee by degrees acquire a meaning and a purpose. Those divine services and sacraments which have partaken of their insincerity, which have become shadows like them, will show thee what a truth and substance lies behind them. In English temples thou mayest hear "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts," resounding from the lips of seraphim. In them thou mayest know that thou art in the midst of a company of angels and archangels and just men made perfect, nay that thou art in the presence of Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and of God the judge of all. And if the sense of that presence awaken all the consciousness of thine own evil, and of the evil of the people among whom thou dwellest, the taste of that sacrifice, which was once offered for thee and all the world, will purge thine iniquity. When that divine love has kindled thy flagging and perishing thoughts and hopes, thou mayest learn that God can use thee to bear the tidings of His love and righteousness to a sense-bound land that is bowing to silver and gold, to horses and chariots. And if there should come a convulsion in that land, such as neither thou nor thy fathers have known, be sure that it signifies the removal of such things as can be shaken, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.'

SERMON XIV.

ISAIAH AND AHAZ.

LINCOLN'S INN, 3RD SUNDAY IN LENT.-MARCH 14, 1852.

ISAIAH, VII. 10—14.

Moreover the Lord spake again unto Ahaz, saying, Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God; ask it either in the depth, or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord. And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David; Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

THE chapter from which this passage is taken immediately follows the one upon which I spoke to you last Sunday. The vision in the year that Uzziah died prepares us for the message of Ahaz. Nevertheless a considerable period-the whole reign of Jotham-elapsed between them. Are we to suppose that the lips which had been touched by the fire from the altar were silent during that time, that the man who had said 'Here am I, send me,' and had received so terrible a message, did not deliver himself of it for sixteen years?

If that had been so I do not know that there may not be

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many parallel cases in the ancient and modern world. A man may feel that he is called to a work long before the moment arrives when he can perform it, long before the outward event occurs which corresponds to the inward impulse and explains its full meaning. Such intervals no doubt make great demands upon the faith and patience of him who is appointed to pass through them. There is the strongest temptation to doubt whether that which seemed to give a law and purpose to his life was not itself a dream. There is a temptation to create the occasion for speaking or acting before it arises. But the delay is an education which is profitable in proportion as the original inspiration and conviction are kept alive; it is necessary and often lengthened, in proportion as the subsequent work is to be of a powerful, terrible kind, such as may affect generations to come. If the opinion which has been ordinarily deduced from St. Paul's account of his stay in Arabia in the Epistle to the Galatians be a true one, he would offer the most memorable example of this probation.

There is no reason however to suppose that Isaiah was silent during the time I have spoken of. There is the best evidence that he was not. What we may, I think, fairly affirm is that the events in the reign of Ahaz, to which I alluded in a former lecture, the conspiracy against him by the Samaritans and Syrians, the appearance of the Assyrian hosts in Palestine, the entreaty of Ahaz that Tiglath Pileser would punish his enemies, the fulfilment of that petition and the consequent preparation of a new and fearful calamity for his son and his people, were the especial objects to which Isaiah's vision pointed, and that the prophecy contained in the text derives great part of its

232

CHAPTER I.-PARTLY GENERAL.

[Serm.

interpretation from that vision. It is equally true that the connexion between them would not be intelligible, if the purged eyes of the prophet had not been enabled to see the condition of society in Judea in the years of apparent prosperity and splendour which preceded the league of Pekah and Rezin, and if he had not given us a most vivid and graphical description of that which he saw.

The first chapter of his prophecy can hardly be said to contain this description. The words at the commencement of it, “I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me; the ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib; but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider," might apply to Jotham's time or any other. I hinted last Sunday that they served as a kind of general preface to the prophecy, indicating what the sin was against which all the after denunciations of the seer would be directed; how it was the revolt of a people from One who cared for them, watched over them, loved them; how it was the wild and wilful desire of the heart to seek abroad for the treasures which it would have found stored up at home. Something of the same general character may be traced through the rest of the chapter. But there are passages such as these, "Your country is desolate, your cities are burnt with fire, your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers, and the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city," which must, it would seem, refer to a much later time, when either Shalmaneser or Sennacherib had laid waste the greater part of Palestine, and when Jerusalem was nearly the last hold of the chosen race. Some may feel a difficulty in connect