and ships came home laden with the costliest articles of trade. But the people succumbed to the temptations of wealth; the priests had failed to arm them with a healthy morality; and corruption, almost equalling that of neighbouring Israel, proclaimed the approaching decay of the commonwealth. A terrible locust plague and a destructive earthquake startled the people from their heedlessness; the plains were deserted, the vineyards lay waste, the cattle perished. And now thoughtless levity gave way to unmanly dejection and despair. Prophets came forward and declared the catastrophe to be a scourge of the Almighty; they were anxious to hold up the distress as a warning, and thus to bring back the people to the God whom they had forsaken. Inspired with Divine indignation, full of sorrowing love for their country, and gifted with an eloquence which should have pierced through the mists of ignorance and stubbornness, the prophets of Judah rose to a sublime greatness unequalled among the prophets of Israel.

Although statesmen and public orators, they directed their weapons not only against the political offender, but against the whole multitude, whose sins were those common to all demoralised ages and to all degenerate nations. But their addresses, though replete with warnings and reproof, were not without bright promises of consolation. Perceiving too clearly the danger and the wickedness of the time in which they lived, they looked far beyond it to a period of universal peace, justice, and knowledge, which they considered to be the true goal, not only of God's chosen people, but of all mankind. By their fervent descriptions of that glorious future, they sought to bring the nation nearer to their own ideal, and to connect it with the whole human race.

B. THE THREE GREATER PROPHETS.

ISAIAH (759 to about 700).

[ISAI. I.-XXXIX.]

AMONG the prophets Isaiah was the most profound in his teachings and the most exalted in his conceptions. With a natural acknowledgment of his superiority, the Bible places his writings at the head of the prophetic works. He will, therefore, first claim our attention, not as the earliest of the prophets, but as the greatest-the greatest with respect to the mission he had to fulfil, the influence his orations exercised not only during his life-time but ever afterwards, the ardour of his sympathies, and the loftiness of his ideas.

Isaiah is familiar to us less through historical accounts than through his own writings. These contain all that we know of his life and work; and from them alone can we trace an intelligible outline of the events which called forth his Divine powers.

The scanty information we possess of his life may be briefly told. He was the son of Amoz, a man of Judah, and seems to have been called to his high mission when still a youth. He himself describes the scene when he was first endowed with the gift of prophecy, which took place in the year of King Uzziah's death (B.C. 759). Nothing can be grander than the few verses in which he relates his earliest vision, and no introduction could better

prepare us for his subsequent orations. The natural diffidence of a young man in accepting so exalted a charge is well marked in the trembling hesitation with which he delayed to answer the Divine summons. Like his great predecessor Moses, he doubted his competency to perform the grave duties entrusted to him.

'In the year that king Uzziah died,' he relates, 'I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and His train filled the Temple. Before Him stood Seraphim; each one had six wings, with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he did fly. And one cried to another and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory. And the posts of the door shook at the voice of those that cried, and the House was filled with smoke. Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. Then flew one of the Seraphim to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from the altar; and he laid it upon my mouth and said, Behold, this has touched thy lips; and thy iniquity is taken away, and thy sin is purged. And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I, send me. And He said, Go and tell this people, you shall hear indeed, but not understand; and you shall see indeed, but not perceive. Harden the heart of this people, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn, and be healed. Then said I, Lord, how long? And He answered, Until the cities be wasted without an inhabitant, and the houses without a man, and the land be utterly desolate; and the Lord will remove men far away, and there will be a great

dreariness in the land. Yet there shall remain in it a tenth, and that shall in its turn be consumed, but as a terebinth and an oak which keep their root when they are cut down—a holy seed shall be their root.'

Thereupon Isaiah went forth unflinchingly to obey God's behest. His mission lay first in the very midst of that people whose uncleanness he had lamented. The depravity was great during the reign of Joram; it had increased with the prosperity, the wealth, and the security, which were monopolised by a powerful class.

The elders of the houses and their chiefs,' the very leaders of the nation, were the offenders who roused the prophet's bitterest indignation. For you have eaten up the vineyard, the spoil of the poor is in your houses: what do you mean that you make my people poor?' cried the prophet to all the great, the honoured, and the gifted of the land. The humbler classes looked to them in vain for help and support, for advice and example. The wives and mothers of the great and wealthy were equally tainted with the sins of pride and the worst effects of opulence. The daughters of Zion exercised no softening influence ; they surrounded the domestic hearth with no genial charm. Isaiah, well knowing that they were in no slight degree the cause of the general perversion, pursued their worldly vanities with the sharpest ridicule; he denounced them with equal anger and derision, because they walked with stretched forth necks, and wanton eyes, mincing as they went, and tinkling with their feet.' Instead of a desire for modest retirement, they evinced by their manners and their garments an inordinate love of display and finery; frivolity turned their thoughts to the multiplicity of their ornaments, to their hoods and their veils, to their bracelets and their rings; and the constant changing of apparel seemed to be the one object of their lives. But their doom was also to come, and as the men should suffer

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in that which they deemed most precious, in their wealth and their power, so the women should be humbled in their pride and their vanity-their gorgeous attire should be turned into tatters and sackcloth, and their beauty into repulsiveness.

The inevitable effects of unbridled luxury proved baneful to the whole community, and were closely followed by ingratitude to God, irreligious indifference, and cruel injustice to the poor. In a beautiful parable, Isaiah proclaimed the degeneracy of the people and their unworthiness of the Divine blessings: Now will I sing to My well-beloved a song of My beloved about his vineyard. My well-beloved had a vineyard in a very fruitful hill. And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress therein; and he hoped that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes. And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge, I pray you, between Me and My vineyard. What could have been done more to My vineyard, that I have not done in it? Wherefore then, when I hoped that it should bring forth grapes, did it bring forth wild grapes? And now come, I will tell you what I will do to My vineyard: I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up; and break down the wall thereof, and it shall be trodden down. And I will lay it waste; it shall not be pruned, nor digged, but there shall come up briers and thorns; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah the plant of His delight; and He looked for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry.'

Gross neglect of the poor had now become disgracefully common among that very people whose fairest virtue was