SERMON XIV.

ISAIAH AND AHAZ.

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

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.— ISAIAH vii. 10-14.

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 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 interpretation from that vision. It is equally true, that the connection 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 splendor 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 connecting the following passages, which declare that their condition. would have been like that of Sodom and Gomorrah if the Lord had not preserved a very small remnant, with the time in which Hezekiah was reigning, after he had commenced a great reformation. But we may find, as we proceed, what all reason and experience would lead

us to expect, that this reformation was slow in its progress, that it brought to light evils which were lying very deep in the heart of the nation, that some of the immediate household of the king (Shebna, the scribe, is denoted by name as one of them) fully deserved to be called "companions of thieves, men who loved gifts and followed after rewards, who judged not the cause of the fatherless." And the reaction in favor of the temple services and the appointed feasts, which was sure to follow the change in the disposition of the king, may have led to that semblance of faith which the prophet denounces in the words, "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord; I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats"; together with that cry for an inward and radical reformation, "Wash you. Make you clean. Put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes. Cease to do evil; learn to do well. Seek judgment. Relieve the oppressed. Judge the fatherless; plead for the widow." And the promises, at the end of the chapter, that the city should become once more a city of righteousness, a faithful city, point naturally to that higher and nobler state of things which was to be seen in the latter years of Hezekiah's reign, after the ministers of corruption had been swept away, and the truer hearts had been purified by suffering.

But the most intelligent students of Isaiah have believed, and apparently on the most reasonable grounds, that the next passage of his prophecy, from the beginning of the second to the end of the fourth chapter, belongs to the very commencement of his work. There had been many allusions in earlier prophets - we have noticed one in Joelto a time of great blessedness

and glory, when Mount Zion should be exalted above the hills, and the law of the Lord should go forth from Jerusalem. Such sentences we may easily suppose had become texts and commonplaces among the people, often in the mouths of the popular and court prophets, applied by them to the state of things which was then established, or to some one which would naturally grow out of it. A passage of this kind, it is supposed, and the hypothesis gives great coherency to the whole discourse, is to be found in the second, third, and fourth verses of the second chapter. Adopting words which were well known to his audience, from some venerable teacher of the past, the prophet proceeds to comment upon them, and show that they might indeed have been fulfilled in that time, but that the sins of the nation had produced a state as unlike as possible to that which the seer spoke of.

No contrast can be more living and terrible than that which the prophet draws between the actual condition of things and that true and blessed one which he as much as his predecessor looks for. The first sign of corruption is that they were replenished from the east, and pleased themselves in the children of strangers. In other words, they had a love for all foreign habits, luxuries, superstitions. Above all, they had acquired a taste for enchantments, a delight, and - if it were not profaning the word - a faith, in auguries drawn from visible portents, in whatever wonders did not testify of a God of order. This sure and fatal symptom of a people indifferent to realities, occupied with self-exalting vanities, stood side by side with the tokens of which I spoke last Sunday, the multitude of chariots and horses, the abundance of silver and gold, the practical worship of these which produced all other more obvious kinds of idolatry. Before that bright