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we should be and should do exactly as before. Brethren, the close of a year is a solemn call to recognize the great truth which David confesses. Life, and all that surrounds it and belongs to it, comes from God, and is due to Him. Every true character must be salted with the spirit of sacrifice, at one while expressing itself in effort, at another in resignation. For this great purpose, life is still our own; but we know not how much or how little of it may yet be granted to us. The hours are passing, and they are put down to us; pereunt et imputantur. As they pass, let us try to remember that, like all else, they too come from the Eternal Being, and that, in consecrating them to Him, we are only giving to Him that which is already His own.

SERMON XIV.

THE PERISHING AND THE IMPERISHABLE.

(SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS.)

ISA. XL. 8.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the Word of our God shall stand for ever.

THE last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah are so unlike those which precede them that they might seem to form a separate book. The Prophet appears to live in the days of the Babylonish Captivity; he is carried by the Spirit away from the days of Hezekiah, and from his own home in Palestine; and prophesies as if he were dwelling among the exiles under a heathen king. So much is this the case that some writers, who do not believe in the possibility of really predictive prophecy, have assumed that these chapters were written by another prophet living in the midst of the scenes which are here described by anticipation, and two centuries later than the son of Amos. This opinion is not supported by critical arguments of decisive weight; and it does violence to the great unities which can be shown to run through Isaiah's work. It really rests upon an assumption contradicted by ancient as well as modern experience; that God cannot or will not distinctly reveal anything strictly future to

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the human soul.a Isaiah, in these wonderful poems, reaches the very crown and flower of his prophetic work. They seem to be related to his earlier prophecies, as are those last words of Moses, uttered in the highlands of Moab, and embodied in Deuteronomy, to the earlier writings of the great Lawgiver; as is the last Discourse in the Supper-room to the earlier teaching of the Incarnate Word. In this splendid climax of his work the Prophet is very far from confining himself to the future. needs, or sufferings, or triumphs of his countrymen. He begins with a prophecy which furnishes the Baptist with the theme of his preaching; he proclaims the sufferings and triumph of Messiah as clearly as if he had stood beneath the Cross; he describes the creation of a new Heavens and a new earth with a clearness which, to say the least, is not surpassed in the Apocalypse. The text is uttered by the second of two voices, spoken to Isaiah as if out of the world of spirits, at the beginning of this, the final, series of his prophecies.

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'Hark, one is speaking, 'Cry.'

And he answers, 'What shall I cry?'

All flesh is grass,

And all the beauty thereof as the flower of the field.

The grass withereth,

The flower fadeth :

Because the Breath of the Lord

Has blown upon it.

Surely the people is grass.

The grass withereth,

The flower fadeth:

Yet the Word of our God will stand for ever.'"f

a Cf. Delitzsch, on Isaiah : preliminary observations on ch. xl.-lxvi., who quotes Windischmann, Zoroastr. Stud., p. 137, on the prediction of Cyrus by name 210 years before his birth. Cf. also Pusey, Daniel the Prophet, 3rd edit., p. 124. Dr. Pusey used to say that the only serious reason for denying the unity of Isaiah was the revelation of the name of Cyrus in xliv. 28. b St. John xiii.-xvii. Comp. Isa. xl. 3-5; St. Luke iii. 3-6. e Ib. lxv. 17-25. f Ib. xl. 6-8.

d Isa. liii.; lxiii.

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Now, the immediate purpose of these words is to reassure the Jews of the Captivity. There they were in Babylon, as Isaiah saw them across the centuries, far from their home, surrounded by the imposing fabric of a great Empire, crushed into silent submission by its power, awed, at times half-fascinated, by its splendour. It seemed so much more solid, so much more lasting than the monarchy of David had been; they could not think that it would perish. In truth, outside Egypt, all that was then possible in material civilization was apparently concentrated in the valley of the Euphrates. When Isaiah wrote it had been a seat of empire for some three thousand years. But the great king who was to make it what it was when the Jews visited it as captives, was not yet living in the days of Isaiah; although he had lived and died before the days for which Isaiah wrote. Probably no other ruler of men has left behind him such vast architectural works as did King Nebuchadnezzar. Both the ancient ruins and the modern towns of Babylonia are mainly constructed with his bricks. Besides rebuilding the walls and restoring the temples which had come down from an earlier age, he raised that splendid palace which, with its plated pillars, its sumptuous decoration with enamelled tiles, its hanging gardens, its triple enclosure, was regarded as one of the wonders of the ancient world. Babylon itself was surrounded by a wall, according to the lowest trustworthy estimate forty-two miles in length, and three hundred feet high; that is to say, only sixty feet lower than the cross of St. Paul's. The area which was thus enclosed would, no doubt, have been

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So Ctesias, who, like Herodotus, saw Babylon. The latter makes the circuit of the wall fifty-six miles.

partly filled by orchards and gardens; but it contained a vast population. Besides the great palace already referred to, there was the enormous temple of Belus; a species of pyramid, composed of eight square towers placed one above another; each side of the basement tower being more than two hundred yards in length. There was another palace, on the west of the Euphrates, enclosed within a single wall of three and a half miles in circumference, and connected with the larger one, not only by the bridge, but by a tunnel under the Euphrates. The rest of the city would have been on a corresponding scale; and it is needless to say that nothing like it was to be seen on the coasts of the Mediterranean, or, indeed, anywhere in the Western world.

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It was to men whose eyes were resting on this scene of magnificence and power that Isaiah spoke, out of another land and an earlier age, the solemn words, "All flesh is grass, and all the beauty thereof as the flower of the field." " The simile is elsewhere used by Isaiah himself in his message to Hezekiah, to describe the completeness of the destruction of the Jewish towns by the Assyrian Sennacherib's invading army.

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They were as the grass of the field,

And as the green herb,

As the grass on the housetops,

And as corn blasted before it is grown up." " b

Was it conceivable that the metaphor which so aptly described the collapse of some petty Jewish towns before the advance of a power which Babylon herself had since humbled to the dust, could be truly applied to what was to befall the city, and throne, and people of Nebuchadb 2 Kings xix. 26.

a Isa. xl. 6.

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