A COMFORTABLE FAITH THE GOD OF ALL COMFORT Comfort ye, Comfort ye My people, saith your God." -Isaiah 40: I. T HIS is one of the really great chapters of the Bible. For sublimity of thought, for richness of imagination, it is conceded to be one of the first things in Old Testament literature. Possibly no other single chapter has exerted so wide and weighty an influence on the world's leaders. Handel begins his Messiah with it, "Comfort ye, Comfort ye My people." Luther pored over it in the fortress of Salzburg; John Brown read it in the prison at Harper's Ferry; Oliver Cromwell went to it for strength in time of storm; Daniel Webster read it again and again when he was crushed and broken in spirit; Wordsworth and Carlyle both refer to its influence on their style; while Tennyson confessed it to be one of the five great classics in the Old Testament record. Surely such a chapter, and with such a list of tributes, is entitled to our most earnest study. Some years ago an English magazine wrote to the most eminent scholars in the Empire, asking what lines in prose or poetry seemed to them most immortal. Their answers were interesting. Tennyson quoted from "Hamlet "; Matthew Arnold from Homer; George Meredith chose a passage from Virgil; Swinburne selected the "Agamemnon" of Eschylus. Lord Derby said his favourite was the "Phædo" of Plato. Andrew Lang selected the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad where Priam seeks the dead body of Hector. John Addington Symonds said the greatest passage known to him in literature was the drama of Job; while Mr. Gladstone, grand old man, said, "Give me the fortieth chapter of Isaiah." As we read and study Isaiah we come to realise what a remarkable man he was. To begin with he was a statesman, a man of great political foresight. For true and sterling patriotism he has had few equals. Perhaps there never has been a nation more patriotic than the Hebrew nation. There was only one city in all the world to the Jew, and that was dear Jerusalem. "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning." Isaiah was passionately patriotic. Patriotism was a fire in him. More than Athens to Demosthenes, more than Geneva to Calvin, more |