than Florence to Savonarola was Jerusalem to Isaiah. He has painted for us her fashions, her customs, her situation, her gates, her prominent men and women, her sufferings, her wars, her final ruin,-and all with an insight that is keen and accurate. And he was an orator. He is one of the few great kings of speech, magnificently gifted and with every gift consecrated. Great is the sage, great the statesman, great the poet, but greater far the prophet.

"He needs no converse nor companionship,

In cold starlight, whence thou canst not come,
The undelivered tidings in his breast,

Will not let him rest.

He looks down upon the immemorable throng,
And binds the ages with a song.

And through the accents of our time,
There throbs the message of eternity."

And he was par excellence a preacher. Verily here was a man called of God. That call had not been a conventional one, either. There had been no "Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel." There had been no lightning flash, no articulate utterance summoning him to the work. He had had a deep religious experience. He had been forgiven, anointed, baptised, then left to himself. He had heard of the need. He had heard the Lord's voice calling, "Who will go?" And he had an

swered, “Here am I, Lord, send me; I will go." It was a simple, willing surrender of a man set apart, and on the watch for opportunities. One almost feels, after reading Isaiah's history, that the call to the ministry has full oft been made too mandatory and alarming. Here, for instance, is a passage quoted verbatim from Dr. Campbell Morgan: “A young man comes to me and says, I am not at all sure, but I have a sort of idea that I ought to enter the Christian ministry. What shall I say to him? I say, for God's sake and the sake of humanity keep out. No man that thinks, but is not sure, should ever enter the Christian ministry." That principle would have closed the door on Isaiah. It would have closed the door on Henry Drummond, who tells us that he never felt any direct call to the work. (Drummond, be it remembered, was a licentiate of the Free Church of Scotland.) The voice that calls a young man to the sacred desk is not always a woeful voice. Sometimes it is; sometimes it is not. Oftentimes it is a wooing voice. We, not God, must make the decision. There is no tidal compulsion. It is a willing, devoted offering. Here, for instance, is that great gifted apostle Robert Bruce, whom Alexander Whyte calls the most finished divine that Scotland has produced. His father and

mother had educated him for the bar, but against the wish of both parents the Lord had set him apart for the Edinburgh pulpit. Listen to what he says, "I would rather walk through half a mile of burning brimstone every night than spend over again those dread midnight hours when I fought against the call of God." But here, on the other hand, is our own beloved American, Phillips Brooks, who went very tremblingly to his first charge, who was not at all sure that he was in the holy calling for a life-work, but who said, ✅ If lives are changed, I shall take that as the best evidence that God wants me."

But let us to the chapter. I have read this chapter a great many times. I have read it in English and I have tried to struggle through it in Hebrew. I have tried to saturate myself with its beauty, and I find there are three wordthreads on which the prophet strings, or shall we say, rings his eloquence. These three words being:

The Greatness of God;
The Glory of God;

The Gentleness of God.

Let us think of these words in the light of the passage before us.

1. The Greatness of God.

Some books have no breadth about them. It

is hard to breathe freely while you are reading them. They are smothering, so to speak. One feels the need of air and better ventilation. Not so Isaiah. There is nothing cramped about the great poet-prophet; there is nothing of the cell or the cloister. He carries with him rather the breeze of the infinite. A prophet is a man with the odour of the infinite on his garments. This chapter is bathed in the infinite. "Lift up your eyes on high, and see who hath created these, that bringeth out their host by number; He calleth them all by name; by the greatness of His might, and for that He is strong in power, not one is lacking."

The best way to rescue life from littleness is to associate oneself with something large. No man gets the most out of life till the sky steals into his blood, till the sea surges through his veins. Great fish do not swim about in ponds. I found last summer that the trout caught up in my little island home are about in proportion to the dimensions of the stream.

Give me a great thought," was the dying cry of Schiller. Nature is a cabinet of great thoughts. Great thoughts make great men. "Lift up your eyes on high and behold;" there they are-God's thoughts.

You look up into the sky and you see only

six thousand stars, or so, with the naked eye. Isaiah never saw more than that, yet they startled him; but to-day, with the aid of the telescope and the sensitised plate we can count millions. Lord Kelvin reckoned that the system around us numbers not less than a thousand million worlds. Think of it! A thousand million! Nothing cramped about that surely! This little earth on which we live is pretty big, we sometimes boast; the planet Jupiter, out yonder, is eleven times bigger. A step farther and the sun is ten times bigger than Jupiter. A step farther still, and there is Sirius, a thousand times bigger than the sun and a million times as far away. But these numbers mean nothing to us. We are bewildered. We are simply lost in a retinue of figures. If you touch a hot iron with your hand you feel it instantly, so fast does feeling travel; but if you had an arm long enough to reach the sun, and it is pretty hot (11,000 degrees Fahrenheit), you would not feel it for one hundred and fifty years. We are lost, I repeat, in this bewildering arithmetic.

And this is how Isaiah felt. He was staggered; he was overwhelmed. "Lift up your eyes on high, and see who hath created these, that bringeth out their host by number; He calleth