oured by the appearance of the Saviour, who shall come to have
mercy upon the miserable, and to seek that which was lost. Isaiah has,
further, first taught that, by the redemption, the consequences of the
Fall would disappear in the irrational creation also, and that it
should return to paradisaic innocence, chap. xi. 6-9. He has first
announced to the people of God the glorious truth, that death, as it
had not existed in the beginning, should, at the end also, be expelled,
chap. xxv. 8; xxvi. 19. The healing powers which by Christ should be
imparted to miserable mankind, Isaiah has described in chap xxxv. in
words, which by the fulfilment have, in a remarkable manner, been
confirmed.

Let us endeavour to form, from the single scattered features which
occur in the prophecies of Isaiah, a comprehensive view of his
prospects into the future.

The announcement first uttered by Moses of an impending exile of the
people, and desolation of the country, is brought before us by Isaiah
in the first six chapters, in the prophecies belonging to the time of
Uzziah and Jotham, at which the future had not yet been so clearly laid
open before the Prophet as it was at a later period, at the time of
Ahaz, and, very especially, in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah. A
reference to [Pg 5] the respective announcements of the Pentateuch is
found in chap. xxxvii. 26, where, in opposition to the imagination of
the King of Asshur, that, by his own power, he had penetrated as a
conqueror as far as Judah, Isaiah asks him whether he had not heard
that the Lord, long ago and from ancient times, had formed such a
resolution regarding His people. These words can be referred only to
the threatenings of the Pentateuch, which a short-sighted criticism
endeavoured to ascribe to a far later period, without considering that
the germ of this knowledge of the future is found in the Decalogue
also, the genuineness of which is, at present, almost unanimously
conceded: "In order that thy (Israel's) days may be long in the land
which the Lord thy God giveth thee."

In the solemnly introduced short summary of the history of the
covenant-people, in chap. vi., there is, after the announcement of the
impending complete desolation of the country and the carrying away of
its inhabitants in vers. 11, 12, the indication of a _second_ judgment
which will not less make an end, in ver. 13: "But yet there is a tenth
part in it, and it shall again be destroyed;" and this go