NOTE.-It may be well to add a few words on the treatment of this question by Dean Stanley, in his second volume of "Lectures on the Jewish Church." It will be seen that he (p. 244), indicating with his usual force the points of contact between the Book of Job and the Proverbs of Solomon, follows M. Renan in regarding the former as derived "years or centuries afterwards" from the latter. I own that there still seems to me an immense preponderance of evidence on the other side. At what period after Solomon would an Israelite have been likely to throw himself so entirely into the spirit of an earlier period and a distant country, or an Idumæan to have turned to the Proverbs of Solomon as a textbook of wisdom? Would the Jews of the captivity, with the intense hatred of Edom shown in Ps. cxxxvii. 7, have been likely then to receive an Idumæan poem into their sacred books? Apart too from these historical difficulties, I must add that it seems to me almost inconceivable that the overflowing grandeur of the poem should have grown out of the calm precision of the proverb. I could almost as soon accept the theory that the Gospel of St. John was an echo of the teaching of the Apostolic Fathers and the Gnostics of the second century. X. THE OLD AGE OF ISAIAH. HE death of Hezekiah forms a dividingpoint in the life of the great prophet of glad tidings between what we know with certainty and the obscurities of conjecture and tradition. Up to that point we trace his history, partly through his own writings, partly through what is recorded of him in the Books of Kings and Chronicles. We see the solemn call to his work as the spokesman of the Lord of Hosts in the vision, full of awe and sorrow, in the year that King Uzziah died, the insight then given him into the evils that were eating into the nation's life, the foresight of the penalties sure to follow upon those evils (vi. 1— 13). After a period of comparative tranquillity under Jotham, he comes before us in full activity, when the weakness and wickedness of Ahaz were wearying both men and God (vii. 13). He rebukes king and people for their falsehood and cowardice; bids them look on without fear at the attempts of the kings of Syria and Israel to depose the dynasty of David and to set up an unknown ruler, some son of Tabeal, as their own creature in its place (vii. 4—6); warns them of the coming flood of fierce invaders from Assyria, and tells them that, while it will sweep away utterly the nations of which they were most afraid (vii. 8), it would also be in God's hands an instrument to punish them and make their land, the land of Judah, desolate (vii. 17-25). With the reign of Hezekiah the brightest phase of his life begins. The king is young, and he is his chosen friend and counsellor. We trace his influence in the restored worship, the revived unity of national life, the glorious Passover, the zeal against idolatry and its defilements, perhaps also in the thoroughness which did not shrink from the work of reform even when it involved the destruction of a relic so venerable and, as it might seem, so sacred, as the Brazen Serpent (2 Kings xviii. 1-8; 2 Chron. xxix. 1; xxx. 27). When the armies of Sennacherib fill men's minds with terror it is to him that king and people turn, and from his lips comes the assurance of a marvellous deliverance (2 Kings xix. 2; 2 Chron. xxxii. 20; Isa. xxxvii.). When the king is sick unto death he is at once prophet and physician (2 Kings xx. ; Isa. xxxviii.). When Hezekiah, in the glory and state of his later years, is tempted to court the alliance of the rising kingdom of Baby-lon, just asserting its independence against the overwhelming power of Assyria, the prophet, faithful to the last, rebukes even the devout and good king, warns him of the coming judgments, and bids him trust in no arm of flesh, but in the might of the Lord of Hosts (2 Kings xx. 12—19; Isa. xxxix). But here our knowledge ends. All that comes later is wrapt in legend and tradition. Jewish writers tell us that he protested against the sins of Manasseh and was put to death with a singular refinement of cruelty, and Christian commentators find a reference to this in the mention, among the heroes of faith, of those who "were sawn asunder" (Heb. xi. 37). A wilder fable* reports that the ostensible ground of the sentence was the charge of blasphemy in having said that he had "seen the Lord" (Isa. vi. 1), and that the king's baseness was aggravated by the fact that his mother Hephzibah was the prophet's daughter. It is now proposed to fill up the gap thus left from notices scattered, fragmentary, incidental, in what may well be described as the second volume of Isaiah's writings, the great closing series of his prophecies which, in our present division, fill the last twenty-six chapters of the book that bears his It is possible, I believe, to reconstruct out of those fragments the personal history of the man, and much of the history of a time of which we otherwise know but little. Once again the pictures of the past, long obscured and faded, will grow clear, and the Old Age of Isaiah will come before us with a new completeness. name. At the death of Hezekiah, the prophet must have been already far advanced in life. Sixty-one years had passed since that vision in the temple in the year that King Uzziah died, and he could hardly have been under twenty when he entered on an office that called for so much energy and insight. What had been the last great interests of the old man of fourscore during the reign of the king who loved and honoured him? The later chapters of the first part of his works supply the answer. They were (1) the prospect, long delayed, of an heir to the throne of David; (2) the vision, long familiar to the prophet's mind, and recently revived, of a calamity about to fall at no distant period on both * See the article "Manasseh," in Dr. Smith's "Dictionary of the Bible." king and people,—a life of exile in the far lands watered by the Tigris and the Euphrates. (1.) Manasseh was but twelve years old at his accession, and it is natural to infer that Hezekiah's marriage with his mother had taken place comparatively late in life. The name of that mother is given as Hephzi-bah (2 Kings xxi. 1). The prominence given in the king's elegiac "writing, when he had been sick and had recovered from his sickness," to the thought of doing a father's work, should his life be spared, in the training of his child, indicates either that that child was as yet unborn or still in his infancy. His passionate craving for life appears in this light with a nobler aspect:— "The living, the living he shall praise thee, The father to the children shall make known thy truth." Such a marriage, we may well believe, would have been hailed by Isaiah at the time as likely to be fruitful in blessing. All its circumstances would acquire in the light of his hopes a new and mystical significance. Even when the hopes had been disappointed he would yet turn to them as suggesting the fittest imagery for the fuller and diviner hopes. which still remained. Throughout the later chapters this thought recurs again and again in varied aspects : "I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, My soul shall be joyful in my God; For he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, "As I live, saith the Lord, lxi. 10. Thou shalt surely clothe thee with them all, as with an |