My days are in the yellow leaf, , The flowers and fruit of love are gone,
The worm, the canker, and the grief Are mine alone.^
2. Work. — It was to a busy people that the words of our text were first addressed. Most probably this prophecy was uttered on the eve of the return of the Jews from captivity in Babylon. Long ago had they looked for deliverance from the miseries of the exile, but when it began to appear as if God had forgotten His people, and as if all their bright national hopes were for ever shattered, it was inevitable that they should seek for some other source of consolation and rest. Many lost hope, lost faith in the covenant promises, and turned to find in trade and worldly aims a substitute for religion. All their splendid powers of heart and mind they transferred to commerce, and joined in the pursuit of gain until, as one has put it, " from being a nation of born priests, they equally appear to have been
1 H. Bushnell, The New Life, p. 37.
* Byron, on the day he completed his 36th year.
ISAIAH 357
born traders." Gain now took the place of God. They had been a religious nation, now they became a commercial nation.
The exile in Babylon made money. He increased it by increased trade. He amassed possessions. His body revelled in conditions of ease. His carnal appetites delighted themselves in fatness. He climbed into positions of eminence and power. What else ? " In the fulness of his sufficiency he was in straits." The body luxuriated ; the soul languished. He drenched the body with comforts ; he could not appease its tenant. " Soul, thou hast much goods laid up . . . eat, drink, and be merry ! " And still the soul cried out, " I thirst," and disturbed him like an unquiet ghost. He spent money and more money, but was never able to buy the appropriate bread. He plunged into increased labours, but his labours reaped only that " which satisfieth not." The body toiled, the brain schemed, the eyes coveted, and still the soul cried out, " I thirst."
^ It is related that a nobleman, greatly incensed that his sister had married a man of affairs, turned her picture, which hung in the manor house, face towards the wall, and on its back inscribed in crude letters the legend, " Gone into trade." It was the ex- pression of his abhorrence that one who had been nobly born should make an alliance which, in his estimation, was beneath her station. When Israel, by reason of her own iniquities, was led in exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, God turned her picture face to the wall and on it wrote the legend, " Gone into trade." Her history expressed God's abhorrence of her choice between His service and the worship of the world.^
He found his work, but far behind
Lay something that he could not find:
Deep springs of passion that can make
A life sublime for others' sake.
And lend to work the living glow
That saints and bards and heroes know.
The power lay there — unfolded power —
A bud that never bloomed a flower;
For half beliefs and jaded moods
Of worldlings, critics, cynics, prudes.
Lay round his path and dimmed and chilled.
Illusions passed. High hopes were killed;
But Duty lived. He sought not far
^ Jf. BoyatOQ, in Sermons by tlot Alonday Club, xvii. p. 51.
358 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
The " might be " in the things that are ; His ear caught no celestial strain ; He dreamed of no millennial reign. Brave, true, unhoping, calm, austere, He laboured in a narrow sphere. And found in work his spirit needs — The last, if not the best, of creeds.^
3. Privation. — In India ascetic practices have been very widely prevalent from the very earliest times. The mortification of the body, and the self-inflicted penances associated therewith, have been habitually carried to lengths beyond anything familiar to other peoples. Tradition and legend have united to glorify the ascetic, whether human or Divine ; religion, as elsewhere, has sanctioned and encouraged his devotion ; and the highest rewards of place and power have been within his reach, if only his austerities have taken a form sufficiently protracted and severe. Eastern patience, self-abnegation, and resolution are seen in their strangest guise, in submission to extreme conditions of self-torture and distress. The profession of the ascetic has always been held in the highest esteem, and his claim to support at the public charge by gifts and alms universally allowed. If it is his merit to practise, it is the merit of others to give to him, that his simple wants may never lack supply. And thus on both sides asceticism ministered to spiritual profit, to the actual and personal gain of the ascetic himself, both present and pro- spective, and to the store of credit which by his generosity the householder trusted to accumulate for himself, so as to win a higher position and birth in the next existence. Part of the secret of the hold which the ascetic ideal has maintained on the Indian mind lies in the fact that, according to the teaching of their sacred books, benefit accrues also to the donor who for- wards the holy man on his way with gifts of money or food, or ministers in any way to his personal needs.^