But further in his favourite gospel of the REASONABLENESS OF GOD--that God does not work fruitlessly, nor create and cultivate with a view to judgement and destruction--Isaiah was furnishing an argument for personal immortality, the force of which has not been exhausted. In a recent work on _The Destiny of Man_[74] the philosophic author maintains the reasonableness of the Divine methods as a ground of belief both in the continued progress of the race upon earth and in the immortality of the individual. "From the first dawning of life we see all things working together towards one mighty goal--the evolution of the most exalted and spiritual faculties which characterize humanity. Has all this work been done for nothing? Is it all ephemeral, all a bubble that bursts, a vision that fades? On such a view the riddle of the universe becomes a riddle without a meaning. The more thoroughly we comprehend the process of evolution by which things have come to be what they are, the more we are likely to feel that to deny the everlasting persistence of the spiritual element in man is to rob the whole process of its meaning. It goes far towards putting us to permanent intellectual confusion. For my own part, I believe in the immortality of the soul, not in the sense in which I accept demonstrable truths of science, but as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work."
[74] By Professor Fiske.
From the same argument Isaiah drew only the former of these two conclusions. To him the certainty that God's people would survive the impending deluge of Assyria's brute force was based on his faith that the Lord is _a God of judgement_, of reasonable law and method, and could not have created or fostered so spiritual a people only to destroy them. The progress of religion upon earth was certain. But does not Isaiah's method equally make for the immortality of the individual? He did not draw this conclusion, but he laid down its premises with a confidence and richness of illustration that have never been excelled.
We, therefore, answer the question we put at the beginning of the chapter thus:--Isaiah had a gospel for the individual for this life, and all the necessary premises of a gospel for the individual for the life to come.