However, depraved as the Israelitish and Judæan nobles had become, there existed a safeguard which prevented depravity from becoming an established institution of law. In Israel, injustice could never pass as public justice. Here there were men who loudly declaimed against the mockery of justice, and the degradation of the poor; men who defended justice and morality as the only right course; men who supported the weak against the mighty. Just at this period of degradation, while Jotham ruled in Judah and Pekah in Israel, several God-inspired men arose, who spoke with words of fire against the vices of the nobility. These men were the third generation of great prophets who succeeded Amos, Joel, and Hosea, as these had followed Elijah and Elisha. The most important amongst them was Isaiah, son of Amoz, from Jerusalem. With his contemporary prophets, Zechariah, Hosea II., and Micah II., he shared the courage which calls vice and crime by their right names, and which mercilessly brands the guilty. But he surpassed them and all his predecessors in depth of thought, beauty of rhythm, exaltation of poetical expression, in the accuracy of his similes, and in the clearness of his prophetic vision. Isaiah's eloquence combined simplicity with beauty of speech, conciseness with intelligibility, biting irony with an inspiring flow of language. Of his private life but little is known. His wife was also gifted with prophetic insight. He wore the usual prophet's dress--a garment of goat's hair. Like Elijah, he considered his prophetic task as the vocation of his life. His energies were entirely directed to exposing wickedness, to warning and exhorting the nation, and to holding before it the ideal of a future, to attain which it must strive with heart and soul. He gave his sons symbolical names, indicative of future events, to serve as signs and types. For more than forty years (755-710) he pursued his prophetic ministration with untiring zeal and unshaken courage. In critical moments, when all--great and small, kings and princes--despaired, his confidence never deserted him, but aroused the hope and courage of his people. Isaiah first appeared in the year of king Uzziah's death (755), when he was about thirty-three years of age. He announced to the nation (probably on the Temple Mount) the vision which he had been vouchsafed, and his election as a prophet. Isaiah's first speech was a short, simple communication of this vision, the deep meaning of which could not be misunderstood. He related that he had seen in a dream Jehovah Zebaoth on a high and exalted throne, surrounded by the winged seraphim. One seraph after another cried, "Holy, holy, holy is Jehovah Zebaoth," with such thrilling voices that the very supports of the Temple trembled: "Then I said, Woe is me, for I am undone; I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.