Read the memoirs of Isaiah, and you will see how intense and intimate was the part he played in the life and movement of his age. One day you will find him at the Temple, scathing with scornful reprobation the hypocrisy and hollowness of the established ritual of religion. Another time he has taken his stand over against the fashionable promenade of Jerusalem, and as he watches the passing procession of pomp and opulence, built up on the misery and degradation of defenceless poverty, his heart grows hot with honest indignation, and he breaks into impassioned invective against the stream of selfish luxury, as it rolls by with a smiling face and a cruel heart. Again, he forces his way into a meeting of the Privy Council, fearlessly confronts the King and his advisers, denounces the iniquity of a faithless foreign policy and sternly demands its abandonment. In every department of national life, in every section of social and religious existence, his voice was heard and his personality felt. Yet nobody ever mistook him for a mere politician, philanthropist, or reformer. He was ever, and was ever felt to be, a prophet. For he did not speak like other men, he did not act like other men, he did not reason like other men. He spoke not for himself, but for God. He claimed for his speech, not the persuasiveness of human probability, but the imperativeness of Divine certainty. He relied solely on the coercive power of truth. He did not touch the tools of political partisanship or scheming statecraft. He cared nothing for the suggestions of expediency; he defied the most certain conclusions of earthly wisdom, and followed absolutely the bidding of an unseen guidance. He was a man taken possession of by an irresistible perception of the will of God, and an all-absorbing passion to have that will done on earth. He held in the commonwealth the place that is held by that inexorable voice which, deaf to all balancings of earthly gain or loss, unflinchingly proclaims the antithesis of right and wrong, and imperatively demands that right shall be obeyed. The prophet was the conscience of the nation. Preachers and teachers of religion, that is what England asks of us. It is a high calling.