The office of a prophet was not an easy one. The man had to hazard or sacrifice most of those things that men count dear—property, popularity, home. Every day he had to take his life in his hand, as he risked the rage of a royal tyrant, or faced the fury of insensate mobs. Still harder was it to stand alone in his faith and opinion, rejected by the multitude, by the wealth, by the wisdom of his day, mocked or pitied as a madman; hardest of all to see his efforts foiled, his country humiliated, his people depraved, to feel his heart sink within him, to struggle with dark misgivings, to doubt the reality of the Divine prompting, and despairingly to ask whether this world were indeed governed by a righteous Will, or were not rather the sport of blind caprice or the slave of iron fate! Ah! it was not easy to be a prophet. Before a man could become a prophet he needed to possess a knowledge of God of such absolute certainty as nothing could shake. Once at least in his life he must have come into actual contact with God. The experience that made Isaiah a prophet took the form of a vision. It happened in a period of distressing perplexity and gloom. Wrestling passionately with the darkness, craving wistfully for light, the yearning to see God in the man's soul became so intense and sensitive that the great Heart in heaven answered the longing of the heart on earth, and aspiration leapt into realisation, and faith flashed into vision. On a throne, high and lifted up, crowning and dominating all things, fixed on immovable foundations, untouched by the changes of time, unshaken by the shocks of history, Isaiah beheld, seated in sovereign supremacy, a Form of ineffable splendour, the power and presence of the Eternal in awful actuality, beyond all doubt or question the Lord of the universe and the Arbiter of destiny. Henceforth he could never doubt the being and the might of God. That is a great experience, but it leaves the heart unsatisfied. We want to know the nature, the character of this God, who holds our fortunes in His awful hands. Is He good, and just, and gentle, or hard, and cold, and cruel? The answer came to Isaiah in the seraphs' song of adoration, with its ascription of perfect triune holiness. It told him that in God is light, and no darkness at all. Through and through, utterly and absolutely, in every chord and fibre of His being, there is no baseness, no harshness, no injustice; there is nothing but stainless purity and splendour, nothing but radiant justice, goodness, and truth. "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts." Still, one wistful doubt, one anxious question, lingers in the human heart. For what were our poor world the better of this holy God if He be content to sit aloof in the light and glory of heaven, leaving the web of human story to be woven by the blundering fingers of sinning, erring men on earth? That fear, too, was laid for ever in Isaiah's soul by the comforting response of the seraphs' chorus. God