"Had Moses failed to go, had God Granted his prayer, there would have been For him no leadership to win; No pillared fire; no magic rod, No smiting of the sea; no tears Ecstatic, shed on Sinai's steep; No Nebo, with a God to keep His burial; only forty years Of desert, watching with his sheep." A Yet Deeper Meaning. When we turn to the leaders of the latter years of the Kingdom time of God's teacher-nation, the prophetic time, there is one thing that stands out sharply in the men God used. It was this, a man's inner personal life and experience were made use of to an unusual degree. It is as though the sacred inner life were sacrificed. The holy privacies were laid bare to the public gaze. The sweets of the inner holy of holies of the personal life were given up. The people were so far God-hardened that only _acted_ preaching, _lived_ messages, that took it out of one's very life, with pain in the taking, had any effect. This is most markedly so in the case of _Hosea_, whose experience it seems almost if not wholly impossible for us to take in.[114] It is true that the Christianized West has conceptions of personal privacy to which the East is a stranger. Yet, even so, the way in which these men were asked to yield up their inner personal lives, must have been a most marked thing to these Orientals. For God used it as the one thing apparently, the extreme thing, to touch their hearts with His appeal. _Isaiah_ had just such peculiar experiences. The birth of a son is planned for, and told of for the purpose of making more emphatic the message to the dull ears and slow heart of the nation.[115] His two sons bore names of strange meaning, as a means of teaching truths that were peculiarly distasteful to the people. Isaiah takes one of these strangely named sons as he goes to deliver a message to the king. And the son standing by his father's side is a reminder in his name of a disagreeable truth.[116] A little later the man is actually required to go about barefooted, and without clothing sufficient for conventional respectability, and to continue this for three years.[117] When we remember that he was not an erratic extremist, but a sober-minded, fine-grained gentleman of refinement and of a good family, it helps us to understand a little how hard-hearted and stubborn were a people that could be appealed to only in such a way. And it tells us, too, how utterly surrendered was the man who was willing thus to give up his private personal life. How much easier to have been simply an earnest, eloquent preacher, with his inner personal life lived free from public gaze, a thing sacred to himself. Following meant the giving up of the sacred private life to a strangely marked degree, for God to use.