But I did not know what “root of Jesse” meant. The name, “Jesse,” I faintly remembered reading in the poems of David; but where it was I could not recall. Hence the phrase was obscure. I determined to put off the further study of Paul for the present, and to glance through the book of Isaiah in the hope of meeting this and other passages quoted above. Accordingly I unrolled the prophecy and began to read it from the beginning. At first, the language was clear—though the Greek was as bad as in the poems of David. The “children” of God, said the prophet (meaning the ancient Jews or Hebrews, whom he often spoke of as “Israel”) had rebelled against their Father and were being punished with fire and sword by hostile nations executing God’s vengeance on their impiety. Then came the sentence I quoted above, from Paul, about the “remnant.” After this, the prophet introduced “the Lord”—that is the God of the Jews—as saying that He cared no longer for their incense or their offerings because they came from hands stained with blood. This was somewhat like the saying of Horace about Phidyle mentioned above. But what followed was not like anything in Horace: “Wash you, make you clean; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.” If they would act thus, then, said God, “though your sins be red as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” As though the nation were molten metal in a crucible, and He Himself were refining them with fire, the Lord said to the whole people of Israel, “I will purge away thy dross … afterwards thou shalt be called the city of righteousness.” I had begun to hope that I should be able to understand this author as easily as Euripides and much more easily than Æschylus. But now came obscurities. First I read of a golden age. People were to “beat their swords into ploughshares,” and not to “learn war any more.” Then I found a mention of general destruction as by a universal earthquake. Then came, without any chronological or other order apparent to me, the following pictures, or predictions:—a land without a ruler governed by children and women; a picture of luxurious ladies of rank, a list of their dresses, ornaments, jewels and cosmetics; a “branch of the Lord, beautiful and glorious”; a purifying with a “spirit of burning”; “a song of my beloved touching his vineyard”—all confused together (so it seemed to me at the time) like the prophecies of the Sibyl.