How these three descriptions meet the three failings of our faith! We forget that God is ceaselessly at work in wisdom in our lives. We forget that God must sometimes, even when He is saving us, seem lionlike and cruel. We forget that "the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind." Having thus made vivid the presence of their Lord to the purged eyes of His people, patient, powerful in order, wise in counsel, persistent in grace, and, last of all, very tender, Isaiah concludes with a cry to the people to turn to this Lord, from whom they have so deeply revolted. Let them cast away their idols, and there shall be no fear of the result of the Assyrian invasion. The Assyrian shall fall, not by the sword of man, but the immediate stroke of God. _And his rock shall pass away by reason of terror, and his princes shall be dismayed at the ensign, saith the Lord, whose fire is in Zion, and His furnace in Jerusalem._ And so Isaiah closes this series of prophecies on the keynote with which it opened in the first verse of chap. xxix.: that Jerusalem is Ariel--_the hearth and altar, the dwelling-place and sanctuary, of God_. CHAPTER XV. _A MAN: CHARACTER AND THE CAPACITY TO DISCRIMINATE CHARACTER._ ISAIAH xxxii. 1-8 (ABOUT 702 B.C.?). The Assyrians being thus disposed of, Isaiah turns to a prospect, on which we have scarcely heard him speak these twenty years, since Assyria appeared on the frontier of Judah--the religious future and social progress of his own people. This he paints in a small prophecy of eight verses, the first eight of chap. xxxii.--verses 9-20 of that chapter apparently springing from somewhat different conditions.