We can explain much with the outward eye, but the most of the explanation lies beyond. Where our knowledge of a man's life ends, the great meaning of it often only begins. All the vacancy beyond the outline we see is full of that meaning. God is there, and _God is a consuming fire_. Let us not seek to explain lives only by what we see of them, the visible strife of man with man and nature. It is the invisible that contains the secret of what is seen. We see the shoulders stoop, but not the burden upon them; the face darken, but look in vain for what casts the shadow; the light sparkle in the eye, but cannot tell what star of hope its glance has caught. And even so when we behold fortune and character go down in the warfare of this world, we ought to remember that it is not always the things we see that are to blame for the fall, but that awful flame which, unseen by common man, has been revealed to the prophets of God. Righteousness and retribution, then, are an atmosphere--not lines or laws that we may happen to stumble upon, not explosives, that, being touched, burst out on us, but the atmosphere--always about us and always at work, invisible and yet more mighty than aught we see. _God, in whom we live and move and have our being, is a consuming fire._ CHAPTER XXII. _THE RABSHAKEH; OR, LAST TEMPTATIONS OF FAITH._ ISAIAH xxxvi. (701 B.C.). It remains for us now to follow in chaps. xxxvi., xxxvii., the historical narrative of the events, the moral results of which we have seen so vivid in chap. xxxiii.--the perfidious return of the Assyrians to Jerusalem after Hezekiah had bought them off and their final disappearance from the Holy Land.