A Child, he says, shall shortly be born to whom his mother shall give the name Immanu-El--_God-with-us_. By the time this Child comes to years of discretion, _he shall eat butter and honey_. Isaiah then explains the riddle. He does not, however, explain who the mother is, having described her vaguely as _a_ or _the young woman of marriageable age_; for that is not necessary to the sign, which is to consist in the Child's own experience. To this latter he limits his explanation. Butter and honey are the food of privation, the food of a people, whose land, depopulated by the enemy, has been turned into pasture. Before this Child shall arrive at years of discretion not only shall Syria and Ephraim be laid waste, but the Lord Himself will have laid waste Judah. _Jehovah shall bring upon thee, and upon thy people and upon thy father's house days, that have not come, from the day that Ephraim departed from Judah; even the king of Assyria._ Nothing more is said of Immanuel, but the rest of the chapter is taken up with the details of Judah's devastation. Now this sign and its explanation would have presented little difficulty but for the name of the Child--Immanuel. Erase that, and the passage reads forcibly enough. Before a certain Child, whose birth is vaguely but solemnly intimated in the near future, shall have come to years of discretion, the results of the choice of Ahaz shall be manifest. Judah shall be devastated, and her people have sunk to the most rudimentary means of living. All this is plain. It is a form which Isaiah used more than once to measure the near future. And in other literatures, too, we have felt the pathos of realizing the future results of crime and the length to which disaster lingers, by their effect upon the lives of another generation:-- "The child that is unborn shall rue The hunting of that day!" But why call the Child Immanuel? The name is evidently part of the sign, and has to be explained in connection with it. Why call a Child _God-with-us_ who is not going to act greatly or to be highly honoured, who is only going to suffer, for whom to come to years of intelligence shall only be to come to a sense of his country's disaster and his people's poverty? This Child who is used so pathetically to measure the flow of time and the return of its revenges, about whom we are told neither how he shall behave himself in the period of privation, nor whether he shall survive it--why is he called Immanuel? or why, being called Immanuel, has he so sordid a fate to contrast with so splendid a name?