The other meaning of righteousness, however,--the sense of social and civic morality, which was its usual sense with the earlier prophets,--is not altogether excluded from the use of the word in Isa. xl.-lxvi. Here are some commands and reproaches which seem to imply it. _Keep judgement, and do righteousness_,--where, from what follows, righteousness evidently means observing the Sabbath and doing no evil (lvi. 1 ff). _And justice is fallen away backward, and righteousness standeth afar off, for truth is fallen in the street, and steadfastness cannot enter_ (lix. 14). These must be terms for human virtues, for shortly afterwards it is said: _Jehovah was displeased because there was no justice_. Again, _They seek Me as a nation that did righteousness_ (lviii. 2); _Hearken unto Me, ye that know righteousness, a people--My law is in their hearts_ (li. 7); _Thou meetest him that worketh righteousness_ (lxiv. 5); _No one sues in righteousness, and none goeth to law in truth_ (lix. 4). In all these passages _righteousness_ means something that man can know and do, his conscience and his duty, and is rightly to be distinguished from those others, in which _righteousness_ is equivalent to the salvation, the glory, the peace, which only God's power can bring. If the passages, that employ _righteousness_ in the sense of moral or religious observance, really date from the Exile, then the interesting fact is assured to us that the Jews enjoyed some degree of social independence and responsibility during their Captivity. But it is a very striking fact that these passages all belong to chapters, the exilic origin of which is questioned even by critics, who assign the rest of Isa. xl.-lxvi. to the Exile. Yet, even if these passages have all to be assigned to the Exile, how few they are in number! How they contrast with the frequency, with which, in the earlier part of this book,--in the orations addressed by Isaiah to his own times, when Israel was still an independent state,--_righteousness_ is reiterated as the daily, practical duty of men, as justice, truthfulness and charity between man and man! The extreme rarity of such inculcations in Isa. xl.-lxvi. warns us that we must not expect to find here the same practical and political interest, which formed so much of the charm and the force of Isa. i.-xxxix. The nation has now no politics, almost no social morals. Israel are not citizens working out their own salvation in the market, the camp and the senate; but captives waiting a deliverance in God's time, which no act of theirs can hasten. It is not in the street that the interest of Second Isaiah lies: it is on the horizon. Hence the vague feeling of a distant splendour, which, as the reader passes from ch. xxxix. to ch. xl., replaces in his mind the stir of living in a busy crowd, the close and throbbing sense of the civic conscience, the voice of statesmen, the clash of the weapons of war. There is no opportunity for individuals to reveal themselves.