spiritual and universal character. III. THE TEMPER OF SERVICE. 1. _He shall not cry, nor lift up, Nor make his voice to be heard in the street._ There is nothing more characteristic of our prophecy than its belief in the power of speech, its exultation in the music and spell of the human voice. It opens with a chorus of high calls: none are so lovely to it as heralds, or so musical as watchmen when they lift up the voice; it sets the preaching of glad tidings before the people as their national ideal; eloquence it describes as a sharp sword leaping from God's scabbard. The Servant of the Lord is trained in style of speech; his words are as pointed arrows; he has the mouth of the learned, a voice to command obedience. The prophet's own tones are superb: nowhere else does the short sententiousness of Hebrew roll out into such long, sonorous periods. He uses speech in every style: for comfort, for bitter controversy, in clear proclamation, in deep-throated denunciation: _Call with the throat_, _spare not_, _lift up the voice like a trumpet_. His constant key-notes are, _speak a word_, _lift up the voice with strength_, _sing_, _publish_, _declare_. In fact, there is no use to which the human voice has ever been put in the Service of Man, for comfort's sake, or for justice, or for liberty, for the diffusion of knowledge or for the scattering of music, which our prophet does not enlist and urge upon his people. When, then, he says of the Servant that _he shall not cry, nor lift up, nor make his voice to be heard in the street_, he cannot be referring to the means and art of the Service, but rather to the tone and character of the Servant. Each of the triplet of verbs he uses shows us this. The first one, translated _cry_, is not the cry or call of the herald voice in ch. xl., the high, clear Kārā; it is ssa`aḳ, a sharper word with a choke in the centre of it meaning _to scream_, especially under excitement. Then _to lift up_ is the exact equivalent of our "to be loud." And if we were seeking to translate into Hebrew our phrase "to advertise oneself," we could not find a closer expression for it than to _make his voice be heard in the street_. To be "screamy," to be "loud," to "advertise oneself,"--these modern expressions for vices that were ancient as well as modern render the exact force of the verse. Such the Servant of God will not be nor do. He is at once too strong, too meek and too practical. That God is with him, _holding him fast_, keeps him calm and unhysterical; that he is but God's instrument keeps him humble and quiet; and that his heart is in his work keeps him from advertising himself at its expense. It is perhaps especially for the last of these reasons that Matthew (in his twelfth chapter) quotes this passage of our Lord. Jesus had been disturbed in His labours of healing by the disputatious Pharisees. He had answered them, and then withdrawn from their neighbourhood. Many sick were brought