III. liii. 4-6. The earliest and most common moral judgement, which men pass upon pain, is that which is implied in its name--that it is penal. A man suffers because God is angry with him and has stricken him. So Job's friends judged him, and so these speakers tell us they had at first judged the Servant. _We had accounted him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted_,--_stricken_, that is, with a plague of sickness, as Job was, for the simile of the sick man is still kept up; _smitten of God and degraded_ or _humbled_, for it seemed to them that God's hand was in the Servant's sickness, to punish and disgrace him for his own sins. But now they know they were wrong. The hand of God was indeed upon the Servant, and the reason was sin; yet the sin was not his, but theirs. _Surely our sicknesses he bore, and our pains he took as his burden. He was pierced for iniquities that were ours. He was crushed for crimes that were ours._ Strictly interpreted, these verses mean no more than that the Servant was involved in the consequences of his people's sins. The verbs _bore_ and _made his burden_ are indeed taken by some to mean necessarily, removal or expiation; but in themselves, as is clear from their application to Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the whole of the generation of Exile, they mean no more than implication in the reproach and the punishment of the people's sins.[223] Nevertheless, as we have explained in a note below, it is really impossible to separate the suffering of a Servant, who has been announced as practical and prosperous in his suffering, from the end for which it is endured. We cannot separate the Servant's bearing of the people's guilt from his removal of it. And, indeed, this practical end of his passion springs forth, past all doubt, from the rest of the strophe, which declares that the Servant's sufferings are not only vicarious but redemptive. _The discipline of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed._ Translators agree that _discipline of our peace_ must mean discipline which procures our peace. The peace, the healing, is ours, in consequence of the chastisement and the scourging that was his. The next verse gives us the obverse and complement of the same thought. The pain was his in consequence of the sin that was ours. _All we like sheep had gone astray, and the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all_,--literally _iniquity_, but inclusive of its guilt and consequences. Nothing could be plainer than these words. The speakers confess, that they know that the Servant's suffering was both vicarious and redemptive.[224]