The Preacher's Complete Homiletic Commentary on the Books of the Bible, Volume 15 (of 32): The Preacher's Complete Homiletic Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, Volume IBertram, Robert Aitkin
Religion
The Preacher's Complete Homiletic Commentary on the Books of the Bible, Volume 15 (of 32): The Preacher's Complete Homiletic Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, Volume I
serve.+ We have both these truths illustrated in the seraphim and in
Isaiah.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The scene of the Vision is the Temple, and its features
will have the same whether we suppose them to have risen
before Isaiah's imagination while he was absent from the
spot, in the solitude of his chamber or his house-top, or
assume (as I myself prefer to do), that he was actually
praying in the Temple at the time.
Though it is unlikely that any of the successors to what
was but a small remnant of Solomon's kingdom perfectly
restored the Temple after it was deprived of its original
splendour by Shishak in the reign of Rehoboam, yet we see
the worthier princes from time to time repairing the
structure when it had been suffered to fall into decay, and
replacing, as far as they could, the treasures and the
costly decorations of which it was repeatedly despoiled to
buy off foreign invaders; and probably there was no period
in which the restoration would be more complete than in the
reign of Uzziah, who in his power, wealth, and
magnificence, came nearer than any other to Solomon. As
there will be much more of fact than of fancy in the
picture, if, for the clearer understanding of the scene of
the vision, we figure to ourselves the youthful prophet in
his rough hair or woollen garment (probably not unlike that
of the Capuchin friar as we now see him in the streets or
churches of Rome), going up to the Temple to worship;--and
if we look with him at the Temple as, at the end of 300
years from its building, it must have presented itself to
his eyes, with its ample courts, and colonnades, and porch,
and its holy house, and holy of holies, well-proportioned,
and of the most elaborate workmanship, though rather
massive than large according to our notions. As he crossed
the variegated pavement of "the great court of the
congregation," and stopped--for we have no reason to
suppose him a Levite--at the entrance to the inner, or
"priests'" court, on each hand would rise one of the tall
pillars which Solomon set up in token that the kingdom was
constituted by Jehovah, and would be upheld by His might
(1 Kings vii. 21; 2 Chron. iii. 17), and which, once of
"bright brass," but now mellowed into bronze, had their
square capitals richly wreathed with molten lilies,
chain-work, and pomegranates; before him, resting on the
back of the twelve oxen, and cast like them in brass, would
appear the "molten sea," a basin of thirty cubits in
circumference, and containing two or three thousand _baths_
of water, its brim wrought "like the brim of a cup with
flowers of lilies," and under these a double row of
ornamental knobs; while on each side stood five smaller
lavers, the bases of which rested on wheels, and were most
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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