The prophecy in Isaiah refers to a sign to be given to Ahaz, King of Judea, to encourage him under the invasion, or threatened invasion, of his country by the kings of Syria and Israel. The sign was to be,--1. The conception by a virgin of a son; 2. that she should call his name "Immanuel," translated "God with us;" 3. the removal of the kings of Syria and Israel before the child emerged from infancy. Following on this, and in continuation of the same subject, Isaiah narrates,--1. That he went unto the prophetess, the result being that she bore a son; 2. that the Lord told him to call his name "Maber-shalal-hash-baz," translated "making speed to the spoil he hasteneth the prey;" 3. the removal by the superior force of the Assyrian monarch of the riches of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria, before the child could cry "father" or "mother." The plain meaning, then, of all this is that the sign was to be given to Ahaz,--if realised, it must necessarily have been realised in his lifetime; also that the overthrow of Syria and Israel was to take place during the infancy of the child. To affirm, as Matthew does, that it is a prophecy _fulfilled_ by a birth that occurred seven centuries after the events it refers to, surely requires an unbounded credulity. Does the prophet refer to two children, "Immanuel" and "Maher-shalal-hash-baz"? Or was the prophetess "the virgin," and these two names bestowed on her child? The condition applying equally to both names, that Syria and Israel were to be overrun during the infancy of the child, is almost conclusive in favour of the latter construction. Isaiah had thus taken immediate steps to ensure the fulfilment of his prophecy. The word translated "virgin" is not the same as is used in such passages as Gen. xxiv. 16, Lev.xxi. 3, and may have been applicable to any modest and chaste married woman. The mother in calling the child Immanual, followed the common Hebrew custom of forming names by combining an appropriate phrase with the word "El," God. Thus Hagar was directed by the angel in the wilderness to call her son "Ishmael," "God who hears." Hannah too named the son she had longed and prayed for "Samuel," "asked of God". The sign to Ahaz was thus, in the extremity he was relieved from, most appropriately named "Immanuel," "God with us," or "God on our side;" and the same name in the next chapter (Isaiah viii. 8) is applied to the deity himself, "the breadth of thy land, O Immanuel," i.e., "God on our side." In any reading of Isaiah's prophecy it cannot be inferred that the conception of the virgin was to be by supernatural power. Nor from one end of the Jewish scriptures to the other is there the slightest support to such a notion as the deity begetting a mortal child by a mortal woman.