your heart, living and dying; may you be led to his person and work, and feel joy and peace in believing in the love which God hath for you in Christ. Your’s, truly, _Ruhamah_. LETTER XXXII. _Achor’s Vale_, _November_ 18th, 1818. Mrs. MARCH. MY DEAR FRIEND, I well know the cause why you are absent from chapel—if a preacher does not stand manifest to your conscience, you cannot hear him, nor can I blame you. The time of my deliverance I hope will come, when I trust to meet the Lord’s people once more, and abide with them, till sickness and death finally separate. The second chapter of Isaiah is a very grand and solemn part of God’s word. I have no commentators here to explain it, but hope the Lord will give me a little light into it, as I write this short note on it, particularly that important address, in the 10th verse, which you beg a few thoughts on. The compass of a very long letter, would be too short to set forth one half the beauties and excellencies contained in this part of sacred writ. The prophet Isaiah is supposed to be the most evangelical of all the prophets, not, but all the rest wrote of the same grand object, Christ, but this great man was led more deeply into the subject. He lived under the reigns of several kings, and died a martyr, under the reign of Manasseh. It is supposed he was sawn asunder with a wooden saw. He was led most divinely to see the person, glory, love, work, and the kingdom of Christ, the nature of the Gospel dispensation, and the peculiar happiness of the Church, in the first dawn of that period, and its full meridian in the latter day glory. To these distant times, he, no doubt, alludes in the five first verses of this chapter. The conquests of grace, is particularly pointed out in the 4th verse. When Christ, to whom all judgment is given, shall reign in the power of his Gospel, in every part of the world, and when fierce persecutors, who have been as swords and spears against the saints, those being converted, should be made useful characters in the Lord’s garden. We are exhorted to walk in the light of the gospel, and perhaps our Lord, and his servant John, alludes to this text in their several addresses to the saints, in the Gospel and Epistles of John. We may, with propriety, call Isaiah the Old Testament Apostle—such were his clear views of Christ, that one would think we were reading a history of circumstances past, more than a prophesy of what was to come, although he lived, probably, seven hundred years before the events themselves took place. The prophet then proceeds, from the 6th verse of this chapter, and the following verses, to predict the desolation of Jerusalem, for those sins which had so much displeased the Lord, particularly the reigning sin of idolatry, to which the Jews were so awfully prone.