I took up the epistle to the Romans, but I did not read it long. Another subject stepped in to claim immediate attention in the first words on which I lighted. They were these, “Isaiah cries aloud on behalf of Israel, Though the number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea, the remnant [alone] shall be saved,” and then, “Even as Isaiah has foretold, If the Lord of Sabaoth had not left seed to us, we should have become as Sodom and should have been made like unto Gomorrah.” Previously when I had read these words I could neither understand them nor see the way to understand them, not knowing the meaning of “Sodom” and “Gomorrah,” nor even “Isaiah.” But now, knowing that Isaiah was one of the principal Hebrew prophets, I began to see that many obscure passages of Paul might become clearer to me if I first studied this prophet. This view was confirmed when I found Paul, later on, quoting him again, “But Isaiah is very bold and says, I was found by them that sought me not, I became manifest to them that consulted me not; but with reference to Israel he says, All the day long, I stretched out my hands to a people disobedient and gainsaying.” The name also occurred toward the close of the epistle thus, “Isaiah says, There shall be the root of Jesse, and he that is raised up to rule over the nations; on him shall the nations set their hope.” These last words reminded me of the doctrine of Epictetus about Diogenes “to whom are entrusted the peoples of the earth and countless cares in their behalf.”

[103]

But I did not know what “root of Jesse” meant. The name, “Jesse,” I faintly remembered reading in the poems of David; but where it was I could not recall. Hence the phrase was obscure. I determined to put off the further study of Paul for the present, and to glance through the book of Isaiah in the hope of meeting this and other passages quoted above. Accordingly I unrolled the prophecy and began to read it from the beginning.

At first, the language was clear—though the Greek was as bad as in the poems of David. The “children” of God, said the prophet (meaning the ancient Jews or Hebrews, whom he often spoke of as “Israel”) had rebelled against their Father and were being punished with fire and sword by hostile nations executing God’s vengeance on their impiety. Then came the sentence I quoted above, from Paul, about the “remnant.” After this, the prophet introduced “the Lord”—that is the God of the Jews—as saying that He cared no longer for their incense or their offerings because they came from hands stained with blood. This was somewhat like the saying of Horace about Phidyle mentioned above. But what followed was not like anything in Horace: “Wash you, make you clean; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.” If they would act thus, then, said God, “though your sins be red as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” As though the nation were molten metal in a crucible, and He Himself were refining them with fire, the Lord said to the whole people of Israel, “I will purge away thy dross … afterwards thou shalt be called the city of righteousness.”

I had begun to hope that I should be able to understand this author as easily as Euripides and much more easily than ?schylus. But now came obscurities. First I read of a golden age. People were to “beat their swords into ploughshares,” and not to “learn war any more.” Then I found a mention of general destruction as by a universal earthquake. Then came, without any chronological or other order apparent to me, the following pictures, or predictions:—a land without a ruler governed by children and women; a picture of luxurious ladies[104] of rank, a list of their dresses, ornaments, jewels and cosmetics; a “branch of the Lord, beautiful and glorious”; a purifying with a “spirit of burning”; “a song of my beloved touching his vineyard”—all confused together (so it seemed to me at the time) like the prophecies of the Sibyl.

As far as I could see, most of these prophecies dealt with the internal corruption of the nation. The “vineyard” of the Lord was the people of Israel. When He visited the vineyard, looking for fruit, said the prophet, “He looked for judgment but behold oppression.” After this, came a vision of the Lord’s glory, and then predictions of external calamities, and invasions of foreign nations. But yet there was a promise of the birth of a Deliverer, a Prince of Peace, to sit “upon the throne of David.” Following this, at some interval, were the words for which I was searching, about “the root of Jesse.” And now I could understand them, for they were preceded by this prediction, “There shall come forth a shoot out of the stock of Jesse, and a branch out of his roots shall bear fruit.” Just before that, there had been a description of an invading army, coming as the instrument of the Lord’s wrath and “lopping the boughs with terror” and hewing down “the high ones of stature.”

Then all was clear to me. I perceived the connexion between the “child” that was to sit on “the throne of David,” and the “shoot out of the stock of Jesse.” The two together brought back to my mind that passage which I could not before recall from the Psalms, “The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended.” The words of Isaiah were like those of Sophocles where he is speaking of the destruction of the royal house of Laius. Sophocles calls the surviving child the “root,” and laments because the axe of Fate was destroying it just when a branch was on the point of “shooting up” from the “stock” so as to produce fruit. So now, but in an opposite mood of hope and joy, Isaiah said that the royal house of David the son of Jesse would not be exterminated, though many of its scions would be cut off. A “branch” would “shoot up” and the succession to the kingdom would be maintained.

In the same way, I perceived, the great Julius, or the[105] Emperor Augustus, being descended from Iulus, the son of ?neas, might be called “the shoot out of the stock of Anchises,” transported from Asia to Europe so as to “shoot up” into a new kingdom more glorious than the old. This, too, explained the word “remnant” used by Paul. As the Trojan followers of ?neas were a “remnant,” so too must be the Jewish followers of this “child,” a remnant left from defeat, disaster, and captivity, after a great “lopping of the boughs with terror.” Virgil sang about the empire of the house of Iulus not as a prophet, but as a poet, prophesying, so to speak, after the event. Isaiah appeared merely to predict empire as a prophet, and a false prophet, prophesying what had not been, and never would be, an “event.” The tree of the empire of Rome was erect for all the world to look on. The tree of the kingdom of Jesse appeared to me as extinct as the house of Laius. So I thought then.

Yet I k............