It was the greatness of Israel to be conscious of their call as a nation to this fundamental service of humanity. Believing in the Word of God as the original source of all things,--_In the beginning God said, Let there be light; and there was light_,--they had the conscience, that, as it had been in the physical world, so must it always be in the moral. Men were to be served and their lives to be moulded by the Word. God was to be glorified by letting His Word break through the life and the lips of men. There was in the Old Testament, it is true, a triple ideal of manhood: _prophet_, _priest and king_. But the greatest of these was the prophet, for king and priest had to be prophets too. Eloquence was a royal virtue,--with persuasion, the power of command and swift judgement. Among the seven spirits of the Lord which Isaiah sees descending in the King-to-Come is the spirit of counsel, and he afterwards adds of the King: _He shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked_. Similarly, the priests had originally been the ministers, not so much of sacrifice, as of the revealed Word of God. And now the new and high ideal of priesthood, the laying down of one's life a sacrifice for God and for the people, was not the mere imitation of the animal victim required by the priestly law, but was the natural development of the prophetic experience. It was (as we shall presently see) the prophet, who, in his inevitable sufferings on behalf of the truth he uttered, developed that consciousness of sacrifice for others, in which the loftiest priesthood consists. Prophecy, therefore, the Service of Men by the Word of God, was for Israel the highest and most essential of all service. It was the individual's and it was the nation's ideal. As there was no true king and no true priest, so there was no true man, without the Word. _Would to God_, said Moses, _that all the Lord's people were prophets_. And in our prophecy Israel exclaims: _Listen, O Isles, unto me; and hearken, ye peoples from far. He hath made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of His hand hath He hid me._
At first it seems a forlorn hope thus to challenge the attention of the world in the dialect of one of its most obscure provinces,--a dialect, too, that was already ceasing to be spoken even there. But the fact only serves more forcibly to emphasize the belief of these prophets, that the word committed to what they must have known to be a dying language was the Word of God Himself,--bound to render immortal the tongue in which it was spoken, bound to re-echo to the ends of the earth, bound to touch the conscience and commend itself to the reason of universal humanity. We have already seen, and will again see, how our prophet insists upon the creative and omnipotent power of God's Word; so we need not dwell longer on this instance of his faith. Let us look rather at what he expresses as Israel's preparation for the teaching of it.