od of about fifty
years, and he was continually consulted by the reigning monarchs.

The great outward events that took place during Isaiah's public career
were the invasion of Judah by the combined forces of Israel and Syria in
the reign of Ahaz, and the great Assyrian invasion in the reign
of Hezekiah.

In regard to the first, it was disastrous to Judah. The weak king, the
twelfth from David, was inclined to the idolatries of the surrounding
nations, but was not signally bad like Ahab. Yet he was no match for
Pekah, who reigned at Samaria, or for Rezin, who reigned at Damascus.
Their combined armies slew in one day one hundred and twenty thousand of
the subjects of Ahaz, and carried away into captivity two hundred
thousand women and children, with immense spoil. The conqueror then
advanced to the siege of Jerusalem. In his distress Ahaz invoked the aid
of Pul, or Tiglath-pileser II., one of the most warlike of the Assyrian
kings, whose kingdom stretched from the Armenian mountains on the north
to Bagdad on the south, and from the Zagros chain on the east to the
Euphrates on the west. Earnestly did the prophet-statesman expostulate
with Ahaz, telling him that the king of Assyria would prove "a razor to
shave but too clean his desolate land." The inspired advice was
rejected; and the result of the alliance was that Judah, like Israel,
fell to the rank of a subject nation, and became tributary to Assyria,
and Ahaz, a mere vassal of Tiglath-pileser. The whole of Palestine
became the border-land of the Assyrian empire, easy to be invaded and
liable to be conquered.

The consequences which Isaiah feared, took place in the time of
Hezekiah, in the actual invasion of Judah by the Assyrian hosts under
Sennacherib. Not the splendid prosperity of Hezekiah, little short of
that enjoyed by Solomon,--not his allegiance to Jehovah, nor his grand
reforms and magnificent feasts averted the calamities which were the
legitimate result of the blindness of his father Ahaz. Sennacherib, the
most powerful of all the Assyrian kings, after suppressing a revolt in
Babylon and conquering various Eastern states, turned his eyes and steps
to Palestine, which had revolted. Hezekiah, in mortal fear, made humble
submission, and consented to a tribute of three hundred talents of
silver and thirty of gold, and the loss of two hundred thousand of his
people as captives, and a cession of a part of his territory,--as great
a calamity as France suffere