year that King Uzziah died." There are
forms of religious experience which are dateless--processes of slow
and unmarked growth, which may spread themselves over years; but there
are also crises, when experience crystallizes into events so
remarkable that they become standing dates in the lives of those who
have enjoyed them, from which they reckon, as other people do from
birth or marriage or the turning-points of their domestic and
commercial history.

Whether this was the first of such events in the history of Isaiah I
have often wondered. There is nothing unlikely in the suggestion. In
other cases the call to enter into God's work synchronized with the
first real encounter with God Himself. Samuel's call to be a prophet
coincided with his first personal introduction to acquaintance with
Jehovah, whom, it is distinctly stated, he did not previously know;
and St. Paul's call to the apostolate happened at the same time as his
conversion. As we go on, we shall come upon at least one circumstance
which points pretty strongly to the conclusion that this was Isaiah's
first conscious transaction with God.

3. The place where the incident occurred is also worthy of note. It
was in the temple. Ewald and other able commentators interpret this to
mean the heavenly temple, and suppose that the future prophet was
transported to some imaginary place which he called by this name. But
this is quite a gratuitous suggestion, and it very much weakens the
impressiveness of the whole scene, the very point of which lies in the
fact that it took place on familiar ground. Isaiah was a Jerusalemite,
and the temple was the most familiar of all haunts to him. He had
witnessed there a thousand times the external ritual of religion--the
worshipping multitudes, the priests, and the paraphernalia of
sacrifice. But now, on the same spot, he was to see a sight in whose
glory all these things would disappear. This is what the critical
moments of religious experience are always meant to do: they
obliterate the familiar externals of religion and reveal the reality
which is hidden behind them; they convert common spots of every-day
experience into the house of God and the gate of heaven.

* * * * *

Such were the circumstances of time and place in which the crisis of
Isaiah's history occurred. One day, in the year that King Uzziah died,
he wended his way, as he had done hundreds of times before, to the
temple; and the