Isaiah stands head and shoulders above the other Old Testament authors in vivid descriptiveness of Christ.  Other prophets give an outline of our Saviour’s features.  Some of them present, as it were, the side face of Christ; others a bust of Christ; but Isaiah gives us the full-length portrait of Christ.  Other Scripture writers excel in some things.  Ezekiel more weird, David more pathetic, Solomon more epigrammatic, Habakkuk more sublime; but when you want to see Christ coming out from the gates of prophecy in all His grandeur and glory, you involuntarily turn to Isaiah.  So that if the prophecies in regard to Christ might be called the “Oratorio of the Messiah,” the writing of Isaiah is the “Hallelujah Chorus,” where all the batons wave and all the trumpets come in.  Isaiah was not a man picked up out of insignificance by inspiration.  He was known and honored.  Josephus, and Philo, and Sirach extolled him in their writings.  What Paul was among the apostles, Isaiah was among the prophets.

My text finds him standing on a mountain of inspiration, looking out into the future, beholding Christ advancing and anxious that all men might know Him; his voice rings down the ages:  “Seek ye the Lord while He may be found.”  “Oh,” says some one:  “that was for olden times.”  No, my hearer.  If you have traveled in other lands you have taken a circular letter of credit from some banking-house in New York, and in St. Petersburg, or Venice, or Rome, or Antwerp, or Brussels, or Paris; you presented that letter and got financial help immediately.  And I want you to understand that the text, instead of being appropriate for one age, or for one land, is a circular letter for all ages and for all lands, and wherever it is presented for help, the help comes:  “Seek ye the Lord while He may be found.”

I come, to-day, with no hair-spun theories of religion, with no nice distinctions, with no elaborate disquisition; but with a plain talk on the matters of personal religion.  I feel that the sermon I preach this morning will be the savor of life unto life, or of death unto death.  In other words, the Gospel of Christ is a powerful medicine:  it either kills or cures.  There are those who say:  “I would like to become a Christian, I have been waiting a good while for the right kind of influences to come;” and still you are waiting.  You are wiser in worldly things than you are in religious things.  If you want to get to Albany, you go to the Grand Central Depot, or to the steam-boat wharf, and, having got your ticket, you do not sit down on the wharf or sit in the depot; you get aboard the boat or train.  And yet there are men who say they are waiting to get to heaven—­waiting, waiting, but not with intelligent waiting, or they would get on board the line of Christian influences that would bear them into the kingdom of God.

Now you know very well that to seek a thing is to search for it with earnest endeavor.  If you want to see a certain man in New York, and there is a matter of $10,000 connected with your seeing him, and you can not at first find him, you do not give up the search.  You look in the directory, but can not find the name; you go in circles where you think, perhaps, he may mingle, and, having found the part of the city where he lives, but perhaps not knowing the street, you go through street after street, and from block to block, and you keep on searching for weeks and for months.