XI.I.3.  The kingdom of Saul and David did not long remain at its height.  Decay set in even at the separation, and when once the Assyrians were heard at the door, it advanced with steps not to be arrested.  But the memory of the period of glory and power was all the greener, and the hope arose of its return.  From the contrast between the sorrowful present and the brilliant past there arose the picture of the state as it should be; when ruin was seen without and anarchy within, the prophets set against this the pattern of the theocracy.  The theocracy as the prophets represent it to themselves is not a thing essentially different from the political community, as a spiritual differs from a secular power; rather, it rests on the same foundations and is in fact the ideal of the state.  Isaiah gave this ideal its classical form in those pictures of the future which we are accustomed to call Messianic prophecies.  These passages are not predictions of this or that occurrence, but announcements of the aims which, it is true, the prophet only expects the future to realise, but which are of force or ought to be of force in the present, and towards which the community, if true to its own nature, must strive.

The first feature of these Messianic descriptions is the expulsion of the Assyrians; but most emphasis is laid on the restoration of the inner bases of the state, the rottenness of which has brought about and rendered inevitable the present crisis.  The collapse of the government, the paralysis fallen on the law, the spoliation of the weak by the strong, these are the evils that call for redress.  “How is the honourable city become a harlot; it was full of judgment, righteousness lodged in it—­but now murderers!  Thy princes are rascals and companions of thieves, every one loveth gifts and followeth after bribes; they judge not the fatherless, neither cloth the cause of the widow come unto them.  Therefore saith the Lord:  Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge me of mine enemies!  And I will turn my hand against thee, Zion, and as with Iye I will purge away thy dross, and I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counsellors as at the beginning; afterwards thou shalt be called a righteous and honourable city.  Zion shall be redeemed by judgment and her inhabitants by righteousness” (Isaiah i. 21-27).  The state the prophet has before his eye is always the natural state as it exists, never a community distinguished by a peculiar holiness in its organisation.  The kingdom of Jehovah is with him entirely identical with the kingdom of David; the tasks he sets before it are political in their nature, similar, we might say, to the demands one would address to the Turkish Empire in our own days.  He is unconscious of any difference between human and divine law:  law in itself, jurist’s law in the proper juristic sense of the word, is divine, and has behind it the authority of the Holy One of Israel.  In that