to tell men plainly how ugly are the vices which they are not ashamed to
commit. No doubt some of the drunken priests and false prophets in
Jerusalem thought Isaiah extremely vulgar and indelicate, in talking
about staggering teachers and tables swimming in 'vomit.' But he had to
speak out. So deep was the corruption that the officials were tipsy even
when engaged in their official duties, the prophets reeled while they
were seeing visions; the judges could not sit upright even when
pronouncing judgment.

Verses 9 and 10 are generally taken as a sarcastic quotation of the
drunkards' scoffs at the prophet. They might be put in inverted commas.
Their meaning is, 'Does he take us grave and reverend seigniors, priests
and prophets, to be babies just weaned, that he pesters us with these
monotonous petty preachings, fit only for the nursery, which he calls
his "message"?' In verse 10, the original for 'precept upon precept,'
etc., is a series of short words, which may be taken as reproducing the
'babbling tones of the drunken mockers.'

The loose livers of all generations talk in the same fashion about the
stern morality which rebukes their vice. They call it weak, commonplace,
fit for children, and they pretend that they despise it. They are much
too enlightened for such antiquated teaching. Old women and children may
take it in, but men of the world, who have seen life, and know what is
what, are not to be fooled so. 'What will this babbler say?' was asked
by the wise men of Athens, who were but repeating the scoffs of the
prophets and priests of Jerusalem, and the same jeers are bitter in the
mouth of many a profligate man to-day. It is the fate of all strict
morality to be accounted childish by the people whom it inconveniently
condemns.