and where a community is cursed with one, the others will not be far
away. They are a knot of serpents intertwined. We touch but slightly on
the other vices denounced by the prophet's burning words, but we must
premise the general observation that the same uncompromising plainness
and boldness in speaking out as to social sins ought to characterise
Christian teachers to-day. The prophet's office is not extinct in the
church.

The first plague-spot is the accumulation of wealth in few hands, and
the selfish withdrawal of its possessors from the life of the community.
In an agricultural society like that of Judah, that clotting of wealth
took the shape of 'land-grabbing,' and of evicting the small
proprietors. We see it in more virulent forms in our great commercial
centres, where the big men often become big by crushing out the little
ones, and denude themselves of responsibility to the community in
proportion as they clothe themselves with wealth. Wherever wealth is
thus congested, and its obligations ignored by selfish indulgence, the
seeds are sown which will spring up one day in 'anarchism.' A man need
not be a prophet to have it whispered in his ear, as Isaiah had, that
the end of selfish capitalism is a convulsion in which 'many houses
shall be desolate,' and many fields barren. England needs the warning as
much as Isaiah's Judah did.

Such selfish wealth leads, among other curses, to indolence and
drunkenness, as the next woe shows. The people described make drinking
the business of their lives, beginning early and sitting late. They have
a varnish of art over their swinishness, and must have music as well as
wine. So, in many a drink-shop in England, a piano or a band adds to the
attractions, and gives a false air of aestheticism to pure animalism.
Isaiah feels the incongruity that music should be so prostituted, and