the exiled nation to its own land. But it soars far beyond that. It sees
all mankind associated with them in sharing their blessings. It is the
vision of God's ideal for humanity. That makes it the more remarkable
that the prophet, with this wide outlook, should insist with such
emphasis on the fact that it has a local centre. That phrase 'in this
mountain' is three times repeated in the hymn; two of the instances
occurring in the verses of my text have lying side by side with them the
expressions 'all people' and 'all nations,' as if to bring together the
local origin, and the universal extent, of the blessings promised.

The sweet waters that are to pour through the world well up from a
spring opened 'in this mountain.' The beams that are to lighten every
land stream out from a light blazing there. The world's hopes for that
golden age which poets have sung, and towards which earnest social
reformers have worked, and of the coming of which this prophet was sure,
rest on a definite fact, done in a definite place, at a definite time.
Isaiah knew the place, but what was to be done, or when it was to be
done, he knew not. You and I ought to be wiser. History has taught us
that Jesus Christ fulfils the visioned good that inspired the prophet's
brilliant words. We might say, with allowable licence, that 'this
mountain,' in which the Lord does the great things that this song
magnifies, is not so much Zion as Calvary.

Brethren, in these days, when so many voices are proclaiming so many
short cuts to the Millennium, this clear declaration of the source of
the world's hope is worth pondering. For us all, individually, this
localisation of the origin of the universal good of mankind is an offer
of blessings to us if we will go thither, where the provision for the
world's good is stored--'In this mountain'; therefore, to seek it
anywhere else is to seek it in vain.