THE magnificent imagery of Isaiah is alone adequate to interpret the artist’s picture. The German Kaiser is at the entrance to hell, on the gloomy portals of which is written the motto: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” The devil, with a Mephistophelian irony, tells his captive: “You need not storm this place.” Hell is only too ready to house the great malefactors who have sinned against light and are doomed to torment.

It is inevitable to recall the great oracles of Isaiah on the King of Babylon—that enemy of his race who had enslaved the Jewish people, persecuted God’s elect and led them into captivity. “Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?... How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cast down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”

But the King of Babylon was received with greater ceremony than falls to the lot of the German Kaiser. To welcome the former the old kings rise from their thrones. Wilhelm is led by the devil alone, and no pomp or circumstance of war surrounds him. His sin is as the sin of those who have believed in their transcendent power and are the victims of megalomania. He, too, said in his heart: “I will ascend into Heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will be like the Most High.” Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

And the sentence passed on such enemies of the human race is the same which Isaiah uttered thousands of years ago. “Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; that made the world as a wilderness and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners?” The very catalogue of offenses is the same. And the penalty is that no such posthumous glory as encircles the monarchs of the past will come to him. He goes down to the stones of the pit, cast out from all honorable burial, as “a carcass trodden underfoot.”

Never did Raemaekers dip his pen in bitterer gall than when he limned this appalling picture of the fate which awaits a merciless and bloodthirsty tyrant.

W. L. COURTNEY.