sick unto death, and Isaiah came to see him, and told him to set his house
in order; for thou shalt die, and not live.... And Hezekiah wept sore."

Then, like Moses, Isaiah had another revelation in which he was directed
to return to Hezekiah, and tell him that he was to live fifteen years
longer. And Isaiah told the attendants to take "a lump of figs." "And they
took it and laid it on the boil, and he recovered."

Afterward Hezekiah asked of Isaiah how he was to know that the Lord would
keep his word and give him fifteen additional years of life. Isaiah told
him that the shadow should go back ten degrees on the dial. And Isaiah
"cried unto the Lord," and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward "by
which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz." [Footnote: 2 Kings xx, 11.]
And yet this man Hezekiah, who could believe in this marvellous cure of
Isaiah, repudiated with scorn the brazen serpent as an insult to
credulity. The contrast between Moses, who hesitated not to take all risks
in matters of disease with which he felt himself competent to cope, and
his timidity and hesitation in matters of war, is astounding. But it is a
common phenomenon with the worker of miracles and indicates the limit of
faith at which the saint or prophet has always betrayed the impostor. For
example: Saint Bernard, when he preached in 1146 the Second Crusade, made
miraculous cures by the thousand, so much so that there was danger of
being killed in the crowds which pressed upon him. And yet this same
saint, when chosen by the crusaders four years later, in 1150, to lead
them because of his power to constrain victory by the intervention of God,
wrote, after the crusaders' defeat, in terror to the pope to protect him,
because he was unfit to take such responsibility.

But even with this reservation Moses could not gain the complete
confidence of the congregation and the insecurity of his position finally