"Comfort ye,” wrote the Prophet Isaiah, a man who – to put it mildly – had to denounce the sinfulness, to say many uncomfortable things, to the stiff-necked Israelites, which is to say to people very like ourselves. A people, like people in every age, in need of comforting, true comforting, because of the turmoil around them and within them – often the result of their own waywardness – with no ordinary human remedy in sight.