LIBEAEY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 Theological Seminary, 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 C BR 45 .B35 1869 
 
 L 
 
 Bampton lectures 
 
THE 
 
 BAMPTON LECTURES 
 
 FOR M.DCCC.LXIX. 
 
PROPHECY 
 A PREPARATION FOR CHRIST 
 
 EIGHT LECTURES 
 
 PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 IN THE YEAR 
 
 1869 
 
 ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE LATE REV. JOHN BAMPTON, M. A. 
 CANON OF SALISBURY 
 
 BY 
 
 R. PAYNE SMITH, D. D. 
 
 Dean of Canterbury 
 Late Regius Professor of Divinity and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford 
 
 d\jn 
 
 SECOND EDITION CORRECTED AND REVISED 
 
 fcnbott wti> §tbx |)odi 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1871 
 
 [AM rights reserved] 
 
OXFORD: 
 
 By T. Combe, M.A., E. B. Gardner, and E. Pickard Hall, 
 
 PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY. 
 
EXTRACT 
 
 FROM THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT 
 
 OF THE LATE 
 
 REV. JOHN BAMPTON, 
 
 CANON OF SALISBURY. 
 
 " I give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to the 
 
 " Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of 
 " Oxford for ever, to have and to hold all and singular the 
 " said Lands or Estates upon trust, and to the intents and 
 " purposes hereinafter mentioned ; that is to say, I will and 
 " appoint that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ox- 
 " ford for the time being shall take and receive all the rents, 
 " issues, and profits thereof, and (after all taxes, reparations, 
 " and necessary deductions made) that he pay all the 
 " remainder to the endowment of eight Divinity Lecture 
 " Sermons, to be established for ever in the said University, 
 " and to be performed in the manner following : 
 
 "I direct and appoint, that, upon the first Tuesday in 
 " Easter Term, a Lecturer be yearly chosen by the Heads 
 " of Colleges only, and by no others, in the room adjoining 
 " to the Printing-House, between the hours of ten in the 
 " morning and two in the afternoon, to preach eight Divinity 
 " Lecture Sermons, the year following, at St. Mary's in 
 " Oxford, between the commencement of the last month in 
 " Lent Term, and the end of the third week in Act Term. 
 
vi EXTRACT FROM CANON BAMPTON S WILL. 
 
 " Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lecture 
 " Sermons shall be preached upon either of the following 
 " Subjects — to confirm and establish the Christian Faith, 
 "and to confute all heretics and schismatics — upon the 
 " divine authority of the holy Scriptures— upon the autho- 
 rity of the writings of the primitive Fathers, as to the faith 
 "and practice of the primitive Church — upon the Divinity 
 " of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ — upon the Divinity 
 " of the Holy Ghost — upon the Articles of the Christian 
 " Faith, as comprehended in the Apostles' and Nicene 
 " Creeds. 
 
 " Also I direct, that thirty copies of the eight Divinity 
 " Lecture Sermons shall be always printed, within two months 
 " after they are preached ; and one copy shall be given to the 
 " Chancellor of the University, and one copy to the Head of 
 " every College, and one copy to the Mayor of the city of 
 " Oxford, and one copy to be put into the Bodleian Library ; 
 " and the expenses of printing them shall be paid out of the 
 " revenue of the Land or Estates given for establishing the 
 " Divinity Lecture Sermons ; and the preacher shall not be 
 " paid, nor be entitled to the revenue, before they are 
 " printed. 
 
 " Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be 
 " qualified to preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons, unless 
 " he hath taken the degree of Master of Arts at least, in one 
 <: of the two Universities of Oxford or Cambridge ; and that 
 " the same person shall never preach the Divinity Lecture 
 " Sermons twice." 
 
PREFACE 
 
 TO THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 It has been my object in the following course 
 of Lectures to show that there exists in the Old 
 Testament an element, which no criticism on natural- 
 istic principles can either account for or explain 
 away. That element is Prophecy : and I have 
 endeavoured to prove that its force does not consist 
 merely in its predictions. These are numerous, 
 special, precise, and have been fulfilled with mar- 
 vellous exactness, and yet not in such a way as 
 any one, Jew or Gentile, had expected before the 
 fulfilment came. But prophecy means more than 
 this. There is throughout the Old Testament a 
 special presence of God preparing for the fulfil- 
 ment of a gracious purpose on His part to restore 
 man to a higher state of perfection and happiness 
 than that from which he fell. The Bible begins 
 by describing man as standing in a nearer relation 
 to God than any other created being on this earth. 
 It describes his first estate of innocency, his fall, 
 and the promise given by God of his restoration. 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 We assert that throughout the Old Testament there 
 is an express and manifest working of the Deity 
 for the accomplishment of this promise. Virtually 
 the promise meant that God would give man a 
 true religion : and a true religion implies such a 
 knowledge of God, and of His purposes towards us, 
 and of our relation to Him, as will suffice for the 
 wants of the soul. It implies, too, the bestowal 
 of sufficient aid to enable us to fulfil our obligations 
 to God, and of some means for the purification of 
 the conscience from the stain of sin, and for the 
 raising of the soul from its present degradation to 
 a fitness for the reception of God's mercies. We 
 assert that Christianity is the sole religion upon 
 earth which fulfils these necessary conditions : and 
 farther, that God has given us the sole satisfactory 
 proof that it is the true religion by pledging His own 
 attributes in its behalf. 
 
 This pledge He has given in miracle and pro- 
 phecy, and without it the proof would fall short 
 of our needs. For no religion could claim authority 
 over the conscience which had no higher evidence 
 to offer than the probabilities of human reasoning. 
 There may be such a thing as a merely natural 
 religion, and for such no supernatural proof would 
 be required. But if we are to be brought into 
 nearer contact with God, and find our peace and 
 happiness in union with Him, we want all that 
 Christianity offers us ; all that we seem to find in 
 it. But the whole scheme of Christianity is super- 
 natural, and for such a religion a preparation like that 
 
PREFACE. lx 
 
 in the Old Testament — a preparation commensurate 
 in its greatness with the Christian faith — was neces- 
 sary. Men could not have believed in a doctrine so 
 marvellous as that of the Divinity of Christ unless the 
 way had been prepared for it by a dispensation in 
 which God's presence was manifested in a super- 
 natural way. 
 
 One portion of this proof was discussed with great 
 ability in the Bampton Lectures of 1 865 a : I have 
 endeavoured to show the reality of the other portion, 
 prophecy. But prophecy must not be narrowed 
 down too closely to words. The prophets were God's 
 representatives on earth, and the mediators between 
 Him and man. And thus in the comparison between 
 our Lord and Moses, it seems to me that our Lord 
 is the prophet like unto Moses, more in being the 
 true Mediator between God and man, than even in 
 being the giver of a new dispensation. All the 
 prophets were mediators, but none held so high a 
 place as Moses among God's representatives under 
 the first covenant : in the second covenant Christ is 
 the one Mediator in Whom God and man are made 
 one (John xvii. 21). Prophets, then, we have none 
 now, because we need no other mediator. In the 
 preparatory dispensation it was the office of the 
 prophet to appear as God's representative whenever 
 any new step was to be taken towards the accom- 
 plishment of God's purpose. No doubt the very 
 highest duty and glory of the prophet was to declare 
 
 a Eight Lectures on Miracles, by J. B. Mozley, B.D., Vicar of Old 
 
 Shoreham, London, 1865. 
 
X PRE FA CE. 
 
 some new truth, or explain some old truth. He was 
 then directly 'the speaker for God,' the bearer of 
 God's message : but God might and did use the 
 prophets for other purposes. They laboured for 
 the preservation of Israel's political existence, for 
 morality, for education, for everything that tended 
 to raise the social condition of God's people. Finally, 
 they laboured for all mankind, in giving us a record 
 of Israel's history, and written memorials of the truths 
 revealed to them. In these memorials they ever led 
 the minds of the people onward to the time when the 
 preparation would be complete, and God's promise 
 fulfilled in the Advent of the Christ. It is especially 
 in this portion of their labours that we affirm that 
 God's Spirit was with them in a higher way than in 
 His ordinary and natural workings. Whatever new 
 truth they taught was revealed to them directly by 
 God, and not attained to by the unaided workings of 
 their mental powers : in recording or explaining old 
 truths we feel sure that they had such aid given them 
 as at least preserved them from error ; and that even 
 in writing history, where the higher gift of revelation 
 was not needed, that nevertheless they had inspired 
 guidance and control. 
 
 Now it is plain from this that such of us as believe 
 in inspiration can never consent to treat the Bible as 
 an ordinary book. In one sense, indeed, it is a matter 
 of painful necessity that it must be so treated. It 
 must be subjected to exactly the same tests as any 
 other document. Its claims are a matter of such 
 incalculable importance to every one of us, that they 
 
PREFACE. xi 
 
 must be closely and critically examined : every 
 possible argument for and against the authenticity 
 and genuineness of every book of the Bible must be 
 closely studied : and history, chronology, philology, 
 must all be made to contribute their aid to the 
 enquiry. Subjective criticism, too, has a right to be 
 heard. The style of these various writings, their 
 inner accord or disagreement, their relation to their 
 supposed date, the degree of knowledge evinced by 
 the writer, the nature of his ideas, his character as 
 incidentally shown by what he says, and his object in 
 writing : all these and many more such things have 
 their weight in the proof. The examination ought to 
 be made seriously, earnestly, impartially, but even 
 where made with hostile view, we yet may be glad 
 that it has been made. For if the Bible be the Word 
 of God, our duty is to bow our wills humbly and 
 obediently before it. But a being made in God's 
 image has no right to abandon his self-mastery except 
 upon the clearest evidence. We may be glad, then, 
 that the examination has been made, and the claims 
 of the Bible closely scrutinized, even if our own 
 reverence for it might have forbidden our entering 
 upon the task. If, indeed, we were placed in such a 
 position, as that our minds could be a tabula rasa, 
 utterly devoid of all prepossessions and ideas one 
 way or another, it would be our duty at once to enter 
 dispassionately upon the enquiry, whether there be a 
 true religion upon earth, and if so, which of the various 
 religions here below is the true one, and what is the 
 extent of its claims upon us. We none of us can 
 
xii PREFACE. 
 
 possibly be in this position, and those of us who have 
 long since arrived at the conclusion that Christianity 
 is God's one religion, may reasonably decline, as far 
 as our own faith is concerned, to re-open a question 
 upon which we have years ago come, upon sufficient 
 evidence, to a definite conclusion. 
 
 But there are those who have arrived at an opposite 
 conclusion, and those who are still undecided as to 
 their own duty, and the side which they ought to 
 take. New arguments have been brought forward 
 against the credibility of Holy Scripture, and men 
 do not know what weight ought to be given them. 
 It is necessary, therefore, to examine these arguments, 
 and to state what seem to be valid reasons for ad- 
 hering to the conclusion that the Bible is, unlike all 
 other books, a book of miracle and prophecy. There 
 are, indeed, critics who deny the use of argument 
 altogether. With them the conclusion is foregone. 
 They assert that miracle and prophecy are absolutely 
 impossible. It is of no use suggesting that the giving 
 of a true religion may be an adequate cause for such 
 an interference — or apparent interference — with the 
 ordinary laws of nature as would give man the requi- 
 site proof that God was speaking to him. No cause, 
 they say, is adequate. The soul cannot be of such 
 value as to justify any interference with the laws of 
 nature. Those laws are found to be, in things material, 
 unchanging. They must therefore be so in things 
 spiritual. The laws that are good enough for the body 
 are good enough for the soul. I do not mean that 
 they use just these words ; but that, arguing solely 
 
PREFACE. xiii 
 
 from their experience in things material, they do deny 
 the possibility of God's acting in any higher way 
 in the things which belong to an entirely different 
 sphere. Into this argument it is not necessary for me 
 to enter farther than as it concerns prophecy. Of 
 course prophecy is a miracle ; the very thing for 
 which we argue is a supernatural presence of God in 
 the words and actions of certain persons who claimed 
 to speak in God's name. Such a claim must be sup- 
 ported by a supernatural proof, and the proof could 
 take no simpler or more cogent form than prediction. 
 The negative critics do not examine this proof ; they 
 start with the denial of the possibility of God speaking 
 to man at all. By their own principles, then, they are 
 bound to affirm that every precise prophecy is either 
 an imposture or an artifice. It may take the form 
 of a prediction, but really must be subsequent to the 
 event which it professes to foretell. Isaiah, in the 
 very place where he predicts the capture of Babylon 
 by Cyrus (xli. 23, 25, xliv. 25, 26), stakes his whole 
 argument for God's unity and the vanity of idols upon 
 the fact that the predictions of Jehovah's messengers 
 were confirmed by the event, and those of the wor- 
 shippers of idols disproved by it. According to the 
 negative critics, that appeal was a specious hypocrisy, 
 and the pretended prophecy of the conquest of 
 Babylon by Cyrus, and of Jerusalem rebuilt by his 
 decree, is proof enough that the last twenty-seven 
 chapters of Isaiah are a forgery, palmed upon the too 
 credulous Jews by some one who wrote at Babylon at 
 the end of the exile. 
 
xiv PREFACE. 
 
 If the principle were true, critics, having thus dis- 
 covered the key to settle the date of each portion of 
 Holy Scripture, would in time arrive at some settled 
 conclusions. There would be a consensus among them, 
 or an approach to one, and absolute results would be 
 obtained. If they could not always tell exactly when 
 a book was forged, scholars would at least be certain 
 that it was a forgery. No reasonable man doubts that 
 the Epistles of Phalaris are a forgery ; no one doubts 
 that the history of Susannah, and of Bel and the 
 Dragon, are forgeries tacked on to the Book of Daniel 
 at Alexandria ; no one doubts that the Gospel of the 
 Infancy, or the Assumption of the Virgin, are for- 
 geries. Fortunately, forgeries are always very easy 
 of detection, and those of ancient date especially so ; 
 for men then had neither the means nor the idea of 
 imitating the style and language of other days. But 
 the negative critics agree in nothing else except in 
 denying the authority and' inspiration of the Bible. 
 When you ask for any positive results you find a 
 Babel of Ishmaels. Every man's tongue is against 
 every other. If Ewald ascribes Psalm ex. to the time 
 of Solomon, Hitzig, a critic of almost equal reputa- 
 tion, ascribes it to the time of the Maccabee Jonathan. 
 Hitzig says that the last six chapters of Zechariah 
 were written by one and the same author in the days 
 of King Uzziah ; Ewald divides them between two 
 different authors, who lived separated from one an- 
 other by a period of one hundred and forty years. 
 Ewald ascribes to the age of Jeremiah portions of 
 Isaiah which Hitzig says are some of the most ancient 
 
PREFACE. xv 
 
 writings of Isaiah himself. The Prophecy of Obadiah, 
 according to Ewald, was written during the Babylo- 
 nian captivity ; Hitzig says it belongs to the time of 
 Antigonus b . 
 
 If the results arrived at by the negative critics are 
 thus unsatisfactory, we are justified in inferring that 
 their method is in fault. In spite of the great ability 
 and patient labour of a host of critics, no such conclu- 
 sions have been obtained as justify their assumption 
 that prophecy is antecedently impossible. It is still a 
 duty, then, to examine the other hypothesis, that God 
 has spoken to man in the Scriptures, and to sift care- 
 fully the evidence offered in its behalf. And here we 
 affirm that the prophecies contained in the Old Testa- 
 ment are so numerous, so entirely inwoven with its 
 innermost substance, so consentient with one another, 
 and yet so contrary to the whole tenour of Jewish 
 thought, so marvellously fulfilled in Christianity, and 
 yet in a way so different from every anticipated fulfil- 
 ment, that while it is unscientific to refuse to listen to 
 
 b See Hofmann, Weissagung, i. 63. He further shows how the same- 
 critics arrive at different conclusions in each edition of their works. 
 De Wette began by ascribing numerous Psalms to the Maccabsean age ; 
 subsequently he summarily rejected such a conclusion. Psalm xlv. at 
 first he said was written in the time of the Persians, afterwards he 
 ascribed it to the age of Solomon. The second half of Zechariah he 
 once thought was written some of it in Josiah's days, and the rest under 
 Ahaz; soon he modified his views, and could see no reason for a divided 
 authorship. Nor, as he observes, are the critics more successful <»n the 
 ground of philosophy than on that of history. Conradi and Bauei 
 see in the Book of Proverbs a genuine work of Solomon's time; while 
 Vatke places it and the Book of Job in the fifth century before our 
 Lord. 
 
xvi PREFACE. 
 
 the proof of their reality because of any a priori sup- 
 position, it is even worse folly to speak of them as 
 mere forecasts and anticipations. The argument for 
 prophecy does not rest upon a small number of special 
 predictions, but upon a vast preparation for an equally 
 vast result. That preparation claimed to be divine, 
 and offered miracle and prediction as its proof. Far- 
 ther, it ever asserted that it was but a preparation for 
 something better, and itself described the nature of 
 the dispensation which was to take its place. Let the 
 critics, then, disprove the real inner unity between the 
 two Testaments ; let them show that the Christian 
 Church does not answer to, and complete and perfect, 
 the earlier dispensation. Till they do this, it is in 
 vain to put forward the negative criticism as fairly 
 commensurate with the greatness of the thesis which 
 it undertakes to prove. The Bible, it says, is an 
 ordinary book ; its miracles are contrary to science ; 
 its prophecies the record of facts that had already 
 happened. But they assume all this ; they do not 
 attempt to prove it. Surely a criticism of the Bible 
 upon these assumptions is not real criticism. The 
 Bible claims to be not a common book. That is the 
 very point in dispute. A fair judgment can be arrived 
 at only by an examination of the evidence which it 
 offers in support of its claims, and this enquiry should 
 be carried on in a judicial frame of mind. The negative 
 critics begin by denying every one of the claims of 
 the Bible, and affirm that they are so impossible that 
 all argument is worthless. 
 
 Still, if criticism carried on upon this assumption 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 xvu 
 
 led to satisfactory results, it would be some indica- 
 tion that the assumption was not absolutely false. 
 Hence the importance of the discussion as to the 
 genuineness of the last twenty-seven chapters of 
 Isaiah. The prophecy about Cyrus is not a matter 
 that very directly concerns us ; but the question 
 whether every prediction was subsequent to the 
 event is of vital consequence. The prophecies about 
 the Messiah would be as remarkable at Babylon as 
 at the end of Hezekiah's reign, but what would be 
 the value of them if no prophecy is more than a mere 
 human forecast ? The question, besides, is one satis- 
 factory to discuss for another reason. The negative 
 critics boast, or did boast, of the dichotomy of Isaiah 
 as their greatest feat. It used to be constantly put 
 forward as a positive and certain result of nineteenth- 
 century criticism. If, however, you boldly face the 
 question, and look at what the German critics say, 
 you will find that no positive result whatsoever has 
 been arrived at. The sole thing in which they 
 agree is the assertion, that as Cyrus is mentioned 
 by name, therefore he must have been living and 
 threatening Babylon, if he had not already conquered 
 it, at the time the prophecy was penned. 
 
 Now let us first of all listen to what Ewald, 
 undoubtedly in many respects the first critic in 
 Germany, says of the real Isaiah. 'We cannot 
 but recognize in Isaiah, as the first condition of 
 his peculiar historical greatness, an originality and 
 a vivacity of spirit rare even among the prophet-. 
 What is seldom united in the same genius, the 
 
 b 
 
xviii PREFA CE. 
 
 deepest prophetic excitement and purest sensibility, 
 the most unwearied and successful activity exert- 
 ing itself evenly midst all the turmoil and vicissi- 
 tudes of life, and the truest poetical versatility 
 and beauty joined with vigour and rushing might 
 of description, this triple band we find realized 
 in Isaiah as in no other prophet, and from the 
 evident traces of the constantly combined action 
 of these three powers we draw our conclusions as 
 to the measure of the original greatness of his 
 genius.' (Proph. d. A. B. i. 272, ed. sec.) You 
 have, then, in Isaiah no common writer. His cha- 
 racteristic is the union in due proportion of three 
 very high and remarkable qualities. Wait a little, 
 and you will find that the Book of Isaiah is a 
 miscellany of fugitive pieces, ' flying leaves,' as 
 Ewald terms one part of it, and that twenty name- 
 less writers all possessed this rare combination of 
 unrivalled native power tempered by the most 
 exquisite judgment. 
 
 Let me give the various stages by which this 
 marvellous conclusion was reached. Less, then, 
 than a hundred years ago the suggestion was first 
 made by Koppe, and soon afterwards repeated by 
 Doderlein, that the last twenty-seven chapters of 
 Isaiah are not genuine. The theory was at first 
 very simple, namely, that the true Isaiah wrote 
 the first half, and a false Isaiah, his equal in native 
 genius, wrote the other. The more toned-down style 
 of the latter half, resulting, as I believe, from its 
 being, first, written in Isaiah's extreme old age, and 
 
PREFACE. xix 
 
 secondly, composed not for public delivery, but for 
 study in the prophetic colleges, gave some faint 
 colour to the assumption of a different authorship. 
 But it was soon found that this dichotomy could 
 not endure a close and accurate examination. The 
 words used, the peculiarities of style, the metaphors, 
 the sentiments, were in the main identical in the 
 two portions. It soon became plain, that unless 
 large portions of the first thirty-nine chapters were 
 taken away from Isaiah, the whole must be restored 
 to him ; moreover, there are parts of the last twenty- 
 seven chapters plainly written before the exile, parts 
 written in a mountainous country, parts which speak 
 of the city and temple as still standing. These 
 must be taken away from the Pseudo-Isaiah. Hence 
 the present state of German thought is as follows : — 
 
 The book is a mere collection of fragments, of all 
 dates, written by a confused horde of nameless per- 
 sonages, many of them mere imitators, whose effusions 
 have been patched together upon no other principle 
 than that of filling up the skins of parchment. And 
 yet this olla podrida, this hotch-potch, in which arc 
 jumbled together the fragments of writers of even- 
 age, from Jonah to Ezra, is the book in which 
 Hebrew genius reaches the summit alike of strength 
 and beauty: never elsewhere is the union so clear 
 of the rarest native gifts and the most consummate 
 skill. Never is the line of beauty overstepped, never 
 does the writer fail in reaching it. As Ewald from 
 time to time cuts it into tiny pieces, he is never 
 weary of lamenting that these noble fragments arc 
 
 b2 
 
XX PREFACE. 
 
 all that we possess of a writer so vigorous and yet 
 so polished, so strong and yet so beautiful. This, 
 then, is the first trial of your credulity. The sub- 
 jective critics require you to believe that a union 
 of native force and perfect judgment peculiar to 
 Isaiah, and found in no other prophet, is maintained 
 throughout a long miscellany of fugitive pieces put 
 together upon absolutely no principle whatsoever. 
 
 Let us next proceed to the details. 
 
 The first twelve chapters are genuine, and un- 
 doubtedly written by Isaiah (Knobel, Bleek), but 
 disfigured by glosses, transpositions, interpolations, 
 &c. &c, so that every critic is justified in rejecting 
 anything in the way of his pet theory. Thus Roorda 
 says that chs. i-v. were written by Micah, Gesenius 
 denies the authenticity of ch. vii. 1-16, Koppe, 
 Vater, Rosenmiiller reject chs. xi., xii., and Ewald 
 ch. xii. 
 
 The next section, chs. xiii-xxvii., are mere ' flying 
 leaves' (Ewald), put together without regard to date 
 or matter, of which ch. xiii. and the first twenty- 
 three verses of ch. xiv. were written by the ' great 
 unknown' at Babylon (Knobel), or at all events by 
 a nameless prophet just about the time when Cyrus 
 took that city (Rosenm., Justi, Bleek). As for 
 the next four verses (ch. xiv. 24-27), they are a 
 fragment of a long prophecy of Isaiah against Assyria 
 (Ewald, Gesenius). The two next chapters (chs. 
 xv., xvi.) were written by Jonah (Hitzig), or if not, 
 then Jeremiah wrote them (Koppe, Augusti, Bertholdt), 
 or if not, then perhaps Isaiah borrowed them, but 
 
PREFACE. xxi 
 
 added the epilogue, ch. xvi. 13, 14 (Ewald), which 
 however is absurd, for the epilogue was written 
 during the Babylonian exile (Bleek). As Jonah 
 lived long before Isaiah, and Jeremiah long after- 
 wards, and as their style and manner are totally 
 distinct, it is hard to invent the reasons which justify 
 so diverse a judgment. 
 
 No one at present has interfered with the two 
 next chapters, but ch. xix., of which Egypt is the 
 subject, was written by Onias, who built the temple 
 at Leontopolis in that country (Hitzig). It men- 
 tions that men fished in the Nile both with hooks 
 and nets, and that papyrus reeds grew there ; facts 
 which plainly could be known only by one who 
 had resided a long time in the immediate neigh- 
 bourhood of that river ! 
 
 The first ten verses of ch. xxi. were written by the 
 ' great unknown ' (Bleek) ; the rest, to the end of ch. 
 xxii., are probably Isaiah's. 
 
 The twenty-third chapter was written by Jere- 
 miah (Movers), or by a scholar of Isaiah (Ewald), but 
 at all events in the time of Jeremiah (Bleek). 
 
 The twenty-fourth and three following chapters 
 — chapters of the most exquisite beauty — were 
 written by an exiled Ephraimite living in Assyria 
 after Nineveh had fallen, and when the Egyptians 
 had begun to be troublesome (Hitzig), though it 
 is hard to see how they could be troublesome to 
 an Ephraimite living at Nineveh. Therefore Ge- 
 senius, Umbreit, Knobel, deny that it refers to 
 Nineveh, and say that it is a prophecy of the fall 
 
xxii PREFACE. 
 
 of Babylon, written at the time when Judah went 
 into captivity. But Ewald places it in the time of 
 Cambyses' expedition against Egypt, whilst Vatke 
 prefers the era of the Maccabees. Other discre- 
 pancies might be added: I will mention but one 
 more. As these chapters contain a repetition of 
 the prophecy found in ch. ii., namely, 'in this 
 mountain shall Jehovah of hosts make unto all 
 people a feast of fat things,' and as that mountain 
 can properly be only Jerusalem, Bleek ascribes the 
 three chapters to a Jew who lived at Jerusalem in 
 Josiah's time. 
 
 The next six chapters (chs. xxviii-xxxiii.) are 
 probably genuine (Knobel) ; but Koppe doubts about 
 ch. xxx. 1-26, and Ewald ascribes ch. xxxiii. to a 
 scholar of Isaiah's. 
 
 The next two chapters (chs. xxxiv., xxxv.), were 
 written early in the exile (Bleek) ; they were written 
 in the middle of the exile (Knobel) ; they were 
 written at the end of the exile by the 'great un- 
 known ' (Gesenius, Hitzig) ; they were written 
 during the exile by a distinct author from the ' great 
 unknown ' (Ewald, Umbreit). 
 
 The last four chapters of the first portion of Isaiah 
 (chs. xxxvi-xxxix.) are a mere historical annex 
 (Knobel), but abbreviated probably from a genuine 
 historical work of Isaiah (Bleek) : no, they are entirely 
 spurious (Hendewerk, Hitzig). They were written 
 by a late chronicler, when legend had taken the 
 place of history. 
 
 Thus, then, subjective criticism, in order to wrest 
 
PREFACE. xxiii 
 
 the last twenty-seven chapters from the true Isaiah, 
 has been compelled, by the searching examination 
 which its simpler theory has undergone, to mangle 
 the prophet's matchless work into a series of frag- 
 ments, all singularly beautiful, all bearing the impress 
 of a master mind, all instinct with the presence of 
 rare genius. I see in this nothing that needs serious 
 refutation, but only that Nemesis, that just retribu- 
 tion, which necessarily overtakes those who argue 
 not for truth but for such a foregone conclusion as 
 that every prediction was necessarily subsequent to 
 the date of the event foretold. 
 
 Let us proceed to the last twenty-seven chapters. 
 These form too decidedly a whole to be easily 
 capable of similar dismemberment, yet only the first 
 sixteen chapters are now confidently ascribed to the 
 Pseudo-Isaiah. Excepting the prophecy of the cap- 
 ture of Babylon by Cyrus, these chapters contain 
 nothing particularly indicative of their date. Directly 
 you come to anything distinctive, it is impossible to 
 hold any longer that it was all written at one time 
 at Babylon. Gesenius maintained, as long as he 
 lived, and Hitzig still argues for the unity of the 
 authorship, but then they are forced to grant that 
 much of it was written in Palestine, and so too Knobel 
 said that the work could have been put into its 
 present form only at a time considerably later than 
 the return of the Jews from exile. He honestly owned, 
 too, that he could not explain how it came to pass 
 that a work composed at such a time could ever have 
 
xxiv PREFACE. 
 
 been ascribed to the true Isaiah. But Ewald denies 
 the oneness of its authorship, as I have shown at 
 length in the note attached to page 295. So Bert- 
 holdt said that chs. lii. 13-liii. 12, lvi. 9— Ivii. 21, lix., 
 lxiii. 7-lxiv. 12, lxv., lxvi., belong to a date anterior 
 to the attack of the Persians upon Babylon ; chs. 
 xl-xlvi., 1-lii. 12, to a time subsequent to it; chs. 
 xlvii., xlviii. were written during the siege of Babylon, 
 and chs. liv-lvi. 8, lviii., lx-lxii. after the capture of 
 the city. Knobel, who seemed to hold the oneness of 
 the authorship, yet argued that chs. xl— xlviii. were 
 written during the first siege of Babylon, chs. xlix-lxii. 
 during the period when Cyrus was making war upon 
 Croesus, and the last four chapters after his victory. 
 Gesenius, on the contrary, thought that the later 
 chapters were written first : while De Wette stood 
 alone in holding that these last twenty-seven chapters 
 were written by one man at one time, namely, the 
 first time of Cyrus, whenever that may have been. 
 
 As for the chapters plainly written in a moun- 
 tainous country (chs. lvi. 9— lvii. 11), some hold with 
 Bleek that Isaiah wrote them, some that it was an 
 ancient prophet who lived in Manasseh's reign, some 
 that the ' great unknown ' was their author, after 
 the return from exile. This theory requires the 
 monstrous supposition, opposed to every tittle of 
 historical evidence, that the Jews under Ezra and 
 Nehemiah offered human sacrifices to Moloch. Yet 
 without this supposition it is impossible to see how 
 De Wette, Gesenius, Hitzig, could maintain that 
 
PREFACE. xxv 
 
 these chapters were the work of one author, unless 
 that author were the true Isaiah c . 
 
 Plainly, therefore, subjective criticism has nothing 
 to offer us, on the very ground where it boasts its 
 greatest triumph, but a farrago of disjointed con- 
 jectures. And the same is true of it everywhere. 
 Instances beyond number could be brought forward 
 showing its entire want of cohesiveness. I will 
 content myself with mentioning but one more. 
 
 Ask it for another of its strong points, and it would 
 tell you that it had wrested Deuteronomy from Moses 
 as thoroughly as it has robbed Isaiah of all but some 
 twelve chapters. You learn from it most extra- 
 ordinary information about Deuteronomy. It is a 
 very late book, never quoted till the time of Jeremiah, 
 probably a pious fraud palmed off by him and the 
 good high priest Hilkiah upon the too credulous 
 Josiah, and so on. Ewald, however, holds a theory 
 that soon after Samuel's time there was a period of 
 extraordinary literary activity, when, upon the basis 
 of certain ' Books of Origins ' and ' Books of Covenants,' 
 a series of apocryphal narratives were put forth, of 
 which the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, the Books of 
 Samuel, and parts of Kings remain to this day. 
 Having, then, no particular bias against Deuteronomy, 
 he finds in his ' History of the Jews' eight references 
 
 c These assertions may easily be verified by any one who will con- 
 sult the Introductions (Einleitungen) of DeWette, and Bleek ; or that of 
 Keil, recently translated into English.and published by Clark, Edinburgh. 
 Knobel also gives a very full account of the guesses and conjectures 
 which form the staple of German negative theology in his valuable 
 work 'Der Prophetismus der Hebraer,' Breslau, 1837, of which I have- 
 made considerable use. 
 
xxvi PREFACE. 
 
 to this book in Joshua, more than twelve in Judges, 
 several in Samuel, in the early Psalms, and so on. 
 Never was judgment more opposed to all that the 
 mass of the negative critics say upon the subject. 
 
 Plainly, therefore, the attack made upon the Bible 
 has had no such measure of success as to justify its 
 assumption that prophecy has no supernatural ele- 
 ment. Still, I can scarcely hope that the negative 
 critics will pay any attention to the arguments which 
 I have endeavoured to offer, in proof that the Old 
 Testament is no human utterance but a message 
 from God. My object will have been fully gained 
 if I have been able to confirm the faith of any who 
 believe, and to remove difficulties out of the way of any 
 who doubt. The prophets are, I know, often regarded 
 as very difficult to understand : I shall not have 
 laboured in vain if I have aided any in seeing how 
 their work led up to and was a preparation for 
 Christ. 
 
 Christ Church, Oxford, 
 Oct, 1869. 
 
PREFACE 
 TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 In this edition I have made a few verbal corrections, 
 and added an Index. I have also omitted the note 
 on Genesis, as not belonging properly to my subject. 
 
 Canterbury, 
 August, 1 871. 
 

 CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 PROPHECY A PREPARATION FOR CHRIST. 
 
 Romans xv. 4. 
 
 Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our 
 learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scrip- 
 tures might have hope. 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 THE PROPER IDEA AND MEANING OF PROPHECY. 
 
 Hebrews i. 1, 2. 
 
 God, Who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time 
 past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days 
 spoken unto us by His Son. 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 SAMUEL, THE RESTORER OF PROPHECY. 
 
 Acts iii. 24. 
 Yea, and all the prophets from Samuel and those that follow 
 after, as many as have spoken, have likewise foretold of thesi 
 
 days. 
 
xxx CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 THE SCHOOLS OF THE PROPHETS. 
 
 i Samuel xix. 19, 20. 
 
 // was told Saul, saying, Behold, David is at Naioth in 
 Ramah. And Saul sent messengers to take David: and 
 when they saw the company of the prophets prophesying, 
 and Samuel standing as appointed over them, the Spirit 
 of God was upon the messengers of Saul, and they also 
 prophesied. 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 PART II. 
 THE ORDINARY LIFE AND DUTIES OF THE PROPHETS. 
 
 Hebrews xi. 37. 
 
 They were slotted, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were 
 slain with the sword : they wandered about in sheepskins and 
 goatskins ; being destitute, afflicted, tormented. 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 THE COMMENCEMENT OF WRITTEN PROPHECY. 
 
 Ephesians ii. 20. 
 .Built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets. 
 
CONTENTS. xxxi 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 THE FOUNDATION OF TRUTH LAID BY THE PROPHETS 
 JONAH, JOEL, AND HOSEA. 
 
 Acts xxvi. 22, 23. 
 
 Saying none other things than those which the prophets and 
 Moses did say should come : that Christ should suffer, and 
 that He should be the first that should rise from the dead, 
 and should shew light unto the people, and to the Gentiles. 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 SPECIFIC PROPHECIES OF CHRIST IN HOSEA, AMOS, 
 ISAIAH, AND MICAH. 
 
 Acts x. 43. 
 
 To Him give all the prophets witness, that through His Name 
 whosoever believeth in Him shall receive remission of sins. 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 THE PROPHECIES OF ISAIAH. 
 
 Acts viii. 34, 35. 
 
 / pray thee, of whom speaketh the prophet this ? of himself 
 or of some other man ? Then Philip opened his mouth, and 
 began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus. 
 
xxxii CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE IX. 
 
 THE JEWISH INTERPRETATION OF PROPHECY AT VARIANCE 
 WITH THAT TAUGHT BY CHRIST AND HIS APOSTLES. 
 
 Matthew xxii. 42. 
 What think ye of Christ? 
 

 LECTURE I. 
 
 PROPHECY A PREPARATION FOR CHRIST. 
 
 Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written 
 for our learnings that we through patience and com- 
 fort of the Scriptures might have hope. — ROM. xv. 4. 
 
 St. PAUL claims in these words for the Scriptures 
 of the Old Testament a special quality distinct from 
 those possessed by ordinary books. They were 
 written, he says, not for temporary use ; not for 
 one age and one people, but for all time : and yet 
 for a limited purpose. Their object is not to divert 
 and amuse ; not even to instruct or give information 
 upon any of the thousand and one things that 
 concern our temporal state. Incidentally they may 
 give us most valuable information, and the purest 
 enjoyment : but they were written ' that we might 
 have hope/ Even this again is limited. In the 
 original Greek it is not hope generally ; not the 
 bright anticipation of joy in life, nor even an in- 
 definite expectation of peace in death. St. Paul's 
 words are, might have the hope, tt\v iXirfoa Ix^M^ 3 - 
 
 a The Vatican Codex reads, ' that we through the patience and 
 the consolation of the Scriptures might have the hope of the conso- 
 lation,' i> k\ v i5a rrjs napaK\4,a€oii. The added words are probably 
 an explanatory gloss, but they give the right sense. 'The conso- 
 lation of Israel' emphatically was the Advent of the Messiah; and 
 
 B 
 
THE BIBLE [LECT. 
 
 It is definitely some special expectation, to which 
 those Jewish Scriptures have encouraged men to 
 look forward : some special promise given in them, 
 by virtue of which they thus instruct and comfort 
 all mankind. 
 
 Now this claim, to be the instructors not of one 
 people only, nor at one time only, but of all people 
 at all times, is no ordinary matter. We are most of 
 us so used to the proposition affirmed by St. Paul, 
 that probably it does not strike us with the force 
 which so remarkable a phenomenon would exert 
 upon us, if we were brought face to face with it 
 for the first time. For the assertion is this, that 
 in a considerable number of short treatises, several 
 of them themselves compiled from more ancient 
 documents 5 , written by the men of one nation, but 
 at distant intervals, under very different states of 
 outward circumstance and. inward development, 
 
 what St. Paul affirms of the Old Testament Scriptures generally — 
 oaa Trpoeypdcprj — is, that directly or indirectly they were all pro- 
 phetic, all looked forward to and prepared for Christ. Similarly, 
 all believers now look forward. St. Paul's words are applicable to 
 the Christian Scriptures quite as thoroughly as to the Jewish : for 
 they also are for our learning, that we by the exercise of that pa- 
 tience, necessarily implied in the fact that we have not as yet the 
 full possession of the promise, and by the comfort given us by 
 the strong conviction of our faith that Christ will come again, may 
 have hope — the hope — that as Christ has come once to open the 
 way of salvation for man, so He will come again to perfect His 
 work. 
 
 b It is certain that the books of Chronicles were thus compiled, 
 and probably most of the Historical books. Many scholars have 
 also held that Moses made use of the primitive records of the 
 House of Abraham in composing Genesis. The Book of Psalms 
 too, though not a compilation, is a collection of national poetry 
 from the time of Israel's greatest glory down to the return of the 
 exdes from Babylon. 
 
3 
 
 I.] A UNIVERSAL TEACHER. 
 
 there is a unity of purpose, common in a greater 
 or less degree to them all ; and that this purpose 
 was not anything national, not anything contempo- 
 raneous with the writers, nor even fully understood 
 by them, but was something future, and for the 
 weal or woe of all mankind. The hope of the 
 whole world — the way of universal restoration — is 
 set before us in the writings of a people, of no 
 great power or influence, limited in number, pos- 
 sessed of many high qualities, but narrow-minded, 
 prejudiced against foreigners, devoid of all cosmo- 
 politan tendencies, not versatile enough to win any 
 large amount of favour, as a matter of fact generally 
 disliked, held usually in subjection by some of the 
 neighbouring powers, but restless and intractable as 
 subjects, and not to be depended upon as friends 
 and allies. These writings possess vigour and 
 beauty, but in so moderate a degree, that few even 
 of those who believe them to be inspired will take 
 the trouble of studying them in the original lan- 
 guage : and that language though profound and 
 sublime is intractable : it adds no fresh beauty to 
 the thoughts, though it expresses those thoughts 
 with a fulness and depth which no translation can 
 entirely convey. Now, had the Greeks with their 
 versatile talents, their dialectic skill, and their 
 flexible, copious, and exact language, had writers 
 like Plato been the teachers of all mankind, truth's 
 universal exponents, we could have understood it. 
 But no ! The fact agrees with what St. Paul affirmed 
 eighteen centuries ago: these Jewish writers arc the 
 great teachers of the world. 
 
 Add to their works the writings of a few more 
 
 B 2 
 
4 EXTRAORDINARY INFLUENCE [lect. 
 
 Jews ; some fishermen, a tax-gatherer, a physician 
 of Antioch c , and a citizen of Tarsus, and you have 
 a book with few external charms, which does not 
 allure its readers by its beauty, of one part of which 
 the language is so alien from our studies that even 
 of the clergy few know the letters of its alphabet, 
 while of the other part the Greek d is so unpolished 
 that your fastidious student, who prefers his style 
 to his soul, shuns its perusal ; yet this book is in 
 every house, is read daily by countless multitudes, 
 is said by these multitudes to give them strength 
 for the struggle of life, and comfort under its sorrows. 
 It is translated into all languages, and poured forth 
 from the press by millions e , is the subject of daily 
 debate and controversy, and divides nations into 
 hostile parties according as they take one view or 
 another of its meaning, so that even the gender f of 
 
 c Luke by birth was of a family of Antioch, and by profession a 
 physician. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. iii. 4. 
 
 d Nevertheless, the hand of Providence is very clearly seen in the 
 production of a language so peculiarly fitted for the conveyance of 
 the truths of revelation, and for translation into other languages, as 
 the Greek of the New Testament. Dr. Pusey has pointed this out 
 with his usual force. ' The Septuagint, the dialect which, uniting 
 the depth of Hebrew with the intellectual precision of the Greek 
 language, was to be the vehicle of the revelation of the Gospel, the 
 Greek of Alexandria modified by the Old Testament, were produc- 
 tions of the peculiar character of the third empire in Alexander and 
 his successors.' Daniel the Prophet, p. 148. 
 
 e The British and Foreign Bible Society alone circulates copies 
 of the Scriptures in 169 languages, and 172 versions: since its 
 foundation no less than fifty millions of Bibles or portions of Bibles 
 have been printed for its sole use. The Society for the Promotion of 
 Christian Knowledge also annually circulates a vast number of 
 Bibles and Testaments, and has had several translations of the 
 Scriptures made into other languages. 
 
 f It is one of the many archaisms of the language of the Penta- 
 teuch that it has only one pronoun for the third person sing, in all 
 
%] OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 5 
 
 a pronoun becomes in it a matter of earnest debate. 
 A bad translation of this book exercises a depressing 
 influence upon a nation's advance in civilization : a 
 good translation is one of the great levers in a 
 nation's rise. By translating this book Luther 
 moulded the German language into shape and con- 
 sistency, and made it a fit vehicle for expressing 
 the thoughts of those great writers whose names 
 are now everywhere as household words. Our own 
 translation so elevated and noble, however deficient 
 it may be in exactness, is the mainstay of our lan- 
 guage, the means whereby its purity is maintained 
 at home and abroad, and the bond which unites 
 our colonists to their mother-land. Nor is this all. 
 In proportion as men study this book and act upon 
 it, they become more just, more temperate, more 
 self - denying, more willing to labour for the good 
 of others : while its neglect leads to luxury, to 
 
 genders, namely, Kin, hu = he, she, it. The Massorites, in the same 
 ignorant way in which they have everywhere endeavoured to reduce 
 the grammar and pronunciation of the Hebrew to the standard 
 of one particular time, give this pronoun a different sound according 
 as it is masculine or feminine. The unhappy result of their labours, 
 in many respects so valuable, has been that they have succeeded 
 only too well in obliterating the traces of change and growth in 
 Hebrew, and given colour to the notion that the language oi 
 Abraham and Moses remained without alteration or development 
 till the days of Ezra. As a matter of fact the consonant.-, all 
 are genuine, and the work of the Massorites, between the sixth and 
 tenth centuries after Christ, was simply a modernizing of the Hel 
 text, though a modernizing of it according to a fixed standard handed 
 down by tradition in the Jewish schools. The pronoun then in 
 Gen. hi. 15 proves nothing, nor is it of much weight that the 
 Massorites vocalize it as masculine: the matter is reall) settled by 
 the verb, which is masculine, and can be nothing else. It is probable, 
 moreover, that the ipsa cotderet of the Vulgate is itsell a mistake, 
 supported by the best manuscripts. 
 
ITS INFLUENCE ESSENTIAL [LECT. 
 
 self-indulgence, to the loosening of the reins of our 
 passions, to national weakness and private infamy. 
 Destroy this book with its ' enthusiasm for humanity/ 
 and no one can even suggest any other influence 
 capable of counterbalancing the materialism of life, 
 and of checking the tendency of increased wealth, 
 and larger command over the powers of natures, 
 to pleasure and an effeminate luxury. Destroy this 
 book, and the poverty which grows more deep and 
 dark and desperate as the wealth of the nation in 
 the aggregate increases, will have nothing to give 
 it consolation ; nothing to alleviate it with lessons 
 of patience ; nothing to ennoble and strengthen it 
 by faith in a future world, where the cruel inequali- 
 ties of our present social state will exist no more 
 (Luke xvi. 25). Destroy this book, and the bond 
 between rich and poor is gone. There is nothing 
 henceforward to speak to both alike of a God Who 
 is no respecter of persons ; Whom rich and poor 
 must both obey, and Who will surely succour the 
 poor who trust in Him. The suffering Christ, the 
 Man of Sorrows, the cross meekly borne leading 
 onwards to the immortal crown, nought of this will 
 there be to comfort the afflicted. The glorified Christ, 
 coming with all power as Judge of quick and dead, 
 and in that judgment putting the poor into His own 
 place (Matt. xxv. 40, 45), nought of this will there 
 be to bid the rich man seek out the poor, and 
 minister to him. To eat and drink and die, that 
 
 g The rapid advance of physical science in the present day by 
 the increased power it has given us over nature, has opened to us 
 a thousand sources of pleasure and convenience unknown even in 
 the last century. A man of ordinary means has no longer to do 
 battle with life, but finds nature well-nigh subdued to his service. 
 
I.] TO HUMAN PROGRESS. 
 
 will be man's all. Among the mass of mankind, — 
 and we must remember that the object of religion 
 is to find a motive power that will influence not one 
 or two extraordinary minds, but the great mass of 
 ordinary people; — among the mass of mankind, a 
 man is in the main just, sober, industrious, temperate, 
 chaste, in exact proportion as he studies and values 
 his Bible. So general, in short, is its influence, that 
 the very student of physical science takes more 
 interest in his facts and theories in proportion as 
 they seem to bear upon some statement of Holy 
 Scripture, or upon some gloss currently put upon 
 its words ; and many a so-called scientific treatise 
 is in reality a theological argument. 
 
 Spoken then primarily of the Old Testament, 
 St. Paul's words have proved true of the whole body 
 of the sacred Scriptures. ' They were written for our 
 learning:' and the whole atmosphere of English 
 thought still in the middle of this nineteenth century, 
 is saturated with their teaching. The very bitter- 
 ness with which they are attacked is an unconscious 
 testimony to their importance. If they were power- 
 less, without influence ; if men could even shake 
 themselves personally free from their influence, they 
 would then be regarded with philosophic indifference ; 
 with that calmness with which thinking men profess 
 to study the problems of human life. Now it would 
 be contrary to the whole tenor of the Bible to expect 
 such a state of calm : to expect a time in which there 
 would not be strong opposition to Christianity: ill 
 which it would not have an up-hill fight, and men be 
 compelled to win their way to its peace and blessed- 
 ness by a severe struggle (Matt. xi. 12). It would be 
 
8 OPPOSITION TO CHRISTIANITY [lect, 
 
 contrary too to the whole tenor of the Bible b to 
 expect that even in the Church the fierce contest of 
 passion will cease ; that it will not be rent by 
 opposing parties, and weakened in doing its Master's 
 work far more by schisms within than by any and 
 all opposition from without (Matt. x. 21, 22; xiii. 
 25, 47). But that sword of which our Lord spake is 
 still wielded as trenchantly as ever. With unabated 
 earnestness we still contend against one another and 
 against the world. Our religious opinions or our 
 irreligious, our faith or our scepticism, hold the 
 foremost, the dearest place in our minds. None but 
 the tame and feeble and irresolute are indifferent in 
 the strife. Christianity is not dead nor dying. It is 
 not yet a stagnant pool of moribund and worn-out 
 theories ; the spirit of life still broods over its waters, 
 and quickens it with energy, with activity, with power. 
 Strange that it should be so ! Strange, humanly 
 speaking! Strange, unless there be in the Bible 
 something more than human, some direct speaking 
 and utterance of God ! How could the words of a 
 Galilaean peasant, and the few fishermen with whom 
 He consorted, thus for eighteen centuries be a law 
 to the civilized world, if they were merely human ? 
 And why should scientific men, in this advanced 
 and advancing age, care to look so constantly behind 
 them, and busy themselves with the enquiry whether 
 every statement in a Jewish cosmogony written many 
 thousand years ago, agrees exactly and literally with 
 their theories, if that cosmogony was a mere specula- 
 
 h Such a state of blessedness is promised (Isa. xi. 9), but only as the 
 result of the universal propagation of Christianity, and its final triumph 
 over all mankind. 
 
I.] INEVITABLE. 9 
 
 tion ? We do not quarrel over the egg, in which 
 Brahm created himself, and then floated majestically 
 over the waters during a period of countless ages, till 
 finally growing tired of his narrow quarters, he parted 
 it asunder, and formed the sky and the earth from its 
 divided portions 1 . We have no counter theories with 
 which to explain, defend, or attack that egg. Nothing 
 in the world depends upon it. In India itself no one 
 cares for it. But a great deal does depend upon the 
 first chapter of Genesis ; and it is a note of the value of 
 Holy Scripture that, written as that record was for an 
 entirely different purpose k , it yet excites so great 
 and sustained an interest in a matter completely sub- 
 sidiary to its main object. 
 
 My business however lies with St. Paul's words 
 in their primary sense. With the New Testament, — 
 with the influence of the Bible as a whole, — I am 
 only so far concerned as it justifies the Apostle's 
 assertion, that the scriptures of the Old Testament 
 had collectively and individually a higher, a nobler, 
 and a more permanent purpose than the instruction 
 of those to whom they were orig'inally addressed. 
 If the preparation in the Old Testament had led on 
 to nothing, if Christianity had been no whit greater 
 than Judaism, if after temporary successes it had 
 proved incompatible with continued and abiding 
 progress in morality and true civilization, if Christian 
 nations had stagnated, and fallen behind others in 
 good government, in laws, in industry, in power, in 
 
 i Hindu Institutes, or Laws of Manu, Book i. 9-13. 
 
 k In revelation man in his relation to God is the one object ofinl 
 and thus in Gen. i. we learn that the end and purpose of the natural 
 creation was man, while in Gen. ii. we have the further lesson that man 
 from the first stood in a moral relation to his Creator. 
 
10 THE OLD TESTAMENT [lect. 
 
 the love of truth, in the pure and ardent quest of 
 knowledge, and in whatever else ennobles our nature, 
 if progress in all that is just and true and lovely and 
 of good report became possible only as men broke 
 away from Christianity, and if its corrupt forms 
 tended to human excellence and human happiness 
 more than an exacter conformity to what is taught in 
 Scripture, and was held in primitive times, — if this 
 were so, then the argument from prophecy would fall 
 powerless upon our ears. The more extraordinary 
 the preparation, the greater evidently must be the re- 
 sult to justify that preparation. If the result be a 
 failure, we could not believe that the Divine Provi- 
 dence had ushered it into the world with more than 
 ordinary care and forethought. Man's works con- 
 stantly do thus fail. That which is begun with arro- 
 gance and ostentation generally results in a mean and 
 disastrous issue. For the most part, great things with 
 men arise out of modest and small beginnings. It 
 cannot be so with God. He is the perfect Worker, 
 and all that He works must be in harmony and 
 proportion. 
 
 It must however be borne in mind that the Holy 
 Scriptures themselves declare that sin, misery, po- 
 verty, death, and with them irreligion, profanity, 
 unbelief, are not to cease till Christ's second advent. 
 It is possible, then, to claim of Christianity that which 
 it expressly refuses to give. What it does profess 
 to give is the one true probation of the soul, the one 
 true means by which sins may be forgiven, and regen- 
 erate and renewed man be made capable of eternal 
 happiness. Why there should be this probation for 
 man, I cannot tell, nor why it should be so difficult. 
 
I.] A PREPARA TION FOR CHRISTIANITY. 1 1 
 
 But I know as a fact that it is difficult ; difficult for 
 myself, difficult for others : and the teaching of our 
 Lord agrees with what we know and feel to be the 
 case. He too does not tell us why there is a proba- 
 tion : the Bible never tells us what are our relations to 
 other intelligent beings, nor what the exact place 
 which this our world holds in the vast plan of the 
 universe. It tells us only how in this state of things 
 in which we do actually find ourselves we may so 
 live as not to miss the object for which God placed us 
 here. And it never leads us to expect that in 
 attaining to this object we are to have a comfortable, 
 easy course. Rather if we are to win the everlasting 
 life, it warns us that in this life we must be content 
 to strive, and labour, and forego. The favour of 
 numbers, the popular acclaim — these are not the 
 notes which Christ gave of success. He spake of a 
 narrow way, whose entrance but few find. He spake 
 of many called, and but few chosen. He even 
 spake despondingly, as if there were doubt of the 
 very permanence of religion. ' When the Son of Man 
 cometh will He still find the faith on earth?' Spa 
 ci/pr/o-ei tt]v ttlcttlv ; (Luke xviii. 8). Why this is so, 
 God only knows. In the Manichseism of my heart 
 I would that it were otherwise ; the entrance wider, 
 the way easier, and more frequented. But doubtless 
 God doeth all things well, and our difficulties arise 
 from our ignorance, because we see the present only, 
 and that but dimly, while the past and the future are 
 alike concealed from our view. 
 
 But the Bible must be judged according to its own 
 principles and assertions, and with reference to the 
 state of things in which as a matter of fact we find 
 
12 
 
 EE VELA TION [lect. 
 
 ourselves. Philosophers may conceive of a world 
 without sin and sorrow and unbelief, of man as a 
 virtuous, gentle, intellectual being, of a religion that 
 involves no probation, and of a state of things, in 
 which all, without struggle and without failure, attain 
 to the highest perfection of which their nature is 
 capable ; and there by all means let them have their 
 ideal Bible, and their ideal Church. But we inhabit 
 no Utopia, and if in this world, such as it is, the 
 Church has succeeded in doing the work marked 
 out for it by the prophets in the Old Testament, and 
 by Christ and His apostles in the New ; and if this 
 work be in close relation to the actual constitution of 
 things as they now exist ; then Christianity does 
 justify the extraordinary preparation made for it. 
 
 And who can deny its success ? It has been, I 
 grant, far more limited than one could have wished. 
 It has but a limited influence even in Christian 
 nations, and Christian nations are but limited in 
 extent. Unbelief, like sin and sorrow, exists every- 
 where around us ; is more universal, more prevalent 
 than faith. But all that this means is, that religion 
 is in exact analogy with and in relation to the general 
 state of things upon earth. It is not a special dif- 
 ficulty with Christianity, but belongs to the province 
 of natural religion, and to the enquiry, Why the 
 state of all things upon earth is just what it is? 
 The solution of this difficulty belongs, I believe, to 
 that time, and to that time only, when we shall 
 no longer see as in a riddle, but face to face, and 
 know as also we are known. Till that time I grant 
 that it is faith only which can make us feel that 
 God doeth all things well : and to faith I am 
 
I.] NOT A FAILURE. 
 
 13 
 
 content to leave it, because reason also tells me 
 that it is a childish and ridiculous folly to endea- 
 vour to explain a proposition of which we know 
 not the data. Till we learn the past and the future, 
 we cannot understand the present. But while I 
 grant the existence of the awful mystery which 
 shrouds life, still, judging of Christianity in relation 
 both to the actual state of things in which we 
 find ourselves, and to what the Bible itself says of 
 the difficulties in the way of attaining to, and 
 holding the truth, I ask again, Who can deny its 
 success ? Attacks upon it from without there will be, 
 and, what is far worse, corruptions within. These 
 corruptions weaken its influence, prevent its increase, 
 and shock our moral sense far more than any attacks 
 from without. There have been times when the 
 immorality and the doctrinal corruptions of the 
 professors of Christianity degraded the Church 
 to so great an extent that its speedy fall seemed 
 inevitable. But God has ever again infused life 
 into its decaying members. Its last stage of decay 
 has ever been also the time of a new birth ; refor- 
 mation has followed close upon the heels of doctrinal 
 corruption ; and Christianity still lives, is strong, 
 and fruitful in holy deeds. It alone possesses the 
 power of influencing men largely and generally. 
 It still speaks mightily to the conscience. After 
 every period of decay, it revives to fresh power. 
 After every attack, it springs up with renewed 
 energy. The very blows aimed against it serve 
 but to quicken and animate it. 'Troubled on every 
 side, it is not distressed : perplexed, it is not id 
 despair: persecuted, it is not forsaken: cast down. 
 
14 CHRIST'S CHURCH ENDOWED [lect. 
 
 it is not destroyed.' Its one assurance of life is 
 that it bears about in the body the dying of the 
 Lord Jesus : that it teaches a suffering Christ, and 
 is content to suffer with Him (2 Cor. iv. 8—10). 
 
 Nor must it be forgotten that the power of Christi- 
 anity ever increases in proportion as nations advance 
 in all that most ennobles our nature. Where men 
 are ignorant, immoral, coarse, dull, degraded ; where 
 bad government and false doctrine unite in depressing 
 the moral state of the people ; where not religion but 
 superstition sways the public mind, there the con- 
 science being darkened, the influence of Christianity 
 is but nominal. But give men good government, 
 good laws ; let them freely search and examine God's 
 word for themselves ; let knowledge of every kind 
 be diffused ; let truth be more loved ; and with in- 
 creasing purity of life and greater freedom of mental 
 action, that nation will also steadily advance towards 
 a more spiritual and more earnest faith. Faith is 
 strongest where the light is brightest, and where life 
 is the purest. The man who believes that the Bible is 
 God's word ought not to fear for it the most searching 
 examination. It is a sickly faith that would seek 
 evasion and concealment. But there is also a sickly 
 utopianism that cannot bear difficulties, and runs 
 away from instead of facing the problems of life. 
 Of neither of these did our Lord speak when He 
 declared that the kingdom of heaven suffereth vio- 
 lence, and must be seized by force. 
 
 The preparation then made for the Gospel in the 
 Old Testament has not failed in having a result 
 worthy of it ; and therefore we may fairly require 
 that the evidence which prophecy offers in support 
 
I.] WITH A SELF-RESTORATIVE POWER. 15 
 
 of the claims of our Lord to be God incarnate in the 
 flesh for man's salvation, should be examined impar- 
 tially. The existence, the nature, the power of 
 Christianity are all phenomena which cannot be 
 lightly passed over. To reject its claims without 
 examining the evidence it produces in their behalf 
 is, in view of these phenomena, unscientific. At the 
 same time, I am aware that the very magnitude of 
 the thesis to be proved alarms many. The Bible 
 claims no less than to be a message from God to the 
 soul. It claims to speak to all men everywhere with 
 authority, only indeed upon one subject, but that 
 the one great and momentous subject which most 
 deeply concerns us all. In the text, St. Paul tells 
 us that it was given to teach us the Christian hope, 
 the hope of a Saviour. Our Lord more exactly 
 defines its object as our 'eternal life,' £07) alwvios 
 (John v. 39). It tells us then that which no other 
 book tells us : that which we could know in no other 
 way unless God did tell it us in some supernatural 
 manner, namely, what are the relations between God 
 and the soul, how the soul can approach God, be 
 made holy so as to be fit for His presence, and be 
 united to Him. These are high claims, and the fact 
 is not at variance with them. The Book is a great 
 teacher. Kant himself concedes, that ' if the Gospel 
 had not previously taught men the universal moral 
 laws, reason would not have been able yet (that is, 
 in the short period between Plato and ourselves — a 
 couple of thousand years or so) to have attained to 
 so perfect an insight into them 1 .' Important as is 
 
 1 Kant to Jacobi in Jacobi's Werke, iii. 523, quoted by Luthardt, 
 p. 160. 
 
1 6 CHRISTIANITY MORE INFLUENTIAL [lect. 
 
 this testimony from a man who endeavoured to build 
 up a system of morality upon the reason only, yet the 
 strength of the Gospel does not lie in its pure moral 
 teaching. It lies in that part of it which is directly 
 supernatural. It is in the manifestation of God in 
 the flesh ; it is in the work of the Emmanuel, the 
 God-man, that its extraordinary power consists. 
 Take this away — the miracle which is the very centre 
 and core of Christianity — and the rest, though not 
 without value, is yet comparatively of so small value, 
 that it would be scarcely worth a struggle. The 
 power, the might, the life of the Christian world 
 would be gone. 
 
 With so great a thesis to prove, it is necessary that 
 the proof should be strong. And naturally the more 
 convincing evidences are those which are usually 
 called internal. Our Lord claims to be so much 
 more than a mere historical character, that a mere 
 historical proof falls below the exigencies of the case. 
 It is valuable, indispensable ; but not enough. We 
 do not regard our Lord as a teacher in the same 
 way as Socrates and Sakya-muni m , but as belong- 
 ing altogether to a higher and diviner sphere. And 
 thus the most convincing evidence of all is our Lord's 
 own character. The more we study that simple but 
 marvellous delineation of Him given in the Gospels, 
 the more certain we feel of His unapproachable per- 
 fectness : that no man ever spake as He spake, or 
 taught as He taught, or wrought as He wrought". And 
 
 m See Appendix, Note A. 
 
 n I would especially recommend a work entitled ' The Jesus 
 of the Evangelists,' by the Rev. C. A. Row, 1868. For fulness of 
 thought, and terseness and accuracy of reasoning, I do not know its 
 
17 
 
 l] in civilized nations. 
 
 next I should place the evidence of the Epistles of St. 
 Paul. The man who can read them, and not be con- 
 vinced both of the greatness and the searching and 
 critical character of St. Paul's intellect, and also of his 
 entire, thorough, and profound belief in the truth of 
 every word he wrote or spoke, must have a mind 
 strangely constituted, and strongly biassed. And an- 
 other powerful though less concentrated proof is that 
 which will be the subject of these Lectures ; the 
 proof, namely, which the Old Testament offers to 
 the truth of the New by the fulness and exactness 
 of the preparation made for it, and the wonderful 
 harmony, under vast external differences, which 
 exists between the two dispensations. 
 
 To treat so great a subject worthily would require 
 powers far greater than I can bring to the cause of 
 God's truth : to treat it fully would require many 
 volumes, and much time and study. I can but touch 
 the subject slightly and generally, and chiefly I shall 
 confine myself to the nature of the preparation made 
 under the Jewish covenant for Christianity : content 
 if I can remove any difficulties out of the way of 
 those who doubt, and confirm the faith of the devout 
 believer. That faith will, I believe, be best built up 
 by the close study of the Bible itself. If it be God's 
 book, it will speak best in God's behalf. And what 
 
 equal. No man can read it without being convinced, I should 
 imagine, not merely of our Lord's historical existence, which is 
 what Mr. Row undertakes to prove against Strauss, &c, but also 
 of His unapproachable perfectness. As a usual rule, it is in myths 
 that we find attempts at describing a perfect character: our Lord 
 is perfect in a way entirely distinct from any and every idea' 
 perfection that the fancy ever suggested, and with such proofs of 
 historical certainty that the more they are examined, the more con- 
 vinced we are that the Gospels are simple narratives of fact. 
 
 C 
 
1 8 INTERNAL EVIDENCES [lect. 
 
 other proof can you offer to the great mass of man- 
 kind ? Christianity is no heritage of the rich, the 
 studious, the learned : it is common property, belong- 
 ing as much to the cottage and the village as to the 
 cloister and the university. Its proof therefore can- 
 not consist in elaborate arguments, such as those only 
 have the time to study, who are set free from the 
 cares and the manifold business of life. It must 
 carry its proof with it, and such a proof as working 
 men can understand : such a proof as makes faith 
 possible to the unlearned. And such a proof, felt 
 even where not consciously understood, I believe to 
 be the unity and consistency of the Bible itself, and 
 the wonderful way in which its many treatises form 
 one book, and all combine in setting before men one 
 and the same way provided by God for man's restor- 
 ation. In the Bible men find the same plan of 
 salvation gradually and steadily unfolded. It grows 
 more plain, more clear and definite as speaker after 
 speaker arises with words from God. No one ever 
 contradicts the past, but each adds his own measure 
 of truth to that already given. And finally 'It is 
 finished : ' — the message of God to the soul is com- 
 pleted under such circumstances, and with so great 
 an outpouring of Divine light, as infinitely to excel, 
 while nevertheless it fulfils and exactly corresponds 
 to all the previous declarations of the prophets. 
 Finally, in this message thus perfect and complete 
 men find, what they need ; it supplies a want, a 
 craving in their own natures. They feel themselves 
 the better and happier for it, and believe not because 
 of other men's words, not because of arguments and 
 proof and evidence, but because they have found for 
 
19 
 
 I.] THE MOST CONVINCING. 
 
 themselves that Jesus is the Christ. Call it, if you 
 will, fanaticism , but as a matter of fact it is this 
 internal conviction which supports and upholds the 
 true Christian. It is man's own heart at last, taught 
 by the Holy Ghost, which convinces him that he 
 needs a Saviour, and that Jesus of Nazareth both 
 can and will save him. 
 
 Nevertheless, if reason contradicted faith ; if we 
 had to do violence to our intellect ; if after careful 
 and candid consideration we felt that the proof was 
 insufficient, the evidence doubtful, or upon the whole 
 against us, I doubt whether the faith of an educated 
 man, used to weigh and balance testimony, could en- 
 dure the trial. Our inward conviction, that which 
 springs from faith, can overcome difficulties, provided 
 that the balance of proof in the main incline largely 
 and decidedly in its favour. And thus if the Bible 
 were at variance with itself ; if the books of the Old 
 Testament marked out some one way, and some 
 another, for man's recovery : if its principles were con- 
 trary to what our Lord sets before us as holy, just, and 
 true : if its lessons and teaching, confessedly and neces- 
 sarily inferior to our Lord's, did not tend in the same 
 direction, and lead men onwards to Him, in Whom 
 the Spirit dwelt, not by measure but fully: — if this 
 were so, the power of the Bible would be gone. It 
 would carry on its very face its own refutation, and 
 there could be neither peace nor joy in believing, 
 if belief arrayed our intellectual faculties in battle 
 
 Though called fanaticism by those outside the faith, it is never- 
 theless the proof which St. Paul asserts is possessed by nil Christians, 
 2 Cor. xiii. 5. The translation reprobates for d86Ktfxoi rather 
 the sense. It more correctly means 'not abiding the proof,' and so 
 not genuine, real Christians. 
 
 C 2 
 
20 CONSISTENCY OF THE SCRIPTURES [lect. 
 
 against our moral faculties. Far different is the case. 
 And yet it is very extraordinary that this discrepancy 
 does not exist among the books of the Bible; — 
 extraordinary and incredible from the sceptic's point 
 of view. For what is the Bible regarded as he regards 
 it ? It is a mere casual collection of the most hetero- 
 geneous treatises possible : laws, poems, biographies, 
 sermons, histories, of which few are genuine, and 
 those vilely interpolated. It is the remains of a once 
 far larger Jewish literature, preserved by mere hap- 
 hazard, dealt with by forgers at their list, but by forgers 
 and interpolators who had not the slightest intention 
 of preparing the way for Christianity. Yet these are 
 the books which the Jews valued as God's most pre- 
 cious gift to them (Rom. iii. 2) : these the books which 
 they everywhere carried with them, and of which they 
 made translations into whatever was their current 
 tongue : these the books which they thought assured 
 to them the heritage of the world. If these books 
 were what sceptics assert them to be, is it possible 
 that the Jews could have regarded them with this 
 profound respect ? Of these too it is that St. Paul 
 affirms that they were written for the teaching of all 
 mankind : that they all have one and the same high 
 purpose, and an eternal value. St. Paul's view in- 
 volves a miracle. Unless they had a supernatural 
 element, the Scriptures could not thus be the 
 universal teachers. But in proof of this assertion 
 and the miracle it involves, there is a vast and 
 wonderful mass of evidence, so thorough, perfect, 
 and complete, as in all ages to have satisfied the 
 most intellectual and earnest minds. And finally, 
 these are the books under whose teaching the 
 
I.] A PROOF OF THEIR INSPIRATION. 
 
 21 
 
 Christian world has outstripped, not only in morality, 
 but also in science, the farthest progress of olden 
 time; and tested as they have been by eighteen 
 centuries of the most varied experience, they still 
 possess authority over many of the most critical, 
 judicious, and acute thinkers of the present day. Per- 
 petually attacked, subjected for centuries to a bitter, 
 minute, and searching criticism, they still survive. 
 Man has done his worst to destroy them. Each new 
 phase of scepticism boasts that at length it has won 
 a final victory ; but still they speak to man with ever 
 renewed power. ' This is the Lord's doing, and it is 
 marvellous in our eyes.' 
 
 Treat the Bible as an ordinary book ; take from it 
 the guiding hand of inspiration, the heavenly light 
 of revelation ; regard it as a merely national litera- 
 ture, the chance combination of a number of myths, 
 legends, forgeries, fabrications, interpolations, mixed 
 up with a few genuine poems, sermons, histories, 
 and the like, and you have — in the face of these facts 
 — the most extraordinary, the most unaccountable 
 phenomenon upon the face of the earth. That such 
 a Bible, — the Bible of the neologian, — or the Bible in 
 any way except as the Word of God, could stand the 
 test of criticism for a single month, or exert on any 
 one average mind a holy and strengthening influ- 
 ence, I for my part regard as an absurdity too great 
 to be believed. 
 
 St. Paul then affirms the prophetic character of the 
 whole of the Old Testament Scriptures. All tin 
 writings combine, and were intended to combine, 
 into a concordant body of teaching, given to man to 
 set before him one and the same great truth. For 
 
22 EXTERNAL EVIDENCE NECESSARY [LECT. 
 
 they were given, first, to prepare for the Advent of 
 man's Deliverer : and secondly, to bear witness to, 
 and be the proof of His mission after He had come. 
 But this preparation for Christ again was twofold. 
 It was necessary first of all to make preparation for 
 the external part of His manifestation. If a De- 
 liverer was to come, if that Deliverer was to take 
 upon Him man's nature, He must come of some 
 lineage, must be born in some place, must have 
 witnesses to record what He said and did, must find 
 on earth such a state of things as would permit of 
 His giving the requisite proof of His mission, and 
 of His performing such acts as were necessary for 
 the carrying out of the Divine purpose. And secondly, 
 there must be such a state of mental and moral 
 culture, as would enable men to understand His 
 teaching, and comprehend whatever ideas were in- 
 volved in the plan of man's restoration. 
 
 As regards the first part of the preparation, evi- 
 dently our Lord could not have come in times 
 like, for instance, the present. How could He have 
 wrought His miracles, and taught His lessons, and 
 gathered people round Him by thousands, and have 
 wandered from place to place always with a more 
 or less numerous following, unless there had been far 
 greater freedom of personal action than is possessed 
 by us now? And again: how could He have died, 
 the just, the innocent, the spotless, unless the times 
 had been rough and arbitrary ? Wherever excessive 
 personal liberty exists, wherever each man has to 
 maintain his own rights, while the law is weak, and its 
 action irregular, there the hand of authority endea- 
 vours to repress any dangers which seem to threaten 
 
I.] IN SUPPORT OF FAITH. 
 
 23 
 
 itself by violent reprisals. And thus the state of 
 Judaea, restless under the Roman yoke, with its native 
 government all but powerless, while its conquerors 
 were alike unwilling and unable to interfere much 
 with domestic matters, was admirably suited for the 
 work of our Lord's ministry. But this was but one 
 of many conditions equally indispensable : and neces- 
 sarily much of the Bible is concerned with this ex- 
 ternal preparation. We see from the time of Abraham 
 all the outward circumstances of our Saviour's mission 
 gradually growing into shape. And it is this which 
 gives its interest to the historical portions of the 
 Bible. Starting with the successive covenants made 
 by God with all mankind in Adam and Noah, it 
 rapidly lessens its field of vision. Nation after nation 
 is dropped out of the programme. Ever it is a 
 narrower stream of history 1 '. You have advanced 
 but a short way in the narrative before it is limited 
 to the fortunes of a childless old man, dwelling in his 
 black camel's-hair tent beneath the lofty terebinths 
 of Mamre. But that old man is the ancestor of 
 Christ, and from him a nation springs whose habita- 
 tion is a land peculiarly adapted for the Saviour's 
 mission, whose institutions all bear close reference 
 to Him, whose ritual sets forth His doctrines, whose 
 heroes are His types, whose fortunes for good and 
 evil are all so controlled as best serve His purpo 
 and whose sons are the first recipients and disciples 
 and propagators of the new faith. The historical 
 
 p As up to Christ it was an ever narrowing stream, until 1 
 centered in Him, so after Christ the stream is ever widening, till the 
 knowledge of the Lord shall at length cover the earth a., the water, 
 cover the sea. 
 
24 NATURE OF THE [lect. 
 
 parts of the Bible all relate to this the closing scene 
 of Israel's drama ; and so exactly is this limiting 
 principle adhered to, that no sooner have the ten 
 tribes forfeited all part in the noble office of pre- 
 paring for the Messiah, than they disappear entirely 
 from Holy Scripture. In the prophets subsequent to 
 Hosea, Israel becomes a symbol for wider mercies 
 than those which belonged to the seed of Abraham 
 after the flesh. The purpose of the Bible is not 
 historical. Its history is strictly subservient to the 
 covenant of grace. 
 
 But essential as was this portion of the preparation, 
 it nevertheless holds but the lower and inferior place. 
 Prophecy had, secondly, the nobler work of preparing 
 for Christ's teaching. Look at that teaching. Consider 
 how spiritual it is, raised how high above the teaching 
 of any other sage whatsoever. How perfect too in all 
 its parts : not a medley, from which you may cull here 
 and there some of wisdom's scattered pearls, while 
 the rest is mere common verbiage, the expression of 
 loose, inaccurate, ordinary thought. Upon our 
 Master's words the best, the wisest, the most intel- 
 lectual of men for eighteen centuries have pondered, 
 and found in them a strength and sweetness such as 
 no other words possess. If you bear this in mind, 
 you can then understand something of the greatness 
 of the task imposed upon the prophets. They had to 
 prepare men's minds for that teaching. If when 
 Christ came the Jews had been in so low a state 
 intellectually and morally that they could not have 
 understood Christ, how could His Church have been 
 formed ? Whence could He have gathered disciples ? 
 Who would have recorded His lessons for us ? Whence 
 
I.] PREPARA TION FOR CHRIST. 
 
 could the St. Paul have arisen to give us their doc- 
 trinal exposition ? Whence the St. John to raise the 
 veil from their spiritual and mystic import ? That 
 nation could not have been in a low state of mental 
 development whose fishermen and tax-gatherers were 
 capable of understanding and recording the interpret- 
 ation put upon the Old Testament by our Lord ; of 
 seeing our Lord's acts in the light of prophecy, and 
 prophecy as illuminated by those acts. As I shall 
 show hereafter, the Jewish scribes and teachers had 
 not attained to the true meaning of the prophecies. 
 The apostles had been brought up under a recog- 
 nized interpretation very different from what our 
 Saviour taught. Yet their mental state was such as 
 enabled them to grasp, slowly I grant and unwil- 
 lingly, nevertheless in due time firmly and fully this 
 new and Christian interpretation of the Old Testa- 
 ment. But while thus the Jews had been educated 
 to such a degree as gave them great aptitude for 
 understanding religious teaching, the nature of the 
 Talmud <1 forbids our conceding them much power 
 of originating doctrine. It is not an elevated or 
 spiritual work, and its strength lies rather in minute 
 
 i The strength of the Talmud lies in what is technically called 
 Halachah, the pathway or course of life, in other words morah. It never 
 places its morality however upon a scientific basis as Aristotle did in his 
 Ethics, but is full of sensible and sententious remarks; yet even in 
 morals the point of many of its treatises is How you can best break the 
 real intent of God's law while keeping the letter of it. Its weakness is its 
 Haggada, its queer tales and narratives, not always of the most inna 
 description, and rivalling in wildness and monstrosity many "I the tales 
 in the Arabian Nights. Something of this tendency of the Je* ish mind 
 may be seen in the Book of Tobit. The morals of the book are - 
 cellent, but the stories of the fish's liver, and of the love of an evil spirit 
 for Sara, belong to the wildest class of legends. 
 
26 PURPOSE OF THE HISTORICAL [lect. 
 
 details, than in those great principles which rouse 
 in us the fire of a noble enthusiasm. And yet it 
 is the literature of a people great in teaching, and 
 if we cannot give them a high place in philosophy, 
 still in morality — practical morality — their system 
 was far more pure and excellent than that of 
 many nations capable of reasoning upon it with more 
 dialectic skill. Prophecy had done its work. It laid 
 the foundation upon which to build, but the builder 
 was Christ. Christ is the great teacher of mankind : 
 but it was Jews, Jews of the middle and lower 
 classes, who carried the great Teacher's words to the 
 Gentile world, and thereby fulfilled that high office 
 and destiny which the prophets had not hesitated to 
 claim for the Jewish nation. ' The law shall go forth 
 of Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem' 
 (Micah iv. 2). 
 
 And still prophecy speaks to us. For its other 
 great purpose was to bear witness to the truths of 
 Christianity. Man's works are for some limited 
 object. They have their use and then pass away. 
 One half of that which we call progress is the 
 removal of what was once sound and good, but is 
 now obsolete, worn out, and decayed. Just as the 
 generations of men pass away, and leave their places 
 for the young and strong to fill, so do their works 
 pass away. But God changeth not, and His doings 
 are not subject to time, do not grow old, do not 
 become obsolete, nor need restoration and renewal. 
 And thus His Word ' shall stand for ever ' (Isaiah xl. 
 8, 1 Peter i. 25). Necessarily using human language, 
 and clothing its eternal truths in the ideas current in 
 
27 
 
 I.] PARTS OF THE BIBLE. 
 
 each writer's time r , it has also to fulfil an impossible 
 condition — impossible for man, and possible only for 
 God — namely, that it must belong to all generations, 
 and speak forcibly to men in every stage and 
 degree of culture and civilization. The more I re- 
 flect upon the conditions of the problem, the more 
 extraordinary it seems to me that the Bible should 
 still be a living book. And what is more, not the 
 New Testament only, but also the Old Testament 
 still fulfils this most difficult condition. It is no more 
 obsolete than the words of our Lord and His apostles. 
 It still has its use : still has its lessons for poor and 
 rich, and the testimony of the Saviour to its power 
 still finds an echo in our hearts. ' Search the Scrip- 
 tures ; for in them ye think ye have eternal life : and 
 they are they which testify of Me . . . Had ye believed 
 Moses, ye would have believed Me : for he wrote of 
 Me' (John v. 39, 46). It still bears witness to all the 
 
 r It is an amusing absurdity of the present day, that some students 
 of physical science speak as if God's Word ought to have used scientific, 
 instead of popular language, that is, it ought to have used the phra- 
 seology of the nineteenth century. For scientific language is itseli but 
 an approximation to an exacter phraseology, just as science is but an 
 approximation to truth. What is scientific language now will be 
 unscientific a century hence. Speaking to men, the Bible must use 
 human words, and, what is worse, human ideas. The best of these 
 words and ideas fall infinitely short of the Divine realities (2 Cor. iv. 7. 
 xii. 4), and are but shadows of the truth. No words short of tin >se 
 used by heavenly intelligences (if they use words) could have adequately 
 expressed the truth, and if so expressed men could not have understood 
 it. God has deigned therefore to clothe His revelation in such w< 
 as men generally can understand, and each writer uses the phraseol 
 of his own period, but we are warned against the folly of supposing 
 that we can see the whole truth as long as we are here in the 
 (Ex. xxxiii. 20, 23, 1 Cor. xiii. 9, 12). 
 
28 GREAT APTITUDE OF THE JEWS [lect. 
 
 great principles of Christianity, and those principles 
 are the best, the truest, the sole firm foundation for 
 whatever is good in man ; upon them all the better 
 part of modern civilization rests, and they alone are 
 its preservatives, and resist and correct the tendency 
 of every form of civilization to exhaustion and decay. 
 I do not know whether modern civilization may or 
 may not have a decline as well as a progress, a fall as 
 well as an uprise : but if it fall, it will be because 
 Christianity has been overpowered, and unbelief taken 
 its place, and let loose the base herd of human 
 passions from their foul den. But wherever Christ's 
 Church shall still exist — for it ever will somewhere 
 exist with Christ present in it, according to His 
 promise (Matt, xxviii. 20) — there will be purity, 
 chastity, temperance, self-restraint, the willingness to 
 suffer, the spirit that 'counts all things but loss so 
 that it may win Christ.' And these things it is which 
 save not the soul only, but society, according to the 
 deeper meaning of the promise, that if there be but 
 ten righteous men in a city, God will not destroy it 
 for those ten's sake (Gen. xviii. 32). 
 
 To all the great principles then of Christianity the 
 Old Testament bears witness, as well as to the facts 
 of our Lord's life and the nature of His person and 
 offices. Gradually, by a long course of teaching, the 
 prophets led men on till they were fit for Christ : so 
 fit that when Christ came the news of His mission 
 was rapidly carried throughout the world, and found 
 acceptance in every city. Even in the Gentile world, 
 at all the great centres of human activity, devout 
 men had been gathered from among the heathen in 
 readiness for Christ. They were not proselytes, had 
 
2 9 
 
 I.] FOR MORAL TEACHING. 
 
 not submitted to the burdensome ceremonial of 
 Judaism, but they had learned from the Jewish 
 scriptures the doctrines of God's unity, His justice, 
 His mercy, His omnipresence, His spiritual nature. 
 Without being Jews they went on the Sabbath to 
 the synagogue to hear the words of the prophets 
 read there. And these were the men who almost 
 universally accepted Christianity, and who, added to 
 the believing Jews, gave the nascent Church a 
 strength and influence it could not, humanly speaking, 
 have otherwise gained among the Gentiles. These 
 were the men who made Antioch the second mother 
 of the faith, who gave there to Christianity its name, 
 freed it from all that was local and temporary in 
 Judaism, and taught and commended it to the Gentile 
 world. And they were the fruits of prophecy. In 
 them the prophets had won the heathen as an in- 
 heritance for Christ. 
 
 In fact, Christianity could neither have so quickly 
 won its way to general acceptance, nor have occupied 
 now so firm and sure a position, had there not been 
 this marvellous preparation for it, carried on so 
 steadily through so long a period of time, and still 
 testifying so clearly to its divine origin. That prepa- ' 
 ration began with the primaeval promise made to the 
 woman in the hour of the first great earthly sorrow. 
 From that day onward one purpose, and one only, is 
 ever kept in view in God's dealings with His fallen 
 creatures. The promise was that man, worsted in his 
 first encounter with his spiritual adversary, should 
 crush that adversary's head by means of one ol the 
 same nature as himself, emphatically the woman's 
 seed. That promise contained in outline the whole of 
 
30 RAPID PROPAGATION OF CHRISTIANITY [lect. 
 
 prophecy. Of that promise the Gospel is the one 
 fulfilment. From the day on which Eve was com- 
 forted by it, all God's dealings in grace ; — for the Bible 
 has nothing to do with God's dealings except as far as 
 they belong to the covenant of grace ; it is not a book 
 of natural religion, but of supernatural ; — but all God's 
 dealings with man in grace, which are the proper 
 object-matter of the Bible, relate to the performance 
 of that promise. They are God's means for raising 
 ruined man, not only to that height from which he 
 fell, but to a far more glorious and perfect state even 
 than that to which Adam would have attained, had 
 he kept the terms of the first covenant (Rom. v. 
 15-21). 
 
 From this short sketch of the office of prophecy it 
 will be manifest that it is by no means to be con- 
 founded with prediction. It was but a part of the 
 office of the prophets to foretell certain necessary 
 facts and particulars with respect to Christ. It was 
 necessary that the preparatory dispensation should 
 give certain sure signs by which the Messiah when 
 " He came might be identified. It was also necessary 
 to keep alive in men a confident belief that the 
 promise of a Deliverer would be fulfilled. Lastly, as 
 the time of that fulfilment approached, it was neces- 
 sary that the minds of men should be roused to a 
 lively expectation that 'the latter days' had at length 
 arrived. But this was not the whole office of the 
 prophets, and the proof which the Old Testament 
 offers to the truth of the New is something far larger 
 and broader than even that extraordinary series of 
 predictions so exactly fulfilled in our Lord and in His 
 Church. Time however will not permit me to enter 
 
!•] A RESULT OF PROPHECY. 3I 
 
 upon so wide a subject to-day, but in my next lecture 
 I shall endeavour to show what is the true idea of 
 prophecy, and what was the proper office and mission 
 of the prophet. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 THE PROPER IDEA AND MEANING OF PROPHECY. 
 
 God, Who at sundry times and in divers manners 
 spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, 
 hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son. — 
 Heb. i. i, 2. 
 
 The Apostle in these words distinguishes between 
 the manner of God's revelation in the Old and in the 
 New Testament. In both God speaks : and the word 
 used of this speaking is a kind and homely word 
 (AaAeot>), agreeing well with the informal a way in 
 
 a It is, however, really this informal manner in which the truth 
 is given that renders the study of the Bible so rich in results. No 
 other book could be dwelt upon word by word, and sentence by 
 sentence, all our lives through, as we dwell upon the Bible, to 
 find ever not only the dear old familiar long-treasured truth, 
 but some new aspect or meaning or application of it. There is 
 always a mine in it, not of new doctrine, but of fuller instruction 
 in the deeper significance of the truths entrusted to the Church's 
 keeping. Each age too of the Church collectively finds in the Bible 
 what exactly answers to its needs. And thus it is not a mere record, 
 nor a body of dead formulae and definitions of doctrine, but is fraught 
 with power, and with that faculty of adaptation which living bodies 
 possess. Experience justifies what is said of it in Heb. iv. 12: 
 ' The word of God is quick, i. e. living, (wv, and active, kvepyris,' 
 capable of doing work, as living bodies alone are capable. Men 
 may ridicule our respect for the Bible, may call it bibliolatry and 
 book -worship ; but the question really is whether what is said in 
 Heb. iv. 12 is true. If the Bible possess a living energy such as 
 no other book possesses, does not reason require us to treat it 
 differently from mere ordinary books ? 
 
II.] OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS. 33 
 
 which the truth is given, not in set definitions, but 
 so as to arrest our attention and interest us, and 
 dwell upon our memories. But though the reve- 
 lation is made in this informal way, nevertheless it 
 is God who speaks, not by, as our translation renders 
 it, but equally in the prophets and in the Son (h 
 toIs irpocpiJTCLLs — h m<3). The prophets were not mere 
 messengers, to whom a definite form of words was 
 entrusted : they spake freely, and fully, but yet not 
 of themselves. They had some share in what they 
 taught. There is no book in which the personality 
 of each writer is more plainly marked than in the 
 Bible. Each retains, alike in things great and 
 small, his own individuality, his favourite modes 
 of expression, even his peculiarities. But however 
 great the freedom of the messengers, it was never- 
 theless God's message which they spake. And 
 they knew it to be His. They ever ascribed it 
 to Him, and declared that their words were not 
 their own, but God's ; not the working of their 
 own minds, but something that came to them from 
 without b . 
 
 The difference, then, between revelation in Christ 
 and in the prophets is not that the words of the One 
 are more God's words than those of the others. To 
 
 b In the Hebrew text there is considerable diversity ofexpn 
 in the manner in which the prophets refer all that is spoken to 
 Jehovah. Thus Isaiah, while constantly saying that it is Jehovah 
 who speaks (Isa. i. 2, 10. 18, &c), yet does not use an introductory 
 formula in the regular way in which Jeremiah and Ezekiel ] 
 one to their several prophecies. Once or twice he speaks of a 
 vision, or a word which he saw, a phrase peculiar to himself, to 
 Obadiah, and Habakkuk, though evidently in popular use long 
 afterwards (Ez. xii. 27, xiii. 6-8, Zech. x. 2). The usual title of 
 
 D 
 
34 EQUAL INSPIRATION OF THE [lect. 
 
 mark how thoroughly they both stand upon the same 
 footing, the Apostle does not hesitate to use language 
 from which perhaps we might have shrunk. We 
 should have said, perhaps, that Christ spake of Him- 
 self, of His own fulness : that being God as well as 
 man He spake as God. The Apostle, of set purpose, 
 says, ' God spake in the prophets, and in the Son.' 
 We must not then draw distinctions between the Old 
 Testament and the New, as though they differed in 
 authority, or in the nature and extent of their inspi- 
 ration. Where God speaks, man's business is to 
 obey. The distinction which the Apostle draws is 
 in the manner of the revelation, the different way in 
 which it was given, not in the degree of it. In the 
 Old Testament it was partial, gradual, progressive ; 
 in the New, it is full, perfect, final, complete. We 
 look forward to no further revelation. Not that we 
 possess all truth. 'We shall know as fully as we 
 are known' only in the beatific vision ; but we possess 
 
 his prophecies is massa, an ambiguous word signifying a sentence, 
 decision, authoritative decree, in which sense Isaiah used it, and also 
 a burden. This ambiguity led to ridicule and profanity on the 
 part of the wits of Jerusalem (Jer. xxiii. 33-38), but nevertheless 
 the word continued in use in its proper sense of a sentence passed 
 by God, especially upon Gentile nations (Nah. i. 1, Hab. i. 1, Zech. 
 ix. 1), though not confined to them (Zech. xii. I, Mai. i. 1). Isaiah 
 also says that Jehovah spake by him (Isa. xx. 2). Jeremiah con- 
 stantly uses two formulae, the first, ' The word of Jehovah was unto 
 me' (c. ii. 1, &c), and a stronger form, 'The word that was upon 
 Jeremiah' (c. xxv. 1, &c), implying the duty on his part to speak 
 it, and suggesting also the reluctance against which he had so often to 
 struggle (c. xv. 18, xx. 7, 8, 9). Ezekiel's constant phrase is, 'The 
 word of Jehovah was unto me,' and this is the usual formula with 
 the rest (Hos. i 1, Joel i. 1, &c '. It must be noticed that it is 
 always Jehovah, the covenant God, not Elohim, God simply, who 
 speaks. It is the God of grace, not of nature. 
 
35 
 
 II.] OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS. 
 
 all that necessary knowledge of our relations to God 
 in Christ, and of our hopes for a future world, which 
 was the proper object-matter of a revelation ; all, 
 namely, which the conditions of our probation in this 
 world involved, if that indispensable probation was 
 to be also merciful and just. 
 
 Revelation, then, in the Old Testament was, first, 
 in many parts or portions, TroXvfiepm, not 'at sundry 
 times' only ; that is but a small part of the meaning. 
 What the Apostle says is that it was an imperfect 
 revelation, given in bits ; now a little, and then a 
 little, with long intervals during which no addition 
 was made to the heritage of truth. The attitude of 
 the saints of old was that of expectation ; ' they 
 searched, and searched diligently what time, or what 
 manner of time the Spirit of Christ that was in 
 them did signify, when testifying to them of Christ's 
 sufferings (I Pet. i. u).' And thus they themselves 
 constantly spake of 'latter days,' and of a 'iu., 
 covenant ;' whereas in the New Testament we read 
 of the ' fulness of time,' and of a ' faith once for ail 
 delivered to the saints.' 
 
 Ours, too, is an attitude of expectation. 'We 
 wait for the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.' 
 But we wait for no new truth : we believe in n i 
 development of old truths. The truths of Holy 
 Scripture, by its very faculty of life (Heb. iv. i 2 
 adapt themselves to each succeeding age, and port 
 often long neglected, or but partially underst* 
 break forth with new energy when circumstances 
 call for their application. Of other portions it is 
 only by careful study and diligent and oft-repeatc 1 
 examination, that the Church at length attains 
 
 D 2 
 
36 REVELATION IN THE OLD TESTAMENT [lect, 
 
 their full meaning, and due relation to other truths. 
 But a new article of the faith, by its very novelty, 
 stands self- condemned. The Church's duty is, not 
 to invent new dogmas, but to defend and maintain 
 in its integrity the whole truth entrusted to its 
 charge. Our duty is to study the inspired records, 
 so carefully and with prayer, that by the Holy Spirit's 
 aid we may comprehend, as adequately as our limited 
 powers will permit, the unsearchable riches of the 
 truth as revealed in Jesus Christ our Lord. 
 
 And next the truth was given ' in divers manners ;' 
 there is a varied ministry in the Old Testament, both 
 of angels c and of men. And to men God spake vari- 
 ously, to Moses face to face, to others in dreams and 
 visions ; to some it may have seemed as the welling 
 up of their own hearts, while to others it was an 
 express message, which they delivered in God's name. 
 When Moses gave his two histories of creation, he 
 must have been recording absolute revelations, made 
 to some of the patriarchs, in the first of which (Gen. 
 i-ii. 3) man appears as the final crown simply of 
 creation, its lord and master, whereas in the second 
 (Gen. ii. 4-iii. 24) he appears as a being in covenant 
 with God, using his freedom for his ruin, yet with 
 that promise of restoration made him, which all the 
 rest of the Bible is occupied in fulfilling. But in the 
 account of the flood he gives the narrative of an 
 eye-witness (see for instance Gen. vii. 19) ; and so 
 also the history of Joseph (Gen. xxxvii-1, omitting 
 Gen. xxxviii, inserted to keep the history of Judah, 
 to whom now belonged the birthright, synchronolo- 
 gical with that of Joseph) bears many internal proofs 
 
 c Especially in the time of the Judges. 
 
II. ] PRO GRESSIVE. 
 
 37 
 
 of having been compiled from contemporary records, 
 or even from a narrative composed by Joseph himself. 
 Subsequently Moses recorded revelations made to 
 himself, facts of history witnessed by himself, and 
 predictions of the future, for Israel's warning and 
 guidance. There is moreover a rich diversity of man- 
 ner in which the truth is given : and constantly 
 words, called forth by some temporary occurrence, 
 rise up to an eternal significance. When David was 
 celebrating the glories of Solomon's wide-spread do- 
 minion, his language, not perhaps altogether without 
 his being conscious of it himself, swelled onwards to the 
 universal reign of Christ. When in other psalms, and 
 in the prophets, the saints poured out their sorrows. 
 God's hand mysteriously rested upon them, and caused 
 them to foreshow the deeper mystery of Christ's 
 passion : so to foreshow it, that those who read felt 
 that the words meant more than mere private grief. 
 And then there were the types and shadows and 
 figures of the law : and many symbolical acts both 
 in the ritual and in the history of the nation, and 
 typical personages, of all of which we know that the 
 Jews regarded them as intended to convey doctrinal 
 truths. It is no peculiarity of St. Paul that he finds 
 Christian verities in Sarah and Hagar, and in the 
 passage of the Red Sea, and in the smitten Rock. Hut 
 we never interpret the New Testament in this way. 
 It is not a book of type and allegory, but one wh< 
 teaching is explicit, definite, and complete. And it 
 is so because we have in Christ 'the brightness ol 
 God's glory,' the a-avya(r\ia, the pure light, that is, 
 of God, unveiled, shining in absolute clearness, limited 
 not in itself, but in us, by our narrowness, held but 
 
38 DIVERSIFIED MANNER [lect. 
 
 in part by us, because infinitely larger than we can 
 hold. And thus, surrounded by the clear daylight, 
 our business now is to endeavour thoroughly to 
 understand what is revealed : for all necessary know- 
 ledge has been already given us ; we have no new 
 revelation to expect. It will be by the enlargement of 
 our faculties that we shall attain to that entire insight 
 into all truth, which will perfect the bliss of the bea- 
 tific vision (i John iii. 2). 
 
 But though thus the revelation of Christ in the 
 Old Testament was first, partial, and secondly, be- 
 stowed in many different ways, yet absolutely the 
 prophet was one in whom God spake. He was God's 
 representative, whose business it was chiefly to speak, 
 but often also to act for God. And plainly this is 
 something far wider than the mere foretelling of 
 future events. Prediction is part of prophecy : for 
 as the past and the future are both present to God, 
 one in whom God spake would be raised above the 
 limits of time, provided that this elevation were 
 needed by that particular portion of God's truth 
 which he was commissioned to deliver. But if, as 
 often was the case with the prophets, their office 
 related to the present state of God's Church, no 
 prediction would be spoken by them. Prediction, like 
 miracle, was rare : nevertheless Isaiah declares that 
 on fit and proper occasions prediction is an essential 
 element of prophecy. In those noble chapters in 
 which he so utterly overthrew idolatry, and proved 
 the necessary unity of God's nature, he speaks thus ; 
 ' Tell ye and bring them near (that set up the wood 
 of their graven image, and pray unto a god that 
 cannot save) : Who hath declared this from ancient 
 
II.] OF ITS BESTO W. 1 1 . 
 
 39 
 
 time ? Who hath told it from that time ? Have not 
 I, Jehovah ? and there is no God else beside Me ! 
 A just God and a Saviour: there is none beside Me! 
 (ch. xlv. 21).' And again ; ' I am God, and there is 
 none like Me, declaring the end from the begin- 
 ning, and from ancient times the things that are 
 not yet done ! saying, My counsel shall stand, 
 and I will do all My pleasure (ch. xlvi. 9, 10).' 
 For plainly as God's knowledge is not limited like 
 man's knowledge, so His words cannot be limited 
 like man's words. Nor does the difficulty really 
 lie in the possession by the prophets of this super- 
 human element. It lies farther back in the existence 
 of the supernatural at all. If there be a God ; if 
 that God be more than a blind force ; if He can 
 will and do ; if being thus a personal God He 
 deign to have relations with man, His chief creature 
 here on earth ; if these relations involve His 
 bestowal upon man of such knowledge as, being 
 necessary for man's restoration, could yet in no other 
 way be bestowed except by a message from God, 
 the bearers of that message must have some proof 
 to give that they really are God's messengers ; and 
 no proof can be sufficient except it be supernatural. 
 The two supernatural proofs offered in the Bible are 
 miracle and prediction. Any proofs but these would 
 fall infinitely below the exigencies of the case. 
 
 For you would have men, who professed to bring 
 words from God, words upon which man's ever- 
 lasting salvation depended, and yet these men would 
 have no proof to offer that their words were more than 
 common words. Without prescience of the future, 
 without power over the present, they could do nothing 
 
40 PREDICTION A NECESSARY [LECT. 
 
 to justify the belief that what they said was anything 
 better than hopes and aspirations dictated by their 
 own hearts. Nay more : Christ spake as never man 
 spake. He declares too that for those who are of God 
 His words would be enough : for ' he that is of 
 God heareth God's words (John viii. 47).' He fur- 
 ther says, that if God had not spoken d , if there had 
 been no revelation, as there would have been no 
 covenant of grace, no possibility of salvation, so 
 also there would have been no such thing as sin. 
 Man would have been in the same state as the 
 cattle (John xv. 22). Yet, in spite of this, unless 
 Christ had performed miracles, there would have 
 been, He tells us, no obligation to examine into 
 His claims, and no sin in rejecting Him. ' If I 
 had not done among them the works which none 
 other man did, they had not had sin (lb. xv. 24).' 
 
 God spake then in the prophets : and necessarily 
 His speaking in man must be something more 
 perfect than mere human speaking ; and being itself 
 a miracle, it requires the supernatural proofs of 
 prediction and miracle. And yet it is possible that 
 
 d In God's speaking we must nevertheless include the light of 
 nature. God speaks in the conscience, and the fact that man 
 possesses the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong 
 involves the duty of choosing what is right. A being set between 
 right and wrong, and endowed with the power of distinguishing 
 between them, is bound to do so. Bound to whom ? What follows 
 if he choose evil? If he resist conscience? Bound, I answer, to 
 Him Who gave him a conscience, and Who enabled him to distin- 
 guish between good and evil. A being so endowed must be liable 
 to a future judgment. If not, man is a blunder, a mistake in 
 creation : he has the false semblance of qualities which serve for no 
 useful purpose. As for happiness, instincts would not merely have 
 sufficed, but have better provided for human happiness than con- 
 science does. 
 
II.] ELEMENT OF PROPHECY. 
 
 41 
 
 the wonderful series of absolute predictions respect- 
 ing the person and offices of the Saviour may have 
 led in many minds to too complete an identification 
 of prophecy with the foretelling of future events. 
 Let us then examine what the Bible says of the 
 prophet's office : for this too exclusive consideration 
 of fulfilled prediction, while it rightly appreciates 
 the great value of the Old Testament in bearing 
 witness to us of Christ, yet makes us perhaps put 
 too much out of sight the influence exerted by 
 prophecy upon the Jews, its preparation for Christ's 
 spiritual teaching, and the testimony it bears to 
 many cardinal truths both of Christianity and also 
 of natural religion. 
 
 Let us begin then with the names applied to the 
 prophet in the Hebrew Scriptures. Of these the 
 first is Roe'h, a Seer. With two exceptions this 
 name is applied only to Samuel ; of these the first 
 is in 2 Sam. xv. 27, where David asks the high 
 priest Zadok, whether he is not a seer : while the 
 second is found in the Book of Chronicles (2 Chr. 
 xvi. 7, 10), a work compiled at a date subsequent 
 to the return from Babylon, when the language 
 was no longer spoken or written in its original 
 exactness and purity. Isaiah also uses the term in 
 the plural : ' This is a rebellious people, which say 
 to the seers e , See not, and to the prophets, Prophesy 
 not unto us right things (ch. xxx. 10).' Nowhere 
 
 e The meaning of Isaiah is, that neither in their worldly matters 
 nor in things spiritual would they listen to upright advice. '1'he 
 seers to whom they went on matters of business, the prophet 
 whom they went on matters of conscience, were both to combine 111 
 flattering and cajoling them. Still many of the seers may have 
 been impostors, and false claimants to supernatural po* 
 
42 NAMES APPLIED TO THE PROPHET [lect. 
 
 else does the word occur except with reference to 
 Samuel. 
 
 From the narrative in Samuel we learn that the 
 people were in the habit of consulting the prophets 
 upon occasions of difficulty, and according to the 
 reading in the Septuagint the term Seer was the 
 popular name f assigned to them when so consulted. 
 The Hebrew text makes the term Seer an archaic 
 name for the prophet : the more probable reading 
 of the Septuagint makes it not merely archaic, but 
 also colloquial. In any case the term has nothing to 
 do with prophecy in its proper sense. Even the 
 large majority of those who, as belonging to the 
 prophetic order, were called Nabhis, prophets, were 
 not inspired ° ; and though the term inspiration, or 
 its equivalents, is used in a far wider sense in the 
 Old Testament than we might have expected h , 
 yet there is no reason for supposing that the Seers 
 had any special Divine help whatsoever in resolving 
 the difficulties of the people. Samuel, when con- 
 sulted by Saul, did give him a divinely-inspired 
 answer, but it was because the occasion was a 
 great one ; for the raw youth, who came with his 
 half-shekel to enquire about his father's lost asses, 
 was to be Israel's first king. Undisciplined as he 
 was, unbroken to the yoke, and, as it proved, des- 
 tined to fail in his probation, he yet possessed alike 
 
 f The LXX in I Sam. ix. 9, read Dyn for OVH, the difference being 
 simply the junction of the two central letters. The sense however is 
 much altered, namely, • for the people formerly used to call the 
 prophet the seer.' The difference however in the letters would be much 
 greater in the ancient or Samaritan method of writing, and thus the di- 
 versity of reading is probably subsequent to the Babylonian captivity. 
 
 s See Lecture III. h See Appendix, Note B. 
 
II.] IN THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES. 
 
 43 
 
 great personal and great mental endowments, and 
 by his soldierlike conduct he did much in raising 
 Israel to the dignity of an independent nation. But 
 we have no reason for supposing that Zadok was 
 inspired, or that the seers generally, as a class, were 
 inspired. Even Hanani, who is mentioned in Chron- 
 icles as a seer, though undoubtedly also a prophet '', 
 may have really been a seer in the proper sense of 
 the term, and Asa's rough treatment of him may have 
 arisen from his venturing to transgress his usual office. 
 It may be doubted whether Asa would have dared 
 to imprison one generally regarded as a prophet. 
 
 But though not inspired, the seers were men of 
 acute understanding, and probably often of better 
 education than the mass of the people. By the 
 exercise of a practised intelligence they solved diffi- 
 culties which passed the comprehension of the rude 
 countrymen around them. Their advice possibly was 
 usually good in itself: but its success was due even 
 more perhaps to the renewed energy which it breathed 
 into the enquirer. Many even of these seers may 
 have been impostors, if not consciously, yet uncon- 
 sciously, and have claimed for themselves more than 
 was their due. Even among us in Christian England 
 there are all sorts of pretenders to spiritualistic 
 
 1 He was a prophet, because his reproval of Asa, and the 
 tence passed upon him, are recorded as true prophetic nets. But it 
 would not follow from 2 Chr. xix. 2, as unwary readers might sup- 
 pose. Seer (in Hebrew Chozeh) belongs there to Jehu, who 
 described as above his father in dignity. He was a CI 
 a Roeh. In Hebrew, people are described by their own 1 
 that of their father, and commentators not remembering this, s 
 times ascribe to the father what undoubtedly belo 
 for though our version is ambiguous, the Hebrew is not I 
 hen. Jehu Hananison is the Chozeh, and not Hanani. 
 
44 GRADUAL DISUSE [LECT. 
 
 powers, all sorts of books published which profess to 
 divine the future. And, what is more extraordinary, 
 there are even people who believe in them. But such 
 pretensions can never endure the test of time. And 
 so as regards these seers, the fact that the very name so 
 entirely disappears suggests the idea that it became 
 discreditable 11 . Seers in Samuel's days there were 
 probably plenty : but the word of the Lord was rare, 
 ' It was precious in those days : there was no open 
 vision (i Sam. iii. i).' If seers had been equally rare, 
 there would have been no popular name for them ; 
 nor would Saul's man-servant have known so exactly 
 what was the method of consulting them. If it was 
 customary to ask advice, and make a return in pre- 
 sents of food and half-shekels, there would be plenty, 
 we may be sure, ready to receive the gifts. 
 
 Still at best we can only conjecture what the 
 functions of the seers were. Like so much in Holy 
 Scripture, we learn about them only incidentally, by 
 reason of the providential occurrence which brought 
 Saul to Samuel. No account is given of them, nor 
 was intended to be given : but we may perhaps infer, 
 
 k Like most appellations it was an honourable one at first. For if 
 Roeh does not occur till Samuel's days, other words from the same root 
 do. Thus mar'eh. a vision, is found in Gen. xlvi. 2, ' God spake to Is- 
 rael in the visions of the night,' and in Num. xii. 6, ' If there be a Nabhi 
 among you. I Jehovah will make myself known unto him in a vision.' 
 Here then it is spoken of as the usual form of revelation, yet as some- 
 thing infinitely lower than that which Moses enjoyed. The verb also is 
 of frequent occurrence, as in Gen. xii. 7. One to whom a mar'eh was 
 vouchsafed, would rightly be called roeh. Visions do not however 
 appear to have been the ordinary way in which God revealed Himself 
 to the greater prophets, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, &c, though 
 Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones is the most instructive of that great 
 writer's lessons. 
 
II.] OF THE TERM SEER. 
 
 45 
 
 from the manner in which the name is applied to 
 Samuel, that he was often thus consulted. Every 
 real prophet would be thus beset Instead of taking 
 the trouble of deliberating for themselves, and doing 
 their best, all feeble, slothful, and superstitious people 
 would try to get the prophets to help them out of 
 their difficulties. But in Samuel's time there was 
 some excuse for it. The miserable state of the land 
 after the utter defeat of Israel at Ebenezer (i Sam. iv. 
 I, 10), made the people need, not the advice only but 
 the encouragement, of the wise and thoughtful man 
 who raised up the nation once again from its utter 
 prostration to a renewed life. As he travelled on 
 circuit year by year round the land, not merely 
 judicial matters, but difficulties of every kind were 
 probably laid before him. But again, we have no 
 reason to suppose that either his answers as a Rocli. 
 or his decisions as a Judge, were inspired 1 . As one 
 established to be Jehovah's prophet he was by Divine 
 right the temporal ruler of the country. He ruled 
 well and firmly: he was a just, upright, able, and 
 active man : he was more. God's gifts of grace were 
 
 1 The gift of inspiration rested permanently on Moses, yet not for all 
 and every, but only for fitting purposes. We find him even thankfully 
 accepting the advice of his father-in-law, Jethro, upon a matter of the 
 highest though only temporal consequence (Ex. xviii. 1 3-36). We **t 
 not to suppose, therefore, that in judging the people even he had any 
 supernatural aid. So of the Apostles, St. Paul wrote at least t' 
 epistles to the Corinthians, one of which is not in our canon. 1 
 probably lost, because it was not inspired (i Cor. v. 9). So again, it 1^ 
 by no means certain that he was right in going up to Jerusale 
 the many warnings he had of what awaited him (Acts \x. -•;,. Dti 1 
 the warnings were perhaps given him to prevent the great loss which 
 the Church would sustain by his imprisonment. Bnt he was an in- 
 trepid, determined man: was he also obedient? 
 
46 MEANING OF THE TWO WORDS [LECT. 
 
 largely possessed and used by him. One so holy, so 
 pure in word and deed, was well worthy that under 
 the extraordinary circumstances of the Jewish dispen- 
 sation, the higher gift of Divine knowledge should 
 rest upon him, to be used on all fitting and proper 
 occasions. But miracle and prophecy were ever too 
 sparingly given to justify us in supposing that the 
 Roeh, the seer, possessed anything more than ordinary 
 but practised acuteness. He must not be confounded 
 with the prophet m . 
 
 In the authorized version the term seer repeatedly 
 occurs elsewhere, but it is the translation of an entirely 
 different word. When we read in the same verse 
 (i Chron. xxix. 29) of ' Samuel the seer, and Nathan 
 the prophet, and Gad the seer,' it would not suggest 
 itself to an English reader, that the three terms are 
 
 m The Bible never does confound these entirely different gifts in 
 Samuel. When Saul goes to consult him about his asses, it is inci- 
 dentally mentioned that the vulgar view of the prophet was that he was 
 a person to be consulted in the ordinary difficulties of life It is quite 
 possible that Samuel may have been even called Seer from this one 
 occurrence. For the choice of Saul as king, and the valiant achieve- 
 ment (1 Sam. xi.) which made all Israel feel that he was king in 
 very deed, must have made the whole land ring with every incident in 
 his appointment. I incline however to the other view, that Samuel 
 did give the people advice in their troubles. But this was a very 
 different thing from those weighty matters in which ' Jehovah was with 
 him,' and for which ' Jehovah appeared to him in Shiloh.' As Moses 
 was the founder, so was Samuel the restorer of Israel; and it was, in 
 this grand work that ' all Israel from Dan even to Beersheba knew that 
 Samuel was established to be Jehovah's prophet (i Sam. Hi. 19-21).' 
 Even the heathen could see that the two things were essentially distinct : 
 for so we read of Oedipus, 
 
 avSpwv at irpcurov ev re avfupopais,. fiiQV 
 KpivovTts, iv T€ dacfMuvcuv owaWayaTs. 
 
 Oed. Tyr. 33, 34. 
 
II.] TRANSLATED 'SEER.' 
 
 47 
 
 essentially dissimilar 1 . Samuel is the Roek, the man 
 who can see, whose eyes are open, and who therefore 
 is consulted in all the more important circumstances 
 of human life. Gad is Chozeh, the gazer, one who 
 sees visions, not the acute intelligent man, possessed 
 of insight in matters of worldly business, but the 
 tranced man who gazes with dazed eyes upon the 
 verities of the spiritual world. This term is as 
 distinctly modern, as that of Roeh is archaic. The 
 usual term for a prophecy was Massa°, a sentence, but 
 also meaning a burden, and so usually rendered in 
 our version. ' Remember how that when I and thou 
 rode together after Ahab, Jehovah burdened this 
 burden upon him,' but more correctly passed this 
 sentence (2 Kings ix. 25). Subsequently a prophecy 
 was called a vision, a term apparently brought into 
 general use by Isaiah p, and probably having in his 
 writings a distinct reference to the glorious spectacle 
 (ch. vi.) by which he was inaugurated into his office. 
 
 u Ewald (History of Israel, vol. i. 189 note, ed. Martineau) affirms 
 that these words are not intended to convey different ideas, as is clear 
 from 2Chron. xii. 15, xiii. 22. I believe on the contrary that every 
 word has its own proper idea, and its several history. Still, I grant 
 that the word Chozeh, applied to Gad, came in popular language to be 
 used as almost identical with Nabbi prophet, though its idea and origin 
 are distinct. Mr. Martineau's translation, however, of Chozeh as viewer, 
 is unfortunate. To view implies careful, exact examination. To view 
 a vision is impossible. The real equivalent of Chozeh is gazer. Ewald's 
 references do not touch the word Roeh. In a different place, in his 
 Propheten d. A. Bundes i. 27 note, ed. 2, Ewald regards the three nai 
 Roeh, Nabhi, and Chozeh as distinct in idea, and as marking t ; 
 progressive stages in the development of Hebrew prophecy. 
 
 See note to page 3^. 
 
 p Before Isaiah's time it occurs only in the 'open vision,' literally, 
 'the vision bursting forth' of 1 Sam. hi. i, and in Psaho bnodx. 10, and 
 Prov xxix. 18. 
 
48 'NAB HI' THE PROPER TERM [lect. 
 
 By the simpler visions of the almond rod and the 
 seething caldron Jeremiah (ch. i. 1 1, 13) was summoned 
 to be Jehovah's prophet, and Ezekiel (ch. i. 4-28) by the 
 chariot of the cherubim, and the four living creatures. 
 And thus the thought of a vision became inseparably 
 connected with the prophetic office. By a vision the 
 prophet was appointed : and the word was applied 
 collectively to the whole body or mass of a prophet's 
 writings (Isa. i. 1, Obad. 1, Nah. i. 1, and 2 Chron. 
 xxxii. 32), because in that inaugural vision all the 
 rest, all God's subsequent revelations to him, virtually 
 were contained. 
 
 This term, then, Chozeh, the seer, however dif- 
 ferent in derivation, became in time equivalent to the 
 word 'prophet.' It meant the man who had been 
 summoned to speak for God by a vision such as those 
 of Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. It does not 
 follow that Gad had seen such a vision ; it was simply 
 a title first applied to the prophet in Isaiah's time 
 because of the magnificent spectacle which he had 
 witnessed, and which subsequently lost its special 
 meaning, and was used of all the prophets indis- 
 criminatelyi. And then, lastly, there is the one 
 proper term for the prophet, Nabhi. Its derivation is 
 from a root signifying ' to bubble up like a fountain r .' 
 
 q This indiscriminate use of it however is confined to the Books of 
 Chronicles. By his contemporaries I do not doubt but that Gad was 
 called Nabhi. 
 
 r Ewald, Proph. d. A. B. i. 7, ed. 2, explains Nabhi as meaning a 
 loud clear speaker. But he draws his explanation from the Arabic. 
 This use of Arabic I have long rejected as utterly unscientific, and as 
 having done more to corrupt Hebrew and to confuse Hebrew scholars 
 than anything besides. Who would dream of settling the meaning of 
 an Anglo-Saxon word by its present signification in English, or 
 
II.] IN HEBREW FOR PROPHET. 
 
 4<> 
 
 But this overflowing fulness is not the prophet's own. 
 The verb never occurs either in the Hebrew, the 
 Syriac, or the Chaldee in the active voice. Like 
 vaticinor in Latin, and fiavrevofiat in Greek, it is 
 properly a passive, and as a passive 5 it is constantly 
 used in the Scriptures both of the writings and of the 
 oral teachings of the prophets. It was by compulsion 
 that the message burst forth from their lips. So the 
 word implies ; and Jeremiah declares that such was 
 literally the case with him. In deep distress at the 
 supposed failure of his efforts, disappointed of his 
 hopes, with wounded feelings at the mockery and 
 derision which daily attended his preaching, sur- 
 rounded by false prophets to whom the people 
 willingly gave ear, he wickedly rebelled against God, 
 and determined to cast his high office from him. 
 'Then I said, I will not make mention of Him, nor 
 speak any more in His name.' But Jeremiah's 
 rebellion was as vain as Jonah's flight. ' His word,' 
 he says, 'was in my heart, shut up in my bones : and 
 I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay 
 (Jer. xx. 9).' The prophet therefore neither regarded 
 himself, nor was regarded by others as entirely a free 
 agent. His freedom was not absolutely overpowered ; 
 
 interpret the laws of the ten tables by French or Italian? There is a 
 connection between Himyaritic Arabic and Hebrew sufficiently near to 
 be of use: between the Arabic dialect which Mohammed adopted and 
 Hebrew there is just such a false show of semblance as suffices to lead 
 all those who use it utterly wrong. 
 
 8 The passive in Hebrew is called Ni/al. As an instance of the use 
 of the verb in Nifal we may quote Amos iii. 8 : — 
 ' The lion hath roared : who will not fear? 
 The Lord Jehovah hath spoken: who will not proph 
 i.e. who will not be compelled to pour forth. Our version, as usual, 
 translates the vowels of the name of God, and leaves tin 
 which alone are genuine, untranslated. 
 
 E 
 
50 REAL AND FALSE PROPHECY [lect. 
 
 but there was a bit in his mouth, and to be restive 
 and struggle against it only brought grief and 
 suffering upon himself. 
 
 The verb is also used in the reflective 1 voice, he 
 acted the prophet. In this way it is spoken of the 
 seventy elders, and of Eldad and Medad in the camp 
 (Num. xi. 25-27) ; of the music and dancing of the 
 sons of the prophets (1 Sam. x. 5) ; of Saul's partici- 
 pation in their religious exercises (1 Sam. x. 6, 10, 13); 
 of the excited cries and contortions of the prophets 
 of Baal (1 Kings xviii. 29) ; of the prophets who 
 prophesied lies at Jerusalem (Jer. xiv. 14) ; and of 
 those at Samaria who professed to be inspired by 
 Baal (Jer. xxiii. 13). So, too, it is the word 
 employed by Ahab, who probably regarded with 
 something like contempt the wish of Jehoshaphat 
 to know Jehovah's will (1 Kings xxii. 8, 18). Oc- 
 casionally therefore it is used in a good sense, 
 though scarcely ever of real prophecy. The seventy 
 elders were regularly appointed to their high office 
 of being deputies for Moses in the administration 
 of justice, by having a share of the spirit that rested 
 upon him communicated to them u (Num. xi. 17). 
 It was God's gift, but it was the gift of govern- 
 ment ; just as it was God's spirit that rested upon 
 Bezaleel, but it was the gift of artistic skill. Twice 
 however it approaches the character of real prophecy. 
 Thus it is said that Eliezer acted the prophet as to the 
 
 * This is called in Hebrew the Hithpahel. It means, to give one's 
 self out as, or profess one's self, a prophet, to play the prophet. 
 
 u When first communicated there was evidently however a certain 
 amount of excitement and agitation on their part, showing itself in 
 unpremeditated and perhaps partially incoherent utterances, chiefly 
 probably of praise. 
 
II.] NEVER CONFOUNDED EV THE HEBREW. 51 
 
 wrecking of Jehoshaphat's navy (2 Chron. xx. 37) * ; 
 but the use of the verb suggests that Eliezer brought 
 a prophetic message merely to Jehoshaphat ; that he 
 came in the character of a prophet, but was not him- 
 self inspired. And finally, in the vision of the dry 
 bones (Ezek. xxxvii. 4, 9, 10, 12), Ezekiel is com- 
 manded — not to prophesy to the dry bones, and to 
 the wind, as our version renders it, but — to act as a 
 prophet. It was a vision, not a real occurrence. 
 The vision was a revelation, and though Ezekiel 
 seemed to himself to take part in it, and to give 
 commands in the character of a prophet, this really 
 was part of the vision, and not an actual fact. And 
 the Hebrew, with that wonderful accuracy which 
 marks every part alike of the Old and New Testa- 
 ments in the original tongues, notes the distinction. 
 It says that Ezekiel seemed to himself to take part 
 in this vision, to be summoned to act in a prophetic 
 capacity, and as such to utter God's commands. 
 
 Everywhere else the distinction between the real pro- 
 phetic gift (Nifal), and the mere acting the prophet 
 (Hithpahel) is so clearly marked that none can mis- 
 take it. The music and dancing of the sons of the 
 prophets formed part of their regular education, 
 and very probably were carried on, as dancing is 
 in the East now, with an intense and enthusiastic 
 
 * The Books of Chronicles however, the latest in date of the 
 Hebrew Scriptures, being composed when Chaldee and qoI Hebrew 
 was the vulgar tongue, are not so exact in language as the 
 and therefore if any one considers that Eliezer was himself a 
 prophet, all I can say is that he may have been, but he maj 
 If he was an independent prophet, then the use of the Hithpahel is 
 a Chaldaism: for the Chaldee, having no Nifal, uses the Hithpahel 
 as a simple passive. 
 
 E 2 
 
52 EXAMPLES [LECT. 
 
 excitement, such as seemed to pass the bounds of 
 nature, while really it did not. But as a general 
 rule, everywhere except in the four places y I have 
 mentioned, the word is used absolutely in a bad 
 sense, of a false and w 7 icked sham, a blasphemous 
 pretence. The distinction is so plain that it is noticed 
 at least once in our version — ' Every man that maketh 
 himself a prophet (Jer. xxix. 26).' The Hebrew tells 
 us that the prophets who prophesied lies at Jerusalem, 
 and the Baal prophets at Samaria, and those who 
 leaped on Baal's altar, while Elijah derided their 
 folly, were not prophets made by God, but men 
 who made themselves prophets. So, too, in Ahab's 
 mouth the word was a confession of his unbelief. 
 Neither the four hundred Jehovah-prophets, who 
 bade him go and prosper, nor Micaiah, who warned 
 him that he would go and die, were in his view 
 men instinct with a higher power, but men who 
 practised an art for their own gain. 
 
 But the word is even used in a worse sense. When 
 Saul had failed in his probation, and fallen from God, 
 and hardened himself in crime, it is said that ' an evil 
 spirit of God came upon Saul, and he prophesied in 
 the midst of the house (1 Sam. xviii. io).' Really 
 the word means that he imitated the prophetic ex- 
 citement, and raved, and roamed about in a moody 
 frantic state, miserable no doubt as bad men are ; but 
 instead of repenting he let jealousy take possession 
 of him, and twice in his phrenzy cast his javelin at 
 David. There was no doubt, a certain degree of 
 
 y These four are (1) The seventy elders; (2) The sons of the 
 prophets ; (3) Eliezer's mission to Jehoshaphat ; (4) Ezekiel's vision of 
 the dry bones. 
 
«•] OF FALSE PROPHECY. 
 
 53 
 
 madness in his state : and to this day the Orientals 
 regard madness as something divine. Even in the 
 true prophets there was occasionally this labouring 
 and excitement of spirit, such as made Elisha call for 
 a minstrel to soothe his troubled feelings before he 
 would prophesy in the presence of a son of Ahab. 
 And so when a son — a disciple — of the prophets 
 came as Elisha's messenger to anoint Jehu, the 
 captains, struck by his strangely abrupt and hasty 
 manner, describe him to Jehu as a madman : — ' Where- 
 fore came this mad fellow to thee? (2 Kings ix. 11)' 
 So too in the Book of Jeremiah, madness and this 
 acting the prophet are coupled together in the con- 
 temptuous letter of the false prophet Shcmaiah, 
 wherein, writing from Babylon, he urges the deputy 
 high priest (Pakid) Zephaniah to punish and imprison 
 Jeremiah. ' Jehovah,' he says, ' has made thee priest, 
 that thou shouldest put in prison and into the 
 stocks every man that is mad and maketh himself a 
 prophet (Jer. xxix. 26).' By this use of the word he 
 asserted that Jeremiah's claims to be a prophet were 
 untrue 2 . 
 
 2 Ewald, Proph. d. A. B. i. 13, describes madness as the melan- 
 choly side of prophecy, resulting from the prophet not being able 
 to control the strong emotions arising from the violence with which 
 the Divine truth urges itself upon him, and hurries his whole 
 nature along. Having thus lost his balance, he becomes either a 
 fanatic or a dreamer. In proof of this he refers to Hos. ix 7. where 
 'the inspired man' is described as -mad,' or rather as going back- 
 wards and forwards, in a state of great excitement Bui 
 excitement would imply no madness. The prophet is 
 the days of Israels visitation, when the- Assyrian host would crush 
 the ten tribes with the sword. The' nabbi, who had long | 
 repentance and foretold the coming ruin, would QOW be .1 'fi 
 having no more counsel to give-, no more \ '"• '•" u,{,u ' 
 
 salutary advice to utter. And 'the inspired man * might wed . 
 
54 EXTREME ACCURACY [lect. 
 
 And thus, then, there is no looseness or inaccuracy 
 in the Bible itself as to this great gift of Divine in- 
 spiration. The seventy elders, and Eldad and Medad, 
 had a gift, but not that of prophecy. The sons of 
 the prophets had no supernatural aid in their music 
 and dancing. Saul, the false prophets at Jerusalem, 
 the Baal priests of Samaria, raved no doubt ; but of 
 prophecy there is not a word. So exact is the Scripture, 
 that Moses does not wish that the Lord's people had 
 even such a gift as that of Eldad and Medad. He 
 does not wish them either to claim what they did not 
 possess, or to be all appointed officers and rulers in 
 Israel. There would not have been room for all to 
 be rulers. What he wishes is, that they were all 
 true, genuine prophets, such as he was himself. 
 'Would God that all Jehovah's people were Nabhis!' 
 As regards this word Nabhi, the first place where 
 it occurs is Gen. xx. 7, where Abimelech is warned 
 in a dream to restore Sarah to Abraham, ' for he 
 is a nabhi, and he shall pray for thee.' The word 
 in this ancient book a is thus used in a distinct sense 
 
 about, horror-stricken at the miserable end of his country. There 
 is in fact a plain allusion in the word to Deut. xxviii. 34, where it 
 is said that the sight of the horrors committed by an invading army 
 would produce this feeling in the minds of the conquered Israelites. 
 The word does not imply the loss of reason, but only a frantic 
 state of excitement. See 1 Sam. xxi. 14, 15, 2 Kings ix. 11, Jer. 
 xxix. 26 Even if David's terror had made him temporarily deranged, 
 the word itself does not prove it. 
 
 a Owing possibly to the Massorites having done their best to 
 carry out a uniform system of grammar and pronunciation through- 
 out the Bible, people entertain the vague idea that the language 
 of the Pentateuch differs but slightly from that of Isaiah and other 
 later writers. The exact opposite is the case. Not only is there 
 an absence of several distinctions of gender which came into use 
 afterwards, but as a usual rule the words employed are different. 
 
II.] OF THE LANGUAGE OF THE BIBLE. 
 
 55 
 
 from any that it ever had in later times 1 '. It means 
 one under God's special protection, one holding a 
 closer than ordinary relation with God, and whose 
 prayers therefore are acceptable. It may suggest the 
 idea that Abraham bore a sort of sacred character ; 
 but his paying tithes to Melchizedek shows that such 
 was not the case to any large extent. And certainly 
 the history never sets him before us as one who 
 had any message from God to the Canaanites c . He 
 
 I became gradually more and more aware of this in writing my 
 Syriac Thesaurus. I there found that the Syriac word is constantly 
 represented by one word in the Pentateuch, and by another in later 
 books. Ewald, whose view is that the historical books of the 
 Old Testament have been recast an indefinite number of times, 
 yet fully grants this fact so destructive of his theories. Speaking 
 of ' the great book of the primitive history,' and of ' the great book 
 of the kings (Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings) ' he says : ' Although 
 both are equally made up of passages by the most diverse writers, 
 yet on the whole each is distinguished by a peculiar cast of lan- 
 guage. Many fresh words and expressions become favourites here, 
 and supplant their equivalents in the primitive history ; others 
 that are thoroughly in vogue here are designedly avoided in the 
 primitive history, and evidently from a historical consciousness 
 that they were not in use in the earliest times; but the most 
 remarkable and pervading characteristic is that words of common 
 life, which never occur to the pen of any single relator of the 
 primitive history, find an unquestioned reception here.' — \\\>\. 
 Israel, i. 133. In the face of this he affirms that the basis of the 
 Pentateuch is in the main two historical works (helped out by a 
 multitude of others), the first the Booh of Covenants, written in 
 Samuel's time, and parts of which are incorporated in Jvdgis; 
 and the Book of Origins, which covers the whole space from Gen. L 
 to the building of Solomon's temple, and of which parts are incor- 
 porated in 1 Ki?igs. Both works, then, had a common basis: how 
 could the language be kept distinct? 
 
 u The passage quoted from Ps. cv. 15, is a remarkable coi 
 ration of this. Tradition had evidently preserved the tact that the 
 patriarchs had been called prophets, at a time when such a meaning 
 of the term had long disappeared from the ordinary language. 
 
 c Abraham, taking with him a powerful elan (Gen. \iv. 14), left 
 the probably more thickly peopled Ur of the Chajdees, and si: 
 
56 ABRAHAM AND THE PATRIARCHS [lect 
 
 taught his own household religiously, as every up- 
 right head of a family would now, but he had no 
 commission to speak in God's name, and reveal His 
 will. Once, and once only besides, is there a similar 
 use of the word in Holy Scripture. ' Touch not my 
 anointed, and do my prophets no harm (Ps. cv. 15).' 
 The prophets here referred to are the twelve patri- 
 archs, men not inspired, but living in closer than 
 ordinary relations to God, as admitted into cove- 
 nant with Him. 
 
 The next place in which the word NabJii occurs 
 is one that throws singular light upon its meaning, 
 and which will sufficiently settle its true sense. 
 'Jehovah said unto Moses, See, I have made thee 
 a God, Elohim, to Pharaoh, and Aaron thy brother 
 shall be thy prophet (Ex. vii. 1).' Now Aaron had 
 no message of his own to deliver. He was not even 
 a man fit to be trusted apart from Moses (Ex. xxxii. 
 1-6). His duty was to find words with which to 
 explain to the people the will of Moses, according to 
 what we read in the parallel place, 'Aaron shall be 
 thy spokesman unto the people (literally, shall speak 
 
 quently Haran, to wander in the southern districts of Palestine, 
 a region by no means of great fertility, and where the population 
 was sparse. We find the Amorites there confederate with him, 
 and a priest-king blessing him in the name of ' the most high God,' 
 and receiving tithes of him (Gen. xiv. 13, 19, 20). We gather 
 from this that though the Canaanites in many of the more fertile 
 parts were grossly voluptuous, yet that they still possessed some 
 knowledge of the true God, and were not tainted in the country 
 districts with the sins which brought down chastisement on the 
 cities of the plain (Gen. xv. 16). Abraham then wandered in the 
 wildernesses of southern Palestine to preserve his clan from corrup- 
 tion, just as afterwards Israel was shut up in Goshen that it might 
 remain pure. The time for the regeneration of the world had not 
 yet come, and Israel was only being trained for effecting it. 
 
II.] IN WHAT SENSE PROPHETS. -; 
 
 for thee to the people) : and he shall be to thee 
 instead of a mouth, and thou shalt be to him instead 
 of God (Ex. iv. 1 6).' Now God and man are so 
 infinitely remote in their own proper natures, that 
 without a mediator or interpreter it would not be 
 possible for them to hold any communication with 
 one another. God's will, and whatever knowledge 
 He may be pleased to give us of heavenly things, 
 must be brought down to human ideas and narrowed 
 to the smallness of human words, before we can possi- 
 bly understand them. To suppose that human words 
 and human ideas can be adequate exponents of divine 
 truths in their full perfectness is simply absurd. As 
 certainly as a vessel can hold no more than its own 
 measure, so certainly no being can understand any- 
 thing higher than itself. The animals have no power 
 of understanding those qualities in which man trans- 
 cends the limits of their nature : man has no power 
 of understanding those qualities in which angels excel 
 us d : the very angels and archangels have no power 
 
 d We must suppose that St. Paul himself understood the revelations 
 made to him in 2 Cor. xii; and also that there was nothing unlawful or 
 unfit to communicate to other saints in the things of which the angels con- 
 versed with him. But if St. Paul understood those revelations only 1»> 
 supernatural help, the law which prevented his communicating them to 
 others (2 Cor. xii. 4) must have been the law of man's nature. The 
 revelations probably did relate to those things into which men often si 
 earnestly try to penetrate — the mysteries of Christ's future kingdom and 
 of the world to come. Now if St. Paul had endeavoured to bring down 
 these paradisiacal ideas to the level of human language, he wi 
 necessarily have been misunderstood, and the Church would have been 
 injured and not benefited by having revelations made to il 
 bounds of its present capacities. Hence it is a note of 1 
 Scriptures that they are silent upon these mysteries. The IK 
 proach to an exposition of them is in Rev. xx, and early com 
 strongly condemned what looks like a not unreasoi I L< - 
 St. John's words. 
 
58 THE PROPHET [lect. 
 
 of comprehending God's infinities. For the finite, 
 however large, can never comprehend the Infinite. 
 If then any knowledge of heavenly things was to be 
 given to man, there must be a mediator between God 
 and man. The very centre of Christianity is that such 
 a Mediator has been given ; one in Whom the infinite, 
 incomprehensible, unapproachable God became one 
 with finite man. In this God-man, the Immanuel, Whom 
 Isaiah describes as God's especial sign, there was this 
 meeting of heaven and earth, by means of which the 
 truths of heaven could be communicated to man. ' God 
 spake in the Son :' it became possible to express in 
 human ideas and human words, not perfect knowledge, 
 but such knowledge of divine things as was necessary 
 for man's salvation. And such as Christ was in His 
 fulness, such were the prophets in their degree. I bade 
 you before remark that the Apostle uses the same 
 word of them as of our blessed Lord. And now 
 I ask you to observe how, in the very first place 
 in which the word ' prophet ' is used in its proper 
 sense, we have just the same truths set before us. 
 We should shrink from the language twice used, 
 that any one man should be a God to another. But 
 it is God Who speaks it. And how deep the mystery ! 
 Moses as God, Pharaoh as sinful man, cannot approach 
 one another. There must be a mediator. The pro- 
 phet is that mediator. Until the true Mediator came, 
 the prophet was His representative. When the true 
 Mediator had come there were prophets no more. 
 There are no mediators now between heaven and 
 earth. Christ is the one point of junction, the one 
 bridge which makes a pathway over the abyss, and 
 unites the Infinite and the finite. The last repre- 
 
II.] A MEDIATOR. 59 
 
 sentative prophet was John the Baptist. The 7rpo<f>7JT7js 
 of St. Paul's epistles, the Ttpo$i]T7)>i of the early Church, 
 was something quite different. His business was to 
 preach, to speak for God by urging upon the con- 
 sciences of the people acknowledged truths. He hail 
 no new truth to declare; bore no message from God but 
 that once for all entrusted to the Church's keeping. 
 
 Under the Old Testament, then, the prophet was 
 the mediator, whose business it was in his measure 
 to do that which Christ did fully and finally for His 
 Church. For the whole theory of the Bible is that 
 man needs a certain amount of information as to his 
 soul, its relations to God, and to eternity. This know- 
 ledge must be conveyed to man through some such 
 medium as will enable him to understand it. It 
 cannot be perfect knowledge, because man is incap- 
 able of understanding perfect knowledge. It would be 
 no use giving man even angelic knowledge : for man 
 is not merely 'an earthen vessel' (2 Cor. iv. 7), but 
 a very small vessel ; the utmost knowledge there- 
 fore of which he is capable is but little, and that 
 little must be in relation to himself, and such 
 as suits his feeble powers. God then chose men as 
 the mediators to convey to man in a human way, as 
 being the only way in which he could possibly un- 
 derstand it, such knowledge as was both necessary 
 and sufficient. Sufficient it must be, or it were no 
 Sood giving it at all. But the amount of truth given 
 was limited by man's needs. There Is all that lie 
 requires, but nothing more: nothing given to satisfy 
 our curiosity, or even our thirst after knowledge. \ et 
 God of His mercy has given us this limited measure 
 of truth in such a way that we seem never to reach 
 
60 REVELATION NOT PERFECT [lect. 
 
 the bottom of it. The more we read, the more full 
 of meaning the Bible seems to be : and as men 
 grow in grace it does unfold to them more and more 
 of God's ways, and they do see more clearly in it 
 God's mysteries of love, and read it with deeper awe 
 and reverence, as it speaks to them with more power, 
 and becomes day by day more thoroughly the law by 
 which they live, and the comfort which sustains them 
 in this troubled world. Still, we are not to read it for 
 knowledge' sake merely, but for use. It has been given 
 to us to enable us to walk in that narrow pathway 
 whereby we may attain to those mansions of perfec- 
 tion where knowledge also will be ours, for ' we shall 
 know even as also we are known (i Cor. xiii. 12).' 
 
 I know that by many these mansions are regarded 
 as but an unsubstantial hope ; and each advance in 
 science, each growth in knowledge, as it reveals to us 
 more and more of those perfect laws by which the 
 Creator works, is supposed to remove that Creator 
 from us, and to leave us laws only without a lawgiver, 
 and earth only without a heaven. But however perfect 
 the knowledge of our bodies may become, there is 
 ever something beyond, something which physical 
 science cannot grasp, because it lies not within its 
 province ; and still do the secret cravings of our nature 
 prompt the question, Has this earthly body, con- 
 structed so curiously and admirably, any unearthly 
 inhabitant ? Is life mere chymical action and nothing 
 more ? Are these so-called mental workings within it 
 simply the result of organization, and therefore not 
 mental but corporeal ? Are there truths that lie safe 
 within the heart of man, because placed there by God ? 
 or are they, not truths, but unsubstantial mockeries ? 
 
II.] BUT SUFFICIENT. 61 
 
 The answer to these questions cannot be given by 
 physical science ; it belongs to other studies, studies 
 such as those in which Plato of old excelled, who, by 
 the examination of the workings of the human mind. 
 deduced the conclusion that there was in man some- 
 thing immortal. The very first lesson about man in 
 the Bible is that he was made out of the dust of the 
 ground. We start with this ; every part of man's 
 bodily organization is physical : and science, by giving 
 a more exact meaning to the language of Scripture, 
 does but enable us with deeper insight to join in the 
 Psalmist's words, ' I will praise Thee, for I am fearfully 
 and wonderfully made' (Ps. exxxix. 14). But it gives 
 no answer to the question, Is the universal belief of 
 mankind in the existence of a God the result of a 
 Divine impress upon the human mind ? Is it a breach 
 of my nature to deny that God exists, and that He- 
 has relations with me ? Are those other words of the 
 Bible true which speak of man as made in God's 
 image and likeness ? (Gen. i. 26). Now verities such 
 as these the Bible never attempts to prove. It never 
 strays off into philosophy or metaphysical science, 
 any more than it does into physical science. Wher- 
 ever any allusion is made to these branches of know- 
 ledge, it is for some moral purpose. The existence 
 of a God, His unity and perfectness ; the existence of 
 a soul, its immortality and spiritual nature,- the* 
 cardinal truths are taught by the very constitution 
 the human mind, and by its irresistible promptii 
 The Bible does but state them clearly, purely, ade- 
 quately: it does not prove, but asserts them. H 
 asserts them as self-evident truths. Apart from re- 
 ligion they may be but probabilities ; yet even as th< 
 
62 THE THEOCRATIC GOVERNMENT [lect. 
 
 probabilities of our nature, they become the law of 
 our nature — the law of our higher and spiritual, though 
 not of our physical nature. The groundwork of the 
 Bible is the tacit assumption that there is a difference 
 between right and wrong, that answering to this dif- 
 ference there is in man a conscience, above man a 
 God, and before man a judgment. It assumes this, 
 and the prophet's message related simply to man's 
 duty to God ; it told him of his present probation, of 
 his future hopes, of God's love, of an opened way of 
 mercy, of sins forgiven, of man reconciled to his 
 Maker, and admitted to an eternal happiness. The 
 prophet in these things was God's spokesman. 
 
 Now there are two things in the Mosaic record 
 entirely in accordance with what I have here said, 
 and which will both themselves be better understood 
 if viewed in connection with the prophet's office, and 
 also throw much light upon it. The one is the 
 nature of the government of the Jews as established 
 by Moses, the other is his celebrated prediction of 
 God raising up unto them a prophet like unto 
 himself. 
 
 The idea of the government established by Moses 
 was that of Jehovah's direct autocracy. The Jews 
 were fenced off from all other people, and were to 
 live under a special providence, with Jehovah as 
 their king. The actual administrator of the govern- 
 ment was to be chosen by Him, and was to have His 
 direct aid and counsel. The ordinary means provided 
 for this by Moses was the Urim and Thummim ; and 
 the priest was the appointed person by whom Je- 
 hovah's will was to be made known. But Moses 
 himself made no use of the Urim and Thummim. 
 
II.] IMPLIED THE EXISTENCE OF THE PROPHET. 63 
 
 It was intended for use only when there was no 
 prophet : and thus when, after Samuel's days, God 
 was pleased to bestow the gift of prophecy more 
 abundantly, we read of it no more. David is the 
 last person mentioned as thus consulting God, and 
 Abiathar the last priest who spake in God's name by 
 means of the ephod e . The priest therefore with 
 the Urim and Thummim was confessedly something 
 inferior to the prophet. Probably nothing more could 
 be learned by it than Yea and Nay. And while it is 
 quite possible that Moses may have expected that 
 the priests would perform many of those duties which 
 as a matter of fact they neglected — I mean the spiri- 
 tual duties of their office, teaching, and preaching, 
 and instructing the people, and warning them of 
 their sins, and urging upon them the necessity of a 
 godly life ; — while the priests seem to have attached 
 
 e Thus David 'enquired of Jehovah' not only when fleeing from 
 Saul (1 Sam. xxiii. 9), but in his wars with the Philistines after 
 he was made king (2 Sam. v. 19, 23, 1 Chron. xiv. 10, 14). From 
 1 Sam. xxviii. 6, however, it appears that we must not infer that the 
 term 'enquired of Jehovah' necessarily implied making use of the 
 ephod, so that it is quite possible that Nathan, or some other 
 prophet, may have given David the instructions recorded in 2 Sam. 
 v. 19, 23. Passages certainly referring to the Urim and Thummim are 
 Judges xx. 27, 1 Sam. xxii. 10, 15, xxviii. 6, 2 Sam. ii. 1, xvi. 2^, 1 Chron. 
 x. 14, xiii. 3, and probably 2 Sam. xxi. 1. We observe in these passages 
 that it is accounted as a sin to Saul that he made no use of the Urim 
 and Thummim; that is, being the first king, he deliberately rejected 
 that means whereby the will of Jehovah as their civil ruler had 
 been previously made known. David's restoration of the ark 1 
 place, and his frequent use of it and of the ephod, mark his deter- 
 mination to rule as Jehovah's representative. Nevertheless gradually 
 he abandoned the use of it, and in the rebellion of Absalom In- a 
 lutely declined the presence, not only of the ark, but "t Zadok and 
 Abiathar (2 Sam. xv. 24-29). Whatever bis reason may have 
 been, he refused to make use of the Urim and Thummim in that 
 unnatural war. 
 
64 THE PROPHET HIGHER [lect. 
 
 themselves too much to their ritual duties, and to 
 have neglected the weightier matters of their office, 
 still, even from the first, the prophet stood on a far 
 higher elevation than the priest. Moses was as high 
 above Aaron as Isaiah was above Azariah, the high 
 priest of the house of Zadok (2 Chron. xxxi. 10) in 
 Hezekiah's days ; as high above Aaron as Jeremiah 
 was above Seraiah and Zephaniah, the high priests 
 in Zedekiah's days (Jer. Hi. 24) ; as high above Aaron 
 as the spiritual must ever be above ritual. And the 
 prophets, with their earnest preaching and teaching, 
 their incessant admonition of the people, their stern 
 and unwavering denunciations of sin, their attacks 
 upon idolatry, their warnings that sacrifices and 
 sabbaths, fastings and festivals, might be an abomin- 
 ation, and that to trust in the temple — to trust in any- 
 thing but in a cleansed heart and a contrite spirit — 
 might be to trust in lying words (Jer. vii. 4) ; — they 
 in all this were the worthy followers of Moses. They 
 had not necessarily civil power. Samuel possessed it ; 
 and we read that in his days the possession of the 
 spiritual illumination of the Nabhi carried with it 
 the right to the government of the state f . But when 
 the people determined to have a king, they separated 
 the two things for ever, and Samuel long protested 
 
 f This is implied in i Sam. iii. 20. It seems, from the example 
 of Eli, that, when there was no prophet, the high priest was invested 
 with the temporal power, possibly because he alone could consult 
 Jehovah by means of the Ui im. As the ark is often associated with 
 the Urim, the people probably took it and Eli's sons with them to 
 battle for the purpose of obtaining auguries (r Sam. iv. 4); but 
 immediately that it became plain that the prophetic inspiration rested 
 upon Samuel, the priests with the Urim retired into their proper 
 office, and Samuel, as Nabhi, became also Shophet or Judge. 
 
II.] THAN THE PRIEST WITH THE URIM $a 
 
 against the change, because he saw that henceforward 
 the true representative of Jehovah, the true adminis- 
 trator of the theocratic government, would be deprived 
 of his right place. But even then the prophets had 
 the right, and usually the power, to dethrone kings, 
 and bestow the crown upon others (i Kings xi. 31, 
 &c). And though shorn, from the days of Saul, of 
 the civil power, yet in all other respects they were 
 the successors of Moses ; only so far from excelling 
 that great spokesman for God, Holy Scripture clearly 
 points out the particulars in which the rest of the 
 prophets fell short of the full powers possessed by 
 the first and greatest of their order (Num. xii. 6-8, 
 Heb. iii. 5). 
 
 The prophet then was the representative of God 
 under the theocratic government, the vizier, or deputy, 
 whose business it was to speak in God's name. And 
 in the Book of Judges, the civil governors, who were 
 also God's representatives, hold a sort of prophetic posi- 
 tion. Deborah indeed judged Israel because she was a 
 prophetess, and the warrior Barak obeyed her. Her 
 successors were men chosen, as we should say, provi- 
 dentially, yet some by direct commission, by the agency 
 of angels, as Gideon and Samson. But their gift was 
 in the main that of government and military skill. 
 And thus, as not having the highest gift, that of 
 speaking God's truth, they are not called prophets, 
 and we read of angels, spiritual messengers from 
 Jehovah, more frequently than of prophets in the 
 interval between Moses and Samuel". Vet neither 
 
 * The only prophet mentioned in the Book of Judg 
 Deborah was the nameless man who preached repentance just before 
 
 F 
 
66 THE JUDGES DIVINELY INSPIRED [lect. 
 
 Joshua, nor Othniel, nor Gideon, nor Jephthah, nor 
 Samson seem to have used the Urim and Thummim : 
 apparently it was used only when God had no repre- 
 sentative, no one who had the right either to speak 
 or to act in His name (cf. Judges xx. 18, 23, 28). 'The 
 Spirit of Jehovah,' we read, • came upon Othniel, and 
 he judged Israel (Judges iii. 10);' 'The Spirit of Je- 
 hovah came upon Gideon, and he gathered the people 
 for battle (lb. vi. 34);' 'The Spirit of Jehovah came 
 upon Jephthah (lb. xi. 29).' And four times the same 
 phrase is used of Samson h (lb. xiii. 25, xiv. 6, 19, 
 xv. 14). The impulse to perform those actions neces- 
 sary for the preservation of Israel's nationality came 
 
 Gideon was summoned to Israel's rescue (Judges vi. 8-io). Here 
 then the higher and spiritual duty of preaching was separated from 
 that of government, even more completely than in the case of Barak. 
 
 h A difficulty may perhaps often have been felt with reference to 
 the high praise given to the heroes of the Book of Judges, which 
 may be resolved probably by bearing in mind two considerations. 
 The first, that God's Spirit, resting upon men like Jephthah and 
 Samson, did not remove them out of the level of their own age. 
 They are both freely numbered with God's saints in Heb. xi. 32, 
 and were doubtless worthy of the high rank given them, and yet 
 may have attained to a far lower degree of holiness absolutely than 
 the saints of the New Testament or of Christian times. Thev must 
 be judged relatively to their own times, for God's Spirit is never 
 revolutionary : the settled order of things goes on in what seems 
 a natural sequence of cause and effect, and the saints are liable to 
 all the prejudices and common errors of their own age, nor can they 
 advance more than a certain limit beyond it. And secondly, the 
 gift of the Spirit, either for government or for declaring the truth, 
 did not interfere with a man's individual probation. God's gifts do 
 not take away our responsibility, but only increase it. In the Book 
 of Jeremiah we have a deeply interesting account of the struggles 
 that went on in the prophet's mind before finally grace was triumphant. 
 But see Note B in the Appendix. 
 
II.] FOR GOVERNMENT. 67 
 
 upon them from without, from God, quite as much 
 as the impulse which compelled the prophets to pro- 
 claim certain truths. And this was an essential part 
 of the theocracy. It was God's direct government : 
 and for that government it was necessary that certain 
 acts should be done, or it could not have been car- 
 ried on. But those who spake for God held a still 
 higher place than the civil governors. For though 
 certain even of their acts might have a typical mean- 
 ing, yet primarily the Judges had their commission 
 for temporal and present purposes only, for the good 
 government of the Israelites and the preservation of 
 their national existence. The prophets had further 
 to prepare for Christ, and continually to raise the 
 nation to a higher state of morality, of knowledge, 
 and of fitness for the spiritual truths of the Gospel. 
 
 And thus, then, we come to the second point, the 
 prediction namely of Moses, twice referred to in the 
 Acts (iii. 22, vii. 37): 'The Lord thy God will raise 
 up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy 
 brethren, like unto me ; unto Him ye shall hearken ' 
 
 1 Ewald (Hist. Israel, i. 125, note 3) denies that this passage was 
 originally Messianic, and asserts that it became so only through the 
 influence of Deut. xxxiv. 10-12. But this latter place asserts, what is 
 undeniable, that no prophet ever did rise up in Israel like unto M 
 and if, as probably was the case, it was added by Eara, it gives his 
 deliberate judgment, that during the whole era of prophecy 1 
 promise made by Moses had not been fulfilled. Further, it shows that 
 the Jews did look forward to the coming of a prophet, wl 
 occupy a place similar to that held by Moses in the ^>Hcrncs> 
 But, as not unfrequently is his custom, what Ewald denies in 
 he virtually grants in another. Thus he says, that ' the eternal I 
 were nowhere so clearlv and firmly held as in Israel, and < 
 quently the strong consciousness could not but prevail there that 
 
 F2 
 
68 MOSES GREATER [lECT. 
 
 (Deut. xviii. 15).' Now we have already seen that the 
 prophet was, generally, the mediator between God 
 and man ; and specifically, that under the theocracy 
 he was God's deputy, and endowed also with the 
 civil power until the people, by the appointment of a 
 king, separated their state government from the direct 
 control of Jehovah. Now both these powers, the 
 power of speaking for God, and the power of acting 
 for God J , existed in Moses in a far fuller manner than 
 
 community must advance to some more perfect state, to something 
 nearer the ideal of human striving. But these Messianic hopes were 
 no invention of the prophets : they inherited them as an old and set- 
 tled property' (Proph. d. A. B. i. 29, ed. 2). But from whom did 
 they inherit them ? How did Israel first gain these eternal truths ? 
 "Whence came this certainty that Israel was to bestow upon all man- 
 kind a perfect blessedness, and itself enjoy an imperishable existence ? 
 Well ! the great part which Moses had in endowing Israel with these 
 high hopes — hopes destined to be fulfilled — is undeniable, and Ewald 
 does not deny it. The whole is granted, but the parts must be denied. 
 The Jews always did look forward for some one to come, though their 
 ideas were often modified by present circumstances. It was Moses who 
 made them thus look forward. This is granted. But Moses must not be 
 allowed to say anything special. Explain everything special away, and 
 the haze that remains will do no harm. It is not enough for faith, and 
 therefore may be left alone. But is such a method of exposition sound 
 and reasonable ? 
 
 j I ought rather to have said 'for Jehovah.' In His covenant 
 relations to Israel the name of the Deity is Jehovah. Not Elohim, the 
 God of nature, but Jehovah, the God of grace, was the king of the 
 covenant people ; and doubtless by this name is meant our Lord Jesus 
 Christ. So in the Te Deum, addressing Christ we say, ' We ac- 
 knowledge Thee to be the Lord,' i. e. Jehovah. And thus, while the 
 ' Word of God' is a phrase constantly used in the New Testament, 
 where God's mercies are coextensive with all nature (Mark xvi. 15), it 
 is not used more than half-a-dozen times in the Old Testament ; nor do 
 the prophets speak in the name of God, but of Jehovah. As for the 
 real pronunciation of this name, while Jehovah is certainly wrong, I am 
 fully convinced that Jahveh is not right. Its use is to me a mere 
 
II.] THAN A PROPHET. 69 
 
 in any of his successors. The distinction is declared 
 by Jehovah Himself. We read in the Book of 
 Numbers (xii. 5-8), that when Aaron and Miriam 
 reproached Moses for having married a Cushite wife, 
 and Moses meekly bore their reproaches, Jehovah 
 came suddenly down in the pillar of the cloud, and 
 summoning the offenders into His presence, reproved 
 them thus : ' Hear now My words : If there be a 
 prophet among you, I Jehovah will make Myself 
 known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto 
 him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so, 
 who is faithful in all My house. With him will 
 I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and 
 not in dark speeches ; and the similitude of Jehovah 
 shall he behold.' Now, not only does it follow from 
 this that inspiration was a permanent and abiding 
 influence upon Moses, an occasional and temporary 
 gift to the rest, but it shows us why Moses had this 
 higher gift. He held a position such as no one 
 besides ever held. In all God's house — in His Church 
 — it was his to order and command as he would, 
 though only as the steward, the servant, while Christ 
 is the Son k . That which Moses did by appointment, 
 
 affectation of an unattainable exactness. The true sound of the name 
 was pronounced only once a year while the temple stood, on the great 
 day when the High Priest entered the Holy of Holies. Had it been 
 recoverable, it would have been found out before the nineteenth century. 
 All the arguments for the name being Jahveh start with the incredible 
 assumption that the vocalization of the Massorites represents the 
 original pronunciation. It is very useful, very clever, very systematic, 
 but that it gives us the actual pronunciation used by Moses is not 
 only not proved, but is contrary to the evidence. 
 
 k Even the Son is not absolute master. He is heir of all, and IIi> 
 rights come to Him by nature, not by gift. Yet as Son He can neither 
 
70 POSITION OF THE SLAVE [LECT. 
 
 by a delegated authority, that Christ does by right of 
 His nature ; and in His own house, for 'the Church is 
 Christ's body (Eph. i. 23),' in which His will, as being 
 the will of the Head, reaches to and controls every 
 part. But the Jewish Church stood in no such 
 relation to Moses. It belonged to Jehovah, and 
 Moses was His slave. 
 
 The changed institutions of our time make us lose 
 much of the force of this comparison between Christ 
 and Moses. Used to the idea of predial slavery, and 
 to the degraded condition of the slave as set before us 
 by the political economists of Greece, who in their 
 inhuman materialism regarded him only as €fjLyj/v\ov 
 opyavov, an implement endowed with life, differing 
 from the plough or mattock in much the same way as 
 the ox differed from them ; — used to see this detest- 
 able idea pushed to its base but legitimate conse- 
 quences by the trading avarice of Christian nations, 
 aided no doubt by the fact that the slave in modern 
 days is one of a different race and colour, marked 
 off by physical inferiorities from his master, and not 
 therefore appealing to his sympathies in the same 
 way as if he had been in the main his master's like 
 and equal ; — used thus to negro and predial slavery, 
 we carry our horrible notions into the Bible, and 
 imagine that the Hebrew slave held an analogous 
 condition. When we turn to oriental commentaries, 
 
 do nor say anything as of Himself. For the former, see Christ's words in 
 John v. 19 ; for the latter, John xii. 49. Yet in this there is a mystery, 
 though not past solving, when we reflect that the Son is the x a P aKT VP 
 (Heb. i. 3), in Whom the Father's ineffable will finds outward form and 
 expression. 
 
II.] UNDER THE LA W OF MOSES. 7 1 
 
 we find altogether a different feeling. We read, for 
 instance, in an Exposition of the Prodigal Son ', 
 that in the household there are three grades of 
 dependence, first that of the son, next that of the 
 slave, last of all that of the hired freeman, c the 
 mean white ' of modern days ; and it is noted as 
 a mark of humility in the repentant prodigal, that 
 he asked only for the lowest place. However 
 this may be, we certainly find two things in the 
 Bible ; first, the entire recognition of the religious 
 equality of the slave. He was to be admitted to the 
 covenant (Gen. xvii. 12, 13), the Sabbath (Ex. xx. 10), 
 the passover (lb. xii. 44), the feast of weeks (Deut. 
 xvi. 11), and tabernacles (lb. xvi. 14), on just the 
 same footing as his master. And further we find, 
 that if there was no son, then the slave stood next. 
 He was heir to the property ; on him devolved the 
 tribal chieftainship m ; and if there were daughters, 
 husbands were chosen for them from the slaves". In 
 the clan the head slave stood in all respects next in 
 rank to the chief and his sons. 
 
 The same thing happens in oriental countries now. 
 The great officers of state, its prime ministers and 
 
 1 Cod. Bodl. Or. 624, fol. 670. See also Ex. xii. 45. 
 
 m Thus Eliezer of Damascus, a slave born in his house, was 
 Abraham's steward, the next in rank to him in the tribe, and till a son 
 was born the heir to all his wealth and power. This office of stewaid 
 is exactly parallel to that held by Moses in Israel towards Jehovah, 
 Israel's king. 
 
 n Thus Sheshan gives his daughter in marriage to an Egyptian 
 named Jarha (1 Chron. ii. 34). By so doing he prevented his landed 
 possessions and chieftainship from being absorbed in those of some 
 other princely house. 
 
72 MOSES THE SLAVE [LECT. 
 
 treasurers, begin life often as slaves. And thus we 
 can understand the meaning of that peculiar title 
 given in so remarkable a manner to Moses, by virtue 
 of which he holds a place in revelation inferior only 
 to that held by our Lord. He is Jehovah's servant ; 
 literally translated, Jehovah's slave; translated accord- 
 ing to the sense, Jehovah's prime minister, His vice- 
 gerent and vizier. Now Moses never appropriates 
 this honourable distinction to himself . It is first 
 found in the narrative of his death, by whomsoever 
 written, and whensoever added to the history. ' So 
 Moses the servant of Jehovah died in the land of 
 Moab (Deut. xxxiv. 5).' It is subsequently given 
 him in the Books of Joshua (seven times), of Kings 
 (1 Kings viii. 53, 56), of Chronicles (2 Chron. i. 3, xxiv. 
 6), in the Psalms (cv. 26), and in Malachi (iv. 4). He 
 is called the servant of Elohim in Chronicles (1 Chron. 
 vi. 49, 2 Chron xxiv. 9), in Nehemiah (x. 29), in 
 Daniel (ix. 11), and finally in Revelation (xv. 3), the 
 substitution of the term Elohim being probably 
 occasioned by that superstitious reverence for the 
 
 Moses records in the place quoted above (Num. xii. 7), that 
 Jehovah called him My servant Moses ; but so he records that Jehovah 
 spake in similar terms of Caleb, My servatit Caleb (Num. xiv. 24). It 
 seems, therefore, that the name was not given to Moses because of God 
 thus addressing him, for then it would have equally been applied to 
 Caleb. It was given to him because he did as a fact hold a peculiar 
 place in God's dealings with mankind. Unless this too is borne in 
 mind, and the relation in which Moses, Jehovah's servant, and Christ 
 His son, stand to one another, it will be impossible to understand the 
 place held by Jehovah's servant in the last twenty-seven chapters of 
 Isaiah. The LXX had a true appreciation of the importance of the 
 name when they applied an analogous term, irats, to Abraham (Gen. 
 xviii. 17). 
 
II,] OF JEHOVAH. 73 
 
 name Jehovah, which gradually grew up among the 
 Jews, which made them unwilling to utter it, which 
 has further led to its being usually translated Lord in 
 our version, and which makes us at this day pronounce 
 it with vowels belonging to another word. Jehovah is 
 a name made up of the consonants of one word, and 
 the vowels of another P. 
 
 Moses, then, emphatically is Jehovah's servant : 
 and the name is virtually peculiar to him. It is true 
 that Joshua, that is, Jesus q, is so styled once, in the 
 narrative of his death (Josh. xxiv. 29) ; and rightly. 
 He was the finisher of Moses' work, and the type of 
 the true Jesus. And once, and once only, is it found 
 again, in Isa. xlii. 19, in a passage strongly Messianic. 
 Why there used, and what it means, I have elsewhere 
 fully discussed r . 
 
 Moses therefore ruled Jehovah's house as that 
 servant who, in the familia, the household of slaves, 
 represented the master, and was invested with his 
 authority. Less than the son, greater than any be- 
 sides, nearer to the master, yet not one with him in 
 nature as is the son, he is the steward, armed with all 
 
 p The Jews read it by the vowels alone, that is, they read it either 
 Elohim, God, or Adonay, Lord, according as it had the vowels of one or 
 the other. Usually it has the vowels of Adonay, the first a being a 
 schva, or auxiliary vowel merely, like the a inserted by us in ' baptism,' 
 pronounced baptisam, or baptisem. The words might thus be written, 
 J'hovah, 'donay. The word Lord in our version is a translation, not of 
 J'bovab, which is distinctly a proper or personal name, but of 'donay. 
 
 1 Joshua is always called Jesus in the LXX and in the New Testa- 
 ment (Heb. iv. 8). There is very great doubt about the correctness of 
 the Massoretic punctuation Joshua and Jehoshua. The Massoritcs them- 
 selves twice punctuate the name Jeshua = Jesus, namely, in Ezra ii. J, 
 iii. 2. 
 
 r In my ' Messianic Interpretation of the Prophet Isaiah.' 
 
74 ANALOGY BETWEEN MOSES [lect. 
 
 the master's power, and entitled to lay down the law, 
 yet not by any plenary or inherent right, but by virtue 
 of his office. In this respect Moses holds a place dis- 
 tinct from any prophet beside ; and our Lord was a 
 prophet like unto Moses. There is no such complete 
 analogy between our Lord and the ordinary prophet. 
 The ordinary prophet did but deliver another's mes- 
 sage. But Moses was a legislator — the bringer in 
 of a dispensation. So also was our Lord. On Moses 
 the spirit of prophecy rested without measure (Num. 
 xii. 8) : so it did on Christ (John iii. 34). Jehovah 
 knew Moses face to face (Ex. xxxiii. n, Deut. xxxiv. 
 10) : 'the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of 
 the Father, hath declared that God Whom no man 
 hath seen at any time (John i. 18).' No prophet was 
 like unto Moses in the signs and wonders which 
 Jehovah sent him to do (Deut. xxxiv. 11): Christ 
 wrought works which none other man did (John xv. 
 24). But that which Moses did by an authority 
 delegated to him, that Christ as the Son did by His 
 own inherent power. 
 
 But if Christ and Moses stand in this relation to one 
 another, then necessarily must Moses give the outline 
 of the whole Gospel. The most ancient writer in the 
 Bible, by the peculiar position which he holds, must 
 in some way or other be commensurate with Him in 
 Whom revelation reaches its last and ultimate perfec- 
 tion. And this absolutely is the case. Moses does 
 mark out the whole programme 8 of God's scheme for 
 
 8 Ewald (Hist. Israel, i. 101) well points out that the support for the 
 furthest prophetic outlook, or, in other words, for the Messianic expec- 
 tations as they existed in their fullest development in the writings of the 
 
II.] AND OUR LORD. 
 
 75 
 
 man's restoration. All the rest of the Bible is but 
 the gradual filling up of the plan of redemption 
 sketched in the Pentateuch. We have the outline 
 of it in the narrative of man's original intimacy 
 and communion with God, followed by the account 
 of his fall, and the promise of a Deliverer. Of 
 this Deliverer Moses next sets before us many 
 notable predictions, as that of Shiloh (Gen. xlix. 
 10), of the Star (Num. xxiv. 17), and of the 
 Prophet like unto himself (Deut. xviii. 15, 18). 
 He farther gives us many remarkable types of 
 Him ; but chief of all, the entire scheme of the 
 Levitical law, the whole burnt-offering, the sin-offer- 
 ing, the thank-offering, the passover, the scape-goat, 
 the Tabernacle with its various parts, all looked 
 forward to, and were fulfilled in Christ. It is not 
 merely the fathers, who often set forth their evangeli- 
 cal import with wonderful force * ; St. Paul equally 
 rests his teaching upon the Pentateuch. So too con- 
 stantly does our Lord, Who even affirms that not 
 one iota of it may really pass away. Lastly, in the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews we have an authoritative 
 exposition of many of its chief particulars. The 
 prophets link the two together. On the mount of 
 Transfiguration Elias unites Moses to Christ. 
 
 And thus then the prophet belonged specifically to 
 the theocratic government. That government might 
 
 greater prophets, is to be found in Genesis. He quotes Gen. xii. 1-3, 
 xviii. 18, 19, xxii. 16-18, xxvi. 4, xxviii. 14. Of these he says in his way, 
 'Few finer presentiments would be found to be declared by the- n 
 great prophets of the ninth and eighth centuries before Christ.' 
 
 4 See, for instance, the noble sermon of S. Cyril on Luke ii. 25, m my 
 Translation of S.Cyril's Commentary on St. Luke, Oxford, 1859, p. »+ 
 
76 THE PROPHETS THE BOND OF UNION [lect. 
 
 be administered by men on whom the Spirit of Jeho- 
 vah rested for action only as statesmen or soldiers. Its 
 highest administrator was the prophet, who could 
 speak and command in Jehovah's name, as well as act 
 for Him. And of this government Moses was the 
 founder. He, in all the grandeur of his viceregal office, 
 as the very representative of Jehovah, gave the chosen 
 people the law which was to train them for Christ : 
 farther, in type and symbol he marked out the nature 
 of the true manifestation of God upon earth, and the 
 office of the true Mediator, Who is the real point of 
 union between God and man, the real Way of access 
 to God, the true Restorer of man's fallen nature. 
 And upon Moses other prophets followed, not equal 
 to him in greatness, but carrying on his work, unfold- 
 ing to clearer view the truths he had veiled in symbol, 
 and preparing the world for the last prophet ; the 
 prophet like unto Moses as being a legislator, but the 
 legislator of a perfect and final law ; like unto Moses 
 as being the founder of a Church, yet that Church not 
 local nor temporary, but catholic, and with the pro- 
 mise that it shall endure till Christ come again : a 
 prophet not like unto Moses, in that His is no dele- 
 gated authority, no vicegerency, but in His own right, 
 by right of nature as the Son, He governs and com- 
 mands in His own house. 
 
 And in Him all the wants of our nature are sup- 
 plied, the breach between heaven and earth repaired, 
 man raised from his fallen state, the veil which had 
 shut out heaven from earth torn asunder, access 
 granted us unto God, and earth and heaven in Him 
 made one ; just as in Him, the Emmanuel, God and 
 
II.] BETWEEN THE LAW AND CHRIST. 77 
 
 man became one. He is the Mediator of the New 
 Covenant, God's final dispensation ; for there can be 
 no higher and better Mediator than Christ. And if to 
 Him gave all the prophets witness, His words are to 
 us the final and sufficient proof of all our heavenly 
 hopes. ' Lord,' we say with Peter, ' Lord, to whom 
 shall we go, save unto Thee ? For Thou, Thou only, 
 hast the words of eternal life.' 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 SAMUEL, THE RESTORER OF PROPHECY. 
 
 Yea, and all the prophets from Samuel and those that 
 follozv after, as many as have spoken, have likewise 
 foretold of these days. — Acts iii. 24. 
 
 St. Peter in these words points out that prophecy- 
 had in Samuel a new beginning. As I have before 
 observed, the theocratic government was carried on in 
 the time of the Judges not so much by prophets as 
 by heroes. God's spirit rested upon mighty men of 
 valour for government and military enterprise, with- 
 out which the nation could not have been preserved. 
 In two instances only do we read of prophets (Judges 
 lv. 4, vi. 8) ; in every other case the commands of 
 Jehovah, as Israel's king, were given either by the 
 priest with the Urim (Judges xx. 27), or by angels 
 (Judges ii. 1, v. 23, vi. 11, &c, xiii. 3, &c). But with 
 Samuel there began a new order of things. On the 
 one hand prophecy became a regular institution, placed 
 upon a settled basis ; and on the other it wrought 
 within a narrower circle, and for a long time in a far 
 humbler way, than when, as in Moses, it gave a 
 powerful nation its laws alike in things human and 
 divine. Not merely in Samuel's days was a final 
 severance made between those two functions of speak- 
 ing for Jehovah and acting for Jehovah, which had 
 
SAMUEL'S OFFICE. 79 
 
 hitherto been combined in the prophet ; but even in 
 speaking for God his words were confined within a 
 more limited range. Great as was Samuel, he had no 
 new truth to declare to mankind, no light to throw 
 upon old truths a . Moses had marked out the whole 
 limits of Gospel truth ; and several centuries passed 
 after Samuel before the prophets began to fill up the 
 outline. Whatever was given of fuller knowledge was 
 in the Psalms. Whatever kindling up there was of 
 Messianic hope was connected with the family and 
 throne of David, the hero-king. Yet Samuel's was no 
 mean calling. His office was to preserve the truth as 
 taught by Moses, and to work for holiness, for spiritu- 
 ality (1 Sam. xv. 22), for a higher moral elevation on 
 the part of the people, and for a fuller appreciation of 
 those primary truths upon which all real civilization 
 rests ; such truths as the unity and spirituality of God, 
 the union in Him of mercy and justice, and the cer- 
 tainty that evil deeds must, because of God's justice, 
 bring a heavy retribution upon the offender. These 
 were the truths that Moses had taught ; and Samuel 
 • w T as to restore them and invest them with new power 
 over the hearts of the people. 
 
 Now it will be impossible to understand the nature 
 of Samuel's office as the Restorer, and in one sense 
 even the Founder, of prophecy, unless we take a glance 
 at the history of his times. He stands then in tin 
 middle, between the fall of the great landowners who 
 had exercised an irregular authority during the days 
 
 a The only Messianic prediction connected with Samuel was that ol a 
 faithful high priest to walk before God's anointed for ever (1 Sam. ii. 
 35). But as God's anointed was the king, the words had a primary 
 reference to the new relations between the priesthood and the temporal 
 power. 
 
80 LINEAL DESCENDANTS OF JACOB [LECT. 
 
 of the Judges, and the new birth of the nation after its 
 
 crushing defeat at Ebenezer, when, under those two 
 
 able warriors, Saul and David, the youthful energies of 
 
 the nation had that grand development which made 
 
 Israel for a time the most powerful monarchy in the 
 
 East. Now in the Book of Judges we find no traces 
 
 of progress except in one, and that a very necessary 
 
 way, namely, the union of the people into one nation. 
 
 When it left Egypt, not only were there those tribal 
 
 jealousies and differences which finally divided the 
 
 nation into two hostile kingdoms, but there were great 
 
 diversities among the people themselves, and nothing 
 
 but the extraordinary vigour of Moses' mind could 
 
 have held together so motley a multitude, and have 
 
 stamped one character upon them. For we trace 
 
 clearly the presence in Israel of those three classes so 
 
 generally to be met with in every ancient history. 
 
 There were first the great nobles, personally descended 
 
 from Jacob, whose genealogies you find in the Books 
 
 of Numbers and Chronicles. Men certainly few in 
 
 numbers, as those genealogies teach us, and possessed 
 
 of great power and vast landed estates. Even these 
 
 nobles were not all of equal rank. The chiefs of Dan 
 
 and Naphtali, of Gad and Asher, descended from slave 
 
 mothers, and therefore of impure blood, did not stand 
 
 upon the same elevation as the chiefs of Judah and 
 
 Ephraim. Even Leah's last two sons, Issachar and 
 
 Zebulun, born after a long period of barrenness, never 
 
 attained to the high dignity possessed by the first 
 
 four. Of these Judah held the foremost place in the 
 
 camp (Num. ii. 3), and ultimately prevailed over his 
 
 brethren (1 Chron. v. 2) ; and the whole nation in the 
 
 third period of its history bore his name. In the 
 
m.] THE LEADERS OF THE EXODUS. 81 
 
 second line in the camp Reuben's banner was fore- 
 most (Num. ii. 10), while in Genesis we read that it 
 was Simeon and Levi, the two other sons of Leah, the 
 first of the high-born wives, who were able with their 
 dependants to conquer the Canaanite city of She- 
 chem b , and add the mass of its population to their 
 clans. To Joseph, the elder son of the second high- 
 born wife, belonged the birthright (i Chron. v. 2); 
 from Benjamin, her other son, the nation chose its first 
 king. And in short, with some notable exceptions, 
 such as that of Samson c , it was the nobles of pure 
 blood who gave Israel its heroes and its kings. 
 
 And next there were the retainers, who formed the 
 strength of these noble houses. The idea that all the 
 Israelites who came out of Egypt were descended from 
 Jacob is so contrary to every text of Holy Writ, that 
 it passes comprehension how it could ever have arisen : 
 even though the truth is obscured in our version by 
 the translation 'little ones' for a word d which the 
 
 b Though Jacob was afraid of the consequences of this deed (Gen. 
 xxxiv. 30), and justly condemned the violence and cruelty with which 
 Simeon and Levi had acted (lb. xlix. 5-7), he nevertheless felt consider- 
 able pride in the exploit itself (lb. xlviii. 22). 
 
 c Barak probably belonged to the tribe of Naphtali, though acting 
 under the orders of Deborah, who dwelt in Mount Ephraim. What is 
 more important is that we find Ephraim claiming supremacy over even the 
 two princely Manassites, Gideon (Judges viii. 1) and Tephthah (lb. xii. 1 ). 
 
 d This word, in Hebrew Cp laph, correctly answers to the word 
 household; thus, in 2 Chron. xxxi. 18, the taphs of the priests arc said 
 to consist of their wives, their sons, and their daughters: and so when, 
 lb xx. 13, the men of Judah brought their taphs to pray in the temple. 
 Gesenius points out that it means their who'e households, excepting 
 only the head. So too we read that 'Joseph nourished his father, 
 and his brethren, and the whole house of his father according to 
 the taph,' i.e. according to the number of the whole household, Gen. 
 xlvii. 12. So Pharaoh was willing to let the Israelites go. but they must 
 leave their taphs, their households, behind, Ex. x. 10, II. So when the 
 
 G 
 
82 NUMEROUS RETAINERS [LECT. 
 
 Septuagint correctly renders household and clan (ohCa 
 and avyyivcia). For we have already seen that the 
 fundamental law of circumcision was that every slave, 
 whether born in the house or bought with money, was 
 to be circumcised (Gen.xvii. 12, 13): thereby he became 
 a member of the covenant just as fully as his master. 
 But Abraham could equip 318 trained servants born 
 in his house, and take them with him to battle. He 
 must have left other servants at home to guard the 
 women and children, the flocks and cattle. You would 
 scarcely find three hundred active young men in a 
 clan of three thousand souls, and yet Abraham grew 
 far more great and powerful than he was at the early 
 period here described (viz. Gen. xiv). So too of Isaac. 
 Not only did he inherit all that Abraham possessed, 
 except the probably large gifts bestowed upon Ish- 
 mael and the sons of Keturah (Gen. xxv. 5, 6), but we 
 read that he so grew in wealth, that Abimelech the 
 Philistine king of Gerar bade him depart : ' for,' said 
 he, 'thou art much mightier than we e (lb. xxvi. 16).' 
 
 Gadites and Reubenites built cities for their taphs, Num. xxxii. 16, 24, 
 26, it does not mean for small children, but for their households. While 
 forty thousand of the men numbered in Num. xxvi. went over Jordan to 
 the conquest of Canaan, more than sixty thousand stayed behind ; but 
 probably most of these were armed retainers, and the taph did not 
 strictly include such, but only the domestic slaves: see Ex. xii. 37, 
 where the taphs are not numbered among the six hundred thousand 
 men who left Eg\pt. In Num. xxxi. 17, 18 the taphs are described as 
 consisting partly of males, who were all to be put to death, and partly of 
 women, some married and some virgins. The translation ' women 
 children ' is erroneous. In other places a distinction is made between 
 the women and the taph; see Deut. xx. 14, xxix. 11, Josh. i. 14, &c. 
 In such places the children and domestic slaves are meant. 
 
 e This verse seems to me to solve the difficulty which some have felt 
 as to the presence of Philistines in Canaan at this remote period. Caphtor, 
 i.e. Crete, was their original home (Amos ix. 7), and an early body of 
 immigrants had founded this kingdom of Gerar in the south of Palestine. 
 
III.] OF THE PATRIARCHS. 83 
 
 To this again must be added the numerous re- 
 tainers brought back by Jacob from Mesopotamia. 
 Though unable to cope with Esau, who came against 
 him with four hundred men, it was not so much 
 perhaps because of inferiority of numbers, as because 
 his men were untrained, while Esau had with him the 
 hardy mountaineers of Seir. His present to Esau 
 was that of a mighty prince, and proves the greatness 
 of his wealth. But further, we read of Jacob being 
 accompanied from Padan-Aram by his brethren. 
 They it was who piled up the hill of Galeed (Gen. 
 xxxi. 46, 54). Now, strictly speaking, brother he had 
 none but Esau, and these brethren can scarcely have 
 been aught else than confederates, who had migrated 
 with him from Mesopotamia, and who were doubtless 
 absorbed into the twelve tribes. But independently of 
 this, we read that after Isaac's death, when Esau and 
 Jacob had divided his wealth between them, ' their 
 riches were more than that they might dwell together ; 
 and the land wherein they were strangers could not 
 bear them because of their cattle (Gen. xxxvi. 7).' 
 And so Esau seized upon Mount Seir, and reduced 
 
 They were however comparatively few, and finally were conquered or 
 absorbed by the Canaanites. When, centuries afterwards, Israel entered 
 Canaan, we read at first nothing about Philistines, and Judah conquered 
 Gaza, Askelon, and Ekron without trouble. But either the opportunity 
 afforded by the troubles consequent upon the invasion of Palestine by 
 Israel, or internal agitations in Crete, induced large numbers of Philis- 
 tines to seek once again a land well known to them by tradition as once 
 occupied by their countrymen, and thus as early as Judges iii. $ we ren 
 of the five lords of the Philistines. From three of these chics they must 
 have expelled the men of Judah, and powerful by sea and land they 
 became Israel's most dangerous enemies, till they were conquered 
 by David, who so respected their valour as to form of them hi- body- 
 guard (2 Sam. viii. 18). To what exact date Judges iii. 3 belongs 
 uncertain. 
 
 G 2 
 
84 THE HOUSEHOLDS OF THE PATRIARCHS [LECT, 
 
 the Horites there to subjection (Deut. ii. 12), while 
 Jacob abode in Canaan. 
 
 Now ' the gifts and calling of God are without 
 repentance (Rom. xi. 29) ;' and I have yet to find 
 the place in Holy Scripture which deprives these men, 
 admitted by express command to the covenant, of 
 their covenant-rights. Equally, I have still to find 
 the place where we are told that the ground opened 
 and swallowed them up ; or that they perished by 
 fire, or pestilence, or famine f . I am quite sure that 
 the great chiefs would not have put them to death, 
 because in them consisted their power. I should as 
 soon expect to find the ' patres majorum gentium ' at 
 Rome putting their clients to death, or the captain of 
 a Scottish clan putting his clan to death, as any of 
 the chiefs mentioned in the first chapter of Numbers 
 putting their households to deaths. What good would 
 
 f All those commentators who make elaborate calculations to prove 
 the possibility of the six hundred thousand men at the Exodus being 
 Jacob's lineal descendants, do by some sleight-of-hand manage to ex- 
 clude all these men from the covenant, to which, both by the original 
 law of circumcision and by subsequent enactments (e. g. Exod. xii. 44), 
 they were expressly admitted. But fairness requires that we should 
 know by what process they were excluded, at what date it took place, 
 and what became of them. 
 
 s The history of Joseph may seem at first sight to militate against 
 what is so absolutely certain from every other part of Genesis, namely, 
 that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were the chiefs of powerful clans. But 
 in so very brief a narrative, the silence of Holy Scripture is not so signi- 
 ficant as the pregnant hints which from time to time it drops, and by 
 which we are able to form some idea of the patriarchs in their worldly 
 aspect. They are not set before us as human history would delineate 
 them, but as men of God, the founders of the Jewish Church, and the 
 forefathers of Christ. Now Joseph's history is full of religious instruc- 
 tion. He is the very model of suffering meekly borne for conscience' 
 sake : he is the visible example of that working of God which brings 
 good out of evil : he is the proof of God's goodness, Who though He 
 
III.] MEMBERS OF THE COVENANT. 85 
 
 the vast territories which Caleb gave to his daughter 
 Achsah, her southland, and her upper and nether 
 springs, have done her, if neither she nor Othniel had 
 had dependants to till them? What good would 
 Hebron have been to Caleb, if he had had to till it 
 with his own hands ? The lineal descendants of the 
 patriarchs always strike me in reading the Bible as 
 remarkably few. 
 
 These clans, then, formed the great strength of 
 Israel, both in Goshen and in the Holy Land. At 
 the head of some such body of retainers the sons 
 of Ephraim made that expedition into the land 
 of Palestine which ended so disastrously in their 
 slaughter (1 Chron. vii. 21, viii. 13). No less powerful 
 was the other son of Joseph ; for we find that J air, 
 
 long try His people will yet surely visit and save : he is the sign of God's 
 providence, so overriding men's good and evil, as to bring about His 
 great designs. Intent upon this, the history puts out of view all those 
 particulars upon which worldly history would descant at large. Of 
 course twelve sacks of corn would not do much to maintain a numerous 
 tribe, but probably the great mass of the servants were dispersed seek- 
 ing pasturage for the cattle. Most probably too Jacob's sons went 
 down only to open trade, and make arrangements for the future. There- 
 was thus ground for Joseph treating them as spies. There is no 
 reason to doubt but that when they were settled in so vast a region ns 
 Goshen, their numbers stood in some relation to the country assigned 
 them. Even the great chiefs were not all born of Jacob. How could 
 Othniel the son of Kenaz be the younger brother of Caleb the son of 
 Jephunneh in any other way than by adoption ? Caleb however hin 
 is called a Kenezite in Josh. xiv. 14, and, from the manner in which he 
 is spoken of in Josh. xv. 13, it is plain that he himself did not belon 
 the tribe of Judah by birth. Apparently the Kenezites were inco 
 rated with Israel at the Exodus, and Caleb and Othniel. the chief 
 two several portions of the tribe, were reckoned as descendants 
 Judah, and as brothers; but in the official genealogy I 1 Chron. iv. 1... 
 15) no attempt is made to connect them either with Judah or with 
 another by actual relationship. They were brothers only in the » 
 in which Jacob's confederates were his brothers. 
 
86 LARGE TERRITORIAL POSSESSIONS [lect. 
 
 accounted to belong to Manasseh (Num. xxxii. 41). 
 because his grandfather Hezron, a son of Judah, had 
 married a daughter of Machir, the son of Manasseh, — 
 we find that this Jair possessed in Gilead, as the 
 representative of Machir's daughter, no less than 
 twenty-three villages (1 Chron. ii. 22), and himself 
 extended his rule over thirty-seven more (ver. 23). 
 No wonder that another Jair of the same house 
 judged Israel for twenty- two years, and that men 
 long remembered his wealth and his magnificence, 
 and talked of his thirty sons riding upon thirty ass 
 colts, and living in feudal style each in his own city h 
 (Judges x. 3, 4). 
 
 Now these retainers grew gradually out of the 
 taph, or household. As I have shown, the position of 
 a slave was not accounted dishonourable, and in 
 course of time those born in the house attained ap- 
 parently to a certain amount of independence, and 
 regarded their lord rather as their chief than as their 
 owner. When Abraham and the patriarchs bought 
 slaves (Gen. xvii. 12), they would probably be em- 
 ployed at first in domestic service, or in tending the 
 cattle, but their children would enjoy greater freedom ; 
 and, finally, in a land so large as Goshen, would 
 acquire a higher position and greater rights. The 
 liberal spirit which had secured for the purchased 
 slave admission to the covenant and equality in 
 religious matters, could not stop there. Civil rights 
 must in time follow, and personal freedom. But the 
 
 h In Judges xii. there are several other instances of this sort of 
 barbaric grandeur, coupled with polygamy upon a large scale ; a thing 
 which is always sure in the long run to lead to the decay of those 
 families which indulge in it. 
 
HI.] OF THE CHIEFS. 87 
 
 connection between them and the great chiefs ap- 
 parently was never dissolved ; and the lineal de- 
 scendants of the patriarchs, whose genealogies arc so 
 carefully given in the Books of Numbers and of 
 Chronicles, depended for their power and influence 
 upon the number of the men who formed their clan, 
 or family \ as it is called in Num. xxvi. 5 sqq. 
 
 1 The word rendered family, mishpachah, means one of the larger 
 divisions into whioh the tribe was distributed, and which bore the name 
 of one of the sons or grandsons of the patriarch after whom the whole 
 tribe was called. Thus the 43,730 men of the tribe of Reuben formed 
 only four families (Num. xxvi. 5, 6), which were subdivided into houses 
 (ib. i. 2). The chiefs of these houses were important men, and are called 
 ' chief fathers' in Num. xxxi. 26, and ' heads of the fathers' in Josh. xiv. 1, 
 which latter is the more exact translation of the Hebrew words. From 
 2 Chron. v. 2 we gather that while each tribe and each house had its 
 chief, the family had none. The same also follows from Num. xxxvi. 
 I, where the spokesmen for the family (not the families, as in our 
 version) of the Gileadites are the chiefs of its houses. In Josh. vii. 1 7, 
 18, in the history of Achan, we find the tribe of Judah thus divided into 
 families, houses, and individuals. Now as the tribe of Judah consisted 
 of 76,500 men, divided into four or at most five families, each sub- 
 divided apparently into about the same number of houses, the whole 
 number of each house must have been large, but by the individuals — 
 those brought man by man— plainly are meant, not the retainers, but 
 those only of pure blood — the nobles actually descended from Jacob, 
 and who would be few. It is necessary to remember this meaning of 
 family. When Saul speaks of his family as the least of all the families 
 of Benjamin (1 Sam. ix. 21), it does not follow that Kish was not a 
 powerful chieftain— Gibeah apparently belonged to him,— but that as 
 Benjamin was but a small tribe, so the division of it to which Saul 
 belonged was not that which held the foremost rank. No doubt each 
 house looked to its Mishpachah for aid, and the Mishpachah to the 
 whole tribe: in which probably some one family bore the preponder- 
 ance, possibly because the tribal chief usually belonged to it. In Saul s 
 history we find an undesigned corroboration of the narrative in Judges 
 xx. xxi. Benjamin, according to Num. xxvi. 3S-40, was divided int.. hx 
 or seven families— probably the latter number. But Saul's family, that 
 of Matri, is not one of them. Doubtless when the tribe was i^\uc^\ to 
 six hundred men, several of the old families were obliterated, and in 
 course of time new ones took their place. 
 
88 ISRAEL ACCOMPANIED AT THE EXODUS [lect. 
 
 But besides these armed retainers, the glory and 
 strength of the great houses, there was also a mixed 
 multitude (Ex. xii. 38, Num. xi. 4), a plebs as it was 
 called in Latin, but in Hebrew Ereb. In Goshen it 
 had formed the lowest class, and probably had con- 
 sisted of Arabs chiefly, who had been forced in times 
 of famine or trouble to leave the wildernessi of Sinai, 
 and seek refuge in the Egyptian border-land, where 
 they had been compelled to own the superior power 
 of Israel. But at the Exodus there must have been 
 Egyptians, too, who threw in their lot with Moses. 
 For Moses had mighty truths to preach, such as God's 
 unity, His spiritual nature, His holiness. Brief as is 
 the narrative, it tells of Egyptians who feared the 
 word of Jehovah (Ex. ix. 20). Such would not have 
 been content to remain behind ; for religion is too 
 powerful a motive to let men endure having their 
 conscientious convictions trampled under foot : and 
 as certainly as it was a struggle for religion between 
 Moses and Pharaoh, so certainly would all those who 
 hated the debased worship of animals in Egypt, and 
 
 J There could not be a greater mistake than to judge of the fertility 
 of the wilderness of Sinai in the time of Moses by its present barren- 
 ness, the result, partly of the large mining operations once carried on 
 there, when the wood was consumed for smelting the ore, and partly of 
 the ravages of the Arabs since the days of Mohammed. In the Bible 
 we always read of it as a populous region, inhabited chiefly by the 
 powerful tribe of Amalek, but also by the Maclianites, with whose chief 
 Moses sought refuge. But just as famines had caused Abraham, Isaac, 
 and Jacob to go down into Egypt, so probably the same cause led to 
 many small Semitic tribes seeking a refuge there with the more 
 powerful Israelites, who had been settled in Goshen by the Pharaohs, 
 and fostered and protected by Joseph, Pharaoh's vicegerent. So, in 
 the march through the wilderness, the Kenites and Kenezites joined 
 Israel Mr. Tristram and the Rev. F. W. Holland have abundantly 
 proved that the wilderness of Sinai was once a thickly-wooded and well- 
 watered region. 
 
III.] BY A MIXED MULTITUDE. 89 
 
 the grovelling superstitions prevalent there, ally 
 themselves to one who proclaimed truths of such 
 marvellous purity as those for which Moses and 
 Israel strove. 
 
 Occasionally the chief of an Arab tribe, or an 
 Egyptian of nob.le rank, may have been adopted into 
 the princely houses ; but the great mass of the Ereb 
 were men of inferior rank. What were their precise 
 position and legal rights we cannot exactly tell, but 
 certainly they had no landed property assigned them. 
 You never find a small landed proprietor in the early 
 history of Israel. You find men like Micah in Mount 
 Ephraim with his house of gods, and rich enough to 
 hire a Levite for his domestic priest. You find Nabal 
 in Carmel, owning sheep and goats by thousands. 
 You find Barzillai providing a king and his army with 
 sustenance while he lay at Mahanaim. Even Ziba, 
 a servant of the house of Saul, has his fifteen sons 
 and his twenty servants. Still more significant is the 
 picture of Boaz, a mighty man of wealth, surrounded 
 by his retainers, and living in rustic opulence at 
 Bethlehem. The idea that the Israelites were, by the 
 terms of the Mosaic law, a nation of small pro- 
 prietors k , is opposed to everything that we read of in 
 
 k Certainly what the daughters of Zelophehad were so anxious to 
 secure was not a miserable acre or two apiece, but some such princely 
 territory as their cousin carried as dower to Ilezron (Num. xwii. 1, 
 1 Chron. ii. 21, 21). The whole thing is made clear by the instructive 
 genealogy in 1 Chron. ii. 50-55, where cities and clans arc reckoned as 
 sons. Compare also 1 Chron. viii. 29 with ix. 35. It is quite plain 
 that Gibeon in these two places was the property of Jehiel. Really, 
 too, it follows from the law as given in Num. xxvi. 5; 56. The land 
 was to be divided among the 601,730 men mentioned there, ' a< 
 to the number of names. To many thou shall make hi, inheritance 
 much, and to few thou shalt make his inheritance small : to each shall 
 
90 THE MIXED MULTITUDE FINALLY [lect. 
 
 the Bible. The Mosaic divisions were into tribes, 
 families, and houses. 
 
 But, further, we are not to suppose that this plebs 
 or Ereb had any share in the covenant 1 . In Goshen 
 their connection with Israel was probably a very 
 loose one, but at the Exodus they would be compelled 
 by the need of protection to attach themselves to one 
 or other of the tribes, and with this closer amalgama- 
 tion a higher position would also gradually be won 
 by them. But it would not be till after the conquest 
 of Canaan that they would fully rank as Israelites 111 . 
 
 his inheritance be given according to those that were numbered of him.' 
 Surely these words must mean that it was the chiefs who had the land, 
 and that their share was greater or less according to the number of 
 their retainers. Of course they would hold it for their clan, and would 
 make allotments to them, but on what terms is uncertain. In the reign 
 of Solomon the power of the great houses seems to have been crushed, 
 and the land subdivided into smaller portions. As much is implied in 
 the phrase ' dwelling every man under his vine and under his fig-tree 
 (i Kings iv. 25).' By what steps this change was brought about we 
 are not told, but the fact is certain. Though we still read of the 
 princes (r Kings xx. 14, 2 Chron. xxx. 24), their power and wealth had 
 greatly declined since the days of David. They had become rather the 
 great officers of the court (Jer. xxxvi. 12), than chieftains living among 
 their own people. 
 
 1 It was simply by confounding these three entirely distinct 
 classes of people, of which the first and second only were members 
 of the covenant, the first by their own right, the second by the 
 fundamental law of the rite of circumcision, that those ingenious 
 arithmetical puzzles were constructed which some short time 
 ago puzzled the unthinking. Those numbers, as of the first-born 
 in the wilderness, really enable any one with a little historical 
 insight to judge of the relative proportions of the three great classes 
 who collectively formed the Israelite nation. 
 
 m It is quite possible that when Joshua renewed the covenant 
 of circumcision at Gilgal (Josh. v. 2-7), the Ereb was admitted 
 into it. If so, its members would then be attached to some tribe, 
 and henceforth numbered with it. They were not so numbered at 
 the Exodus (Exod. xii. 38), but possibly many of them were included 
 in the census recorded in Num. xxvi. 
 
III.] INCORPORA TED WITH ISRAEL. 9 1 
 
 For by that conquest a still lower class was formed, 
 consisting not merely of the Gibeonites, but also of 
 large remains of the native inhabitants (Judges iii. 5). 
 And the Ereb, dignified by the share they had taken 
 in Israel's wanderings in the wilderness, and in the 
 conquest of Palestine, looked down it may be with 
 contempt on the conquered Amorites, who had be- 
 come little better than serfs" ; and so in time they 
 would be regarded even by the true Israelites as their 
 worthy companions and friends. 
 
 And thus they formed a very valuable portion of 
 the community. Enjoying personal freedom, and 
 residing principally in the towns as traders, though 
 many of them no doubt still roamed about as 
 nomads — for to the very last there were large tracts of 
 open country where any could pasture their sheep — 
 
 n Many native towns no doubt maintained their independence 
 during the days of the Judges besides Jebus (2 Sam. v. 6-8j. In 
 fact, we learn from 2 Sam. xx. 15-22 that a walled town was a 
 troublesome thing to conquer. Many such towns and large pro- 
 perties retained by Canaanites (thus Araunah is even called a king 
 in 2 Sam. xxiv. 23) would probably be absorbed by marriages 
 (Judges iii. 6), but while thus the nation was growing in internal 
 unity, its moral state was being depressed by these marriages to the 
 level of the Ereb, and even of the Canaanites. 
 
 The Israelites had always been a people partly agricultural and 
 partly pastoral. Great part of Palestine is a vast table land (the 
 mountain of Matt. v. 1), and much of this apparently was not 
 appropriated, but only the fertile valleys by which it is constantly 
 traversed. Yet even of this Mr. Tristram tells us that 'the whole 
 country south of Hebron, which now is a series of rolling do* 
 bare, and covered only with turf, testifies every mile or two by its 
 ruined heaps, its olive-presses, wine-vats, and wells, to the density 
 of a past population;' and no doubt the large districts originally 
 given to the chiefs (Josh. xix. 50, xxiv. 33, Judges i. ao, 1 I 
 ii. 23, &c.) were, as population increased, broken Up into smaller 
 sections. But a large mass of the people still subsisted by pasturing 
 
i)2 CONDITION OF THE EREB [lect. 
 
 being above all things independent, they would temper 
 and moderate the power of the large houses. But 
 their moral condition was probably low, nor had they 
 those grand and noble ideas of the Godhead which 
 marked the true descendants of Abraham. Of these 
 in the main, the Book of Judges speaks, telling us 
 how in successive dangers they delivered Israel from 
 the inroads of the neighbouring nations, and exercised 
 a sort of sovereignty, now in one quarter of the land 
 and now in another. How great was the preponder- 
 ance of these houses we learn in Gideon's history. 
 When Jehovah's angel came to him, his difficulty in 
 undertaking the command in the war against Midian 
 was the smallness of his father's house. Yet the 
 town of Ophrah belonged to his father Joash ; Gideon, 
 ' the least in his father's house,' had himself ten men- 
 servants whom he could take with him to throw 
 down Baal's altar. He does it by night, because 'he 
 feared his father's household' as well as the men of 
 the city ; and when they come to Joash to complain 
 of his son's conduct, Joash puts them off with a bitter 
 jibe at their having a god who could not help him- 
 self. The townspeople, then, had a sort of import- 
 ance, and yet could not cope with even the small 
 proprietor to whom they appertained. And as con- 
 sisting chiefly of the Ereb, with an admixture of 
 Canaanites, we find them given up to idolatry. It 
 is ever the towns at this era which are the seats 
 of false worship and immorality. It was only gra- 
 
 their flocks in the wilderness or table land. Thus the powerful 
 house of Rechab could all take to a nomad life at the command 
 of Jehonadab, and Jeremiah speaks as if living in tents was still 
 common in his day (Jer. iv. 20, x. 20). 
 
III.] IN PALESTINE. 93 
 
 dually that the higher teaching of the pure Israel- 
 ites leavened them, and it never leavened them 
 thoroughly. Probably few but pure Israelites went 
 into captivity with Jehoiachin, and returned to 
 found the second temple (Ezra ii. 58-65). 
 
 During the days, then, of the Judges, there was no 
 settled form of government, but the rule only of a 
 dominant class, of whom occasionally one here and 
 one there emerged into more general power. Mean- 
 while the nation was growing in unity ; so far there 
 was progress, but we cannot detect many signs of it in 
 any other direction. The extraordinary elevation of 
 Moses' character, which had stamped so deeply upon 
 the minds of his contemporaries such noble truths as 
 that from Jehovah come both love and chastisement 
 (Exod. xx. 5, 6, xxxiv. 6, 7), and that in God a 
 nation finds at once its protection and its code of 
 morality, and that therefore God must alone be king : 
 this influence seemed to lose its hold upon the people 
 as Joshua and the rest who had known Moses passed 
 away. We find instead a race of men valiant, self- 
 reliant, with many rough and youthful virtues, but 
 whose moral state was low, and their capacity for 
 spiritual thoughts limited. Even those to whom 
 Moses must have chiefly looked for carrying on 
 his work, left their religious duties unattended to. 
 Neither priests nor Levites seem after the days of 
 Eleazar and Phinehas to have devoted themselves to 
 the teaching of the people ; and the gift of prophecy, 
 though not absolutely withheld, yet exerted itself in 
 no other way than in the preservation of Israel's 
 national existence. 
 
 Yet the people never abandoned their conviction 
 
94 CONDITION OF THE ISRAEIITES [LECT. 
 
 that they were consecrated to Jehovah, and held a 
 special relation to Him. When sin entangled them, 
 and national calamity came as its result, they never 
 doubted but that upon their true repentance Je- 
 hovah would come to their succour. They knew that 
 it is sin which separates man from God, and that 
 repentance is not the cry of the lips, but the change 
 of the heart. And thus when they returned to God 
 He accepted them, while the splendid reformations of 
 Hezekiah and Josiah wrought no deliverance, because 
 the heart of the people remained unchanged. We 
 find even some slight traces of Messianic hopes. 
 Jephthah's daughter bewails not her death, but her 
 virginity ; as though every Jewish mother hoped 
 that from her might be born the promised Deliverer. 
 They were not untrue then to their calling, and it is 
 even possible that the higher views of the true Israel- 
 ites were gradually leavening both the mixed mul- 
 titude who came with them out of Egypt, and the 
 large number of Canaanites who still remained in the 
 land. At all events, when Samuel appears the whole 
 nation is ready to join in the spiritual worship of 
 the one true God. 
 
 Now, whence came this deep conviction, even in 
 those coarse times, that there is but one God, and 
 that God requires as His, sole true service holi- 
 ness ? If there be one constant tendency in the 
 human heart, it is to make worship a matter of the 
 senses ; to express truth by outward sign and 
 symbol. Truths ever crystallize and harden into 
 objective forms, and lose thereby their quickening 
 and penetrating force. How came this one people 
 ever to struggle after spiritual truth, and finally to 
 
III.] IN THE TIME OF THE JUDGES. 95 
 
 win it and impart it to all mankind ? Whence gained 
 Abraham that better knowledge which made him 
 abandon those gods which Terah worshipped (Josh, 
 xxiv. 2), to serve a God whom no image may re- 
 present ? Rachel brings with her Laban's teraphim, 
 and yet no canker of idolatry is the result. Ex- 
 cepting Joseph, the patriarchs are not set before us 
 as men free from very deep stains of sin, and when 
 the nation settled in Egypt, it was brought into 
 contact with a people whose idolatry was of the 
 basest kind, who worshipped cats and crocodiles, and 
 animals of every sort, and even vegetables, but who 
 nevertheless possessed a civilization — a culture, as it is 
 the fashion now to call it — very far superior to that 
 of the Hebrews, and such as must have greatly in- 
 fluenced and impressed them. It did in fact so 
 debase them, that a forty years' sojourn among the 
 mountains and wildernesses of Sinai was necessary 
 to free them from the demoralizing influences of 
 Egypt. But, in spite of this, there was on their side 
 a healthy love of truth, and the power of embracing 
 it ; and, on the other side, there was Moses, the one 
 man who falls below the level only of Christ, the 
 one man in whom human nature reached its highest 
 glory, and who points onward to Christ, as the per- 
 fection of that which Moses sought, but through 
 human infirmity could not reach (Num. xx. 12, 24, 
 xxvii. 14). After Moses we have the picture of a 
 people impressed by his master-mind with indelible 
 convictions, but convictions far higher than their 
 own moral level. It is but too probable that Moses' 
 own grandson p was ready to minister before a graven 
 
 p Many scholars consider that the Jews, to save the credit of 
 Moses' family, changed Moses into Manasseh in Judges wiii. 30; the 
 
96 SUPERIORITY OF MOSES [lect. 
 
 image, on the excuse, no doubt, that it was but a 
 symbol of the true Deity (Judges xviii. 30). The ephod 
 made by Gideon, in remembrance of the defeat of 
 the Midianites, became a snare both to his own house 
 and to the people generally (Judges viii. 27). Not one 
 of the gods of their heathen neighbours but found 
 worshippers in Israel (Judges x. 6). Plainly the na- 
 tion was leading a double existence. Whence came its 
 better knowledge? Read through the Book of Judges. 
 You do not find there any men capable of winning 
 spiritual truths for themselves. You do not find men 
 struggling after new ideas, and gradually attaining 
 to them. Measured by their times the Judges were 
 men of whom the world was not worthy. For, mixed 
 up with much that was low and bad, they had 
 an unwavering trust in Jehovah, an honest manly 
 love of truth, and a consciousness that God must 
 be served in holiness, and that repentance means a 
 reformation of life — ideas altogether superior to any- 
 thing in the times wherein they lived. But they stand 
 upon an infinitely lower level than Moses. Even 
 Samuel and Jeremiah, the two other most perfect 
 characters of Judaism, reached not up to the standard 
 of Moses. 
 
 The wisdom of Moses was not the product of 
 Jewish culture, nor was it of Egyptian growth. 
 Trained as was Moses in all the wisdom of the 
 Egyptians, and admitted probably to the priesthood, 
 as Egyptian tradition q affirmed, he learned their 
 
 change consisting in but one stroke, namely, altering nt?1D into i"|^3ft, 
 It is remarkable how entirely the family of Moses disappears from 
 Jewish history. 
 
 n Manetho's account, as quoted by Josephus, c. Apion. t. 26 
 sqq., though grossly distorted, contains much nevertheless in itself 
 
Hi.] TO THE JUDGES. 97 
 
 teaching only to hate and condemn it, and at Mount 
 Sinai his purpose was to raise up an eternal barrier 
 between the Israelites and the religion of the country 
 wherein they had so long dwelt. There did this 
 extraordinary man lay broad and deep the founda- 
 tions of the one true religion, which was in due time 
 to become the right of all mankind (Mark xvi. 15). 
 Still in the Ten Commandments we recognize the 
 most perfect summary of our duty to God and man. 
 Still we worship 'Jehovah, as a God merciful and 
 gracious, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and 
 truth, but that will by no means clear the guilty 
 (Ex. xxxiv. 6, 7).' Still in the types and ceremonies 
 of the law we see the outlines of truths since re- 
 vealed, and which were ordained of old not to hide 
 and conceal the light already given, but to prepare 
 and lead men on to more light, to new truths, but 
 truths for which the world was not then ready. No 
 jot or tittle of the law has passed away, but all has 
 either been fulfilled in Christ, or lives on in Christ- 
 ianity in more full and perfect significance. Moses 
 was no mere product either of Egyptian wisdom, or 
 of Israelitic striving after spiritual truth. Truth, in 
 the way of nature, is gained by man only after long 
 struggles, and its ultimate exponent is preceded by 
 a long series of men who have ever been advancing 
 nearer and nearer to its reality. No doubt in Moses 
 personally there had been a long striving after God ; 
 but there was nothing in the times that went before 
 or that followed after to account for the extraordinary 
 
 credible. Cf. Ewald, Hist. Israel, ii. 76. From it we gather that 
 the Exodus was the result of a religious struggle, and that Moses, 
 as he appears also in the Pentateuch, was the bitter opponent of 
 the wisdom of the Egyptian priests. 
 
 H 
 
98 STATE OF ISRAEL [LECT. 
 
 purity and elevation of his views. No long - line of 
 men had preceded him to lead him upwards to the 
 truth. If, as we believe, he was one chosen by God 
 to reveal to mankind the true nature of the Deity, 
 and the right manner in which God must be served, 
 all is easy. God did by him so implant in the chosen 
 people the germs of true religion, that in spite of 
 every difficulty and obstacle it grew and deepened 
 and widened, till at length the time was full and the 
 world ready, and Christ came. If Moses was the 
 mere product of a struggle between Egyptian and 
 Israelitic theology, he is a greater miracle than in- 
 spiration itself. 
 
 The times of the Judges, then, enable us to form 
 something of a judgment upon the greatness of 
 Moses. Immeasurably do the heroes of those times 
 fall below him. They were in proportion and relation 
 to their times ; Moses was great and good absolutely. 
 His standard of truth was perfect, even though per- 
 sonally he once or twice fell below his own standard. 
 And yet the Judges were seekers after God, and 
 wrought too for that complete ascendancy of the 
 Mosaic institutions and views which we find in the 
 days of Samuel. When we think of the long years 
 passed by Israel amid the debasing associations of 
 Egypt, when we think of the vast mixed multitude, 
 which lusted only after sensual pleasures (Num. xi. 4), 
 and of the numerous Canaanitish idolaters, among 
 whom the Israelites freely lived (Judges iii. 5-7), 
 we can estimate the difficulties of the times of 
 Barak, and Gideon, and Jephthah, and Samson, and 
 our wonder is not that the nation fell so low, but 
 that it ever rose again. 
 
 It was at a time of the deepest agony and despair 
 
99 
 
 III.] IN SAMUEL 'S YOUTH. 
 
 that a new life came to it. For many years the 
 Philistines had been gradually crushing Israel. Even 
 in the days of Joshua the people had not been able 
 to conquer the inhabitants of the plains and of the 
 sea coast, and now, aided probably by new immigra- 
 tions from Crete, the Philistines had gained a de- 
 cided superiority r , against which Samson vainly 
 struggled by detached acts of heroism. At length, 
 at the place subsequently called Ebenezer, the 
 national ruin became complete, and church and state 
 fell in one day. Since the days of Joshua the place 
 where the ark was deposited, and which was there- 
 fore the centre of the national religion, had been 
 Shiloh in Mount Ephraim ; and the Philistines de- 
 stroyed Shiloh with such hideous barbarity, that 
 centuries afterwards the heart of the people shud- 
 dered at the very mention of the name s . They 
 never restored the place. Even Jeroboam, though 
 of the tribe of Ephraim, never ventured to use, as 
 a rival to Jerusalem, a site consecrated by so many 
 centuries of worship. In the Psalms you read many 
 a bitter wail over its fall. So late as the time of 
 Jeremiah, the threat of a similar fate hanging over 
 Jerusalem so stirred the rage of the people that but 
 for the princes they would have put Jeremiah to 
 death. So utter was Shiloh's ruin, that its very site 
 was not known until the last few years 4 . It seems 
 as if the people could not bear any allusion to scenes 
 and remembrances so inexpressibly painful. 
 
 r Judges xiv. 4. 
 
 8 See Ps. lxxviii. 60-64, Jer. vii. 12, 14, xxvi. 6, 9. There is 
 probably also an allusion to the return of the ark from captivity in 
 Ps. xiv. 7. 
 
 t It was discovered by E. Robinson: see his Palestine, vol. iii. 
 302 sqq. ; and Wilson, Lands of the Bible, ii. 293 sqq. 
 
 H 2 
 
IOO SUPERSTITIOUS USE [lect. 
 
 But from Shiloh's fall Israel dated its regeneration. 
 There had been brought up there from his infancy 
 a calm, wise, and thoughtful man. A Nazarite like 
 Samson, he was cast nevertheless in a higher and 
 nobler mould. Cut off from the affections of home, 
 he was a daily witness of the supreme power being 
 wielded by a weak and irresolute man, and of the 
 religious sanctuary of the nation being defiled by the 
 immoralities of that high priest's sons. Such a train- 
 ing would have ruined one not possessed of rare and 
 unusual gifts. But he had that rarest gift of early 
 yet not precocious piety : a youthful goodness that 
 was a fit prelude for his religious manhood. But 
 there was also at Shiloh something to make amends 
 for this painful isolation. Eli was at least personally 
 a good man : but of far more consequence for Samuel's 
 mental and spiritual growth were those religious 
 records stored up in the tabernacle. These doubtless 
 were Samuel's study, and from them he learned that 
 great truth which was the inner spring of all his 
 subsequent conduct, namely, that Israel's strength 
 lay in its true religion — that Jehovah was Israel's 
 sole stay and deliverance. Impressed with this truth, 
 he gave his whole heart to teaching it ; and Jehovah 
 accepted him as His spokesman. 'All Israel, from 
 Dan even to Beer-sheba, knew that Samuel was 
 established to be a prophet of Jehovah (i Sam. iii. 
 20).' And up to this time God's spokesman was also 
 God's representative. As prophet, Samuel, was also 
 the temporal ruler, the Judge, of the nation. 
 
 We may be sure that it was against his advice 
 that the ark was taken to battle. People of debased 
 ideas may imagine that success depends upon some 
 holy relic, some consecrated banner, some labarum or 
 
m.] OF THE ARK. ioi 
 
 oriflamme carried out before a host waging it may 
 be unholy war for lust of power or spoil, or to rob 
 freemen of their rights. Such ideas are natural to 
 man. Among the heathen you always find some 
 ancile, or palladium, or image of the great goddess 
 Diana, upon which their safety depends, and which 
 always plays them false at the hour of need : and 
 heathenism is nothing more than man's selfish in- 
 stincts narrowed and hardened by contact with the 
 material world till he loses all perception of the truth 
 that in union with God alone is life and deliverance. 
 Now this truth was Israel's real strength, and when 
 the unchaste and unholy sons of Eli took the ark 
 to battle, they put superstition in the place of re- 
 ligion ; and if the ark had not been captured, and 
 the people utterly smitten, the spiritual teaching of 
 Moses would have been so overborne that it is difficult 
 to see how it could have survived the shock. De- 
 graded then to so base a use, the ark not only did 
 not save the people, but was itself taken in battle. 
 And yet at such a crisis, if there had been no inter- 
 ference of God in the nation's behalf, so heavy a 
 chastisement might have been more than the faith 
 of Israel could have borne. Even then in captivity 
 the god of the Philistines falls prostrate and broken 
 before the ark, and it is restored to Israel in such 
 a way as proved Jehovah's power and the deep 
 reverence with which He must be approached. And 
 never afterwards was the ark put to any superstitious 
 use. The people who broke even the brazen serpent 
 to pieces were too spiritual in their views to regard 
 the ark as anything more than a symbol of God's 
 more immediate presence at that spot which He had 
 chosen as the chief seat of His worship. 
 
102 ISRAEL'S EARLY HISTORY [lect. 
 
 But while this disastrous battle was being fought 
 at Ebenezer, Samuel was probably busy in removing 
 from Shiloh those precious records, of which after- 
 wards he so well knew how to make use. Some 
 possibly were laid up inside the ark u , and were 
 restored with it by the Philistines. But however 
 saved, from these records Samuel learned the great 
 lesson that a nation's strength and prosperity come 
 to it not from without but from within ; not 
 from what a people have, but from what a people 
 are. Not active trade and victorious armies, but 
 religion and morality are the safeguards of freedom. 
 When faith is lost, virtue soon departs also, and 
 corrupt at its very core, an unbelieving nation soon 
 sinks tamely and meanly into decay. Samuel's great 
 work was to bring about a reformation of the people 
 themselves. 
 
 The influences which in modern times raise or 
 depress a 'nation are far more general and diffused 
 than in times when books and reading scarcely ex- 
 isted. Even now the virtues and mental strength of 
 one man may do much for a nation's good, or by 
 mistaken policy he may guide it into a course whence 
 it may be difficult for it to retrace its steps, and 
 escape ultimate ruin. Yet at every turn he will be 
 checked by other influences, and the reaction, which 
 in the main consists of the combined resistance of 
 units, themselves singly powerless, may prove in the 
 end more powerful than the mightiest intellect of the 
 day. But in old time the individual was well nigh 
 everything. Nations rose and fell according to the 
 characters of their leading men : and so, ancient 
 
 u See Deut. xxxi. 26, 
 
III.] CENTRES IN MOSES AND SAMUEL. 103 
 
 history is mainly the history of these men, and of 
 the effects which followed upon their working. Such 
 men were Moses, the founder, and Samuel, the re- 
 storer, of Israel. Still, you must not suppose that 
 the people went absolutely for nothing — that they 
 had no probation, no part in the nation's fortunes. 
 The Bible sets before us the very opposite principle. 
 God bestows His gifts, but they must be accepted 
 (Deut. xxx. 19, Jer. xxi. 8). His people must be 
 willing in the day of His power (Ps. ex. 3). The 
 nation did accept Moses and Samuel. When sub- 
 sequently the people fell away, God granted first 
 a Hezekiah, with Isaiah to press home to their con- 
 sciences the necessity of reformation. He gave next 
 a Josiah, with Jeremiah to aid his efforts. But all 
 was in vain (Jer. viii. 17—20). The influence of a 
 nation's great men may be vastly more at one period 
 than at another, but the issue rests with the nation 
 at large. With us, in modern days, broad principles 
 are at work ; and not one but many minds labour 
 together for good or for evil. Of old, the result was 
 more plainly connected with some one mind ; but 
 then, as now, a nation's uprise or decay depended 
 finally upon the nation's own choice. 
 
 Samuel's lot fell upon times when the instincts of 
 religion prevailed. The testimony of the Book of 
 Judges shows that the people had not lost their 
 conviction that Jehovah was their Deliverer. When 
 then the national existence seemed crushed at Ebcn- 
 ezer, they came to Samuel, as Jehovah's prophet, for 
 aid and comfort. As such all Israel had recognized 
 him in the days of Eli, and now they turned to him 
 as their sole hope. Brief as is the history of his 
 
104 NATURE [lect. 
 
 doings we learn from it three things. The first, that 
 he urged upon the people the necessity of putting 
 away their idols (i Sam. vii. 3). Now this had a 
 moral, as well as a religious significance. Idol worship 
 was but another form of wantonness. Turn where 
 you will, the worship of false gods is the worship 
 of human passion. In honour of the gods men did 
 that which they would have blushed to do as men, 
 but which nevertheless they wished to. The god 
 served only as an excuse to silence conscience, The 
 worship of Jehovah was not a sensuous but a spiritual 
 worship. It meant temperance, chastity, self-restraint, 
 justice to others, holiness. The heart must be pre- 
 pared for Jehovah ; and this, at Samuel's exhortation, 
 the people did by fasting, by prayer, by the confession 
 of sins. And God accepted their repentance because 
 it was sincere ; and at Ebenezer, the very place where 
 they had been so disastrously overthrown and the 
 ark captured, the yoke of the Philistines was lightened. 
 Though they still had garrisons in Israel (1 Sam. 
 xiii. 3), and prevented the importation and manu- 
 facture of arms (ver. 19-22), yet all marauding ex- 
 peditions ceased in Samuel's days : whether or not 
 Israel was tributary to the Philistines does not plainly 
 appear. 
 
 Samuel's first act, then, was to bring about a 
 thorough reformation among the people ; his second 
 was to provide for the maintenance of morality and 
 religion, by personally undertaking the regular ad- 
 ministration of justice. In profane history we find 
 that Deioces by this means raised the Medes into a 
 nation. But Samuel did more than Deioces. Not 
 at one centre only, at Ramah, did he judge the 
 
III.] OF SAMUEL'S REFORMS. 105 
 
 people, but went yearly on circuit to three chief 
 places, Bethel, Gilgal, and Mizpeh (1 Sam. vii. 16). 
 Nor did justice with him subserve the purposes of 
 personal ambition. True to the high theory of the 
 theocracy, as Jehovah's representative he sought only 
 Jehovah's honour. And by his just decisions, and the 
 example of his own unblemished purity, he taught 
 the people themselves to be just, and also united the 
 tribes together into something like one nation (1 Sam. 
 xii. 4). 
 
 Now it was in this upright administration of the 
 government that Samuel soon found the need of fit 
 persons to act under him. The people were no doubt 
 very ignorant, and reading and writing x were mys- 
 teries confined to the descendants of those great 
 scribes, Eleazar and Phinehas. Samuel determined 
 therefore, in the third place, to raise the nation in- 
 tellectually, as he had already raised it morally; and 
 for this purpose he gathered round him at Naioth, 
 that is, the meadows or open pastures at Ramah, 
 where his own house was situated, a number of young 
 men, whom he trained in reading, writing, and music. 
 As their education was in course of time entrusted 
 to Nabhis, prophets, they were called the sons, that 
 
 x It is a mark of the intellectual superiority of the Semitic races 
 that syllabic writing was known to them at a very early period, while 
 the Egyptians, like the Chinese, never advanced beyond pictorial 
 writing. Ewald, Hist. Israel, i. 51, shows that writing existed among 
 the Semitic nations before we can historically trace it, and though it 
 is uncertain to what Semitic people ' half the civilized world owes this 
 invaluable invention, so much is incontrovertible, that it appears in 
 history as a possession of the Semitic nations long before Moses.' In 
 opposition however to so great an authority I venture to think that the 
 phraseology of Gen. xxiii. 17 belongs to a written document, and there- 
 fore that the art of writing existed in Abraham's days. 
 
106 THE PROPHETIC SPIRIT [LECT. 
 
 is, the disciples, of the prophets ; and from this modest 
 beginning arose ■ the schools of the prophets,' of which 
 we read so much afterwards, especially in the history 
 of the northern kingdom. And thus prophecy now 
 first became a regularly organized national insti- 
 tution. 
 
 But let us consider who these Nabhis or prophets 
 were, whom Samuel gathered round him at Ramah 
 to aid him in the work of education. For it is ex- 
 pressly said that ' the word of Jehovah was rare in 
 those days (i Sam. iii. i) ;' and after Deborah and 
 the prophet who preached repentance throughout 
 Israel before Gideon was summoned to the rescue, 
 we read nothing of prophets till Samuel. But the 
 Spirit of Jehovah was not withdrawn. ' When a 
 young lion roared against Samson, the Spirit of 
 Jehovah,' we read, 'came mightily upon him, and he 
 rent the lion as he would have rent a kid (Judges 
 xiv. 6) ;' and can we suppose that that Spirit, at such 
 a crisis in Israel's history, would be withheld from 
 good and earnest men, thoroughly penetrated with 
 the same truths as Samuel, and joining hand and 
 heart with him in once again giving life to the Mosaic 
 institutions ? Had Samuel stood alone he could have 
 effected but little. But other holy men caught from 
 him the pious enthusiasm, and spread it in a wider 
 circle. Now the great characteristic of the prophet 
 is that intense conviction of the truth and necessity 
 of religion which compels him to proclaim its truths 
 to others. On this account there is much in common 
 between the prophet and the preacher. Often the 
 terms are synonymous. Very fittingly, therefore, does 
 our Church require the profession of an inward call 
 
III.] NO T AL WA YS SUPERNA TURAL. 1 07 
 
 before she admits any one into her ministry. ' Do 
 you trust,' she asks, ' that you are moved inwardly 
 by the Holy Ghost to take upon you this Office and 
 Ministration y ?' Now, as certainly as the Spirit of 
 God rested upon Samson and Saul (1 Sam. xi. 6), 
 and did not make them prophets, but only heroes, 
 so may even the prophetic spirit rest upon men, and 
 yet they may rise no higher than earnest preachers. 
 Who shall deny the gift of the prophetic spirit to 
 Wyclif and Luther, to Wesley and Whitfield, to 
 Wilberforce and Clarkson? Who deny it of old to 
 Augustine and Ambrose, to Basil and Bernard ? ' The 
 testimony of Jesus,' we are told, 'is the spirit of 
 prophecy (Rev. xix. 10).' Men bear that testimony 
 now ; they bore it of old. But there were four z great 
 periods at which this testimony rose to a higher and 
 more directly supernatural level. At these periods 
 God's purposes of mercy towards mankind made the 
 higher gift necessary. Prophets then had not merely 
 truths to preach, but truths to reveal. But because 
 no revelation was made by them or to them, I do 
 not therefore infer that the prophets whom Samuel 
 gathered round him had not the Spirit of Jehovah, 
 and were not true prophets, even though the Divine 
 Spirit wrought within strictly natural limits. So, in 
 
 >' The Ordering of Deacons, Question 1 . 
 
 z These four periods are, (1) the Davidic period, when many Mes- 
 sianic Psalms were composed ; (2) the Assyrian period, of which the 
 great glory was Isaiah ; (3) the Chaldee period, equally ennobled by 
 Jeremiah ; (4) the post-exilic period, when the beautiful Psalms of 
 Degrees were composed, and Zechariah, Haggai, and Malachi flourished. 
 The Mosaic period I regard as something higher than ordinary 
 prophecy. It corresponds to nothing but Christianity. The prophets 
 wrought within the circle of the Mosaic truths; Christ finally made 
 those truths full and perfect, and bestowed them upon all mankind. 
 
108 REVELATION NECESSARILY [LECT. 
 
 the Christian Church, I do not infer that Agabus was 
 more a prophet a than the rest, because he was en- 
 dowed with prescience also. And believing, as I do, 
 that there are even now men ' inwardly moved by the 
 Holy Ghost to take upon them the work of the 
 Ministry,' and yet that this influence does not surpass 
 the bounds of human nature, I recognize in such 
 God's presence, though fully aware of the great 
 difficulty of exactly defining where the influences of 
 the Spirit remain entirely within the limits of man's 
 natural, yet quickened and elevated, powers, and where 
 they rise entirely above them. But when the Word 
 of God so truly ascribes to His Spirit that mighty 
 impulse which made Samson rend the lion, and which 
 nevertheless, in another way, may still be viewed as 
 
 a The prophets in the early Church were men inspired by the Holy 
 Ghost, nt»t to foretell events, but to preach truths. They stood, there- 
 fore, next to the apostles, and higher than mere teachers (i Cor. xii. 28), 
 with whom, however, they are constantly associated (Acts xiii. 1). 
 It was the office of the apostles to rule, of the prophets to preach, 
 of the teachers to instruct and catechize. Upon the apostles the Holy 
 Spirit rested supernaturally for certain special purposes. These were, 
 (1) to bring back all Christ's teaching to their remembrance (John 
 xiv. 26) ; (2) to guide them to the right understanding of that teaching 
 (lb. xvi. 13) ; (3) to tell them the things that were coming (lb.). 
 St. Paul, moreover, obtained his knowledge of Christ's life and preaching 
 by revelation (Gal. i. 12). But these supernatural gifts were so 
 regulated as not to interfere with their own probation (1 Cor. ix. 27). 
 The faculty of prediction, as in the case of Agabus (Acts xi. 28, xxi. 
 10, 11), was not involved in the term Trpo(f>r]TT]s, but belonged to that 
 fulness of charismata which distinguished the early Church. We must 
 further suppose that as the apostles were divinely aided in their own 
 knowledge and understanding of Christ's teaching, so they were guided 
 and assisted by inspiration in their communication of it to the Church. 
 But the prophets of St. Paul's times had not necessarily any such 
 inspiration, but that only which every real Christian has, and which 
 is described in 1 Cor. ii. 10-16. 
 
III.] SUPERNATURAL. I Op 
 
 only a natural impulse, we need feel no hesitation 
 in believing that that same Spirit mightily stirred 
 many hearts, and made them run over with earnest 
 words, when Samuel called God's people to his aid. 
 The error is in circumscribing too narrowly the office 
 and duties of the prophet, when men fear to apply 
 the name to those who, though moved by the Holy 
 Ghost, had yet no revelation to make, no commission 
 to declare new truths in Jehovah's name b . 
 
 At first, indeed, Samuel may have attempted to 
 train his young men himself; but soon I doubt not 
 that he gathered round him as teachers many on 
 whom Jehovah's Spirit rested, as it may rest on men 
 now, and who were irresistibly urged thereby to 
 proclaim the old Mosaic truths of God's unity and 
 spirituality, His justice and mercy, and of light and 
 life and strength to be found alone in Him. And 
 evidently Samuel was anxious that there should be 
 many such men dispersed everywhere throughout 
 the land ; and in his circuits he sought such men 
 
 b I wish, in fact, to protest against two errors : the first, that the 
 inspiration of the prophet was unlike anything that happens now. 
 On the contrary, I believe that the Holy Ghost still impels and forces 
 men to preach Christ. But the second seems to me the worse error ; 
 namely, the denial of any spiritual gift higher than is vouchsafed now. 
 On the contrary, I believe that on special occasions the great prophets 
 of old were under the influence of a directly supernatural power. No 
 preacher or teacher now is secure from error, but unless the writers 
 of the Holy Scriptures had been thus secured, what reliance could 
 we have placed upon their words? No preacher now has any new 
 Divine truth to reveal; but it was the very office of prophets and 
 apostles to reveal new truths to the Church. While, then, God's gifts 
 now do not surpass the bounds of our natural powers, however much 
 they may quicken them, a further and supernatural gift was bestowed 
 upon a certain small number of persons in old time, but strictly for one 
 special purpose. 
 
HO UPRISE AND GROWTH [LECT. 
 
 out, and, if young, he took them with him, and gave 
 them fuller instruction. Probably he began with 
 one or two youths who seemed more especially fitted 
 for so high a calling ; and then his institution grew, 
 and teachers had to be found as well as scholars. 
 But it is chiefly the results which the Bible sets before 
 us. We find there nothing less than a new life 
 rapidly beginning for the nation, so that comparatively 
 but a few years separate the rough and untaught 
 anarchy of the times of the Judges from the learning 
 and order and piety of David's reign c . 
 
 Now there can be little doubt but that Moses had 
 intended the priests and Levites to be the instructors 
 of the people. For this purpose he had raised them 
 above the necessity of labouring for their bread, and 
 had dispersed them among the people. Unfortunately 
 they proved but sorry teachers ; and God, in Samuel's 
 days, raised up others to take their place. God has 
 not given to any body of men whatsoever a chartered 
 
 c One instance of this enormous change will suffice. There is much 
 to be learned from the proper names in Holy Scripture. Compounded 
 very frequently of some appellation or other of God, they show us 
 what were the prevailing religious ideas of the time. Now, judged 
 in this way, Saul is half a heathen. He names one son Jonathan 
 = God's gift, in Greek, Theodore ; but another is Ish-baal = Baal's 
 hero (i Chron. viii. 33). Jonathan's son is Merib-baal = Baal's striver. 
 Soon after, feelings so changed that men would not even use the name 
 of Baal, but said instead Bosheth = shame, or disgrace, and, in still 
 later times, abomination (Is. xliv. 19, Dan. xi. 31, xii. II, Mat. xxiv. 15). 
 But what a world-wide difference a few years had made between the 
 state of feeling which allowed»Saul to call his son Baal's hero, and 
 that which could not endure the name of Baal, and substituted for it 
 Ish-bosheth = Shame's hero ! It is very true that the Baal of Saul's 
 time was a very different being from the Baal of Ahab and Jezebel ; 
 but it was a term too directly connected with idolatry to admit of its 
 use by any right-minded man. 
 
III.] OF SAMUEL'S SCHOOLS. 1 1 1 
 
 right to lock up heaven, and let His people perish 
 for lack of knowledge. If those who are regularly 
 called, and who are the priests according to the true 
 succession, neglect their duties, their place will very 
 soon be supplied by those who have only the inward 
 call. The prophets essentially were men whose sole 
 claim to teach was this inward call. So entirely was 
 this the case that the men trained in the prophetic 
 colleges were themselves the first to acknowledge the 
 higher gift which summoned Elisha from his farming 
 at Abel-meholah to be their head (2 Kings ii. 15); 
 and which urged Amos to leave his scanty subsistence, 
 as a puncturer of sycamore fruit at Tekoah, to publish 
 to the ten tribes a warning so weighty that, as the 
 high priest testified, ' the land was not able to bear 
 his words (Amos vii. 10).' 
 
 From the days when Samuel first gathered a few 
 youths round him at Ramah, the schools of the 
 prophets never seem to have ceased in Israel. We 
 read of them afterwards as flourishing at numerous 
 places, especially among the ten tribes, and of the 
 Nabhis, the prophets trained in them, as existing 
 by hundreds — sometimes nobly dying as martyrs for 
 the truth, like those whom Jezebel persecuted to 
 death, but of whom Obadiah saved a hundred pro- 
 phets, hiding them by fifty in a cave (1 Kings xviii. 4) ; 
 at other times ready to lie and flatter, like the four 
 hundred Jehovah-prophets, who bade Ahab go up to 
 Ramoth-gilead and prosper (1 Kings xxii. 5, 6). Evi- 
 dently they filled a position analogous to that of the 
 clergy in the Christian Church, except that their call 
 was somewhat irregular. For neither did these schools 
 form part of the Mosaic institutions, nor was even 
 
112 ANALOGY BE TWEEN [LECT. 
 
 education in them necessary before entering upon the 
 prophetic office. They had been raised up to take 
 the place of men who had failed in their duties ; but 
 they had no regular charter, nothing to appeal to but 
 an internal impulse; and naturally therefore to the 
 last we find a sharply-defined opposition between them 
 and the priesthood. Of the two sides of the truth 
 they press almost exclusively the need of real, deep, 
 personal religion : of the necessity of external aids to 
 our infirmity they say but little. I do not see how 
 they could have done otherwise. The need of these 
 aids is a deduction of the reason drawing its arguments 
 from experience. The prophets spake from a fervent 
 heart, eager for the end and not calmly examining 
 the means. And so their text ever is, 'Behold, to 
 obey is better than sacrifice ;' and their teaching a 
 foreshadowing of His Who taught that the true wor- 
 ship must be ' in spirit and in truth d .' 
 
 Among the men trained in these colleges, there 
 were, I doubt not, thousands who preached the pure 
 spiritual doctrines of the Mosaic economy, and who 
 formed the true core of the nation, and laboured 
 earnestly for that great end for which the Mosaic 
 institutions were given, and which we now enjoy in 
 Christ. But we must not confound these preachers, 
 true prophets though they were, with those few and 
 divinely-gifted men who were speakers for God in 
 a far higher sense, as being directly inspired either 
 
 d So in the New Testament, there is little direct teaching about 
 institutions and ceremonies ; it was left to the Church, the great society 
 of believers, to appoint such institutions and ritual as might best help 
 in guarding the truth intrusted to its keeping, and in propagating it 
 throughout the world. 
 
III.] THE PROPHETS AND THE CLERGY. 113 
 
 to explain old truths, or to proclaim some new portion 
 of that heavenly knowledge which was to be made 
 perfect in Christ. It is to those who were prophets 
 in the largest sense that we owe the Bible. If the 
 preservation of the several books of the Bible was 
 probably due to the prophetic colleges, the writers 
 themselves were men to whom prophecy was no mere 
 calling. or profession. There were Jehovah-prophets 
 by hundreds, doing in the main God's work, as our 
 own clergy do, and who felt that they were inwardly 
 moved to do this work ; and here and there we find 
 men who falsely professed to be thus called, because 
 of the dignity or emoluments to be gained by such 
 a profession. And from time to time the Spirit of 
 Jehovah rested upon some one man — not necessarily 
 of greater natural gifts, but of a heart more intensely 
 devoted to God. And this special call was tied down 
 to no institution whatsoever, nor to any class. It might 
 come to an Amos, gaining a scanty living by his own 
 labour ; it might come to the young priest Jeremiah, 
 dwelling on his own lands at the priests' town Ana- 
 thoth ; it might come to Zephaniah, a prince of the 
 blood royal, amid the splendours of a court. But it 
 came by no initiation, by no training, by no ordinances 
 of men, but directly from above, from God. And 
 when the call came, it summoned them to trouble, 
 to sorrow, to disappointment. The book spread before 
 them was written within and without ; and the writing 
 ever was lamentations, and mourning, and woe (Ezek. 
 ii. 10). They might be wanted for some special 
 mission, as was Amos, and would afterwards return 
 again to ordinary life. It might be a life-long service. 
 Jeremiah must daily be God's witness during the forty 
 
 I 
 
114 REASONS FOR THE TRIALS [lect. 
 
 and two years which preceded the fall of Jerusalem. 
 He must forego for ever all share of domestic happi- 
 ness (Jer. xvi. 2) ; must abstain from all pleasant e 
 company, and dwell lonely and apart (lb. xv. 17); 
 must take no share in the joys or the sorrows of life 
 (lb. xvi. 5, 8) ; and this not to attain to rank and 
 power, not to win those prizes which stir in men an 
 honourable ambition, but to become ' a man of strife, 
 a man of contention ; one that every one did curse 
 (lb. xv. 10).' 'Why,' said he, 'is my pain perpetual, 
 and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed ? 
 (lb. xv. 18).' Such was God's call to him ; and such 
 was it ever. The prophets were sent to a people 
 whose heart was fat, and their ears heavy, and their 
 eyes shut (Is. vi.io). Their cry ever is, 'Lord, who 
 hath believed our report? (lb. liii. 1).' For the false 
 prophet there was reward, honour, emolument ; for 
 the true the word was, ' I hate that man. Put him 
 into the prison, and feed him with the bread of 
 affliction, and the water of affliction,' till his words 
 be disproved (1 Kings xxii. 8, 27). 
 
 And this was necessary for two reasons. First, as 
 regards the prophet. He was summoned to his office 
 by an internal call. But men deceive themselves too 
 greatly for such a call to be trustworthy if it leads 
 on to wealth and power. At first it did lead to 
 power ; Moses and Samuel held their authority by 
 virtue of their prophetic office : and in men of such 
 
 e There is nothing to justify the translation of the A. V. mockers. 
 The word really means those who laugh and are cheerful. Our version 
 entirely corrupts the sense. Jeremiah, as a prophet, had to abstain 
 from what was right, or at least innocent, and not merely from what 
 was wrong. 
 
III.] OF THE PROPHETIC LIFE. 1 15 
 
 extraordinary elevation of character no danger would 
 ensue. But when we find that there were professed 
 prophets who polluted God among His people for 
 such mean gains as ' handfuls of barley and pieces 
 of bread (Ezek. xiii. 19),' to what degradation might 
 not the prophet's name have fallen, if wealth and 
 honour had been its guerdon ? The prophet was 
 called to the highest and noblest of all vocations : he 
 was Jehovah's minister. But his earthly lot was 
 scorn and the enmity of the world. He had his re- 
 ward, but it was not one that allures worldly-minded 
 men. It was a spiritual life hidden in God : and this 
 none can enjoy but the pure in heart. 
 
 But still more important was it for the people. 
 The prophet brought them a message from heaven. 
 Upon this message their acceptance with God de- 
 pended. How were they to know that it was God's 
 message ? Remember that there were false prophets 
 as well as true, and that they made great professions 
 of their prophetic power. We read of Zedekiah 
 making him horns of iron as a sign that Ahab should 
 push the Syrians till he had consumed them (1 Kings 
 xxii. 11). We read of Hananiah taking the yoke off 
 Jeremiah's neck and breaking it in token that Nebu- 
 chadnezzar's empire should be broken (Jer. xxviii. 10, 
 11). We read of Shemaiah writing from Babylon, 
 and reproving the high priest for not punishing 
 Jeremiah, and putting a stop to his predictions of 
 woe (lb. xxix. 24 sqq.). In the last days of the 
 monarchy the false prophets obtained a fearful as- 
 cendancy : and that chiefly because the people loved 
 falsehood and hated truth, and therefore themselves 
 corrupted the prophets. We find the first note of this 
 
 I 2 
 
Il6 THE PROPHETIC CALL [LECT. 
 
 in Isaiah, ' This is a rebellious people, lying children, 
 that will not hear the law of Jehovah, which say 
 to the seers, See not ; and to the prophets, Prophesy 
 not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, 
 prophesy deceits (Is. xxx. 9, 10).' In severer terms 
 Jeremiah speaks of a fearful alliance of prophets, 
 priests, and people in mutually deceiving and cor- 
 rupting one another (Jer. v. 30, 31). How then, in 
 such a state of circumstances, could one who truly 
 sought God know who was indeed the bearer of God's 
 message ? 
 
 He would know it chiefly by the message itself. 
 There is no man who does not at some time or other 
 feel that there is a message from God to his soul : and 
 that that message bids him repent and be holy. He 
 knows that God's message must be a reproof of all 
 that is wicked in him, and a warning that for his 
 wickedness there will be judgment. This is just the 
 message which the true prophets always brought. 
 Not a smooth message, but a rough message of re- 
 buke and expostulation, and of promise only where 
 there had been first repentance. But men deceive 
 themselves. They have ever some excuse, some plea 
 for themselves : and therefore the message must be 
 brought by those who are not merely disinterested, 
 but are actually sufferers by it. Such is still the 
 case now. The highest calls of duty are ever incom- 
 patible with worldly profit. And such certainly was 
 the case with the prophets of old. They neither 
 gained nor expected to gain from their labours any- 
 thing but opposition, abuse, and injury. Read their 
 history through — search in their works for the motives 
 which influenced their conduct ; examine what they 
 
III.] UNSOUGHT. 117 
 
 taught, and the principles which they urged upon 
 others, and you will never find that what they sought 
 was either pleasure or riches, or any worldly, low, 
 mean, unworthy object. They laboured for God, and 
 found in Him their sole reward. And even this very 
 labouring came not to them of their own choice. They 
 sought not the office. ' As for me,' says Jeremiah, 
 ' I have not hastened from being a pastor to follow 
 Thee : neither have I desired the woeful day ; Thou 
 knowest (Jer. xvii. 16).' The inspiration came from 
 God, unsought, against their own wills ; and they 
 knew that earthly ease, happiness, enjoyment must 
 be foregone. Such were the criteria of the true pro- 
 phet : a message which did not flatter man, but raised 
 him from earth to God ; and himself an example 
 of every earthly good resigned that duty might be 
 done, and God obeyed and found. 
 
 Such was the teaching and such the conduct of 
 the men who wrote for us the Old Testament : but 
 to show more clearly their extraordinary excellence 
 I shall in my next lecture explain what was the 
 general nature of the prophetic institutions, the kind 
 of instruction given in their colleges, their mode of 
 life, their ordinary average standard of duty and 
 religion. It is only by contrasting the inspired 
 prophet with his uninspired brethren, that we can 
 see how high he was raised above the usual level 
 of his contemporaries. 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 THE SCHOOLS OF THE PROPHETS. 
 
 It was told Said, saying, Behold, David is at Naioth 
 in Ramali. And Said sent messengers to take David : 
 and when they saw the company of the prophets 
 prophesying, and Samuel standing as appointed over 
 them, the Spirit of God was upon the messengers of 
 Said, and they also prophesied. — i Sam. xix. 19, 20. 
 
 In my last lecture I endeavoured to give a general 
 outline of the nature of Samuel's times, and of the 
 work which he accomplished. We find ourselves in 
 his days transported into an entirely different state 
 of things from that which had existed before. It 
 was the second great era of Judaism, inferior to the 
 age of Moses, but yet one in which the truths taught 
 by Moses first acquired that ascendancy over the 
 Jewish mind which they never afterwards lost ; on 
 the contrary, from Samuel's time they ever grew in 
 strength and clearness, till finally the veil was with- 
 drawn from them in Christ, and apostles and evan- 
 gelists completed what Moses had begun. I showed 
 somewhat of the difficulties with which Moses had 
 to contend. Though round him he had the heads of 
 the tribes, men impressed with the same truths as 
 
THE ERA OF MOSES. 
 
 119 
 
 himself, yet the mass of the people were not merely 
 debased by a long sojourn in Egypt, but were ori- 
 ginally of inferior position, retainers a merely, who had 
 learned somewhat of the nature of God from their 
 chiefs, but probably in a very imperfect manner. 
 And then there was that base mixed multitude, who 
 
 a The number of first-born males, as given in Num. iii. 40-43, is 
 22,273. All the genealogies show that large families were the ex- 
 ception among the Israelites, and not the rule. An average of three 
 or four sons in a family would be a high one, and thus we cannot be 
 far wrong in estimating the number of lineal descendants of Jacob 
 at the Exodus as under eighty thousand. Now Jacob and all his 
 kindred when they went down to Egypt amounted to ' threescore and 
 fifteen souls (Acts vii. 14) ; ' but if we add together Jacob's ' brethren ' 
 and the menservants he brought with him from Mesopotamia, the 
 captives taken at Shechem, and the half of Isaac's possessions, we may 
 safely conclude that Jacob's whole household amounted to many 
 thousand persons. In Egypt Joseph was ruler over the whole land, 
 and his power is proved by the expeditions made by his grandsons 
 into Palestine. By the time of his death the Israelites in Goshen were 
 probably more than a hundred thousand strong, since for military 
 reasons Joseph would do all he could to increase their numbers, so 
 as to enable them to protect the north-eastern boundary of the kingdom, 
 where they were posted. Many Semitic tribes may have been incor- 
 porated with them in Joseph's days, just as the Kenites and Kenezites 
 were in the days of Moses. If their chiefs were adopted into the patri- 
 archal families, as Caleb and Othniel were into that of Judah, even 
 the eighty thousand spoken of above would not all be lineally descended 
 from Jacob. Now, multiplied by four, the sixth generation would 
 make these 75 souls into 76,800, but this implies an average of eight 
 children, all arriving at full age and marrying. But, as a matter of 
 fact, we find that Joshua was the twelfth generation from Joseph 
 (1 Chron. vii. 20-27). It is a vexed question whether the 430 years 
 mentioned in Exod. xii. 41 are to be reckoned from Abraham's vision. 
 Gen. xv. 13, or from the descent into Egypt : but one complete 
 genealogy like that of Joshua has more weight than the shorter genea- 
 logies like those of Moses, because it was the rule with the Hebrews 
 to omit names. Names are omitted even in our Lord's genealogy in 
 Matt. i. As Ewald observes, the names in the genealogy of Moses 
 may represent each a century. In four centuries Jacob's lineal de- 
 scendants might well amount to fourscore thousand men. 
 
120 HIGHER MORAL LEVEL [LECT, 
 
 were half- heathens in their views; and, after the 
 conquest of Canaan, there was added to all this a 
 large admixture of the native population, whose 
 wanton nature-worships had a powerful attraction for 
 at least all the inferior portion of the mighty multitude 
 who left Egypt. 
 
 Even the princes did not always give Moses a 
 hearty support. Aaron and Miriam, and Aaron's 
 sons, on more than one occasion failed him. The 
 chiefs of Reuben, and Korah a prince of Levi, broke 
 out once into open rebellion ; but the real difficulty, 
 as is evident everywhere in the history of the wan- 
 derings in the wilderness, was with the mass of the 
 people. When, at the end of a year, they reached 
 the borders of Palestine, their cowardice was so great 
 that they refused to enter upon the conquest of the 
 land ; and it was not till after that whole generation 
 was dead, and Moses at his head-quarters at Kadesh- 
 barnea had trained up an entirely new generation, 
 invigorated both by his teaching and by the healthy 
 air of the desert, and the hardy mode of life they 
 led there, it was then only that marching upon 
 Canaan by an entirely different route he conquered in 
 person the Amorites of Heshbon and Bashan, and 
 the Midianites, and placed Joshua at the head of a 
 band of hardy warriors, whom nothing could resist. 
 A vast moral and physical change b alike had passed 
 over the people, but it was not complete. Perhaps a 
 large proportion of the tribes were necessarily dis- 
 persed over the desert during Moses' days, seeking 
 
 b Compare Ex. xiv. n, 12, xvi. 3, Num. xi. 4-6, xiv. 1-4, with the 
 bravery displayed when Moses started the second time from Kadesh 
 for the conquest of the land, Num. xxi. 24, 35, &c. 
 
IV.] OF THE ERA OF SAMUEL. 
 
 121 
 
 pasture for their flocks and herds, though incontest- 
 ably the whole region then was vastly more fertile 
 than it is at present. But however it be accounted 
 for, evidently the Canaanitish rites had only too great 
 an attraction for the mass of the people, and the 
 times of the Judges are set before us as times of 
 constant lapses into idolatry, and of a by no means 
 elevated moral tone. 
 
 But in the days of Samuel we find the worship 
 of Jehovah everywhere firmly established, and from 
 their defeat at Ebenezer the people rise to a more 
 vigorous, a nobler, and a higher life. As the conquest 
 of Canaan by Joshua was really Moses' work, because 
 he had formed and trained the men whom Joshua 
 led, so the victories of Saul and the conquests of 
 David were really Samuel's work, because he had 
 raised the nation to that moral level which made it 
 fit and able to win first independence and then 
 empire. Samuel by his reforms had endowed the 
 nation with a vigorous inner energy, which showed 
 itself outwardly in strong acts. Israel had, I grant, 
 never lost that hardy valour with which it emerged 
 from its thirty-eight years' training in the wilderness c ; 
 
 c I am quite ready also to grant that David's strength was in part 
 owing to the decisive way in which Judah now entered the confederacy. 
 It had always been the most warlike of the tribes (Num. x. 14, Judges 
 i. 2, xx. 18), but from the time that Othniel drove back the Meso- 
 potamians (Judges iii. 10), we read nothing more of it, except the 
 not very patriotic proceeding in Judges xv. 9-13. Apparently, how- 
 ever, it had enjoyed a period of unchequered prosperity ; for when 
 David numbered the people, there were in Judah 500,000 valiant men that 
 drew the sword, and only 800,000 in all the rest of the tribes. Now 
 at the last numbering of the people, in Num. xxvi, the tribe of Judah 
 had consisted of 76,500 men, and the other eleven tribes, omitting 
 Levi, of 525,230 men. I think we may appeal to this as an undesigned 
 
122 WARS FOR EMPIRE [lect. 
 
 but Samuel had revived in it its early enthusiasm, 
 had filled it with fresh faith in Jehovah, and with 
 a renewed confidence that Israel was Jehovah's 
 people, and that, if it served Him in truth and holi- 
 ness, He would be its strength and sure defence. 
 This new life not only won for Israel freedom, but 
 dominion over the neighbouring states. It was but 
 too natural for a warrior who had broken the yoke 
 of foreign subjection from off the neck of his own 
 people, to place it, if he could, upon the necks of 
 others. I do not find, however, that the prophets 
 approved of this. Rather they strongly condemned 
 it. When David numbered the people, the prophet 
 Gad reproved him, and bade him choose one of three 
 severe punishments. Why ? We do not doubt but 
 that it is absolutely right to number the people. 
 Moses twice numbered the people. All civilized 
 nations number the people. Yes ; but David num- 
 bered only 'the valiant men that drew the sword,' 
 and he numbered them for a bad purpose — for foreign 
 war and aggression ; and the punishments were all 
 of such a kind as to abate this fighting lust. And 
 when David would have built a temple for Jehovah's 
 service, leave is refused him. A man who had ' made 
 great wars, and shed much blood upon the earth,' 
 must resign so pure and elevated a purpose to 'a 
 man of rest (i Chron. xxii. 8, 9).' 
 
 Now we saw in the last lecture the three great 
 
 coincidence. In the Book of Judges every other tribe is exposed to 
 constant trouble, but Judah remains tranquil in its southern fastnesses. 
 When it emerges from its obscurity, it has grown so strong that it 
 is well-nigh a match for all the rest. The other tribes had increased 
 in numbers, but not to any great extent. Judah had increased more 
 than sixfold. 
 
IV.] CONDEMNED BY THE PROPHETS. 123 
 
 means employed by Samuel in producing this mar- 
 vellous change in Israel, of which David's empire, 
 and the learning and culture prevalent in his days, 
 and his psalms, and the service in the sanctuary at 
 which they were sung, were truly results ; Samuel's 
 three chief means for this were the reformation of 
 the people's morals, the upright administration of 
 justice, and the regular organization of the prophetic 
 order d . Like all true reformers, his object was to 
 raise and elevate the people themselves ; all the rest 
 was sure to follow. Now of all his institutions, that 
 which gave strength and life to everything else was 
 the grand development he gave to the energy of the 
 prophets by means of the schools which he founded 
 for them. He trained in these schools men whose 
 one business was earnestly to labour among the 
 people for their spiritual good. As the priests and 
 Levites laboured to preserve the Mosaic religion, its 
 ceremonies and ritual, its types and sacrifices, its 
 feasts and fasts and festivals, so the prophets laboured 
 to preserve and impress upon the people's hearts all 
 the great spiritual truths and ideas of the Mosaic 
 teaching. After the return from Babylon, this great 
 duty was performed by the synagogues, wherein the 
 law, and psalms, and prophets were read every 
 Sabbath day. Among us it is performed by the 
 
 d Of course I do not put these upon the same level. The first was 
 the end sought also by the other two. I put them down in this order 
 (illogical though it be), because Samuel brought about a national 
 repentance first of all by his own exhortations (1 Sam. vii. 3-6), and 
 then took means for making this revival of faith and morality firm 
 and lasting by his other two measures. His annual circuits as judge 
 would maintain a high standard of morality; the preaching and activity 
 of the prophets would quicken the nation's faith. 
 
124 ORIGIN [lect. 
 
 services of the Lord's house, wherein the teaching 
 of the Church and of the Bible is enforced by the 
 living voice of the preacher. As I have said, I 
 doubt not but that under the Mosaic institutions 
 the priests and Levites were dispersed throughout 
 Israel on purpose that they might discharge this 
 duty : they did not discharge it, and Samuel now 
 confided it to men trained by him for this one end. 
 
 In the text we are introduced to the first and 
 earliest of the prophetic colleges, with its organiza- 
 tion apparently complete and in full working order. 
 We find prophets arranged in a regular company, 
 duties about which they are engaged, and a duly 
 appointed head presiding over them. Already in the 
 tenth chapter we had read of a company of the 
 prophets coming in solemn procession from some 
 religious ceremony, preceded by instruments of music, 
 whereas previously the name of prophet is most rare. 
 And here we see them at their head-quarters, and 
 subject to a settled discipline, with ' Samuel standing 
 as appointed over them.' How appointed ? and by 
 whom ? and whence arose these schools of the pro- 
 phets, of which henceforward we read so much in the 
 annals of the Jewish monarchy ? 
 
 Now, first, the college of which we here read is 
 at Ramah, a town which pertained to Samuel. His 
 father Elkanah had dwelt there (i Sam. i. 19, ii. n), 
 and at his death his possessions descended to Samuel, 
 his first-born son. Thither at the end of each judicial 
 circuit Samuel returned, ' for there was his house, 
 and there he judged Israel, and there he built an 
 altar unto Jehovah (lb. vii. 17);' and there, finally, 
 ' he died, and was buried (lb. xxv. 1).' And, as I 
 
IV.] OF THE PROPHETIC SCHOOLS. T25 
 
 have before said, Naioth is not the name of any town 
 or village, but means pastures, places apparently that 
 were common property, and where the shepherds 
 loved to congregate and pitch their tents. In these 
 pastures, then, near Ramah, Samuel's dwelling-place, 
 there were young men assembled, to be trained, as 
 it appears, not in martial exercises, but in the rudi- 
 ments of a higher education. 
 
 It is quite incidentally that the mention of them 
 is made. Probably the Books of Samuel were com- 
 piled from records which he had himself commenced. 
 Had Gad or Nathan written them, it seems incredible 
 but that they would have told us more about the 
 origin and discipline of these schools. For they had 
 by that time grown into important institutions, and 
 prophets who had learned in them arts so important 
 as reading and writing, would have looked back with 
 affection to their great founder, and told us more of 
 his plans and ways. Not so Samuel. The prophetic 
 colleges had grown up round him as it were by 
 chance. He had not consciously intended to alter 
 the whole course of things, and found a new era : 
 but he had felt a want, a need, and tried to supply 
 it. And his plans by prudent management had pros- 
 pered. From small beginnings there had sprung up 
 round him what virtually was a University e . Men 
 had gradually gathered to his teaching, and learning 
 advanced with rapid strides. Though Deborah records 
 
 e I will not enter into the vexed question whether Kirjath-sepher, 
 Book-town, was a Canaanite University, but Ramah was plainly the 
 first Hebrew University, and stands at the head of that long line of 
 educational institutions which after the Saviour', time ended in the 
 ffreat schools of Tiberias, Sora, and Pumbeditha. 
 
126 RAPID ADVANCE OF LEARNING [lecT. 
 
 that there came to her from Zebulun ' those that 
 handle the pen of the writer (Judges v. 14),' this is 
 the last indication of the existence among the Israel- 
 ites of that culture which they must have acquired 
 in Egypt when living in close contact with a people 
 so highly civilized. Nor can even this be depended 
 upon, for the more probable translation is ' those that 
 handle the staff or baton of the general.' In the 
 sanctuary alone at Shiloh were the arts of reading 
 and writing preserved. But now learning becomes 
 common. The youthful David, son of the rich farmer 
 of Bethlehem, standing there at Samuel's side when 
 Saul's messengers came, was not only himself an 
 educated man, but when he became king could gather 
 round him accomplished scribes and competent his- 
 torians. His son was to be the wonder of the age 
 for literary skill. All this was Samuel's doing. I see 
 not how David could have learned to read and write 
 except in Samuel's schools. His skill in music may 
 also have been acquired there. But be this as it 
 may, from the days of Samuel till the repeated inva- 
 sions of the Assyrians had wasted the land and 
 destroyed its higher civilization, the Israelites f were 
 a highly-educated and literary people. 
 
 His own education then in the sanctuary was bear- 
 ing fruit. Samuel's predecessors had been warriors, 
 men who fought for freedom sword in hand, but who 
 had little idea of anything more. Samuel was no 
 
 f like all energetic races they had an eager thirst for knowledge, and 
 an aptness to learn and teach. 'The scholar and the teacher' are 
 already mentioned in David's time (i Chron. xxv. 8); and among the 
 three precepts ascribed to Ezra in the Talmud is this, ' Teach : make 
 numerous scholars.' See Nicolas, Des Doctr. Rel. des Juifs, p. 31. 
 
IV.] IN SAMUEL 'S BAYS. 1 27 
 
 warrior. Not but that at Ebenezer he put himself 
 at the head of the Israelites, and won for them that 
 great victory which gave them rest for many years. 
 But he had higher purposes. To give Israel per- 
 manent and enduring superiority, he must raise the 
 whole people mentally and morally, as well as reli- 
 giously. If by his own teaching and example he 
 could thus ennoble a few, they would be his instru- 
 ments for ennobling the rest. He gathers round him 
 therefore religious men, deepens their own convic- 
 tions, awakens their zeal, fills them with earnestness, 
 kindles in them the true prophetic spirit, and by them 
 calls forth again into full force and activity those pure 
 and elevating Mosaic beliefs which had at first nerved 
 the people to quit Egypt, and enabled them in the 
 next generation to conquer Canaan. 
 
 At first these young men probably dwelt in tents 
 or booths on the open pasture land : for the ways of 
 life were still simple, and houses g rare, and possessed 
 only by those of higher rank. But as their numbers 
 increased, and a regular constitution was given them, 
 and a settled discipline, it is probable that their 
 dwellings acquired more of a permanent character 11 . 
 In the text they certainly appear as a regularly 
 organized body : for we find ' Samuel standing as 
 
 e That the tent was the ordinary dwelling-place of the Israelites, 
 except in the towns, is suggested by passages such as Is. liv. 2. So 
 David is described as saying, ' I will not go into the tent of my house,' 
 Ps. cxxxii. 3 ; and Isaiah, xvi. 5, calls David's house a tent. If such 
 was the king's habitation, no wonder that all the people in .Solomon's 
 time still lived in tents, I Kings viii. 66, and long afterwards, 2 Kings 
 xiii. 5, Jer. iv. 20, x. 20. 
 
 h At all events they would require something like a common hall, or 
 place of meeting. 
 
123 THE PROPHETS TRAINED [LECT. 
 
 appointed over them.' Now these words may only 
 refer to that religious service of song and chant in 
 which they were engaged when Saul's messengers 
 arrived. If so, they would show that they had arrived 
 at that stage when the service of God was conducted 
 according to a dignified and impressive ceremonial. 
 But the words more probably signify that Samuel 
 1 was chief over them.' Not appointed by any one : 
 that is not the meaning of the Hebrew. As a prophet 
 of the highest rank, he was by virtue of his office their 
 chief. And thus the words suggest, what we should 
 also gather from other things, that after the appoint- 
 ment of Saul to the kingdom, Samuel, for the re- 
 maining thirty years of his life, concentrated all his 
 energies upon these schools. Hence the deep root 
 they struck in Israel, and the vast effects they pro- 
 duced. And, following Samuel's example, other 
 inspired prophets devoted themselves to the same 
 high purpose, and the sons of the prophets looked 
 to them naturally as their chiefs. Thus when at 
 Jericho they saw that ' the spirit of Elijah rested 
 upon Elisha,' they acknowledged him as their head 
 by ' bowing themselves to the ground before him 
 (2 Kings ii. 15);' and subsequently we find him re- 
 cognized as their ruler by all the prophetic colleges 
 among the ten tribes. 
 
 The training of these young men was partly in 
 reading and writing, the two sole foundations of all 
 intellectual culture, and the two greatest steps that 
 men can take forward on the road from barbarism to 
 civilization. But it was partly also, as we have seen, 
 in music, with which was joined probably singing, 
 such as subsequently formed the great charm of 
 
IV.] IN MUSIC. 129 
 
 the temple services, as established there by David, 
 Nathan, and Gad, all three, I doubt not, trained by- 
 Samuel himself. Now the introduction of psalms 
 into the temple service was a great step towards an 
 intellectual and spiritual worship. The sacrifices were 
 full of typical meaning, but their chief attraction pro- 
 bably was the feast which followed. The Psalms were 
 ' a reasonable — an intellectual — service,' and men's 
 hearts rose up in them to God. The synagogues, 
 after the return from Babylon, made this kind of ser- 
 vice, with other similar additions of prayer and the 
 reading of the scriptures, the ordinary form of Divine 
 worship throughout the land. And we have inherited 
 this service. The Christian Church was formed upon 
 the model not of the temple but of the synagogue. 
 Still we read the same law, and the same prophets as 
 they read, and sing their psalms. To this day these 
 Jewish Psalms are our best expression of praise and 
 thanksgiving. When Samuel trained his young pro- 
 phets in music, he introduced "an innovation into 
 Divine service which will continue and bear fruit as 
 long as the Church shall last 1 . 
 
 But this training was necessary also for the times. 
 In a coarse and violent age like that described in the 
 Book of Judges, music and poetry, which inevitably 
 go together, exercise a powerful influence in civilizing 
 men, and giving the softer arts, and the pleasures of a 
 milder and more refined mode of life, value in their 
 
 i Yet here as everywhere else the root is in Moses. He first wrote 
 a Psalm which Miriam and the women sang with timbrels and dances 
 (Ex. xv. 20), and therefore the Psalms are very significantly ascribed to 
 Moses in the Revelation, ' They sing the song of Moses, the servant of 
 God, and the song of the Lamb (Rev. xv. 3).' 
 
 K 
 
130 MEN TRAINED BY SAMUEL [lect. 
 
 eyes. We now are subject to innumerable softening 
 influences. It was not so then. Music, the song, the 
 religious chant, the solemn dance at holy festivals, 
 these were the chief, and well-nigh the sole civilizing 
 elements of early times k . 
 
 We must not, however, suppose that all the young 
 men trained by Samuel at Ramah became prophets. 
 Very probably at first he wanted men to aid him 
 in the civil administration of the realm : and besides, 
 though the sons of the prophets occupied a lower 
 position than that held by men so highly inspired as 
 Samuel and Gad and Nathan, and Elijah and Elisha, 
 yet before a man was admitted even into the lower 
 grades of the prophetic order, proof was necessary 
 that Jehovah's spirit rested upon him ; proof that he 
 had the inner call to bear to men Jehovah's message. 
 But men so called formed probably but a small pro- 
 portion of those who frequented Samuel's schools. 
 Certainly we find that David had returned to his 
 ordinary duties at home when the war with the 
 Philistines summoned him away from his obscurity. 
 Yet we cannot be far wrong in concluding that he did 
 not learn at Bethlehem either his extraordinary skill 
 in writing or his mastery over the harp. We read 
 
 k In a fighting age the bard stands in the same relation to civilization 
 as the newspaper of the present day. He was the organ of intelligence, 
 the bearer of news, the representative of the ideas of his times. When 
 men take to reading, the bard becomes a plaything. He may beguile 
 the long hours of a winter evening, or increase the pleasures of a feast, 
 but no more. In early times he was the educator also. His lays, as 
 sung by himself, and repeated from mouth to mouth, formed the minds 
 of his countrymen. The song, the ballad, — these were the intellectual 
 food of the people. Of such ballads probably consisted the Book of 
 Jashar, and the Book of the Wars of Jehovah, so often mentioned in 
 the Bible. 
 
IV.] FOR ORDINARY DUTIES. 131 
 
 of him too as dancing before the ark, and though not 
 expressly mentioned, still we cannot doubt but that 
 this formed part of the religious exercises of the 
 sons of the prophets \ Still more conclusive is the 
 elevation of his views as shown in his contest with 
 the giant, his self-devotion, and early piety. From 
 all this I doubt not that after Samuel had anointed 
 David as Israel's future king, he had him with him 
 as much as possible, and carefully trained him for 
 his high destiny m . 
 
 We find a proverb twice referred to connecting 
 even Saul with the prophetic schools (1 Sam. x. 11, 
 xix. 24). Two circumstances are mentioned, in both 
 of which the ready wit of the people noticed that 
 strange incongruity of character, which strikes us to 
 this day in reading Saul's history. But we must not 
 conclude from the proverb that Saul had ever had 
 any such training. The history presents him to us 
 as one who had no personal knowledge of Samuel 
 (1 Sam. ix. 18) when God's providence brought him 
 first to Ramah : and apparently he resided at Gibeah 
 during the no very long period which intervened be- 
 tween his designation to the crown and the establish- 
 ment of his authority by the defeat of Nahash. Saul 
 was a man of great natural ability, with many noble 
 qualities, who yet failed miserably in his probation. 
 But his whole history is that of an untrained man, 
 nor is there the slightest indication that he could read 
 
 1 Compare Michal's reproach of David, 2 Sam. vi. 20, with what is 
 said of Saul, 1 Sam. xix. 24. 
 
 m According to the ordinary chronology, Saul's second and final re- 
 jection was in B. c. 1079, and David's combat with Goliath in n. c. 10^3. 
 There is thus an interval of sixteen years, giving ample space for David's 
 anointing and subsequent training for the kingly office. 
 
 K 2 
 
132 CONNECTION OF SAUL [lect. 
 
 or write, or that he possessed any of the accomplish- 
 ments taught in the prophetic schools. The national 
 wit, then, contrasted the tall, ungainly, uncultivated, 
 but still stalwart hero with the educated and accom- 
 plished men whom Samuel was training for intel- 
 lectual w T ork. It did more. It contrasted the wilful, 
 irreligious, wayward despot with the good and holy 
 men whose conduct was regulated by settled religious 
 principles. 
 
 Still the proverb shows that there was no im- 
 possibility in Saul having been thus trained. The 
 incongruity seized upon by the people was that of 
 his personal character. The probability is, that of 
 those trained by Samuel, some, like Gad and Nathan, 
 became Nabhis, prophets, and as a learned and de- 
 voted order of men filled an important place in the 
 national economy ; others returned to more ordinary 
 duties, to the cultivation of their estates, or to a 
 military life or office under the king ; while, lastly, a 
 large majority were probably Levites, and from the 
 time that David brought the ark to the tent which 
 he had pitched for it in Zion, they had the charge 
 of the services there. For we are expressly told that 
 the music in the house of Jehovah was according 
 ' to the commandment of Jehovah by the prophets 
 (2 Chron. xxix. 25)/ 
 
 For Samuel was himself a Levite, and to the 
 Levites he would naturally look for the men to aid 
 him in his reforms. He recognized the high place 
 they were intended to fill in the Jewish economy, 
 and saw that they had not filled it : but while organ- 
 izing his new institution on a freer footing, so far 
 from excluding the Levites from it, he would still 
 
IV.] WITH THE PROPHETIC SCHOOLS. 133 
 
 chiefly turn to them. The opposition between the 
 priest and the prophet has often been noticed by 
 writers of every kind : but of the comparatively few 
 prophets whose lineage has been recorded, the ma- 
 jority are priests. And so when Samuel n added a 
 more spiritual element to the services of the sanc- 
 tuary, it was entrusted entirely to the Levites. 
 Though the priests and Levites had not done all that 
 Moses had expected, yet it is exceedingly probable 
 that they had always maintained among themselves 
 a higher standard both in morality and religion than 
 the rest of the community. There was an opposition 
 in the law itself between its spiritual truths and its 
 burdensome ritual (Ezek. xx. 1 1, 25, Acts xv. 10), and 
 yet the law contained and harmonized both elements. 
 And so, if the prophet seized the law in its inner, and 
 therefore its higher and more spiritual reality, while 
 
 n It is certain from 1 Chron. ix. 22 that Samuel commenced that 
 reorganization of the Levites which David completed. From 1 Chron. 
 xxv. we learn that all the great singers and musicians, Heman, Asaph, 
 Jeduthun, &c, were Levites, and that Heman was a Kohathite, like 
 Samuel himself (1 Chron. vi. 22, 28, 33). From the part taken by Gad 
 and Nathan in the arrangement of the temple service (2 Chron. xxix. 25), 
 it is exceedingly probable that it was modelled upon the same plan as 
 that originated by Samuel in the schools of the prophets : and when in 
 the text Saul's messengers found ' the company of the prophets prophe- 
 sying, and Samuel standing as appointed over them,' there can be little 
 doubt that they were engaged in a religious service, consisting of music 
 and singing, like that subsequently instituted by David for the taber- 
 nacle, and performed by a chorus of 288 trained voices (1 Chron. xxv. 7). 
 How impressive Samuel's service was we gather from the effect pro- 
 duced upon three successive sets of messengers sent by Saul, and sub- 
 sequently upon Saul himself (1 Sam. xix. 20-24). From the last verse 
 we learn that there were also solemn dances, in which Saul, clad only 
 in a linen ephod, or tunic, such as David danced in before the ark 
 (2 Sam. vi. 14, 20), took part so enthusiastically, that he finally 
 fell down completely exhausted, and for many hours afterwards lay 
 motionless. 
 
134 CONNECTION OF THE LEVITES [lect. 
 
 the priest saw chiefly its lower and objective aspect, 
 still the prophetic spirit was not denied to the priest- 
 hood ; and often, as in Ezekiel, the two modes of 
 thought were happily combined in the same man. 
 
 Such, then, was the new beginning of prophecy. 
 The dismal state of things which preceded Samuel, 
 and his own far-seeing and thorough remedies, made 
 him need a more highly-educated" class of men than 
 Israel had ever before possessed. But the prophets 
 were no mere literary class ; I do not know that such 
 a class has ever either merited or met with much 
 respect ; and certainly that was not what Samuel 
 wanted. The very root of his reforms was his desire 
 to see Israel more virtuous and more religious. His 
 instruments, therefore, must above all things be men 
 who themselves were holy. He needed a clergy. For 
 them education was something : the grace of God was 
 more. Now the prophets had ever been men who 
 pleaded for God. Religion with them was the one 
 thing essential. And though we cannot suppose that 
 the Spirit of Jehovah rested in the way of direct 
 inspiration on all the holy men trained by Samuel, 
 still they earned and deserved the name of prophet 
 by their intense conviction both of the truth and of 
 the need of God's message to man. They were men 
 who felt an irresistible call to work for God, and in 
 whom God's Spirit wrought by a large outpouring of 
 the ordinary gifts of grace. But there were also here 
 and there among them men on whom extraordinary 
 gifts were bestowed. Such men were Gad and Nathan 
 in David's days. 
 
 What they were endowed with was no mere intel- 
 lectual superiority ; no mere human wisdom ; but 
 
iv.] WITH THE PROPHETIC ORDER. 135 
 
 something directly supernatural. There were at 
 David's court men of the highest worldly wisdom. 
 Ahithophel was so wise that ' his counsel was as 
 if a man had enquired at the oracle of God (2 Sam. 
 xvi. 23) :' but men knew that there was nothing 
 divine about it, and David left his friend Hushai the 
 Archite to frustrate Ahithophel's advice. There was 
 nothing wrong in so doing : for Ahithophel's was 
 mere worldly wisdom ; his strong sense made him 
 discern what were the best means for gaining his 
 ends ; but the question of right and wrong formed no 
 element in his counsel. But the prophet ever spake 
 of right and wrong, and duty. And when he went 
 inspired with a message from above, like Nathan to 
 David, it was the conscience that was addressed, not 
 the intellect ; and man's duty was, not to understand 
 it, and judge of it, but to obey. It was a command 
 given by the highest and final authority, from which 
 there was no appeal. 
 
 But our business with the prophets at present is 
 rather with their ordinary and every- day level. It 
 is only by looking at them as they were in the large 
 majority of cases that we shall be able to judge of the 
 extraordinary elevation of those wonderful men, who 
 stand out from time to time in gigantic vastness 
 among the actors in the annals of Jewish history. 
 
 Now first, as regards the time, we have already 
 seen that this remodelling of the Mosaic institutions 
 by Samuel took place just at the period when the old 
 method of consulting Jehovah by the oracle and Urim 
 went out of use. This was but an unsatisfactory way 
 at best, but it lasted just to the time when real pro- 
 phecy, the real mediatorship between Jehovah and 
 
136 THE PROPHETS [lect. 
 
 His people, such as that with which Moses had been 
 himself invested, was set free from its connection 
 with the priesthood, and founded again upon a wider 
 and freer basis by Samuel. From this time forward 
 Jehovah was no more consulted according to the 
 Mosaic enactments. His will could no longer be 
 ascertained whenever the chief ruler wished. Hence- 
 forward the Urim probably answered no more. For 
 Jehovah had now His own special servants, who 
 declared His will not as and when men desired, but 
 as He commanded. And this usually was as men 
 least desired. The prophets were unwelcome visitors. 
 Elijah meeting Ahab in Naboth's vineyard was a 
 most disagreeable intruder ; yet scarcely more so 
 than Nathan with his ' Thou art the man' to David, 
 or Gad with his three plagues, or Shemaiah bidding 
 Rehoboam dismiss his army. Seldom is God's mes- 
 sage received by man with joy. 
 
 And next we must repeat that, unlike the priest- 
 hood, the prophetic order was open to all, without 
 respect of birth or even of education. Samuel's 
 schools were as free to all of every tribe, as are our 
 own universities open to every one now. But we 
 must not connect prophecy too closely even with 
 them. Neither were all prophets trained in his 
 schools, nor were all trained in his schools prophets. 
 But just as now a higher education is the usual pre- 
 paration for the calling of a clergyman, so it was 
 then with the prophets. Samuel no doubt intended 
 his scholars to be prophets, and urged them to it. 
 But not only was the highest gift of all absolutely 
 untrammelled by any and every earthly ordinance, 
 but even the lower gift would depend upon the 
 
IV.] A NUMEROUS CLASS. 137 
 
 personal fitness of the recipient. And these schools 
 called forth men who were fit. But as the usual rule 
 they were prophets by education only and calling. 
 We find them in time gradually falling to a very low 
 spiritual level ; but this corruption was long after 
 Samuel's days. Even in their worst day they were 
 still called prophets. No practical inconvenience 
 arises from the use of words in a higher and a lower 
 sense. Neither the Nabhis whom Samuel set over 
 his schools, nor the young Nabhis trained there, sup- 
 posed themselves, or were supposed by others, to 
 share the same gift as Samuel and Elijah possessed. 
 It was only in bad and demoralized times, like the 
 reigns of Jehoiakim and Zedekiah, that we find false 
 prophets claiming direct inspiration (Jer. xxix. 9) 
 for their lies, and denying it to the true prophet 
 ( lb. 27). 
 
 After Samuel's days these schools greatly multi- 
 plied. His foundation had been at Ramah in Ben- 
 jamin, but in the time of Elisha, when our accounts 
 of them are most full, we find prophetic colleges 
 existing at Bethel, at Jericho, and at Gilgal, places all 
 of them, except Jericho, connected with Samuel's his- 
 tory °. But as they are mentioned only incidentally, 
 it is very probable that similar institutions existed 
 elsewhere. At all events prophets had become a 
 very numerous class. For when, seven years after 
 Elijah's great day of triumph at Carmel, Jehoshaphat 
 wished Ahab to enquire at the word of Jehovah about 
 
 ° This makes it highly probable that in the long period of thirty 
 years and more between the anointing of Saul and the death of Samuel, 
 the latter had established prophetic colleges in many other places 
 besides Ramah. 
 
138 HIGHER EDUCATION [LECT. 
 
 the expedition to Ramoth-gilead, that king, in spite 
 of Jezebel's cruel persecutions, was able to collect in 
 one town, Samaria, where, as far as we know, there 
 was no prophetic college, no fewer than four hundred 
 men. The whole narrative shows that these men were 
 by profession Jehovah -prophets, and they all pro- 
 phesied in Jehovah's name. But there was something 
 unsatisfactory about them : perhaps Jehoshaphat knew 
 that God does not speak by people in crowds, and 
 so he asked if there was not some one prophet of 
 Jehovah besides ; and the true prophet came unwel- 
 come as usual. Now though we cannot but condemn 
 the four hundred as flatterers, and that of such a king 
 as Ahab, still even they probably were in advance of 
 the mass of the people both in religion and morals. 
 It is at all events but fair to remember, that but a 
 few years before, when Jezebel was persecuting the 
 Jehovah -prophets, large numbers of them willingly 
 suffered death rather than abjure God's true worship. 
 
 No class of men ordinarily is very far in advance 
 of the general state of feeling in the midst of which it 
 lives ; and thus until the days of Jeremiah we never 
 find the Jehovah-prophets in Judah sinking so low as 
 their brethren in Samaria. But however discreditable 
 may be the behaviour of these men before Ahab, yet 
 there are many particulars in which plainly great na- 
 tional progress had been made, which we cannot be 
 far wrong in attributing to the prosperity of the pro- 
 phetic schools under the able management of Elisha. 
 Thus, long after the palmy days of David and Solo- 
 mon, none apparently but the prophets were able to 
 read and write till about this time. But now we are 
 told of a writing addressed to Jehoram, king of Judah, 
 
IV.] THE WORK OF THE PROPHETS. 139 
 
 in Elijah's name, which we must suppose that king 
 could read (2 Chron. xxi. 12). Jezebel sends letters 
 to the elders of Jezreel, and seals them with Ahab's 
 seal, a proof that such communications had now be- 
 come common (1 Kings xxi. 8). Jehu twice writes 
 letters to the same elders (2 Kings x. 1, 6) ; even 
 the king of Syria sends a letter with Naaman, and 
 it is expressly said that the king of Israel read it 
 (2 Kings v. 5, 7), though it is probable that it was 
 written by some royal scribe. Henceforth letters and 
 writing play an important part in all political matters. 
 Now when we bear in mind Jezebel's persecution of 
 the prophets, and then read how active and numerous 
 they were under Elisha, and further see so very 
 marked an advance in the liberal arts, we may safely 
 draw the conclusion that the prophetic schools had 
 long before struck deep root in the northern king- 
 dom, and established a firm hold over the affections 
 of the people. Plainly they were a great national 
 institution. 
 
 The general government of the prophetic body, as 
 well as of their colleges, would necessarily devolve 
 upon whatever prophet was then inspired. And thus, 
 as we have seen, no sooner did the sons of the pro- 
 phets at Jericho perceive that Elijah's spirit rested 
 upon Elisha, than by their deep obeisance they re- 
 cognized him as their head. But besides this, he 
 had also another claim, namely, that of having been 
 Elijah's personal attendant. So probably Gehazi 
 would have succeeded Elisha, had he not yielded, like 
 Judas and Demas, to the seductions of covetousness ''. 
 
 p It is important to remember that Gehazi's fall was the fall of a 
 man of high prophetic dignity. Just as being in the ark did not save 
 
140 E LIS HA THE RECTOR [lect. 
 
 As head of these colleges we find Elisha leading a 
 life of incessant activity. We read of him at Dothan, 
 at Samaria, where he had a house, and usually dwelt 
 (2 Kings v. 3, vi. 32), on Mount Carmel, at Shunem, 
 and at Damascus ; but chiefly we find him with the 
 sons of the prophets. Thus he multiplies the oil of 
 the widow of one of them, to enable her to pay her 
 debts (lb. iv. 1) ; at Gilgal he renders the poisoned 
 pottage wholesome, and multiplies the first-fruits 
 offered by the farmer from Baal-shalisha (lb. iv. 41, 
 43) ; and here incidentally we learn that the college 
 at Gilgal numbered a hundred men. Elsewhere we 
 read of his accompanying them to choose timber for 
 the enlargement of their dwelling (lb. vi. 2), and re- 
 storing to one of them the axe-head lost in the waters 
 of the Jordan. Again, he uses one of them as his 
 
 Ham, nor his apostleship Judas, so neither did the prophetic office save 
 the prophet. A gift so high as inspiration was probably not attained to 
 till after many internal struggles, and long wrestlings after grace. Yet 
 Balaam fell, and Jeremiah has recorded his own long-continued resist- 
 ance against God, ending finally in his submission ; but the struggle 
 might have ended otherwise. The prophets had their own probation 
 quite as much as the apostles and all other saints, and when saved, they 
 were not saved by the gifts they had received , but by grace : by faith 
 and the work of the Holy Ghost on their hearts, just like other men. 
 And if so many fell whose gifts were above nature, well may baptized 
 Christians ' not be high-minded, but fear.' Gehazi, however, had never 
 received the actual gift of inspiration, but probably hoped to attain to 
 it upon Elisha's decease. This, however, was no necessary result of his 
 position. Baruch, who held the same rank with regard to Jeremiah, 
 never became a prophet, though he was a good and holy man. Some 
 think that Jer. xlv. was written to comfort him under the disappoint- 
 ment. A common tradition in the East represents him as so vexed by 
 the withholding of the gift, that after Jeremiah's death he apostatized, 
 and under the name of Zerdusht, or Zoroaster, became the founder 
 of the religion of Persia. The tradition is only so far interesting as 
 illustrating the relation in which the great prophets stood to their 
 immediate attendant. 
 
IV.] OF THE PROPHETIC COLLEGES. 141 
 
 messenger to Jehu (lb. ix. 1), and everywhere plainly 
 stands in the closest relation to them. 
 
 And, next, we must notice that all the express re- 
 ferences to the schools of the prophets connect them 
 with the northern kingdom. To the ten tribes belong 
 those great prophetic heroes Elijah and Elisha ; and 
 God, Who is merciful to all, seems to have granted to 
 those of the Israelites who loved Him a compensation 
 in prophecy for the loss of the temple-service at 
 Jerusalem, and for the withdrawal of the priests and 
 Levites. If the great means of grace provided by the 
 Mosaic ritual were no longer theirs, at all events they 
 had the less regular institutions of Samuel to aid 
 them in living unto God. Still it is hard to believe 
 that no similar institutions existed in Judaea. The 
 notices respecting the schools of the prophets in the 
 northern kingdom are so casual, so entirely connected 
 with the personal history of Elisha, that we can found 
 no argument upon the silence of Holy Scripture re- 
 specting other places. And when we come to the 
 books of the prophets, we find every one possessed 
 of so intimate an acquaintance with the writings of 
 the rest, that we feel sure they had some regular 
 organization to render this possible. Thus Isaiah 
 quotes, verbally and exactly, without even omitting 
 the conjunction, a passage from the writings of a 
 prophet of his own time, Micah. He could not have 
 so quoted it but from a written book. Obadiah 
 quotes in the same way from Jeremiah. Amos takes 
 up the very words of Joel as his beginning, and 
 concludes with other words from Joel which all but 
 immediately follow his first quotation *. Nor is this 
 
 1 Compare Joel iii. 16 with Amos i. 2, and Joel iii. 18 with Amos i.v 1;, 
 
142 EXISTENCE OF PRGPHETIC COLLEGES [LECT. 
 
 all. The prophets use the same metaphors, dwell in 
 the same circle of thoughts, employ the same phrases, 
 have certain expressions always occurring in the same 
 meaning : all this shows that they had some centre, 
 some head-quarters, where they met, and where the 
 young were educated, and the inspired writings of the 
 great prophets made available for general use and 
 study. It is exceedingly probable that they had some 
 such college in Jerusalem, of which Isaiah in his days 
 was head ; and if so, the intimate knowledge which 
 Jeremiah possessed of the writings of his predecessors 
 is no longer so extraordinary. He was but a lad 
 when called to be a prophet (Jer. i. 6), and one so 
 eminently conscientious would doubtless prepare him- 
 self for his office by deep study of the Scriptures. 
 Even if he did not enter the prophetic college, still, 
 living at Anathoth, three miles from Jerusalem, he 
 would constantly go thither to read the writings there 
 laid up. At all events he knew them almost by heart. 
 Nor is Jeremiah the only instance of this. Short as 
 is the prophecy of Obadiah, a large proportion of it is 
 in the very words of Jeremiah r ; and though the rest 
 write more freely, yet all of them show a large and 
 exact knowledge of the works of the prophets who 
 had gone before. 
 
 Now this was scarcely possible unless the prophets 
 had some head-quarters, where the inspired writings 
 of their great chiefs were preserved and read and 
 studied. Though, as I shall hereafter show, the 
 exhortations of the prophets were far more widely 
 known, and attracted far more public attention than 
 
 r Besides constant allusions, the first seven verses of Obadiah are 
 borrowed, with slight alterations, from various places in Jeremiah. 
 
iv.] IN JUD^A. 143 
 
 the negative critics suppose, yet this verbal and 
 minute acquaintance, not merely with their general 
 teaching but with the very words of the written text 
 just as we read it at present, could have been ac- 
 quired only by the eye, by the actual perusal, and 
 the committing to memory of their works. But we 
 have something like direct evidence upon this point. 
 In the days of king Uzziah, a hundred years after 
 Elisha's death, Amos, in answer to Amaziah the high 
 priest of Bethel, says, ' I was no prophet, neither was 
 I a prophet's son (Amos vii. 14).' Now the words 
 ' a prophet's son' mean one trained or educated in the 
 prophetic schools. But though Amos' mission was to 
 Israel, yet he belonged to Judah, and his dwelling- 
 place was Tekoah, twelve miles south of Jerusalem, 
 on the borders of the great desert. We can scarcely 
 doubt but that Amos in his answer referred to the 
 state of things existing at that time in Judaea. If 
 there were none trained to be prophets in Judaea, 
 as Amaziah very well knew that Amos belonged to 
 Judah, and in fact as all he wanted was to induce him 
 to leave Bethel, and go home, it would have been 
 very unnecessary for Amos to tell him that he did 
 not belong to an order of men that did not exist. 
 Thus his words serve to show us how little really we 
 know of the social state and internal history of these 
 kingdoms, and warn us against the too hasty con- 
 clusions of those commentators who have argued, that 
 because the schools of the prophets are not mentioned 
 after the days of Elisha, they therefore did not exist : 
 and that they never existed in Judaea, because we 
 have no express mention of them there. 
 
 It is, however, exceedingly probable that they 
 
144 HIGH CULTURE [LECT. 
 
 neither were so numerous nor so important in Judaea 
 as in the sister kingdom ; for many of their functions 
 in this latter country were performed in Judaea by 
 the priests and Levites. But the large number of 
 prophets mentioned as writers of histories, and whose 
 works are referred to in the Books of Chronicles, 
 the high state of learning at Jerusalem, especially 
 in Hezekiah's days, and still more the unity of 
 symbolism employed by the prophets, forbid our 
 imagining that they had no special training. The 
 chroniclers and historians of Judah were probably 
 educated in the same way as Nathan and Gad had 
 been. In short, Samuel founded the schools of the 
 prophets to give men a better intellectual culture and 
 to fit them for God's ministry. The whole country 
 is soon raised by them to a high level in literary 
 matters, and though at first they flourished chiefly in 
 Samaria, yet finally it was Jerusalem that became 
 the centre of this learning, and of that class for whom 
 these schools were instituted. It is not therefore very 
 reasonable to suppose either that this culture existed 
 in Judaea without the educational means which had 
 called it into existence, or that so large a number of 
 men would have followed this profession, unless there 
 was still that special training which made men pro- 
 phets in the lower sense of the word. 
 
 For mental culture is one thing, and the gift of 
 inspiration another. It was one thing to be directly 
 God's spokesman, and another to be a prophet like 
 those who existed in crowds at Jerusalem, and who 
 joined with the priests and people in shouting for 
 Jeremiah's death because he prophesied as miserable 
 a fate for the temple as had befallen Shiloh (Jer. 
 
IV.] OF THE PROPHETS. 
 
 M5 
 
 xxvi. 8). Jeremiah, who more than any one else has 
 disclosed to us the internal state of Jerusalem just 
 before its fall, always speaks of the prophets there as 
 a large, powerful, and organized class s : but he does 
 not speak favourably 1 of them. They were prophets 
 as far as education and class-feeling could make them 
 such, somewhat better possibly than the four hundred 
 Jehovah-prophets at Samaria, who had nothing but 
 good words for Ahab : certainly better than the 
 mass of the people, because they were as a rule 
 opposed to idolatry, with all its base accompaniments. 
 They were moral, to a certain extent even religious 
 men, as far as externals went, and joined, I have no 
 doubt, eagerly in Hezekiah's and Josiah's reforms 11 . 
 
 8 See Jer. ii. 8, 26, iv. 9, v. 31, xiii. 13, xxvi. 7, xxxii. 32 ; they formed 
 even a powerful class among those carried captive with Jeconiah to 
 Babylon, lb. xxix. 1,2, but wrought more for evil than for good, lb. 8, 
 
 9» 2I > 3 1 . 3 2 - 
 
 * The prophets in Jeremiah's days must have been fearfully corrupt, 
 see vi. 13, viii. 10, xiv. 13-16, xxiii. 9, n, 14-32, xxvii. 9-18, Lam. ii. 
 14, iv. 13. Occasionally, however, he uses words which show that God 
 had still His own true servants among them, Jer. ii. 30, xxv. 4, xxvi. 5, 
 Lam. ii. 9, 20. The whole picture in Jeremiah shows how hopeless 
 is the state of that nation whose very clergy have become demoralized, 
 Matt. vi. 23. 
 
 u I have no doubt that the confidence expressed and felt by these 
 prophets that Jerusalem would never become subject to Nebuchad- 
 nezzar (Jer. xxvii. 9), and that the captives would soon return (lb. 16), 
 was entirely founded upon the fact of Josiah's thorough reforms, and of 
 the continuance of the temple-service in all its magnificence during his 
 days and the days of his successors. It was, they deemed, a detestable 
 act in Jeremiah to threaten Jerusalem with the fate of Shiloh so long 
 as the sacrifice was daily offered, and the Levitical priesthood active in 
 its ministrations (Jer. xxvi. 8). But Jeremiah took exactly the same 
 view as all the true prophets. They did not care much for sen 
 (Is. i. 11-15, Jer. vii. 4), but set an enormous value upon repentance 
 (Is. i. 16-18, Jer. vii. 5-7, xxvi. 3). Far more pleasant was the doctrine 
 of the false prophets, that men can be saved by what others do for them. 
 
 L 
 
m6 their deciine [LECT. 
 
 Just the one thing they wanted was the heart touched 
 by the live coal from the altar : the grace of God was 
 not in them, and therefore they fell each one in his 
 own way by his own besetting sin, and that in most 
 cases was the love of the world, the love of power and 
 praise and money. 
 
 And in them and with them the nation fell too, 
 It was the solemn duty, the weighty responsibility of 
 the priests and prophets to be, as the clergy ought to 
 be now, the salt of the earth. Upon them, morally 
 speaking, depended the purity of the people's faith, 
 the depth of their religion, the sobriety of their 
 practice. Individuals could be saved without them, 
 but their influence told largely and directly upon the 
 mass. If they then, with the advantage of special 
 religious training, with higher associations, and louder 
 professions, and solemn call to Jehovah's service, 
 failed, what could you expect of the rest ? Jeremiah 
 tells us what was the natural and inevitable result : 
 ' A wonderful and horrible thing is committed in the 
 land ; The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests 
 bear rule by their means ; and my people love to 
 have it so : and what will ye do in the end thereof ? 
 (Jer. v. 30, 31).' 
 
 In Jeremiah's days, then, we see the prophets 
 fallen, but with true prophets still existing among 
 them, and the inspired word rising to as high an 
 elevation as in any previous age v . It was the un- 
 
 and that services are acceptable to God independently of the personal 
 faith of the worshipper. 
 
 v To this period belong Jeremiah, Obadiah, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, 
 and the writers of several psalms, besides the prophetess Huldah. 
 Jos'ah was also aided in his reforms by pious priests, like the high- 
 
IV.] AND FALL. \ 47 
 
 inspired prophets that had fallen, and it is a mark of 
 their fall that they claimed to speak in Jehovah's 
 name (Jer. xxiii. 21), and also that they combined 
 with the priests in seeking worldly ends. But we 
 must not therefore underrate either their piety, or 
 their services in earlier and purer ages, any more 
 than we must those of the clergy of the Christian 
 Church because of the low level to which they 
 have occasionally fallen. At first they were men 
 who had the inner call to the ministry : to this was 
 added a religious training, and a higher culture than 
 that ordinarily enjoyed by their countrymen. They 
 could not therefore but be an influential class. But 
 however useful they might be, and blessed to do 
 much good, yet it was in the way of God's ordinary 
 gifts of grace, and it does not appear that the 
 highest gift of direct inspiration was often bestowed 
 upon them. Nor again was it confined to them. If 
 Gad and Nathan were thus trained, and if the Psalms 
 were mostly composed by men so trained, still Elisha 
 was called from the plough, and Amos from garden- 
 ing. Yet they too were both educated men. Elisha 
 was competent to take the supervision of the prophetic 
 schools, and in the appropriateness and terseness of 
 his metaphors, and in the judicious arrangement of 
 his subject, Amos w even excels the other prophets. 
 
 priest Hilkiah, and equally pious laymen, such as Gedaliah, Maaseiah. 
 Neriah, and others. 
 
 w Though some words in Amos are spelt peculiarly, and though his 
 metaphors are taken from rural life, yet he was a well-taught man, who 
 wrote simply and easily, and with true artistic feeling. How highly 
 educated then must the Jews have been, when thus a gardener, earning 
 but a scanty livelihood, and who had had no special training, could 
 think and write so correctly ! Reading was- no easy matter then, nor 
 
 L 2 
 
148 THE PROPHETS [lect. 
 
 We must, however, still consider what was the 
 ordinary mode of life of the mass of the prophets 
 when their training was over. We find, then, first of 
 all that they married. We gather this not merely 
 from the special command given to Jeremiah not to 
 marry, for reasons peculiar to his days (Jer. xvi. 2, 3), 
 nor from Ezekiel's being married (Ezek. xxiv. 18), 
 but are taught it directly in Elisha's miracle of 
 multiplying the widow's oil (2 Kings iv. 1-7). She is 
 described there as ' a certain woman of the wives of 
 the sons of the prophets.' These young men there- 
 fore married. And next, the husband had incurred 
 debts : from this it follows that their maintenance 
 was not ensured them from any common fund, but 
 from their own personal labours. At his death the 
 creditor comes to take the two sons as bondmen x to 
 work out the debt. The widow goes to Elisha, and 
 he has no common fund out of which to relieve her, 
 but asks, ' What hast thou in the house ? ' She has 
 nothing but one pot of oil. They had separate 
 houses therefore, and their own furniture, though 
 poverty had in this case stripped the widow of every- 
 thing. Was this oil grown by themselves, some of 
 their own produce ? It would not, however, follow 
 from this that they possessed or farmed land, as two 
 
 were the means for learning so simple and readily attainable as with us 
 since the invention of the art of printing. And Amos is but one proof 
 among many of the advanced state of culture attained to in the southern 
 kingdom before the Assyrians and Chaldaeans wasted the land, and 
 which reached its highest elevation in Hezekiah's days. 
 
 * The words may even mean to take them absolutely as slaves. 
 Either alternative was a violation of the Levitical law (Lev. xxv. 
 44-46), which however required that a debtor should himself be liable 
 to work out in person his debt (lb. 39). 
 
149 
 
 IV.] IN THEIR ORDINARY LIFE. 
 
 or three olive trees might in a good season produce a 
 large quantity of oil. Elisha finally bids her borrow 
 vessels, and, having closed the door, to fill them from 
 her one remaining jar, and then sell the oil thus multi- 
 plied, and pay her debts, and with her children live 
 upon the rest. 
 
 After this it is but natural to read of Samuel's 
 house at Ramah, of Nathan's in Jerusalem, of Ahijah's 
 at Shiloh, of Elisha's at Samaria, of Ezekiel's at 
 Telabib. As regards Elijah, it has been argued that 
 his ascetic character and wandering habits were 
 incompatible with a settled dwelling and a wife. But 
 this is to confound modern with oriental manners. 
 One would have thought St. Peter's life incompatible 
 with marriage : not so our Lord. St. Paul even tells 
 us that not only Peter but the rest of the apostles y 
 and our Lord's brethren were accompanied by their 
 believing wives on their circuits ; and so we find 
 St. Peter's wife with him at Babylon (i Pet. v. 13). 
 I do not know whether any one has ever supposed 
 that St. Peter's 2 wife may have been in the number of 
 those Galilaean women who ministered to our Lord, 
 
 >" The phrase is so very strong as to imply that marriage was the all 
 but universal rule with the apostles, ol Aonrol dnoaroXot, /cat ol dS(\(j>ol 
 tov Kvpiov (1 Cor. ix. 5). In the A. V. occurs one of those mistrans- 
 lations which occasionally mar our beautiful version, ' Have we not 
 power to lead about a sister, a wife?' the Greek means a believing wife, 
 a wife who is a sister, that is, a Christian. The wives of the apostles, 
 then, were all Christian women. The rendering in the margin is a 
 violation of one of the commonest Greek idioms, but has some patristic 
 authority, e.g. Clem. Alex. Strom, iii. p. 210. 
 
 1 St. Peter certainly had the high privilege of doing more for our 
 Lord, in earthly matters, than any of the rest of the apostles. His 
 house was our Lord's dwelling at Capernaum, and his boat that in 
 which our Lord so often crossed the sea of Galilee. 
 
150 THE PROPHETS HAD WIVES [lect. 
 
 but certainly we find several married women among 
 them, such as Joanna, and Mary the mother of James 
 and Joses, and Zebedee's wife, If the mothers of 
 apostles followed our Lord, so also may their wives. 
 As regards Elijah and Elisha, the latter was more 
 perpetually in motion than Elijah himself, yet he had 
 a settled dwelling. It was so imperative a duty upon 
 the Jew to marry, that it is a very hazardous thing to 
 conclude that either of these prophets had departed 
 from the ways and habits of their countrymen. 
 
 But though the sons of the prophets had thus 
 their own separate houses, yet we find something of 
 a collegiate life existing among them, probably during 
 their training. Thus we read of a great pot in which 
 they seethe pottage for the sons of the prophets 
 (2 Kings iv. 38). Into this pot a man shreds a 
 whole mantle a full of wild gourds. Evidently a 
 common meal was in preparation for a large number 
 of people. So when the farmer from Baal-shalisha 
 brings firstfruits, a common meal was being prepared 
 for a hundred men (lb. 43). But the meal taken 
 together is the great centre of a collegiate b life. 
 Equally important is the common lodging. And of 
 this, too, we find something. On one of his numerous 
 circuits the sons of the prophets say to Elisha, ' The 
 place where we dwell with tliee is too strait for us 
 (2 Kings vi. 1).' With Elisha at their head they go 
 
 a The word in the original is not a ' lap full,' as in our version. 
 It is the 1)121 the loose upper garment, — the blanket, as Mr. Grove 
 calls it, — which was filled with these gourds ; and implies a load as 
 large as a man could carry. The Vulgate translates it very properly 
 pallium. 
 
 b Hence, in Oxford, our usual term for the junior members of 
 the University is Commoners. 
 
IV.] AND SEPARATE DWELLINGS. 15 1 
 
 to the Jordan, and there cut down every man his 
 beam, to construct therewith some addition to their 
 dwelling. But they had no community of goods ; 
 for we find them going, some with their own axes, 
 and some with borrowed tools. Now from their 
 going to Jordan, the place was probably Jericho. 
 Certainly it was not Samaria, where Elisha had his 
 own dwelling. To carry timber from Jordan to Sa- 
 maria would have been beyond the power of so feeble 
 a community. We gather, therefore, that the build- 
 ing which was thus to be enlarged by their common 
 efforts was not Elisha's private property, but was 
 one used for educational purposes. The manner in 
 which they describe it, as a place where they dwelt 
 with Elisha, shows that he did not content himself 
 with merely visiting these institutions, but took a 
 real share in their management. 
 
 The offering brought by the man from Baal- 
 shalisha was intended for ' the man of God' himself: 
 but it is probable that the students were in part 
 maintained by private charity. Such, in later times, 
 was constantly the case in the East ; and so in 
 Europe, during the middle ages, young men entirely 
 without means did not hesitate to go into distant 
 countries, wherever any University became famous 
 for its teaching, sure of finding a maintenance, though 
 often a very miserable one. And to give this help 
 was long recognized in our Church as part of the 
 
 c The need of some such common lodging was early felt in our 
 own University. The three hundred and ten marks bequeathed by 
 William of Durham were expended on educational buildings; and 
 John de Balliol's endowment was of a similar kind. From these 
 benefactions our two most ancient Colleges reckon the date of 
 their foundations. 
 
152 COLLEGIATE BUILDINGS [lect. 
 
 ordinary duty of the beneficed clergy. They were 
 required by the Injunctions both of King Edward VI 
 and of Queen Elizabeth to maintain one student at 
 the Universities for every hundred pounds of annual 
 income. We have, however, no absolute proof that 
 the sons of the prophets were thus supported by 
 voluntary offerings ; but, as such offerings were cer- 
 tainly made to the prophets generally, some part of 
 the revenues of the colleges were possibly derived 
 from this source. 
 
 But when their education was complete, the pro- 
 phets, as forming an educated and literary class 
 among those who could neither read nor write, 
 would be too useful and necessary for the general 
 good, not to be well paid. Many of course had 
 private property like Elisha, who was apparently 
 a rich man, with a good landed estate at Abel- 
 meholah ; but the narrative of the son of the pro- 
 phet, who went out into the field to gather herbs, 
 and came back with his mantle full of wild gourds, 
 does not justify the conclusion which some have 
 drawn from it, that the schools of the prophets were 
 endowed with landed property. People do not grow 
 the cucumis colocynthis on cultivated ground ; and 
 the word field d in our version is used almost exclu- 
 
 d Thus the plants and herbs of the field (Gen. ii. 5) are wild 
 plants ; so in this very place the ' wild vine ' is in the Hebrew 
 'a vine of the field.' Even in Ex. xxii. 6, Gesenius explains, 'the 
 field' of wild herbs, olera agrestia, in opposition to those cultivated. 
 So ' the beasts of the field ' are the wild beasts ( 1 Sam. xviL 44, 
 Cant. ii. 7). So Esau is a 'man of the field,' a man living by hunt- 
 ing, and not by agriculture (Gen. xxv. 27). As for the wild gourd, 
 it is excellently explained by Tristram, Natural History of the 
 Bible, p. 452. He says that near Gilgal and all round the Dead 
 Sea the citrullus or cucumis colocynthis grows most abundantly on 
 
IV.] AND MAINTENANCE. 153 
 
 sively of the open country, the common land, where 
 all might pasture their cattle, and which belonged 
 exclusively to no one. Wandering over this the 
 young man found a bed of wild colocynth, a plant 
 which will grow in the driest weather, and gathering 
 his mantle full he brought home as a great prize what 
 had nearly proved fatal to the whole community. 
 
 While, then, there were probably offerings in aid of 
 the juniors, the seniors whose education was finished 
 would have to depend upon their own labour. Such 
 as were priests and Levites would have their share 
 of the revenues of their order. Amos had his fruit 
 and cattle, and we find Jeremiah buying his uncle's 
 land at Anathoth. The generality — like St. Paul, 
 who supported himself in his missionary travels by 
 his own hands — had doubtless some occupation or 
 trade by which they earned their living. But be- 
 sides this they had the offerings of the people who 
 came to consult them. As men of greater literary 
 attainments they would be useful in many ways to 
 those among whom they dwelt. They would be the 
 physicians, the lawyers, the advisers, the letter- 
 writers of their neighbours, and their aid would be 
 invoked not merely in difficulties like that which 
 brought Saul to Samuel, but in numerous legal 
 matters. Thus at the death of the head of a family 
 
 the barren sands, covering much ground with its tendrils, which 
 reach a prodigious length, and bear great quantities of fruit. 
 Elisha had just arrived at Gilgal, and the son of the prophet who 
 gathered the fruit had probably come with him, and not being used 
 to the plants in the neighbourhood, on going out to search for food 
 had mistaken it for the wild melon, cucumis prophetarum, which it 
 very much resembles, and which is perfectly harmless. Some one 
 of the natives of Gilgal happily discovered the mistake, and Elisha 
 transformed « the drastic medicine ' into wholesome nourishment. 
 
154 FEES AND OFFERINGS [lect. 
 
 some sort of assistance would generally be necessary 
 for the arrangement of the property and its distribu- 
 tion according to the terms of the Mosaic law (Deut. 
 xxi. 17). In the New Testament we find the scribes, 
 who had the management of all such legal matters, 
 a numerous and important class. 
 
 But besides law, medicine probably was an art 
 specially cultivated by the prophets, and one that 
 brought them no mean emolument. Thus we find 
 Jeroboam's wife disguising herself in order that 
 she may go to consult Ahijah at Shiloh about the 
 sickness of her son. Being thus in disguise she 
 would not wish to expose herself to detection by 
 taking much more than the usual offering, and this 
 in her case consisted of ten loaves, some delicate 
 confectionary called pricked cakes, and ajar of honey 
 (1 Kings xiv. 3). Jeroboam even offered a present 
 to the man of God who came from Judah (1 Kings 
 xiii. 7). We cannot doubt, then, that offerings e were 
 made to the ordinary uninspired prophets, and many 
 probably by their skill made large emoluments, and 
 earned them as fully as they are earned now by 
 those who practise law and medicine. But it is equally 
 certain that these presents had a bad effect in the 
 end upon the characters of many of them. For two 
 
 e These offerings may however be looked upon in a different light. 
 In the East no one ever approaches a great man without a gift, and 
 this is looked upon not as payment for services but as an act of 
 homage. The quarter-shekel to be given to Samuel by Saul was, 
 no doubt, a mark of respect. And similarly the offerings made to 
 the prophets may be regarded not as fees, or payments for their 
 services, but as homage done them. If so they must have held 
 a very high place in the national estimation, and been looked upon 
 as raised above the ordinary level of the people, when thus they 
 could be approached only by gifts. 
 
IV.] GIVEN TO THE PROPHETS. 155 
 
 things were mixed up which are really incompatible, 
 namely, the delivery of God's message, and the 
 practice of arts which however honourable are still 
 practised for the sake of gain. And thus men who 
 were prophets merely by education were led to claim 
 powers which they did not possess (1 Kings xxii. 11, 
 Jer. xiv. 14, xxiii. 21, xxviii. 15, xxix. 31, Ezek. 
 xiii. 2). Against these men the inspired prophets 
 utter the severest denunciations, because they made 
 Jehovah's people to err. Even as early as the days 
 of Micah this degradation of the prophetic office had 
 begun ; for he accuses the princes of judging for 
 bribes, the priests of teaching for hire, and the pro- 
 phets of divining, — a thing strictly forbidden f , — and 
 that for money (Mic. iii. 11). Micah accuses them 
 also of using terrorism, and compelling people to fee 
 them by threats of false accusation ; ' He that putteth 
 not into their mouths, they even prepare war against 
 him (lb. 5).' To one so intensely truthful and 
 just as Micah, such conduct must have seemed 
 most abominable. His contemporary Isaiah, however, 
 speaks of the prophets rather as failing in their duty 
 (Is. xxx. 10, lvi. 10, 11), than as being consciously 
 false. But the evil had begun, and it waxed in 
 intensity, till, as we have seen, in Jeremiah's days 
 the prophets were utterly corrupt, and Jerusalem a 
 
 f Deut. xviii. 10, 1 Sam. xv. 23, 2 Kings xvii. 17. The Hebrew 
 in these passages, and many of similar import, is just the same as 
 in Mic. iii. 11, Ezek. xiii. 23, &c., and implies, without doubt, 
 a gross imposture. As I have before shown, the word for prophesy 
 in Ezek. xiii. 17, as applied to the women, means a sham, a false 
 pretence of prophecy; but when used just afterwards of Ezekitl. 
 ' prophesy thou against them,' the word used is one that means true 
 prophecy. We lose in our version the force of this opposition. 
 
156 THE PROPHETS CORRUPT 
 
 foul den, whose king and princes and priests and 
 prophets were fit only to be ' removed into all the 
 kingdoms of the earth, to be a reproach and a pro- 
 verb, a taunt and a curse, in all places whither 
 Jehovah shall have driven them (Jer. xxiv. 9).' 
 
 Even these uninspired men, therefore, were powerful 
 alike for good and for evil ; but they were not the 
 men who wrote the Bible. The true prophets never 
 spake smooth things, but had ever a message of re- 
 proof and warning. And to strengthen this message, 
 it was ever brought by the holy, the self-denying, the 
 suffering ; by men to whom their high gift brought 
 only trouble, and wrong, and contumely. And the 
 world' rejected both them and their message. Their 
 history is a history of good done by them, and wrong 
 done to them. The New Testament sums it up in 
 these words, ' They had trial of mockings and scourg- 
 ings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment : 
 they were stoned, were sawn asunder, were tempted, 
 were slain with the sword : they wandered about in 
 sheepskins and goatskins ; being destitute, afflicted, 
 tormented.' And who that reads the records of their 
 ministry can justly challenge the Apostle's verdict, 
 that ' they were men of whom the world was not 
 worthy? (Heb. xi. 36-38).' 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 PART II. 
 
 THE ORDINARY LIFE AND DUTIES OF THE 
 PROPHETS. 
 
 They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were 
 tempted, were slain with the sword : they wandered 
 about in sheepskins and goatskins ; being destitute, 
 afflictedy tormented. — Heb. xi. 37. 
 
 To those acquainted with the Septuagint these 
 words carry the mind at once back to the prophets 
 of the preparatory dispensation, wearing their dis- 
 tinctive dress, ever actively in progress from one 
 place to another, bearing every kind of contumely for 
 Jehovah's sake, and often finally sealing with their 
 lives the truth of their message. And in the main 
 these words refer to the uninspired prophets — the 
 men who formed the mass of the order — as fully as 
 they do to those who had received the extraordinary 
 gift of inspiration. Or rather they refer chiefly to 
 them : for the writer was speaking of faith, of what 
 everybody can attain to : and while we naturally 
 perhaps think most of gifts of power, gifts such as 
 that of working miracles and foretelling thing- 
 
158 LOW MORAL STATE [LECT. 
 
 come, our Lord and St. Paul a both expressly teach 
 us that God looks at these things very differently, 
 and that in His eyes the gifts of grace are the more 
 precious. For the gifts of power save no man. Men 
 may have had the gift of prophecy and of working 
 miracles, who nevertheless at the last day will be 
 disowned by the Judge, ' I never knew you : depart 
 from Me, ye that work iniquity.' The gifts of grace 
 do save. The things that abide in life, and endure 
 throughout eternity, are ' faith, hope, love ; and the 
 greatest of these — that which we are commanded to 
 follow after — is love (1 Cor. xiii. 13, xiv. 1).' Great 
 and extraordinary powers were bestowed under the 
 Jewish dispensation for special purposes : but they 
 were given sparingly, and at distant intervals. 
 Usually the men who attained to them were such 
 as had made extraordinary progress in the higher 
 gifts of faith, love, purity, holiness. But the Divine 
 purposes were sometimes even better accomplished 
 by the bestowal of gifts of power on men less worthy. 
 The glowing predictions of the man brought from the 
 mountains of the East to curse God's people, but who 
 was compelled to bless, more deeply impressed upon 
 their hearts a firm faith in Jehovah than any other 
 words could have done. But if Balaam fell, as Judas 
 and Demas fell afterwards, it was because these gifts 
 of power interfere with no man's probation. A man 
 is neither saved nor lost by the number of talents 
 which he possesses, whether they be moral, intel- 
 lectual, or supernatural. They do but increase his 
 powers of doing good or harm, and thereby make 
 
 a Matt. vii. 22, 23, I Cor. xii. 31, xiii. 2. 
 
IV.] OF THE PROPHETS IN EPHRAIM. 159 
 
 his responsibility heavier. There is but one way of 
 salvation, and that is by faith in Christ, sealed by the 
 work of the Holy Spirit on the heart. Prophecy and 
 miracles do not save (1 Cor. xiii. 2), nor anything but 
 the new and spiritual birth (John iii. 5). 
 
 Now it is probable that a large proportion of the 
 ordinary prophets, at all events at first and in Judah, 
 had God's better gift of grace, though, as we have 
 seen, they gradually declined in spirituality, till in 
 Jeremiah's days they were utterly fallen. Nor need 
 we doubt this because we do not always find them 
 very advanced in their views either in morals or 
 religion. No class of men is ever very far removed 
 from the level of its own age, and we must not there- 
 fore indiscriminately condemn the prophets in the 
 northern kingdom, because many of them unques- 
 tionably reached but a low standard. Nor, on the 
 other hand, can we form a high estimate of their 
 moral state. That old prophet at Bethel who caused 
 the ruin of the. man of God from Judah was certainly 
 a Jehovah-prophet. He speaks in Jehovah's name 
 (1 Kings xiii. 18) ; was probably greatly struck by 
 his fellow-prophet's doings, and thought possibly that 
 in bringing hirn back he was himself working for a 
 good end. ' But he lied unto him' (lb.), and, by his 
 false profession of a message from Jehovah, brought 
 upon him fearful punishment. But in persuading the 
 man of Judah to go back with him, he probably 
 intended not so much to gratify his curiosity, or 
 even to increase his own personal importance, as 
 to strengthen the right cause at Bethel. It was .1 
 place where the king was doing his utmost to set 
 up a false worship. This worship he and the other 
 
!6o THE OLD PROPHET [lect. 
 
 Jehovah-prophets were opposing as far as they dared. 
 If then this prophet from Judah, who had wrought 
 such miracles, could, after refusing the king's present 
 and hospitality, be prevailed upon to come to his 
 house, and eat and drink with him, what a triumph 
 it would be ! What a proof that he was Jehovah's 
 chosen mouthpiece ! And how he would talk all 
 the rest of his life of his noble brother from Judah, 
 who had so helped him in his great struggle against 
 idolatry ! True, that such an acknowledgment would 
 bring him power, honour, emolument. But this he 
 would keep in the background. The excuse he would 
 put off upon himself would be the great good he was 
 doing for the right cause so unrighteously oppressed 
 at Bethel. He was a man, then, who strained his 
 conscience for the sake of his cause. And this is a 
 temptation which assails many men in all ages. They 
 so think their cause the one right cause, and so 
 identify themselves with it, that they lose all definite 
 perceptions of right and wrong. Like Uzzah, they 
 think that God's ark cannot stand unless they hold it 
 up. But God rejects them and their unhallowed aid. 
 This old prophet was compelled himself to pass sen- 
 tence upon the man of God from Judah for returning 
 with him, and thereby to prove that God had not 
 accepted his own previous labours. And most pro- 
 bably it was this condemnation of Jeroboam's calves, 
 followed by the rejection of the Jehovah-prophets at 
 Bethel, and the severe punishment of the true prophet 
 for even eating with them, that made all the true wor- 
 shippers of Jehovah quit the northern kingdom. The 
 priests and Levites we know all left the ten tribes b , 
 
 b 2 Chron. xi. 13, 14, 16 : and cf. xv. 9. 
 
IV.] OF BETHEL. 161 
 
 and so probably did many good men, from the con- 
 viction that Jeroboam's worship was one utterly re- 
 jected by the true God. The old prophet did not quit 
 Bethel : but he showed his belief in the man of God's 
 message by ordering his sons at his death to bury 
 him in the prophet's grave. 
 
 Yet this old prophet had been brought up under 
 the better influences of Solomon's reign, and within 
 hearing of the teaching of true prophets like Ahijah. 
 What wonder, then, if at Samaria seventy years after- 
 wards they were ready to flatter a powerful king like 
 Ahab ! Yet even here we miss not the one true 
 prophet. It is the glory of Jewish history that it 
 always has the one true man. Even if its great hero 
 David falls into sin, there is the man found ready to 
 go with his life in his hand and carry to him God's 
 reproof. Nathan reproving David is something in- 
 finitely nobler than Clitus rebuking Alexander: as 
 much nobler as is the repentant David than Alexander 
 murdering his reprover, and dying of surfeit and 
 intemperance. 
 
 But it is not the greatness or nobleness of the few 
 that is the true proof of the acceptance with God of any 
 order of men. God gives His people, from time to time, 
 men of extraordinary powers, whose mission it is to 
 rouse up the great mass of the community to a higher 
 life and truer faith in Him. And thus He gave the 
 northern kingdom those two great heroes of prophecy, 
 Elijah and Elisha. Priests and Levites had aban- 
 doned Israel (2 Chron. xi. 13, 14): the mass of the 
 prophets had fallen to a very low ebb. But Israel is 
 not yet rejected. It may yet repent and take its 
 share in God's great work of saving mankind. Its 
 
 M 
 
1 62 THE CLERGY STRONGLY INFLUENCED [lect. 
 
 sons may yet be the heralds of salvation to the hea- 
 then, and the word of Jehovah go forth, not from 
 Jerusalem only, but from Samaria also. There rises 
 then, first of all, that wonderful prophet Elijah ; and 
 he summons, by God's especial directions, Elisha to 
 carry on his work. Their individual greatness proves 
 nothing in favour of the northern kingdom, nor of the 
 prophets there. Rather the contrary. Israel was 
 sinking so fast that no ordinary help could save it. 
 Nor did these two men save it. They gave Israel its 
 last call to repentance, and that a mighty call, but 
 it availed not. 
 
 Naturally they first addressed themselves to the 
 prophets, and for a time had great influence over 
 them for good. For, as I have said, they formed a 
 sort of irregular clergy, and though such a body 
 always holds a close relation to the state of morality 
 and religion and thought prevalent in its day, yet its 
 members are always among the first to be influenced 
 by, or even to originate, religious movements. If 
 they are cold when others are cold, lax in morals in 
 a careless age, negligent at a time of indifference, 
 they are also the most earnest when men's minds 
 are aroused and quickened with energy. It is very 
 seldom that religious movements have begun with 
 the laity. The priest Wyclif, the monk Luther, the 
 pastor Calvin, the Anglican clergyman Wesley, may 
 serve as examples of a general rule. Even unbelieving 
 and neologian movements often find some of their 
 promoters among the clergy : for where religion is 
 the one subject of thought, there must ever be those 
 who range themselves in opposition to the dearest 
 convictions of the rest. So it was of old. The intel- 
 
IV.] BY EVERY INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT. 163 
 
 lectual life of the Jewish nation centred in its priests 
 and prophets. And not only were many of the greatest 
 prophets themselves priests or Levites, but even men 
 like Elijah and Elisha would look to those trained in 
 the prophetic schools as the only men who could give 
 final success and permanence to their labours. 
 
 I have already shown that the order was numerous 
 and powerful ; and that there were special schools 
 for its training, certainly in Israel, and most probably 
 in Judah. I have shown that in these institutions 
 there was something of a collegiate life, but no traces 
 of any common fund or endowment, except in their 
 buildings. How T long a time was spent in these 
 schools does not appear, nor whether many were 
 educated in them besides those intended for the pro- 
 phetic calling. In Judaea it is probable that a large 
 number of the Levites were thus trained. For the 
 temple-service was -a direct result of the music and 
 singing in the prophetic schools, and some such ser- 
 vice was probably offered to Jehovah even in Israel, 
 perhaps on the high places c . But however this may 
 be, doubtless a large proportion of the ' sons of the 
 prophets' devoted themselves to the more distinctly 
 religious life. And of these many probably made 
 no gain of their profession, but gave themselves up 
 entirely and unreservedly to preaching and teaching. 
 But evidently other arts were also taught in the pro- 
 phetic schools, such as medicine' 1 . Not only do we 
 
 c Hezekiah was the first to remove the high places even in Judah 
 (2 Kings xviii. 4, cf. xv. 4), and probably they were the sole resource 
 of the true worshippers in Israel. 
 
 d Originally medicine must have been studied also by the priests. 
 •Witness the considerable knowledge they were expected to have of 
 the symptoms of leprosy. 
 
 M 2 
 
164 MEDICAL SKILL [lect. 
 
 find Ahijah consulted by Jeroboam's wife about her 
 son Abijah, but we read also of Benhadad sending 
 Hazael to Elisha, and saying, ' Take a present in 
 thine hand, and go, meet the man of God, and enquire 
 of Jehovah by him, saying, Shall I recover of this 
 disease ? (2 Kings viii. 8).' In the history of the 
 cleansing of Naaman, every one, from the little 
 Jewish maid to the king of Syria, regards it as per- 
 fectly natural that recourse should be had in sickness 
 to a prophet ; and the rich presents which Naaman 
 brought would have sufficed to have raised Elisha 
 to the height of affluence had he deigned to accept 
 them. It is exceedingly probable that considerable 
 medical knowledge was accumulated in the prophetic 
 colleges ; and Isaiah, who was probably their Rector 
 in Judaea, displayed no mean skill as a physician 
 in his treatment of Hezekiah's disease. Many com- 
 mentators suppose that Hezekiah's malady was the 
 same as that which so suddenly smote down the 
 army of Sennacherib. In a country wasted by war 
 pestilence is sure to appear, and the plague 6 which 
 
 e The pestilence is called the angel, that is, the messenger of Jehovah, 
 just as that sent to punish David's sin is so called in 2 Sam. xxiv. 16, 17. 
 Both visitations were more than providential. They had been foretold, 
 and were both the direct interference of God with the laws of nature, 
 yet acting in and by the laws of nature for moral purposes. Just. then, 
 as it was God's messenger who smote David's realm with pestilence, 
 so most probably pestilence was the natural means used by the angel 
 in smiting the camp of Sennacherib. A remarkable illustration of this 
 method of God's dealings may be found in the plagues of Egypt. With 
 the exception of the smiting of the firstborn, they are all natural occur- 
 rences, though many of them heightened to a supernatural degree. 
 Hail and lightning, though very rare, do occur in Egypt. The rest are 
 all based on phenomena by no means unusual there. I may add that 
 Ewald, Hist. Is. i. .218, enumerates the natural calamities to which 
 Palestine is subject. Only one of these, locusts, occurs among the ten 
 
IV.] OF THE PROPHETS. 1 65 
 
 broke forth so violently in the camp of the Assyrians 
 probably remained for some time in the country, 
 though in a milder form. Ulcers have been a symp- 
 tom of the plague in all ages, from the plague of 
 Athens down to the plague of London. But be 
 this as it may, Hezekiah's recovery from a malady, 
 which would otherwise have been fatal, is expressly 
 attributed to the medical skill of Isaiah. No doubt 
 there was God's especial blessing, but it was a bless- 
 ing resting, as is usual with God's operations, upon 
 the right use of means. Naturally we have in the 
 Bible but a very brief summary of Hezekiah's sick- 
 ness, and of the means used by Isaiah for its cure. 
 The Bible is not a medical work, and is concerned 
 only with the moral and religious significance of the 
 event. Still it does tell us an important symptom 
 of the malady, and suggests to us that Isaiah wrought 
 a cure by his method of treating it. 
 
 I will add upon this point but two remarks ; the 
 first that the healing art has always been regarded 
 as something sacred. It was so in Greece and in 
 Egypt ; throughout the East the Hakem, the wise 
 man or sage, is usually too the physician of the com- 
 munity. So among us it is a calling which not a few 
 in holy orders follow professionally, and many more 
 unprofessionally. A man is scarcely fit to be a mis- 
 sionary who is not well versed in it. The second and 
 far more important remark is, that when in the mani- 
 festation of our Lord prophecy reached its highest 
 
 plagues of Egypt. This is very remarkable, and a proof that the Book 
 of Exodus is a narrative of real facts. Had it been written in Palestine 
 in Samuel's days, as Colenso supposes, the plagues would have been 
 such as were known in Palestine. 
 
1 66 HEALING AND TEACHING [lect. 
 
 elevation, so also did the power of healing. The two- 
 fold occupation of the Saviour, as He wandered from 
 place to place perpetually throughout the land, was 
 healing and teaching. And when He sent out the 
 seventy disciples two and two, His command was, 
 ' Heal the sick (Matt. x. 8).' Even the false gods 
 claimed a knowledge of the symptoms of disease : 
 and thus the messengers of Ahaziah were on their 
 way to enquire of Baal-zebub, god of Ekron, whether 
 the king would recover from his accident, when Elijah 
 met them, reproached them for not making their 
 enquiry of the prophets of the true God, and foretold 
 Ahaziah's speedy death. 
 
 But, as the one educated class, there would be 
 numerous occasions on which their aid would be in- 
 dispensable to the people. And though here and 
 there cases might occur of poverty, yet no one can 
 read the prophetic books without being convinced 
 that the prophets formed a very powerful order, 
 great in influence, large in numbers, with ample 
 sources of revenue, working generally for good, but 
 sharing in Judah's decay, and by the time of Jeremiah 
 hopelessly corrupt, time-serving, covetous, and false. 
 Not perhaps so much in doctrine. Professionally 
 they were opposed to idol-worship : and yet Jeremiah 
 charges them with it. Adultery, spiritual adultery 
 was, as everybody knows, the phrase applied by the 
 prophets to idolatry ; and of this Jeremiah accuses 
 them : ' I have seen in the prophets of Jerusalem 
 a horrible thing: they commit adultery (i.e. idolatry), 
 and walk in lies : they strengthen also the hands of 
 evildoers, that none doth return from his wickedness 
 (Jer. xxiii. 14).' Only a few perhaps fell thus utterly ; 
 
IV.] THE OCCUPATIONS OF CHRIST. 167 
 
 yet of the mass he says, ' Mine heart within me is 
 broken because of the prophets.' ' Both prophet and 
 priest are profane.' ' I have not sent these prophets, 
 yet they ran : I have not spoken to them, yet they 
 prophesied (lb. 9, II, 21).' No wonder that Jeru- 
 salem was as Sodom, and the inhabitants thereof as 
 Gomorrah (lb. 14), when that order of men, who 
 as God's clergy were especially bound to preach holi- 
 ness, and whose privilege it was to be required to 
 enforce the spiritual part of the law, and not its mere 
 ritual, were themselves hopelessly corrupt. A believ- 
 ing clergy cannot by itself save a nation. That will 
 depend upon whether the nation accepts their teach- 
 ing or rejects it. But an unbelieving clergy is simply 
 ruin. It is morally impossible for religion to survive 
 the apostasy of that order of men who are especially 
 devoted to its maintenance. Things must already 
 be far gone when the very salt has lost its savour. 
 Yet even then God sent a Jeremiah. His justice 
 waited till the last call had been made and re- 
 jected. So it is ever. No nation utterly falls till 
 it has again and again refused to hearken to God's 
 voice. 
 
 But the prophets had thus formed a separate and 
 numerous order long before the power and wealth 
 which prophetic gifts brought with them had led to 
 its corruption. And as its duties were different from 
 those of ordinary life, so probably it would be distin- 
 guished by a peculiar dress. Such we find to have 
 been actually the case. When Ahaziah's messengers 
 return to the king with so stern a rebuke, they de- 
 scribe the person who had stopped them on their way 
 to Ekron thus : ' He was a hairy man, and girt with a 
 
1 68 DISTINCTIVE DRESS [lect, 
 
 leathern girdle about his loins (2 Kings i, 8).' Such 
 are the words of our version ; but plainly it is absurd 
 to describe a man by his long hair or beard, and 
 girdle. The words really mean that he wore a gar- 
 ment f made of hair, long and loose fitting, and to this 
 is fitly added the description of the belt with which it 
 was girt about his waist. Now this garment, generally 
 made of camel's hair, and the leathern girdle, formed 
 the distinctive dress of the prophet. When then his 
 messengers told him that the man who had so sternly 
 rebuked them was thus clad, Ahaziah knew that it 
 was some prophet, and rightly guessed that it was no 
 other than Elijah the Tishbite. 
 
 The marginal references make this plain. The first 
 is to Zech. xiii. 4 : ' In that day the prophets shall be 
 ashamed every one of his vision ; neither shall they 
 wear a rough garment to deceive.' Now if you turn 
 to the Hebrew, you will find that the passage is very 
 loosely translated. Zechariah does not say a rough 
 garment^ but uses the proper word for that garment 
 of hair which was the prophet's peculiar dress. The 
 word is AdderciJi, a term four times applied to Elijah's 
 garment in the Book of Kings, and there translated 
 mantle. That mantle plays, as you know, a very 
 important part in Elijah's history. It is to him what 
 his rod was to Moses. It was the possession of this 
 garment which assured Elisha that his prayer for a 
 
 f The Hebrew is literally * a man master of hair.' This may no 
 doubt mean that he wore his own hair long, but it may equally 
 well mean that he was clad in a mantle of hair-cloth. Just as in 
 Latin dominus abollae means a philosopher, and in the middle ages 
 do7>iinns cuculli a monk, so the Hebrew phrase means dominus vesiis 
 pilosae, in other words a prophet. 
 
IV.] OF THE PROPHETS. 169 
 
 double" portion of his master's spirit had been accepted 
 (2 Kings ii. 9, 14) ; and with it he smote the waters 
 of Jordan, and they parted hither and thither. By 
 wearing it he claimed to be a prophet, and the sons of 
 the prophets acknowledged him as such — as Elijah's 
 successor, and their own head and chief. And then, 
 next, we can see the meaning of the second reference 
 to Matt. iii. 4. John the Baptist's dress is there 
 described as consisting of a cloak or robe of camel's 
 hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins. This dress 
 was not of his own choosing, still less was it the dress 
 of a self-inflicted asceticism. It was the regular pro- 
 phetic costume, and was a claim on John's part to the 
 prophetic rank and dignity. St. Matthew's words are, 
 in short, the right translation of the description of 
 Elijah's dress as reported to Ahaziah. 
 
 Now, instead of this hair robe, the Septuagint uses 
 the term sheepskin, ^Kcotyj. It describes Elijah's 
 mantle in this way. In the cave at Horeb it says 
 that he wrapped his face in his sheepskin, tv rrj /xrjAcoTTJ 
 avrov. So it thrice uses the term in the account of his 
 translation, and in other places. It does not of course 
 follow from this that the prophet's robe was really 
 made of sheepskins, but only that the translators 
 of the Septuagint identified the Addereth, the hair 
 
 s Many persons misunderstand this passage, and imagine that Elisha 
 asked for twice as large a gift of God's Spirit as ha rested on Elijah. 
 Really, he asks for the portion of the first-born son. Among the Jews, 
 when the father died, the property was divided into a number of shares 
 exceeding by one the number of the children. If he had two sons, it 
 was divided into three shares ; if three sons, into four shares ; and so on. 
 The first-born then took two shares, the rest one a-pLi_e. Thus he had 
 always twice as much as any one of the res Deut. xx,. 17). Elisha, 
 then, prayed that he might— not excel his master, but— be in the posi- 
 tion of the eldest and favoured son. 
 
170 THIS DRESS CALLED [lect. 
 
 mantle h , of the Hebrew, with the melote, the sheep- 
 skin of their own days, a rough cloak worn probably 
 by some class of men in Egypt. In the passage 
 therefore chosen for our text, instead of that vague 
 general notion which too often passes current for a 
 knowledge of Holy Scripture, we find an exact de- 
 scription of the prophets on their frequent journeys 
 clad in their distinctive dress. The person stoned 
 was not Naboth, as the parallel reference might lead 
 you to infer, but Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, stoned 
 in the very court of the Lord's house (2 Chron. xxiv. 
 21), and possibly Jeremiah stoned at Tahpanhes. The 
 prophet sawn asunder has been generally supposed to 
 be Isaiah. To be tempted or tried was the common 
 lot of all ; of Elijah when he fled from Jezebel's 
 threats to seek new strength at the mount of God ; 
 of Micaiah when cast into prison by Ahab ; of Elisha 
 when the king threatened him with death because of 
 the famine at Samaria ; of Jeremiah obliged to flee 
 for his life from Jehoiakim, and reduced to silence 
 during .the last seven years of that despot's life, and 
 again cast into the pit by Zedekiah. It was Urijah, 
 the son of Shemaiah, who was slain by the sword 
 (Jer. xxvi. 23), though this was the common fate of 
 prophets. Jeremiah compares Jerusalem to a mur- 
 deress, whose very garments were dabbled in their 
 blood : ' Also in thy skirts is found the blood of the 
 
 h Strictly speaking, the word means a robe, a loose upper garment 
 enveloping the whole body. Made of rough materials, and black in 
 colour, it marked the prophet; but it was often made of the most costly 
 textures, and thus what Achan stole is described as Addereth-Shin'ar, 
 a Shinar or Babylonian robe (Josh. vii. 21); and so the king of Nineveh 
 wears an Addereth (Jonah iii. 6). Even the prophet's Addereth was 
 not necessarily of camel's hair ; it might be made of sheepskins. 
 
iv.] A 'SHEEPSKIN' IN THE SEPTUAGINT. 171 
 
 souls of the poor innocents (Jer. ii. 34):' for during the 
 whole reign of Manasseh the prophetic voice was 
 silent, owing to the violence of that unhappy monarch, 
 who slew them ' till he had filled Jerusalem with inno- 
 cent blood from one end to another (2 Kings xxi. 16).' 
 So, too, of their wanderings, when the apostle speaks 
 in the next verse of ' deserts and mountains, and dens 
 and caves of the earth,' Elijah in the cave at Horeb 
 in the desert of Sinai and Elisha dwelling on Mount 
 Carmel (lb. ii. 25, iv. 25) are the two most notable 
 examples. But in the text, ' they wandered about ' 
 is a wrong translation. The word irtpir\k6ov refers to 
 no purposeless wandering, no restless mendicancy, but 
 sets before us the picture of a calm and regular but 
 never-ceasing activity. So Samuel, TrtpirjkOe, went 
 about on circuit to judge the people. Like the apostles 
 afterwards, the prophets were ever on foot, going from 
 place to place, bearing with them words from God. 
 We find this especially the case with that prophet 
 whose history is given us at greater length — Elisha. 
 While Samaria and Mount Carmel seem to have 
 been his chief abodes, we read of the rich woman at 
 Shunem proposing to her husband to make for him a 
 little chamber that he might lodge there whenever he 
 chose ; for, said she, ' I perceive that this is a holy man 
 of God, which passeth by us continually (lb. iv. 9).' 
 In these circuits we find him visiting the schools of 
 the prophets at Gilgal (iv. 38), at Jericho (vi. 1), at 
 Bethel (ii. 23) ; again, we find him at Dothan (vi. 13), 
 not far off when Jehoshaphat and Jehoram, in their 
 march against Edom, were in danger of perishing for 
 want of water (iii. u), going even as far as Damascus 
 (viii. 7), but always with a purpose. Such, too, was the 
 
172 CEASELESS JOURNEYINGS [lect. 
 
 journey which Amos took throughout the ten tribes, 
 though limited to a set time, and for the one object of 
 giving Israel a final call to repentance while, during 
 the victorious reign of Jeroboam II, it still enjoyed 
 internal prosperity. The prophetic life was no life 
 of self-willed asceticism : it was the far higher and 
 worthier life of practical usefulness. 
 
 In these circuits the prophets ever wore their dis- 
 tinctive dress. By it the Shunammite knew that 
 Elisha was a man of God. Amos would wear it 
 while on his mission, but would probably lay it 
 aside at Tekoah when his mission was over. From 
 the words of Zechariah, quoted before, we learn that 
 all those who were prophets by profession regularly 
 wore it, as certainly would Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, 
 called by express vision to their office for their whole 
 lives. So also did John the Baptist. Of Isaiah we 
 have an express prophecy relating to his dress. For 
 three years he is to loose the sackcloth from off his 
 loins, and walk naked and barefoot (Is. xx. 2). The 
 word naked) both here and in several other passages 
 of Scripture, means clad only in the close-fitting 
 under-garment, or rather it means simply that the 
 loose upper robe had been thrown off (1 Sam. xix. 
 24), or parted with through poverty (Job xxii. 6, 
 xxiv. 7, 10). And this loose robe is here called Sak, 
 translated sackcloth, but the word does not neces- 
 sarily refer to the material. Usually it was made of 
 hair, and, thus clad, the two witnesses are represented 
 in the Revelation of St. John as prophesying for the 
 thousand two hundred and threescore days (Rev. xi. 3). 
 Plainly it was a coarse rough garment, which in 
 times of sorrow and self-abasement was worn by 
 
IV.] OF THE PROPHETS. 173 
 
 any one, and often without the tunic underneath. 
 Thus Job says, ' I have sewed sackcloth upon my 
 skin (Job xvi. 15);' and at the famine at Samaria 
 we read that when the king, passing by upon the 
 wall, heard of the women eating their own children, 
 'he rent his clothes, and the people looked, and, 
 behold, he had sackcloth within upon his flesh 
 (2 Kings vi. 30).' In these two places the sense 
 requires us to understand that the under-garment 
 was made of that coarse material usually employed 
 only for the outer robe. But when Ahab was reproved 
 by Elijah for the murder and robbery of Naboth, ' he 
 put sackcloth upon his flesh, and lay in sackcloth 
 (1 Kings xxi. 27);' and when Joel proclaims a general 
 fast, he bids the people 'lie in sackcloth (Joel i. 13),' 
 in both which cases we may best understand it of 
 their wrapping themselves in this mantle of hair. 
 Thus, then, we find that the prophet's ordinary dress 
 was that worn by the people as a mark of sorrow. 
 The sheepskin, juryAcor??, was, on the contrary, the 
 dress of the poorer people. Now as the prophet's 
 message was ever a warning of woe impending be- 
 cause of sins unrepented of, his proper dress would 
 be the garb of mourning. Still very fittingly he 
 might also wear the dress of poverty ; for doubtless 
 those who had the real inward call to the prophetic 
 office would give up all worldly interests in order to 
 do God's work. It is very probable that the more 
 intensely ascetic life adopted by Jeremiah was in- 
 tended as a protest against the worldly spirit of the 
 prophets in his days. 
 
 But great as was the necessity of a more than 
 ordinary rigid life on his part (Jer. xv. 17, xvi. 
 
174 THE PROPHETS [LECT. 
 
 2, 5, 8), yet were the prophets generally ascetic and 
 self-denying men. Even Isaiah, high in authority 
 and influence at the court of Hezekiah, walks naked 
 and barefoot for three years (Is. xx. 3) ; and Ezekiel 
 weeps in bitterness, and sits among his people 
 astonished for seven days (Ezek. iii. 14, 15). The 
 Baptist in the wilderness, poorly clad and fed, but 
 whose summons to repentance reached even the city 
 and the soldiery, is their type ; and yet there is such 
 freedom about them, that no prophet is bound by the 
 practices of another. They were earnest men, whose 
 care and thought was of duty and holiness ; yet, 
 under different circumstances, and with different parts 
 of God's message to deliver, they were limited to no 
 one type. Our Lord is the very highest type not 
 merely of the prophetical but also of the spiritual 
 life, and He had nothing distinctive in dress or manner 
 or habit. He came eating and drinking, and was 
 as thoroughly occupied in doing the duties of a pro- 
 phet when feasting in the house of Matthew the 
 publican, or with the rich Pharisee, or at the mar- 
 riage in Cana of Galilee, as John gathering his soli- 
 tary meal of locusts and wild honey in the wilderness. 
 It is the prerogative of the Gospel to sanctify to 
 God the ordinary duties and relations of human life. 
 To abandon these duties and relations is to fall below 
 the level of Christianity. The Christian is not to 
 abandon the world, but to win it for God, and in its 
 ordinary routine he must lead the life of prayer, of self- 
 denial, of devotion to God, and active work for man. 
 Especially is this the duty of the clergy, who in 
 so many respects hold a position analogous to that 
 of the prophets under the preparatory dispensation. 
 
IV.] TOOK PART IN POLITICS. 175 
 
 To leave the world would be to abandon their pro- 
 fession ; to lead a worldly life is to be false to their 
 profession, to be a stumbling-block in the way of 
 others, and bring ruin on their own souls. Yet both 
 their outward life and the manner in which they seek 
 to maintain the spiritual life within them, will de- 
 pend very much upon external circumstances. Scat- 
 tered throughout the land there will be places where 
 a more rigid life may be necessary, and much have 
 to be foregone in itself right, because a more forcible 
 example is necessary to raise men sunk in foul and 
 degraded habits. Yet naturally Christ is the highest 
 pattern of our life, and our desire should be, under 
 every outward diversity, to aim at that thorough 
 holiness of which our Lord was alike the teacher 
 and the example. 
 
 And this brings me to the prophet's work. Now 
 this was wider than the work of the clergy in 
 the present day : for we find them not confining 
 themselves to religion and morality, but also taking 
 part in politics. I suppose that it would be the duty 
 of the clergy now to take part in politics, if the 
 government attacked either religion or morality. 
 Whenever current political ideas are based upon im- 
 moral or irreligious principles, it is the duty of the 
 clergy, as teachers, to enforce Christian principles 
 in opposition to them : but this is more frequently 
 and better done by means of the press than in our 
 ordinary parochial ministrations. But religion was 
 the basis of the Jewish commonwealth. It existed 
 for a religious purpose, and even after the appoint- 
 ment of kings, Jehovah was still the supreme ruler 
 and the prophets His representatives. Certain poli- 
 
176 ORATORY THEIR CHIEF MEANS [LECT. 
 
 tical maxims, therefore, formed part of that cycle of 
 truth, which every religious man was bound to 
 maintain, as far as in him lay, in its integrity. 
 That cycle of truth consisted of ideas relating partly 
 to the Divine nature, partly to human life and 
 duty, partly to the right theory of government. 
 Now it was especially the duty of the prophets 
 to maintain those ideas, and their chief means for 
 so doing was oratory. They were the great public 
 speakers, I may even say the great public men 
 of ancient time, who, when they saw king or people 
 violating any truth, or entering upon any course 
 of action opposed to those fundamental ideas upon 
 which the Jewish theocracy was based, stood forth 
 manfully, and resisted this wrong policy with power- 
 ful and spirited appeals to men's consciences. 
 Sin and impiety they boldly rebuked even in 
 princes : warned all men of the inevitable conse- 
 quences of violating the law of God, whether natural 
 or revealed : and often gave fresh energy to their 
 addresses, or stimulated the curiosity of the people, 
 and woke up new attention to their words, by 
 symbolical actions. Sometimes, as when Jeremiah 
 took his stand in the temple on some solemn day of 
 gathering there, it was the national conscience that 
 was addressed (Jer. vii. 2, xxvi. 2) : sometimes, as 
 in the roll of that same prophet which Baruch 
 copied at his mouth, it was the conscience of the 
 ruler, or of some powerful individual or class. The 
 grandest day of Jewish prophecy was undoubtedly 
 that on Mount Carmel, when Elijah stood forth 
 alone, braved singly the anger of the king, and 
 the more determined and fanatical malice of the 
 
TV.] OF INFLUENCING THE PEOPLE. 177 
 
 queen, confronted the serried ranks of the priests 
 and prophets of Baal and Astarte, and forced the 
 hesitating and reluctant nation to give in its adher- 
 ence to the truth, and cry, ' Jehovah, He is the God, 
 Jehovah, He is the God (1 Kings xviii. 39).' Such 
 crises are rare : but upon all the great occasions 
 in the nation's history, the prophets ever stood forth 
 as the boldest, the most disinterested, and the most 
 powerful actors. Through them Israel attained to 
 the greatest of all blessings, religious truth. If there 
 be such a thing on earth — and what would earth 
 be without it ? — they won it for their nation. And 
 then One came of Whom the prophets had ever 
 spoken : and He gave truth, religious truth, to the 
 whole world (John xviii. 37). 
 
 Necessarily, then, under the theocracy the pro- 
 phets, as the representatives of Jehovah, took great 
 part in all political matters, and we find them even 
 bestowing the crown. It was Samuel who chose 
 Saul, and when he failed in his probation it was 
 again Samuel who anointed David in his room. 
 At his death it was Nathan who was foremost in 
 advising that not Adonijah, the first-born, but 
 Solomon should be placed upon the throne (1 Kings 
 i. 11, 1 Chron. xxii. 8, 9). In the history of the 
 subsequent kings the narrative is too brief to enable 
 us to judge how far the influence of the prophets 
 may have been exerted in selecting one son before 
 another for the succession : but in the reign of 
 Asa we find Oded the son of Azariah the prime 
 mover in the extirpation of idolatry in Judah, and 
 able even to prevail upon the king to depose Maachah 
 the queen-mother from her office, which was one 
 
 N 
 
178 INTERFERENCE OF THE PROPHETS [lect. 
 
 next in rank to that of the king himself. In Israel 
 it was Ahijah the Shilonite who chose Jeroboam 
 to be king : and though henceforward the annals 
 of that kingdom scarcely present us with more than 
 a succession of murders and military usurpations, yet 
 the one dynasty which did retain the crown for 
 four generations, and which under Jeroboam II 
 gave Israel its last epoch of success and glory, was 
 called to the throne by Elijah and Elisha. The 
 whole narrative shows that the command of these 
 two men was looked upon not merely as ensuring the 
 success of Jehu's enterprise, but also as conferring a 
 valid title to the crown. Humanly speaking, the 
 long continuance of the dynasty, and the ready 
 obedience of the people, were the result of the 
 general conviction that Jehu was the duly appointed 
 king. 
 
 Even in the military affairs of the nation the 
 prophets exercised not merely a great, but often 
 a preponderating influence. It was the continuation 
 of that appeal to Jehovah, as the king of the nation, 
 by the Urim and Thummim, which we find in 
 general use from the death of Joshua (Judges i. i) 
 to the early years of David (2 Sam. v. 23). In 
 David's wars of conquest the prophetic voice was 
 silent ; but when a foreign enemy attacked Israel, 
 or the two kingdoms warred with one another, the 
 prophets constantly interfered in a very peremptory 
 way. Thus when Rehoboam had collected 180,00c 
 warriors to compel the ten tribes to return to their 
 allegiance, at the command of Shemaiah (1 Kings 
 xii. 21-24) tne attempt was given up, sorely, no 
 doubt, to the discontent of Rehoboam, a violent and 
 
IV.] IN POLITICS AND WAR. 179 
 
 godless man, with an Ammonitish mother : but he 
 had no choice. To persevere was useless ; for the 
 people recognised in the prophet's voice the deci- 
 sive command of Jehovah. The same Shemaiah 
 subsequently averted from Rehoboam the worst con- 
 sequences of the Egyptian invasion (2 Chron. xii. 7), 
 possibly by having counselled submission, whereby 
 the expedition of Shishak passed away as a mere 
 temporary evil. Soon afterwards we find Hanani 
 reproaching Asa for having purchased the services 
 of the king of Syria, instead of himself preventing 
 Baasha from fortifying Ramah (2 Chron. xvi. 7), 
 and, as a punishment for his want of faith, Hanani 
 declares that henceforward he shall be troubled by 
 perpetual wars, a denunciation to which Asa replied 
 by casting him into prison. This did not however 
 deter Jehu, Hanani's son, from denouncing utter 
 destruction against Baasha (1 Kings xvi. 1), nor 
 from reproving his own sovereign Jehoshaphat for 
 his ill-starred alliance with the house of Ahab 
 (2 Chron. xix. 2). We have seen this same Jeho- 
 shaphat unwilling to go to battle without enquiring 
 at the word of the Lord, ill-content with the loud 
 assurance of the four hundred Jehovah-prophets of 
 Samaria, and asking for the one true man. Sub- 
 sequently, when attacked by Moab and Ammon, 
 Jahaziel instructs Jehoshaphat in the conduct of 
 the war, and promises him victory (2 Chron. xx. 
 14) : while his partnership with king Ahaziah in 
 ship-building, and his attempt to revive the old 
 commerce of Solomon with India, are condemned 
 by Eliezer, and the wrecking of the ships foretold 
 {lb. 2>7)- When, too, Amaziah had hired 1 00.000 
 
 N 2 
 
180 GREATNESS OF THEIR INFLUENCE [lect. 
 
 fighting men from Israel, and paid them a hun- 
 dred talents, sorely against his will he had to forego 
 their help, lose the large sum of money alread\- 
 expended, and incur the bitter anger of the mer- 
 cenaries at the bidding of a man of God (lb. xxv. 
 7). So, too, Hezekiah consults Isaiah in the war 
 with Sennacherib, and sends to him the insulting 
 letter he had received from that king, by the hands 
 of the noblest princes of the realm. 
 
 All this is very remarkable. It shows us the pro- 
 phets possessed of an authority before which the very 
 kings had to bow, even in cases where to yield was 
 most painful to them. Still the kings of Judah pro- 
 fessed allegiance to Jehovah ; but we find plain indi- 
 cations that the Jehovah-prophets exercised a similar 
 influence also in the northern kingdom. Thus the war 
 between Ahab and Ben-hadad, king of Syria, is car- 
 ried on in accordance with the directions of a prophet, 
 who speaks in Jehovah's name (i Kings xx. 13). In 
 Jehoram's reign Elisha gives the king repeated infor- 
 mation of the ambuscades laid for him by the Syrians 
 (2 Kings vi. 9, 10), and when Samaria was so pressed 
 by siege that its surrender seemed inevitable, Jehoram 
 determined to behead Elisha, as though the issues of 
 war lay in his power (lb. 31). Finally, Elisha makes 
 Jehu king in the place of Jehoram, and on his death- 
 bed sends for Joash, the grandson of Jehu, and gives 
 him encouragement, and the promise of thrice-repeated 
 victory in the long struggle between Israel and Da- 
 mascus (lb. xiii. 19). When we bear in mind this 
 constant activity and interference of the prophets in 
 matters of peace and war, it no longer surprises us, 
 but seems perfectly natural, that Elisha should be 
 
IV.] AT SAMARIA. 181 
 
 found in the host of Jehoram and Jehoshaphat in 
 their expedition against Moab. For, one purpose for 
 which the spirit of prophecy was given was the pre- 
 servation of Israel's political existence. Israel existed 
 that God by it might give mankind the one true and 
 sole way of salvation. It could not therefore be 
 destroyed. The mighty realms of which we read so 
 much, Nineveh and Babylon, Egypt and Macedonia, 
 have passed away with their people. You could not 
 find, search where you would, any remains of them. 
 The Arabs, and tribes of Mongolic race like the 
 Turks, have wasted and destroyed those realms once 
 so powerful. Israel could not be destroyed, for in it 
 all mankind was to be blessed : and, even now, the 
 Jew still remains, the best proof and evidence of the 
 unchangeableness of God's counsels. 
 
 Still, important as was the preservation of Israel's 
 national existence, it was yet only a means for an end. 
 Far more important was the work of the prophets for 
 this end. Israel existed that the world might be 
 taught the nature and attributes of the one true God : 
 and the great duty of the prophets was to maintain 
 the worship of the one true God in its purity. And 
 this is the explanation of the fact that it was in the 
 northern kingdom that prophecy first assumed such 
 grand proportions. It is not true that it arose there. 
 On the contrary, for a long period after the disruption 
 of Solomon's empire, all the prophets whose names 
 occur belong to the southern kingdom. Shemaiah, the 
 man of God who went from Judah to Bethel, Iddo, 
 Azariah, Hanani and his son Jehu, Jahaziel, Eliezer, 
 all belonged to Judah. Ahijah alone still dwelt at 
 Shiloh in Mount Ephraim. During the long period 
 
182 INTRODUCTION INTO ISRAEL [LECT. 
 
 from the beginning of Jeroboam's reign down to the 
 time of Ahab, we find the prophets full of life and 
 energy in Judah, forbidding or rousing the nation to 
 war, ever actively mixed up in all political matters, 
 and possessed of enormous influence : while in the 
 kingdom of Israel we find only that old Jehovah-pro- 
 phet at Bethel, who played so dubious a part in rela- 
 tion to the man of God who came from Judah. Had 
 we not been told so, we should never have guessed 
 that God had numerous prophets in Israel during this 
 time, and that they were earnest enough in the cause 
 of religion to bring upon them the cruel anger of 
 Jezebel. 
 
 Now during this period the kings were all nominal 
 worshippers of Jehovah. Jeroboam's calves were not 
 the images of a false god, but were a false way of 
 worshipping the true God. Even Ahab never directly 
 broke off from his allegiance to Jehovah, but, like 
 his predecessors, took part in that corrupt and schis- 
 matical form of worship established at Bethel and at 
 Dan. Upon his marriage, how T ever, things changed ; 
 for his Sidonian wife did her very utmost to destroy 
 the worship of Jehovah, and substitute that of Baal 
 in its place ; and Ahab made no opposition to her 
 wishes. He even built, at her suggestion, a temple 
 to Baal in Samaria, and reared in it an altar, and 
 made an image of Astarte ' (i Kings xvi. 32, 33). 
 
 i The word rendered in our version grove is in the Hebrew Asherah, 
 which is merely another form of the word Astarte, or Ashtaroth. Her 
 image in ancient times was a roughly-carved beam of wood fixed in the 
 earth ; while the statues of Baal were made of stone. As the Asherah 
 could thus be cut down and burnt (see Judges vi. 25), our translators 
 concluded it must be a grove of trees. As for the meaning of the word, 
 Asherah is probably a name for the planet Venus, and signifies good 
 
IV.] OF IDOLATRY. 183 
 
 Now this was an entirely new state of things. It 
 was the public establishment of a licentious nature- 
 worship, and joined with it the determination to 
 uproot the worship of Jehovah. Upon how grand a 
 scale Jezebel set up her idolatries we learn from the 
 fact that there were four hundred and fifty prophets k 
 of Baal, and four hundred prophets of Astarte, who 
 ate at the queen's own table. And not satisfied with 
 this she put to death the true prophets, as we learn 
 incidentally from Obadiah's speech, who urges his 
 interference in their behalf as a reason for Elijah 
 excusing him from a mission which he regarded as 
 equivalent to his own death-warrant. Even after 
 that great day at Mount Carmel, Jezebel flinched 
 not. Resolute against God, all undaunted 1 by what 
 
 luck ; the root being connected with the well-known word Jashar, and 
 implying prosperity and success. But that beautiful planet soon became 
 the symbol of lust, and Baal, the sun, the husband, and Astarte, the 
 star of love, were degraded into mere representatives of the repro- 
 ductive powers of nature, and worshipped by acts of the most unbridled 
 profligacy. 
 
 k Evidently Jezebel did not consider that she had done enough for 
 her national deities till she had surrounded them with a vast retinue 
 of persons who imitated the Jehovah-prophets. Doubtless they, too, 
 claimed to be inspired by Baal and Astarte, and to speak in their names. 
 But we thus have an unintentional proof of the importance of the true 
 prophets, as elsewhere the attendants upon the heathen deities were not 
 prophets but priests. 
 
 1 None perhaps but a woman would have set herself thus desperately 
 to uproot the national religion of a country whither she had gone as 
 a wife, in order to establish in its place that in which she had been 
 brought up. It was a woman's entire devotion and unwavering faith, 
 degenerated into fanaticism. Like her daughter Athaliah, she had a 
 fearless energy, which shrank back from no deed, however atrocious : 
 but Athaliah's was a selfish wickedness, while Jezebel, like Philip of 
 Spain, may have thought she was labouring for God. And how fearlessly 
 she fell ! Arrayed in queenly attire, as careful of her beauty as if she 
 was preparing, not for death, but for some high ceremonial, she boldly 
 
1 84 ELIJAH RAISED UP [lect, 
 
 evidently made the deepest impression upon Ahab, 
 she defied Elijah at the very moment of his victory ? 
 and bound herself by an oath to destroy him. Such 
 a struggle as this between truth and falsehood had 
 never existed in Israel before, and God was pleased, 
 in order that the people might not fall for lack of 
 knowledge, to raise prophecy to a far grander height 
 than it had ever reached in previous times, 
 
 The open worship of Baal and Astarte had no- 
 doubt roused all the deeper religious feeling of the 
 nation ; and persecution had purified the motives and 
 quickened the faith of the worshippers of Jehovah, 
 while it had also separated the lukewarm from their 
 company. But who would have supposed when read- 
 ing of that old Jehovah-prophet at Bethel, with not a 
 word to say against Jeroboam's calves, though ready 
 to tell any number of falsehoods to obtain the counte- 
 nance of the true prophet ; who would have supposed 
 that he was the representative of a class who preferred 
 death to the entire abandonment of Jehovah ? Yet so 
 it was ! The only voices raised against the calves had 
 all come from Judah. Thence came the man of God 
 who denounced Jeroboam to his face : thence came 
 Jehu the son of Hanani to condemn Baasha. But 
 when they are required to abandon Jehovah's worship 
 altogether, and force is used, and the sword wakes up, 
 men's better principles resist, and death seems pre- 
 ferable to so shameful a desertion of their creed. And 
 in this nobler state of mind there springs up from 
 
 confronts one whom she deems an usurper, and provokes him with a 
 bitter taunt. And then her pride, her determined purpose, her unflinching 
 courage, her queenly dignity : the end of it all was a crowd of curs 
 yelping over carrion ! 
 
iv.] TO OPPOSE IDOLATRY. 185 
 
 among themselves one of the most heroic men that 
 ever bore witness for God's truth ; and for a time he 
 stays the nation in its downward course, and gives it a 
 fresh opportunity of repentance. 
 
 And this is ever the way of God's doings with man- 
 kind. He is longsuffering and merciful, and deals 
 with His people, not, as some seem to suppose, with 
 the technicality and harshness of the letter of the law, 
 but with a largeness and fulness of mercy such as 
 befits His perfect nature. In David's time we find 
 the prophets Gad and Nathan engaged in the com- 
 paratively unimportant duty 111 of arranging the singing 
 and ritual of the temple-service (2 Chron. xxix. 25) : 
 but when the usual means of grace were taken away, 
 when Jeroboam's impious worship had driven from 
 his realm all the believing priests and Levites ; when 
 the solemn feasts and festivals, the sacrifices and 
 offerings of the Mosaic law were lost, and ordinary 
 men ministered instead of the true priests at altars 
 devised to serve the purposes of worldly scheming ; 
 God gave then to His true worshippers some com- 
 pensation in the increased vigour and power of the 
 prophetic order. God withdraws not His grace till 
 men have long struggled against it. Long and often 
 do men grieve the Holy Ghost before His light is 
 finally quenched in the heart, and not unfrequently 
 grace at length gains the victory. Ill were our lot 
 
 m This duty was not, however, really unimportant : for we owe to 
 that temple-service the Book of Psalms. And while uninspired men 
 might have been sufficient for arranging the service in itself, yet we 
 cannot say that prophetic aid was unnecessarily lavished upon that 
 which was to give the Church, throughout all time, her best manual 
 of praise and devotion. 
 
1 86 GREAT INFLUENCE [lect. 
 
 if it were not so. Ever throughout the Bible God 
 is revealed as one ' Who waiteth to be gracious 
 (Is. xxx. 18):' and who deals with us not according 
 to the harsh letter of some statute, but so as may 
 best serve for our own moral and spiritual good. And 
 thus as religion declined in Israel, as the nation re- 
 jected or lost one after another all its means of grace, 
 and the more pious members of the nation withdrew 
 from a country where Jehovah could not be served 
 in truth, He was pleased to give a last loud call to 
 repentance and faith, by the grand development of 
 the prophetic schools, and the extraordinary energy 
 of individual prophets. 
 
 Who can estimate the influence of men like Elijah 
 and Elisha ? But few in the whole Bible rise to so 
 high an eminence as they ! On the mount of trans- 
 figuration it is one of them, Elijah, who appears 
 as the representative of the prophetic order, uniting 
 Moses to Christ ! And never did men more truly 
 work as prophets. They kept religion alive in the 
 hearts of the people, encouraged the fainthearted, and 
 were the centres of resistance against all the attempts 
 of Jezebel to make Baal and Astarte usurp the place 
 of Jehovah in Israel's worship. Gross sins in king 
 and people they openly rebuked : disclosed to view 
 the Divine vengeance following with speedy step 
 upon each act of national apostasy, and foretold the 
 final ruin which would inevitably follow upon per- 
 sistence in idolatry. And yet it is noteworthy that 
 neither the schools of the prophets, nor the influ- 
 ence and unparalleled energy of Elijah and Elisha 
 availed to save Israel. Had Jehu been more free from 
 worldly ambition, less ready to shed blood, and more 
 
IV.] OF ELIJAH AND ELISHA. 187 
 
 singleminded in his faith, he would have abolished 
 Jeroboam's calf-worship, and restored the Mosaic law. 
 In this case the labours of the prophets, united to the 
 influence of the state, might have been blessed with 
 happier results. As it was, there was no national 
 repentance. After all, it is the use or neglect of the 
 ordinary means of grace upon which our weal or 
 woe depends. And so even the prophets were no 
 compensation for the loss of priest and Levite, the 
 degradation of the priestly office by thrusting into 
 it unworthy men, the separation from Jerusalem, 
 and the enforced absence from the great festivals 
 celebrated there. I doubt if any extraordinary gifts, 
 however great, can compensate for the loss or neglect 
 of God's ordinary gifts ; or, rather, I have no doubt 
 that they cannot. For our Master has plainly taught 
 us so : 'If men hear not Moses and the prophets, 
 neither will they be persuaded though one rose from 
 the dead (Luke xvi. 31).' The greatest possible miracle 
 would not be so efficacious in bringing a man to God 
 as the simple reading of the Bible. The resurrection 
 of Christ did not move those Jews who had heard 
 Christ preach, and heard in vain. 
 
 And so Israel, cut off from Jehovah's true worship, 
 and resolutely abiding by her calves, fell rapidly into 
 moral and religious ruin : and, as is ever the case, 
 national corruption was but the prelude to national 
 decay. Judah still flourished and gloried in a 
 Hezekiah and a Josiah long after Israel had ceased 
 to exist. Not a single monarch in the long line of 
 Israel's kings was a good or a pious man, though 
 many were able statesmen and brave warriors. And 
 such as were the kings, such also was the people 
 
1 88 GREATER SUCCESS [lect. 
 
 Ever it sank lower and lower, and those who were 
 moved to better things, and who might by their pre- 
 sence have resisted the growing degeneracy, preferred 
 rather to withdraw to Judah, where they could enjoy 
 those religious privileges which were denied them at 
 home. They went where they could worship God as 
 He had commanded men to worship Him : and where 
 they recovered their full share in the blessings of the 
 covenant, and the actual enjoyment of its privileges. 
 Thus it was one of the tribe of Aser who held the 
 infant Saviour in her arms at His presentation in the 
 temple (Luke ii. 36). But though one here and one 
 there of the ten tribes was thus restored to the Church 
 (Acts xxvi. 7), the mass fell gradually more and more 
 away. We know of no Israelites now. They are 
 all 'lovhaioi, Jews, descendants of Judah. Of the ten 
 tribes we know nothing. Where they are, or whether 
 they still are, and what purpose God may yet have 
 for them, or whether they have been finally rejected, 
 all this is matter of debate and uncertainty. As re- 
 gards those passages of Scripture which seem to refer 
 to them, every man has his own doctrine, and his own 
 interpretation of their meaning. 
 
 And yet one remark more, and one only. Judah, 
 too, became corrupt, and in the place of the good, 
 or comparatively good kings that had sat on David's 
 throne, an Ahaz, a Manasseh, and a Jehoiakim, set 
 the people the example of substituting the gross 
 licentiousness of idolatry for the pure worship of 
 Jehovah. And then God gave prophecy as grand 
 a development in Judah as previously it had enjoyed 
 in Israel. It was not of the same type. Isaiah has 
 little in common with Elijah : Jeremiah in personal 
 
IV.] OF THE PROPHETS OF JUDAH. 189 
 
 character is the very reverse. Round Jeremiah there 
 was gathered one of the noblest circles n of men that 
 ever lived. There is nothing comparable to it in the 
 whole history of the northern kingdom. And prophecy 
 in them saved Judah. The captivity of Israel was for 
 aye. It had no return. The exile of Judah was for 
 seventy years, and it had a return (Jer. xxiv. 5-7). 
 Judah returned to work out that purpose for which 
 God had called the Jewish Church into existence, and 
 watched over it from the days when Abraham first 
 left his birthplace. That purpose was the giving the 
 one true religion to the whole world. Weary, footsore, 
 in tears, the saddened exiles toiled on their homeward 
 journey : there was in their poor array nothing of 
 wealth or pomp, of glory or earthly splendour, and 
 yet they bore with them all that we hold best and 
 dearest. Of them sprang a carpenter's son, and some 
 fishermen : and they were the Saviour of the world, 
 and His apostles. On so slight a thread seemed to 
 hang the destinies of mankind, but really that thread 
 was a chain of adamant. For God had declared by 
 His prophets, that ' out of Zion should go forth the 
 law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem (Micah 
 iv. 2, Is. ii. 3).' 
 
 n Jeremiah's labours were seconded by all the foremost priests and 
 laymen of his time. It is enough to mention the high priest Hilkiah, 
 the nobles Shaphan, and his son Ahikam, Neriah, and his son Baruch. 
 the prophets Zephaniah and Habakkuk, and the prophetess Huldah. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 THE COMMENCEMENT OF WRITTEN PROPHECY,. 
 
 Built upon the foundation of the apostles 
 and prophets. — Eph. ii. 20. 
 
 We have now traced at some length the upgrowth 
 of Jewish prophecy, but thus far we have been occu- 
 pied with it only in its earlier stages. Yet even in 
 these early stages, when apparently it. was engaged 
 mainly in the lower work of maintaining the kingdom 
 of Israel in its integrity, and of making ready the 
 earthly scene of Christ's labours, it was ever true also 
 to its higher duty of preparing for Christ Himself, and 
 for the doctrines which have not only raised Christian 
 nations to a level so far surpassing what even was 
 best and noblest in heathen philosophy, but in which 
 we believe that we have ' the words of eternal life.' 
 
 If we would understand what was its office and 
 work directly as regards our Saviour, it seemed ne- 
 cessary that we should thus study it throughout the 
 whole period of its existence. For prophecy forms 
 a grand whole, of which we shall lose the right inter- 
 pretation if we regard it merely as the fitful display 
 of extraordinary powers granted to men here and 
 there of high intellectual gifts. Such men there were ; 
 men who stood far above the general mass of the 
 
GOD'S PURPOSE IN MAKING ISRAEL A NA PI ON 191 
 
 prophets, and whom God called by a supernatural 
 impulse to be the teachers in His name of truths 
 which man could not by any exercise of his own 
 powers have learned for himself. Of these men 
 St. Paul speaks when in the text he says that we 
 have been ' built upon the foundation of apostles and 
 prophets.' For while all truth centres in Christ as the 
 one corner-stone, yet it was the especial duty of the 
 prophets before His coining, and of the apostles after 
 He had come, to give us the doctrinal explanation 
 of His person and office, and of the manner in which 
 we have salvation through Him. 
 
 But besides these men who spake under the direct 
 impulse of the Holy Ghost, there were prophets ' in 
 companies,' on whom God's Spirit rested in the way 
 of His ordinary gifts, and who wrought for God as 
 men may work for Him now. And if we would 
 understand our Bibles, we must study what is said 
 of these men too, and examine all the agencies and 
 influencies employed by God in His dealings with His 
 people throughout the whole period of its existence, 
 and not those only which were supernatural. Abraham 
 was called by God, and Israel formed into a nation 
 for the noblest of all possible purposes — the bestowal 
 upon mankind of the one true religion, and of the 
 one Saviour, in Whose Name alone we can be saved. 
 Hence the interest that attaches itself to every portion 
 of the Old Testament. We read it not as the history 
 merely of a very remarkable and singular people, but 
 as the opening scene and gradual progress of that 
 which very closely concerns ourselves. We are looking 
 in the Old Testament at our own foundations ; and it 
 is well that we should be again and again reminded 
 
192 IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL [lect. 
 
 that our religion did not spring out of nothing. We 
 are not people of yesterday, or the day before. Our 
 Lord was the chief corner-stone — \i9os aKpoyaviaios — 
 of a building that had long been in course of erection. 
 If in these days of scientific enquiry there are diffi- 
 culties about the first chapter of Genesis, yet, on the 
 other hand, it is worth remembering that ours is the 
 sole religion that goes back to the day of creation 
 itself : and that we claim that throughout the long 
 series of records which describe God's dealings with 
 mankind, beginning with that account of creation, 
 one, and one plan only has been steadily carried out, 
 and that that plan was completed and made perfect 
 in Christ. No type of the law, no teaching of the 
 prophets, has failed of its fulfilment. 
 
 It is the spirit of prophecy which thus binds 
 the Old Testament together, and gradually leads it 
 onward to the final and perfect teaching of our Lord 
 and His apostles. Two stages of this we have already 
 considered, the era namely of Moses and that of 
 Samuel. Now the distinguishing characteristic of 
 prophecy, as it existed in Moses, is that it gives the 
 whole outline of Gospel truth. There is, indeed, one 
 remarkable exception. Moses did not clearly teach 
 the Israelites the doctrine of a future judgment and 
 of an eternal state of rewards and punishments. He 
 did set it forth typically. There is in Paradise a tree 
 of life, and fallen man must be driven from Paradise, 
 lest ' he put forth his hand, and take of the tree of life, 
 and eat and live for ever (Gen. iii. 22).' As the Bible 
 begins so does it end with that tree of life : but its 
 meaning in the last chapter of the Book of Revelation 
 is no longer veiled, but, as ' the pure river of the water 
 
V.] NOT CLEARLY TAUGHT BY MOSES. 
 
 *93 
 
 of life ' is the grace of the Holy Ghost, so that tree of 
 life is ' the living bread which came down from heaven, 
 of which if any man eat he shall live for ever (John 
 vi. 51).' The doctrine, then, of eternal life is contained 
 in the teaching of Moses. He expressly states the 
 possibility of man living for ever. (For implicit 
 teaching see Matt. xxii. 32). Why, then, was it not 
 taught more clearly ? 
 
 We obtain the answer to this question by the study 
 of the mental and moral state of the Israelites when 
 they left Egypt. The more closely we examine their 
 state, the more unfit we find them for any just ways 
 of thinking about God. Still this did not prevent 
 Moses from setting many high spiritual truths before 
 them ; but as regards the immortality of the soul we 
 must remember that the Egyptians held that doctrine, 
 but in such a way as tended more to the debasement 
 than to the ennobling of human nature a . It might be 
 better, therefore, for the people to have the doctrine 
 withheld from them for a time, than for it to be asso- 
 ciated in their minds with gross conceptions of what 
 happens after death. And in fact we are expressly 
 taught by Ezekiel that this is the principle of God's 
 revelations in the Pentateuch, namely, that while in 
 many respects it set perfect truth before the Israelites, 
 in other respects it taught them what was good only 
 
 a On the views of the Egyptians, see Wilkinson, Manners and Cus- 
 toms of the Egyptians, vol. ii. 2nd series, 184c, p. 381 sqq. Ewald, 
 Hist. Isr. ii. 134, very well remarks, ' The religion of Jehovah, while 
 dealing a blow to all the mythology that had hitherto prevailed, espe- 
 cially abhorred the generally gross heathen conceptions of events after 
 death, because its thoughts respecting God and man's relation to Him 
 had so totally changed.' 
 
 O 
 
194 TWOFOLD CHARACTER [lect. 
 
 for the time, the utmost that they could attain to, but 
 which was in itself imperfect, and not good, compared 
 with what the prophets subsequently were permitted 
 to reveal. For first he says, ' When I caused them to 
 go forth out of the land of Egypt, and brought them 
 into the wilderness ; I gave them my statutes, and 
 shewed them my judgments, which if a man do, he 
 shall even live in them (Ezek. xx. 10, n) :' and then 
 he adds, ' But when they despised my statutes, and 
 polluted my sabbaths, and their eyes were after their 
 fathers' idols, then I gave them also statutes that were 
 not good, and judgments whereby they should not 
 live (lb. 24, 25).' I need scarcely remind you how 
 generally the fathers exaggerate Ezekiel's meaning ; 
 and how constantly they use the word Deuteronomy, 
 1 the second law,' in the way of reproach, as a burden 
 imposed upon the Israelites for their sins b . But we 
 
 b I do not know that I can refer to any place where this patristic 
 teaching is more unreservedly carried out than the 26th chapter of the 
 Didascalia Apostolorum, ed. Lagarde. This work, though spurious, and 
 guilty of putting into the mouths of the apostles somewhat unscriptural 
 doctrines, is very good evidence of the views current in the fifth century. 
 The chapter referred to is addressed to the Jews, and tells them that the 
 law which David asserted to be perfect (Ps. xix. 7), and which our Lord 
 said that He came not to destroy but to fulfil (Matt. v. 1 7), is the ten com- 
 mandments only. After giving for this a puerile reason, namely, that 
 the symbol for ten is the Hebrew letter yod, which yod or jot our Lord 
 said was not to pass away (lb. 18), and which, too, is the first letter 
 of His own name, it draws the more important distinction between the 
 decalogue, as the law given before Israel's apostasy (Ex. xxxii. 1-6), 
 and those * distinctions of meats, and offerings of incense and sacrifices 
 and burnt offerings,' which were subsequently imposed upon them for 
 their sin, and which it calls the Deuteronomy, or second law. Till 
 then, the author argues, sacrifices had never been expressly commanded, 
 though offered spontaneously by Abel, Cain, and Noah : but for 
 Christians to offer them, or submit to the yoke of any part of the 
 Levitical law, would be a violation of their baptism, &c An earlier 
 
v.] OF THE LAW. 195 
 
 must not therefore forget his warning. The law had 
 a twofold character. On the one hand it marked out 
 the whole length and breadth of the divine counsels. 
 It foretold that man should be raised from his fallen 
 state by the wounding for him of one Who was to be 
 the woman's seed. It showed by its sacrifices that sin 
 could be atoned for only by the death of a spotless 
 victim, and God approached only by that victim's 
 blood. It set God forth as a personal God, keeping 
 covenant with His people, and showing mercy, but 
 that will by no means acquit the guilty. It taught 
 all this, and much more. But this teaching had to be 
 accommodated to the moral and mental state of the 
 Jews. If the world was fit for Christ's coming only 
 after long ages of preparation, the very fact of the 
 necessity of this preparation shows that there must 
 be a development, a progress in revelation itself, and 
 consequently that there must be much in the ear- 
 lier stages that was temporary, partial, incomplete. 
 
 and more trustworthy evidence is the Persian bishop Farhad, whose 
 homilies are dated respectively a. d. 337, 344, and 345, and who was 
 present at the Council of Seleucia in the latter year. In his Homily on 
 the Distinction of Meats, discussing the passage quoted from Ezek. 
 xx. 11, he asks, ' What are these commandments and judgments, which 
 if a man do he shall live in them ? They are the ten commandments, 
 which God wrote with His own hand, and gave them to Moses, that he 
 might teach them to the people. But when they had made them a calf 
 and apostatized from Him, then He gave them commandments and 
 judgments that were not good ; such as those of offerings and purifica- 
 tions and defilements and sacrifices for sin,' all which he contrasts with 
 the terms of the Gospel in Matt. xi. 28-30. Dr. Wright has lately 
 edited the original text of these Homilies from a MS. dated as early as 
 a. d. 474, and the passage will be found in page 318 of his edition, and 
 also in page 334 of that of Antonellus, who edited an Armenian version 
 of several of them at Rome in the year 1756, but wrongly ascribed them 
 to St James of Nisibis. 
 
 O 2 
 
196 THE PROPHETS SET FREE [ L ECT. 
 
 Remembering this, it is the more extraordinary that 
 Moses should nevertheless have marked out so tho- 
 roughly the whole domain of revelation ; and have 
 stood in a more close relation to God than any subse- 
 quent prophet. No one besides has so completely filled 
 the prophet's office, and been the mediator between 
 God and man. Other prophets there were many : but 
 a prophet like unto Moses God gave but one, even 
 Him, Who came as the Son over that house of which 
 Moses, great as he was, had been the steward only. 
 
 During the long period that followed, the work 
 of Moses languished. Great men rose — men instinct 
 with the Spirit of God — but they did not labour 
 directly for religion, and even in temporal matters 
 Israel seemed in danger of being permanently con- 
 quered by the Philistines. It could not, indeed, be 
 so. For salvation was to be of the Jews (John iv. 22, 
 Is. ii. 3). The purpose for which God had summoned 
 Abraham to leave his country must be carried out to 
 its full end. And so, just when the country was ripe 
 for him, God sent Samuel, and from his days there 
 is no break in the activity of the prophetic order. 
 Violent men like Manasseh might silence the prophets 
 for a time by the sword ; Jehoiakim might compel 
 Jeremiah to quit Jerusalem ; but the work went on. 
 The world, under their teaching, was daily growing 
 more ripe for Christ's advent : men were advancing 
 in morality, in intellect, and in the power of under- 
 standing spiritual truths. And simultaneously the 
 plan of redemption was being more and more plainly 
 declared. The time of the Saviour's coming, His 
 birthplace, His nature, His office, all were becoming 
 more definite, more exactly foreshown. Isaiah has 
 
V.] FROM THE DUTIES OF GOVERNMENT 197 
 
 so clearly unfolded the nature of Christ's sufferings 
 for us, that not even the apostles after His crucifixion 
 could give a more complete doctrinal statement of the 
 manner in which they avail for our redemption. 
 
 Before the prophets could attain to this elevation it 
 was necessary that they should be set free from lower 
 duties. Although the idea of the theocracy required 
 that the prophet, as God's mouthpiece, should also di- \ 
 rect the government of the state, yet, as long as human j 
 nature is such as it is, this really placed the prophet 
 in circumstances more likely to put difficulties in his 
 way than to keep him singleminded. Moses, Deborah, 
 Samuel, had combined the two offices in spotless 
 integrity. But there were great dangers in the union ; 
 and thus Samuel unwillingly, yet by God's express 
 monition, separated the two for ever (1 Sam. viii. 22). 
 Under Saul and David Israel soon obtained not free- 
 dom only, but empire. That, as usual, was but a 
 dubious blessing. But though the prophets remained 
 so much mixed up with political and worldly matters, 
 that it became a snare to many of them, yet, set free 
 at least from having any direct share in the govern- 
 ment of the nation, they could henceforth devote 
 themselves more entirely to God's immediate service, 
 and to the higher duty of teaching the people. 
 
 We see this in Samuel's own case. Released from 
 the toils of government, he could give his time and 
 thoughts to the management of the prophetic schools. 
 By their means he obtained for Israel, first of all, a 
 higher culture, and, secondly, a large and active class 
 of men who laboured directly for religion. In both 
 these respects we find ourselves at the close of 
 Samuel's days in a state of things removed by a vast 
 
198 REVOLT OF THE TEN TRIBES [LECT. 
 
 gulph from the days of the Judges. Idolatry has dis- 
 appeared. The people are everywhere making great 
 advances in learning, and a high tone of morality and 
 religion generally prevails. The one blot upon the 
 time is David's lust of war, bringing men like Joab to 
 the front, and debasing David's own character, But 
 the prophets were too true patriots to approve of this. 
 They disapproved of it, and laboured that his throne 
 might be filled at his death by a man of peace. Even 
 he, too, disappointed them. Religion pined under the 
 costly trappings of an imperial court. Vice followed 
 close upon the heels of luxury. The people were 
 ground down by forced labour, exacted from them to 
 rear works of royal magnificence, and a lasting schism 
 tore into two petty nations what had once been a 
 powerful state. If ever God wrote His verdict plainly 
 upon ambition and aggressive war, he wrote it upon 
 the wars of David. They brought the stain of 
 two foul crimes on David himself; ruined his own 
 domestic peace and happiness ; ruined, by the pos- 
 session of too great power, that one of his sons who 
 started so wisely and so well ; and ruined the kingdom, 
 which broke asunder of its own weight. Absalom saw 
 clearly enough that the flaw in David's government 
 was his neglect of the administration of justice at 
 home (2 Sam. xv. 2-6). If he had followed Samuel's 
 example (1 Sam. vii.15,16), or provided, as Jehoshaphat 
 did afterwards, for the upright administration of the 
 law in every city (2 Chron. xix. 5—7), instead of de- 
 voting himself to war, he would have knit the tribes 
 of Israel into one united and compact monarchy. 
 
 But it is probable that this schism in the kingdom 
 was for Israel's real good. The work of the prophets 
 
v.] NOT AN UNMIXED EVIL. 199 
 
 at all events was made more easy thereby. I can 
 scarcely see how an institution so free, so independent, 
 so brave in resisting sin even in the mightiest, could 
 have existed in the face of a powerful and despotic 
 court. We find Asa casting prophets into prison, 
 Manasseh and Jehoiakim putting them to death. 
 Means such as these would soon have reduced the 
 prophets to the condition of those at Samaria, who 
 must perforce say to Ahab ' go and prosper,' or 
 be content with prison fare and the cruelties of a 
 dungeon. 
 
 But, in these petty kingdoms they had, as a general 
 rule, full scope for their powers, and we have seen to 
 what grand proportions prophecy attained in the per- 
 sons of Elijah and Elisha. Even they, however, were 
 men of action only ; we have not yet come to the days 
 of written prophecy. It was by oratory, by personal 
 addresses, that the prophets moved the people, but 
 we are now approaching the time when they began to 
 write their prophecies, or at least some memorials of 
 them. The prophecies of Amos and Jeremiah are 
 records of long and unwearied labours, the former an 
 orderly and well-arranged account of one important 
 mission, the other the rough and unarranged jottings, 
 as it were, of a life of incessant activity and constant 
 suffering, closed by a violent death, nor does the pro- 
 phet seem ever to have had any period of tranquillity 
 during which he had leisure enough for reducing to 
 order the narrative of his noble zeal. Micah's pro- 
 phecy, so vigorous and terse, so abrupt and broken, 
 seems but as the heads of discourses often urged upon 
 the people. On the other hand, the last twenty-seven 
 chapters of Isaiah, the prophecies of Habakkuk, Joel, 
 
200 IMPORTANCE [lect. 
 
 Nahum, and others, are probably written composi- 
 tions, never orally spoken in public, but from the first 
 committed to writing. These written compositions 
 were less powerful at the time, and the influence of 
 the prophets far smaller than it had been in Elijah's 
 days. But to us the change is all-important. We are 
 admitted by it within the circle of inspired teaching c . 
 We can appeal to that teaching, can compare our 
 Lord's life and death and doctrines with what the 
 prophets had long before said of Him. The New 
 Testament comes not down to us single-handed. We 
 can point also to the Old, and say, Read both these 
 books ; both these collections of books ; compare 
 them with one another : and you will see that in 
 Christ all is accomplished that prophets had foretold ; 
 and you will see also that, from the first, men had 
 been bidden to look forward to, and expect, and pray 
 for all that is found in Christ. This is a thing to be 
 noted and remembered, this unity of teaching and 
 doctrine, beginning with the earliest records of God's 
 dealings with mankind, and ending in that book 
 
 c Christians are sometimes twitted with being ' the people of a book,' 
 and our respect for the Bible is called bibliolatry and other bad names. 
 So the Mohammedans are called ' the people of a book,' and having 
 thus a fixed standard for their religion, they have a consistency among 
 themselves, and a backbone for their creed, which has hitherto made 
 them very unmanageable opponents of even Christian missionaries. But 
 we are not ' people of a book,' but of thirty or forty books, all for con- 
 venience' sake bound together in one volume, but none the less distinct 
 books. While this widens the field of attack, it also makes the defence 
 more decisively successful. It is to be expected that clever and brilliant 
 fallacies will be brought forward from time to time, and urged as 
 unanswerable attacks upon some part or other of the long line which 
 believers have to defend. But what else than truth can make so long a 
 line really defensible ! 
 
v.] OF WRITTEN PROPHECY. 201 
 
 which sets before us the only sufficient Saviour, the 
 only religion worthy of God and man, the only 
 revelation that invites and can endure the closest 
 scrutiny. Such a fact is no chance-work. Either 
 Christianity is true, or you must believe that mere 
 human agency has for many thousand years steadily 
 persevered in preparing for, in producing, and in 
 maintaining the noblest and purest delusion. A creed 
 utterly unlike what men could have invented, which 
 raises and ennobles man, gives him the mastery over 
 himself, works only for purity, chastity, and holiness, 
 and which is nevertheless false, A creed supported 
 by a vast and solid mass of evidence, none the less 
 solid and vast because little holes have been picked 
 in it, but which no evidence may be allowed to prove. 
 Those may believe so who like. But those who think 
 the question too important to be prejudged, and are 
 content to weigh the evidence calmly, know that the 
 balance of that evidence is largely in favour of 
 Christianity, even though there are difficulties enough 
 to try our faith. As prudent men, too, they will wait 
 to see whither the apostles of doubt intend to lead 
 them. We know the value of our faith : we may 
 reasonably ask what is to be the substitute, before 
 we part with what we have. 
 
 The early prophets, then, laboured for the main- 
 tenance of the true religion in Israel ; the later pro- 
 phets laboured to raise Judaism from being a mere 
 local worship to its true dignity as the catholic 
 religion, the one true religion for the whole world. 
 The first was an absolutely necessary part of God's 
 scheme of mercy for man. Our Lord must have some 
 place where He could be born, and give proofs of His 
 
202 DISTINCT OFFICE OF THE EARIY [lect. 
 
 Messiahship, and die. There must be there men able 
 to witness, to understand and to record His doings, 
 and to teach them to others. Men must be prepared 
 also for their teaching. A certain cycle of doctrine, 
 relating especially to the nature and attributes of God, 
 and to man's relation to Him, must be impressed first 
 upon the minds of the Jews, and then, through them, 
 upon the more thoughtful of the heathen, among 
 whom the Jews were dispersed, apparently for this 
 very purpose. Nor was this preparation confined to 
 Judaea. The conquests of Alexander, the empire 
 of Rome, the translation of the Septuagint, and the 
 gropings of philosophy after truth, were all ordained 
 by the Divine Providence, and so regulated as best to 
 lend their aid also to this part of the preparation for 
 Christ. A vast external work was necessary, as well 
 as a body of pure and spiritual teaching. In Israel, 
 and outside of Israel, everything combined to make 
 that the very fulness of time when Christ came. 
 When we see the vast scale on which, far and wide, 
 all earthly things had been fitted and made ready 
 for the manifestation of God's mercies to mankind in 
 Christ, we need not wonder at the high rank held by 
 Elijah among the prophets, even though he committed 
 no prophecy to writing, and his work chiefly belonged 
 to this, the outer and material, preparation for the 
 Saviour's ministry. 
 
 But already the inner work had begun, of giving 
 to men the abiding record of the faith, and its firm 
 memorial as long as the world shall last. Even the 
 early prophets did not confine their activity to oral 
 teaching, the effect of which, however powerful, is 
 nevertheless transient. Already there had been added 
 
v.] AND OF THE LATER PROPHETS. 203 
 
 to the law of Moses works of history and psalms. 
 Both begin with Moses. Repeatedly he is commanded 
 to lay up written memorials of certain great events 
 within the ark : and psalmody commenced with that 
 hymn of triumph sung by Miriam and the women on 
 the shore of the Red Sea, with timbrel and dance. 
 But these again had a new beginning in Samuel. The 
 singing in the temple is expressly said to have been 
 the work of the prophets (2 Chron. xxix. 25), and it 
 was in the prophetic schools that Samuel revived the 
 art of music, and made it part of the regular course of 
 instruction given there ; while history we find was the 
 special study and business of the prophets. The an- 
 nals of each king's reign were kept by prophets, and 
 numerous biographies written by them are referred 
 to in the Books of Chronicles. The Jews call all the 
 historical books of the Old Testament the ' books of 
 the early prophets.' 
 
 But though histories and psalms were composed 
 thus early, the prophets did not as yet record their 
 own addresses to the people. And this continued to 
 be the rule for rather more than three hundred years, 
 from the time of Samuel till the uprise of the Assyrian 
 monarchy. During this period Israel and Judah were 
 left to work out their own destinies, with no worse 
 evil than their constant rivalry with one another, 
 and no more powerful foreign foe than the Syrian 
 kingdom of Damascus. The most prominent figures 
 in this era are Elijah and Elisha ; the most remark- 
 able fact the grand development of prophecy in the 
 northern kingdom. Written prophecy began with 
 the Assyrian period, so called because the relations 
 of Israel and Judah to Nineveh form the leading 
 
204 GENTILES INCLUDED [lect. 
 
 features of the times. It lasted about a hundred 
 years, commencing about 800 B. C, in the reigns of 
 Jeroboam II, king of Israel, and Amaziah, king of 
 Judah. The prophets of this era were Jonah, Joel, 
 Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, Nahum. The third or Chaldaean 
 period witnessed the life-long struggle of Jeremiah, 
 the fall of Jerusalem, the seventy years' captivity, and 
 the final outburst of prophecy among the returning 
 exiles. And then for four hundred years there was 
 silence, till the Precursor came, announcing the advent 
 of the prophet like unto, but greater than, Moses, in 
 Whom God gave mankind the fullest light that would 
 avail for their good. We have no new revelation to 
 expect. The Old Testament ever looked forward to, 
 and spake of, latter times : the New Testament bids 
 us earnestly contend for a faith that has been once 
 for all delivered to the saints. 
 
 It was in these two last eras that, with a message 
 still for Israel, ' the spirit that was in the prophets 
 testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the 
 glory that should follow (1 Peter i. 11).' The earlier 
 prophets had laboured to keep Israel true to its mis- 
 sion. They tried to maintain the worship of Jehovah 
 in its integrity ; instructed the people in the great 
 doctrines of God's unity, His omnipresence, His spi- 
 ritual nature ; resisted their longings after idolatry, 
 and strove to make them worthy of their high voca- 
 tion of being Christ's brethren after the flesh, and His 
 future ministers for teaching mankind the true faith. 
 To bring about these ends, the prophets had hitherto 
 taken great share in things political ; but now, with- 
 out altogether abandoning this lower field (Is. vii. 
 Jer. xxxii. 3-5, &c), they yet constantly rise above 
 
v.] WITHIN THE RANGE OF PROPHECY. 205 
 
 it, and look onward to a new covenant, made not with 
 one small nation, but unto which ' all nations shall 
 flow (Is. ii. 2).' In a people so exclusive as the Jews, 
 whom Moses had so separated from all the neigh- 
 bouring kingdoms, whose patriotism was so fierce and 
 so narrow, who looked with such open aversion upon 
 all foreign races, and who refused to admit even 
 proselytes into full equality with themselves until the 
 fourth generation, it is the more remarkable that their 
 prophets speak of the deliverance of Gentile as well 
 as Jew, of the bestowal of a common Saviour, and of 
 the founding of a universal Church. Up to this time 
 they had been content with trying to save Israel from 
 idolatry ; they now attack idolatry itself, and summon 
 the whole world to witness God's controversy with 
 idols. The Jews are no longer to be the one people 
 possessed of truth, but must be made fit to be the 
 apostles and teachers of a suffering Messiah, who died 
 ' not for one nation only, but that also He might 
 gather together in one the children of God that were 
 scattered abroad (John xi. 52).' For this end the 
 prophets now expand, simplify, show the living spirit 
 which animated the teaching of the law, free it from 
 all that was local, temporary, national, and labour to 
 make Judaism the religion of all lands, and people, 
 and languages. The first, and imperfect, and pre- 
 paratory Church, is fast growing into a Church per- 
 fect, final, universal. The flickering taper of Judaism 
 is changing into a dawn preceding the rising of the 
 Sun of Righteousness. 
 
 You see this in their own writings. Passing by the 
 first chapter of Isaiah, written, as the contents plainly 
 show, when the prophet was gathering his earlier pro- 
 
206 COMMON MESSAGE [lect. 
 
 phecies together, to form an introduction or preface 
 to the whole volume ; passing this by, we find in the 
 second chapter Isaiah's programme — his leading idea. 
 And it is given in a very remarkable way. He quotes 
 three verses from a contemporary prophet, Micah, not 
 omitting even the conjunction and 6 at the beginning, 
 as if he had nothing to add to or subtract from 
 Micah's message, but only to explain and enforce it. 
 Or perhaps it was to remind the people that there 
 was something that came before that and. For 
 what was Micah's message ? A very painful one ; so 
 painful that the people would have gladly seen Micah 
 put to death, if Hezekiah would have permitted it 
 (Jer. xxvi. 18, 19). In good Hezekiah's days, when 
 there was so much to justify the expectation of an 
 era of great national happiness, Micah warned them 
 that ' Zion should be ploughed as a field, and Jeru- 
 salem become heaps of ruins (Micah iii. 12).' Why? 
 Because it had to make room for something else, 
 something better. ' In the latter days,' a phrase 
 which always with the prophets means the days of 
 the Messiah, ' in the latter days the mountain of the 
 house of Jehovah shall be established on the top of 
 the mountains, and to it, the Christian Church, not 
 Jews only, but all nations shall flock. Out of Zion 
 the law shall go forth, — of old it had stayed within it, 
 — and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.' And 
 this, not to found an empire of force, like that of 
 David, but an empire of peace. ' Nation shall not 
 
 d In our translation the conjunction is translated but in Micah iv. i ; 
 in the Hebrew it is and in both places. It is the form of the verb, 
 however, which proves that Isaiah quotes from Micah, and not Micah 
 from Isaiah. 
 
V.] OF MIC AH AND ISAIAH. 2 07 
 
 lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn 
 war any more (lb. iv. 1-3, Is. ii. 2-4).' If ever there 
 was anything contrary to the whole tenor of Jewish 
 thought, it was Christ's command to go out into all 
 the world, and make disciples of the whole creation. 
 That command, even now, has not been fully obeyed. 
 Missionary enterprise soon died out, and its revival 
 is a matter of recent date. Man's supineness and 
 disobedience have too long delayed this promised 
 reign of peace. No such reign, too, will come till 
 Christianity has been more fully received at home, 
 and has established a more complete authority over 
 the bad passions of fallen human nature. But Micah 
 and Isaiah spoke of a duty incumbent upon every 
 one who has been brought near Christ, when they 
 described this expansive power which has ever been 
 a note of real Christianity ; and in this empire of 
 peace they showed what would be the result, if the 
 principles taught by Christ had obtained full mastery, 
 first over our individual selves, and then, through us, 
 over all mankind. 
 
 Now how came Isaiah to quote these words as his 
 programme ? You cannot say that he took them in 
 a less threatening sense than we do, for Jeremiah has 
 
 told us how greatly Hezekiah and the people 
 
 Isaiah's contemporaries — took them to heart (Jer. 
 xxvi. 19). You cannot say that Isaiah had no par- 
 ticular purpose in quoting them, for he refers to them 
 six or seven times elsewhere (Is. xi. 9, xxv. 6, 7, 10, 
 lvi. 7, lvii. 13, lxv. 11, 25, lxvi. 20). You cannot say 
 that he thought only of an extension of Judaism ; for 
 the prophecy expressly declared that the ' mountain 
 of the house,' the area on which the temple was 
 
208 JERUSALEM TO GIVE PLACE [lect. 
 
 situated, was to be ' as the high places of the field,' 
 as the hill-tops, which rise barren, and lone, and 
 desolate in the uncultivated wilderness. You cannot 
 say that Isaiah shared in the popular alarm that the 
 Assyrians would capture Jerusalem. He expressly 
 assured Hezekiah of the contrary. You may take 
 refuge with some of the new critics in saying that the 
 words had no meaning, or that we cannot tell what 
 that meaning was. But if the words have a meaning, 
 it can be no other than this ; that instead of that 
 mountain of Zion on which stood the temple, and 
 of the dispensation of which that temple was the 
 centre and symbol, God would have another, a holy 
 mountain, a dispensation of which holiness would be 
 the distinguishing characteristic : that in it all nations 
 would have equal rights with the Jews : and that this 
 dispensation would be first published from Jerusalem, 
 but that afterwards that city would have nothing 
 more to do with it. Titus may destroy Jerusalem, 
 Arabs and Turks waste it : but in doing so they are 
 wasting the site merely of a dispensation that has 
 fulfilled its purpose. ' The Law has gone forth from 
 Zion : ' it is not there now. * The word of the Lord 
 has gone forth from Jerusalem : ' it has no special 
 head-quarters, no local centre now. ' In every nation 
 he that feareth God, and worketh righteousness, is 
 accepted with Him (Acts x. 35).' 
 
 It is quite possible that Isaiah did not himself dis- 
 tinctly contemplate or understand all that was con- 
 tained in his words. It is the nature of prophecy not 
 to be capable of being fully understood until it is 
 accomplished. But 'borne along by the Holy Ghost,' 
 Isaiah took as his programme a text that showed that 
 
V.] TO GOD'S HOLY MOUNTAIN. 209 
 
 Judaism was to pass away, and that the business of 
 prophecy henceforward must be to prepare for that 
 better and enduring dispensation, of which the grand 
 features are nowhere else so clearly set forth as in 
 Isaiah's own predictions. In this second stage, then, 
 the prophets laboured not for the means only but 
 for the end e : not for Israel, as God's instrument in 
 giving man the true religion, but for that religion it- 
 self, for Christ and His Church. And therefore they 
 wrote their prophecies, because they had not merely 
 a temporary but an eternal use and value. ' They 
 were written for our learning — the instruction of all 
 Christians : that we through patience and comfort 
 of the Scriptures might have the hope.' 
 
 And we, — possessing these writings, and daily- 
 reading therein of the hope and consolation of the 
 true Israel, who are Abraham's seed by being sharers 
 in that faith which God accepted in Abraham while 
 he was yet uncircumcised, — we, having these lively 
 oracles of God ever before our eyes, are in danger not 
 of over-estimating their value, but of under-estimating 
 the importance of the work of those prophets who left 
 behind them no written memorials of their teaching. 
 The place which Elijah holds in the New Testament 
 may serve to warn us that we are wrong in our view 
 of them ; and yet, when we compare him with an 
 Isaiah, or a Jeremiah, we may wonder why he should 
 have been chosen, as the representative of the whole 
 prophetic order, to stand on the Mount of Transfigur- 
 ation between Moses and Christ, as the link which 
 
 e Of course the Christian Church and its ordinances are really means 
 only : means for bringing men to God. But as regards the Jewish 
 Church, they were the ends for which that Church existed. 
 
 P 
 
210 PROPHETIC TRUTHS OLDER [lect.' 
 
 unites the law to the gospel. Moses of course was 
 there. He had showed what God is. Go where you 
 will ; search where you will among all the cosmo- 
 gonies and philosophies of ancient and modern times, 
 but you will never find anything so true, so simple, 
 and so sublime, as the opening words of Genesis. 
 God the Creator, the sole active, intelligent, life-giv- 
 ing, spirit : matter dull, heavy, void, shapeless, created 
 by God. And besides this, he showed what God is 
 with relation to man : what man was, how he fell, 
 what he needs, how those needs must be supplied, 
 how sin can be atoned for, and man raised up again, 
 and the breach between heaven and earth repaired, 
 and all once again be as at first ' very good.' Moses 
 must be there, for in him God gave man the full out- 
 line of the marvellous plan of redemption. But why 
 Elijah ? Because, you will perhaps say, of his high 
 personal merits, of those qualities which made it meet 
 that he should be exalted to heaven in the chariot 
 of fire. But Elijah was there as the representative of 
 the whole prophetic order, and not by reason of his 
 personal merits. You will say then, perhaps, that 
 Elijah was the great preacher of repentance, and that 
 repentance is the true preparation for faith, the Baptist 
 cry that must precede the preaching of the Gospel. 
 But this is scarcely enough. You have on the Mount 
 of Transfiguration Moses, Elias, Christ : the law, the 
 prophets, the Gospel. You can scarcely say that 
 repentance is the equivalent of the second term. 
 
 May not the reason then be that Elijah and his con- 
 temporaries were the real founders of the prophetic 
 teaching ? and that written prophecy was the result, 
 the product of their work ? That product is all- 
 
v.] THAN THE PROPHETIC WRITINGS. 21 1 
 
 important to us : by being committed to writing, pro- 
 phecy took a firm, lasting, and permanent shape. Yet 
 the men who first taught those truths, which Micah 
 and Isaiah penned, may justly hold a higher place 
 in the view of Him Who judgeth not according to 
 the semblance, but according to reality. For with 
 one exception the prophets all belong to, and give 
 expression to the same grand circle of ideas. They 
 speak plainly, clearly, decisively, and harmoniously. 
 Each retaining his own individual character, his own 
 style and mode of thinking, they yet utter no con- 
 fused and uncertain cries, but all teach the same 
 truths. Now God, even in His highest gifts, yet 
 works ,by means. And, as I have shown, prophecy 
 was a great institution, numbering its ordinary mem- 
 bers by hundreds and thousands, with its inspired 
 teachers few, yet so grand and elevated in their cha- 
 racters and powers, that they stamped the impress 
 of their thoughts deeply upon the minds of their 
 disciples, and of all the religious and earnest men 
 of the nation. I have shown you that this lasted for 
 three hundred years before Joel and Jonah penned 
 the first written prophecy. Shall we be wrong in 
 concluding that so great an institution had a soul as 
 well as a body? a purpose for which it existed as well 
 as an organized existence ? If there were so many 
 and such flourishing prophetic colleges, are we to 
 suppose that nothing was taught in them except the 
 simplest rudiments? They were religious corporations, 
 and therefore must have had some doctrines, some- 
 thing that they believed. We may be sure, then, that 
 what the later prophets taught, and have left us in 
 written records, the early prophets taught also : yet 
 
 P 2 
 
212 CYCLE OF DOCTRINES [lECT. 
 
 probably God gave these truths, these spiritual ideas 
 about man and God and a Saviour, gradually. They 
 were slowly won by the piety and faith of these early 
 prophets : many of them probably by the close study 
 of the law of Moses, yet not without the Spirit's direct 
 aid. Humanly speaking, we should say that the circle 
 of truth penned by the later prophets was the result 
 of the teaching of the prophetic schools during these 
 three centuries. Thus Elijah stands on the Mount of 
 Transfiguration as the representative of the prophets, 
 because the truths committed to writing by later 
 prophets were those which he and his contemporaries 
 had won for men, and which they had taught their 
 disciples. 
 
 We are not left, however, to conjecture and reason- 
 ing upon this point. As I mentioned, the prophetic 
 schools were closely connected with the temple-ser- 
 vice. Prophets arranged that service : the psalms 
 sung there were the work of men educated in the 
 prophetic schools, and composed, many of them, long 
 before the era of written prophecy : the Levites who 
 sang them had there also their training. Now psalms 
 and hymns f , I grant, are not the proper means for 
 
 f Psalms and hymns constantly have their origin in doctrines, and 
 thus they indirectly bear witness to them. But their use to inculcate 
 doctrines began with heretics. Bardesan first used them to make 
 Manichaean ideas popular in the East, and Ephrem Syrus then wrote his 
 poems ' Against the Enquirers ' to frustrate his purpose. So Peter the 
 Fuller convulsed the Greek Church by inserting into the hymn ' O holy 
 God, holy Almighty, holy Eternal, have mercy upon us ! ' the words 
 ' That wast crucified for us,' but was anathematized by the council of 
 Constantinople for his pains. So in St. Chrysostom's time the battle 
 between Arianism and Orthodoxy was fought with hymns. But it 
 was an evil necessity which led to controversial hymns, and all such, 
 especially when intended to enforce the pet notions of some sect, are 
 
v.] IN THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 213 
 
 teaching doctrine. A doctrinal hymn is a hymn 
 that has mistaken its vocation, and congregations are 
 sorely to be pitied who have to sing them. Psalms 
 and hymns ought to be the voice of praise and 
 thanksgiving, mounting up spontaneously from glad 
 hearts to glorify God for His goodness. And this is 
 the character of the Psalms of the Bible. They are 
 the expression not of controversy, but of devotion, 
 and spring not from the intellect, but from the heart. 
 Still in pouring forth of its fulness the heart will give 
 unpremeditated utterance to those thoughts which 
 most deeply agitate it, and little as the early psalms 
 have in them of distinctive doctrine, yet they do 
 show us something of the belief of the saints who 
 lived in times anterior to the first book of written 
 prophecy. What, then, do we find in them ? Exactly 
 the same great circle of ideas as that given us in 
 prophecy, forming at all events the back-ground, and 
 giving the occasion often for the burst of praise which 
 follows. You have the prophetic view of the intrinsic 
 worthlessness of sacrifices, and that God's true offering 
 is thanksgiving (Ps. 1. 8-15, xl. 6-8) : the prophetic 
 view of repentance, that it is the contrite heart, and 
 a renewed life (lb. li. 17, 10). Sin is forgiven by our 
 iniquity not being imputed unto us (lb. xxxii. 1, 2). 
 The Jewish priesthood is to give place to one higher 
 and better, after the order of Melchizedek e (lb. ex. 4), 
 
 painfully out of place in public worship. Naturally, however, Christian 
 hymns will have more of doctrine in them than the early psalms, be- 
 cause more doctrine has been revealed ; but a hymn of praise, springing 
 from a heart filled with thankfulness at God's dealings with us in grace 
 is one thing, and a hymn intended to indoctrinate us, and drag some 
 new notion in, is altogether another. 
 
 « On the authorship of this psalm see Ewald, Poet. Bucher des A. B. 
 ii. 56, and Rev. C. Taylor's ' Gospel in the Law,' p. 18. 
 
214 PURPOSE AND PLACE [lect. 
 
 There is a mysterious tale, too, of suffering, an oft- 
 repeated promise of especial love for the poor and 
 needy, and anticipations of a universal empire over 
 which a Son of David shall rule, of Whom it is said, 
 ' His name shall endure for ever : His name shall 
 be continued as long as the sun : and men shall be 
 blessed in Him : all nations shall call Him blessed 
 (lb. lxxii. 17).' But it is not doctrines only which 
 connect the psalms with the prophets. They are full 
 of pure, noble, spiritual thoughts, such as the prophets 
 Everywhere give utterance to. Now many of these 
 psalms are written records of those early times when 
 as yet the prophets preached only, and did not pre- 
 serve any memorials of their sermons : when it was 
 only by the living memory that the truths taught 
 by Samuel and Nathan and Elijah and Elisha were 
 preserved in the prophetic colleges. And it was right 
 that thus the earliest written memorials of prophetic 
 teaching should be these glorious psalms of praise 
 to God. The first-fruits were ever God's share, and 
 when they had been offered, the rest was thereby 
 sanctified to man's use and enjoyment. 
 
 But, farther, one prophet, as I said, stands apart 
 from this cycle of ideas ; that is Daniel. In him pro- 
 phecy has a new development : it breaks away from 
 the bonds of Jewish thought, and sets before us the 
 grand onward march of the world's history, and the 
 Christian Church as the centre and end of all history. 
 Prophecy would not have been complete had not this 
 new direction been given to it. For ' the world is 
 Jehovah's, and the fulness thereof.' If in Judaism 
 there was a special preparation for a certain end, that 
 end belonged to the world outside of Judaism, and 
 
v.] OF THE BOOK OF DANIEL. 215 
 
 prophecy must put the two in their right connection. 
 When the Jew read in Daniel that the world was 
 greater in God's eyes than Judaea, and that his own 
 especial work was nearly over, and that therefore the 
 city and sanctuary would in a few weeks be destroyed, 
 and the sacrifice and oblation cease, and that God 
 would set up a kingdom that would never be de- 
 stroyed, and that this kingdom would not be Judaea, 
 he was puzzled and offended, and though he could 
 not help inserting Daniel in the canon of Scripture, 
 yet he would not admit him among the prophets, 
 but placed the Book of Daniel between Esther and 
 Ezra, in its chronological order, as a sort of historical 
 writing. Now God works by means. It was neces- 
 sary that prophecy should have this development, and 
 whom did He choose as His instrument for giving it? 
 One carried as a child to Babylon, probably a prince 
 of the blood royal of Judaea, but brought up to serve 
 as a eunuch at the king of Babylon's court. He is 
 not educated at any prophetic college, but in the 
 wisdom of the Chaldaeans. No doubt he would often 
 meet and converse with many of those believing 
 men who had been brought captive to Babylon with 
 Jeconiah, and would read with them the law of 
 Moses, and the recent prophecies of Jeremiah ; for 
 they, we know, were the great study and comfort of 
 the exiles; but he would not be able, as Jeremiah had 
 been, to pore over and meditate day by day upon the 
 great mass of prophetic literature stored up in the 
 college at Jerusalem. And when he arrived at man's 
 estate, he became a mighty ruler, busied with the 
 government of a vast empire, and necessary alike 
 to the Chaldaean monarchs, and to the Medes, their 
 
216 WRITTEN PROPHECY THE PRODUCT [lect. 
 
 conquerors. Intensely deep as was Daniel's religion, 
 and tender as were his love and reverence for Jeru- 
 salem, yet his thoughts are not as the thoughts of the 
 prophets who preceded him, nor of Ezra and the 
 returning exiles. God placed him in such circum- 
 stances as made it easy for him to look at Christ's 
 kingdom not with Jewish but with Gentile eyes. 
 He is the link between Jewish prophecy and the 
 Christian Church. 
 
 And thus, then, I have endeavoured to show that 
 St. Peter was not wrong in assigning so high a place 
 among the prophets to Samuel (Acts iii. 24), and 
 that Elijah was the right representative of the pro- 
 phets, as the bond of union between the law and the 
 Gospel. Prophecy did not grow out of nothing, nor 
 does God, so infinitely wise and good, bring about 
 effects without causes, or govern this world by 
 chance-medley. His providence moved Samuel to 
 found his schools ; it freed him from the cares of 
 government, by appointing Saul to be king ; and it 
 prolonged his life for more than thirty years after 
 that event, that his schools might take deep root and 
 be strengthened for lasting and powerful influence. 
 In these schools there grew up under the teaching of 
 inspired men a definite body of doctrine, having its 
 foundation in the law, but in close connection with 
 the more spiritual part of its teaching ; that part 
 which Ezekiel described as statutes by which the soul 
 might live. Its effects were first felt in God's own 
 service. To the burdensome ritual of animal sacrifice 
 was added a spiritual sacrifice of praise and thanks- 
 giving. That service has lasted from its first com- 
 mencement in Samuel's schools to our own dav. 
 
v.] OF THE PROPHETIC SCHOOLS. 217 
 
 Psalms written by that youth who found refuge at 
 Naioth from the violence of Saul and his messengers 
 are sung by us now. May they not have been first 
 sung by Samuel and his choir ? One of that choir 
 probably was Heman, the son of Joel, Samuel's first- 
 born (1 Chron. vi. 33, 1 Sam. viii. 2), and he there ac- 
 quired that mastery of music which made him one of 
 the three singers selected by David and the captains 
 of the host to arrange and preside over the temple- 
 service ( 1 Chron. xxv ). Blessed with a numerous 
 family, who all seem to have inherited his musical 
 ability, Samuel trained them all ' for song in the 
 house of Jehovah with cymbals, psalteries, and harps 
 (lb. ver. 6)1 and it is remarkable that no less than 
 fourteen out of the twenty-four courses of singers 
 were Samuel's own descendants, and that as long as 
 the first temple stood they were the chief performers 
 of that psalmody which he had instituted. Their 
 ' songs of Jehovah,' then, give us the earliest glimpses 
 of the teaching of the prophets, but when in due time 
 it was so far perfect as to be fit for permanent use, 
 God moved the prophets to commit the revelations 
 made them to writing. And thus we know what were 
 the truths for which Samuel and Elijah and Elisha 
 and so many others laboured. For the new know- 
 ledge vouchsafed ever confirmed the old, and belonged 
 to the same cycle of thoughts, only it made them 
 more clear, and pointed them more definitely to 
 Christ. Finally, if we read our Bibles intelligently, 
 and observe how, from the days of Moses downward, 
 one great purpose has been steadily carried out, and 
 then examine the religion of Christ, and see what 
 it has done for mankind, and for the soul of each 
 
?l8 RELIGION GOD'S BEST GIFT. 
 
 believer, at all events we must acknowledge that the 
 claims of Christianity are not to be carelessly and 
 lightly thrust aside. One might venture, perhaps, 
 to say, that a true religion is the best and most 
 precious gift that God could bestow upon the noblest 
 of His earthly creatures — man : if so, it would justify 
 the great and extraordinary preparation made for it ; 
 and this vast preparation proves again the greatness 
 and value of the gift. 
 
 But written prophecy also requires a close and 
 exact examination ; and to this I shall proceed in 
 my next Lecture. 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 THE FOUNDATION OF TRUTH LAID BY THE 
 PROPHETS JONAH, JOEL, AND HOSEA. 
 
 Saying none other things than those which the prophets 
 and Moses did say should come : that Christ should 
 siiffer, and that He should be the first that should 
 rise from the dead, and should shew light unto the 
 people, and to the Gentiles. — Acts xxvi. 22, 23. 
 
 St. Paul, in these words, affirms that the one sub- 
 ject of his preaching was the fulfilment of prophecy 
 in Christ. Now it may seem natural that our Lord 
 Himself should constantly refer to the Old Testament 
 as the proper proof of His ministry ; that He should 
 say, ' Search the Scriptures : for they are they which 
 testify of Me.' And, again, ' Had ye believed Moses, 
 ye would have believed Me : for he wrote of Me 
 (John v. 39, 46).' And that first to the two disciples 
 going to Emmaus, and then to all the apostles, 
 ' beginning at Moses, He should have expounded 
 to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning 
 Himself (Luke xxiv. 27, 46).' This seems quite natural. 
 Our Lord was speaking to Jews, and they confessedly 
 had been brought up in the belief that a national 
 deliverer was to come, and that in their Scriptures 
 there were certain marks and signs by which they 
 were to recognize Him when He did come. But it 
 
220 CALL OF THE GENTLLES [LECT. 
 
 was St. Paul who gave a wider scope to Christianity, 
 and carried the message of salvation far and near to 
 those who otherwise would never have heard it. We 
 find in the Acts of the Apostles very slight traces 
 of any readiness on the part of the apostles to obey 
 our Lord's command to make disciples of the whole 
 creation. Even the Christians scattered abroad upon 
 the persecution that arose about Stephen preached 
 to Jews only. With slight exceptions, such as the 
 mission to Samaria, and Peter's journey to Lydda and 
 Joppa, we always find the apostles on all occasions at 
 Jerusalem, or in the immediate neighbourhood. It 
 is a matter of pious belief that they did become 
 missionaries, but they apparently learned their duty 
 from St. Paul. His noble example brought home to 
 them the solemn responsibility laid upon them by 
 their Lord. 
 
 It was St. Paul, then, who was God's chosen 
 minister for the fulfilment of that which Christ 
 Himself had proved to the apostles to be the teach- 
 ing of the Old Testament, namely, ' that repentance 
 and remission of sins should be preached in His name 
 among all nations (Luke xxiv. 47).' And what is so 
 remarkable is, that St. Paul takes to these nations the 
 same proof as that to which Christ had appealed at 
 Jerusalem. He, too, appeals to the Jewish Scriptures. 
 He can give the Gentiles no stronger evidence of the 
 truth of Christianity than the fact that in a long 
 series of books, written gradually in the course of 
 many centuries, and of which the most modern was 
 composed four hundred years before the Saviour's 
 birth, there was the most distinct preparation for the 
 religion which He came to found, and a vast array of 
 
VI.] DENIED BY THE JEWS. 221 
 
 passages which found in His person and ministry a 
 most exact fulfilment. 
 
 One proof which especially would come home to 
 their minds, is the undeniable fact that prophecy had 
 from the first distinctly contemplated the substitution 
 of a catholic for a local religion. ' Moses and the 
 prophets taught that Christ should proclaim light to 
 the people and to the Gentiles.' St. Paul, no doubt, 
 spoke Greek before men like Festus and Agrippa ; 
 but in the vernacular tongue of Jerusalem it was 
 but a single letter that separated the Jews from the 
 Gentiles. They always spoke of themselves in the 
 singular number as ' the people.' They were the one 
 people, the chosen, the beloved, to whom all God's 
 mercies belonged, who had an exclusive right to His 
 favour. All mankind besides were ' the peoples ' in 
 the plural number, who lived outside the circle of 
 God's care, beyond the pale of His providence, with 
 no right to His mercies. Now, as we have seen, the 
 call of the Gentiles was one of the most important 
 points of that circle of doctrine taught by the pro- 
 phets. And yet it had not made the slightest im- 
 pression upon the popular mind at Jerusalem. When 
 Stephen preached that Jesus of Nazareth would de- 
 stroy Jerusalem, an event which Daniel had foretold 
 (Dan. ix. 26), and which Titus, during the lifetime of 
 that very generation, accomplished, they stoned him. 
 Christ again and again had taught what St. Stephen 
 preached (Matt. xxi. 41, Luke xix. 44, xxi. 6), and as 
 He hung upon the cross His murderers taunted Him 
 with His prediction that the temple— the symbol and 
 centre of Judaism— should be destroyed (Matt, xxvii. 
 40) ; and yet, in. the Church itself, we read but of one 
 
22 2 A GENTILE CHURCH [LECT. 
 
 besides Stephen who comprehended the full meaning 
 of the Saviour's words, and saw that Judaism and 
 Christianity could not exist together. That one man 
 was St. Paul. He had consented to Stephen's death. 
 He made glorious compensation by taking upon him- 
 self Stephen's work, and building up not a Jewish sect, 
 but a catholic Church, gathered from all nations, and 
 whose doors were open to all of every country and 
 rank and degree. 
 
 And how was he treated ? They resented with the 
 bitterest hatred his attempt to do what their own pro- 
 phets had foretold. In every city the Jews were his 
 resolute enemies ; his friends were those devout Gen- 
 tiles, who knew the Old Testament, and read it in the 
 Septuagint translation, and who, not being blinded by 
 Jewish prejudices, could both understand the sublimity 
 of its teaching, and also see that it had promises for 
 them. As for the people of Jerusalem, when the 
 Roman garrison had rescued Paul from their attempt 
 to beat him to death, and had obtained for him a 
 hearing, they listened to his defence till he used the 
 hated word peoples in the plural, and then their pa- 
 tience broke down, and they cried, ' Away with such 
 a fellow from the earth, for it is not fit that he should 
 live (Acts xxii. 22).' 
 
 Now, as I have shown, Micah and Isaiah had pro- 
 phesied just exactly the same truths as those which 
 Stephen and Paul preached. Those two prophets 
 happily escaped violence. They lived in good times, 
 and Hezekiah used their prophecies rightly. A pro- 
 phecy is never merely a prediction. The heathen 
 oracles simply foretold an event. So to do is an act of 
 divination or soothsaying, — a thing always condemned 
 
VI.] FORETOLD BY THE PROPHETS. 223 
 
 in the Bible in the strongest terms. A prophecy al- 
 ways has a moral purpose, and Hezekiah used Micah's 
 prophecy for its proper purpose when he repented, 
 and urged the people to repentance, and besought the 
 Lord to avert the evil. But their repentance was 
 short-lived ; and other prophets arose with the same 
 ' burden,' the same sentence upon Jerusalem, and they 
 were met with as fierce an outcry as Stephen and 
 Paul. Urijah repeated Micah's prophecy, and king, 
 princes, and people were all indignant, and the prophet 
 fled from their rage, but fled in vain ; for Jehoiakim 
 sent men to Egypt, who ' fetched Urijah forth thence, 
 and he slew him at Jerusalem with the sword, and 
 cast his dead body into the graves of the common 
 people (Jer. xxvi. 23).' Undeterred by this cruelty, 
 Jeremiah proclaimed the same truth, and great again 
 was the popular rage at Jerusalem. ' Thou shalt 
 surely die,' they said ; and with difficulty was he 
 rescued from their violence (lb. 8). The Jews read 
 all this, and in Paul's days no prophet was so highly 
 esteemed as Jeremiah a . But as for the truths he had 
 taught, they were as unpalatable as ever. Jeremiah 
 declared absolutely that Jerusalem should become as 
 Shiloh, and a curse to — that is, a thing cursed by — 
 all the nations of the earth. St. Paul did no more 
 
 * In Matt, xxvii. 9, Jeremiah's name is used as equivalent to the whole 
 circle of the prophets. But it is chiefly in Jewish legends that we 
 find how great a place he held in the popular imagination. Thus in 
 2 Mace. ii. 5 he is described as hiding the tabernacle and ark and altar 
 of incense in a cave; and in ch. xv. 13-16 he appears as ' a man with 
 grey hairs, and exceeding glorious, and of a wonderful and excellent 
 majesty/ who prays much for the people and for the holy city, and 
 summons Judas Maccabeus to its aid, and girds him with a sword of 
 gold. Hence the expectation of his reappearing, John i. 25. 
 
224 PRIM A R Y AND SB CONDAR V [lect. 
 
 than preach to the Gentiles. Even that he did only 
 when the Jews rejected his message. Everywhere 
 he spake to the Jews first. And yet they were so 
 enraged even at this, that they cried, ' Such a one is 
 not fit to live.' 
 
 The destruction, then, of Jerusalem, the rejection of 
 the Jews, the call of the Gentiles, were plainly taught 
 by the prophets Micah, Isaiah, Urijah, Jeremiah. But 
 what do we find at the commencement of written pro- 
 phecy ? for it has been said that prophecy takes its 
 colour from contemporary events. ' The Psalms of 
 David,' we are told, ' and the writings of Solomon, 
 gave utterance to the feelings of a time when the 
 hopes of Israel came to at best but a typical fulfil- 
 ment. The prophecies that followed were to comfort 
 Jehovah's people for the loss of this splendour.' And 
 these by no means comforting prophecies of the 
 removal of the Jews, took their colouring, it is said, 
 from the gloom cast by those vast and restless 
 monarchies of Nineveh and Babylon over the neigh- 
 bouring states. Now I am quite prepared to grant 
 that very often a lower reference is possible. Many 
 a psalm which speaks of Christ's universal empire 
 begins with a possible allusion to David's wide-spread 
 dominion, or to the calm peace of Solomon's reign. 
 But rapidly it breaks away from this narrow begin- 
 ning, and uses words which not merely surpass the 
 bounds of Oriental imagery, but would be fearfully 
 impious if applied to any being less than God. So 
 the troubled relations of Jerusalem with the Assyrian 
 monarchy may have made the prophets, on the one 
 hand, forebode Jerusalem's fall, while, on the other, 
 they could not but feel that a nation chosen so 
 
VI.] SENSE OF PROPHECY. 225 
 
 specially must have, in spite of present difficulties, a 
 grand future before it. Grant all this — though it is 
 only right to say that Jewish expositors do not grant 
 it ; they know nothing about this theory of a second 
 sense of prophecy — but grant it, and what follows ? 
 Nothing : nothing, at least, that in the slightest degree 
 invalidates the argument from prophecy. It rather 
 strengthens it. The voices of the prophets are in 
 exact relation to their times ; in other words, the his- 
 tory of the Jewish people combines with the express 
 teaching of their holiest men in establishing that 
 wide circle of doctrine which finds in Christ and in 
 Christianity its exact fulfilment. But then, besides, 
 there is a vast mass of teaching in the prophetic 
 books which you cannot thus account for. Even that 
 which does grow out of some fact or circumstance in 
 Jewish history quickly leaves behind it all reference 
 to that present event, and hastens on to ' the latter 
 times.' But much has no such reference, and would 
 have been absolutely without meaning to the prophet's 
 contemporaries, had not they as well as he been 
 trained and habituated to look forward to the times 
 of the Messiah as those in which all the national 
 hopes should be fulfilled. 
 
 The Jews, as I said, do not hold this theory of a 
 primary and secondary sense of prophecy. Their 
 Targums and all their early expositors refer a large 
 number of passages peremptorily to king Messiah 
 and to Him only. The rest, in an equally absolute 
 manner, they refer to the prophet's own times. But 
 the Christian view rather is that you cannot thus 
 separate the Bible into two parts, one belonging to 
 Christ, and one having no reference to Him. We 
 
 Q 
 
226 THE OLD TESTAMENT [lect. 
 
 affirm that there are many passages which belong to 
 Christ only, which have no reference to contempo- 
 raneous history, have nothing to do with anything 
 Jewish, and were not suggested by anything local or 
 temporary, but were opposed to and contradicted all 
 Jewish prejudices and modes of thought. The most 
 evident example of this directly Christian teaching of 
 the prophets is the complete portraiture which they 
 give of a suffering Messiah, and any one acquainted 
 with the Targums and with Jewish expositors is well 
 aware what an utter puzzle this portraiture was and is 
 to them, and how it contradicted and still contradicts 
 all their deepest feelings and their patriotic hopes. 
 They were equally puzzled, too, with that other teach- 
 ing, that while the Jewish Church was to live on for 
 ever, it was nevertheless to be a Church of the Gen- 
 tiles. But while we affirm that such ideas as these 
 of a suffering Christ and a Catholic Church were 
 entirely alien to the whole tenour of Jewish thought, 
 we also affirm that much may finally have a real 
 fulfilment in Christ, which has also an equally real 
 reference to something Jewish. It may have begun 
 with man, but it ends with God : it may have begun 
 with some event or person belonging to the pre- 
 paratory church ; but it moves onward, and rises to a 
 fuller and nobler — yes, and a truer meaning. Psalms 
 occasioned by some temporary occurrence, prayers 
 bursting from hearts overcharged with emotions 
 arising from present mercies, narratives and persons 
 in strictest harmony with their times, yet leave con- 
 stantly those times far behind, and suggest thoughts 
 of Christ, and shed light upon His office and work for 
 us. If this occurred once only, or twice, or ten times, 
 
VI.] EVERYWHERE PROPHETIC. 227 
 
 you might say it was chance work. If it were mere 
 spiritualizing, a forced and far-fetched interpretation, 
 it would not have any argumentative force, however 
 capable it might be of adaptation to pious uses. But 
 the interpretation is natural, obvious, plain. It is so 
 general a rule in all the prophetic books, that you 
 do not get rid of its force by hunting up with petty 
 minuteness some present occurrence to which the 
 declarations of the prophets may in some few cases, 
 here and there, possibly refer. 
 
 For, after all, it is not on separate passages that 
 we depend for our proof, so much as on the manner 
 in which the whole Bible prepares for and teaches 
 Christ. The whole atmosphere of the Old Testament 
 is instinct with prophecy ; Judaism from first to last 
 is a progress towards the Gospel. You have, I grant, 
 many very remarkable predictions which came exactly 
 true : this is something — a great thing. Still, far more 
 weighty is the fact that these express predictions are 
 but the highest summits as it were of a whole region 
 rising up everywhere to Christ. The facts and persons 
 of the Old Testament typify Him : the Mosaic law 
 and the ritual of the temple teach us the nature and 
 efficacy of His work for us and in us ; its psalms, and 
 prayers, and songs of rejoicing speak not merely of 
 present blessings, but of a coming Saviour : while the 
 thoughts of the prophets ever dwell among those 
 ' latter times,' when the work of Israel is done, and 
 God's new covenant bestowed upon mankind. All 
 the institutions of Judaism, the whole state of things 
 which it sets before us, as well as the express teaching 
 of its sacred books, look forward to and converge in 
 Jesus of Nazareth. Eighteen centuries have passed 
 
 Q2 
 
228 JUDAISM INSUFFICIENT [LECT. 
 
 since Jesus of Nazareth came, and Christians still, as 
 they read the Old Testament, find there the same 
 truths as in the New. We read it without note or 
 comment, and without an effort it tells us of Christ's 
 offices, and Christ's work. We need not ask, Of 
 whom speaketh the prophet this ? With calm, clear, 
 powerful voice it sets before us the Man of Sorrows, 
 Who died that we might live. You say this is 
 fanaticism ; but fanaticism never reasons. It never 
 compares truths with one another, nor can it stand 
 the test of enquiry and cool reflection. But it is to 
 our reason that this argument, drawn from the unity 
 of the two Testaments, appeals, and >men, as they 
 compare them, cannot but see that they do hold a 
 definite relation to one another. Necessarily imper- 
 fect, veiled, reserved, the Old Testament yet leads 
 up directly to the New, and forms a connected whole 
 with it. It does fit exactly into its place, and that in 
 a large grand way of which no minute criticism can 
 lessen the force. 
 
 Still, as St. Peter reminds us, Christianity does not 
 owe its light to Judaism, nor was either Judaism or 
 Christianity the effect of the external state of things 
 by which they were surrounded. I have shown that 
 there was nothing in the state of Israel when it left 
 Egypt to account for Moses, nothing in the time of 
 the Judges to account for Samuel. It would be labour 
 thrown away to show that there was nothing in the 
 state of things under the kings of Judah and Israel to 
 account for the pure, spiritual teaching of the pro- 
 phets. As St. Peter says, ' the prophetical word was 
 a lamp shining in a squalid place,' while Christianity 
 is the day-light, and the morning star (2 Pet. i. 19).' 
 
VI.] TO ACCOUNT FOR PROPHECY. 229 
 
 The one is a small light, the other a great and glorious 
 light, but the place was but av\firjpbs tokos. But both 
 lights infinitely excel the mental and moral condition 
 of the people by whose instrumentality God gave 
 them. The Jews had many great and noble qualities, 
 but the Bible everywhere describes them as a stubborn 
 and rebellious race. Their history is a disappointing 
 one, with little in it of earthly grandeur and nobility. 
 But there is just one point in which they do excel all 
 nations. They had a true religion, and were God's 
 means for bestowing it upon mankind. But this 
 religion was no product of their own ; no national 
 growth. They were not a race naturally philosophic 
 or pious, and their history is the history rather of a 
 continuous resistance to God's purposes. As a rule, 
 they did their very utmost to corrupt religion. There 
 was not one of those spiritual truths taught by the 
 prophets from Moses to Malachi, which they did not 
 do their best to degrade, and from which they would 
 not willingly have escaped. It was the few, — one here 
 and one there, — the few, yet men never wanting in 
 the Jewish Church, by whom God gave mankind His 
 light. As for the mass, they were uncircumcised in 
 heart and ears, and Stephen truly said of them, ' Ye 
 do always resist the Holy Ghost : as your fathers did, 
 so do ye (Acts vii. 51).' They were but a squalid 
 place, yet God deigned to put His light there, and 
 that light was God's express gift, for it was the light, 
 not of natural, but of revealed truth, dim often, yet 
 ever growing in brightness, and pointing onwards to 
 Him Who is the Truth. 
 
 Even the few, the men by whose instrumentality 
 God gave mankind the light, were seldom men pos- 
 
230 EARLY PROPHECY [lect. 
 
 sessed of great originality, or of what we should call 
 creative minds. Moses in the Old Testament, St. John, 
 St. Stephen, St. Paul in the New, had minds thus 
 powerful, but most of the prophets and apostles were 
 practical men who received truth slowly, and only 
 gradually yielded their assent to new ideas. A vast 
 gulph separates them from our Lord. In Him truth 
 welled up as from an inner fountain, without struggle 
 or effort. Of Him alone could we say, not that He 
 had attained to truth, or spake truth, but that simply 
 He was the Truth. 
 
 And truth in Christ St. Peter declares to be no 
 lamp or torch, but sunlight. And like the light of the 
 sun it belongs to all. It is no private property, but 
 Gentiles and Jews alike share in it. It is too large 
 and universal for it to be possible that there can be 
 any exclusive right to its possession. Now if there 
 be anything plainly taught in the prophets, it is, that 
 Judaism was to give place to a catholic, a universal 
 religion. And it taught this in direct opposition 
 to every hope and aspiration of the Jew. The Jew 
 dreamed of successful war, and of the Gentiles 
 trampled ruthlessly under foot ; his Messiah was to 
 be a fierce and pitiless zealot, whose sword would 
 be drunk with slaughter. The prophets spake of a 
 suffering Messiah, of a religion of peace and love 
 (Micah iv. 3, 4), of a church which Jews indeed were 
 to found (lb. 2), and of which they were to be the 
 first teachers, but which would very soon turn against 
 them, and regard them with the bitterest hostility 
 (Jer. xxiv. 9). It is painful constantly to read in 
 the Fathers their rooted and unreasoning antipathy 
 to the Jews, and the aversion remains to this day. 
 
VI.] CATHOLIC IN ITS TEACHING. 231 
 
 Jeremiah's words have proved true. The Jew is a 
 curse in the mouth of all the nations of the earth 
 (lb. xxvi. 6). 
 
 Now what I wish to point out to-day is, that this 
 grand catholic teaching is no afterthought, but that 
 written prophecy starts at its very beginning with as 
 wide a programme as that of Micah and Isaiah, in 
 the days of its fullest development. The two oldest 
 written prophecies are those of Jonah and Joel. The 
 object of the former of these books is to set before us 
 the nature of prophecy itself, while Joel strikes the 
 key-note of that spiritual teaching which has made 
 the prophets the instructors, not of one age, but of all 
 ages and all peoples. These two books form the pro- 
 per introduction to the whole series of the prophetic 
 records, but instead of arranging them in chronological 
 order, we have adopted from the Jews a method appa- 
 rently devised to make it impossible to read our bibles 
 intelligently b . The Book of Jonah would never have 
 been regarded as a mere tale, nor its importance 
 missed, if it had held its proper place at the head of 
 the roll. And so of Joel. Ewald c has well remarked 
 
 b Though there is comparatively little uncertainty as to the chrono- 
 logical order of the prophetic books, we nevertheless arrange them 
 according to their length, and thus Hosea, the prophet struggling with 
 apostatizing Israel, is put after Daniel, the link between the Jewish and 
 Gentile Churches. The confusion of the New Testament is even worse. 
 Not only are St. Paul's Epistles arranged according to the supposed 
 political importance of the place to which they were addressed, but, 
 contrary to the rule of antiquity and the authority of manuscripts, the 
 Catholic Epistles, with their general teaching, are placed after the 
 specific teaching of St. Paul ! 
 
 c ' Jesaja ware ohne Joel und andre grosse vorganger unmoglich 
 gewesen, er schliesst sich an sie, und fiihrt ihr werk in lebendiger 
 fbrtsetzung weiter.' Ewald, Propheten d. A. B. i. 273. 
 
232 PURPOSE OF THE [LECT- 
 
 that Isaiah would have been, morally speaking, an im- 
 possibility, had not Joel and other spiritual prophets 
 preceded him, and yet we put Isaiah first, while Joel, 
 whose teaching prepares the way for that of Isaiah, 
 is put into a corner, as if the importance of a prophet 
 depended solely upon the number of chapters which 
 he wrote. So, too, Isaiah's quotation from Micah 
 would have been much more obvious and forcible, if 
 Micah had held his proper place in the canon : while 
 Jeremiah's narrative of the outcry raised against 
 Micah in Jerusalem, and of the effect produced by his 
 prediction upon Hezekiah's mind, and of the national 
 mourning to avert Jehovah's anger, all this and more 
 would have come home to us with double force and 
 fuller meaning, if in the course of our daily readings 
 that narrative had followed instead of preceding the 
 prophecy which led to such remarkable events. 
 
 Now what is the nature of the teaching of this 
 Book of Jonah ? The first thing that strikes us is 
 that this, the earliest book of written prophecy, 
 is a narrative of a mission to a Gentile city, which 
 was the sworn foe and enemy of Israel. Jonah did 
 labour for Israel, as we learn in the Book of Kings 
 (2 Kings xiv. 25) : but in his written prophecy Israel 
 holds no place. And next it is an errand of mercy. 
 Nineveh repents at his preaching, and is spared. 
 Now the prophets generally have a message for the 
 heathen nations round ; only two or three confine 
 themselves to Israel and Judah. The heathen nations 
 do not lie beyond the pale of God's providence ; and 
 thus Nahum's one subject is Nineveh, Habakkuk's 
 is Chaldaea, Obadiah's is Edom. But this is no case 
 merely of sending them a warning, or recording a 
 
VI.] BOOK OF JONAH. 233 
 
 condemnation of their sins. Jonah has to labour in 
 person among these heathen, and his whole Jewish 
 nature rises up against such a service. He will flee 
 to the ends of the earth rather than so violate his 
 prejudices. His name, Jonah, means a dove ; but he 
 cannot brook the thought of carrying the olive-branch 
 to these hateful Assyrians. Nothing short of evident 
 necessity can induce him to obey God's command. 
 So it was with the apostles. Simon Bar-jonah will 
 not go and receive the Roman centurion, Cornelius, 
 into the Church until he has thrice had a command 
 from heaven not to call, in his Jewish way, that com- 
 mon and unclean which the Holy Ghost had sanctified. 
 Had Jonah been quite sure that Nineveh would be 
 destroyed, then he would have nerved himself to 
 obedience. What he could not endure was the feeling 
 that there might be mercy for these ruthless Assyrians. 
 ' This was what I said when I was yet in my country, 
 and therefore I fled before Thee unto Tarshish : for 
 I knew that Thou art a gracious God and merciful, 
 slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest 
 Thee of the evil (Jonah iv. 2).' 
 
 Jonah knew, then, the nature of prophecy better 
 than most expositors do now, and his book is more 
 remarkable for what it teaches us about prophecy, 
 than even for the fact that he was sent to labour in a 
 Gentile city. The great lesson of the Book of Jonah 
 is, that prophecy is no blind fate, threatening men 
 with an irrevocable destiny, but that it has a moral 
 purpose, and is a warning given by an omniscient 
 but merciful ruler to beings capable of repentance, 
 and of reversing thereby the decrees of justice, 
 In the heathen world you ever find the idea of evil 
 
234 PROPHECY [lect. 
 
 impending upon men without the possibility of escape. 
 This is the one ground-thought of the Greek drama, 
 and the more innocent the sufferer the more tragic 
 and interesting is the onward course of events, by 
 which, through no fault of his own, he is doomed to 
 destruction. This, too, is the one idea of all ancient 
 oracles. Obscurely and in enigma they predict some 
 calamity. The prediction must be so given as that 
 it shall not serve as a warning, but, if possible, rather 
 invite its victim to his fate. In the opening book 
 of prophecy all these detestable views are carefully 
 guarded against. It is no blind fate, but a kind, a 
 merciful, a man-loving God, Who orders all earthly 
 things for man's good, and Who directs the course 
 of history, and guides the very laws of nature so as 
 to make them serve for moral purposes. If there is 
 one lesson clearly taught in the prophetic writings, 
 it is God's longsuffering. It is even startling to find 
 Jeremiah declaring in Jehovah's name to Zedekiah, 
 but a short time before Jerusalem was captured, that 
 if he would even then submit, God would spare him 
 and the city (Jer. xxxviii. 17). Our patience has long 
 been too utterly exhausted with that weak bad man 
 for us to imagine that God's patience is not exhausted 
 too. But His compassions fail not. There is mercy 
 even after the eleventh hour has struck. It is man 
 who obstinately persists in his evil courses. The 
 danger of a death-bed repentance does not consist at 
 all in God not being ready to spare, but in the moral 
 certainty that such as a man has lived, such will he 
 also die. 
 
 Now if the Book of Jonah had held its proper 
 place at the beginning of the prophetic writings, men. 
 
VI.] OPPOSED TO FATALISM. 235 
 
 could never have confounded prophecy and fatalism. 
 Nothing could be plainer and more express than 
 Jonah's prediction, ' Yet forty days and Nineveh shall 
 be overthrown.' But it was not an absolute decree, 
 but conditional. Repentance could and did reverse it. 
 Now I am not prepared to enter upon the question 
 what God's decrees are, when looked at from above 
 — from God's side. So regarded they are probably 
 absolute, unchanging, inevitable. But the discussion 
 would lead me into the mazes of the controversy how 
 man's free will can coexist with God's omniscience 
 and omnipotence. If you work downwards from 
 definitions of these two divine attributes, it is easy 
 to show that everything must have been predestined 
 from the beginning, and be irrevocably fixed ; and if 
 you include the idea of God's absolute immutability, 
 you will get an argument by no means easy to 
 answer in proof that there is no such thing as the 
 world at all, with such disturbing elements in it as 
 sin, and repentance, and prayer, and reward, and 
 punishment. But it is possible to begin at the 
 other end : to begin with man, and this created 
 world around us, and the facts of our own nature 
 and experience : to begin, that is, with what we 
 understand, and not with that which we cannot 
 understand. And thus we find ourselves free, and 
 the Bible speaks of us as free ; for it says that we 
 are made in God's own image, and endowed with 
 dominion over nature (Gen. i. 26). But to be like 
 God, and to rule, and yet not be free, is an absurdity. 
 And so, then, I look at prophecy in the same way, 
 from man's side, and as it is set before us in the 
 Bible ; and there I find it clearly declared to be con- 
 
236 GOD'S DEALINGS WITH MAN [lect. 
 
 ditional. God's dealings with us would not be moral 
 dealings if they were irrevocably decreed, and if 
 human repentance and human prayer availed nothing 
 with Him. If this were so, instead of a personal God, 
 a blind, harsh, cruel, relentless fate would rule man's 
 destinies, and crush him with stony calmness and 
 scientific precision. Thank God, this is not what the 
 Bible sets before us. Jonah's prediction was moral, 
 that is, it had man's good for its object, and was con- 
 ditional upon the behaviour of the people of Nineveh ; 
 and Jonah was sent to declare it to them, not for 
 so unworthy a purpose as that they might know 
 an inevitable future, but that they might repent. If 
 they repented, the whole purpose of the prophet's 
 mission was gained. A prophecy can only be said 
 to have failed when it has wrought no moral effect 
 whatsoever. 
 
 For the God in whom we believe is a God of provi- 
 dence, a God who made man free to serve or disobey 
 Him, and who can justly reward and punish because 
 He still governs man by moral means. Fate, destiny, 
 the changeless sequence of nature, the immutability 
 of law, every idea that human actions are governed 
 by an inflexible necessity, all this belongs to heathen, 
 and not to Christian men. A Christian believes in 
 repentance, and it is the very law of repentance that 
 it reverses God's previous decrees. The Scriptural 
 phrase, that ' it repented God,' may be very unphilo- 
 sophical. Really and truly, as Scripture tells us, God 
 cannot repent. But the phrase teaches us a great 
 truth — a truth without which religion could not exist, 
 namely, that human actions produce a change in the 
 order of Providence, or seem to us to do so ; for I am 
 
VI.] CONDITIONAL. 237 
 
 looking at things in the only intelligible way in which 
 men can look at them, namely, as they appear to us 
 and concern us. To frame a constitution for man as 
 a moral agent from a priori notions of God's nature, 
 deserves to be set side by side with that other folly, 
 of deciding what creation ought to be from the same 
 sort of views. As certainly as the creation of the 
 world is incompatible with a priori notions of God's 
 immutability ; as certainly as the existence of sin and 
 sorrow in the world is incompatible with a priori 
 notions of God's wisdom and goodness ; so certainly 
 is man's moral freedom incompatible with similar 
 notions of God's foreknowledge and omnipotence. 
 That is, it is incompatible with man's a priori notions. 
 Of course this is a very sad predicament for those 
 who regard man as the ultimate and perfect measure 
 of all things, and suppose that that which to man 
 seems to be, also really is. To the Christian it is no 
 difficulty at all. We start with the confession, that 
 now we know only in part (1 Cor. xiii. 12). But it 
 would be well for all to remember, that men cannot 
 really argue from ignorance. Of course I do not mean 
 but that plenty of people as a matter of fact do thus 
 argue, but what I mean is that no legitimate con- 
 clusion follows from such arguments. Absolutely we 
 know nothing of God's real nature, such as it is in 
 itself. He has revealed to us what He is towards 
 us, what His attributes are, and what His nature is, 
 relatively to man, and so far as man can understand 
 Him. But who can mount up to the contemplation 
 of the one eternal I AM, such as He is in Himself? 
 No being can rise to any idea higher than that of 
 itself elevated to the utmost degree of such perfection 
 
238 ALL EARTHLY KNOWLEDGE [lect. 
 
 as it is capable of, and purged from all imperfections. 
 It is part of the promised bliss of heaven, that we 
 shall know as we ourselves are known (1 Cor. xiii. 12). 
 For ' when God shall have appeared, we shall be like 
 Him, for we shall see Him as He is (1 John iii. 2).' 
 But even this does not mean that man will ever fully 
 comprehend God, or that our nature will be com- 
 mensurable with His nature. What it means is, that 
 whereas now we have no other notions of God than 
 those derived from our own nature, hereafter we shall 
 understand somewhat of God's real, heavenly nature, 
 such as it is in itself. And thus we are content to 
 leave many an enigma unsolved (1 Cor. xiii. 12). 
 We know that here we are limited on every side, 
 but we look forward to a better and abiding home, 
 where, in the beatific vision, we shall be freed from 
 the infirmities, physical, mental, and moral, which in 
 this, our trial world, constantly remind us that it can- 
 not be our rest. 
 
 Viewed, then, thus from below, we find ourselves 
 living in a world of the conditional, a moral world, as 
 we call it, because human actions in it are influenced 
 by pleasure and pain, reward and punishment. And 
 this is the great lesson of the Book of Jonah. It 
 teaches us that prophecy, like all God's dealings, is 
 for man's good, and not for his destruction. The 
 threatenings of the prophets are no absolute decrees, 
 no predictions of an inevitable necessity, but may be 
 averted by repentance and prayer. As I said before, 
 no prophecy could be more express. The time is 
 fixed, ' Yet forty days.' The event specified, ' Nineveh 
 shall be overthrown.' The people repent, and the city 
 is spared. Jonah, naturally, is very angry. A man's 
 
vi. ] IlsTCOMPLE TE. 
 
 2 39 
 
 one-self is of much more importance to him than six 
 hundred thousand other people, and better they perish 
 than Jonah's word fail of a literal accomplishment. 
 But by his sorrow over the gourd God makes him 
 condemn himself, and shows him the wickedness of 
 his conduct. 
 
 And this most important lesson certainly did not 
 grow out of anything either in the feelings or in the 
 history of the Jews themselves. In opposition to that 
 narrow and concentrated patriotism which so marked 
 the whole nation, and of which we see plain proofs in 
 Jonah's flight and refusal to carry to heathens a call 
 to repentance, and his desire that repentant Nineveh 
 might still perish ; in opposition to all this he is made 
 the instrument of teaching that prophecy is for man's 
 good, and that its errand of mercy is not confined to 
 the Jewish Church, but embraces within it all man- 
 kind. So St. Paul declared that this was the one 
 object of any threatenings of evil in his own writings : 
 1 Knowing the terror of the Lord we persuade men 
 (2 Cor. v. 11).' But persuasion is impossible where 
 there is no hope. No state is so dangerous as that 
 of the man who gives himself up for lost. But there 
 is no trace of this detestable fatalism in either the 
 Old Testament or the New. It is a message of mercy 
 from first to last, and warns man of his dangers only 
 that he may be moved to escape from them. And 
 how is he to escape from them ? It is by prayer and 
 repentance. It is prayer which ' brings up Jonah's 
 life from corruption;' it is repentance which saves 
 Nineveh. Not even in the Gospel itself is the efficacy 
 of prayer and repentance more plainly set forth. 
 
 But in the Gospel you learn why prayer and repent- 
 
240 OCCASION [lect. 
 
 ance avail. The time had not come in Jonah's days for 
 the full revelation of the manner in which God saves 
 us. Yet, as our Lord Himself teaches us (Matt. xii. 40), 
 there is in Jonah the sign of that death and resur- 
 rection whereby we can die to sin and rise again to 
 a renewed life. It was a sign not understood at the 
 time, nor intended to be understood. Even when our 
 Lord referred to it, none probably could tell what 
 His words exactly meant. It required other teaching 
 to explain it. But when Christ had risen from the 
 dead, then the full significance of the sign became 
 plain. And thus, then, in the earliest written pro- 
 phecy d , — for we may, I think, accept the date given 
 by Mr. Drake, namely B. C. 840, in the reign of 
 Adrammelech II, as the most probable; — in this 
 earliest prophetic record we are taught, first, what is 
 the nature of all prophecy, namely, that it is condi- 
 tional, for man's good, to move him to godly sorrow, 
 
 d Supposing, however, that the Book of Jonah were a mere tale, a 
 fiction, as the neologists assert, you then, without losing any of the force 
 of its teaching, have a problem to solve more difficult than ever. Of 
 course the Book of Jonah must be put at a much later date, because on 
 neologian principles it was the fall of Nineveh which suggested it ; and 
 yet the purity of its style, which nevertheless has something very per- 
 sonal and individual about it, will not let it fit in well even with the 
 Chaldaic period. Supposing, however, that with Ewald (Proph. d. A. B. 
 iii. 237) you assert that it belongs to the end of the sixth century before 
 the Christian era, how do you account for the teaching of the book ? 
 Who was the wonderful man who entertained this view of prophecy so 
 much in advance of even Christian commentators ? Whence came his 
 enlarged views towards the Gentiles ? his conviction that God cared for 
 them ? I can find no era in Jewish history when such views would have 
 had a hearing, or any book containing them have been admitted into 
 the canon except upon the conviction that the writer was a prophet. 
 It was the popular view of prophecy that its business was to curse the 
 Gentiles and bless the Jews. They would have trampled the Book of 
 Jonah under foot unless its external authority had been irresistible. 
 
VI.] OF THE BOOK OF JOEL. 241 
 
 and no disclosure of destiny, but a warning of the 
 necessary consequences of sin unless averted by re- 
 pentance : secondly, we find a type of the central 
 facts of Christianity, Christ's death and resurrection : 
 and lastly, we have a foreshowing of the call of the 
 Gentiles, and of their acceptance of the call. Surely 
 such a prophecy was a fit preface and introduction to 
 the whole prophetic canon ; for it gives the outline 
 and measure of that which succeeding prophets did 
 but fill up and complete. It is Jewish, and yet it 
 transcends all Jewish ideas and notions, contradicts 
 their prejudices, and sets before them a nobler mission 
 than any they ever contemplated, even that of being 
 the messengers of love to mankind. There is a 
 tenderness too in it, a purpose of healing the ills of 
 all mankind, which even the apostles with difficulty 
 realized. It needed the call of Paul, the Roman 
 citizen, the Hellenist trained at the Greek university 
 of Tarsus, the inhabitant of trading Antioch, before 
 even the Christian Church could throw itself heartily 
 into the work of bearing the Gospel of love to all the 
 Ninevehs, the fierce, debased, heathen cities of a world 
 lying in darkness and estranged from God. 
 
 And next in the list comes Joel ; and his teaching, 
 too, is spiritual, and not Jewish so much as catholic, 
 with a lesson for all mankind. The occasion of his 
 prophecy was a two-fold national calamity ; the first 
 a general drought, the second and more terrible the 
 appearance year after year of vast armies of locusts, 
 whose ravages are described with wonderful force, and 
 also with the greatest truth and most exact agreement 
 with nature. Many commentators have supposed that 
 the description of the locusts is symbolical, but a 
 
 R 
 
242 PROVIDENCE [lect. 
 
 passage in Amos iv. 9 shows that the land was really- 
 desolated by these insects, and it is far more probable 
 that the misery caused by the wasting of their crops 
 was what moved the prophet to urge the people to 
 repentance, than that he introduced these details as 
 mere poetical colouring for his exhortations. When 
 we bear in mind that, in spite of the help given them 
 from this country, one fourth part of the people of 
 Ireland died from the failure for one year of a single 
 article of food, we may to some extent form an esti- 
 mate of the distress occasioned by successive years 
 of famine. No wonder that ' joy had withered away 
 from the sons of men (i. 1 2),' and that not only had 
 they parted with their silver and gold to the Sidonians 
 and Philistines to purchase corn, but had even sold 
 their children to the Greeks (iii. 4-6), thinking slavery 
 better for them than death, or lost, it may be, to all 
 feelings of natural affection from the greatness of their 
 despair. Finally, so utter was the famine, that the 
 meat-offering and drink-offering, and probably all the 
 sacrifices of the temple, had to be discontinued for 
 want of means (i. 9). 
 
 In this extremity of grief Joel summons them to 
 a solemn fast. All the people must gather together, 
 the priests and the ministers of the altar, the elders 
 and the inhabitants of the land : they must assemble 
 at God's house with fasting, with weeping, and with 
 mourning; but withal he warns them that it must be a 
 rending of the heart and not of the garments (ii. 13) ; 
 it must be a true, real, earnest, heartfelt repentance. 
 If so they return to God, He will withdraw from them 
 His chastisements. The early and latter rain shall 
 come in abundance, and the fertility of the land in 
 
VI.] JOEL'S LESSON. 243 
 
 future seasons shall amply compensate them for their 
 lost treasures. ' I will restore to you the years that the 
 locust hath eaten (ii. 25).' 
 
 Thus far, then, we have the simple but grand lesson 
 of God's Providence. As the Book of Jonah had 
 taught that prophecy is given for a moral purpose, 
 so the Book of Joel teaches that God's dealings with 
 man in nature have also their moral lessons. The 
 God of nature is also the God of grace. He may 
 speak more plainly to us in His holy word than He 
 does in the world around us, but the lessons taught 
 are the same. And men try to escape from them 
 however they are taught. Man prefers to be alone 
 in the world — he will not brook the presence of any 
 active intelligent power higher than himself; and thus 
 he will see in nature only the endless procession of 
 cause and effect moving on coldly, senselessly, pur- 
 posely, in obedience to fixed laws, which laws have 
 either no lawgiver, or one who must not watch over, 
 or control, or influence them. Christians believe that 
 the so-called laws of nature mean only the presence 
 of God's almighty will, and that they are so even, 
 perfect, apparently changeless because His will is 
 calm, perfect, unchangeable. But they believe that 
 from the beginning God so ordered these laws as that 
 they should minister to man's probation, and to the 
 individual good of all who love Him (Rom. viii. 28). 
 And thus Joel's lesson is, that under all the dealings 
 of God's providence there lies a moral purpose. That 
 this is so may not be capable of proof by inductive 
 reasoning, but it is taught us by the faculties of our 
 soul, proved to us by the facts and experience of our 
 daily life, acknowledged by us in every act of prayer, 
 
 R 2 
 
244 REPENTANCE FOLLOWED BY [lect. 
 
 grasped firmly by our spiritual instincts. The belief 
 in Providence is the belief in God's active presence in 
 the world. Without this belief, what a mockery life 
 would be ! What a blank atheism would lie before us 
 as the alternative ! And as regards any other world, 
 if God be present here only as a power inherent in 
 laws which move darkly forward without any intel- 
 ligent or moral purpose, how can we dare hope that 
 we shall find Him an intelligent or moral governor in 
 any other world, whether existing now elsewhere, or 
 yet to come into being ? 
 
 But from the lesson of Providence Joel draws other 
 lessons. If the events of our lives, and whatever 
 happens in the world around us ; if chastisement and 
 mercy, joy and sorrow, are all intended to move man 
 to repentance, and wean him from sin, and win him 
 to God, what follows upon this ? Why should men 
 repent ? And is repentance perfect in itself, or a 
 condition for something better ? The answer is, that 
 upon repentance follows God's gift of grace. ' I will 
 pour out My Spirit upon all flesh ; yea, even upon 
 slaves and maidservants in those days will I pour 
 out My Spirit (ii. 28, 29).' Repentance has its own 
 happiness, and this Joel has described as the restora- 
 tion of that which we had lost. But to those who 
 have God gives more ; and thus His people, freed from 
 the curse of sin, move onward to higher privileges. 
 Repentance opens, as it were, the door by which we 
 may enter upon the spiritual life. And so, eight 
 hundred years afterwards, John the Baptist preached 
 again Joel's sermon, but in a new form. He preached 
 first of all ' the baptism of repentance for the remis- 
 sion of sins (Mark i. 4) ;' that was a mere preparatory 
 
VI.] THE GIFT OF THE SPIRIT 245 
 
 stage. His other words were, ' He that cometh after 
 me is mightier than I : He shall baptize you with the 
 Holy Ghost, and fire (Matt. iii. 11).' 
 
 Now this is a universal truth belonging to all times, 
 and to every individual man. It matters not when, or 
 who ; there is but one entrance to the Christian life, 
 and that is repentance. He who lives in sin unrepented 
 of is no Christian. Yet Joel connects this truth with 
 one special time, concerning which however he knew 
 only that it was the time of the Messiah. He speaks 
 indefinitely ; ' It shall come to pass afterward? And 
 again, ' In those days will I pour out My Spirit.' 
 St. Peter tells us (1 Pet. i. 10) that the prophets la- 
 boured diligently to find out more exactly when these 
 times should be ; but, excepting to Daniel, only signs 
 of them were given whereby not the prophets them- 
 selves, but men subsequently might be able to re- 
 cognize them when they came. So our Lord Himself 
 gave only signs of that dread coming of the Son 
 of Man in the destruction of the Jewish Church and 
 commonwealth, which that very generation was to 
 witness. Its exact date He declared was no proper 
 subject for revelation ; for if times and seasons were 
 made known to us, probation would be rendered 
 impossible. And thus the prophets necessarily spake 
 indefinitely, and their words must often have been an 
 enigma to themselves and to their contemporaries. 
 Yet even the men of those times were taught a 
 valuable though general lesson. Jonah taught them 
 the wideness of God's mercy, and the efficacy of prayer. 
 Joel taught them the present blessedness of repent- 
 ance, and that it is the indispensable condition for 
 receiving still higher gifts. 
 
246 THE BIBLE NEVER MORE THAN [LECT, 
 
 And if these early writings had deeper, fuller 
 teaching stored up for the use of future times, is not 
 this exactly what we should expect of revelation ? 
 If the Bible is God's word, must it not speak to men 
 throughout all ages ? It is a thought difficult to 
 realize, that God's word must be so constructed as 
 to speak with living power to men at all times, 
 of all nations, in all stages alike of civilization and 
 barbarism, of learning and ignorance, of progress and 
 of decay. Till our Lord came the word of God was 
 growing, but in Him revelation became complete, and 
 its record ends with a curse upon the man who shall 
 add to or detract aught from the words of the Book 
 of Life. But, complete as it is, must it not have 
 lessons for the future as well as for the present and 
 past ? Would not the Bible soon grow stale and 
 obsolete if there were no deep meanings wrapped 
 up in it which only the course of time can unfold ? 
 Surely it is this fulness of meaning which makes each 
 generation turn to it for the solution of the problems 
 of its own days. It has been well said e , that the 
 Church never understood St. Paul's Epistles till the 
 era of the Reformation ; and even then it was one 
 vital doctrine rather than the whole of St. Paul's 
 teaching that attained to its true importance. We 
 seem once again in danger of losing that insight into 
 his marvellous teaching which then so stirred all the 
 more intellectual minds in the Church. But those 
 very minds failed to realize the value of St. James' 
 teaching, which to us seems so absolutely necessary 
 in order to complete the true portraiture of faith. The 
 
 « Hofmann, Weissagung u. Erfiillung, i. 46. 
 
VI.] PARTIALLY UNDERSTOOD. 247 
 
 time, perhaps, is fast coming when the Revelation of 
 St. John, excluded no longer from our services, may 
 speak with trumpet tongue to us, and the messages 
 of our Lord to the seven churches may be seen to be 
 a clear, plain message to churches now. And may I 
 not ask, Is not the Old Testament a sealed book to 
 most of us now ? ' The Jews misuse it : Christians 
 know not how to use it f .' The study of Hebrew has 
 been so neglected that while to one here and there it 
 is not destitute of meaning, to the mass it teaches but 
 little. But when the time comes described by St. Paul 
 in Rom. xi., the Old Testament may once again speak 
 with living force, and be the means of welding Jew 
 and Gentile into a Church whose vast proportions and 
 firm hold of evangelical truth may far surpass every- 
 thing that exists now. 
 
 For mark how even an apostle could fall short 
 of the full significance of the words of God. St. 
 Peter, at Pentecost, quoted Joel's prophecy (Acts 
 ii. 16-21). It was the day on which the prophecy 
 was fulfilled. And Joel evidently was much studied 
 by the apostles, for they quote him continually. But 
 though Peter repeated the words, ' I will pour out 
 My Spirit upon all flesh,' it needed an express 
 revelation and direct command before he could be 
 persuaded that all flesh meant more than Jewish 
 flesh. When the Holy Ghost was poured out upon 
 Cornelius, Peter and they of the circumcision were 
 astonished beyond measure, and though he submitted 
 to what he felt to be God's will, yet his affections 
 remained concentrated upon his own people. Not that 
 
 f Hofmann, as above. 
 
248 JOEL REVEALS [LECT. 
 
 there was any doubt that 'all flesh' meant all man- 
 kind. Peter would never have argued that the 
 phrase either had or could have any other meaning. 
 But that meaning had never presented itself defi- 
 nitely before his mind. So, often all our lives 
 through, we have words in our mouths, and read 
 and hear them, and yet their true, full meaning 
 never strikes us. The truth is familiar to us, it 
 is daily confessed and repeated by rote, but has 
 never reached our hearts ; then perhaps at length 
 something wakens us up, and henceforward the truth 
 is a living reality, influencing and moulding our 
 lives ; or, it may be, we die, and have never under- 
 stood it. So, at the day of Pentecost, half Joel's 
 words suddenly came home to Peters mind. With 
 joy he witnessed servants and handmaids inspired 
 with God's Holy Spirit ; but all his life long he 
 gave but an unwilling assent to the other half, that 
 Gentiles should henceforward share the gift of the 
 Spirit as freely as Jews. 
 
 But if Joel had stopped even here, could we have 
 said that he and Jonah between them sketched out 
 the full outline of Christian truth ? God's presence in 
 the world, supernaturally in Revelation, naturally in 
 Providence, the sign of a Saviour's death and resur- 
 rection, the efiicacy of repentance and prayer, the 
 outpouring of the Holy Ghost, this is much, but 
 is it all ? They were no sorry teachers who taught 
 this ; but what of man ? Supposing that he chooses 
 to stand outside of this, and lets things take their 
 course, and leads merely a natural life, virtuous, 
 because virtue makes life happy, but content with 
 virtue and its present reward, — what then ? Why 
 
VI.] A DAY OF JUDGMENT. 249 
 
 should he not ? Why should not nature be enough ? 
 and man's highest aim be to live according to nature ? 
 To this question Joel gives the answer. He it is 
 who first spake of a general judgment. Now this 
 is a truth which gives vitality to every part of 
 religion. Without it man's duties and hopes would 
 begin and end with this world. But the life according 
 to nature is not enough if we have to give an account 
 hereafter of our actions. Nature gives us neither 
 knowledge enough of the principles upon which our 
 conduct will be judged, nor help enough to enable 
 us to conform our actions to the Judge's will. If there 
 be a judgment, then there is another life following 
 upon our few years here. Nature is but a poor guide 
 even for this mortal life. For the life to come her 
 guidance is absolutely naught. 
 
 Now it was Joel who first placed personal religion 
 upon a settled basis by teaching men the doctrine of a 
 general judgment. The Church, whether the Jewish 
 of old or the Christian now, is the outer organization 
 in which God's dispensation of grace is embodied, 
 and it is grace alone that will suffice for the judg- 
 ment day. At the very root of all, before we can 
 believe in anything supernatural, in divine gifts of 
 any kind, or even in a God, we must believe in 
 the immortality of the soul, and in its responsibility 
 to its Maker. To believe in God, without believing 
 in any relation between God and man, is to believe 
 in something so remote and abstract that at most 
 it is a speculation and not a belief. Now I am quite 
 ready to grant that it was very slowly that the 
 doctrine of a general judgment attained to its due 
 proportions. Its full proportions indeed it never did 
 
250 UNITY [lect. 
 
 attain to till Christ came. He it was who brought to 
 the light the eternal life of heaven, and the immortality 
 of the soul (2 Tim. i. 10). Until these were understood 
 men could have had but a faint notion of the mean- 
 ing of words such as these, ' Multitudes, multitudes in 
 the valley of decision : for the day of the Lord is 
 near in the valley of decision (Joel iii. 14) ;' or of 
 what was meant by those metaphors under which he 
 described the whole world as ripening for judgment. 
 But there, in Joel, the truth stood revealed, and in due 
 time its full importance was seen (Dan. xii. 2, 3). 
 And no sooner had the Incarnate Word come than 
 an apostle could describe it as an elementary part of 
 religion, that men must believe not only in the existence 
 of a God, but that God rewards and punishes human 
 actions (Heb. xi. 6). Surely this is an extraordinary 
 phenomenon. In the words of Dr. Pusey s, ' To this 
 unknown prophet Joel, of whose history, condition, 
 rank, parentage, birthplace, nothing is known, nothing 
 beyond his name, save the name of an unknown 
 father ; of whom moreover God has allowed nothing 
 to remain save these few chapters ; to him God 
 reserved the prerogative to be the first to declare 
 the outpouring of the Holy Ghost upon all flesh, 
 the perpetual abiding of the Church, the final struggle 
 of good and evil, the last rebellion against God, and 
 the day of judgment. " The day of the Lord, the 
 great and terrible day," the belief in which now forms 
 part of the faith of all Jews and Christians, was a 
 title first revealed to this unknown prophet.' And 
 again, ' To Joel it was first foreshown that the Gen- 
 tiles too should be filled with the Spirit of God, 
 s Introduction to the Book of Joel. 
 
VI.] OF JOEL'S TEACHING. 251 
 
 To him was first declared that great paradox or 
 mystery of faith, which after his time prophet after 
 prophet insisted upon, that while deliverance should 
 be in Mount Sion, and the stream of God's grace 
 should issue to the barren world from the temple of 
 the Lord, those in her who should be delivered should 
 be a remnant only.' 
 
 Now these doctrines which Joel taught form an 
 inseparable whole. The doctrine of a future judg- 
 ment would crush man with insupportable terrors, 
 were not repentance possible. But what would re- 
 pentance avail, if we sorrowed for sin only to return 
 to it again ? It is God's gift of the Holy Spirit 
 which makes repentance the starting-point of a 
 renewed life ; which makes it possible for a man 
 'born from above of water and the Holy Ghost' to 
 live henceforward unto holiness. And this again 
 deepens our responsibility towards our Judge. If 
 no grace were offered us, if a renewed life were 
 impossible, if the natural life were all that we could 
 attain to, in hatred and bitterness we should defy 
 the terrors of a day which offered us nothing but 
 despair. As it is, we have only to use our privileges 
 aright, and that day will be to us a day of mercy 
 and blessedness. 
 
 I will only add to-day that Hosea completes by his 
 one most touching lesson the great truths taught by 
 Jonah and Joel. His prophecy is one long wail of 
 sorrow over the impenitent ; we may even truly 
 say that it is God's lamentation ; for God constantly 
 speaks in it in His own person. If any perish it 
 is not because God's love fails. Israel was not 
 rejected from the covenant until after long warnings ; 
 
252 CATHOLIC TRUTHS [lect. 
 
 nor until God had exhausted every possible means 
 for its recovery. And when it hardened itself against 
 all God's love, even then its rejection was thus 
 tenderly bemoaned. Can man's final ruin be less a 
 grief in heaven than was Israel's earthly abandon- 
 ment ? We may be sure it cannot. Of the manner 
 of God's dealings with the heathen, with those 
 whom the preaching of the Gospel has never reached, 
 with those born and brought up under such circum- 
 stances that a life of sin seems inevitable ; how God 
 will deal with such cases we have no means of 
 knowing. Here, as elsewhere, it is a note of reve- 
 lation that it tells us nothing to gratify a foolish 
 curiosity. It tells us only how we may be saved 
 or lost ourselves. Even where our Lord declares 
 that God's judgment will be just, and our stripes 
 be according to our knowledge, He was speaking 
 of the servants only (Luke xii. 47, 48). But God's 
 yearning love even for the impenitent, as proved 
 by the words of Hosea, plainly teaches us that as 
 God must necessarily be just in all His dealings, so 
 will He also be merciful and good. But if we, the 
 servants, members of God's house, and sharers of His 
 covenant, if we reject all God's love, then equally does 
 Hosea warn us that our final doom is certain. Israel 
 was rejected. God's goodness did not, could not, 
 save the impenitent. And so with us : God's long- 
 suffering, His repeated calls to repentance, the ever 
 renewed struggle of His Holy Spirit with us ; all 
 this leaves us without excuse. We are living in the 
 clear light : if we love darkness, what plea can avail 
 us at the last day ? 
 
 It was the office, then, of these, the three earliest 
 
VI.] TAUGHT BY THE EARLY PROPHETS. 253 
 
 prophets, to declare general truths. They do give 
 utterance to prophecies of Christ, but they are faint, 
 and couched in symbolical terms ; not express, full, 
 exact, particular, like those of the later prophets. 
 But the great outlines of truth, the doctrines which 
 were to be the special distinction of Christianity, 
 and the nature of the Christian Church, these it was 
 their business to teach, and they do teach them fully 
 and exactly ; as fully and exactly as their successors 
 teach the great truths which relate to Christ's office 
 and person. The method of prophecy is a strictly 
 scientific one. It begins with general doctrines and 
 catholic truths, and gradually it moves onward to 
 particular and specific truths. The later prophets 
 do not so much develope as fill up the outlines of 
 the Gospel which the early prophets sketched in full, 
 large, and grand proportions. Together they com- 
 bine in setting before us the perfect lineaments of 
 the truth. 
 
LECTURE VI f. 
 
 SPECIFIC PROPHECIES OF CHRIST IN HOSEA, AMOS 3 - 
 ISAIAH, AND MICAH. 
 
 To Him give all the prophets zvitness, that through His 
 Name whosoever believeth in Him shall receive 
 remission of sins. — Acts x. 43. 
 
 I MENTIONED in my last lecture that the earliest 
 written prophecies were occupied with the great 
 doctrines of Christianity, while it is the office of 
 the later prophets to set Him before us in Whom 
 these doctrines became the vital principles of the 
 Church. And this is a method that commends 
 itself to our reason. For many ages under the 
 Jewish dispensation men felt no need of anything 
 more than Moses had given them. Their state 
 mentally and morally was such as to make them 
 content with the possession of the land of promise, 
 and with the general knowledge that Jehovah — their 
 covenant God — was a God of love and mercy, in 
 Whom there was pardon for sin upon repentance. 
 But when at length they found, as all men find, that 
 ho earthly good can fill man's heart, and that there is 
 ever a craving for something more perfect : when the 
 sin-struck conscience found sacrifice and offering in- 
 sufficient, and sought for some more efficacious 
 remedy (Ps. 1L 17) : when the instinctive longings of 
 our nature for a nearer approach to God made the 
 
ORDERLY PLAN OF PROPHECY. 255 
 
 Israelites impatient of those types and shadows of 
 better things, and that mere outer court of truth 
 into which the law of Moses had admitted them, it 
 was fitting that they should first be taught those 
 eternal and catholic truths, which are the very 
 ground-work of religion, and which a man must 
 believe before he can come to God (Heb. xi. 6).- 
 Upon this in due time would follow the particulars 
 and details of the plan of salvation. But these 
 details would have been meaningless had not man 
 first been taught general truths which explained to 
 him his needs, made him understand the meaning of 
 his own emotions, and revealed to him the relation 
 in which he stands to God, and what are God's 
 purposes towards him. Thus taught, he would 
 study with growing interest every detail of the 
 means whereby his restoration was to be accomplished, 
 and the breach, caused by sin, between God and man 
 made whole a . 
 
 a No doubt in this there is a great mystery. To many it is a thing 
 not easy to understand why a preparation should have been necessary. 
 They argue that man might have been so created, as that all should 
 have been exactly equal, with the same advantages, the same diffi- 
 culties, and the same probation to undergo. As a matter of fact this 
 is not the case. Men differ not only in their outward circumstances, 
 but in their inner selves : and that not only in things intellectual, but 
 in things moral. Not only is the lot of a heathen entirely different 
 from that of a Christian, but the probation of the inhabitants of a 
 Christian country differs immensely according to the place where they 
 live, the character of their parents, the nature of their education, of their 
 calling in life, and so on. But all that this means is simply that the 
 law of life is progress. Without progress this would be but a poor 
 world, and it is the hope of progress which nerves to their work 
 statesmen and moralists, and all who hope in any way to benefit man- 
 kind. Progress, then, is God's law, not only in the Old Testament, but 
 in the New, for the Church (Matt. xiii. 31-33), and for each individual 
 Christian (lb. 12). In old time it was the office of the prophets to 
 
256 JUDAISM PREPARATORY [LECT. 
 
 If the writings of the prophets seem wanting to 
 us in method, it is simply because we arrange them 
 according to their length, or what we are pleased to 
 consider their comparative importance, and not ac- 
 cording to their chronological sequence. If we study 
 them in the order in which God gave them, we shall 
 find that they began with large and general ideas, 
 and that the early prophets having thus laid a sure 
 foundation, others built thereupon the exact and 
 finished edifice of truth. If I have succeeded at all 
 in my object, I shall have shown in these Lectures 
 that the prophets formed a large and organized com- 
 munity, thoroughly conversant with one another's 
 writings, trained up in the study of them, anxiously 
 searching out their meaning, comparing statement 
 with statement, and, as St. Peter says, slowly tracking 
 out — Zpevv&vT€s — both the time and the nature of that 
 salvation of which the Spirit of Christ that was in 
 them did testify beforehand (1 Pet. i. 10, 11). I doubt 
 not that many a later prophecy was the result of 
 patient and prayerful study of what had been already 
 revealed ; and hence the constant reference and allu- 
 sion made by each succeeding prophet to the writings 
 of those who had preceded him. 
 
 And thus, though the Jews as a nation would not 
 hear of such a thing, it was the unanimous teaching 
 of the prophets that Judaism was to give place to 
 something better and more perfect. If Jonah teaches 
 
 labour for human progress, it is now especially the office of the Church. 
 Within her the highest possible probation is offered mankind. It is 
 her duty to labour that this probation may become possible for 
 millions now living in the darkness of heathenism, and more perfect 
 and more easy for those within her fold. 
 
VII.] TO A SPIRITUAL DISPENSATION. 257 
 
 this truth in a general way, it is Isaiah who describes 
 the nature of that universal Church which was to take 
 its place, and Jeremiah (xxxi. 31-34) and Ezekiel 
 (xxxvi. 26, 27) who show that its sanctions are to 
 be spiritual, that religion in it is not to consist of 
 ceremony and ritual, but of God's law written in men's 
 hearts, of sin forgiven, and of iniquity remembered 
 no more. But neither they nor Isaiah more clearly 
 taught the spiritual nature of religion than Joel did. 
 Isaiah's office was to add to Joel's teaching more dis- 
 tinct ideas of Christ's work for man. 
 
 For, as we have seen, Joel taught the presence of 
 God in Providence, the restorative power of repent- 
 ance, the gift of the Holy Ghost to repentant men, 
 and, as a necessary consequence, the certainty of a 
 general judgment. Now we are expressly taught in 
 the New Testament that two of these doctrines are 
 absolutely essential even to the very lowest form of 
 religion. Any one that cometh to God must believe 
 that there is a God, and that God rewards and 
 punishes. But certainly by the existence of a God 
 is not meant here the existence of a power merely to 
 keep the dull machinery of material laws in motion, 
 and who must not venture to exercise any act of 
 volition. Such a Deity neither could nor would reward 
 or punish : for material laws perpetually confound the 
 innocent with the guilty, and involve both in one 
 common fate. It must mean a God Who practically 
 concerns Himself with man, Who has subjected him 
 to a state of probation for some moral purpose, Who 
 by His providence leads him on to repentance, Who 
 will accept that repentance, will after repentance give 
 him all necessary aid for living a holy life, and Who 
 
 S 
 
258 IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL [lect. 
 
 therefore can and will reward and punish justly, be- 
 cause man has a real choice between God's service 
 and disobedience to Him. And thus, then, the teach- 
 ing of the New Testament, in this most important and 
 fundamental passage (Heb. xi. 6), exactly agrees with 
 that of Joel. If there were no restorative power in 
 repentance, if no aid were granted man in leading 
 the life of faith, there would be no possibility of God 
 rewarding any, and punishment would not be just 
 where the condemnation of all alike was inevitable. 
 
 Still it was very slowly that the prophets unfolded 
 what seems to us a necessary result of such teaching ; 
 namely, that there must be a world to come, and that 
 the soul can not perish at death, but lives onward, to 
 bear the consequences there of what it has been here. 
 Fully revealed this doctrine never was till Christ 
 came. For He it was Who, in St. Paul's words 
 (2 Tim. i. 10), made death a nullity by the clear light 
 cast in the Gospel upon the doctrines of eternal life 
 and of the incorruptibility of the risen body. It was 
 the privilege of Daniel, who in so many respects 
 stands apart from the rest of the prophets, to declare 
 this elementary truth in words as clear as any in the 
 Gospel itself. ' Multitudes that sleep in the dust of 
 the earth shall awake, these to everlasting life, and 
 those to shame and everlasting contempt. And they 
 that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the 
 firmament ; and they that turn many to righteousness 
 as the stars for ever and ever (Dan. xii. 2, 3).' The 
 meaning of words such as these none could mistake, 
 but many, I doubt not, pondered long and anxiously 
 over the language used by Joel, and wondered what 
 it might mean. Now it is not enough to say, that 
 
VII.] revealed VERY GRADUALLY. 259 
 
 there — in Joel's words — was the truth waiting only 
 for the fulness of time to attain to its full proportions : 
 taught clearly, if not clearly understood : and in due 
 season to become an elementary part of the Christian 
 religion, and a fundamental tenet without which we 
 cannot see how religion could exist at all. This is 
 true, but not enough. The prophets spake to their 
 own times as well as to us : and what they said was 
 intended to be carefully studied and examined by 
 their contemporaries. It was so studied, and its 
 meaning was ever more and more fully understood. 
 Men's hearts mused upon their teachings, and looked 
 eagerly forward to the time when, instead of this 
 lantern light, the Sun of Righteousness should Him- 
 self arise to illuminate the dark region of this world 
 (2 Pet. i. 19). But neither one nor the other was any 
 light of nature, or product of human wisdom ; for, as 
 St. Peter tells us, ' Prophecy was never brought by 
 the will of man, but men carried along by the Holy 
 Ghost spake of God (lb. 21 according to the Vatican 
 codex).' 
 
 Time will not permit me to show the continuity 
 of the teaching of the prophets step by step. I can 
 only illustrate it by touching very briefly upon some 
 of the more salient points. I shall notice then as 
 regards Hosea and Amos, the prophets next in order, 
 only this fact, that they are the first who connect the 
 promise of the Messiah with the lineage of David, 
 and that in a very remarkable way. You have in 
 the Psalms an anticipation of the eternal duration of 
 David's throne (Ps. lxxxix. 3, 4), and of a priesthood 
 to be connected with it for evermore (lb. ex. 4) ; but 
 in the mouth of these two prophets those sure mercies 
 
 S 2, 
 
260 TEACHING OF ROSEA [LECT. 
 
 of David, which subsequently became the especial 
 subject of Isaiah's prophecy, are first spiritualized and 
 separated from the thought of an earthly kingdom. 
 Hosea's prophecy is one long outpouring of the divine 
 sorrow over the ruin of the ten tribes ; and I have 
 already pointed out the remarkable fact that through- 
 out it is God Who in His own person thus shows the 
 tenderness of His love. And this is Hosea's main 
 lesson, — the lesson which John taught so affectionately 
 afterwards, — that God is love. He utters, however, 
 one very remarkable prediction. ' The children of 
 Israel shall abide many days without a king, and 
 without a prince, and without a sacrifice,' and yet free 
 from all stain of idolatry : for there shall be in them 
 ' neither statue of Baal, nor ephod, nor teraphim.' It 
 is an exact prophecy of the state of Israel at the pre- 
 sent moment. They have no civil government, and 
 no temple or altar ; but neither are they guilty of any 
 form or kind of idolatry. And this is to be their state 
 for many days. How long it shall last is known to 
 Him Who has kept times and seasons in His own 
 hands. But it will not last for ever. 'Afterwards 
 shall the children of Israel return, and shall seek 
 Jehovah their God, and David their king ; and shall 
 fear Jehovah and His goodness in the latter days 
 (Hos. iii. 4, 5).' 
 
 Now Hosea was an Israelite, and was preaching to 
 the ten tribes. Ephraim, as the head of the great 
 house of Joseph, to whom belonged Reuben's forfeited 
 birthright (i Chron. v. I, 2), had never looked upon 
 the lineage of David in any other light than as 
 usurpers who had taken from it its own property. 
 Isaiah thus speaks of the envy of Ephraim towards 
 
VII.] RESPECTING DAVID'S KINGDOM. 26 1 
 
 Judah. Plainly it regarded, as did by far the larger 
 proportion of the tribes, the rising of the Ephraimite 
 Jeroboam as a successful attempt to restore to the 
 house of Joseph that supremacy in Israel which it had 
 ever claimed, and which had generally been readily 
 accorded. Naturally, then, we ask, Had the lineage 
 of David already become among the prophets the 
 symbol of those mercies which in older time had been 
 connected with Abraham, in whose seed all the king- 
 doms of the earth were to be blessed ? Certainly the 
 Israelites would have felt neither pleasure nor pride 
 in the exaltation of David's earthly lineage. It would 
 simply have meant the failure of their own claims 
 to supremacy — claims persistently made during many 
 previous centuries (Jud. viii. f, xii. 1) — claims subset 
 quently inherited by the Samaritans, and of which 
 we hear the last echo in the discourse of the woman 
 of Samaria with our Lord. The Israelites, then, would 
 only have been irritated by the natural sense of the 
 words. Anyhow the prophecy was painful enough, 
 that, after the loss for long ages of their national 
 independence and national religion, their restoration 
 was to be connected with the object of their envy — 
 Judah. The words, then, must already have become 
 the symbol of spiritual mercies ; mercies too large to 
 leave room for envy or national rivalry. And cer- 
 tainly the Jews so understood them. The Targum of 
 Jonathan paraphrases them as follows, ' Afterwards 
 the children of Israel shall repent, and shall enquire 
 for the worship of Jehovah their God, and shall obey 
 Messiah the son of David their king, and shall come 
 in troops to the worship of Jehovah, and great shall 
 be their happiness at the end of days.' 
 
262 AMOS' PROPHECY [lect. 
 
 This is plain enough, and it is remarkable that the 
 Targum should describe their worship, even when free 
 from idolatry, as no true worship of Jehovah, till they 
 obey Messiah their king. But Amos is even more 
 explicit. He speaks of a time when ' the house of 
 Israel shall have been tossed about among all nations 
 like as corn is tossed in a sieve,' and yet with so 
 extraordinary a providence watching over it that not 
 the least grain of it, or, more correctly, not even the 
 least stone or bit of gravel that has got into the sieve, 
 in spite of all the tossing, shall fall to the ground. 
 And then there is a time of punishment : ' All the 
 sinners of My people shall die by the sword.' But 
 this is followed by Israel's restoration : ' In that day 
 will I raise up the fallen booth of David, and will wall 
 up their breaches, and restore its ruins ; and I will 
 build it as in the days of old : that they may inherit 
 the remnant of Edom, and of all the Gentiles, on 
 whom My name is called, saith Jehovah the doer of 
 this (Amos ix. 9-12).' Now Amos wrote when the 
 house of David had not fallen ; the king in his days 
 was Uzziah, who reigned for fifty-two years in great 
 prosperity. Yet Amos calls the royal lineage a booth 
 merely, a contemptuous word, says Gesenius, applic- 
 able to a small ruined cottage. Now the mission of 
 Amos, like that of Hosea, was to the ten tribes. Why 
 should he thus describe the royal house of Judah ? 
 What comfort would it be to the Israelites to know 
 that the ruling lineage of a neighbouring state, which 
 had not yet fallen, should fall, and be restored again ? 
 He represents Israel also as tossed in a sieve, and 
 scattered among the Gentiles. To leave no doubt of 
 his meaning, he says soon afterwards, \ I will bring 
 
vii.] OF THE FALLEN BOOTH. 263 
 
 again the captivity of My people Israel (lb. ix. 14).' 
 Now Amos wrote in the days of Jeroboam II, the 
 era of Israel's greatest prosperity, when under their 
 warrior-king they had pushed their conquests north- 
 ward as far as Hamath, and eastward as far as the 
 Dead Sea (2 Kings xiv. 25). What scattering, what 
 captivity would Israel fear then ? Fifty years pass 
 by, and all outward things are changed. The tide 
 of war has rolled over these lands, and Israel has 
 fallen. The words of Hosea and Amos have been 
 in part fulfilled. Israel has no king, but has gone into 
 captivity. And what of Judah ? The army of Assyria 
 is advancing upon Jerusalem as an easy prey, but it 
 is to have an extraordinary deliverance, and Isaiah is 
 commissioned to announce that the pride of Senna- 
 cherib shall fall by a sudden and heaven-sent over- 
 throw. In terse and vigorous language he sets before 
 us that warrior's onward march ; describes the rapidity 
 with which town after town is captured ; shows the 
 terror of the inhabitants, and their flight in hopeless 
 confusion. And now the conqueror has reached the 
 capital ; Jerusalem is in sight, and, secure of victory, 
 he shakes his hand in his pride against the mount of 
 the daughter of Zion, the hill of Jerusalem. Suddenly 
 he falls by the hand of God, and not of man. ' Behold, 
 the Lord Jehovah of hosts lops the boughs with terror : 
 the tall trees are cut down, the lofty trees are felled. 
 He cuts down the thickets with the axe, and Lebanon 
 falls by the hand of the Mighty One.' And what 
 follows without pause or break upon this description 
 of Jehovah hewing down the army of Sennacherib ? 
 ' There shall come forth a sprout from the cut-down 
 
264 ISAIAH'S PROPHECY [lect. 
 
 trunk of Jesse, and a sucker shall bud forth from 
 among his roots (Is. x. 33, xi. 1).' 
 
 Now it was not very complimentary to Hezekiah, 
 just after Isaiah had been describing Sennacherib's 
 army as a glorious Lebanon felled by God's own 
 hand, for him to speak of David's royal lineage as 
 a dead stump, out of which there springs one poor 
 sucker. Nay, he passes by David. It is no longer 
 a royal lineage, but the lineage of the farmer of 
 Bethlehem. If the prophecies were mere poetry, or 
 if they grew out of the present circumstances of their 
 times, then Hosea, Amos, and Isaiah, wrote what was 
 perfectly inexplicable. The reasonable thing for Isaiah 
 to have done would have been to wind up his prophecy 
 with a few words of encouragement for Hezekiah, 
 some delicate praise of his well-meant reforms, and a 
 timely hint that the services of the prophets might be 
 well repaid by a little seasonable liberality. Isaiah 
 might then have done as well by his prophecy as 
 Virgil by his lines upon Marcellus, which made him a 
 rich man. But he stoops to nothing of the sort. The 
 prophets never turn aside from the path of truth to 
 flatter any man. Nor is this all. In each of the 
 three cases the prophecy of the restoration of David's 
 ruined house comes in so abruptly, and Hosea places 
 it at so distant a time — after Israel has been many 
 days without a king — that I can see but one explana- 
 tion which satisfactorily accounts for such teaching. 
 They could not have thus spoken had it not been 
 clearly revealed to the prophets, and become a settled 
 truth among them, and one regularly taught in the 
 prophetic schools, that the Messiah was not to come 
 
VII.] OF THE CUT-DOWN TRUNK. 265 
 
 till after the house of David had fallen into obscurity. 
 A long period was to separate the earthly splendours 
 of David's temporal sovereignty from the spiritual 
 glories of Christ's rule over the hearts of believers b . 
 I am not prepared to grant that these three prophets 
 spake nonsense, or, what is much the same thing, what 
 was unintelligible to their contemporaries. There 
 is abundant proof that the prophetic schools had a 
 settled body of teaching, and that the people generally 
 were sufficiently trained in it to know what the pro- 
 phets meant. And thus the ten tribes would perfectly 
 understand Hosea's meaning, namely, that their cap- 
 tivity would be a very long one, — not limited to 
 seventy years as in the case of Judah, — and that their 
 restoration would only be after the Messiah's advent, 
 ' by their obeying Christ, the Son of David, their king, 5 
 as the Targum explains it. They would gather the 
 same conclusions from the words of Amos. And 
 Hezekiah would feel no bitterness at Isaiah, though his 
 words could not but suggest many sad and troubled 
 thoughts ; still there would be no anger, because he 
 knew that with one accord the prophets all taught 
 the same truth as Isaiah — that the Messiah, though 
 
 b Nothing, too, could more plainly show that the true interpretation 
 of those prophecies which promise an era of glory and splendour to the 
 Israelites was to be a spiritual one. The perpetuity of David's throne, 
 for instance, was repeatedly affirmed in the plainest terms by the pro- 
 phets (2 Sam. vii. 13, 1 Kings viii. 25); in terms equally plain they 
 stripped it of all temporal rule and grandeur (Is. xi. 1, &c.) ; and then, 
 as if to show that they themselves felt no difficulty in this seeming con- 
 tradiction, they refer to it long after the last king of David's line had 
 reigned, as an encouragement for rebuilding the second temple (Ps. 
 cxxxii. 11, 12). Surely they must have been fully aware that 'the 
 sure mercies of David' were something higher and better than earthly 
 greatness. 
 
266 DAVID 'S LINE NOT RESTORED [lect. 
 
 of David's line, would be born in a low place ; that 
 He would be a root springing out of dry ground, 
 at Whom kings would purse up their mouths, and 
 Who would have no earthly splendour to make men 
 desire him. 
 
 And thus, after the seventy years' exile, David's 
 line was not restored. There was great respect felt 
 for and shown to Zorobabel, but no power was given 
 him. Many psalms ' to David' were written, extolling 
 the promises made to his house. In the Psalms of 
 Degrees, psalms sung by the returning exiles, psalms 
 of joyous praise, pre-eminent even in the Book of 
 Psalms for their beauty and the loving gratitude 
 which they express ; in them you have the record 
 of the promise, ' Jehovah hath sworn in truth unto 
 David, He will not turn from it ; Of the fruit of thy 
 body will I set upon thy throne (Ps. cxxxii. n).' But 
 there was no legitimist party among the exiles who 
 proposed to fulfil that promise in a literal sense. In 
 short, neither were the prophets so unintelligible, nor 
 the people so stupid, as the negative critics imagine. 
 They lived in a great circle of thoughts : and these 
 thoughts they were ever urging upon the people : 
 everywhere throughout the land the same truths were 
 taught by thousands whose names are written in no 
 earthly record, but in the Book of Life : in their col- 
 leges they had head-quarters for training those whom 
 God called to the ministry, and in which the writings 
 of their great chiefs and leaders were stored up. The 
 recipe for making the prophets unintelligible and the 
 people stupid, is to stand apart from this circle of 
 truth. If the prophecies were mere human presenti- 
 ments and forebodings, they are absolutely inex- 
 
VII.] AFTER THE CAPTIVITY. 267 
 
 plicable. For there could not have been one fixed, 
 settled, and consentient teaching in that which took 
 its colouring from the varying course of events. 
 Isaiah would never have described Hezekiah's lineage 
 as a decaying stump in the same breath as that in 
 which he foretold the overthrow of Sennacherib ; 
 nor Amos have spoken of Uzziah's palace as a 
 ruin, with gaping breaches in its walls, and with a 
 mere booth or hut as all that remained of its former 
 splendour. 
 
 The ancient Jews did not misunderstand these pro- 
 phecies. They mused upon them in sorrow : for they 
 saw in them the overthrow of their nation. Still there 
 was comfort. As Jeremiah so repeatedly affirmed, 
 God would never make ' a full end ' of them : or, to 
 use Isaiah's words, ' a remnant would remain.' The 
 ground would be dry, yet out of it a root would spring 
 forth : the stem of Jesse would be prostrate, yet from 
 its stump would come forth a sucker ; the royal palace 
 would be in ruins, yet among them would be a booth 
 or hut for David's son. And thus, after their ex- 
 pressive way, one of their names for the Messiah was 
 ' The Son of the fallen.' Now how came these pro- 
 phets to know that two such contrary things would 
 be combined in Christ as the fall of David's throne 
 and its establishment for ever ? That, like Solomon 
 the Magnificent, He would be the Prince of peace, 
 with the key of government upon His shoulder, and 
 yet one despised and rejected of men ? The Jews 
 could not understand this contradiction, and they 
 divided the prophecies between two Messiahs. To 
 one, the son of Joseph, they gave all those passages 
 which spake of Christ's humiliation and rejection and 
 
2 58 PROPHECIES APPARENTLY INCONGRUOUS [lect. 
 
 death. To the other, the Son of David, they applied 
 all those which spake of His kingdom and triumph 
 and glory. In Jesus of Nazareth all these passages 
 are combined in one harmonious yet unexpected solu- 
 tion. All equally find in Him their place and mean- 
 ing, though in a very different way from what any 
 uninspired expositor had ever imagined. If the nega- 
 tive critics are to effect anything, they must, on their 
 own principles, show that Hosea and Amos and Isaiah 
 lived in the second or third century of the Christian 
 era. They say that prophecy is nothing more than 
 the record of past history, and that the prophets 
 wrote subsequently to the events which they profess 
 to predict. It is one of their established canons of 
 criticism, if that can be called established which rests 
 upon nothing but unsupported assertion. Well, then, 
 let them prove the soundness of their principles by 
 showing us in what century of the Christian era these 
 prophets lived. If I may refer to the Church in the 
 same breath as to the negative critics, I would remind 
 you that St. James had no doubt of the meaning of 
 Amos' prophecy. In the first council of Jerusalem, of 
 whose decrees the apostles ventured to say, ' It seemed 
 good to the Holy Ghost and to us (Acts xv. 28)/ 
 St. James quotes these words of Amos as a sufficient 
 justification for his sentence, that the Gentiles should 
 be admitted into the Church without requiring of them 
 obedience to the law of Moses. 
 
 With Hosea and Amos closed the long struggle 
 of grace with Israel. It had begun with the man of 
 God sent to rebuke Jeroboam at the very altar of his 
 calves. It had been sustained by the heroic energy of 
 Elijah and Elisha. It ended with Hosea's — or rather 
 
Vll.] RECONCILED IN CHRIST. . 269 
 
 Jehovah's — lamentation over Israel's fall. Their words 
 primarily referred to this struggle, but combined with 
 their message to their own times, they had also grand 
 truths for God's universal Church. The rest of the 
 prophets belong to Judah, except Daniel. He is the 
 link between the prophets and the Church. But 
 already we have seen that the prophets of Judah 
 teach just the same truths as those of Israel. It is 
 quite evident, as regards their doctrine, that the pro- 
 phetic schools at Gilgal and Jericho taught just the 
 same as was taught at Jerusalem. 
 
 Now we have already shown that the two earliest 
 prophets of Judah, Micah, and Isaiah, start with a 
 contradiction in terms. The mountain of the Lord's 
 house is to be desolate and solitary at the very time 
 when it is to be established upon the top of the moun- 
 tains, and when all peoples— Gentile nations in the 
 plural number — are to be flocking into it. And what 
 have we just been considering ? Under a perfectly 
 distinct metaphor, and one that refers primarily not 
 to the Church but to Christ, Hosea and Amos teach 
 you just the same truth. Daniel, as we have seen, 
 dispensed with metaphor altogether. He taught 
 (xii. 11) that the daily sacrifice would be taken away, 
 and that for a vast period after the abomination of 
 desolation had been set up by Titus within the sacred 
 area — a period which he describes as a thousand two 
 hundred and ninety days — the Jews would continue 
 in that very condition described by Hosea. Elsewhere 
 he foretells the destruction of the city and sanctuary, 
 and that the sacrifice and oblation are to cease 
 (ix. 26, 27). But is this the teaching of all prophecy ? 
 Plainly it is. The temporary nature of the Jewish 
 
270 THE MOSAIC INSTITUTIONS [lect. 
 
 Church and of the Mosaic institutions is as clearly- 
 taught as the eternal nature of Christianity, and the 
 certainty of the perpetual existence of the Christian 
 Church. And if we have seen the one set of pre- 
 dictions come true, we may rest perfectly confident 
 that the other will prove equally true, whoever they 
 may be ' who rage and take counsel together against 
 the Lord and against His Christ.' 
 
 For, first, it is a mere trifle, but it is something, 
 that the Mosaic religion had for its symbol an ark 
 of gopher-wood, a very lasting material, which with 
 proper care might have existed just about down to 
 the days of our Lord. It was past repair in Josiah's 
 time ; it perished when Nebuchadnezzar burnt the 
 temple. The Jews understood its significance, and 
 stoutly denied that it had perished (2 Mace. ii. 5). 
 Jeremiah, they said, had stowed it away safely, and 
 in due time would come again to restore it to them. 
 You have here the contrast between prophecy that 
 grew out of the circumstances of the times — the pro- 
 phecy of patriotism — and true prophecy. The re- 
 storation of the ark was necessary as a proof of the 
 perpetuity of their covenant rights, and hence the 
 predictions of Jeremiah's reappearance to give it them 
 back : but he has never come. Of more importance 
 was the tabernacle : for it involved the fact that 
 Judaism had a local seat, and a definite centre. Such 
 an institution never could be universal. And what 
 were the fortunes of this central seat of Judaism ? 
 Once in about every four hundred years it was 
 destroyed. The Philistines destroyed it at Shiloh, 
 and the ark went into captivity. Nebuchadnezzar 
 destroyed it at Jerusalem, and burned the ark. The 
 
VII.] TEMPORARY. 271 
 
 third temple lasted somewhat longer, but was at last 
 levelled to the ground with a destruction as complete 
 and enduring as that which had befallen Shiloh. 
 Jeremiah, one of the truest patriots that ever lived, 
 foretold this in the most marked and public way 
 (vii. 12-16). And with the temple fell the whole 
 Levitical law. There is no high-priest to enter the 
 Holy of Holies now, and no Holy of Holies for him 
 to enter upon the great day of atonement, and thereby 
 give validity to the sacrifices of the Mosaic ritual. 
 And thus two things combine. The very nature of 
 the Levitical law and the course of Jewish history 
 alike show that Judaism was a temporary religion. 
 And Micah and Isaiah not merely teach this clearly 
 and plainly as I showed in a previous Lecture. 
 That would be a very small truth in itself. What 
 they teach is, that it was to be removed out of the 
 way solely to give room for something better. The 
 imperfect was to be followed by the perfect : the 
 preparatory by the final : the torch of truth by the 
 risen sun. ' God's mountain is to be established, not 
 on the mount Moriah, but upon the mountains every- 
 where : and exalted above the hills.' ' Out of Zion 
 goes forth the law, and the Word of Jehovah from 
 Jerusalem.' The law was to become the rule of life 
 of all nations, but only as spiritually explained in the 
 Sermon on the Mount. God's mountain was to be 
 established, but it was to be a stone cut out without 
 hands that was to fill all the earth. 
 
 I do not suppose that the prophets understood this 
 great truth as fully and exactly as we understand it 
 now : but they understood the main outlines of it. 
 Naturally they used metaphors drawn from the state 
 
272 CHRISTIANITY [LECT. 
 
 of Jerusalem in their days. Their city, their temple, 
 their covenant relations with Jehovah, naturally sug- 
 gested the terms in which they were to speak to the 
 people of their times. And rightly so. Jerusalem 
 was the seat of God's true Church. The Jews were 
 the cluster which contained the new wine of the 
 Gospel (Is. lxv. 8, 9). Christianity is Judaism sepa- 
 rated from all that was temporary, and raised to the 
 highest possible perfection. And this is what the 
 prophets say, ' Jacob is to be brought back : Israel 
 is to be gathered c .' But this redemption of Israel is 
 but a small thing in the prophet's eyes. ' It is a 
 light thing that thou shouldest be My Servant to 
 raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the pre- 
 served of Israel : I will also give thee for a light to 
 the Gentiles, that thou mayest be My salvation unto 
 the end of the earth (lb. xlix. 6).' Messiah's kingdom 
 is to be a religion co-extensive with creation (Mark 
 xvi. 15): yet not won by war and conquest, for its 
 symbol is a mountain, strong, calm, perpetual, and in 
 which none hurt or destroy. And how does Isaiah 
 in this very place — the place where he describes the 
 peace and love which is to prevail in God's' holy 
 mountain, — how does he himself explain it ? ' The 
 earth,' he says, ' shall be full of the knowledge of 
 Jehovah, as the waters cover the sea (xi. 9).' It is 
 the general prevalence of Christ's religion in which 
 consists this vast and universal monarchy which was 
 to take the place of David's temporal kingdom. Of 
 David's kingdom the symbol in prophecy is the hill 
 
 c There is little doubt that this is the right reading and meaning of 
 Isaiah xlix. 5. 
 
VII.] PERFECT AND FINAL. 273 
 
 of Zion : the mountain of Jehovah is the Christian 
 Church. 
 
 This temporal kingdom was expressly to pass away. 
 ' The Sceptre was to depart from Judah when Shiloh 
 came (Gen. xlix. 10).' 'Ships,' sang Balaam, 'shall 
 come from the coast of Chittim, and shall afflict 
 Asshur, and shall afflict Eber ; and he also shall 
 perish for ever (Num. xxiv. 24).' ' They shall come,' 
 says Jerome, ' in triremes from Italy, and shall con- 
 quer Assyria, and devastate the Hebrews, and they 
 too shall finally perish.' His translation is the right 
 one, and the temporal dominion and polity of the 
 Hebrews was to fall as certainly as that of the 
 Seleucidae, the rulers of Asshur at the time referred 
 to in this prophecy d . There is nothing, then, so 
 extraordinary in the fact, that Moses in Deut. xxviii. 
 foretold the fall of Jerusalem, and the dispersion 
 of the Jews. What is very remarkable is, that the 
 details are so exactly described, that if the book be 
 a forgery, it must have been forged by some one with 
 Josephus' history of the Jewish war by his side. The 
 general fact that the Jews were to be scattered among 
 the heathen was, so to say, a common place of pro- 
 phecy. It was declared in the book of Leviticus 
 (xxvi. 33) as clearly as in Deuteronomy; it is referred 
 to by Nehemiah (i. 8) as a prediction of Moses that 
 had become a tradition of the race: but what was 
 only obscurely foreshown by Moses in the way of 
 
 d However absurd may be the attempt of the Romish Church to 
 thrust this version upon nations who do not speak Latin, yet, in 
 itself, Jerome's translation, known as the Roman Vulgate or com- 
 mon edition, will always rank among scholars as a work of primary 
 authority. 
 
274 MICAH'S PROPHECY [lect. 
 
 warning, and as something conditional upon their 
 conduct, was constantly referred to by the prophets 
 as something that daily was becoming inevitable. 
 There is really but one teaching upon the subject 
 from Moses to Malachi. And this I cannot but think 
 is one of the most extraordinary phenomena ever 
 witnessed in the annals of thought. You have an 
 order of men of the most exalted patriotism ; men 
 who are perpetually looking forward to ' latter days/ 
 in which Israel and Judah are to enjoy every temporal 
 and spiritual blessing ; and yet these very men with 
 one consent foretell an evil end for everything in their 
 religion and their country. The nation is to be scat- 
 tered and become a curse, the city is to be destroyed, 
 the temple to be laid in ruins, the sacrifice and obla- 
 tion to cease, the royal lineage to sink into obscurity. 
 Yet nothing is to perish. The throne of David is to 
 be eternal, his dominion universal ; all nations are to 
 enter their Church ; in this Church the Jew is to have 
 no exclusive privileges, the Gentile to be subject to 
 no disabilities. It is to be the Church of all nations. 
 I have read many attempts to weaken the force of 
 detached portions of this scheme. I have never 
 read nor expect to read any attempt to explain on 
 naturalistic principles the combined force of this 
 grand teaching of prophecy as a whole. 
 
 But when the prophets had thus sketched out the 
 great future of religion, — for, as I have said, the one 
 purpose for which the people of Israel was called by- 
 God, and made subject to so extraordinary a provi- 
 dence, was that God by it might give mankind the 
 one true religion, — when, then, the prophets had 
 taught plainly the main outlines of this great purpose, 
 
vil] OF CHRIST'S BIRTHPLACE. 275 
 
 they began to add specific and particular details. 
 And these specific prophecies are so numerous, and 
 have been so wonderfully fulfilled, that naturally they 
 have excited the chief attention on the part of ex- 
 positors, and have been most frequently appealed to 
 as the sure foundation on which our faith may calmly 
 rest. Now the first of these predictions is found in 
 Micah. From Bethlehem-ephratah, the old home of 
 David's family, but which nevertheless must so 
 dwindle as to become ' too small to be reckoned among 
 the thousands — the princely divisions — of the tribe of 
 Judah, out of it there shall go forth to Me one that 
 shall be ruler in Israel ; whose goings forth have been 
 of old, from the days of eternity (v. 2).' Israel, then, 
 is to go back to Bethlehem for a new beginning of the 
 kingly power, and this new king is described by the 
 prophet as one Who had gone forth from all eternity. 
 But I am not going to press this : it belongs to the 
 inner essence of Christianity, to that which is the 
 rightful portion of believers — its doctrines — and not 
 to its outer proof. I take, then, only the fact that 
 Micah affirms that a second kingdom would spring 
 forth from Bethlehem, and I ask you to read the 
 Book of Micah, and follow the order of his thoughts. 
 You will then see the force of his words, not in that 
 haphazard way in which they come before you sepa- 
 rately from what leads up to them, and which makes 
 people sometimes speak as if prophecy were a sort of 
 legerdemain, but as the calm, thoughtful, and orderly 
 unfolding of the chart of truth. 
 
 Micah, then, begins his prophecy by reproving the 
 Jews for their sins. Zion, he says, is built up by 
 blood, and Jerusalem by improbity. The chiefs judge 
 
 T 2 
 
276 CONTEX T [lect . 
 
 for bribes, the priests teach for hire, the prophets 
 divine — and I have shown before how strictly all 
 divination was forbidden — for silver. All classes thus 
 are corrupt, and therefore justice requires their re- 
 moval. It is because of this deep-set and general 
 moral corruption that Zion is to become ploughed 
 as a field, and Jerusalem a heap of rubbish, and the 
 temple-area a desolate place, where the sound of 
 God's true service is never heard. Observe then : 
 moral reasons caused the removal of Israel out of its 
 place. Clearly as that removal was foretold, it was 
 never foretold as a fated necessity. The Jews to the 
 last might have averted it. ' How often would I have 
 gathered thee, even as a hen her chickens ! ' It is 
 unrepentant man who turns the warnings of prophecy 
 into certainties. And so, then, there was no inevitable 
 reason why the Jews should have been taken captive, 
 and Jerusalem destroyed, except their own immo- 
 rality. Read the pages of Josephus' Jewish War, and 
 you will find that if ever there was a city ripe for 
 judgment it was Jerusalem. No wonder that our 
 merciful Saviour denounced manifold woes upon its 
 inhabitants, when they were capable of so acting, as 
 their own historian describes. Moral reasons, then, 
 caused them to reject Christianity nationally ; had 
 they received Christianity, they might have become 
 the first and foremost of all Christian nations, and 
 their temple have been the St. Peter's of the world. 
 But even in Micah's days the immorality of the nation 
 was too entire for any mild remedies to suffice. It 
 was this immorality which frustrated the earnest 
 attempts of Hezekiah and Josiah to bring about a 
 national reformation. It was the wickedness of the 
 
vii.] OF MICAH' S PROPHECY. 277 
 
 people which made the teaching of our Lord practi- 
 cally so powerless, that at His resurrection the num- 
 ber of the disciples was but one hundred and twenty. 
 From the hopeless present, therefore, Micah hurries 
 on to the distant future. ' In the last days the moun- 
 tain of the Lord's house shall be established.' The 
 Jewish Church was to have a great development. Its 
 teaching was not altogether to fail because of the 
 immorality of the nation. Accordingly the justice 
 of God separated first of all at the exile between the 
 good and the bad. It was shown to Jeremiah before 
 the event, that those who would perish at Jerusalem 
 with Zedekiah were the refuse whom God had re- 
 jected, while those who had gone captive to Babylon 
 with Jeconiah were men picked out by God's provi- 
 dence, that in them the Jewish Church might survive 
 (ch. xxiv). So too the teaching of our Lord and His 
 apostles gathered out of the festering mass of the 
 Jews all those fit for admission to the Christian 
 Church, and God's Providence notably saved every 
 one of them from perishing with the refuse of the 
 nation at Jerusalem. In both cases the nation by 
 its immorality had separated itself from the Church. 
 But in what way God would still carry on His work 
 Micah could not yet see, though he did see that the 
 Jews were to go to Babylon, and be delivered there 
 (iv. 10). Generally what he saw was that the thorough 
 immorality of all classes of the Jews, while it would 
 put an end to their national existence, would never- 
 theless remove them only that something better might 
 take their place. As, then, ^Eneas saw the gods 
 leaving vanquished Troy, so Micah sees the law going 
 out from Jerusalem, but only that it may gather the 
 
278 THE MESSIAH NOT DESCENDED [LECT. 
 
 Gentiles into a nobler and truer Zion. And, thus, 
 after describing that peace and love which are the 
 necessary effect of Christian principles, and which do 
 not prevail as they ought among Christian nations, 
 because their Christianity is nominal only, or nominal 
 too much — after this he goes on to speak of the 
 Church's triumphs. She was lame, driven out, and 
 afflicted, yet she shall become a great nation. God 
 makes the horn of the daughter of Zion iron, and her 
 hoofs brass, that she may beat in pieces many peoples, 
 and consecrate them and their substance to the use 
 of Jehovah, who is now described as the ' Lord of the 
 whole earth (Micah iv. 13).' 
 
 And thus, then, having seen the Church's glory, 
 having seen, in metaphor though it be, a time of vast 
 activity, when nations far and wide are to be won, not 
 for any national god, but for Him Who is Lord of all, 
 he finally couples all this with one of David's race. 
 From the town of Jesse shall go forth the Church's 
 everlasting ruler. And his words about this ruler 
 surpass all reasonable bounds. Yet it could not be 
 flattery ; for the prophecy nearly cost the prophet his 
 life. It roused up general and intense indignation 
 against him. But Hezekiah was of a tender con- 
 science, and he urged the people not to destroy the 
 prophet, but to repent. Yet the prophecy does not 
 soften its painful details by connecting this restoration 
 of the Church with Hezekiah's race. As a matter of 
 fact the Messiah did not spring from Hezekiah, nor 
 from any Jewish king but David. He came from an 
 uncrowned branch of his descendants. And it is 
 notable that the prophets never do connect the 
 Messiah with any king but David. This is very 
 
VII.] FROM THE KINGS OF JUDAH. 279 
 
 unlike flattery : flattery would have coupled the 
 promise with something distinctive of Hezekiah. 
 Micah couples it with a decaying town, where the 
 dynasty lived ere it had achieved greatness. 
 
 Time forbids me to speak of the rest of the 
 prophecy — how Micah tells of a waiting-time until 
 she that travaileth hath brought forth, and that then 
 the remnant of his brethren shall return to the sons 
 of Israel, and Israel shall feed in the divine strength, 
 and be magnified even to the ends of the earth : and 
 how the remnant of Jacob shall be scattered among 
 many peoples, no longer as a curse, but as the dew, 
 and as showers, bringing a blessing unasked, and yet 
 strong as a lion amid meaner herds, whom none may 
 resist. Already the Gentiles have been thus blest by 
 the missionary labours of the apostles and early 
 Christians, most of whom were of Jewish parentage : 
 and never have missionary labours been more beauti- 
 fully described than as the coming of the soft, gentle, 
 refreshing dew, heaven's own gift, but a gift unasked ; 
 and of the showers which descend unbidden upon the 
 arid waste, and bid it revive : labours which neverthe- 
 less have a lion's strength to break through the bonds 
 and obstacles which sin and error place in the way of 
 God's truth. And a still greater fulfilment will 
 assuredly come : ' for if the casting away of Israel 
 was the reconciling of the world, what shall the 
 receiving of them be but as life from the dead ? (Rom. 
 xi. 15).' Upon these and similar points I have not 
 spoken, nor do I intend to speak, because they belong 
 to those who accept the Christian interpretation of 
 the prophecies as given by our Lord and His apostles, 
 and held by the Church. It is the believer's privilege 
 
280 MIC AH COMPARED [lect. 
 
 to study such prophecies as are still but partially 
 fulfilled, and search out their deeper lessons. But 
 with those who deny the inspiration of the prophets 
 we can bring forward only the larger and salient 
 points, and say, Here are certain plain facts. Chris- 
 tianity gives of them a straightforward, simple, and 
 natural explanation, — an explanation nevertheless 
 quite different from anything imagined by the Jews, 
 or by any one before the fulfilment came. Of the 
 prophetic teaching, involving apparently a contradic- 
 tion, we assert that both sides have in Christianity an 
 exact and complete, but unexpected fulfilment, a 
 fulfilment not brought about by human means, but by 
 God. If the critics refuse to accept this fulfilment, 
 then let them offer some tenable theory of the 
 phenomena. What at present they do is to nibble at 
 trifles, pare away a little here and a little there, and 
 insinuate that the rest is unintelligible. 
 
 I will only add, as regards Micah, that there is the 
 most striking similarity between his thoughts and 
 those of Isaiah, while, as writers, nothing can be more 
 dissimilar than their style. They both lived at the 
 same time, and though born at Moresheth, a village 
 on the Philistine frontier, yet Jerusalem was evidently 
 the place where Micah laboured. Both he and 
 Isaiah were probably members of that college 6 at 
 
 e Our version in 2 Kings xx. 4 suggests an entirely wrong notion as 
 to Isaiah's dwelling. It says, ' Afore Isaiah was gone out into the 
 middle court,' whereas the Hebrew is, ' before he had reached the 
 middle of the city/ The substitution of the word court for city was an 
 absolutely unauthorized change made by the Massorites, to suit a 
 Jewish notion that Isaiah dwelt in the temple. At the time when our 
 version was made, the corrections of the Massorites were supposed to be 
 authoritative; now they are as generally acknowledged to be changes 
 for the worse. Isaiah, then, dwelt in the city, and moved in a circle 
 
vii.] WITH ISAIAH 281 
 
 Jerusalem, of which we read subsequently as the 
 residence of the prophetess Huldah. Of this college 
 Isaiah was probably the head during the latter part of 
 his life, and Micah no unworthy colleague. But while 
 Isaiah is the most polished of Hebrew writers, Micah's 
 prophecy reads like a series of rough notes. It does, 
 in fact, belong to a period when the prophets were 
 still orators rather than writers : and we may justly 
 consider it as representing only the more important 
 points in a long course of public teaching. The 
 prophecy of Judah in ruins, and of a new kingdom 
 starting afresh at Bethlehem, was no chance ex- 
 pression thrown off by the pen in a moment of 
 enthusiasm. It was the settled conviction of Micah's 
 whole teaching. 
 
 Never were there writers whose style is more 
 exactly marked than the prophets, and the idea that 
 large interpolations are possible, and that you may 
 pull a prophecy to pieces and divide its dismembered 
 limbs among a heap of other writers, simply means 
 
 separate alike from the king and the priests. But his rank was so high 
 that Hezekiah sent as a deputation to him the highest nobles of his 
 court, Eliakim and Shebna (of whom see Is. xxii. 15-25), together with 
 the elders of the priests (2 Kings xix. 2). Isaiah plainly must have 
 held some position of great power and influence ; for we do not find 
 that his prophetic office saved Jeremiah from contumely and personal 
 indignities of the gravest kind (Jer. xx. 2, 8). But if Isaiah was the 
 regularly appointed head of the prophetic order, we can understand his 
 position. It is quite plain that the prophets were a numerous and 
 powerful body : it is but reasonable, therefore, to suppose that they had 
 their own chiefs, and a regular organization and head quarters. Manas- 
 seh no doubt broke these institutions down; and though possibly 
 restored afterwards, they never seem to have regained their original 
 strength ; for the prophets themselves had lost their old vigour, and in 
 the days of Jeremiah and Ezekiel had become, as far as the mass was 
 concerned, utterly corrupt. 
 
282 MICAH'S CHIEF SUBJECT [lect. 
 
 that people know so little of the subject that they 
 suppose that Hebrew literature is unlike every other 
 literature. If I were to affirm that Horace wrote 
 considerable portions of Virgil's Georgics, the assertion 
 would be treated as ridiculous, not because it is more 
 ridiculous than what has been said about Isaiah, but 
 simply because men generally know enough of Latin 
 to be able to form a judgment upon the subject. If 
 a man makes a similar assertion as regards the writers 
 of the Old Testament, he can always count upon the 
 ignorance of his readers. They do not know that the 
 prophets have each one his own marked and peculiar 
 style. Micah's is abrupt and broken. Evidently he 
 was a man of deep feeling, who beheld with intense 
 pain the growing corruption of the people. And 
 thus though he wrote those remarkable Messianic 
 predictions, yet his primary subject was morality. 
 What stirred his whole nature was the violation, by 
 God's own people, of the moral law. And never has 
 any man gone more directly to the root of the whole 
 question of human conduct than Micah in that short 
 code which forms perhaps the best known portion of 
 his whole prophecy : — 
 
 Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, 
 
 And bow myself before the High God ? 
 
 Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings? 
 
 With calves of a year old? 
 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams? 
 
 With ten thousands of rivers of oil ? 
 Shall I give my first-born for my transgression ; — 
 
 The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? 
 He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good : 
 And what doth the Lord require of thee 
 
 But to do justly, and love mercy, 
 
 And to walk humbly with thy God ! 
 
VII.] MORALITY. 283 
 
 In short passages such as this we often see Micah 
 master of a powerful and impressive style. The 
 earnestness of the thoughts is equalled by the beauty 
 of the language, and both the memory readily seizes 
 upon the words, and the heart is moved by their 
 import. His rhythm, too, is good and effective, though 
 far from being so smooth and exact as that of Joel 
 and Amos : and his Hebrew is that pure dialect 
 spoken in Jerusalem by the educated class, and by 
 that class only. Still there is no prophet who requires 
 more minute and patient study. You must think 
 over Micah before you can see how his thoughts 
 grow out of one another, and what is the inner chain 
 which binds his terse, brief, disjointed sentences into 
 a connected whole. 
 
 Such, then, is Micah, the contemporary of Isaiah, 
 and no unworthy associate of that great prophet. 
 Not that he ever rises to that height of sublimity and 
 beauty, whither indeed Isaiah mounted alone. Nor is 
 his teaching so complete as that of Isaiah. It is very 
 full as regards the Church, but as regards the person 
 of the Messiah he tells us but little. His great lesson 
 is holiness, that one sole foundation upon which alone 
 Christ can be built. But he never separates this 
 lesson from Him Who made holiness possible for us. 
 Whatever may be their special lesson, the prophets 
 are men whose hearts are ever full of one great 
 subject, the advent namely of the promised Deliverer. 
 And natural as it may seem to us in our cold pedantic 
 way to look for some lower application of each 
 prophecy, something in the prophet's own times to 
 which it may refer ; to them and to the people 
 generally it was as natural to look onward to the 
 
284 ADVENT OF THE MESSIAH. 
 
 distant future, and to the coming of that Messiah, in 
 Whom their nation, shorn of its glory and fast sinking 
 under the power of Assyria, was to revive to a grander, 
 a more enduring, a more world-wide, and a more 
 spiritual empire. 
 
LECTURE VIII. 
 
 THE PROPHECIES OF ISAIAH. 
 
 I pray thee, of whom speaketh the prophet this ? of 
 himself or of some other man ? Then Philip opened 
 his month, and began at the same scripture, and 
 preached unto him Jesus. — ACTS viii. 34, 35. 
 
 We can well understand the confusion which dis- 
 turbed the eunuch's mind when reading the fifty-third 
 chapter of Isaiah. The words of that chapter were to be 
 the key wherewith in due time the Church would unlock 
 the mystery of the atonement ; they were to explain 
 to us why Christ suffered, why His death was neces- 
 sary for our acquittal, why His merits avail for our 
 pardon and acceptance. But until ' He was brought 
 as a lamb to the slaughter,' the mystery of a suffering 
 Christ, though clearly taught in prophecy, was some- 
 thing so alien from the usual current of men's 
 thoughts, that they read the words of the prophets 
 without understanding their meaning. Men never 
 do understand anything unless already they have in 
 their minds some kindred ideas, something that leads 
 up to the new thought which they are required to 
 master. Our knowledge grows, but it is by the gra- 
 dual accumulation of thought upon thought, and by 
 following out ideas already gained to their legitimate 
 
286 PROPHECY [lect. 
 
 conclusions. God followed this rule even in the 
 supernatural knowledge bestowed upon the prophets. 
 It was a growing light, a gradual dawning preparatory 
 to the sunrise, and not a flash of lightning, illuminating 
 everything for one moment with ghastly splendour, 
 to be succeeded immediately by a deeper and more 
 oppressive gloom. It has been our endeavour to 
 trace this growing light. We have seen how the 
 foundation for the revelation of Christ was laid in 
 broad and general doctrines concerning the univer- 
 sality of the Church, the power of prayer and repent- 
 ance, the necessity of sanctification, the certainty of 
 judgment. Upon these followed exacter teaching 
 as regards the plan of salvation, and the person and 
 offices of Him Whose name is Jesus, a Saviour ; and 
 we have seen that this knowledge came in no hap- 
 hazard way. Carefully, and with prayer, the prophets 
 studied the words of their predecessors, and by the 
 use of the light already given were made fit for more 
 light, and to be the spokesmen of Jehovah in teaching 
 with growing clearness to the Church those truths 
 which have regenerated mankind. For the truths 
 of religion alone give us the power of mastering 
 the baser portion of our nature, and of rising to a 
 nobler and more spiritual, aye! and a more manly, 
 existence ! 
 
 And this exacter teaching attains to its greatest 
 clearness and highest elevation in Isaiah. There are 
 other inspired writers, whose lessons instruct, as their 
 varied excellencies adorn, that ' goodly fellowship of 
 the prophets,' by whom God gave us the Scriptures. 
 Had time permitted, there are many of whom one 
 would fain have spoken. There is much I would 
 
VIII.] A GROWING LIGHT. 287 
 
 gladly have said of Jeremiah, a man it may be of 
 small natural gifts, but worthy, nevertheless, to stand 
 at the very head of the prophetic choir, and to be in 
 his sorrows the type of Christ ; for never was there a 
 character more distinguished for moral excellencies, 
 or one more determined, in spite of the shrinking 
 melancholy of his disposition, at all hazards to do his 
 duty. There is the sublime, but often obscure, pro- 
 phet of the exile, Ezekiel, whose mysterious teachings 
 appear again in their Christian form in the Revelation 
 of St. John ; but it would need a volume in itself to 
 show what are the relations in which these two books 
 stand to one another. There are the prophets of the 
 return, especially Zechariah, whose mind dwelt so 
 exactly among the same thoughts as filled the heart 
 of Isaiah and the old prophets, that Archbishop 
 Newcome a argued that he must have been their 
 
 a The portion of Zechariah, so entirely in the style of the old pro- 
 phets as to have suggested (first of all to Dr. Mede) the idea that it 
 was written before the exile, consists of the last six chapters. Of these, 
 Dr. Newcome assigned chapters ix., x., xi., to a date antecedent even 
 to the carrying away of the ten tribes by Shalmaneser, while chapters 
 xii., xiii., xiv. he thought were by a different author, who flourished 
 between the death of Josiah and the destruction of Jerusalem. Un- 
 doubtedly these six chapters are most remarkable. They contain the 
 account of Christ's entry into Jerusalem, riding upon an ass' colt ; of 
 His betrayal, and of the thirty pieces of silver being cast to the potter. 
 They contain the weighty prophecies of the two staves, Grace and 
 Union ; of the cutting off of the three evil shepherds ; of the destruction 
 of Jerusalem, and of its better restoration, when God shall pour out 
 upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the 
 spirit of grace and of supplication, and they shall look upon Him whom 
 they have pierced. They contain, too, the great prophecy of Christ's 
 divinity, joined with that of His death, ' Awake, O sword, against My 
 shepherd, and against the man that is My fellow, saith Jehovah of hosts:' 
 and. to add but one prophecy more, when Jerusalem has been captured, 
 Jehovah goes forth to fight with the nations : ' And His feet in that day 
 
288 REJECTION OF JEWS [lect. 
 
 contemporary. More reasonably we may attribute 
 this fact to his careful examination of their writings, 
 and see in those very many remarkable predictions 
 spoken by him of Christ, God's especial blessing 
 upon his thoughtful study of what had been already 
 revealed. Finally, there is Malachi, whose office it 
 was solemnly for the last time to declare God's pur- 
 pose of calling the Gentiles, and His rejection of the 
 Jews. ' I have no pleasure in you, Israel, saith Jehovah 
 of hosts, nor will I accept even the unbloody sacrifice 
 at your hand,' to say nothing of the sacrifices of 
 animals, which at Israel's rejection would of course 
 become impossible, and which already among the 
 Jews of the dispersion had ceased to be offered. ' For 
 from the rising of the sun even unto the going down 
 of the same My name shall be great among the Gen- 
 tiles ; and in every place incense shall be offered unto 
 My name, and a pure unbloody offering : for My 
 
 shall stand upon the Mount of Olives, and the mount shall cleave 
 beneath them, and living waters shall go forth from Jerusalem, and 
 Jehovah shall be king over all the earth : in that day shall there be one 
 Jehovah, and His name one.' 
 
 Now the sole reason for conjuring up several Zechariahs, was the fact 
 of these predictions agreeing so exactly with what the old prophets had 
 taught about the Messiah. It seemed impossible that one who lived in 
 the time of Darius Hystaspes, and whose office it was to encourage the 
 exiles in rebuilding the temple, would foretell a fresh destruction of 
 Jerusalem in as clear a manner as Isaiah and Jeremiah had foretold its 
 capture by the Chaldees. But the minute criticism of the Germans has 
 scattered this theory to the winds. Especially De Wette and Stahelin 
 made a most exact and thorough examination of everything connected 
 both with the language of the book and with its historical allusions, 
 and came to the conclusion, not only that the last six chapters were 
 written by the same author, but that, whoever he was, he also wrote 
 the first eight. Ewald, however, still divides the book into several 
 fragments, which he assigns to different periods, but without giving any 
 adequate reasons for his decisions. 
 
VIII.] PROPHESIED BY MA LA CHI. 289 
 
 name shall be great among the Gentiles, saith Jehovah 
 of hosts (Mai. i. 10, n).' The Israelites must have 
 read such a prophecy with sinking hearts, and its 
 ominous meaning was made the more threatening by 
 Malachi being the prophet who was commissioned to 
 foretell in such clear terms the speedy advent of the 
 forerunner, and the sudden appearance immediately 
 afterwards in His temple of the Lord, as the mes- 
 senger of the new covenant. Clearly too he sets 
 forth that separation between the believing and the 
 unbelieving Israelites, which was to be effected by the 
 preaching of the apostles, as the heralds of this new 
 covenant, even within the lifetime of the very genera- 
 tion who had seen our Lord manifest in the flesh. 
 Nationally it was the last day of acceptance for the 
 Jews, and Christ sat, during the last few years of the 
 Mosaic dispensation, as a refiner and purifier of silver, 
 putting aside for the Christian Church all the faithful 
 and true : leaving for Titus and the armies of Rome 
 all ' impostors, and adulterers, and false-swearers, and 
 those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, 
 and the fatherless, and who turn the stranger from 
 his right, and fear not Me, saith Jehovah of hosts 
 (Mai. iii. 1-5).' 
 
 Upon this, and much more, there is no time to 
 speak. For the Bible is like an ever-flowing fountain. 
 Take what we will, and as much as we will, we ever 
 leave more than we take to satisfy the wants of 
 others b . Neither the writers nor the thinkers of any 
 
 b Compare the passages culled from St. Augustine in Archbishop 
 Trench's ' Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount,' pp. 5 sqq., expres- 
 sive of that great father's ' entire confidence that in the Scriptures were 
 laid up all treasures of wisdom and knowledge.' 
 
 U 
 
290 PROPHECY CULMINATES [lect. 
 
 one age can exhaust its fulness. For nearly eighteen 
 centuries men have thought and written upon that 
 one book, and if for eighteen more centuries men so 
 write, yet will there still remain much to call for fresh 
 examination and fuller enquiry: new knowledge to be 
 won, old truths to be better and more fully understood. 
 I do but submit to the general law in acknowledging 
 that my subject is ten times larger than I can ade- 
 quately treat. I have but stirred the surface, whereas 
 if I had dug deeper, I should have won a richer har- 
 vest. Yet even the slightest stirring of God's Word 
 yields abundant fruit. The books of men have their 
 day, and then grow obsolete. God's Word is ever 
 fresh and new — like Himself, ' the same yesterday, 
 to-day, and for ever.' Time passes over it, but it ages 
 not. As long as the Church shall last, so long will 
 it be the voice of God speaking in it and to it ; and 
 that not as a thing of the past, but as a thing of the 
 present. ' The Word of the Lord is quick, — alive,' 
 says the apostle to the Hebrews (iv. 12). Its power is 
 as fresh as if God spake it but yesterday. 
 
 All these later prophets, then, add each his own 
 portion to the exact delineation of Christ and the 
 doctrines of the Gospel. But, passing them by, I 
 shall content myself with a few words upon Isaiah, as 
 being the prophet who gives us the clearest possible 
 description of Christ's person and office. In Isaiah 
 all the peculiarities of Hebrew prophecy reach their 
 highest elevation, and especially in the last twenty- 
 seven chapters, concerning which no critic of note 
 abroad any longer holds that they can be distin- 
 guished from the first thirty-nine chapters, by any 
 test either of language or matter. If any critic at 
 
VIII. ] IN ISAIAH. 291 
 
 home still holds that some Babylonian Isaiah wrote 
 the last twenty-seven chapters, it is because criticism 
 with us is, as a rule, at second-hand, and it is only 
 gradually that we learn what is the conclusion arrived 
 at by those abroad, who devote their whole lives to 
 study. What that conclusion is the reader will find 
 in my Preface c . It is not what we hold. A routed 
 army will still try to save w T hat it can of its baggage : 
 and with Isaiah the negative critics can have no peace. 
 For the mention of Cyrus by name, and the circum- 
 stantial account of the manner in which Babylon was 
 captured, cannot be explained away as mere outlooks 
 and presentiments. Either they were written after 
 the event, or prophecy is supernatural and divine, and 
 ' God the Holy Ghost spake by the prophets.' 
 
 Theirs is a hard fate. They have to turn God out 
 of His own word, and out of His own world ; and it 
 is not easy to do either one or the other. When they 
 began what they are pleased to call (modestly ?) the 
 higher criticism, they supposed that if they could sug- 
 gest doubts about the dates of some few very remark- 
 able prophecies — that if, by the power of reiterated 
 assertion, they could make people suppose that this 
 passage was an interpolation, and that a forgery — then 
 all their work would be done. Knowing the credulity 
 of unbelief, they did reasonably count upon rationalists 
 being childish enough to take upon trust two Isaiahs, 
 two Daniels, and three Zechariahs. But these make- 
 
 c Ewald's view will be seen below, note e , page 295. Virtually, he 
 acknowledges that more or less of eleven chapters out of the twenty- 
 seven are irreconcilable with Doderlein's theory. A very full discussion 
 of the authorship of these chapters will be found in Mr. Stanley Leathes' 
 ' Witness of the Old Testament to Christ,' pp. 254-300. 
 
 U 2 
 
292 ENTANGLEMENTS [LECT. 
 
 shifts are by no means easy to manage ; and, behind, 
 there are a multitude of prophecies as exact, as precise, 
 as completely fulfilled, as those more commonly put 
 forward in argument. The prophecy of Cyrus by name, 
 and of the capture of Babylon, does not stand alone : 
 from beginning to end the Bible is a book of special 
 predictions exactly fulfilled. Take it as God's word, 
 and its various parts all unite well together, and are all 
 capable of satisfactory exposition ; and the difficulties 
 in it are such only as were reasonably to be expected 
 in a book which gives us all necessary knowledge of 
 another world, but in human language, through the 
 medium of human thoughts and human ideas. There 
 must be mysteries in such a book : places where the 
 human words can give us but a faint and shadowy 
 representation of the Divine reality. But treat the 
 Bible as an ordinary book, as the mere remains of a 
 curious national literature, and you are involved at 
 once in hopeless entanglements. The Divine element 
 in it is too strong, too clearly evident, to yield to this 
 treatment. You must upset all Jewish history, all 
 Jewish chronology ; you must cut out large portions 
 of every prophetic writing, and bring them down to 
 a time removed by centuries from that in which the 
 prophet lived : you must say that the rest is obscure, 
 unintelligible, meaningless. Anyhow the Bible can- 
 not be an ordinary book. For if the miracles and 
 prophecies recorded in it are real and true, then must 
 God have been with the writers and workers of those 
 miracles in an extraordinary manner. If they are not 
 true, then the book is an imposture, and every portion 
 of it which contains a prediction must have been 
 written after the event predicted had happened. It 
 
VIII.] OF THE NEGATIVE CRITICISM. 293 
 
 is this necessity which requires the invention of those 
 numerous shadowy personages, referred to above, 
 summoned up to write a bit of a book now, and a 
 bit then, as occasion serves. Fortunately, the fertility 
 of the imagination of the negative critics has bounds 
 set to it. They cannot say of any prophecy fulfilled 
 in Christ, or in His Church, that it was written after 
 the event. For, three centuries before Christ came, 
 God was pleased in His providence to cause the 
 Septuagint version of the Old Testament to be made 
 at Alexandria by a colony of Jews placed there 
 by Alexander, and who gradually became greatly 
 estranged from their brethren at Jerusalem. But 
 for this independent testimony, we should have been 
 told that the chief prophecies were fabricated by 
 Christian writers ; and that predictions of Christ, so 
 plain and clear, were interpolations put into the Bible 
 after the event d . 
 
 d It should also be remembered that the Jews, immediately after the 
 return from the exile, set themselves most earnestly to the study of their 
 sacred books. Their great scribe Ezra is believed on reasonable evidence 
 to have begun the work of settling the canon of Scripture, and tradition 
 ascribes to Nehemiah the gathering of a library, containing the acts of 
 the kings and prophets (2 Mace. ii. 13). The previous age of Hezekiah, 
 as I have shown, was one of very high culture; this culture revived 
 immediately after the return from Babylon, and the style of the three 
 last prophets and of the post-exilian Psalms is far more pure than that 
 of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Plainly it was an age when the old models 
 were carefully studied. The numerous books quoted or referred to in 
 Chronicles prove how large were the literary resources of Ezra and his 
 contemporaries ; and the men of the Great Synagogue continued his 
 work. In Ecclesiasticus we see with what reverence the prophets were 
 regarded, and Isaiah is referred to as the author of these last twenty- 
 seven chapters: * Esay comforted them that mourn in Sion (Ecclus. 
 xlviii. 24, Is. xl. 1, lii. 9).' The external evidence, in short, gives 
 a strong presumption for the general authenticity of the prophetic 
 writings : and no negative critic, to the best of my knowledge, has 
 
294 LAST TWENTY-SEVEN [lect. 
 
 And nowhere are these predictions more clear and 
 plain than in these last twenty-seven chapters of 
 Isaiah. They are, as I believe, the final memorial of 
 the prophet's teaching, a monograph written in the 
 calm seclusion of his later life, when retired from the 
 turmoil of public business, saddened, too, it may be, 
 by the failure of Hezekiah's reforms, viewing with 
 heartfelt sorrow that relapse of the nation into sin, 
 which, upon the succession of the child Manasseh to 
 the throne, amounted almost to national apostasy ; 
 in grief at the present, he turned away from the 
 sickening sight of God's own people offering human 
 sacrifices to devils, to concentrate all his powers upon 
 the contemplation of the future and happier times of 
 Messiah. It was a monograph w r ritten chiefly for the 
 use and study of that portion of Israel which was true 
 to its calling — the prophetic order. Isaiah had not to 
 combat and struggle, like Jeremiah, with corruption 
 at home. There were many lukewarm prophets it 
 may be (Is. xxx. 10), some utterly corrupt (Micah iii. 
 5, u), but the mass was still true. It is, however, 
 abundantly plain to any attentive reader of the Bible 
 that Hezekiah's later days were days of disappoint- 
 ment, when, in spite of all that king and prophet 
 could do, idolatry was generally prevalent. And thus 
 Isaiah represents the people as ' enflaming themselves 
 with idols under every green tree, and slaying the 
 children in the torrent-beds under the clifts of the 
 
 grappled with it. No one has shown when, or under what circum- 
 stances, or by whose hands, this falsification of the Hebrew Scriptures 
 took place. It is a thing unparalleled in any other literature. We 
 ought to have something more than mere subjective criticism. Sub- 
 jective criticism can do much : but it must be sober and careful. That 
 of the negative critics is usually wilful, capricious, and fanciful. 
 
vili.] CHAPTERS OF ISAIAH. 295 
 
 rocks (Is. lvii. 5).' Now I need scarcely say, that as 
 there are no torrents, but only canals in the flat 
 alluvial soil of Babylonia, so there are no torrent-beds 
 there, but that these form a common feature of the 
 landscape in Palestine as of all other mountainous 
 countries. Such places were the favourite haunts of 
 superstition, and there, in the deep channels worn by 
 the rushing streams of winter, they reared, it seems, 
 altars of the loose stones, and celebrated on them 
 their horrid Moloch-rites. ' Among the smooth stones 
 of the torrent-bed is the place chosen for the sacrifice : 
 they, even they, are Israel's lot.' Its lot, its inherit- 
 ance, used to be Jehovah : but now their God, their 
 country, their love as parents, all that ennobles man, 
 is rejected and trampled under foot, and nothing 
 valued but what ministers to sin ! And so, on these 
 stones placed altar-wise, ' they pour their drink offer- 
 ing, and there they offer their meat offering.' Now 
 this portion of the last twenty-seven chapters Ewald 
 and other great critics have at length been forced to 
 own must have been written in Palestine, and most 
 of them further grant that it describes the state of 
 things before the exile, and that there is no evidence, 
 but rather the contrary, of human sacrifices having 
 been offered at Babylon. They invent, however, for 
 it a shadowy author, who lived, they say, during 
 Manasseh's reign e . 
 
 e According to Ewald, Proph. d. A. B. iii. 27, several portions of 
 this last prophecy of Isaiah, namely, chaps, xl. 1, 2, lii., liii., liv. 1-12, 
 lvi. 9-12, lvii. i-ii, were written by an unknown prophet, who lived 
 in the time of Manasseh. He invents this mythical personage in a few 
 off-hand lines at the end of vol. i. p. 537, but in this latter place he 
 speaks of him more respectfully, and laments that we possess ' only 
 
296 IDOLATRY IN ISAIAH'S DAYS [LECT. 
 
 Now it is the state of things here described which 
 is the key to the whole monograph. There are 
 periods in every nation's history when it seems to 
 struggle violently against God, and endeavour to 
 free itself from the restraints of religion. In modern 
 days the struggle takes the form of infidelity : with 
 the Jews it took the form of idolatry. There was 
 much idolatry in Jeremiah's time. He, too, speaks of 
 human sacrifices outside the walls of Jerusalem 
 (Jer. vii. 31) in the valley of Hinnom. But in his 
 days it was more the wantonness of idolatry that 
 captivated the people than its darker rites ; and so 
 he tells how even in the streets of Jerusalem in 
 
 these noble fragments, as evidences of a time so remarkable as the reign 
 of Manasseh — a time of the deepest trial, distraction, and humiliation, 
 but also of endless elevation and high enlightenment on the part of the 
 most pious and the most true in Israel.' See also lb. hi. p. 102. It is 
 strange that reasonable men do not see the absurdity of these shadowy 
 personages, and how destructive they are to real criticism. Whenever 
 German critics get into a difficulty, and do not know what to do with 
 any portion of the .prophetical books, they invent an ancient prophet, 
 or a modern prophet, or a great unknown, or a little unknown, till one 
 is weary of such commonplace makeshifts. Thus the last twenty-seven 
 chapters are written by a ' great unknown ' who lived at Babylon at the 
 end of the exile : but first, he did not write the opening words, he 
 borrowed them from an earlier prophet. He wrote, however, the contro- 
 versy with idols, and the account of the capture of Babylon : but when 
 you reach the very kernel of the book, ch. liii., Ewald owns that it 
 could not have been written at Babylon. He even thinks that it may 
 describe Isaiah's own martyrdom, or if not, then the martyrdom of some 
 one else, but at all events the sorrows there described were suffered 
 under Manasseh (p. 90). Why ? Simply because the prophecy would 
 have been almost more remarkable in the mouth of an exile at Babylon 
 than in that of Isaiah. To get rid of its Messianic character you must 
 affirm that it is historical, an account of some past tragedy. Tradition 
 says that Isaiah was sawn asunder; it is certain that Manasseh was a 
 tyrant ; ergo, by the higher-criticism, it was Isaiah who ' bore our griefs 
 and carried our sorrows.' Well! then come chaps, lvi. 9-lvii. It is a 
 
VIII.] THAT OF DESPAIR. 297 
 
 the days of Josiah, and again in Egypt after the 
 destruction of the temple, ' the children gathered 
 the wood, and the fathers kindled the fire, and 
 the women kneaded dough to make cakes to 
 Melcath,' the love-goddess of those days (lb. vii. 
 18, xliv. 17, 19). But in Isaiah's later days it was 
 the darker side of idolatry which oppressed the 
 minds of the Jewish people : the idea that sin 
 could be atoned for only by the blood of the young, 
 the beautiful, the innocent. God was no longer, as 
 taught by Moses, a being good, merciful, gracious, 
 long-suffering : he was a dark, malignant, cruel demon, 
 who rejoiced in human woe, and whose envy and 
 
 passage which in Germany has brought great ridicule upon the negative 
 critics. No one on full consideration could believe that it was written 
 at Babylon, as was at first innocently affirmed. But Ewald is equal to 
 the emergency. It was copied from ' an ancient prophet,' and must be 
 printed in italics. But chaps, lviii. and lix. are almost as unmanageable, 
 so they, too, must be printed in italics, and assigned to a ' modern pro- 
 phet,' an imitator of Ezekiel (p. 107). And now there are no great 
 difficulties till we come to ch. lxiii. Judah had nothing to fear from 
 Edom and Bosra at Babylon. And so the first six verses are printed in 
 italics again, and the passage is said to be borrowed from the prophet 
 who wrote ch. lviii. (p 1 19). And as for all the rest Ewald fairly gives 
 it up. The great unknown may have written it, but at a later time, and 
 under different historical circumstances (p. 125). Ch, lxvi. 6, which 
 shows that the city and temple were still standing when the prophecy 
 was composed, must refer, he says, to a time subsequent to the decree 
 of Cyrus and the ' weak commencement of the rebuilding of the holy 
 city.' Observe then; omitting the opening words, eleven chapters out 
 of the twenty-seven, i. e. all the crucial passages, are confessedly jrre- 
 concileable with the theory of a great unknown having written this 
 magnificent composition at Babylon. Either, then, this book was 
 written by Isaiah, as the Jews constantly affirmed from the most ancient 
 times, or it is a piece of patchwork. Ewald has proved convincingly 
 that it is not the work of a Babylonian Isaiah. Is his own theory more 
 than an unwilling confession that the victory remains with the orthodox; 
 critics of Germany ? 
 
298 MOL CII- 1 VORSHIP [lect . 
 
 hatred of man could be appeased only by the vio- 
 lation of the holiest instincts of our nature. If 
 Melcath, the queen, was pleasure-giving, the stern 
 king Moloch f could be served only in anguish and 
 despair. 
 
 Now it is only too probable that the distress 
 occasioned by the Assyrian invasions had caused this 
 deep gloom of anguish to settle upon the national 
 mind. Isaiah describes Judaea as desolate, its cities 
 burnt with fire, the land devoured by marauding 
 strangers in the very presence of the hopeless in- 
 habitants, watching perhaps from the hill-tops the 
 destruction of their property. Zion alone is left, 
 and it is but as a booth put up for the temporary 
 use of the watchers in a vineyard (Is. i. 7, 8). 
 It was the first time, too, that the land had been 
 thus afflicted, and used as the people were to re- 
 gard temporal prosperity or adversity as the direct 
 results of religion, their faith seems to have given 
 way. In their anguish Isaiah describes them as 
 multiplying their sacrifices, and busying themselves 
 with all the externals of religion (i„ 11-15), but 
 Micah, his contemporary, discloses to us a darker 
 back-ground. He, too, speaks of the thousands of 
 rams they were willing to offer, and of meat-offer- 
 ings so numerous that the temple ran with rivers 
 of oil. But still unrepentant, and oppressed there- 
 fore with a sense of unforgiven sin, they looked 
 round for something wherewith to crush the con- 
 science, and were ready to ' give their first-born 
 
 1 I have little doubt that the right vocalization in Isaiah xxx. 33, 
 lvii. 9, is Tjpb Moloch, not 7]7E king, but it makes no difference what- 
 soever in the sense. 
 
VIII.] OCCASIONED BY MISERY. 299 
 
 for their transgression ; the fruit of the body for 
 the sin of the soul (Micah vi. 7). It was this 
 despairing unbelief which Hezekiah tried to stem 
 by a national reformation. This, too, was present to 
 Isaiah's mind when he wrote the last twenty-seven 
 chapters of his prophecy. He wished to meet this 
 despair : wished to give them consolation, and to 
 raise their hopes. He shows them, therefore, the 
 powerlessness of idols : tells them that though they 
 must go into captivity, yet that they shall be de- 
 livered. And then he sets before them their Mes- 
 siah — describes Him as the true expiation of sin, 
 the true giver of peace to the conscience : while 
 finally, in terms of mixed upbraiding and comfort, 
 he exhorts them to repentance, and declares to them 
 the future glories of the Church, Christ's love for 
 it, and the high office to which nationally and 
 individually they were called. 
 
 For the time both failed. Hezekiah's reforms 
 led to no national repentance, and Isaiah's exhort- 
 ations reached only that 'remnant,' in whom the 
 Jewish Church was to live on, till the time came 
 for it to do God's work. But, for the present, the 
 nation's faith totally gave way. The long reign 
 of Manasseh was a period of utter irreligion, when 
 everything good and right was persecuted to the 
 death. For unbelief is never a philosophy : a phi- 
 losophy may be — generally is — tolerant. Unbelief 
 is a propaganda, fierce usually, and intolerant, and 
 eager to crush out belief. And so Jeremiah, speaking 
 of Jerusalem in Manasseh's days, says, ' In thy skirts 
 is found the blood of the souls of the poor inno- 
 cents : I have not found it by secret search, but 
 
;oo 
 
 CAUSE [lect. 
 
 upon all these (Jer. ii. 34).' Like Jehoiakim's murder 
 of Urijah, Manasseh's bloodshed was done openly, 
 to strike terror, and put to silence that hateful 
 word of Jehovah, that would still speak of sin and 
 judgment. 
 
 This utter failure, then, of Judah's faith was prob- 
 ably the result of that first great wave of trouble 
 (Is. viii. 7, 8) which broke over the land in Heze- 
 kiah's days. Their faith had been hollow before, 
 but now it quite gave way. Isaiah describes their 
 unbelief in that stage in which it degrades the 
 outward forms of true religion to superstitious 
 uses. Micah describes it in that further stage 
 when it looks to a false creed for peace, and would 
 appease God, not by serving Him in holiness and 
 truth, but by offerings of pain and anguish and 
 cruelty. And gradually this darker side of unbelief 
 prevailed. The feeling which Micah describes grew 
 more intense in Hezekiah's later years : during 
 Manasseh's reign it became universal. He made 
 his own offspring to pass through the fire (2 Chron. 
 xxxiii. 6), but — poor child — when he came to the 
 throne at twelve years olds, he could have had 
 little to do with the nation's apostasy. There must 
 
 e It may be answered that children in the East are more pre- 
 cocious than with us, and that Josiah was equally young when he 
 began his reforms. But Josiah is just a case in point. He was 
 surrounded by good men, Hilkiah, Shaphan, and others. For four 
 years he did nothing, though he gave every indication of piety : at 
 twelve years old he began his reforms, but it was not till his eighteenth 
 year that the vigorous proceedings recorded in 2 Kings xxiii. took 
 place. These things depend not upon the precocity of the under- 
 standing, but upon the strength of the will, and it may be doubted 
 whether this ripens faster in the East than with us: witness our 
 own Eii ward VI. 
 
VIII.] OF JUDAH'S APOSTASY. 301 
 
 have been strong bad men behind, such as had 
 rejected God in Hezekiah's days. Men like Shebna 
 (Is. xxii. 15-19) had come to the front again, and 
 so those last fifteen years of Hezekiah's life (lb. 
 xxxviii. 5) were years probably of much sorrow, 
 when the king saw all his efforts for the spiritual 
 good of his people frustrated, and idolatry every 
 day more powerful and rampant throughout the 
 land. To his own soul this sorrow may have been 
 blessed (2 Kings xx. 19), but they were not years 
 in which he could have rejoiced. For evil seemed 
 in them more powerful than good. 
 
 During the latter part of Hezekiah's reign Isaiah 
 seems to have withdrawn from public business. The 
 first thirty-nine chapters record his labours during the 
 time when he was strong and active. They are the 
 record of a long life of duty : for when for the last 
 time he left the prophetic college to reprove Hezekiah 
 for his vanity, and forewarn him of the Babylonian 
 captivity, forty-six years had passed since, in the 
 last year of Uzziah, he was called to be a prophet h . 
 The time for personal labour was now past, but he 
 was no unobservant spectator of the signs of the 
 times ; and thus, in retirement, occupied probably 
 with teaching the sons of the prophets, he gathered 
 into one memorial the great truths which he had 
 
 h Isaiah was certainly very young at his call. During the reign 
 of Jotham he does not seem to have done much more than prepare for 
 his high office, and write the life of Uzziah. It is in the reign of 
 Ahaz that he first steps forth with great boldness and authority 
 in Jehovah's name, while the period of his greatest activity is the first 
 half of the reign of Jotham's grandson, Hezekiah. If he was about 
 Jeremiah's age when called to be a prophet he would be now (in the 
 fifteenth year of Hezekiah's reign) sixty-two years of age. 
 
302 GOD'S C0XTR0VERSY [LECT. 
 
 taught all life through, and which the present 
 circumstances of his times made more than ever 
 necessary. 
 
 The one great subject, then, of this his last writ- 
 ing is God's controversy with idols. With this 
 Isaiah begins : to this he returns. It was the 
 great struggle during Hezekiah's reign. Ahaz, his 
 father, Manasseh, his son, were both open idolaters. 
 Between these two there was an interval of thirty 
 years, during which Hezekiah struggled against the 
 national will ; but it prevailed, and Manasseh repre- 
 sented the winning side. Still the triumph of evil is 
 never more than temporary, and Isaiah, mindful of the 
 promises made to the nation, looked forward to a 
 better age, when Judah would again worship the one 
 God in truth. And with this he connected the be- 
 stowal of Christ. Necessarily so. Christ cannot come 
 to idolaters, or to atheists. The heart which is oc- 
 cupied by many gods : the heart which believes in 
 no God : in neither of them can Christ dwell. The 
 great preparation for Christ, throughout the Bible, 
 is the teaching that there is but one God, and the 
 teaching what that God is. It is only when men 
 know and feel, more or less thoroughly, that God is 
 a Spirit, that God is good, and that God is love, that 
 it becomes possible to worship Him in spirit and in 
 truth. And thus Isaiah begins by the utter over- 
 throw of all the principles of idolatry. And he does 
 it with a master's hand. Jeremiah — the authors of 
 several psalms — later prophets — apocryphal writers — 
 can but reproduce Isaiah's arguments. They exult in 
 them, repeat them as an unanswerable demonstration 
 of the follies of the heathen creed. They were 
 
viil] WITH IDOLS. 303 
 
 unanswerable. In due time they did banish idolatry 
 entirely from the minds of the Jews. Naturally a 
 very sensuous people, ' projectissima ad libidinem 
 gens (Tac. Hist. v. 5),' idolatry had a strong hold 
 upon them. They loved it because it was vile. 
 But the combined teaching of the two prophets, 
 Isaiah and Jeremiah, prevailed against their besetting- 
 sins. From the close of the Babylonian exile the 
 Jews hated idolatry as decidedly as before they had 
 loved and delighted in it. 
 
 This, then, was a very great step onwards in 
 God's purposes. The controversy with idols had 
 begun when Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees. God 
 had set him apart that his seed might grow into 
 a nation, whose office it should be to contend for a 
 spiritual faith. When we roll backward the pages 
 of history, we can generally discern, of all the chief 
 races of mankind, what is the purpose they have 
 served in God's counsels. So plain everywhere is 
 His handwriting. But here we have a nation whose 
 office is marked out for it at the commencement of its 
 history, and which has fulfilled that office exactly. 
 Abraham, indeed, was rather removed from evil 
 influences than commanded to testify publicly to 
 God's unity 1 . It was at the Exodus that the 
 struggle began in earnest ; and the result of that 
 struggle was to stamp deeply into the minds of 
 Israel those great spiritual truths which in the 
 Bible alone are expounded clearly and purely. 
 Take all your philosophies, and you will find them 
 only groping darkly and hesitatingly after those 
 
 1 See page 55, note c . 
 
304 ISRAEL IN EXILE [lect. 
 
 grand truths taught in the two first verses of Genesis, 
 that God created everything that is not God, and 
 that there is no progress from darkness to light, from 
 confusion to order, except by the presence of God's 
 Spirit. And for eight centuries after the time of 
 Moses these and the like truths were entrusted to 
 Israel's keeping. Taught in Israel by the law, by 
 the temple ritual, by the psalms, and by the prophets, 
 not merely were they maintained, but were growing 
 in depth and clearness, and both the men were being 
 prepared to teach them, and the truths were being 
 put in such a form as made them ripe and fit for the 
 acceptance of the whole world. 
 
 In Isaiah we reach the last stage of this prepara- 
 tion. For mark, as regards these last twenty-seven 
 chapters, what immediately precedes them. It is 
 Isaiah's visit to Hezekiah with the painful message, 
 ' Behold, the days come, that all that is in thine 
 house, and that which thy fathers have laid up in 
 store until this day, shall be carried to Babylon : 
 nothing shall be left, saith Jehovah. And of thy 
 sons that shall issue from thee, which thou shalt 
 beget, shall they take away ; and- they shall be 
 eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon (Is. 
 xxxix. 6, 7).' Now I have not time to stop and ask 
 whether Isaiah was likely to end his prophecies with 
 this announcement ? whether any prophet concludes 
 with a prediction of unmitigated evil ? But it is 
 necessary to point out that henceforward the idea of 
 Israel's exile is uppermost in Isaiah's mind. Involun- 
 tarily the fact clearly breaks through that the writer 
 was living at Jerusalem. Even such small matters 
 as his calling the land Hephzibah, the name of He:t> 
 
VIII.] ISAIAH'S IEADING THOUGHT. 305 
 
 kiah's wife, all agree with this supposition, and with 
 no other. But Judah in exile is the thought upper- 
 most in Isaiah's mind throughout. He seems to have 
 gone home, and to have made this sad prediction to 
 Hezekiah the one subject of his prayers and medita- 
 tions. There was nothing new in it. Jerusalem a 
 heap of ruins, Zion ploughed as a field, the area of 
 the temple desolate and bare ; these, as we have seen, 
 were the opening declarations of Isaiah's prophecy. 
 Yet truths come home to men at various times with 
 fuller force ; and the picture of Hezekiah's descend- 
 ants ministering as eunuchs to the pride of a savage 
 conquerer may well have set Isaiah pondering upon 
 the mysterious ways of God. 
 
 Israel in exile, then, is the starting-point of these 
 last twenty-seven chapters, and thus they are a 
 natural sequel to the melancholy announcement made 
 to Hezekiah. As I have repeatedly said, the prophets 
 never predict anything simply that men may know 
 the future : their words have ever a moral purpose. 
 Hezekiah was the first to be benefited by Isaiah's 
 message ; but its chief fruits were those which the 
 prophet himself won by prayer and study for the 
 whole Church. 
 
 Of these, the first was for the Jews themselves. As 
 I have said, that despairing form of idolatry which 
 then prevailed was partly due to the misery, so 
 utterly beyond anything in previous times, which 
 the Assyrian invasions had brought upon the land. 
 Isaiah heals this by hope. Just as Jeremiah's pre- 
 diction of the seventy years of captivity became, as 
 time rolled on, the comfort and strength of the exiles 
 at Babylon, so Isaiah's plain and definite predictions 
 
 X 
 
306 ISRAEL'S WORK [lect. 
 
 of the return, and of the rebuilding of the city and 
 temple, and of the grand and unique though spiritual 
 destiny of the nation, were intended to rouse it from 
 its despair, and quicken it with new hope. 
 
 But there was more than this. That exile was itself 
 the first beginning of the fulfilment by Israel of its 
 appointed duties. And this, again, is another key to 
 unlock the meaning of these twenty-seven chapters. 
 Why did Isaiah at this very time come forward with 
 arguments which utterly overthrew the principles of 
 idolatry ? If there be a God, and Isaiah was His 
 prophet, it was because it was just the right time for 
 them. If there be not, I have nothing more to say, 
 except that it actually was just the right time, and so 
 you endow chance with a will and a purpose. The 
 captivity of Israel had become a settled decree of 
 prophecy. It was to take place in about a century. 
 As soon as it had happened, the people would find 
 themselves face to face with idolatry. Of this inter- 
 vening century, half was occupied by the open hea- 
 thenism of Manasseh's reign, when Jehovah's worship 
 was violently suppressed. Where was the mighty 
 though silent influence which maintained the pure 
 doctrines of the Mosaic teaching during this period, 
 and gave them at the close of it such entire ascend- 
 ancy, that at Babylon no single doubt about the folly 
 of idol-worship ever entered the people's minds ? 
 
 At Babylon, then, in the ninth century after Moses, 
 Israel's specific work began. Their training was now 
 all but completed, and the time had arrived when 
 they must begin to make the Gentile world ready for 
 Christ. For this purpose they were scattered far and 
 wide. Other nations when scattered in this way are 
 
VIII.] BEGAN AT BABYLON. 307 
 
 absorbed. Their influence is often great for a time, 
 as was that of the Greeks who followed in the wake 
 of Alexander's conquests, but at length the race itself 
 disappears. Not so the Jews. To do God's work 
 they must be dispersed, but He endued them with 
 such vitality and tenaciousness, that to this day they 
 remain a distinct and separate people. Now this dis- 
 persion began just six centuries before Christ, when 
 Jeconiah was carried into captivity. Up to that time 
 the oracles of truth had been intrusted to Israel's 
 keeping, and confined to their sole use. Yet from 
 the first, account for it how you will, they had been 
 taught by their own chiefs and sages, that they had 
 not received their many privileges for their own good 
 simply, but for the good of others ; and that in them 
 all the nations of the earth were to be blessed. Never 
 was there a people who set themselves more obsti- 
 nately against what their own sacred books told them 
 was the one purpose of their existence. But that pur- 
 pose was fulfilled in spite of them. Upon the fertile 
 plains of the Euphrates arose vast earthly empires, 
 cruel, merciless, the robbers and oppressors of man- 
 kind ; not worse, perhaps, than other great military 
 powers, but as bad. And these crushed the independ- 
 ence of Judaea, but the Jews were thereby dispersed 
 throughout the world. Everything proves that the 
 time of Hezekiah was a period of great culture. It 
 was a time when literature had advanced far enough 
 to be interested in and proud of its own past career ; 
 and thus we read of the men of Hezekiah making 
 search for and copying out the proverbs of Solomon, 
 and the three first books of the Psalms apparently 
 were collected and arranged by the same hands. So, 
 
 x 2 
 
308 HIGH CIVILIZATION OF JUDMA [lect. 
 
 too, in Isaiah, the prophet of Hezekiah's days, the 
 Hebrew language reached its highest perfection. No 
 such Hebrew was written before or after ; and though 
 there were among the prophets who succeeded him 
 his equals perhaps in native power, yet there is none 
 whose style is so pure and perfect. Whence, then, 
 came it that just when there was this palmy state of 
 things at Jerusalem, when the long peace of the reigns 
 of Uzziah and Jotham had led to these happy results, 
 that God's providence should permit those merciless 
 Assyrians to crush and destroy a civilization so infi- 
 nitely superior to anything that existed at Nineveh 
 or Babylon ? 
 
 This is the question which the prophet Habakkuk 
 asks in Josiah's days. How could God permit a hasty 
 and bitter nation like the Chaldaeans, men that were 
 idolaters, who sacrificed to their net, and burned in- 
 cense to their drag, to slay the nations continually, 
 and devour those that were more righteous than them- 
 selves ? Equally were the cruelties of the Assyrians 
 a terrible stumbling-block in Hezekiah's days, and 
 made men turn to Moloch, a demon to be served 
 only by human tears, and by the offerings of despair. 
 Habakkuk gives the answer which suited those times, 
 and quieted, no doubt, many troubled consciences. 
 But he could not give the whole answer. It is ever 
 the weakness of man's judgment when he tries to 
 justify the dealings of God, that he can know only in 
 part. Our judgments are the judgments of ignorance. 
 By Habakkuk, however, God revealed just such a 
 portion of the truth as satisfied men's requirements 
 then. He showed that the Chaldaeans were com- 
 missioned only to chastise Israel ; and that God's 
 
VIII.] WHEN CRUSHED. 309 
 
 justice would visit their sins with a severe and merited 
 retribution. Babylon, the city built with blood, was, 
 as Habakkuk foretold, the scene of murder and 
 usurpation oft repeated till Cyrus captured it, and 
 from that day it has been an independent state no 
 more. But our interest lies not with Babylon, but 
 with Judaea ; and now that the whole course of God's 
 Providence is open to us, and not a part only, we can 
 see more clearly why, just when Judaea had reached 
 its highest point of civilization, God allowed those 
 fierce empires to arise and trample it under foot. 
 
 For, to use Isaiah's metaphor, it was the crushing 
 of the cluster in order to obtain from it the new wine 
 (lxv. 8, 9). The grapes must be ripe before they are 
 crushed. Had Israel been dispersed earlier, they 
 would not have been fit for their mission. Had the 
 Philistines crushed Israel in Samuel's days, the one 
 true religion would have been trampled out. Had 
 the dispersion taken place soon after the disruption 
 of Solomon's empire, you would have had a set of 
 men of great military capacity, as good soldiers as the 
 Chaldaeans, who, until they established their short- 
 lived empire at Babylon, were the great mercenaries 
 of the East : but that would have been all. As you 
 read the books of Judges and Kings, you see the dis- 
 cipline by which God formed the most firm, tenacious, 
 inflexible, and enduring race that ever existed, or that 
 now exists, on the face of the earth. Without the 
 military glory of David's empire, without the fame 
 for wealth and wisdom of Solomon's court, the Jews 
 could not have been that lasting monument of God's 
 dealings with mankind which they are now. No 
 nation can look forward to an abiding position on 
 
310 GOD'S PURPOSE [lect. 
 
 earth for the future, which cannot look back with 
 pride upon the past. But so false a position as that 
 of earthly empire for God's chosen people lasted but 
 for a short time. Restored to the happier position 
 of a petty monarchy, they slowly ripened under a 
 long succession of good kings till they became fit for 
 God's purposes. And then there came bad kings ; 
 for the higher good is never reached without a 
 struggle, and men like Manasseh and Jehoiakim 
 served as a fan to separate the base and mean and 
 unworthy from Jehovah's true followers (Mat. iii. 12). 
 Finally there arose that succession of monstrous 
 earthly empires, which occupy the pages of profane 
 history : empires at first of brute force, but which in 
 time gave way to the learning and commerce of 
 Greece, and to Rome's empire of law. No sooner did 
 these earthly empires arise, than the dispersion of 
 Israel began. ' I will bring forth a seed out of Jacob, 
 and out of Judah an inheritor of my mountains.' 
 They are Isaiah's words just where he had been 
 speaking of the crushing of the grape as a necessary 
 step towards the obtaining of the new wine. The 
 whole passage is one full of all the marked peculi- 
 arities of prophecy. It begins with the call of the 
 Gentiles, while it reproaches the Jews as a rebellious 
 people, stained with the worst forms of idolatry and 
 sin. Punished they must be if God be just. This 
 crushing, then, by Assyria, is no harsh decree, serving 
 merely for a future purpose. The dealings of God 
 with Israel — with man always — combine what is most 
 just and merciful and good for the present, with what 
 is also best for the future. Had Israel not sinned, 
 and so deserved the chastening armies of Assyria, 
 
viii. ] IN THE DISPERSION OF ISRAEL. 311 
 
 God would have brought about the necessary dis- 
 persion of the Jews in other ways, as He did increase 
 it subsequently by the favour of Alexander, and by 
 the aptness of the Jews for trade. The carrying 
 away, then, to Babylon, was primarily the chastise- 
 ment due to their iniquities. Yet it was also, by a 
 deeper and more mysterious counsel, for the redemp- 
 tion of the whole human race. Crush the cluster : 
 yes ! for so will the new wine be found in it, the new 
 spiritual Israel, Abraham's seed by faith in Christ. 
 But ' destroy it not ; for a blessing is in it :' the old 
 blessing, ' In thy seed shall all the nations of the 
 earth be blessed.' And therefore he proceeds, ' I will 
 bring forth a seed out of Jacob, and out of Judah an 
 inheritor of my mountains.' Chastised though it be, 
 yet that seed of believers which is to inherit, not 
 mount Zion only, but all God's holy mountains, His 
 Churches everywhere, can be brought forth only by 
 Israel's aid. Scattered far and wide, they carry with 
 them the promise of universal blessing, and immedi- 
 ately begin the work of the renovation of the world. 
 
 And just when the time of Israel's dispersion was 
 at hand, Isaiah wrote his prophecy. The elect part 
 of the nation was ripe for it ; the teaching of all the 
 prophets had gradually led up to, and prepared for it : 
 and if the Jews were to do their work, it was essential 
 that they should carry with them some such docu- 
 ment as this. They were going forth as the advanced 
 guard, comparatively few in number, at a time when 
 idolatry was firmly established everywhere, and none 
 doubted but that the heathen gods were real beings, 
 delighting some in lust and impurity, some in cruelty 
 and bloodshed. They were to shake this belief, and 
 
312 PURPOSE OF THE [lect. 
 
 destroy its influence, and lead the thoughtful every- 
 where to the conviction that there is but one God, 
 and that He is good. And henceforward all Israel's 
 history tends to this one object. They are restored, 
 and Jerusalem rebuilt, not merely because the Messiah 
 must be born of them, and must have Judaea as the 
 scene of His labours, and Jews for His apostles and 
 the propagators of His teaching, but also because it 
 gave stability to the Jews abroad. They went up 
 there at the great feasts, and so their faith was quick- 
 ened, and their views and doctrines brought back to 
 the standard of the Scriptures. When we read Philo, 
 and the works of other Jews of the Alexandrian 
 school, we see how great a purpose Jerusalem served 
 in the economy of preparation for the giving of the 
 Gospel. The Jews living among the heathen were 
 the connecting link between truth as revealed in the 
 Scriptures, and the truths of natural religion. Open 
 themselves to the influence of Greek philosophy, it 
 was their office to bring the influence of Divine know- 
 ledge in return to bear upon the Greek mind. But 
 their teaching, in spite of the extraordinary tenacity 
 of the race, would not have been so powerful or so 
 pure had not the Jews of the disperskm from time to 
 time revisited Jerusalem, and gone forth thence re- 
 newed and refreshed for their noble warfare. In no 
 other way could the balance have been maintained. 
 We now see what was the object of the Divine pro- 
 vidence in those constant journeyings thrice every 
 year to the holy seat of their religion, so stringently 
 required of every Israelite in the Mosaic law. Thrice 
 in the year there were those great gatherings, and 
 though distance prevented the Jews abroad from 
 
VIII.] THREE GREAT JEWISH FEASTS. 313 
 
 being present at every festival, yet there were few 
 who did not often in. their lives revisit Zion, to 
 worship there in all the beauty of holiness. This 
 also was the great means by which Christianity was 
 so rapidly propagated. Not at the first Pentecost 
 merely, but constantly, at every feast, ' devout men 
 out of every nation under heaven ' were brought into 
 contact with the apostles and the Christian Church 
 at Jerusalem, and returned home to prepare men's 
 minds in every city for the visits of Christian mis- 
 sionaries. But if we suppose that this was the sole 
 use of those great gatherings, we shall lose half the 
 truth. The place held by Jerusalem in the affections 
 of the Jews, and their constant pilgrimages to it, had 
 kept them true to their faith and earnest in their 
 calling during those six centuries before Christ, in 
 which God's providence was yearly dispersing them 
 more and more widely throughout the whole civilized 
 world. So complete, so perfect in every point, ex- 
 ternally as well as internally, was the preparation in 
 Judaism for the Christian Church. 
 
 The return, then, of Ezra and the exiles from 
 Babylon, the rebuilding of Jerusalem, the restoration 
 of the temple and its glorious ritual, were things 
 absolutely necessary for the establishment and pro- 
 pagation of the Gospel. Without the dispersion of 
 the Jews there would have been nothing to prepare 
 the Gentile mind for Christ : without Jerusalem, and 
 all those influences which knit the hearts of the dis- 
 persed Jews in unwavering love and duty to their 
 hallowed home, they could not have maintained that 
 firm adherence to their law, that inflexible determina- 
 tion to be Jews and nothing else, which marks them 
 
314 THE JEWS ISOLATED [lect. 
 
 everywhere, which rouses against them the anger of 
 the philosophic historian, and the satire of the Roman 
 moralist : but without which the influences which the 
 Greek and Roman world brought to bear upon them 
 would have been irresistible. With open indignation 
 Tacitus reviles the Jews for that superstitionis pervi- 
 cacia, that fides obstinata, which made them, even at 
 banquets, sit at a separate table, and prevented all 
 intermarriage with the Gentiles. To him it is simply 
 adversas omnes alios hostile odium (Tac. Hist. ii. 4, v. 5) ' 
 a bitter enmity against the whole human race. And 
 this isolation, he says, was simply for a reason so 
 absurd to his philosophic mind as a difference of 
 creed. The Jews, he says, worship God mente sola, — 
 worship with them was spiritual, a service of the heart 
 and affections. And then he says, ' they worship but 
 one God, and believe that God to be supreme and 
 eternal, incapable of change and of death : and they 
 reject the worship of images, shaped after the likeness 
 of men, and liable to decay.' To us these truths are 
 worth any price : and we note with wonder the long 
 course of discipline, by which the providence of God 
 formed in the Jews that tenacity of character, and 
 that strength of will, which enabled them to stand up 
 firmly, and resolutely, though alone, amid the thou- 
 sand reasons that tempted them to conform to the 
 world around them. But no ! they were God's wit- 
 nesses, and while there were many that hated and 
 reviled them for their inflexible steadfastness, the 
 more thoughtful and unworldly listened to their noble 
 teaching about the oneness and goodness of God, and 
 believed that God was one, and was good. 
 
 Had not Jerusalem, then, been rebuilt, and the law 
 
viii.] AMONG THE GENTILES. 315 
 
 of Moses obtained there a local establishment, the 
 Jews could not so easily have maintained themselves 
 in their dispersion as a separate people. But, next, 
 had Judaea been rich, prosperous, successful in war, 
 and thriving in commerce, the Jews would have re- 
 turned thither, and so again they would not have 
 effected the purpose for which God had formed them. 
 It is a glorious history, that history of the poor exiles 
 restored to their dear country. The martyr-spirit in 
 which they resisted the abominable persecutions of 
 the Syrian kings, the valour and heroism of the 
 Maccabees, this and more sheds a halo of light 
 around God's chosen people during the centuries 
 which preceded the coming of the Messiah. But 
 like most heroic histories, it is a history of the few 
 and the weak striving against the strong, a history, 
 therefore, of endurance, of indomitable resolution, of 
 determined resistance to wrong. But such a state 
 of things does not allure men from more peaceful 
 homes to take part in it. It made the Jews of the 
 dispersion proud of their country ; it made them, it 
 may be, hate uncharitably those Gentile kingdoms 
 which so cruelly illtreated the home of their race. 
 But every act of oppression drove many J'ews away 
 from their land : and at other times their aptitude for 
 trade, and their many useful, yes, and high qualities, 
 made rulers of large mind invite them as valued 
 settlers to new and rising towns. It was thus that 
 Alexandria became a second metropolis of the Jews, 
 and we may well contrast its fortunes — the fortunes 
 of a city founded for peaceful purposes — with those 
 of Babylon, ' the city built with blood.' Sometimes, 
 then, by violence, occasionally by gentler means, the 
 
6 
 
 1 6 THEIR SEPARATE EXISTENCE [lect. 
 
 dispersion of the Jews from the time of Nebuchad- 
 nezzar's conquest was continual. On the one hand, 
 there was everything to make them proud of Jeru- 
 salem, and love it, and go there from time to time, 
 and have their faith quickened and refreshed by the 
 sight of the temple - services, and by the glorious 
 memories of martyrdoms, and of stern resistance to 
 wrone. and noble deeds of heroism which hallowed 
 every spot there ; as well as by intercourse with 
 the great teachers who had made Jerusalem a town 
 wholly devoted to religion : on the other hand, there 
 was no motive to return and settle there. The 
 old did, that they might die and be buried in holy 
 ground : the young and active sought their fortunes 
 in more prosperous lands. I may even add, that 
 physical causes conspired with political in producing 
 this effect. The soil of Palestine, owing perhaps to 
 the destruction of the trees, owing certainly to the 
 continual ravages of war, has undergone an extraor- 
 dinary deterioration since the days of the monarchy. 
 Districts where at every turn you meet the ruins of 
 wine-presses, and every mark of a large and thriving 
 population, will now scarcely maintain a few half- 
 starved sheep. It was possibly with the Assyrian 
 invasions that this deterioration began. 
 
 I ask you, then, to notice that Isaiah wrote rather 
 more than a century before this dispersion of the 
 Jews began. The interval just about served for the 
 book of his prophecies to become widely and generally 
 known : and silently, I doubt not, it was working 
 during Manasseh's evil reign, and was the secret root 
 of Josiah's piety, and the teacher of those holy men 
 who stood in such goodly numbers round him. 
 
VIII.] HOW MAINTAINED. 317 
 
 Notice, too, that this dispersion is the third great 
 stage of God's dealings with His people. The first 
 was the Exodus, the second was the monarchy, the 
 third the dispersion. Moses was God's representative, 
 His great chief and spokesman, for the first period ; 
 Samuel for the second ; Isaiah for the third. Is it, 
 then, so incredible that Isaiah, after having predicted 
 the Babylonian captivity to Hezekiah, should have 
 been inspired by God to give that instruction which 
 so great a crisis required ? and that God should have 
 set His seal to Isaiah's words by the express pre- 
 diction that Cyrus would let the Jews go free, and 
 restore them to their land ? Grant that it is, in some 
 respects, a more express prediction than you usually 
 find in Holy Scripture : yet is there not a sufficient 
 cause ? Our Lord's miracles were greater and more 
 wonderful than those of any preceding period. They 
 offer no difficulty to the believer, for he knows that 
 it was the last and final stage of God's revelation. 
 His purposes were then full, and so He sent no longer 
 a servant, but the Son — Himself God blessed for 
 evermore. If miracles and prophecy, when Christ 
 came, necessarily reached their highest elevation, is it 
 not reasonable that at the third stage Isaiah should 
 also be in some way or other more plainly accredited 
 by God as a messenger from Him ? Was there not 
 the same necessity for a special proof of Isaiah's mis- 
 sion as there had been at the first stage when God 
 sent Moses as His prophet ? 
 
 And still I must notice one thing more. Prophecy 
 ceased at the dispersion. It belongs distinctly to the 
 second stage of God's dealings with Israel. It began 
 with Samuel, and ended with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and 
 
318 PROPHECY CEASED [LECT. 
 
 Daniel. Moses, as I have shown, occupied different 
 ground from those who were ' the prophets.' He 
 stands in direct relation to our Lord. In our Lord, 
 with John the Baptist as His forerunner, and the 
 apostles as His messengers to all the world, there was 
 a fulness of every grace, by which all the blessings 
 and gifts of every previous period were poured out 
 afresh in riper and larger measure upon the Church. 
 But prophecy distinctively belongs to the age from 
 Samuel to the dispersion. It was not withdrawn 
 abruptly. It still lingered in those beautiful Psalms 
 of Degrees sung by the returning exiles, and in those 
 prophets who helped in rearing the second house. 
 But at the dispersion it had done its work. The Jews 
 wondered that no prophet more arose. We can see 
 why the gift was withdrawn. The time of teaching 
 had ceased. The Jews were children no longer, but 
 grown men ; and like grown men they must leave 
 home, and go out into all lands to carry to others the 
 truths which the prophets had taught them. They 
 must study their Scriptures : must translate them : 
 must gather their teaching into one focus, and bring 
 their concentrated light to shine upon the dark re- 
 gions of heathenism. You never find the Jews of the 
 dispersion falling away into idolatry. They had their 
 faults, I do not deny it. But their faults did not lie 
 in their creed or their teaching : and the reason why 
 the heathen world so hated them was their evident 
 superiority to the heathens both in doctrine and in 
 morals. At Jerusalem, when the Christian Church 
 had gathered into it the elect, I read with sorrow the 
 painful picture drawn of the rest in the pages of 
 Josephus. But it is the description of the threshing- 
 
VIII.] AT THE DISPERSION. 319 
 
 floor after the wheat has been separated from the 
 chaff. His pages also tell us how rapid had been the 
 progress of corruption at Jerusalem during the last 
 few festering years. We must not judge by his 
 narrative of the moral state of the Jews at an earlier 
 time, nor of that of the Jews of the dispersion. There 
 were bad among them as well as good : but the good 
 and true were numerous. There were those every- 
 where who were themselves ripening for Christ's 
 kingdom, and preparing others for it. Of the Jews 
 at home and abroad, of those called to be God's 
 people everywhere and in all times, mournfully we 
 own the painful fact that Christ's is ever a ' little flock.' 
 1 Semen Abrahae,' says St. Augustine, speaking of 
 those who shared Abraham's faith, ' Semen Abrahae, 
 in comparatione multitudinis impiorum, profecto in 
 paucis est (De Civ. xvi. 21).' This mysterious law 
 of God's providence held good, I doubt not, of the 
 Jews of the dispersion : but few, comparatively, as 
 may have been God's saints among them, yet all 
 nationally held firmly to the great doctrines of the 
 prophets : and upon the foundation laid by the Jews 
 of the dispersion rose the Christian Church. To this 
 day, in our forms of worship, in our rites of burial, 
 in our graces before and after meals, and much more 
 besides, we still follow the modes and habits of those 
 scattered and exiled Jews. 
 
 And now to conclude. Were those Jews of the 
 dispersion to carry with them, as their manual, only 
 an unanswerable demonstration of the absurdity of 
 idolatry ? Read for yourselves those last twenty- 
 seven chapters. You will find Israel described in 
 them as Jehovah's servant — the epithet applied in 
 
>320 TRUE TEACHING CONSTRUCTIVE [lect. 
 
 so remarkable a way to Moses, the legislator, who 
 first established God's Church upon earth, and gave 
 to the one true religion the necessary support of ex- 
 ternal forms and ordinances. But now all Israel is 
 Jehovah's servant, and I have endeavoured to show 
 that this was an absolute fact. I have shown you 
 what their work and mission was, and that the time 
 had come for them to enter upon it. Could it be 
 that Israel's mission as Jehovah's servant was only 
 to throw down evil ? Lucretius did that. He over- 
 threw the superstitions of heathen Rome, and left it, 
 as regards faith, a blank. And when the house is 
 empty, swept, and garnished, there can be but one 
 result. There will come seven devils worse than that 
 ejected, and the last state of that man, or empire, or 
 people, will be worse than the first. Those who pull 
 down without having anything to put into its place 
 are simply doing Satan's work. God's servants pull 
 down the false, the wicked, the corrupt, but only that 
 they may build in its place the true, the good, the 
 sound, the eternal and abiding verities of God. 
 
 And thus, then, Isaiah's teaching is not destructive 
 but constructive. He pulls down the motley super- 
 stitions of a debasing heathenism, to build up in its 
 place the ennobling service of the one true God. 
 And oh ! how great is the mystery of that teaching ! 
 He sets forth Him Who in very deed is Jehovah's 
 servant, the prophet like unto Moses, bearing in 
 Isaiah's pages the same distinctive name, but ruling 
 by no delegated power, but as a Son in His own 
 house. Yes, He was a servant — for though ' in the 
 form of God and very God, He took upon Him the 
 form of a servant and became very man.' But inas- 
 
vill.] NO T DESTR UCTIVE. 3 2 1 
 
 much as when He was man He ceased not to be very- 
 God, therefore He could by one sacrifice of Himself 
 offered once for all make that atonement for sin, 
 whereby God's justice was appeased and man's salva- 
 tion won. 
 
 I need not dwell upon Isaiah's teaching of Christ : 
 so full, so mysterious, so admirably adapted to keep 
 the Jews everywhere in an attitude of expectation, to 
 make them ask with the eunuch, ' Of whom speaketh 
 the prophet this ? ' and wait with minds open and 
 ready for the answer when the fulness of time should 
 come. Without Isaiah, I doubt whether the Jews 
 could have preserved their faith and maintained their 
 isolation during those long centuries of dispersion : 
 without Isaiah I doubt whether the Christian Church 
 could have been so quickly, so surely founded. 
 Christ, His apostles, the early Christians, always 
 appeal to the Old Testament as the great proof of 
 Christianity being the one true religion : that proof 
 is plain everywhere, but nowhere so plain and con- 
 centrated as in Isaiah. Nowhere else do we find 
 Christ suffering, and Christ triumphant, and the 
 character and duties and destinies of Christ's Church, 
 so clearly taught. 
 
 And with Isaiah I conclude. Jeremiah must yet 
 strive to the very last with the disobedient Jews, till 
 Zedekiah flees by night from the beleaguered city. 
 His was a strife for God, hopeless as long as he lived, 
 successful, triumphant, as he himself foresaw, among 
 the exiles at Babylon. He could not save Jerusalem, 
 he did save the Church in banishment. In that strife 
 Ezekiel was his true yokefellow. They were really 
 the men who won for Israel its restoration. And amid 
 
 Y 
 
322 FULFILLED PROPHECY. 
 
 the mingled tears and rejoicings of that restoration 
 prophecy uttered its last grand words : after Malachi 
 it ceased till He came Who as the Divine Word is 
 the Author of all revelation. I have endeavoured, 
 feebly I know, and unworthily, to trace the develop- 
 ment of this wonderful gift of God ; to show in what 
 institutions it took its rise, how it grew, what was 
 its outer form, what its purpose, what its lower and 
 political aspect, what its higher and diviner life, and 
 how the prophets as an order became corrupt at the 
 very time when prophecy itself attained its highest 
 elevation in Isaiah and Jeremiah. What may have 
 been the effect of these Lectures upon the minds of 
 others I know not. But when, for my own part, I 
 think upon what Christianity is, what it has done 
 for mankind, what it is still capable of doing if men 
 would but give it fuller obedience, and then look at 
 this marvellous preparation for it, so complete and 
 perfect, carried on through so vast a length of time, 
 and answering so perfectly to Christianity, combining 
 so exactly with it, and forming in fulfilled prophecy 
 so trustworthy a proof of its divine origin, I cannot 
 believe that in all this there is nothing more than 
 empty mockery, and the foolish play of blind chance. 
 I believe that I can see His hand Who, with perfect 
 wisdom and almighty power, doeth all things well, 
 and Who instructs me by this proof to worship that 
 Messiah Whom these prophets foretold as my Lord 
 and my God. 
 
The following Lecture forms no part of the Bampton Course, 
 but is added as constituting a necessary part of the argument 
 (see Lect. I. p. 25). My object in the foregoing Lectures has 
 been to show that there was in the Old Testament a real, large, 
 and thorough preparation for Christianity ; and that this prepar- 
 ation was no chance work, but the definite and systematic carrying 
 out of a settled purpose, not kept secret, but publicly proclaimed 
 from the very first, and constantly referred to in every stage of 
 the fulfilment. But it is necessary also to meet a counter theory, 
 which does not deny the close connection between the Old and 
 New Testaments, but affirms that it was the fanatic belief of the 
 Jews in the assertions of the prophets which brought about their 
 seeming accomplishment. Wrought up to the very fever-point 
 of excitement by the long series of cruelties suffered by them at 
 the hands of the Seleucidae and the Romans, they surrounded with 
 a halo of romance a simple Galilsean peasant, and invested him 
 with powers and qualities which were the mere result of their 
 own over-heated imaginations. In opposition to this theory I have 
 shown that the fulfilment of prophecy in Jesus of Nazareth 
 contradicted all the preconceived ideas of the Jews both in 
 Palestine and abroad. Clear as it is to us, it was utterly at va- 
 riance with the deductions of their teachers. This Lecture 
 was preached before the University as the sermon upon 'the 
 Jewish Interpretation of Prophecy,' in Lent, 1867. 
 
 Y 2 
 
LECTURE IX. 
 
 THE JEWISH INTERPRETATION OF PROPHECY AT 
 
 VARIANCE WITH THAT TAUGHT BY CHRIST 
 
 AND HIS APOSTLES. 
 
 What think ye of Christ? — MATT. xxii. 42. 
 
 When our Lord put this question to the Phari- 
 sees, their hesitation showed how great was the 
 confusion and uncertainty of their views respecting 
 both the person and the attributes of the Messiah. 
 They knew that He was to be David's son ; the 
 voice of prophecy was too plain and consentient 
 for there to be any doubt so far : but whether 
 He was to be David's son lineally, or only politi- 
 cally, as the restorer of David's throne, upon this 
 they had no settled convictions. They were even 
 uncertain whether all the prophecies respecting the 
 Messiah would be fulfilled in David's son. Many 
 seemed to them so unworthy of Him, and spake 
 so confidently of His humiliation and dishonour and 
 death, that they shrank from connecting them with 
 One in Whom all the glories of David's empire 
 were to revive. Nor had they any certain opinions 
 as to His attributes, and therefore when our Lord 
 asked them for a solution of but one of the many 
 apparent contradictions contained in prophecy con- 
 
326 JEWISH UNCERTAINTY [LECT. 
 
 cerning the Christ, they had none to offer. Prophecy 
 had described Him as at once David's superior and 
 inferior, his Lord and yet his son, and they could 
 not tell how this could be. They had not reflected 
 upon Micah's words, that though born in time at 
 Bethlehem, yet ' His goings forth had been from 
 of old, from everlasting (Micah v. 2).' 
 
 Nor is this the only place which bears witness to 
 the unformed character of the opinions of the Jews 
 respecting Christ. When, for instance, the wise men 
 from the East came at the appearance of the star 
 to worship Him, the scribes at Jerusalem, being 
 asked by Herod where the Messiah should be born, 
 answered, ' in Bethlehem of Judaea,' and adduced 
 in proof the words of the prophet Micah. But in 
 St. John's Gospel we find that Micah's words were 
 by no means universally regarded as conclusive. 
 Some held — and many famous expositors among 
 the Jews have since maintained the same opinion 
 — that the Messiah would come suddenly, like a 
 bright and unexpected meteor. 'We know this 
 man whence He is : but when Messiah cometh, no 
 man knoweth whence He is (John vii. 27).' The 
 popular opinion, however, agreed with the answer 
 of the scribes to Herod : for many asked, ' Hath 
 not the Scripture said that Christ cometh of the 
 seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, 
 where David was ? (lb. 42).' 
 
 Now it would be erroneous to suppose that the 
 opinion of those who held that at Christ's coming no 
 man would know His origin, was groundless, or 
 fanciful. It rested upon all those passages of the 
 Old Testament which refer to our Lord's divine 
 
IX.] ABOUT CHRIST'S NATURE. 327 
 
 sonship. To us the doctrine of the divine and 
 human natures indissolubly united in Christ is a 
 cardinal article of the faith : and trained in this 
 belief we reconcile by its aid, almost without con- 
 scious effort, those many statements of the prophets 
 which externally are at variance with one another. 
 But this twofold aspect of our Lord must have 
 been a serious difficulty to those who had only 
 the teaching of the prophets without the exposi- 
 tion of that teaching given in the New Testament : 
 nor can I see anything absurd in the expectation 
 that, like a second Melchizedek, He would appear 
 suddenly, with no human lineage, no natural parent- 
 age, and no place of earthly birth and education. 
 More correctly we may regard this idea as only a 
 confused anticipation of the truth that the Messiah 
 was not only David's son but also ' the Son of God.' 
 
 Now this very title is more than once given 
 to our Lord. Thus Nathanael says, ' Rabbi, Thou 
 art the Son of God ! (John i. 49).' So, too, Peter 
 confessed, ' Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living 
 God (Matt. xvi. 16).' Even more remarkable is it 
 that the high priest adjured our Lord to tell him, 
 whether He were the Christ, the Son of God (lb. xxvi. 
 6$). For his words bear witness to the recognized 
 existence among the Jews of this most pure and 
 spiritual conception of the Messiah's nature. Caia- 
 phas himself probably put the question contempt- 
 uously, as representing what he deemed to be the 
 most extreme form of Messianic doctrine : but there 
 were other and better men who held it devoutly 
 as a truth. But could those noble souls, who did 
 hold this doctrine, make it harmonize with the 
 
328 CONFLICTING OPINIONS [le'ct. 
 
 equally plain prophetic teaching that the Messiah 
 was to be a man, a descendant of David, and born 
 at Bethlehem ? Many attempts no doubt were 
 made to harmonize this and other apparent dis- 
 crepancies of the Old Testament. One such we 
 read in Justin Martyr's Dialogue with the Jew 
 Trypho (c. 8). Trypho there affirms 'that the Mes- 
 siah at His birth would remain unknown, and unac- 
 quainted with His powers until Elias appeared, who 
 would anoint Him, and proclaim Him as the Christ.' 
 Attempts such as this only show that the difficulty 
 was a real one, and was felt to be such. 
 
 In the Talmud the most conflicting opinions are 
 found respecting the Messiah's advent. In one place 
 it is said that the Messiah will first manifest Him- 
 self at Rome : in another that the place will be 
 Babylon : in a third that He will not appear at 
 all unless the Jews reform their manners. More 
 frequently, however, it asserts that Jerusalem would 
 really be the place of His birth. Did not the 
 Psalmist say, ' Of Zion it shall be reported that 
 He was born in her? (Ps. lxxxvii. 5).' Was not 
 Zion the one source of all that was good ? ' Out 
 of Zion shall go forth the Law, and the Word of 
 Jehovah from Jerusalem (Is. ii. 3) :' ' Out of Zion, 
 the perfection of beauty, God hath shined (Ps. 1. 2)1 
 Who could read such passages, and not draw from 
 them the conclusion that the Messiah would be 
 born on Zion's holy hill ? By a similar argument 
 the Jewish zealot who wrote the Second Book of 
 Esdras was led to place at Jerusalem the scene also 
 of the last judgment. The Messiah when He comes 
 again as judge is to rebuild the hill of Zion, and 
 
IX.] IN THE TALMUD. 329 
 
 stand upon it to pass sentence upon the nations 
 gathered at its foot (2 Esdras xiii. 6, 35, etc.). 
 
 Now, however confused and mistaken may have 
 been the expectations of the Jews concerning Christ, 
 still the knowledge of their opinions seems to me 
 in two respects to be of value. For, first, it helps 
 us in understanding what the prophets wrote : and, 
 secondly, it is not without use in the interpreta- 
 tion of the New Testament. We have in their 
 opinions an exposition of the Old Testament entirely 
 independent of that given by our Lord and His 
 apostles. Too often it seems to be the result rather 
 of national prejudice than of sober reflection : it 
 expresses rather what they hoped than what they 
 read. Still it often gives us one side of the mean- 
 ing, and usually that side which we are in danger 
 of not seeing. It contributes, then, something to 
 our knowledge of the Old Testament, but for the 
 interpretation of the New it is of direct importance. 
 How, for instance, could we possibly understand that 
 extraordinary ferment of the popular mind at Jeru- 
 salem, occasioned by our Lord's teaching and miracles, 
 and so forcibly set before us by St. John in the 
 seventh and three following chapters of his Gospel, 
 unless we knew something of the various and con- 
 flicting views respecting the Messiah, which were 
 struggling in the hearts of the Jews ? Those chap- 
 ters seem to me to have been written for the express 
 purpose of explaining to us what were the feelings 
 at work in the minds severally of the Pharisees and 
 Sadducees, which made them combine in putting to 
 death One Whose teaching contradicted and irritated 
 the prejudices of them both. No doubt the Gospels 
 
330 THEORY [lect. 
 
 themselves throw great light upon the theories then 
 current among the Jews, but to understand these 
 marvellous chapters fully, and much besides in the 
 New Testament, we need a more complete and exact 
 knowledge of the doctrines which the scribes had 
 gathered from the words of the prophets, and 
 which they taught as their authorized interpret- 
 ation. 
 
 In recent times an additional interest, perhaps, has 
 been given to the enquiry by the theory of Strauss, 
 who argued that the Gospels were not the record 
 of a real life, but the result of fancies and notions 
 generally prevalent among the Jews in the era 
 immediately preceding the destruction of their city ; 
 and that their present external form had been given 
 to them under the influence of an overwrought and 
 unnatural excitement. This excitement undoubtedly 
 existed, but it is not the fact that the Gospels em- 
 body any explanation of the prophetic writings cur- 
 rent or generally received by the Jews of that time 
 either in Palestine or in Egypt. On the contrary, 
 our Lord's death, humanly speaking, was caused by 
 the intense disappointment of all parties at finding 
 one endowed with such remarkable powers steadily 
 opposing and refuting all their received opinions. 
 Strauss' theory itself had never much intrinsic value, 
 but owed its importance chiefly to the skilful manner 
 in which the author had combined with it every 
 objection in detail which had usually been brought 
 against the credibility of the Gospels. In the last 
 edition of his work he has virtually abandoned his 
 theory, and the current of thought now sets in the 
 exactly opposite direction. Thus Renan ascribes 
 
IX.] OF STRAUSS. 331 
 
 Christianity to the extraordinary personal qualities 
 of our Lord, and to the enthusiasm excited by Him 
 in the minds of His disciples : while in the pages 
 of Ecce Homo we begin with a man, but a man 
 endowed with the power of working miracles, and 
 as we proceed, and learn more of His doings, no 
 other conclusion seems possible than that to which, 
 perhaps, the writer meant to lead us, namely, Ecce 
 Deus. But independently of this, the enquiry has 
 a legitimate source of interest in the fact that our 
 materials for learning what the Jews thought of 
 Christ have been very greatly increased during the 
 course of the present century. 
 
 I propose, therefore, to consider what were the 
 conclusions arrived at by the Jews during those 
 four hundred years in which the voice of prophecy 
 was silent, and also during the first century of the 
 Christian era. The materials are so large that I 
 can only offer a very cursory review of them, and 
 that rather in the hope of awakening interest in a 
 very important field of study, than of giving full in- 
 formation concerning it a . 
 
 The question, then, has often been asked, What 
 was the purpose and intention of that long interval 
 between the last utterance of prophecy in the Old 
 Testament and the Advent of our Lord ? When 
 Malachi closed the roll of the Hebrew Scriptures it 
 
 a For a fuller account of these materials, consisting chiefly of 
 works belonging to what is called ' apocryphal ' literature, I must 
 refer the reader to the valuable treatise of Dr. Joseph Langen, 
 Professor of Catholic Theology in the University of Bonn, en- 
 titled ' Das Judenthum in Palastina zur Zeit Christi,' Freiburg 
 im Breisgau, 1866, to which I am perpetually indebted through- 
 out this lecture. 
 
332 PERIOD DURING WHICH [lect. 
 
 was with so spirit-stirring an announcement of the 
 speedy coming of Elijah, that the minds of the Jews 
 could not but have been roused to the earnest study 
 of those priceless records, which told them of the 
 future glories of their race. And this study was 
 the appointed work of those four centuries. The 
 Jews were already widely dispersed throughout the 
 Greek empire ; they were everywhere being brought 
 into contact with the heathen world : and that world 
 they were gradually to leaven with principles far 
 higher and holier than any to which its philosophers 
 had been able to attain by the light of nature. Up 
 to this time they had been at school, shut up in 
 a narrow region, and subject to a sharp and inci- 
 sive discipline. That was now over : for prophecy 
 had spoken for the last time. Daniel had told 
 them that there were but a few more weeks unto 
 Messiah the prince : Malachi had bid them listen 
 to the approaching footsteps of the Forerunner. 
 Everything, therefore, both in their outward cir- 
 cumstances and in their relations with God was 
 altered. His word was no longer growing : it was 
 perfect and complete as far as their Church could 
 receive it. They must now study it, and find out 
 its meaning, and learn what it taught them of their 
 duties now that their scattering had begun, and 
 what would be the next stage of God's dispen- 
 sation. And they did study it : for everything 
 combined to make them love and value it more 
 and more. The very fact that prophecy was silent 
 made them feel more deeply how priceless were those 
 oracles which God had entrusted to their keeping 
 (Rom. iii. I, 2). 
 
IX.] PROPHECY WAS SILENT. 333 
 
 And their study was not fruitless. Two invalu- 
 able results of their labours remain to this day in 
 the Septuagint and the Chaldee Targums, the one 
 the work of the Jews in Egypt, the other that of the 
 Jews in Palestine. Of these the former is the more 
 valuable. For, first, it is the more ancient. Though 
 the Targums had an earlier beginning, and embody 
 many a traditional rendering of great antiquity, and 
 much knowledge gathered by a long course of 
 teachers in the schools of Jerusalem, yet the very 
 earliest — that of Onkelos — probably was not commit- 
 ted to writing till about the first, or even the second, 
 century of our era. Much indeed of its matter was 
 far more ancient, and no less an authority than M. 
 Neubauer b considers that it very possibly embodies 
 much of the very Targum made immediately after 
 the return from exile (Neh. viii. 7, 8). The other 
 great Targum, that of Jonathan, was the work of the 
 Jews in Babylonia, and though probably not written 
 down till the fourth century, it, too, is a trustworthy 
 record of traditions far- more ancient than that date. 
 But the Septuagint is beyond all price. For it was 
 made far away from Jerusalem by the Jews in 
 Egypt, who were^ a numerous and learned body. 
 At Alexandria, at Leontopolis, and at other places 
 there existed a large literary class, of whom some 
 studied philosophy, like Philo, and the author of 
 the Book of Wisdom. Others studied history, and 
 we have a specimen of their labours in the Second 
 Book of Maccabees. But their great strength lay 
 in apocryphal writings. Two goodly volumes still 
 exist of Sibylline oracles forged by them, but re- 
 
 b Geographie du Talmud, Preface, p. xi. 
 
334 VALUE [lect. 
 
 garded as genuine by many of the fathers. Except- 
 ing the Second Book of Esdras they wrote all the 
 more worthless portion of our Apocrypha, and much 
 besides of a similar kind not contained in our 
 collection. But they also wrote the Septuagint. 
 It is the work of many hands, was probably a long 
 time in making, and is of very unequal merit, some 
 books being very well and closely rendered, and 
 others very loosely and badly, but its very mistakes 
 show that the translators had substantially the same 
 text before them as we possess now c . It is not too 
 much to say, that without the Septuagint, and the 
 Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan, instead of that 
 comparative certainty which we now enjoy, very 
 great uncertainty would rest upon the genuineness 
 of the Hebrew Text Owing to the prejudices of 
 the Christian Church against the Jews, Hebrew 
 manuscripts were destroyed as things unholy. None 
 exist of great antiquity, but the ancient versions 
 happily take their place, and give us full assurance 
 that the Hebrew Scriptures were neither, on the 
 one hand, corrupted or interpolated by Christians, 
 nor on the other hand, have the Jews been able to 
 weaken their testimony to Christ and the doctrines of 
 the Gospel. 
 
 But for my present purpose it is necessary to 
 notice that these works also teach us what the Jews 
 thought. The Targums are professedly paraphrases : 
 the Septuagint, though nominally a translation, is 
 throughout largely influenced by the opinions of 
 the translators. In both alike the hopes and fears, 
 
 c They had, however, a somewhat different text of the Book of 
 Jeremiah, and this again furnishes most valuable aid for the criti- 
 cism of the Old Testament. 
 
IX.] OF THE SEPTUAGINT. 335 
 
 the prejudices, the current philosophy and theories 
 of the times respecting the nature of God and man 
 and of the earth, are freely substituted for the 
 inspired words of the Hebrew Text. The Septua- 
 gint, for instance, in its opening words substitutes 
 the Greek notion of a chaos in the place of the very 
 different ideas contained in the Hebrew. The earth, 
 it says, was aoparos koX aKaraa-K^vacrros, a mass of 
 matter, but of matter not discernable by the sight, 
 because its separate atoms were still uncombined. 
 Even more remarkable is the care with which both 
 the Targums and the Septuagint soften down, and 
 alter, or entirely omit all those expressions in which 
 human actions or attributes are ascribed to the 
 Deity. 
 
 We must confine ourselves, however, to one point, 
 namely, the conclusions at which the Jews arrived 
 respecting Christ. And here first, generally, we find 
 an entire disagreement between the opinions of the 
 Jews of Palestine and those of Egypt. To the former 
 the Messiah was a man, a hero, a soldier : to the 
 latter he was an allegory, an idea only, and not a 
 reality. 
 
 Now, vast as is the difference between the two 
 theories, they both grew out of Holy Scripture. 
 Errors generally are but one-sided and partial state- 
 ments, and have their origin in half-truths, which 
 gradually are pushed onward and developed till the 
 grain of truth in them is lost in the mass of 
 falsehood. And thus the Jews of Palestine and of 
 Egypt divided between them those statements of the 
 prophets, which, when combined, present to us 
 the perfect delineation of our Lord. We find in 
 
336 TWO THEORIES [lect. 
 
 Scripture a twofold sonship of the Christ : on the one 
 hand, Jehovah says unto Him, ' Thou art My Son 
 (Ps. ii. 7) ; ' on the other, He is but a root growing in 
 a dry soil, an off-shoot merely of a lineage fallen to 
 decay (see page 267). Now He is the Son of David, 
 and now the seed of a woman. So, too, he is 
 described at one time as suffering, at another as 
 triumphant. In some places He is represented as a 
 man of sorrows, universally despised and rejected ; 
 elsewhere He is God, and His throne is established 
 for ever. So again, He is sometimes the judge, 
 and sometimes is Himself led to judgment and cut 
 off by an unrighteous sentence. Finally, the very 
 times of the Messiah are sometimes described as a 
 period of earthly glory and universal empire, and 
 again as a disastrous period, in which the city and 
 sanctuary are destroyed, the sacrifice and oblation 
 cease, and pagan symbols profane the temple area. 
 What wonder if uninspired men could not reconcile 
 these conflicting statements ! 
 
 Were the Jews of Palestine unreasonable when 
 they put a literal interpretation upon words such 
 as these : ' God will extend peace to Jerusalem like 
 a river, and the glory of the Gentiles like an over- 
 flowing torrent? (Is. lxvi. 12).' Or these, 'The 
 righteous bud of David shall reign as a king and 
 prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in 
 the earth ? (Jer. xxiii. 5).' Even words incapable of 
 being literally understood, yet seemed to portend 
 an era of surpassing earthly magnificence : ' Thy sun 
 shall no more go down, neither shall thy moon with- 
 draw itself: for the Lord shall be thine everlasting 
 light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended 
 
IX.] RESPECTING THE MESSIAH. 337 
 
 (Is. lx. 20) : ' for they followed upon a promise of 
 changing the brass of Jerusalem into gold, and its 
 iron into silver ; of making its officers peace, and its 
 exactors righteousness, and of stilling all violence, 
 wasting, and destruction within its borders. There 
 were prophecies of successful war. ' Ephraim and 
 Judah shall fly upon the shoulders of the Philistines 
 towards the west ; they shall spoil them of the east 
 together (lb. xi. 14).' 'The house of Jacob shall 
 be a fire, and the house of Joseph a flame, and the 
 house of Esau for stubble (Obad. 18).' 'Proclaim 
 ye this among the Gentiles ; Prepare war, wake up 
 the mighty men. Beat your ploughshares into 
 swords, and your pruninghooks into spears (Joel 
 iii. 9, 10).' There were also prophecies of peace. 
 ' They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and 
 their spears into pruninghooks : nation shall not lift 
 up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn 
 war any more (Micah iv. 3).' 'They shall not hurt 
 nor destroy in all God's holy mountain (Is. xi. 9).' 
 In short, while some of the prophets describe the 
 Messiah's advent as a time of blessedness at home, 
 and dominion abroad ; a time when Israel shall pos- 
 sess the heathen, and David's son ' break them with 
 a mace of iron (Ps. ii. 9) : ' other prophets as clearly 
 declare that the heathen shall then conquer Jeru- 
 salem, defile the sanctuary, and cause the sacrifice 
 and oblation to cease. It ' shall be a time of trouble,' 
 says Daniel, ' such as never was since there was a 
 nation even to that same time (Dan. ix. 26, 27. 
 xii. 1, 11).' 
 
 In the interpretation of the prophecies given in 
 the New Testament, all these conflicting statements 
 
 z 
 
3 3 8 PHIL SO PHY [lect . 
 
 fall naturally and easily into their place. To the 
 Jews before Christ's advent they could not but be 
 a difficulty, and we have no right to be surprised 
 if we find that in Palestine a literal interpretation 
 prevailed, while in Egypt all was turned into alle- 
 gory. The Jews of Palestine, however, attempted to 
 combine the two sides of prophecy into a whole, and 
 held either that there would be two Messiahs, or that 
 the one Messiah after being slain (Zech. xii. io, u) 
 would be raised again to life. They held, too, that 
 His coming was to be accompanied by a fierce struggle, 
 during which they would as a nation suffer terrible 
 calamities, but finally would gain the victory, and 
 attain to universal empire. But here they had a 
 difficulty. The Messiah would be the first king of 
 the whole earth, but they could not make up their 
 minds whether He would found a dynasty, and sons 
 born of Him succeed to His crown, or whether He 
 would restore the theocratic government, and, after 
 His death, Jehovah rule again by the Urim and 
 Thummim. A small school seems even to have held 
 that the Messiah would not die at all. But among 
 the Jews in Egypt a belief in a personal Messiah 
 soon entirely ceased. Already in the Septuagint 
 we find them obliterating from the text all reference 
 to Christ's birth in the flesh. Thus, whereas in Ps. 
 ex. 3 the words of the Hebrew are, ' Of the womb of 
 the morning is the dew of thy birth,' the Septuagint 
 paraphrases it thus, ' Of the womb have I begotten 
 thee before the morning dawn.' They acknowledge 
 the pre-existence of the Messiah, but are offended at 
 the doctrine of His birth in time. We must not, 
 however, conclude that therefore they confessed His 
 
IX.] OF THE BOOK OF WISDOM. 339 
 
 Divinity. For in Isaiah ix. 6, where the prophet 
 speaks of the birth of the child, Whose name shall 
 be called ' The Mighty God,' they reject a statement 
 so contrary to all philosophy as that God could be 
 born, and, omitting this title altogether, they para- 
 phrase the passage thus : ' His name shall be called 
 the angel of the great counsel.' Now, according to 
 the Alexandrian philosophy, the angels were born of 
 God before the world was, and the idea which the 
 translators of the Septuagint seem to Jiave formed 
 of the Messiah was, that He might possibly be 
 a being similar to and sharing the nature of the 
 angels. 
 
 It is, however, in the Book of Wisdom that 
 we find the open expression of those philosophical 
 opinions which finally ruined the Alexandrian school. 
 Beautiful as is this book, and ready as we are to 
 acknowledge that its influence upon the Christian 
 Fathers has been less unwholesome than might have 
 been expected, yet nothing can be more unsound than 
 its philosophy; and the respect felt for it in old times 
 did introduce principles into the Church contrary to 
 the teaching of the New Testament. Apparently it was 
 the work of a man of singular richness of imagination, 
 and great command of language, and his description 
 of the shortness of life, and the greatness of immor- 
 tality, is the noblest and most powerful passage in 
 the whole of the apocryphal scriptures. In his 
 attempt, however, to combine the philosophy of the 
 Greeks with the teaching of the Old Testament, 
 he adopts principles entirely at variance with the re- 
 vealed word. Thus he teaches that matter is eternal 
 (xi. 17), and that creation consisted in fashioning 
 
 Z 2 
 
34° EGYPTIAN THEORY [lect. 
 
 what already existed, though only as a\xop<\>6v nva 
 vkr/v, a mass of chaotic shapelessness. Like Plato, 
 he also teaches the pre-existence of the human 
 soul (viii. 19, 20), a passage, however, which the 
 fathers interpreted of the pre-existence of Christ. 
 But the most dangerous of the principles which he 
 adopted from Plato, was that of the essential opposi- 
 tion between matter and spirit, and the inherent 
 badness of matter. The body is no temple of the 
 Holy Ghost, as with St. Paul, but a heavy clog and 
 dull prison-house of the soul ; and the Christian 
 hope of a resurrection, in which body and soul will 
 once again be joined together, and mutually perfect 
 one another's happiness, was a thought which he would 
 have rejected with horror. Worse in itself than 
 even this dualism, was his conception of the Divine 
 Logos, or Wisdom of God. It becomes with him 
 mere pantheism, a sort of cosmical life pervading 
 the universe, with not a trace of a personal existence. 
 The Book of Ecclesiasticus may be, as Dean Milman 
 argues, the programme of Sadducseanism. It gives, 
 as he shows, no word of comfort to the dying, no 
 hope of any life after death. In the universe it 
 acknowledges neither angel nor spirit, but two beings 
 only, God and man d . But in the main it is a noble 
 book, and as regards the doctrine of the Divine 
 Wisdom, its teaching is sober, thoughtful, judicious, 
 and scriptural. As a rule, it adheres closely to the 
 inspired words of the Book of Proverbs ; but the 
 Book of Wisdom sets before us a refined but thorough 
 pantheism. 
 
 In fact, these two books illustrate in a remarkable 
 
 d Milman, History of the Jews, ii. 32, note. 
 
IX.] OF THE MESSIAH. 
 
 341 
 
 manner what I have said before of the tendencies of 
 the two great divisions of the Jews. The Palestinian 
 book is religious, but in a hard, worldly, matter of 
 fact way ; the Alexandrian book is religious, but in a 
 mystic way. In neither of them is the Messiah a 
 living reality, and in this respect the Palestinian book 
 is not a fair representative of the views of the great 
 mass of the Jews in Judaea. It belonged to a sect 
 who believed in no future world, nor had any hope 
 beyond the grave. 
 
 Time will not permit me to trace the gradual dis- 
 appearance in Egypt of the doctrine of a personal 
 Messiah, as shown in other apocryphal works, like the 
 Fourth Book of Maccabees 6 , the Sibylline Oracles, 
 and other products of the Jews of Alexandria and 
 Leontopolis. Living under a foreign rule, losing 
 gradually their hold of the Hebrew language, occu- 
 pied with trade, and thereby brought into daily 
 contact with the Greeks, powerfully influenced by 
 their ideas and literature, and daily growing cos- 
 mopolitan rather than patriotic, their efforts were 
 directed chiefly to recommending their books to the 
 heathen by explaining away in them everything 
 Jewish, and by detecting the chief tenets of Greek 
 philosophy under the veil of the facts and laws and 
 doctrines and institutions of the Old Testament. 
 Probably, too, they wished to find some authority in 
 their sacred books for ideas which had seized upon 
 their own minds with all the charm of novelty and 
 power. But in embracing the new they parted with 
 
 e An edition of the Syriac version of this interesting work will 
 shortly be published, with much illustrative matter, by Mr. Bensly, 
 
 Sub-Librarian of the Cambridge University Library. 
 
342 PALESTINIAN THEORY [lect. 
 
 the old. Gradually their Messiah ceased to be a 
 person with a real existence. He became a mere 
 abstraction, a phantom. Thus Philo teaches that the 
 Jews are to be delivered solely by their own virtues. 
 Their heathen masters will grow ashamed of keeping 
 in slavery people of such extraordinary merit. And as 
 they return to their land he describes them as ' guided 
 on their way by a kind of human figure divine beyond 
 the limits of nature, invisible to the rest but visible to 
 those who are being saved f .' The idea is taken from 
 the pillar of fire and cloud which led the Israelites 
 through the wilderness : here the returning host is 
 guided by a phantom visible only to the eyes of 
 believers. 
 
 Throughout the Alexandrian theosophy the Messiah 
 never once appears as King, or Ruler, or Conqueror, 
 or Judge : in Palestine, on the contrary, the tendency 
 was to separate from Him every religious element, 
 and see in Him a great national hero. It was the 
 doctrine of the theocracy, but degraded till it was 
 simply human, carnal, earthly. No doubt many noble 
 minds struggled against this debasing tendency : like 
 Nathanael they believed that He would be the Son of 
 God. Others stopping short of this yet held that He 
 would be a prophet, and regarded therefore Christ's 
 miracles as His proper credentials. 'When the 
 Messiah hath come, will He do more miracles than 
 these which this man hath done? (John vii. 31).' 
 But with none, except the Sadducees, was the doctrine 
 allowed to fall into the back-ground. Under some 
 
 f sevayovpievoi irpos twos Oaoripas f) Kara cpvaiv av&pcvnivTjs o^ecos, 
 a%r/\ov jitv kripois, novots 5e tois dva<roj(o/j.(uois kpicpavovs, Philo de 
 Execrat. § 3, 9. Cf. Langen, Judenthum, p. 398. 
 
IX.] OF THE MESSIAH. 343 
 
 form or other all believed in a Messiah, all daily 
 looked for Him, and were ready to join Him, and 
 even to draw the sword for the restoration of David's 
 throne. Their opinions were confused, incoherent, 
 contradictory ; but all held opinions, and those strong 
 ones, upon His coming : and while the mass expected 
 only a hero to fight for them, there were doubtless 
 those who had higher conceptions of His nature, and 
 were thus prepared to understand and embrace the 
 spiritual interpretation put upon the writings of the 
 prophets in the New Testament. 
 
 The first work to which I shall refer, for a more 
 exact statement of the views entertained by the better 
 class of Jews respecting the Messiah, is the Book of 
 Enoch. To this University belongs the honour of 
 having first published both an English translation 
 (Archbp. Laurence's, Oxford, 1821), and subsequently 
 the Ethiopic text (in 1838) of this, the most valuable 
 of all the apocryphal writings, though apparently it 
 was not from our present work that St. Jude made 
 the quotation contained in the 14th verse of his 
 Epistle. As regards its date, the best authorities 
 ascribe it to the time of the Maccabees, and consider 
 that its object was to defend and protect the teaching 
 of the Old Testament against the errors and en- 
 croachments of Greek philosophy as held by the 
 partizans of the Seleucidae. Probably, however, very 
 considerable additions have been made to the work 
 at various times, and as all that we possess is a 
 translation made for the use of a Christian Church, 
 there is nothing surprising in the fact that a more 
 directly Christian bearing has been given to certain 
 portions of it. Like the Second Book of Esdras, it 
 
344 ORIGIN IN DANIEL [lect. 
 
 bears many marks of having been worked over by 
 Christian hands. As a whole, however, the book 
 represents the spirit of Judaism in its better days. 
 Religion with it is not a matter of Rabbinical 
 scrupulousness about externals, nor of the exact 
 observance of the minuter precepts of the law, but of 
 mercy, judgment, and truth. In its lofty tone, its 
 earnest spirit, its wealth of thought, and its sincere 
 piety, it is no unworthy companion of the canonical 
 writings of the Jews g . 
 
 It is thus the earliest of a large mass of literature 
 which had its origin in the inspired Book of Daniel. 
 With him first Jewish prophecy left the comparatively 
 narrow circle within which it had hitherto worked, 
 and contemplated the progress of the w T orld from a 
 Gentile point of view. With all the other prophets 
 
 8 In 185 1 Dillmann edited a text of the Book of Enoch, founded upon 
 the collation of five manuscripts, and two years afterwards published a 
 German translation with a most valuable and elaborate Introduction. 
 Till the publication of these works the materials for criticism were not 
 sufficiently definite to enable scholars to arrive at any certain conclusions 
 as to the date of the book. Dillmann's own view, supported by very 
 satisfactory arguments, is that it was written abo ut n oyears before the 
 birth of Christ (p. xliv) : Ewald makes it still older, about 144 B.C. (See 
 his Abhandlung tiber des Buches Henokh Entstehung, Gottingen, 1854.) 
 Both of them consider that new matter has from time to time been 
 interpolated, but Dillmann maintains that the great mass of the work 
 was written by one and the same author. On the other hand, Philippi 
 asserts that the book was written after the destruction of Jerusalem, at 
 the end of the first century of our era (Das Buch Henoch, Stuttgart, 
 1868. p. 30, see also p. 142). It is, however, so thoroughly Jewish, in 
 spite of its having been worked over by Christian hands, that I cannot 
 believe that it was from the first a Christian work. Unfortunately there 
 was a period when Christians rivalled the Jews of Egypt in the number 
 of their forgeries, but they are all very clumsy performances, and their 
 authors never attempt to give them any appropriate colouring. Philippi's 
 is, however, a very clever essay, though not to be set against the 
 judgment of Ewald and Dillmann. 
 
IX.] OF APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE. 345 
 
 the reign of Christ had ever been associated with the 
 thought of a time of glory for their nation. Messiah's 
 throne was the throne of David's son ; the Levitical 
 law was the law of His empire ; His abode Jerusalem ; 
 Mount Zion the seat of His glory ; the Jew foremost 
 among His subjects ; and the place of their worship a 
 temple the very measurements of which had been 
 given by Ezekiel. Whatever mercy there was for the 
 Gentiles could be won only by their joining themselves ^j 
 to God's chosen people. No doubt this was but the 
 outward aspect of Jewish prophecy. There were not 
 wanting plain and definite indications that Christ's 
 kingdom would be something far nobler and greater 
 than these metaphors seemed at first sight to signify. 
 In Daniel all is altered, as well the outer form as the 
 inner essence. The prime minister of Chaldaean, 
 Median, and Persian monarchs, he traces the course of 
 Gentile history till the God of heaven sets up a 
 kingdom that shall never be destroyed : and con- 
 temporaneously with its establishment ' the people of 
 the prince destroy the city and the sanctuary,' and 
 everything distinctly Jewish ceases to exist. 
 
 Naturally it was not this part of Daniel's predictions 
 which formed the staple of Jewish apocalyptic litera- 
 ture. Such teaching may well be found in an inspired 
 book, because the facts taught were the predetermi- 
 nate counsel of God. But no Jew, especially in so 
 spirit-stirring a struggle against heathenism as that of 
 the Maccabaean age, could of himself have conceived 
 or endured the thought that all that he was fighting 
 for was very soon to be destroyed in order that 
 Messiah's Gentile Church might be delivered from an 
 element alien to her free development. The part of 
 
346 DOCTRINE OF THE BOOK OF ENOCH [lect. 
 
 Daniel generally imitated in apocalypses like those of 
 Enoch and Esdras is his description of the Gentile 
 kingdoms under the form of fierce and raging animals. 
 Thus in the Book of Enoch, Judas Maccabaeus is 
 described as a lamb with a mighty horn, against 
 which the Syrian kings of the race of Seleucus wage 
 war in the shape of ravens. In a similar way in the 
 Second Book of Esdras the Roman empire appears as 
 an eagle, and the Csesars are its twelve feathered 
 wings ; and in another place it is described as the 
 fourth beast, which by the capture of Jerusalem had 
 ' destroyed the dwellings of them that brought forth 
 fruit (xi. 42).' 
 
 Now the doctrine of the Book of Enoch respecting 
 the Messiah is very remarkable. He is usually spoken 
 of as ' the Elect ' or chosen one, a title equivalent to 
 that more than once given to our Lord in the Gospels, 
 ' the Holy One of God.' (Mark i. 24, Luke iv. 34, and 
 in John vi. 69 in the Sinaitic and Vatican copies.) 
 But he is also called the Anointed, the Son of Man, 
 as in Daniel, and the Son of God, as by Nathanael. 
 He is even called the Son of Woman, a name more 
 strongly indicative of His human nature than even the 
 title of the Son of Man. As regards His dignity, 
 sometimes He holds a place very near to God ; He 
 sits upon the throne of majesty; all address to Him 
 their prayers, and He rules over all : but in other 
 places He is classed with the angels. Like them He 
 has an existence prior to the founding of the world, 
 a view adopted from the speculations of the Jews 
 of Alexandria, and held, as we have seen, by the 
 translators of the Septuagint. He is, moreover, the 
 Teacher and Prophet of His people, and the spirit of 
 
IX.] RESPECTING THE MESSIAH. 347 
 
 the old prophets lives again in Him. It is worth 
 noticing, too, that the Messiah is the Light, not of the 
 Jews only, but also of the Gentiles. He is the teacher 
 of virtue everywhere, the comforter of the distressed, 
 the healer of those wounded in heart. He is also the 
 Judge, before whose tribunal not mankind only, but 
 Azazel and the fallen angels must stand. Finally, 
 after the great judgment, heaven and earth will be 
 changed and renovated, and henceforward no sinner 
 will be found, nor sin exist, in Messiah's realm. No 
 wonder that some of the fathers raised this book 
 almost to the level of the inspired Scriptures h . 
 
 And here I must notice, that while some of the 
 Palestinian Jews recognized the Messiah as the Great 
 Judge of the world, they never formed the idea of His 
 second advent for the purpose of sitting in judgment. 
 So to speak, there was no perspective in their views, 
 but everything that every prophet had foretold as 
 belonging to the Messiah was all compressed into 
 one narrow period. Thus we find the apostles sorely 
 puzzled when our Lord said that He was going away 
 
 h Tertullian, de Habitu Muliebri, § % argues that the book was 
 actually written by Enoch, and was inspired. It is remarkable that he 
 says that it was not received by the Jews, ' in armarium Judaicum non 
 admittitur,' and in fact it does not represent their ordinary views 
 respecting Christ. Clement of Alexandria also supposed it to be 
 authentic, but the more critical Origen rejected its claims for himself, 
 though leaving it as an open question for others. Jerome unhesitatingly 
 calls it an apocryphal book, and destitute therefore of authority (Hieron. 
 ad Ps. cxxxii. 3). Augustine (de Civ. Dei, xv. 23) thinks that Enoch 
 wrote something, but denies that it was the so-called Book of Enoch : 
 and he also mentions (lb. xviii. 38), that the Jews rejected it. After 
 Augustine's time it disappeared, excepting some long quotations from it 
 in George Syncellus, till the famous traveller Bruce brought from 
 Abyssinia the copy now in the Bodleian Library. 
 
348 THE PSALTER [lect. 
 
 for a little while, and would then come again. Hence, 
 too, the grief of the two disciples going to Emmaus, 
 because He Who, they trusted, would have delivered 
 Israel had died a malefactor's death. And again, in 
 St. John's Gospel, where we find the most numerous 
 allusions to the current opinions of the Jews, when 
 Christ foretells His death the people make this objec- 
 tion, ' We have heard out of the law that the Messiah 
 abideth for ever, and how sayest Thou, The Son of 
 Man — another name for the Messiah — must be lifted 
 up ? (John xii. 34).' Now this view, too, is found in 
 the Book of Enoch. The Messiah at His advent first 
 sets His people free, then holds a general judgment, 
 and finally reigns for ever upon a renovated earth 
 over a people incapable of sinning. 
 
 Another interesting work is the Psalter of Solomon, 
 consisting of eighteen Psalms, written in the style of 
 the Old Testament, and bewailing the sufferings of 
 the chosen people. From the account given of these 
 sufferings there can be little doubt that the writer's 
 just indignation was stirred at the barbarities inflicted 
 upon Jerusalem by Pompey, after it had of its own 
 accord opened its gates to receive him. The siege 
 and profanation of the temple, the merciless slaughter 
 of its defenders, and of many of the inhabitants of the 
 city, and the leading away into captivity of its sons 
 and daughters, are regarded as so many chastisements 
 brought upon the nation by the godless misrule of the 
 later princes of the Maccabsean line. Naturally the 
 writer turns for comfort to the promises made to the 
 Jews of a Messiah, who will avenge these cruelties, 
 but unfortunately the Hebrew original was translated 
 by some Christian hand, and we can put no confi- 
 
IX.] OF SOLOMON. 
 
 349 
 
 dence in the genuineness of its Messianic teaching'. 
 The two most important passages (Ps. xvii. 33-51, 
 xviii. 6-10) are probably even interpolations. All we 
 can safely affirm is, that the public calamities of the 
 nation had filled the writer with an eager longing for 
 the Messiah's advent, and for that display of super- 
 natural power whereby He was to save the nation. 
 The work was much valued at one time by Christians, 
 as is proved by its being the only specimen of Jewish 
 apocryphal literature inserted as an appendix to the 
 New Testament in our own Codex Alexandrinus. 
 
 But, after all, the Targums are the most trustworthy 
 evidence of the views and opinions of the Jews at the 
 very time when our Lord was manifest in the flesh. 
 The oldest of these paraphrases — that of Onkelos 
 upon the Pentateuch — keeps very closely, as a general 
 rule, to the Hebrew original. Twice, however, it refers 
 to Christ passages of very great importance. The first 
 of these is the well-known text respecting Shiloh in 
 Jacob's blessing, which Onkelos renders as follows : 
 1 A sultan shall not pass away from the house of 
 Judah, nor a scribe — an interpreter of the law— from 
 his sons' sons for ever, until Messiah shall come, 
 Whose is the kingdom, and Him shall the Gentiles 
 obey (Gen. xlix. 10).' We have a proof here that the 
 Jews were expecting the speedy arrival of the day 
 of their deliverance, and that they believed that the 
 Gentiles would then be subject unto them. The 
 
 i Movers, Dillmann, Ewald, Delitzsch, Langen. all agree that the 
 style is too Hebraizing for the work possibly to have had any other 
 than a Hebrew original. Huet, on a less critical examination of the 
 Psalter, had thought it was written in Greek. Fuller information will 
 be found in the Church Lexicons of Wetzer and Welte (Romanist), and 
 Herzog (Protestant). 
 
 > 
 
35© TAR GUM [LECT. 
 
 other passage is Balaam's prophecy of the star, which 
 Onkelos paraphrases thus : ' A king shall arise out 
 of Jacob, and Messiah shall wax great k out of Israel, 
 and shall kill the princes of Moab, and rule over all 
 the sons of men (Num. xxiv. 17).' Again, we find 
 Messiah as a king, invested with universal empire, 
 slaying ruthlessly, and giving the Jews that vengeance 
 which the long and cruel wrongs inflicted upon Jeru- 
 salem had made the inhabitants of Palestine so 
 eagerly desire, a feeling, however, of which we find no 
 trace among the more prosperous Jews of Egypt. 
 The Septuagint version of both these places is entirely 
 destitute of interest. The Alexandrians do not seem 
 to have attached any importance to either of these 
 prophecies. 
 
 The other Targum, that of Jonathan l upon the 
 historical books of the Old Testament and the Pro- 
 phets, is distinguished first of all by its division of 
 
 k This is usually translated, ' shall be anointed,' but the passages 
 alleged in proof of this rendering seem to me rather to mean, ' to be 
 made the high priest.' I have given the ordinary and usual signification 
 of the verb. 
 
 1 The Targum of Jonathan, though probably committed to writing 
 at Babylon two or three centuries after Christ, is yet satisfactory 
 evidence of the opinions of the Jews of previous ages, because of the 
 tenacity of the hold which tradition had over their minds. Thus the 
 Massorites, who began their work in the sixth century after Christ, 
 seem to have given us little of their own, but have put into writing, 
 with the most minute accuracy, that system of reading Hebrew which 
 was elaborated in Judaea in the first and second centuries of our era, and 
 which rested even then upon an older basis. So the translation of the 
 Hebrew text into Chaldee had begun with Ezra (Neh. viii. 8), and 
 without doubt its interpretation became a matter of tradition, from 
 which neither Onkelos nor Jonathan departed very widely. The other 
 Targums I pass by as too late in. date and too Haggadic in character to 
 be trustworthy. All the Targums are entirely Jewish, and have never 
 been coloured by Christian scribes or translators. 
 
IX.] OF ONKELOS. 35 1 
 
 time into that before Messiah's advent, and Messiah's 
 own time. Thus to the account of Solomon's wisdom, 
 his 3000 proverbs, and 1005 songs, Jonathan adds 
 these extraordinary words, 'And he prophesied of 
 the kings of the house of David, that shall reign in 
 this world and in the coming world of the Messiah 
 (1 Kings iv. 32).' He thus seems to have imagined 
 that when the Messiah had restored David's throne, 
 a new line of kings sprung from His body would 
 reign over Israel. Elsewhere, however, he speaks as 
 if Messiah Himself would be their perpetual king. 
 For in Isaiah's prophecy, ' Unto us a Son is born,' he 
 paraphrases the names of the Messiah thus ; ' God 
 wonderful in counsel, man enduring to eternity, even 
 Messiah, Whose peace shall be multiplied upon us 
 in His days (Is. ix. 6).' Apparently he expected 
 a restoration of the theocracy in the person of an 
 immortal and divine m Christ. 
 
 m We must not, however, conclude too much from his calling the 
 Messiah ' God wonderful in counsel.' The divinity of Christ was cer- 
 tainly not a Jewish dogma. We find no trace of it elsewhere in Jonathan. 
 Thus if we turn to crucial passages like Micah v. 2 we find him rendering 
 the prophet's words thus, ' Out of thee, Bethlehem, shall Messiah go 
 forth before Me to exercise dominion over Israel, Whose name has been 
 spoken from of old, from the days of eternity.' So in Zech. xiii. 7 his 
 rendering is, ' Unsheath thyself O sword, against the king, and against 
 the prince, who is his companion and equal.' Even in the Book of 
 Enoch, which gives so high a place to the Messiah, He stands among 
 the angels to worship God (lxi. 10). So, too, the words of ch. xlviii. 6, 
 ' He was chosen and concealed before God before the world was created, 
 and even to eternity will He be before Him,' belong to that connection 
 of the idea of the Messiah with the divine Wisdom, which produced the 
 Alexandrian teaching of the Logos, and which made even the Sadducees 
 acknowledge a sort of eternity in Wisdom, see Ecclus. xxiv. It was 
 not a personal existence, and yet Jonathan avoids even granting this 
 (Micah v. 2), though immediately before he had been speaking (lb. iv. S) 
 of the concealment of Israel's Messiah, and the delay of His kingdom 
 
352 TEACHING OF JONATHAN [lect. 
 
 In those magnificent chapters of Isaiah, which treat 
 of the Servant of Jehovah, the Targum refers all to 
 Christ, yet so as to exclude from Him every note of 
 suffering. Every word there of sorrow and affliction 
 Jonathan transfers to the Jewish people : it is they 
 who suffer, while the Messiah is a victorious warrior. 
 Thus the words, ' He hath no form nor comeliness' 
 are paraphrased as follows : ' His aspect shall be no 
 common aspect, nor His fear like the fear of a private 
 person : but His beauty shall be the beauty of holi- 
 ness ; whosoever seeth Him shall look at Him with 
 admiration. He shall be despised, indeed, but He 
 shall strip all kings of their glory ; they shall be feeble 
 and in pain, like a man of sorrows, and one delivered 
 over to diseases (Is. liiL 3).' In the following verses it is 
 the Jewish people who are smitten of God for their own 
 sins : and the Messiah, so far from being the Lamb, 
 is the Judge, Who 'shall sentence the mighty among 
 the Gentiles like lambs to the slaughter, and like a 
 sheep silent before its shearers, nor shall any one ven- 
 ture to open his mouth and speak in His presence 
 (lb. 7).' And when thus He has given over the 
 
 because of their sins. In short, Trypho in Justin Martyr's dialogue gives 
 the ordinary Jewish view, even though there were better schools of 
 thought, which held that in some sense or other the Messiah would be 
 the Son of God. Trypho says, ' We all expect that the Messiah will 
 be a man born of men (c. 49):' and again; 'It is an incredible and 
 well-nigh impossible thing that thou undertakest to prove, that God 
 submitted to be born and become a man (c. 68).' Naturally, therefore, 
 he denied that the Messiah's birth was miraculous, and said that the 
 virgin of Isaiah vii. 14 meant a young woman (c. 71) ; and when Justin 
 affirmed that He would not be the seed of man's race, Trypho answered. 
 ' How then does the Scripture say to David that God will take to Him- 
 self a son of his loins, and will establish his kingdom, and seat him 
 upon the throne of his glory? (c. 68).' 
 
IX. ] A UTHORITA TIVE. 353 
 
 wicked n to the grave, explained as Gehenna, the 
 place of the lost, He purifies His own people, and 
 accompanied solely by the righteous He takes great 
 nations for His prey, and strong states for His spoil. 
 And so, generally, in this Targum the Messiah ap- 
 pears often as King, as Judge, as High Priest, as Pro- 
 phet : He never appears as a Saviour, as one Who 
 will make atonement for His people's sins and die in 
 their stead. As regards the actual passages, Jonathan' 
 refers to Christ, as a rule, the same texts that we 
 do ; but there is an impassable gulf between his 
 interpretation of them and that of the Christian 
 Church. 
 
 Now the Targum of Jonathan was a book of au- 
 thority among the Jews, and was regarded as only 
 less venerable than the inspired text itself. We may 
 be sure, therefore, that it embodies no private views, 
 but is the record of the received opinions of the 
 scribes and teachers of the Law. Nevertheless, it is 
 a far worse corruption of the sense of Holy Scripture 
 than anything contained in the Book of Enoch, and 
 may be almost called a systematic perversion of the 
 
 n The exact sense of Jonathan's words in this place may be elucidated 
 by his rendering of Isaiah xi. 4, ' By the speaking of His lips He shall 
 slay the wicked Armillus.' Armillus is the great opponent of the Jewish 
 Messiah, the personal representative and captain of the Gentiles on 
 whom Messiah is to wage war. In subsequent times, Armillus became 
 with the Rabbins the symbol of the Christian Church, and they described 
 him as the offspring of Belial and a beautiful female statue at Rome, 
 made to conceive by magical arts. Beneath his banners all the sons of 
 Esau were to gather to attack Jerusalem, where, according to some, he 
 would slay Messias ben Joseph, but finally would himself be slain by 
 the breath of the true Messiah, according to Isaiah xi. 4. A full account 
 of the various legends concerning him will be found in Buxtoif's 
 Rabbinic Lexicon. 
 
 A a 
 
354 THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH [LECT. 
 
 teaching of the prophets. And these were the views 
 which prevailed at the time of our Lord's advent. 
 The mass of the people expected a Messiah armed 
 with supernatural powers, but he was to use these 
 powers for earthly purposes, to drive the Romans 
 from their land, and lead the armies of Israel to the 
 conquest of the world. Hence their eagerness to 
 make our Lord a king after the miracle of feeding the 
 thousands, and the care with which He frustrated 
 their endeavours, and ever taught His disciples that 
 the Messiah was to suffer. Hence the constant dis- 
 putes of the apostles about place and dignity, and the 
 request of Zebedee's wife that James and John might 
 be the two chief officers of state in Christ's kingdom. 
 Hence, too, the constant uprisings of the populace, 
 their readiness to follow Theudas, and Judas of 
 Galilee, and Bar-Cochba. They were living in a very 
 fever of expectation for the coming of their deliverer ; 
 they saw that Judah's sceptre had departed ; they 
 knew that Daniel's weeks had expired ; but they 
 would not believe that at the end of those weeks their 
 sanctuary would be destroyed, their city captured, 
 their temple-service suppressed, and ' the power of the 
 holy people scattered.' And so their very fanaticism 
 led to the exact fulfilment of the words of the pro- 
 phets in their true meaning. They joined in cutting 
 off their Messiah because he was no fierce warrior but 
 a preacher of holiness, Whose kingdom was not of 
 this world. And then they brought by their restless- 
 ness the avenging armies of Rome upon their city, 
 and from that time the sacrifice of the great day of 
 atonement has been offered no more. 
 
 Even before the Jews ceased to be a nation, they 
 
IX.] FOUNDED BY JEWS. 355 
 
 had ceased to be God's Church. But that separation 
 between the believing and the unbelieving Jews which 
 Malachi had described as the Messiah's great work 
 (iii. 1-5) at His first advent, became then complete, 
 and God's covenant from that day forth has been with 
 those who had accepted the Gospel of His Son. God 
 cannot have two Churches ; still less can the pre- 
 paratory Church and that final and perfect Church 
 for which it was to prepare exist at the same time. 
 But Jews founded the Christian Church. Jews were 
 everywhere its first teachers, its missionaries and 
 apostles, its bishops and pastors. Jews everywhere 
 were the first converts, and the nucleus in every town 
 round which the Gentiles gathered. The forms of 
 worship in their synagogues became those of Christian 
 congregations, their scriptures are our inspired law, 
 and to this day our very name testifies that we are 
 those who have accepted a Jewish Messiah. All this 
 had been foreshown before. When the Chaldaeans 
 encamped before Jerusalem, Jeremiah (xxiv.) warned 
 the Jews that in destroying city and temple, with the 
 high priests, the king, the princes, and the people, 
 Nebuchadnezzar was not destroying the Jewish 
 Church : for it had departed from Jerusalem with the 
 believing Jews, who went into captivity with Jeconiah 
 to Babylon. So Titus did not destroy God's covenant- 
 people. They had gone to Pella as the believers in 
 His Christ. Those who remained at Jerusalem were 
 the refuse merely whom God had cast out, because 
 in their greed for earthly dominion they had rejected 
 the spiritual blessings offered them by the true 
 Messiah. 
 
 Plainly, the Christ of the Gospels was not the crea- 
 
 A a 2 
 
356 THE ASCENSION [lect. 
 
 tion of uninspired thought. His wondrous character, 
 His spiritual teaching, His kingdom of grace in the 
 hearts of men, His future kingdom of heavenly bles- 
 sedness, all this the prophets had taught, but the Jews 
 had not found it in their writings. Their imagination 
 had seized only upon metaphors and symbols drawn 
 from earthly things, and these, grossly materialized, 
 had entirely obscured in their minds all the better 
 and deeper teachings of their scriptures. The doctrine 
 of a suffering Saviour was not revealed even to Peter 
 ' by flesh and blood, but by the Father Who is in 
 Heaven (Matt. xvi. 17).' To the mass of the Jews, 
 when our Lord came, the Messiah was scarcely more 
 than a mere political character, a warrior who would 
 bid them rise against Edom — the Roman empire — to 
 battle, and give them Zarephath and Sepharad — the 
 fertile regions of France and Spain — for a possession 
 (Obad. 1,19, 20). As usual, man's necessity was God's 
 opportunity. When Scribes and Pharisees had done 
 their worst to blot out and darken the teaching of the 
 Scriptures concerning the Messiah, He came Who is 
 our true Light, and the words of the prophets were set 
 forth for the first time in their real meaning, and that 
 a meaning so clear, so simple, so straightforward, so 
 consistent, that we wonder how any other interpreta- 
 tion could ever have been put upon their teaching. 
 
 There are numerous other writings of this period, 
 chiefly of an apocalyptic character, which, if time per- 
 mitted, would serve to show conclusively how entirely 
 the Messiah of the Jews of Palestine had become 
 a mere man, from whom every thought of heavenly 
 dignity, and every diviner attribute, had been com- 
 pletely removed. I must content myself, however, 
 
IX.] OF MOSES. 357 
 
 with a very brief reference to two works written 
 at the end of the first century of our era, and both 
 expressive of the honest indignation of the Jews 
 against the Romans for the cruelty with which they 
 had destroyed Jerusalem and treated its inhabitants. 
 These two are the Second Book of Esdras, and the 
 Ascension of Moses °. Of the latter, however, I shall 
 make no further use than to say that it proves to us 
 that the creditable view of the Messiah set before us 
 in the Book of Esdras was not the chance product of 
 one religious thinker, but was held at the end of the 
 first century, at all events, by the better class of 
 minds. For substantially the two works agree, and 
 both stand in agreeable contrast with the Targum of 
 Jonathan, and with the unpatriotic Josephus, who was 
 base enough to apply to Vespasian the predictions of 
 the prophets respecting Christ. 
 
 No doubt the capture of Jerusalem by Titus was 
 a terrible blow to those who were at that very time 
 eagerly anticipating in their Messiah an able general 
 to lead them on to victory, and may have led many 
 
 This work, which is quoted by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, 
 CEcumenius and other fathers, had long been regarded as lost, but in the 
 year 1861 a fragment of a Latin translation of it was found by Ceriani 
 in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, and published in the first volume 
 of his Monumenta Sacra et Profana. It is a slavishly literal translation 
 of a Hebrew original, which was probably written about the same time 
 as the Second Book of Esdras. Both books describe the Roman empire 
 under the similitude of an eagle with many necks and wings ; and both 
 have the same object, namely, to comfort the Jews for the destruction 
 of their city and temple by Titus. A time of retribution, they teach, 
 draws near, and then shall Israel mount up to heaven on eagles' wings, 
 and sit among the stars, while their enemies lie humbled upon the earth. 
 ' Of Christian view and interpretation not the least trace can be dis- 
 covered in this fragment : we have in it a genuine product of the Jew s 
 of Palestine.' Langen, Judenthum, p. 106. 
 
 
358 THE SECOND BOOK [lect. 
 
 others besides Josephus to open infidelity. The dis- 
 appointment and pain caused by the abandonment of 
 false religious tenets too often produces this effect, but 
 there are others whom it leads to search for a more 
 true interpretation. And thus, in the Second Book of 
 Esdras, we find the Messiah invested with religious 
 attributes. The book itself, which was known in 
 early times to Jerome and Ambrose, has long disap- 
 peared, but in the year 1462 a Latin translation of it 
 was appended to the Vulgate. It exists also in 
 various oriental versions, but has not hitherto been 
 discovered in Greek ; and it ought to be mentioned 
 that, though appended to the Vulgate, its pages are 
 separately numbered, and it has nothing of that 
 critical apparatus which accompanies those books 
 which the Church of Rome considers in any sense 
 canonical. Readers are in fact warned in the Preface 
 to the Vulgate, that neither the Third nor Fourth 
 Books of Esdras — our first and second — are anything 
 more than adscititium et extraneum quid. Our own 
 Church, not using the uncanonical Scriptures for the 
 establishment of doctrine, inserts both the Books of 
 Esdras among its Apocrypha, but it does not thereby 
 give them any more authority than that possessed by 
 the Book of Enoch, the Third and Fourth Books of 
 Maccabees, the Ascensions of Moses and Isaiah, the 
 Book of Jubilees, and the Testament of the twelve 
 Patriarchs. There was a vast apocryphal literature, 
 of which the works appended to our Bible are speci- 
 mens, but most of those mentioned above have been 
 brought to light again in modern days, since the time 
 when our version was made. The First Book of 
 Esdras is an Alexandrian work of very little value. 
 
IX.] OF ESDRAS. 359 
 
 The Second Book is really most interesting, but is 
 known to us at present only in a bald Latin trans- 
 lation ; and this has been so interpolated by Christian 
 hands, that whole chapters are a mere tissue of 
 phrases taken from the New Testament. Even the 
 name of Jesus occurs in it (vii. 28), where no doubt in 
 the Hebrew original the word was Messiah. Never- 
 theless, the Jewish part is easily separable from the 
 rest, and is the work of a man of deep religious feel- 
 ing, but entirely ignorant of Christianity. It burns 
 with intense indignation against the Romans for their 
 cruel treatment of Jerusalem, and finds in the hope 
 of Messiah's advent consolation under the miseries of 
 the times. 
 
 The main portion of the book is a vision of the 
 Roman empire under the figure of an eagle. Its 
 twelve wings, as I mentioned before, are the twelve 
 Caesars : of these the two first, Julius Caesar and 
 Augustus, are more fully described, as also the last 
 three of the Flavian house, Vespasian, Titus, and 
 Domitian, who naturally are the objects of the writer's 
 ill-concealed aversion. Rapidly they fall, and with 
 them the empire of the twelve Caesars is brought to 
 a disastrous close. A double pair of wings next 
 arises ; they are the Emperor Nerva, and Trajan, his 
 chosen successor. And now the purpose of the vision 
 discloses itself. A roaring lion* from the wood, 
 speaking with man's voice to the eagle, condemns it 
 for unjust and tyrannous rule, and proclaims its 
 speedy downfall. That lion is the Messiah, come to 
 deliver the Jew from the intolerable yoke of Rome. 
 
 I 
 
 P Compare Revelation v. 5. 
 
360 JEWISH NOTIONS [lect. 
 
 It might have been dangerous to speak openly, but 
 surely it must have been a relief to apostrophize the 
 Romans thus : ' Thy wrongful dealing hath come up 
 to the Highest, and thy pride to the Mighty One. 
 The Highest hath also looked upon the proud times, 
 and behold they are ended, and their abominations 
 fulfilled. And therefore appear no more, thou eagle, 
 nor thy horrible wings, nor thy wicked feathers, nor 
 thy malicious heads, nor thy hurtful claws, nor all thy 
 vain body : that all the earth may be refreshed, being 
 delivered from thy violence (ch. xi. 43-46).' The 
 cruelties practised by Titus upon Jerusalem were still 
 fresh in the writer's mind, but probably it was not 
 merely the feebleness of Nerva's reign, but still more 
 the prophecies of Daniel, which made him hope that 
 a speedy retribution for these cruelties was at hand. 
 
 But this retribution is confined within the limits of 
 justice, and we find in the vision of Esdras no trace of 
 that lust of conquest which would have raised the 
 Jews to an equally wicked eminence with the four 
 great military empires of Daniel's dream (vii). Titus 
 had crushed them too utterly for such of them at 
 least as lived in Italy still to dream of battle and war. 
 And thus we find only a tame anticipation of a 
 millennium, if one may so call it, limited to four 
 hundred years, in which the Jews will rejoice in 
 Christ's personal reign. 'My son Jesus q shall be 
 revealed with those that be with Him, and they 
 
 q Ambrose, on Luke ii. 21, had already pointed out that the word 
 Jesus has been substituted for something else. It is morally certain 
 that the translator was a Christian, and, finding Messiah in the Hebrew 
 text, instead of rendering it by Christus, or unctus, he put Jesus as the 
 exact equivalent, in his view, of the original word. See above, p. 359. 
 
IX.] OF CHRIST'S PERSONAL REIGN. 361 
 
 that remain shall rejoice within four hundred years 
 (2 Esdras vii. 28).' If in these words we are struck by 
 the absence of the fierce fanaticism of the Targum of 
 Jonathan, even more remarkable is the next verse, 
 ' After these years shall My son Christ die, and all 
 men that have life, and the world shall be turned into 
 the old silence seven days, like as in the former 
 judgments.' It seems, then, that in his view there had 
 been a perpetual series of dispensations, between each 
 of which there was upon earth the silence of death for 
 a period as long as the creative week ; and the end of 
 the present dispensation he thought was approaching, 
 but before it came the Jews would have at least a 
 moderately long period of consolation. And then 
 they and their Messiah and all living things would 
 die, and after the seven days' silence the dead would 
 rise, and God hold a judgment. If in all this there 
 was a religious conception of the Messiah's character, 
 yet it was a very mean one, nor does the writer at- 
 tempt any exposition of the actual words of prophecy, 
 but rather substitutes for them his own notions. 
 
 There is, then, an impassable gulf between the 
 Christ of the Jewish interpretation of prophecy and 
 the Christ of the Gospels. That interpretation was 
 in no sense a preparation for the teaching of our 
 Lord : His Gospel was no culmination of ideas which 
 had long been at work in the Jewish mind. Christ 
 at Alexandria had become an allegory with the mass, 
 and a metaphysical Logos with the philosophers ; in 
 Palestine He was a warrior, with no attributes but 
 those of strength and cruelty ; and if in certain 
 apocryphal works we find a religious conception of 
 His character, it was the view probably of minor 
 
362 EXTERNAL OPPOSITION [lect. 
 
 sects only, and had little influence over the popular 
 mind. Even these works fall utterly short of the 
 teaching of the Gospel, and had little or nothing to 
 do with its success. The reception of that teaching 
 was not effected without a violent wrench alike to 
 the Jew of Jerusalem and the Jew of Egypt. It 
 involved a revolution in all their habits of thought, 
 and this was not accomplished without a fierce and 
 bitter struggle. In the Acts of the Apostles we find 
 abundant evidence of the violence of the conflict, 
 and the battle there gathered chiefly round St. 
 Stephen and St. Paul, the two men who most 
 clearly saw that Christianity implied the abolition 
 of Judaism. In the history of the Christian Church 
 the traces of the struggle are equally plain. We see 
 the marks of it in the deep hatred which grew up 
 between the Christian and the Jew ; we see it in the 
 general neglect of Hebrew by the Fathers, in the 
 upgrowth of sects which rejected the Jewish Scrip- 
 tures, and in the doctrine of books like the Apostolical 
 Constitutions, which taught that the mass of the Old 
 Testament was a Deuteronomy, a second law, bad in 
 itself, and imposed upon the Jews because of the 
 badness of their hearts. 
 
 In short, we now in these latter days see only, 
 or chiefly, the profound inner agreement between 
 the Old and the New Testament. Men at first saw 
 chiefly their external antagonism, and to thousands 
 of devout men, brought up to love and venerate 
 and to believe in the eternal obligation of the 
 Mosaic law, it must have been an intense and 
 heartfelt misery which they had to endure, before 
 they could bring themselves to believe that that 
 
L] between THE TWO TESTAMENTS. 363 
 
 law was a mere Traibayooyos, a slave, with no higher 
 function than to lead on the heir, while still under 
 the beggarly elements of the world, to the true 
 teacher Christ (Gal. iii. 24) ; and that the Christian 
 was that heir, no longer in his nonage, but arrived at 
 man's estate, and in full possession of his heritage. 
 
 Nor did the Jew alone thus feel. The key to 
 most of the heresies which troubled the early Church, 
 was the conviction of an antagonism, instead of an 
 agreement, between the two Covenants. If Marcion, 
 in his Book of Oppositions (' AvTideo-cis), wrought the 
 theory out, the strength of his party lay in the fact 
 that the Christian interpretation of the prophets was 
 something new, and entirely contrary to the inter- 
 pretation current among the Jews. 
 
 And thus, then, in the first place, cursory as is this 
 view of what the Jews thought of Christ, it may 
 make it easier to understand the cause of the general 
 indignation aroused in the mind of the populace at 
 Jerusalem by the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. He 
 had those, indeed, who loved Him : Galilaeans, it may 
 be, chiefly, who lived too far away from the centres 
 of thought to hold very settled theories as to what 
 the Messiah ought or ought not to be ; but plainly 
 some of the Jews in Jerusalem also believed in Him. 
 The mass saw in Him one Who contradicted and 
 frustrated all their hopes ; and if the Galilaeans were 
 content to follow a lowly king with their hosannas, 
 their own cry was, Crucify Him ! Peter and the few 
 said, ' Lord to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the 
 words of eternal life.' What was eternal life to the 
 populace ? They wanted the empire of the world, 
 and if the Messiah would not give it them, then they 
 
364 CONCLUSION. 
 
 would destroy Him. And, secondly, the Christ of 
 the Gospels is no human invention. Men did not 
 at all learn what He would be from the words 
 of prophecy, plain though they be. Give men 
 what proof you will, but seldom do they find more 
 than what it suits them to find. If what is said 
 agrees with their preconceived notions, well : if not, 
 they reject it. So was it with the oracles of truth. 
 The Jew did not find the interpretation, because he 
 never sought to find it. If we see it, it is because 
 the Holy Ghost has given us the true exposition of 
 those Scriptures which He Himself inspired. 
 
NOTES. 
 
 NOTE A, p. 1 6. 
 
 The following Note, conclusively showing that Buddhism is a 
 
 religion destitute of historical credibility, has been kindly 
 
 furnished me by one able to speak with authority upon the 
 
 subject, E. B. Cowell, Esq., ALA., Professor of Sanskrit 
 
 in the University of Cambridge. 
 
 Buddhism cannot be called an historical religion, if we 
 mean by that term a religion whose origin is to be traced 
 in contemporary annals. 
 
 S'3kya Muni himself (like Socrates) left no writings behind 
 him ; his teaching was only oral ; and there are two separate 
 streams of tradition for his history and doctrines. These are 
 found in the Sanskrit books of Nepal, i. e. the Northern 
 tradition, current in Nepal, Tibet, China, and Mongolia; 
 and in the Pali book of Ceylon, i. e. the Southern, current in 
 Ceylon, Burmah, and Siam. These books are said to have 
 been gradually arranged in the celebrated Three Councils, in 
 a threefold form — the discourses of Buddha (sutra), the 
 ceremonies and discipline (vinaya), and the metaphysics 
 (abhidharma). But the dates of these Councils differ in the 
 two traditions. The Southern fixes them as respectively 
 held (i) shortly after the founder's death; (2) 100 years after 
 it, under king Kala&oka; and (3) 235 years after it, under 
 
366 NOTE A. 
 
 Dharmasoka ; while the Northern fixes the two latter as held 
 no years after his death, under Asoka, and more than 400 
 years after in Cashmir, under Kanishka. The Ceylonese 
 say nothing of a reduction to writing even at the third 
 Council, and their great chronicle the Mahdwanso, expressly 
 states that the canonical traditions, which were introduced 
 into Ceylon by the missionaries from the third Council, were 
 not committed to writing till the reign of Wattagdmini, b.c. 
 100-88. The Northern traditions may have been reduced 
 to writing at their third Council, 400 years after S'dkya 
 Muni's death. We can hardly, in fact, believe that nothing 
 was written even at an earlier date ; but we have no reason 
 to suppose that any text which we at present possess goes 
 back even to Kanishka' s time. 
 
 The Lalita Vistara, our great authority for the early life of 
 Buddha, has been published in Sanskrit. There are said to 
 be four Chinese translations of it : the first was made 
 between a.d. 70 and 76, the second a.d. 308, the third about 
 a.d. 652; of the fourth and latest I do not know the date, 
 but as only the third and fourth have the same division as 
 our present Sanskrit text, into 27 chapters, it would appear 
 that the two earlier may represent another text ; but on this 
 point we want fuller information. The Lalita Vistara is 
 legendary in the highest degree — it has miracles in every 
 chapter, and is written in the most hyperbolical style. Every 
 event is related twice, first in a very bald mediaeval Sanskrit, 
 and then in a poetical version of very corrupted Sanskrit. 
 The latter appears to be the older version, representing these 
 legends in their popular ballad shape. 
 
 No doubt the same legends are to a great extent current 
 in every Buddhist country ; but directly we proceed to ana- 
 lyse them, we find the usual divergencies which characterize 
 a legendary, as distinguished from an historical, period. 
 Thus, to take only one instance, the Northern tradition calls 
 
NOTE B. 367 
 
 the bride whom S'akya Muni wins by his skill in arts and 
 arms, Gopa, the daughter of Dandapani, but the Southern 
 calls her Yasodhanl, the daughter of S'akya Suprabuddha. 
 It is well known that there are at least twenty different dates 
 of S'akya Muni's death, varying between b.c. 2422 and 543 ; 
 and even the last date (that of the Ceylonese) has been 
 falsified, and has been conjecturally corrected by modern 
 scholars to b. c. 477. 
 
 We know with historical accuracy what Buddhism was 
 three or four centuries after its founder's death, and we may 
 conjecture with great probability what his own teaching 
 actually was ; but the details of his life are wrapt in the same 
 cloud of fiction which envelopes every event in ancient Indian 
 history. We must never forget Elphinstone's remark at the 
 commencement of his ' Hindu period,' ' no date of a public 
 event can be fixed before the invasion of Alexander, and 
 no connected relation of the national transactions can be 
 attempted until after the Mohammedan conquest ; ' or, in 
 other words, we can only get historical light when other 
 nations, possessing an authentic history of their own, come 
 in contact with the Hindus ; but they, of course, can be of 
 no use with regard to events which they could only learn 
 from legends current in India. 
 
 [The best account of Buddha and his doctrines is to be 
 found in the first volume of Koeppen's ' Die Religion des 
 Buddha und ihre Entstehung,' Berlin, 1857. ^ ts tone * s 
 decidedly anti-Christian, but it contains a store of informa- 
 tion collected together from different sources.] 
 
 NOTE B, p. 42. 
 
 Nothing can be more contrary to the teaching of Holy 
 Scripture than that view of inspiration which confines it to 
 words. In the Bible most of the great acts of the heroes 
 of old time are ascribed to the presence of God's Spirit. 
 
3 6 8 NOTE B. 
 
 • > 
 
 When Othniel stirred up the military ardour of Judah, and 
 led that great tribe to battle against the king of Mesopotamia, 
 it was ' because the Spirit of Jehovah was upon him (Judges 
 iii. io). Such, too, was the case with Gideon (lb. vi. 34), 
 with Jephthah (lb. xi. 29), with Samson, when he rent the 
 lion (lb. xiv. 6), and when, having burst the new cords with 
 which he was bound, he slew of the Philistines a thousand 
 men (lb. xv. 14). The Bible speaks in the same way 
 of gifts of artistic skill. Bezaleel's hand was cunning in gold 
 and silver work, and in cutting of stones, and wood-carving, 
 because ' he was filled with the Spirit of God (Ex. xxxi. 3).' 
 Such, too, was the case with Aholiab (lb. xxxv. 35). Even 
 the ordinary operations of agriculture ' come forth from 
 Jehovah of Hosts : He hath made counsel wonderful, He 
 hath magnified skill (Is. xxviii. 29)/ If Isaiah uses words 
 such as these of the labours of the farm, may we not apply 
 them with even fuller meaning to the wonderful enterprizes 
 of the engineer, and to all the works of genius ? 
 
 But here, as also where St. James tells us that all good and 
 perfect gifts come down to us from God, the difficulty is to 
 draw the right line of distinction between God's gifts where 
 they are the result of His working in nature, and where 
 that working was special and extraordinary. It may be that 
 these two methods of working, apparently so different to 
 us, are not different in themselves. At all events in the 
 workings of Providence we cannot distinguish them. We 
 believe that not a hair of our heads falls to the ground with- 
 out Divine permission ; that our smallest and most ordinary 
 acts are not separable from God's working : while in the 
 great crisis of our spiritual lives we feel that there have been 
 special interventions in our behalf. God has been working 
 by and in natural laws, and yet, apparently, has controlled 
 them for our individual good (1 Cor. x. 13, Phil. ii. 13). 
 Believers have the fullest conviction of this, and yet might 
 hesitate about saying that God had wrought a miracle for 
 
NOTE B. 369 
 
 them, or that the laws of nature had not held on their 
 undeviating course. They are content with saying that such 
 interpositions are providential. So, if we were to say that 
 these operations of the Spirit of Jehovah, spoken of especially 
 in the Book of Judges, were providential, many might think 
 this a sufficient explanation, because they imagine that some 
 sort of distinction can be drawn between the providential and 
 the miraculous. Really, the terms miracle and miraculous are 
 unknown to the Bible : they are the products of the Latin 
 language, which has done so much by the inaccuracy of its 
 words to vitiate theology. The working of God is so much 
 more perfect than man's working, that that which seems to 
 man miraculous, because unusual, may be perfectly natural to 
 God. If you drive God out of the world, and exalt . nature 
 into His place, understanding by nature a working of matter 
 only, neither originating in, nor sustained or controlled by 
 any intelligent mind, then of course you leave for God only 
 such operations as are unnatural, and it does not much 
 matter what you call them, miraculous or not. Not only 
 scientific men, but theologians, I presume, would join in 
 disbelieving in the existence of such actions. But if ' in 
 God we live and move and have our being/ our natural 
 actions cannot be separated from Him, and to Him all 
 actions may be alike natural, though they differ according 
 to the degree in which His presence in them is apparent 
 to our perceptions. In fact, in these things we are reasoning 
 about that of which we know nothing. In all the discussions 
 that have lately taken place about prayer, there has been out 
 of sight the assumption of the postulate that God is a man, 
 acts as a man, and is subject in His working to the same 
 limitations as man. Grant this, and of course prayer 
 cannot produce any effect: providence is impossible: a 
 revelation absurd, and miracle monstrous. Grant it, and post 
 mortem nihil. But if God be God and not man, and not 
 subject to human limitations, these results do not follow. If a 
 
 Bb 
 
37° NOTE B. 
 
 flock of sheep were to discuss man's nature, they could form no 
 idea of him but that he was a very strong and mischievous kind 
 of sheep, Man's discussions about God's nature are about as 
 wise and convincing. But worthless as they are, after all we 
 cannot form any idea of God except as a very powerful and 
 perfect man, because no being can rise to any idea higher 
 than that of itself freed from all imperfections. But while 
 we may feel sure that God's absolute attributes, such as love, 
 goodness, justice, must be in accordance with our ideas, we 
 ought to recognize that His negative attributes are only veils 
 to our ignorance. We can form no idea of infinity, im- 
 mutability, eternity. And thus all our discussions must stop 
 at a certain point, and all negative conclusions be worthless. 
 Enough, then, to notice that the Bible does not draw a 
 distinction between the action of God's Spirit upon Samson 
 when rending the lion, and upon Isaiah when prophesying 
 of the Messiah. To us the difference may be vast. In 
 ordinary language we might call the one a natural impulse, 
 or, at most, speak of it as providential : the other we should 
 call supernatural. Really, the difference may be that in one 
 God reveals His presence more than in the other : in 
 natural operations His arm is hidden, in supernatural He 
 makes it bare in the sight of all His people. 
 
INDEX OF SUBJECTS. 
 
 Aaron, Moses' prophet, 56. 
 Abraham, a prophet, 54. 
 
 — chief of a clan, 82. 
 
 Advent, Christ's second, not a Jewish 
 
 doctrine, 347. 
 Ahithophel, counsel of, 135. 
 Alexandria, Jews of, see • Israelites.' 
 Amos, not trained at a prophetic 
 
 college, in, 143. 
 
 — his mission temporary, 113, 199. 
 
 — his literary skill, 147 and note. 
 
 — prophecy of the booth, 262. 
 
 — quoted at Council of Jerusalem, 
 
 268. 
 Angels, ministry of in times of 
 Judges, 65. 
 
 — Alexandrian theory of, 339. 
 Ark, superstitious use of, 100. 
 
 — its significance, 270. 
 
 — Jewish myths about, 270. 
 Armillus, Jewish legends of, 353 n. 
 
 Baal, used as a name in Saul's 
 
 family, no n. 
 Babylon, its prosperity of short 
 
 duration, 309. 
 
 — contrasted with Alexandria, 315. 
 Babylonia, alluvial nature of its soil, 
 
 295. 
 Bible, its circulation, 4 n. 
 
 — a collection of numerous books, 
 
 200 n. 
 
 — conditions it has to fulfil, 246. 
 
 — its meaning exhaustless, 290. 
 
 — not an ordinary book, 292. 
 
 See also ' Hezekiah ' and ' Testa- 
 ment.' 
 Bethel, old prophet of, 159, 182. 
 Buddhism, unhistorical nature of, 
 
 3 6 5 »■ 
 
 Burden, meaning of, 34 «., 47, 223. 
 
 Canaanites, their position in Pa- 
 lestine, 91. 
 
 Catholicity of Church, taught by 
 prophets, 221, 230. 
 
 — resisted by Jews, 226. 
 Chozeh, name for prophet, 47, 48. 
 Christ, Son of the Fallen, 267. 
 
 — not sprung from any king but 
 
 David, 278. 
 
 — two expected by Jews, 267. 
 
 — Jewish views about His advent, 
 
 326. 
 
 — conflicting views of, in Palestine, 
 
 337- 
 
 — His twofold sonship, 326, 336. 
 
 — cause of His crucifixion, 330. 
 
 — His personality not believed in 
 
 Jews of Egypt, 335, 341. 
 
 — regarded in Palestine as a soldier, 
 
 335, 34 2 - 
 
 — His personal reign, as taught in 
 
 2nd Book of Esdras, 360. 
 
 — His sufferings not understood by 
 
 Jews, 226, 267, 285. 
 Christianity not incompatible with 
 progress, 9. 
 
 — influence of, increases with civil- 
 
 ization, 14. 
 
 — its relation to Judaism, 272, 355. 
 Church, its type, mountain of Jeho- 
 vah, 273. 
 
 — prophesied of by Micah, 278. 
 
 — its forms taken from Jews of the 
 
 dispersion, 319, 355. 
 
 — its relation to Jewish Church, 
 
 355- 
 
 Clergy, analogy of, to prophets, 
 106, 113. 
 
 — originators of religious move- 
 
 ments, 162. 
 College, see ' Prophets.' 
 Cosmogony, Indian, 9. 
 Creation, two accounts of, 36. 
 
 — view of, in Septuagint, 335. 
 Criticism, negative, see ' Rational- 
 ism.' 
 
 B b 2 
 
37 2 
 
 INDEX OF SUBJECTS. 
 
 Daniel, differs from all other pro- 
 phets, 214, 269, 344. 
 
 — Book of, why not placed among 
 
 writings of Prophets, 215. 
 
 — not educated in prophetic schools, 
 
 215. 
 
 — origin of apocalyptic literature 
 
 in Book of, 346. 
 
 — clearly teaches a resurrection, 
 
 258. 
 David, trained by Samuel, 131. 
 
 — rebuked by Nathan, 161. 
 
 — evil effects of his wars, 198. 
 
 — sure mercies of, 259, 261, 265 n. 
 
 — prophecies relating to fall of his 
 
 dynasty, 265 n. 
 
 — his dynasty not restored, 266. 
 Deioces contrasted with Samuel, 
 
 104. 
 Deuteronomy, meaning of, in Fathers, 
 
 194 and note. 
 Didascalia Apostolorum, its teaching 
 
 as regards the Jews, 194. 
 Divination absolutely forbidden, 155, 
 
 222, 276. 
 
 Ecclesiasticus, teaching of Book of, 
 
 340- 
 Egypt, Jews of, see ' Israelites.' 
 Elijah, why raised up in northern 
 
 kingdom, 162. 
 
 — his work on Mount Carmel, 
 
 176. 
 
 — why present at Transfiguration, 
 
 186, 210. 
 Elisha, rector of prophetic colleges, 
 
 14°. J 5i- 
 
 — progress of education under, 138. 
 
 — learning of, 147. 
 
 Enoch, Book of, its date, 343, 344 n. 
 
 — its teaching concerning Christ, 
 
 346, 351 n. 
 
 — view of the Fathers concerning, 
 
 347- 
 Ephraim, its claim to supremacy, 
 
 260. 
 
 Ereb, account of, 88. 
 
 Esdras, 1st Book of, worthless, 358. 
 
 — 2nd Book of, symbol of Roman 
 
 empire in, 346, 359. 
 
 — not included by Church of Rome 
 
 among Apocrypha, 358. 
 
 — criticism of, 359. 
 
 Evidences, internal, value of, 16, 18. 
 
 Ezekiel, his imagery reproduced in 
 
 the Apocalypse, 287. 
 Ezra, his work on canon of Scripture, 
 
 293 »• 
 
 Family, see ' Mishpachah.' 
 Farhad, his teaching respecting the 
 
 Jews, 195 n. 
 Feasts, Jewish, their purpose, 312. 
 Field, meaning of, 152. 
 Flood, narrative of, 36. 
 
 Gehazi, rank of, 139 n. 
 Genealogies, omission of names in, 
 
 119 n. 
 Genesis, Book of, its opening words, 
 
 210; grand truths in, 304. 
 Gourd, Elisha's, what, 152 n. 
 Grove, meaning of, 182 n. 
 
 Habakkuk, his prophecy written, not 
 spoken, 199. 
 
 — difficulty of God's providence 
 
 only partially answered by, 308. 
 Hebrew, neglect of study of, 247, 282. 
 
 — manuscripts destroyed by Chris- 
 
 tians, 334. 
 Heman, a grandson of Samuel, 217. 
 Hezekiah, malady of, 164. 
 
 — reign of, period of high culture, 
 
 293, 3°7- 
 
 — last fifteen years of, 301. 
 History, special study of prophets, 
 
 203. 
 Hosea, Book of, its lesson God's 
 love, 251, 260. 
 
 — remarkable prediction in, 260. 
 Houses, families divided into, 8 7 n., 9 2 . 
 Hymns, doctrinal, origin of, 212 n. 
 
 Idolatry, overthrown by Isaiah, 302. 
 
 Immortality of soul, why not taught 
 by Moses, 192, 193. 
 
 Inspiration of Old and New Testa- 
 ments equal, 34. 
 
 — two errors concerning, 109 n. 
 
 — wider meaning of, 367 n. 
 Isaiah, medical skill of, 165. 
 
 — programme of, 206. 
 
 — his dwelling and rank, 280 n. 
 
 — his teaching of Christ's passion, 
 
 196, 321. 
 
 — why so attacked by negative 
 
 critics, 291. 
 
INDEX OF SUBJECTS. 
 
 373 
 
 Isaiah, summary of German criticism 
 on, 295 n. 
 
 — length of his prophetic labours, 
 
 301. 
 
 — perfection of style of, 308. 
 
 — ch. i, purpose of, 205. 
 
 — chs. xl-lxvi, a written, not a 
 
 spoken prophecy, 199. 
 
 — leading idea of, 305. 
 
 — written for Israel's use in dis- 
 
 persion, 311. 
 
 — ch. liii, how paraphrased in Tar- 
 
 gurn, 352. 
 
 — pseudo-, theory of, 295 n. 
 Israel, meaning of, after time of 
 
 Hosea, 24. 
 
 — kings of, nominally worshippers 
 
 of Jehovah, 182. 
 
 — final rejection of, 188, 224; see 
 
 also 'Judaism.' 
 
 — purpose of its existence, 191, 274, 
 
 303- 
 
 — struggle of, against idolatry, 303. 
 
 — began its work at exile, 306. 
 
 — why scattered, 307, 309. 
 
 — discipline, by which it was fitted 
 
 for the dispersion, 309. 
 
 — merged in Christendom, 355. 
 Israelites, not all descended from 
 
 Jacob, 81, 1 19 n. 
 
 — state of, under the Judges, 93. 
 
 — length of their sojourn in Egypt, 
 
 119 n. 
 
 — trained in the wilderness, 1 20. 
 
 — their literary tastes, 126. 
 
 — their rejection foretold, 224, 288. 
 
 — utter destruction of, impossible, 
 
 267. 
 
 — the remnant of, not the nation, 
 
 heirs of the promise, 267, 277, 
 
 355- 
 
 — probable fate of, if they had 
 
 accepted Christ, 276. 
 
 — views of, respecting Christ's 
 
 birth, 326. 
 
 — how preserved in isolation, 313, 
 
 3I5- 
 
 — three stages of God's dealing 
 
 with, 317. 
 
 — views of, at the time of Christ's 
 
 advent, 354. 
 
 — of Alexandria, worthless nature 
 
 of their apocryphal literature, 
 334- 
 
 Israelites of Palestine, views of, re- 
 specting Christ, 335, 356. 
 
 Jacob, brethren of, 83. 
 
 — number of his lineal descendants 
 
 at the exodus, 119 n. 
 Jair, wealth of, 86. 
 Jehovah, meaning and spelling of, 
 
 68 n. 
 Jeremiah, unwilling to become a 
 
 prophet, 49. 
 
 — mission of, for life, 113. 
 
 — sorrows of, 114. 
 
 — his knowledge of other prophetic 
 
 writings, 142. 
 
 — Book of, 1 99. 
 
 — his reputation among the Jews, 
 
 223 and note. 
 
 — his excellences, moral, 287. 
 Jeroboam, calf-worship of, 182. 
 Jerusalem, destruction of, caused by 
 
 moral reasons, 276. 
 Jews, see ' Israelites.' 
 Jezebel, fanaticism of, 182, 183. 
 Joel, teaching of, 199, 241, 257. 
 
 — founder of spiritual prophecy, 
 
 231. 
 
 — prepares the way for Isaiah, 232. 
 
 — occasion of his prophecy, # 24i. 
 
 — teaches God's providence, 243. 
 
 — teaches coming of Holy Ghost, 
 
 244. 
 
 — and general judgment, 249. 
 
 — often quoted by Apostles, 247. 
 
 — only partially understood by St. 
 
 Peter, 247. 
 Jonah, Book of, earliest written 
 prophecy, 231. 
 
 — teaching of, 232. 
 
 — shows nature of prophecy, 233. 
 
 — foretells call of Gentiles, 241. 
 
 — gives type of Christ's death and 
 
 resurrection, 241. 
 Joseph, history of, 36, 84 ?i. 
 Josephus, his baseness, 357. 
 Judah, its strength in David's reign 
 
 accounted for, 121 n. 
 Judaism, insufficient to account for 
 
 Christianity, 22S. 
 
 — its temporary nature foretold, 
 
 270. 273, 274. 
 Judges, in what way moved by the 
 spirit, 65, 66 11., 106, 368. 
 
 — state of Israel under, 93. 
 
374 
 
 INDEX OF SUBJECTS. 
 
 Judgment, general, foretold by Joel, 
 249. 
 
 — revelation a necessary conse- 
 
 quence of teaching of, 249, 258. 
 
 — not fully revealed till Christ 
 
 came, 250, 258. 
 Justin Martyr, Jewish view of Christ's 
 advent in, 328. 
 
 Kenezites, in what way Israelites, 
 
 85". 
 Knowledge, human, imperfect, 237. 
 
 — grows gradually, 285. 
 
 Land, how divided among the 
 
 Israelites, 89 n. 
 Law of Moses, temporary, 270, 271. 
 Learning, progress of, in days of 
 
 Samuel, 126: ofElisha, 138. 
 Levites, largely trained in prophetic 
 
 schools, 132, 
 
 — had charge of Temple service, 
 
 133 and note. 
 Little ones, meaning of term, 81 n. 
 Locusts, description of in Joel, 241. 
 
 Malachi, foretells rejection of Jews, 
 288, and state of things prepara- 
 tory to fall of Jerusalem, 289. 
 
 Mantle, Elijah's, 168. 
 
 Marcion, his Book of Oppositions, 
 
 363. 
 Massorites, labours of, 5 n., 280 n., 
 
 350 11. 
 
 Mediator, necessity of, 58. 
 Medicine, studied by prophets, 154, 
 163. 
 
 — practised by Christ, 166. 
 Melcath, her worship in time of 
 
 Jeremiah, 297. 
 Melote, see ' Sheepskin.' 
 Messiah, see ' Christ.' 
 Micah, prophecy of, 199. 
 
 — predicts destruction of Jerusalem, 
 
 206, 276. 
 
 — is repeated by Isaiah, 207. 
 
 — earliest prophet who gives spe- 
 
 cific predictions, 275. 
 
 — how these predictions were pre- 
 
 pared for, 276. 
 
 — style of, 280. 
 
 — morality of, 282. 
 
 — prophecies chiefly of Church, 283. 
 Mishpachah, meaning of, 87 n. 
 
 Missionary labours, how described 
 
 by Micah, 279. 
 Mixed multitude, see ' Ereb.' 
 Moloch, prevalence of his worship 
 
 in Isaiah's time, 297. 
 Morality, laws of, taught by Gospel, 
 
 15. 
 
 Mosaic period parallel to Chris- 
 tianity, 107 n. 
 Moses, the servant of Jehovah, 72. 
 
 — elevation of his views, 93, 97. 
 
 — grandson of, 95. 
 
 — greatness of, 95, 97, 98. 
 
 — gives outline of whole Gospel, 
 
 192,196. See ' Pentateuch.' 
 
 — why present at Transfiguration, 
 
 210. 
 
 — foretold fall of Judaism, 273. 
 
 — Ascension of, 357 n. 
 Mountain of Lord's House, 269, 
 
 271, 272, 273, 277. 
 Music, prophets trained in, 128. 
 
 — its influence in barbarous times, 
 
 129. 
 
 Nabhi, name for prophet, 48. 
 
 — meaning of, 54. 
 
 — head of prophetic schools, 139. 
 Nahum, prophecy of, 200. 
 Naioth, meaning of, 105. 
 Nations, teleology of, 303. 
 Nature, meaning of its laws, 243. 
 Neubauer, his view of Targums, 333. 
 Nineveh, purpose of its empire, 310. 
 
 Obadiah, his quotations from Jere- 
 miah, 142. 
 
 Palestine, Jews of, see ' Israelites.' 
 
 — its physical deterioration, 316. 
 Patriarchs, why called prophets, 56. 
 Paul, St., evidential value of epistles 
 
 of, 17. 
 
 — the first active missionary, 2 20. 
 Pentateuch, archaic style of, 54 n. 
 
 — contains the Gospel, 75, 79, 97. 
 
 — nature of revelation in, 193. 
 People, in singular the Jews, in 
 
 plural the Gentiles, 221. 
 Philistines, early presence of in 
 Gerar, 82 n. 
 
 — supremacy of, 99. 
 
 Philo, his view of the Messiah, 342. 
 Preparation for Christ twofold. 22. 
 
 — vastness of, 202. 
 
INDEX OF SUBJECTS. 
 
 375 
 
 Progress, this world one of, 255 n. 
 
 — law of, requires preparation for 
 
 Christianity, 255 n. 
 Prophecy, the witness to Christian 
 truth, 26. 
 
 — not identical with prediction, 30, 
 
 38, 108 n., 222, 305. 
 
 — meaning of Hebrew verb to pro- 
 
 phecy in various conjugations, 
 
 49. 5°- 
 
 — idea of, associated with madness, 
 
 53. 
 
 — four great periods of, 107. 
 
 — not confined to any class, 113, 
 
 136. 
 
 — development of, in northern king- 
 
 dom, 182, 184. 
 
 — development of, in Judah, 188. 
 
 — period of unwritten, 203. 
 
 — Assyrian period of, 203. 
 
 — Chaldaean period of, 204. 
 
 — work of prophets of Assyrian 
 
 period, 205. 
 
 — written, object of, 209. 
 
 — written, result of prophetic 
 
 schools, 210. 
 
 — secondary sense of, not a Jewish, 
 
 but a Christian view, 225, 226. 
 
 — nature of, taught by Jonah, 233. 
 
 — opposed to fatalism, 234. 
 
 — conditional, 236, 238, 276. 
 
 — general in early prophets, 253, 
 
 254- 
 
 — specific first in Micah, 275. 
 
 — contradictions of, reconciled in 
 
 Christianity, 280. 
 
 — plan of, 253, 254, 286. 
 
 — why and when it ceased, 317, 332. 
 
 — its external view of Christ, 345. 
 Prophet, see ' Chozeh,' ' Nabhi,' 
 
 ' Roeh.' 
 
 — speaker for Jehovah, ^7, »., 65. 
 
 — a mediator, 58, 59, 68. 
 
 — higher than priest, 63. 
 
 — the, like unto Moses, 67, 74. 
 
 — how called, 106, III, 112. 
 
 — teacher of spiritual truth, 123. 
 
 — and priest, how opposed, 112,133. 
 
 — meaning of name in New Testa- 
 
 ment, 108 n. 
 Prophets, schools of, 105, no, in, 
 
 i 2 4' *37> J 39. H 1 * *5o, 152. 
 
 — of Samaria, III, 138. 
 
 — uninspired, 106, 147. 
 
 Prophets, urge subjective side of reli- 
 gion, 112. 
 
 — why called to life of endurance, 
 
 114. 
 
 — decline and fall of, 115, 146, 155, 
 
 166. 
 
 — majority of, priests, 133. 
 
 — personal probation of, 140 n. t 158. 
 
 — their knowledge of one another's 
 
 writings, 141, 256. 
 
 — had a college at Jerusalem, 142, 
 
 280. 
 
 — a powerful class, 145 and note. 
 
 — wives of, 148, 149. 
 
 — houses of, 148, 149. 
 
 — collegiate life of, 150. 
 
 — offerings made to, 151. 
 
 — maintenance of, 153, 166. 
 
 — dress of, 167, 172. 
 
 — journeys of, 171. 
 
 — asceticism of, 174. 
 
 — political activity of, 175, 178. 
 
 — crown conferred by, 177. 
 
 — set free from office of Judge, 197. 
 
 — early, work of, 199, 201. 
 
 — later, work of, 201. 
 
 — Books of, ill-arranged, 231. 
 
 — teach imperfection of Judaism, 
 
 256. 
 
 — unity of teaching of, 266. 
 
 — metaphors of, whence drawn, 271. 
 
 — style of, marked, 281. 
 
 — external evidence of authenticity 
 
 of writings of, 293 n. 
 Providence, the main lesson of Joel, 
 
 243- 
 
 — verges on miracle, 368. 
 Psalmody, beginning of, 129, 203. 
 Psalms, doctrines of, 213. 
 
 — prove nature of teaching of early 
 
 prophets, 213, 214, 217. 
 
 — of degrees, 266. 
 Psalter of Solomon, 348. 
 
 Ramah, 124, 125, and note. 
 Rationalism, credulity of, 291. 
 
 — weakness of, 292. 
 Renan, theory of, 330. 
 Repentance, nature of, 244. 
 Revelation, manner of, in Old Testa- 
 ment, 35. 
 
 — nature of proof of, 39. 
 
 — nature of knowledge given by, 6 1 . 
 Roeh, meaning of, 41. 
 
376 
 
 INDEX OF SUBJECTS. 
 
 Samuel, bringing up of, i oo. 
 
 — three great acts of, 104. 
 
 — reformation wrought by, 121,127, 
 
 196, 197. 
 
 — later years of, devoted to schools 
 
 of the Prophets, 197. 
 
 — most of the courses of singers 
 
 descended from, 217. 
 Saul, high qualities of, 42. 
 
 — among the prophets, 131. 
 
 Seer, popular name for prophet, 42 ; 
 see also ' Chozeh ' and ' Roeh.' 
 Septuagint, value of, 293, 333. 
 
 — work of many hands, 334. 
 
 — translates according to precon- 
 
 ceived notions, 335, 337. 
 Servant of Jehovah, title of Moses, 72. 
 
 — of Israel, 320. 
 
 — of Messiah, 320. 
 Sheepskin, dress of prophets, 169. 
 Shiloh, destruction of, 99, 271. 
 Sibylline oracles, forged by Jews, 
 
 333- 
 
 Sinai, fertility of wilderness of, 88 n. 
 Slavery, nature of Jewish, 70, 86. 
 Solomon, evils of his reign, 198. 
 Son of God, Jewish title of Messiah, 
 
 327- 
 
 Spirit, gift of, first taught byjoel, 244. 
 Strauss, theory of, 330. 
 Synagogue, model of Christian 
 church, 129. 
 
 Tabernacle, significance of, 270. 
 Tacitus, character of Jews by, 314. 
 Talmud, teaching of, 25, 328. 
 Taph, see ' Little ones.' 
 
 Targum of Jonathan, 261, 350, 353. 
 
 — of Onkelos, 349. 
 
 Targums, Chaldee, account of, 333. 
 Tents, the ordinary Jewish dwelling, 
 
 127 and note. 
 Testament, Old, the proof of Christ's 
 
 ministry, 219. 
 
 — use of, by St. Paul, 220. 
 
 — prophetic of Christ, 227. 
 
 — Old and New not opposed, 362. 
 
 See also ' Bible.' 
 Theocracy, meaning of, 62. 
 Towns, low moral state of, 92. 
 Transfiguration, why Moses and 
 
 Elias there, 210. 
 Tribes, different in rank, 80. 
 
 — Ten, their revolt, 198. 
 
 Unbelief, intolerance of, 299. 
 University, Ramah the first Jewish, 
 
 125 and note. 
 Urijah, fate of, 223. 
 Urim and Thummim, 62, 63 n., 66, 
 
 135. 178. 
 
 Vision, why prophecy so called, 47. 
 Vulgate, value of, 2 73 n. 
 
 War, condemned by Prophets, 122. 
 Wisdom, Book of, 339. 
 Writing, antiquity of, 105 n. 
 
 — not common till time of Elisha, 
 
 !39- 
 
 Zachariah, genuineness of Book of, 
 
 287 n. 
 Zion, hill of, type of what, 272. 
 
INDEX OF TEXTS EXPLAINED. 
 
 Gen. iii. 15 
 
 — xviii. 32 
 
 — xxxi. 46, 54 
 Exod. vii. 1 
 Num. xi. 17, 25-5 
 
 — xii. 5-8 
 
 — xxiv. 24 
 Deut. xviii. 15 
 Judg. v. 14 
 
 — vi. 25 . 
 1 Sam. iii. 20 
 
 — ix. 9 
 
 — xviii. 10 
 
 1 Kings iv. 25 
 
 — xvi. 33 . 
 
 2 Kings i. 8 
 
 — ii. 9 . 
 
 — ii. IS • 
 
 — iv. 39 . 
 
 — ix. 25 . 
 
 — xx. 4 
 
 1 Chr. xxix. 29 
 
 2 Chr. xix. 2 
 
 — xx. 37 . 
 Ps. lxxxix. 3, 4 
 
 — ex. 3 . 
 
 — ex. 4 
 
 — exxxii. 11, 12 
 Is. ix. 6 
 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 
 5». 
 
 Is. x. 28-34 
 
 263 
 
 
 28 
 
 — xi. 1 . . . 
 
 264 
 
 
 83 
 
 — xi. 4 
 
 353" 
 
 
 56 
 
 XX. 2 
 
 172 
 
 27 . 
 
 50 
 
 — xlix. 5 , 
 
 272 & n 
 
 
 69 
 
 — lxv. 8, 9 . 272, 3c 
 
 9>3H 
 
 
 273 
 
 Jer. xv. 17 . 
 
 114 
 
 
 67 
 
 — xxiii. 14 
 
 167 
 
 
 126 
 
 — xxiv. 5, 8 . 
 
 277 
 
 
 182 n. 
 
 Ezek. xxxvii. 4-12 
 
 5i 
 
 
 64 n. 
 
 Hos. iii. 4, 5 
 
 260 
 
 
 42 n. 
 
 Joel ii. 28 
 
 247 
 
 
 52 
 
 Amos vii. 14 
 
 143 
 
 
 90 n. 
 
 — ix. 9-12 
 
 262 
 
 
 182 n. 
 
 Micah iv. 10 
 
 277 
 
 
 168 
 
 — v. 2 
 
 275 
 
 
 169 
 
 Zech. xiii. 4 
 
 . 168 
 
 
 128 
 
 Mat. iii. 4 . 
 
 169 
 
 
 150 n. 
 
 Luke xii. 47, 48 . 
 
 • 252 
 
 
 47 
 
 John vii. 27 
 
 326 
 
 
 280 n. 
 
 — vii. 31 . 
 
 342 
 
 
 46 
 
 — xii. 34 . 
 
 348 
 
 
 43 n. 
 
 1 Cor. ix. 5 
 
 149 n 
 
 
 51 
 
 Heb. iv. 12 . 32 
 
 ».»35 
 
 
 259 
 
 — xi. 37 . 
 
 170 
 
 
 338 
 
 1 Pet. i. 10, 1 1 . 
 
 256 
 
 
 259 
 
 — v. 13 . 
 
 149 
 
 .265 
 
 1., 266 
 
 2 Pet. i. 19 
 
 228 
 
 . 
 
 339 
 
 1 John iii. 2 
 
 238 
 
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