Hebrew prophecy'.
Oxford and London, 1865.

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HEBREW PROPHECY, 1

A SERMON

PBEA.CHEB BEEOEE

THE UNIYEBSITY* OE OXEOED,
MARCH 26, 1865,

H. H. MILMAN, D.D.,
DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S.

OXTOKD and LONDON :
JOHN HENRY and JAMES PARKER.
LONDON: JOHN MURRAY.
1865.
 ;  *

HEBREW PROPHECY.

A SERMON

PREACHED BEFOB.E

THE UNIYEBSITY OE OXEOED,
MARCH 26, 1865,

H. H. MILMAN, D.D.,

> i >
DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S.

%&•*.

OXFORD and LONDON :
JOHN HENRY and JAMES PARKER.
LONDON: JOHN MURRAY.
1865.

Cljis S*nwm,

PREACHED AT THE REQUEST OF THE VICE-CHANCELLOR,
ON A SPECIAL SUBJECT,
BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD j
PUBLISHED IN DEFERENCE TO THE JUDGMENT OF MANY,
PERHAPS PARTIAL FRIENDS \
IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED TO
%\i SEnifoersitg,
TO WHICH IN YOUTH I OWED SO MUCH, AND TO WHICH
I HAVE BEEN EVER ATTACHED BY AFFECTION,
REVERENCE, AND GRATITUDE.

i^Irnfca ItopjmjL

ST. LUKE xxii. 67.
" Art thou the Christ ? tell us. And He said unto them,
If I tell you, ye will not believe."
QTJCH was the question of the Jewish Sanhedrin,
" the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,"
(at once the senate and hierarchy, as well as the
supreme legal tribunal of the nation,) addressed to
our Lord after His betrayal and apprehension. Such
was His answer to their interrogatory. He was in
these words solemnly adjured to declare whether He
was indeed the expected Messiah, the Hope of Israel.
It may be difficult exactly to appreciate the force and
significance to the Jewish ear, of the appellations, the
"Son of Man," and "the Son of God," which in His
subsequent answers our Lord seemed to appropriate
to Himself. But that they were tantamount to an
assertion of His Messiahship, appears undeniable :
"And they said, "What need we further witness? for
we ourselves have heard of His own mouth." So
proceeded they to that, which to the Christian mind
is the most unanswerable fulfilment of prophecy, His
being " despisedi and rejected of men;" His being
"the man of sorrows;" his "acquaintance" with un-
describable " grief." Then followed the Crucifixion,
the Eesurrection, the Ascension.
He, that read the heart of man, had declared in
the latter words of the text, " If I tell you, ye will
b2

4 HEBREW PROPHECY.
not believe." In the Jewish mind there was insur
mountable oppugnancy to belief, a moral incapacity
of believing, an obstinate prepossession, which made
it all but impossible that they should believe "the
signs of His coming." They were sheathed in the
impenetrable and inflexible iron of national pride
and obduracy against the acknowledgment of our
Lord's divine mission, of His divinity — verities to
our eternal welfare accepted by a large part of man
kind. It may better become us, however, calmly to ex
amine the nature of this obduracy, rather than bit
terly to reproach it ; to investigate its causes and its
motives, rather than passionately to condemn it, or
to look on it with that haughty compassion which
is akin to scorn, although such passion may seem
allied with our holiest thoughts, with our profound
reverence for that sacred Person, thus ignominiously
rejected, thus the object of the most insulting con
tempt and the most revolting cruelty. Why espe
cially were the Jews sternly deaf to what has borne
such conviction to the Christian, the voice of pro
phecy ?
The usual course in this controversy has been
either to insist on the collective force of the various
prophecies gathered from the Old Testament, as has
been done by one who in my younger days was held
in high and just honour in this University51; or to
array the series of separate predictions, either applied
in the New Testament, or which appear in themselves
fairly applicable to Jesus as the Messiah.
Far be it from me to depreciate the ability and
erudition with which each of these lines of argument
* Mr. Davison of Oriel.

HEBREW PROPHECY. 0
has been worked out. But the latter, at least, may
seem wellnigh exhausted ; at all events, is better
suited for a long elaborate dissertation to be deli
berately examined in the closet, rather than for
a discourse from the pulpit.
In truth, since old Baymond Martin brandished his
"dagger of the faith b" against the Jews of Spain, not
much has been added to the point and sharpness of
this weapon of attack. Nor then, nor in later times,
does it appear to have been wielded with much effect,
so far as concerns the Jews. The zealous monk was
fain to call in the aid of the stake and the fire to
convince the obstinate unbelievers. The lurid light
of the auto-da-fe was necessary to enlighten their
benighted minds.
And still has every point been contested with sullen
resolution. The same arguments from language and
from history have been urged against the Virgin birth,
since the days when Justin Martyr contended with
the Jew Tryphon. On the seventy weeks of years,
how many volumes have been written ? have we seen
the last ? And so on with every separate prediction.
But we take, in my judgment a narrow view of
Hebrew prophecy, if we confine and limit it to the
more or less distinct anticipation of future events.
The function of the prophet was not that of the seer
alone, the diviner of things hereafter to take place.
He was far more than this to his own generation.
He was the voice of God, to admonish, to rebuke,
to console, to teach ; he was the authorized preacher
of God's justice, of God's wisdom, of God's mercy.
In the most dismal times, in the most voluptuous
times, in the most idolatrous times, in the most care-
b Raymond Martin, "Pugio fidei."

6 HEBREW PROPHECY.
less times, the prophet was the great moral power,
the remembrancer of God's perpetual presence. Under
the heaviest tyranny he was the assertor of religious
freedom ; under the darkest disasters he, and he alone,
elevated and ennobled the souls of the people, for he
raised their thoughts to God : he was their comforter,
for he opened to them the inexhaustible treasures of
the Divine goodness.
But besides this, in a sense more nearly approach
ing to prophecy in its common signification, he was
the voice of God, as pre-announcing, pre- developing,
pre-expanding the great truths of morality and of
religion, which not before future days were to attain
their full and mature authority. He hailed the dawn
ing of that light which in God's good time was to rise
to its meridian ; he caught and uttered the first whis
perings of those verities, which erewhile were to be
proclaimed on the house-tops.
Hebrew prophecy was thus a vast vaticination, not
only in special texts and, as it were, premature allu
sions to facts and circumstances in the evangelic his
tory, but of the Gospel itself; a twilight, a dim twi
light of Christian righteousness ; a necessary open
ing act in the great drama of the providential govern
ment of the world.
It is much to be regretted, that not merely to the
popular ear, but in graver theology, the imperfect
and restricted sense of prophecy is that which is
dominant and almost established.
One, indeed, of our great divines, — one who with
the imagination of a Shakespearian poet, the subtlety
of a schoolman, was gifted with the devoutness, bor
dering on asceticism, of a saint, — he, and he almost
alone, re-asserted for this word its higher signification ;

HEBREW PROPHECY. 7
and it is remarkable that while he vindicated for the
prophet his proper office, he was himself in some
degree like a prophet of old. The author of the
"Holy Living and Dying" was also the author of
the " Liberty of Prophesying ;" and in that book
Jeremy Taylor was the prophet of great truths, pre
mature in his own age, but now dominant in all the
enlightened parts of Christendom (would they were
in the whole Christian world !) ; the Christian truths
of universal toleration, the freedom of human thought,
of human conscience, the emancipation even of the
clergy from the shackles wound around them by hu
man hands, the eternal paramount duty of candour,
forbearance, mutual respect, charity to all men. *
"What, then, were some of those truths (for to some
we must confine our enquiry) which, thus more or
less dimly foreshewn in the prophetic writings, cul
minated and expanded to their full height and breadth
in the New Testament ?
I. The absolute spirituality of the Godhead. In
the writings of the Prophets, God is withdrawing,
as it were, into the sanctuary of His unapproachable
Being; apprehensible but not comprehensible, and
that by the spiritual part of man alone, his mind and
his heart. The ruder, more familiar anthropomorphic
figures of the older time are falling away. The vulgar
notion that God was but the God of the Jews, only
a mightier power than the rival gods of the hostile
nations, was gradually rebuked before the higher sense
of the Divine Majesty. A loftier conception, but to
which materialistic images still clung, raised Him, as
it were, to a great Oriental sovereign, seated on
a visible throne, with an innumerable body-guard of
celestial beings.

o HEBREW PROPHECY.
Though these images still adhere to its commence
ment — to the framework, as it were, of that noblest of
poems — the Book of Job is, in this sense, one great
prophecy ; a prophecy not merely in that single verse
familiar to us in our Burial Service (I discuss not
this text) ; but throughout there is a solemn protest
against, a corrective as it were, of two narrow mis
apprehensions, which almost naturally arose out of
the Mosaic law. From the threatenings of temporal
visitations, the promise of temporal blessings, had
grown up in the Jewish mind the notion that human
misery was the sure sign of God's displeasure, pros
perity of His favour. It were presumptuous to ad
duce* the sorrows of Job as in any way foreshadowing
that sorrow "which was above all sorrow," yet as
suredly it was a prelibation of that great Gospel
truth, " Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth." It
held up to the wonder of men the beauty of patience
under the heaviest affliction, the majesty of resigna
tion to the Divine will, the grandeur of unswerving
confidence in the justice and in the love of God.
Secondly, where had the universality of God's pro
vidence been proclaimed in such soul-expanding
phrases ? The poem was, as it must have been, the
history of a man, not of the Chosen race, a man of
Edom. It is a wonderful thing to find the history
of a stranger, a foreigner, of a hostile, hated race,
among the records of the Jewish people, and that
stranger, that foreigner in intimate intercourse with,
under the special protection of God. "What more
solemn rebuke to the exclusiveness of the proud race
of Israel ? Surely here is some remote intimation of
the great Christian truth, that "there is no respect
of persons with God;" that all are alike under His

HEBREW PROPHECY. 9
providence, who makes His sun to shine and His rain
to fall, alike on all His creatures upon earth.
Even the sublime prayer on the dedication of the
Temple, though it seemed to repudiate the notion, in
some degree circumscribed the Godhead in a local
residence. But the view of divine Providence in the
Book of Job is on the whole an expansion towards,
though it may be far from the great Christian truth,
uttered in the words of Christ Himself, "The time
eometh, yea now is, when the worshippers neither in
this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, shall worship the
Father. The true worshippers shall worship Him in
spirit and in truth. God is a Spirit, and they that wor
ship Him, must worship Him in spirit and in truth0."
Passing from the Book of Job, there was another
contracting notion, which clung to the last around the
Jewish mind — the hereditary malediction, the here
ditary privilege of God's favour : " Did this man sin
or his father, that he was born blind4?" Yet had
not Ezekiel uttered those wonderful words, wonderful
for his race and for his time, — I quote but a part of
this remarkable passage, — " Yet say ye, Why ? Doth
not the son bear the iniquity of the father ? When
the son shall have done that which is lawful and right,
and hath kept all My statutes, and hath done them,
he shall surely live. The soul that sinneth, it shall
die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father,
neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.
The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him,
and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him e."
Who that had laid these words of ancient prophecy
to heart has been so startled by the declaration that
0 St. John iv. 21—24. d Ibid. is. 2.
• Ezek. xviii. 19, 20.

10 HEBREW PROPHECY.
God " of these stones might raise up children unto
Abraham?" Is not here a far-off anticipation of the
great Christian revelation, "that there is neither Jew
nor Gentile, bond nor free, but that in every nation
he that feareth God, and worketh righteousness, is
accepted with Him ;" that each individual man is
the keeper of his own soul; that according to the
measure of his life, of his grace and power, he must
stand or fall ?
II. As the spiritual being of God expanded, so the
worship of God is becoming more spiritual. Prayer — •
not the sudden cry of supplication in the hour of dis
tress, the burst of gratitude in the hour of joy, but
prayer as adoration, as the habitual intercourse of the
immaterial soul with the immaterial Godhead — becomes
predominant. Examine the Book of Psalms. Here
and there anthropomorphic images still appear, but
more as poetic forms. Passages are harsh with the
Judaic maledictory tone : the suppliant's enemies are
the enemies of God, and justly doomed to the most
cruel misery. Yet, on the whole, Christian devotion
has found no strains so exquisite, so congenial to its
gentler spirit, to express either the devout outpourings
of the assembled people, or the quiet emotions of the
solitary heart. With these exceptions the Psalms may
be called a prophetic manual of Christian prayer.
Ceremonial observances are shrinking into their
proper domain. The moral effects, the true tests of
religion, are assuming their rightful supremacy. Al
ready works of goodness and of charity are advancing
into the first rank. " Is it such a fast that I have
chosen ? a day for a man to afflict his soul ? Is it to bow
down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth
and ashes under him ? Wilt thou call this a fast, and an

HEBREAV PROPHECY. 11
acceptable day to the Lord ? Is not this the fast that
I have chosen ? to loose the bands of wickedness, to
undo the heavy burdens, and let the oppressed go
free, and to break every yoke ? Is it not to deal thy
bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor
that are cast out to thy house ? when thou seest the
naked, that thou clothe him? and hide not thy face
from thine own flesh f?" Contrast the two following
passages : " Then the king and the people offered
sacrifice before the Lord ; and king Solomon offered
a sacrifice of twenty and two thousand oxen, and
a hundred thousand sheep. So the king and all the
people dedicated the house of God s." Now hear the
Prophet Micah : "Wherewith shall I come before the
Lord, and bow myself before the high God ? Will the
Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten
thousands of rivers of oil ? Shall I give my firstborn
for my transgressions, or the fruit of my body for the
sin of my soul ? He hath shewed thee, 0 man, what
is good, and what doth the Lord require of thee, but
to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly
with thy Godh?"
Is this a prophet of the Law, or a disciple of Him
who uttered the Sermon on the Mount? of Him who
approved the assenting Scribe, when he acknowledged
the love of God and the love of his neighbour to "be
more than whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices ?" who
said of that learned Jew, that he "was not far from
the kingdom of God1;" his Jewish hardness of heart
was fast melting away, he was ripe for the acceptance
of the Gospel. In these words of Micah the purest
Christian virtues seem springing to precocious life ;
' Isa. lviii. 5—7. s 2 Chron. vii. 4, 6.
h Micah vi. 6, 7. ' Mark viii.

12 HEBREW PROPHECY.
the fruits of Christian righteousness are in the bud of
promise ; he scents afar off the incense of true Chris
tian sacrifice — self-sacrifice, and self-sacrifice for the
good of others.
I bow in submissive but silent reverence before the
great mysterious sacrifice, which was to consummate
and conclude all outward sacrifice. It might have
been well, perhaps, if theology had maintained that
awful reverence, and not "rushed in" where we may
humbly presume that " angels fear to tread." But
even of that sacrifice there are two aspects, which in
some sense were not obscurely foreshewn. It was
a willing sacrifice, it was a sacrifice for the good of
others. " I lay down My life ;" " no man taketh it
from Me, I lay it down of Myself k." And then for the
motive, — "I lay down My life for My sheep." Pass
from the Gospel to the Epistle of St. John, and mark
the inference, " Because He laid down His life for us,
we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren 1."
Even if the Prophets in express words have not
affirmed this great principle, that of self-sacrifice and
sacrifice for the good of others, we may perhaps not
unjustly appeal to the lives of some of them, — Isaiah,
if the tradition be true, under the saw, Jeremiah in
the prison, Daniel in the den of lions. We may go
further. Every man who confronts death for the truth,
does so for the good of mankind. The Maccabees who
died for their faith, and so for the truth, as far as in
them lay, were self-immolated victims for the good of
man ; they may be described, not irreverently, as the
first skirmishers in the noble army of martyrs.
But in the pregnant words of Micah this vital prin
ciple is already alive, is still speaking to the intelli-
k St. John x. 17, 18. ' 1 St. John iii. 16.

HEBREW PROPHECY. 13
gent ear. The practice of every virtue, pre-eminently
of every Christian virtue, is the offering up of our
free will as a voluntary victim ; it is the dethrone
ment of the great idol, self, and that necessarily for
the good of others. The justice-doing, the mercy-
loving, the humble man has brought, is habitually
bringing, to the foot of the altar, his rapacity and
his iniquity, his sensuality and his cruelty, his in
solence and his pride. All this may be more fully
summed up in the love of God and the love of man ;
but the elements of these two all - comprehensive
commandments are in the less perfect words of the
Prophet. For let it be asked who that had truly
determined to " do justice," and from his heart "loved
mercy," who that "-walked humbly with his God,"
would have laboured under the moral incapacity of
beholding in Jesus of Nazareth the Messiah who
was to come ?
III. But of all the hard sayings of our Lord, there
was one which jarred most harshly on the Jewish ear,
so as utterly to deaden its sense, — " My kingdom is
not of this world ;" and with this saying all was in
perfect harmony. The kingdom " came not with ob
servation ;" Himself and His religion grew up as
" a tender plant," and that " in a dry ground." Was
this then, and how far was this pre-intimated, more
than in these and other similar words in the ancient
Prophets? Of this there has always appeared to
me, in a scene in the life of that most famous of
Prophets, of him sometimes called "the Prophet,"
what of course cannot be called a prophecy in its
ordinary sense, not even a type, but as it were an
adumbration, a dim emblematic foreshadowing. Be
fore Elijah, when " God was not in the great and

14 HEBREW PROPHECY.
strong wind" that "brake in pieces the rocks before
Him," when He was not in the " earthquake," we
cannot but think of the terrors of Sinai, perhaps of
the wild times of the prophets ; we seem to hear the
Gospel in the "still, small voice" in which God
was present.
Bear with me if for a moment I seem to indulge in
what may sound fantastic to severer ears. Human
science has, as it were, laid bare the secrets of these
elemental disturbances. It has at least begun to
trace to its primary cause the strong wind, to ex
plain the laws of its movement. It has dived into
the depths of the earth, and watched the brooding and
the nursing of the earthquake. For the fire of heaven,
the lightning fire, thought of old to be the sure sign
of God's presence, man has grasped it ; he has de
composed the triple cord, of which the heathen be
lieved were woven Jove's thunderbolts. He has
made the flaming fire his messenger. But " the still,
small voice within ;" the voice of God in the soul of
man ; the voice which proclaims with irresistible and
unresisted force His being, His providence, His good
ness ; the voice of God in the conscience, rebuking
sin, working remorse, giving at least a yearning for,
if not an assurance of immortality ; Christ's voice
bringing the Gospel home to the heart, — who has
traced this to its birth, read the signs of its coming
and its going ? Observation shrinks in confessed in
sufficiency ; metaphysics lose themselves in a maze of
words ; science veils its face, and is silent.
The absolute unworldliness of Christ's kingdom ;
the declaration that the Messiah was to work a revo
lution entirely and exclusively moral and religious,
was a notion least comprehensible to the Jewish

HEBREW PROPHECY. 15
mind; it required a spiritual discernment of what
they were least capable. Even to the Jew, prophecy
might seem to dwell in a strange and unaccountable
manner on Him that was to come in lowliness and
gentleness, on Him that " would not break the bruised
reed, nor quench the smoking flax," on His meek
ness, on His peacefulness, on His debasement, on
His afflictions, even on His ignominious death. Such
things lurked beneath ; they lay in deep, if I may so
speak, in tender distances, behind the bright and
dazzling foreground of the picture, which expanded
before the eager eye. For look on it again, and who
shall deny that there were other images in the pro
phetic writings which appeared at least to speak of
material things — of an earthly kingdom, of a univer
sal empire, of the Jews as the leading nation of the
world, of the Gentiles in willing subjection, of glorious
wars, of thrones, of trampling on their enemies, their
enemies and those of their God, of the twelve tribes
judging the world ? The temple of Ezekiel, however
magnificent in its materials, stupendous in its dimen
sions, was still like that of Solomon of old, a visible
earthly temple. We know how slowly the Apostles
themselves, how imperfectly even they were disen
chanted from those old hereditary notions ; how re
luctantly, it might seem, even they submitted to the
profound spiritual interpretation of all this glowing
and intoxicating poetry. If, then, the rejection of
Jesus had been all; if the evangelic history had
closed with the judgment-hall, and had not gone on
to Calvary; had Jesus only been disowned, repu
diated as the Messiah, we might deplore, we might
compassionate the fatal blindness which infatuated
the nation ; but should we have dared to condemn,

16 HEBREW PROPHECY.
should we have dared to gaze on them with hate,
even now unchristian hate ? should we not have looked
rather in awe, perhaps in humiliation, on that ob
duracy ?
Against those who looked for an earthly, not a
heavenly kingdom — who heard only, or chiefly, tem
poral promises — who were unwilling or unable to com
prehend the true nature of Christ's rule — who were
bewildered by that which we may surely call, hu
manly speaking, the great ambition of being not only
the lords, but the teachers, the priests of human-kind,
— who shall cast the first stone ?
Those who insist on the rigid, literal acceptation of
every word, syllable, and letter in the Sacred Writ
ings, and look with avowed hatred, or jealousy at
least, on all who would pierce through the dazzling
haze of Oriental or poetic imagery to the central
spiritual truth — on all who believe the Holy Scrip
tures to be a revelation of moral and religious veri
ties, and of those alone ? — Shall it be those who would
assert the absolute indefeasible supremacy of au
thority, vested in some gifted class, or sacred order,
or sect, of whose time-honoured dictates it is presump
tion, impious pride, to entertain a doubt? "Have
any of the rulers or the Pharisees believed in Him ?"
Who shall cast the first stone ? Those who on the
foundations, as they assert, of this unworldly king
dom, have built up a world-wide empire, with tem
poral state and temporal power and temporal wealth,
and have declared that without this temporal wealth
and dominion the spiritual kingdom cannot stand,
that without that kingdom Christianity would vanish
from the face of the earth ; who, bearing the lowly
appellation of Servus Servorum Dei, have overwritten

HEBREW PROPHECY. 17
it with the superscription Dominus Dominorum orbis
terrarum ; those who have girt St. Peter with a civil
as well as a spiritual sword, and too often bathed that
sword in human blood ; those who have summoned
the secular power to be their obedient bond-slave, the
executioner of their behests of torture, of death,
against all whom they have declared rebels to their
authority ?
Or shall it be those, who, with a less haughty
sacerdotalism, have placed themselves, on earth, in
the judgment-seat of Him to whom alone all judg
ment is given by the Father ; and who have left little,
as regards the fate of individual men, to the final
adjudication of the one great King ?
Who shall cast the first stone ? Those who have
dreamed of the reign of the saints upon earth, them
selves being those saints, alas ! too often, with few
signs of Christian sanctity? Those who still dwell
on unfulfilled prophecy, prophecy to be fulfilled on
earth, for earthly objects, and by earthly means, if
not with the fantastic millenary views, as they appear
in old Irenseus, with much as remote from the pure
spirituality of the Gospel ?
Who shall cast the first stone ? Those who in any
way use their religion as a means for their temporal
advancement or advantage, to obtain their objects of
worldly ambition, distinction, wealth, authority ?.
Who shall cast the first stone ? but he, and he
alone, who has extirpated, or at least subdued the
innate Judaism within us all, the pride and the love
of power, and the assumption of exclusive and dis
dainful religious superiority ? who, but he that ac
knowledges and truly believes that there is but one
throne of God, of God in Christ, upon earth, the
c

18 HEBREW PROPHECY.
throne in the unseen heart of man? " For behold the
kingdom of God is within youm." From that heart in
possession of another sovereign, we are authoritatively
told, proceed " all evil thoughts, murders, adulteries,
all which defiles a man," — surely, we may add, all
which makes men base and miserable. So from that
heart, the throne of Christ, as it is the seat of inward
joy and peace, proceed all holy influences, all those
charities which bind man to man, which bless the
family, the neighbourhood, the nation, the world.
That throne may be the heart of the most wide-
ruling sovereign, who devotes his whole self, his
power, his authority, his influence, his example, to
the well-being of his subjects. It may be that of the
very meanest of those subjects, faithfully discharging
the most base, the most loathsome of offices for the
good of his fellow-creatures. It may be the heart of
the loftiest pontiff in the most splendid cathedral,
in the most gorgeous robes, the most pompous cere
mony, (charge not the inconsistency on the humble
speaker who addresses you, but on human nature,)
who nevertheless may be secretly smiting on his
breast, and uttering the publican's prayer, with
the publican's fervour and sincerity, " God be mer
ciful to me, a sinner." It may be that of the meekest
missionary, laying down his unregarded life for the
faith on some wild foreign shore. It may be of the
most ragged crone, mumbling her feeble prayers in the
darkest corner of the lowliest church. It may be the
heart of the man of untold wealth, making unto him
self, by the distribution of that wealth, " a friend of
the mammon of unrighteousness," or that of the not
neglected Lazarus at his door. It may be that of
- St. Luke xvii. 21.

HEBREW PROPHECY. 19
the bold philosopher, who is following out the dis
coveries of his science with intrepid love of truth,
though they may seem to clash with received opi
nions, with time-honoured interpretations of the sa
cred writings. It may be that of him who, in irre
mediable ignorance, is telling his beads at the shrine
of some questionable saint, and humbly following
prayers in a language to him unintelligible.
IY. That sublimest of truths, the immortality of
man, how far was this, of which the Law was silent,
pre-intimated, suggested, confirmed by the voice of
Hebrew Prophecy ? On this, in a certain form, the
Jewish mind had not refused to be enlightened. Every
page of the New Testament shews that a resurrec
tion was deeply moulded up with the popular belief,
" We know that all shall rise again at the last day."
The rigid orthodox Mosaists alone, who received no
thing but the Law, and the Law in its strictest literal
words, stood aloof from the common creed. The
Prophets had indeed uttered but dim and doubtful
words on this great subject. The "dry bones" of
Ezekiel would bear another interpretation. Daniel
(of the age of the Book I speak not) -« as more dis
tinct. But by the days of the Maccabees, the doc
trine of another life had so interpenetrated the popular
mind, that it was recognised as the motive of their
death-defying courage; it had become the ground
work of a public ceremonial : just as at a later period
the heathen were compelled to admire it as the great
element of their obstinate valour in the last war with
the Komans.
But He, who had said, " If I tell you, ye will not
believe," had likewise said of some, " They will not be
persuaded even if one rise from the dead." It may
c2

20

HEBREW PROPHECY.

be surmised that the popular belief in the Resur
rection may rather have hardened the hearts of men
against the great Christian truth, " I am the Resur
rection and the Life." Instead of hailing Him who
" brought life and immortality to light," the universal
publication of this sublime verity, as well as the new
form which it assumed, interfered, as some might think,
with their exclusive feeling, that at least the first
Resurrection was the proud prerogative of the Chosen
people. And so the heathen in his melancholy doubt,
or in his utter blank despair, caught at once, and
clasped to his heart, this consolatory, this ennobling
tenet. That which Plato had dreamed, and the
loftiest thinkers had argued, but failed to implant
on the gradually darkening mind of man, became an
accepted truth wherever the Gospel was preached..
The Jew, at one time so far advanced, fell back, as
suredly not into Sadducaic scepticism or unbelief; but
still repudiated that which gave to the Christian his
stedfast irrepressible assurance, the motive and ac
tuating principle of his faith. While the Jew still
rested on dim tradition, on the deathless instincts of
man, on forced interpretations of his older Scriptures,
the Resurrection of Christ spread throughout the
world the certitude of immortality, and made that
certitude not only an- awful, it might be terrible
revelation, but a certitude of hrjpe and peace and joy.
The belief in Christ " risen again," stamped upon the
consciousness of humankind, we trust and believe,
the undying conviction of our immortality.
Y. How far had prophecy, taken in its proper and
widest sense, implanted or developed in the Jewish
mind the conception of a mediator between God and
man, especially of a divine mediator? This is no

HEBREW PROPHECY. 21
easy question. As God, we have already seen, re
tired into His more unapproachable incomprehensible
Being, as the anthropomorphic images gradually dis
persed, how was the widening chasm between the
spiritual and the material — in common phrase, be
tween heaven and earth — bridged over? How was
the communication maintained? How far had God
"in divers manners spoken by His Prophets" on this
inevitable subject, before he was distinctly heard to
" speak by His Son." The student of the LXX will
have observed how frequently words are, as it were,
interpolated; how for the direct agency of God is
substituted the intermediate agency of angels. In
the later prophetic period stand forth beings, it might
seem, higher than the angels, as the representatives
of God to the mind of man. The Wisdom of God, as
it appears in the Book of Proverbs, hardly more than
a divine attribute, in the later books is assuming more
of personality. In Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom " stands
up beautiful before the throne of God11." In the
Wisdom of Solomon, to Wisdom are attributed all
the wonders in the early history of mankind, all the
works of Jehovah. In Philo and the Alexandrian
school, though the intermediate being takes the
name of the Logos, the Word, it is a purely meta
physical conception — the Platonic idea, or the col
lective ideas of God, centred in one. In the earlier
Targums appears the Memra, the Word of God, the
Metatron, the Mediator. All these appellations seem
to have risen out of the speculations of the learned.
But whether learned or popular, all was vague, un
determined, unauthoritative. In a historical work I
have endeavoured to describe how vast, various, yet
" Eoclus. xxv. 1.

22 HEBREW PROPHECY.
universal was the conception of the Messiah in our
Saviour's time. " Such were the vast, incoherent,
and dazzling images with which the future teemed
to the hopes of the Jewish people. They admitted
either a part or the whole of the common belief, as
accorded with their tone of mind or feeling. Each
region, each rank, each sect — the Babylonian, the
Palestinian, the Samaritan, the Pharisee, the Lawyer,
the Zealot — arrayed the Messiah in those attributes
which suited his own temperament. Of that which
was more methodically taught in the synagogue or
the adjacent school, the populace caught up whatever
made the deeper impression. The enthusiasm took
an active or contemplative, an ambitious or a religi
ous, an earthly or a heavenly tone, according to the
character, habits, or station of the believer; and to
different men the Messiah was Man or Angel, or more
than Angel, He was King, Conqueror, or moral Re
former, a more victorious Joshua, a more magnificent
Herod, a wider-ruling Caesar, a wiser Moses, a holier
Abraham, an angel, the angel of the covenant, the
Metatron, the Mediator between God and man ;
Michael, the great tutelar archangel of the nation,
who appears by some to have been identified with the
mysterious Being who led them out of Egypt. He
was the Word of God ; an Emanation from the Deity,
Himself partaking of the Divine nature. While this
was the religious belief, some there were, no doubt,
of the Sadducaic party or the half-Grecised adherents
of the Herodian family, who treated the whole as a
popular delusion, or as Josephus with Vespasian, would
not scruple to employ it as a politic means of advanc
ing their own fortunes. While the robber chieftain
looked out from his hill-tower to see the blood-red

HEBREW PROPHECY. 23
banner of Him whom he literally expected to see
coming from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah,
treading the winepress in His wrath, the Essene in
his solitary hermitage, or monastic fraternity of hus
bandmen, looked to the reign of the Messiah, when
the more peaceful images of the same prophet would
be accomplished, and the Prince of Peace establish
His quiet and uninterrupted reign °."
But which of these, how few, how very few, of
these, ambitious and fierce visionaries, religious or phi
losophic speculatists, mystic recluses, were prepared
to recognise the Messiah in Jesus of Nazareth ! How
incomprehensible but to those very few the beauty
of His life ! His wonderful works were seen, but not
by many; by most of those contested, disbelieved,
ascribed to other powers. Nor less incomprehensible
the wisdom of His words, the holiness of His words,
the loving-kindness of His words, still in great part
wrapt in parables, to which their minds had no key,
which awoke no kindred emotions in their hearts.
How, as the Christ unfolded within Him and around
Him, were souls in such a state as we believe that
we have justly described that of the Jewish mind
to have been, — how were they to see, to acknowledge,
to bow down before the fulness of the Godhead, ap
pearing bodily in Him ? How were they to accept the
slowly expanding truths that " God was in Christ,
reconciling the world (observe the whole world) to
Himself?" how, with eyes so blinded, dazzled, con
fused, to behold in Jesus of Nazareth the untranslate-
able aTravyaa-fia ttjs S6£r)?, the ineffable xaPaKTVP TV?
vTroa-rda-eas avrovv J finally, how at length to aspire
0 History of Christianity, ii. 79. r Heb. i. 7.

24 HEBREW PROPHECY.
to the full sense of St. John's saying, " The Word
that was with God, the Word that was God?"
On the whole, then, if the Jewish nation laboured
under an incapacity of believing Jesus Christ to be
the Messiah, it was a moral incapacity. It was no
hard decree of God, no iron necessity, the bondage
of which they could not have broken. This cruel
fatalism is repudiated alike by rational religion and
by rational history. But let me be clearly under.
stood. As to what in the vulgar sense is commonly
termed morality, the Jews can hardly be arraigned
with justice as pre-eminently depraved. They were
not habitually a cruel people; they became so not
till maddened by oppression, and when, as is usually
the case in an insurrectionary war, the fiercer part
of the population were in the ascendant, and bandit
chiefs became their leaders. They were not peculiarly
a sensual people. They were comparatively free from
the indescribable abominations prevalent in the Greek
and Roman world. Except as regards the frequency
of divorce, the rebukes of Our Lord are in a differ
ent tone from those forced from St. Paul at Corinth
and in Rome. They doubtless were not exempt from
the vices of a trading and commercial people. The
Pharisees are generally reproved as "covetous5."
Mammon is especially denounced. But perhaps these
vices were most dominant among the foreign Jews
already, in search of gain, dispersed throughout the
world. It was first Roman tyranny, then, alas !
Christian persecution, which crushed too many of
them down to their proverbial baseness in these mat
ters. But it was with regard to much higher things
that they were wanting. If, as we are authoritatively
q St. Luke xvi. 14.

HEBREW PROPHECY. 25
told, "When Moses was read the veil was upon their
hearts," we may presume that in some sort they had
degenerated from the milder spirit of their Lawgiver.
But when the Prophets were read, that veil doubt
less was more dense, and hid from them far brighter
truths. They had not advanced with the advancing
spirit of their religion, they had not expanded with
the expansion of their own faith. Had the Prophets
been more submissively studied, more wisely inter
preted, they would have been at least in some degree
better prepared for that higher morality, that highest
morality, revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, and
in His Gospel, and by His Apostles. In that morality
I include the conception of the parental character of
God, the parental character to all mankind, the love
of God as shewn in the Redemption, the mild and
gentle ideal of goodness in every word and act of the
Redeemer, the brotherhood of all men as alike the
offspring of God, the Sermon on the Mount, the charity
as unfolded by St. Paul, the love as instilled into the
heart by St. John.
It was the sense and perception of this highest
morality, this world-embracing morality, revealed in
the person and in the teaching of Christ, of this
transcendent human and therefore divine goodness,
which in the Jewish rulers and the Jewish people
was dormant, obtuse, perverted, dead. This moral
sense, whether it be intuitive in the heart of man,
and though liable to suspension or obscuration, inex
tinguishable ; be it the cause or the consequence, or
both, of a higher civilization, made finer and more
acute, and strengthened by the advance of man in
knowledge and in wisdom ; be it the uneffaced image
of God within us, the working of the spirit of God in

26 HEBREW PROPHECY.
our spirits ; call it conscience, or by any other name ;
define it, describe it as you will ; it is to this moral
sense, whatever it be, to which Christ appealed, to
which Christ's Gospel appealed, to which Christianity
on its first preaching appealed, to which it still ap
peals, to which it will appeal to the end of time.
Doubtless our Lord said, " If I had not done among
them the works which none other man did, they had
not had sinr." But these works as distinguished by
their moral character, works of love, as well as by their
marvellousness, were addressed to the moral sense of
man ; and the Saviour Himself condescended even to
submit His own words to this test. I speak not of
that recital of His wonderful acts, His cures, His
healing of physical sufferings and infirmities, which
closes with a moral miracle, seemingly intended to
overtop and crown them all, " and the poor have the
Gospel preached to them "." But look to that remark
able passage in which Our Lord taught His disciples
to discriminate between His own works and those
wrought, or supposed to be wrought, by His adver
saries. How was the difference manifested ? To what
part of man ? His were those of a beneficent, theirs
of a malignant being ; His increased the power of the
kingdom of good, theirs that of the kingdom of evil \
And how was this to be discerned, but by some inex
tinguishable sense or faculty in the heart of man ?
So was it with His religion. For one who witnessed,
for one who had convincing testimony of a miracle,
and could or would discriminate it from those with
which the world teemed, how many thousands em
braced the faith for its religious blessings alone, the
' St. John xiv. 21. 'St. Matt. xi. 5.
1 St. Matt. xii. 24 ; St. Luke xii. 1 8.

HEBREW PROPHECY. 27
promise of pardon and immortality, the satisfaction of
the spiritual necessities- of our nature, the universal
love which it displayed and taught, and evinced to
the heart within and to the world without ! How
many conversions were made, profound conversions,
by that simple sentence, " How these Christians love
one another !"
At all events, whatever may have been the pro
vidential course at the promulgation of the Gospel,
these were the eternal truths which, rejected by the
Jews, subdued the world. St. Paul seems to intimate
that the one enduring result of the Gospel is charity,
and by charity he must surely mean what I hold to be
the intrinsic, undying source and consequence of true
Christian morality; though "prophecies may fail and
tongues cease," though all the wonders of earlier times
break off and come to an end, this is the everlasting
preacher, this the final preaching of the Apostles of
Christ. These are the eternal truths which " shall never pass
away ;" these are what designate Christianity, I will
not say pre-eminently, but solely, exclusively, as the
religion of civilization; these, to man in his highest
conceivable state, are the irrefragable evidence of its
divinity ; these, while civilization advances, come out
in fuller light ; these, as man advances in knowledge,
may be still purifying themselves to his keener and
more unclouded vision ; they will bear no rival near
the throne of the sanctified heart, of the more en
lightened reason. This I fearlessly assert, that there
is nothing in the milder, more humane, more generous,
more self-devoting and self-sacrificing spirit, nothing
in that philanthropy of which we hear, thank God, we
see so much, (I dislike the awkward word, I prefer

28 HEBREW PROPHECY.
the good old Christian term, charity,) there is nothing
of all this, in the manners, thoughts, sentiments, in
the ideal, if I may so speak, of our day, which is not
to be found in, which does not flow more or less
directly from, the New Testament. And this is a proof
at once of the divinity of Christ and of Christianity ;
and also that it has not yet become, is gradually be
coming, more fully comprehended by the soul of man ;
that though it has yet far from fulfilled, it may still be
fulfilling more and more its perfect work upon earth.
It is this vital union, this deep if hidden harmony,
this unquenchable if untraceable sympathy, this hal
lowed Marriage sacrament between true religion and
this highest morality, which has been declared of
God to be eternal, indissoluble. But man is ever
striving, man has ever striven, to set asunder what
God has joined together.
Survey the whole history of Christianity, and ob
serve religion at almost every period giving a bill of
divorce to his heaven-appointed consort, and taking
to his bosom some other companion, or what has been
more common, reducing the legitimate partner of his
life to a humble and neglected handmaid.
Ceremonial observance, monastic asceticism, sacer
dotal power, orthodoxy of creed in various forms,
have usurped the honours, engrossed the affections,
which ought to have been the inalienable rights of
the first love, the wedded bride, of young Christianity.
Sometimes the intrusive stranger may seem to have
enforced absolute repudiation, entire estrangement.
Ceremonial observance has offered itself as the whole
of religion. Have the Pharisees been the only re
ligionists who paid their tithe of mint, anise, and
cummin, small ritualisms, timorous observances, rigid

HEBREW PROPHECY. 29
punctualities of worship, and neglected the weightier
matters of the law, justice, mercy, and truth ? When
ceremonial observance was at its height, when it
was in full possession of the house of religion, the
Church, when it occupied the whole heart, when it
absorbed every thought, did not even then the reek
of human blood rise up from the earth more constant
and more dense than the incense from the altar ;
might we not suppose that the cry of the oppressed
and down-trodden of mankind, drowned before it
reached the throne of grace the solemn prayer from
the temple ?
Monastic asceticism ! But have not the loosest of
men been too often found with the roughest sackcloth
swathing their limbs, the proudest with bare feet and
the cord around their loins, the most cruel among
those who have most severely mortified their own
bodies ? Monks have ever been the most ready
and remorseless executioners of persecution. Quench
the natural affections, in the long run you quench
humanity. Sacerdotal power ! Has that been always true to
its mission ; never issued indulgences, when indul
gences were sure to be abused ; never thought that
it was speaking in the name of God, when speaking
from the worst passions of man ?
Orthodoxy of creed ! But has that insured the in
ward orthodoxy of the Christian heart, which breathes
only Christian love ? I am one of those who believe
torturing and burning our fellow-creatures a worse
heresy against the Gospel than the most perverse of
those opinions of the miserable victims led by thou
sands to the stake. Take the converse. If the sound
creed guarantees not the Christian life, so have not

30 HEBREW PROPHECY.
the most extreme opinions extirpated the blessed in
fluences of the faith. Of all awful doctrines, Pre-
destinarianism, which makes God create myriads of
human beings, even innocent babes, with the doom of
damnation irrevocably, inseparably, bound round their
necks, might seem most irreconcilable with the Gospel
of love. Asserting itself to be the most godly, is it
not the most godless of tenets ? Before such a God we
might .shudder ; could we love such a God ? Who
shall deny that the most frightful Antinomianism
might seem to be the inevitable consequence of the
doctrine? Yet who, again, will deny that among
Predestinarians, holding the tenet in its harsher or
milder form, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, our Puri
tans, the Jansenists, the followers of Whitfield, the
readers of Jonathan Edwards, have been very many
of the best and holiest, and — such is the triumph of
the Christianized heart over the logic of the Christian
understanding — the most loving of Christians ?
Look once more — rapidly it must be — at history.
In what were of old called the Dark Ages, which it is
now among some the fashion to call the ages of Faith,
was not the sin, misery, ignorance, of mankind in the
most fearful contrast with the majesty and power
of the ruling Church — of what proudly called itself,
the Church ? And when, at the Reformation, light
seemed to break forth, did the moral atmosphere clear
up at once, and persecution cease, and superstition
shrink away abashed ? Was the wedlock, too boast
fully proclaimed, as renewed between Christian faith
and Christian holiness and love, more complete, more
lasting ?
Take another illustration from times nearer our
own. When the great Nation, sometimes, nor alto-

HEBREW PROPHECY. 31
gether unjustly, called the leading nation of Europe,
the only one since the publication of the Gospel,
solemnly renounced her Christianity, had that awful
renunciation no root in the long divorce between the
religion and the morality of the Gospel ? When, in
succession, broken only by the reign of the Great
King, the counsels of France were presided over by
princes of the Church, one the most ambitious, one
the most artful, one the most debauched of mankind ;
when the reign of the Great King was divided into two
periods, one, so-called, of glory, during which though
Bourdaloue preached, and Fenelon wrote, the mighty
monarch was ravaging whole provinces with wanton
and savage ferocity, which might have moved the
hearts of the fiercest barbarians, and peopling his
court with his illegitimate offspring; when during
the other, under the influence of a pious but narrow-
minded woman, he was crushing out of his realm
almost all that remained of vital religion, not alone
among the descendants of Calvin, of Coligny, of
Duplessis Mornay, but with less cruelty but hardly
less inveterate hatred the disciples of Arnauld and
of Pascal, had all this nothing to do with her later
atheisms and later atrocities ? Gave all this no
power to the adversaries of religion ? It was not as
the most brilliant wit, as acknowledged lord in the
domain of letters, but as the defender of Calas and of
De la Barre, that Voltaire ruled the mind and heart
of France.
I have two fears : lest I should be preaching satire
while I would be preaching the Gospel; and while
the unflinching assertor of charity, I should forget
my own charity. Nor would I be thought as irre
solutely and timidly trimming the balance between

32 HEBREW PROPHECY.
the good and evil of conflicting systems. Still, true
as all this is, it is no less true, that in all this per
petual and too often successful effort to break this
heaven-assorted union, this wedlock bond between
Christianity and moral perfection, the divorce, by
God's grace, never and nowhere was complete. The
bill of divorce was not accepted. Faithful to the
last, faithful in the darkest times, faithful when the
affections of her Lord might seem most entirely
alienated, Christian morality would never be quite
discarded. She was on every opportunity irresistibly
pleading her cause, asserting, maintaining, exercising
her rights ; in silence discharging her duties. When
seemingly most estranged, turned out of doors, if
I may so speak, she was resuming her benignant in
fluence. She was too much bone of the bone, flesh
of the flesh of her appointed spouse, absolutely to
recede from her rightful position by his side, ever
winning him back by her infelt congeniality, again
and again binding him to her by the all-powerful
magnetism of kindred affections and immortal love.
If banished or standing apart in the high places of
the world, in the lowlier valleys of life they were
found in close undisturbed companionship, like their
Master unobserved, like their Master perhaps de
spised, like their Master a hidden fountain of bless
ing, welling forth through untraceable channels, fer
tilizing, purifying, gladdening an unconscious, per
haps ungrateful world.
What is the sum and conclusion of all ? To those
who believe in the providential government of God,
who hold that all events in the history of man have
their purpose, their function, in the development of
our race, the Roman empire, the Barbarian inroads,

HEBREW PROPHECY. 33
medieevalism, the Papacy, the Reformation, the French
revolution, it cannot be supposed that our own won
derful times are without, if I may so say, their mis
sion. Of the future of Christianity what Christian
will presume to despair ? May not that future be the
more complete redintegration of that eternal union,
the more solemn ratification, as it were, of that
heaven-blessed marriage sacrament, the more perfect
fusion of the religious and moral elements of our
faith ? We may believe not less profoundly, though
we believe in a more Christian spirit. As it will most
need, so the highest civilization will submit, and only
submit, to a Christianity which has shaken off all un
worthy superstitions, the encrustation of ages upon its
simpler doctrines. There will ever, it is to be feared,
be those, who though our Lord assert Himself to be
the Christ with His own commanding voice, the
voice of love, will be self-incapacitated for belief; who
will judge Him as it were out of His own mouth,
out of His Gospel, not to be the Christ ; those alas,
who will crucify anew the Lord of life. Yet I can
not and will not believe but that the advancement of
mankind in arts, in science, in knowledge, in the
knowledge of itself, the history of our race, the limits
of our intellectual faculties, the powers of our lan
guage, in the intercommunion of family with family
of nations, in civil and religious liberty, and in all
that expands and elevates our being, will not even
tually harmonize and enter into closer fellowship with
the religion of Christ.
May there not be even in what some think our
darkling times, prophets abroad, and speaking among
us ? May not great truths, which some of us may think
D

34 HEBREW PROPHECY.
clouding over, be but clearing up, and expanding to
more full effulgence ?
The spirituality of God ! May it not, as the One
Supreme is still receding farther and farther from
human comprehension, as His works are unfolding
themselves to vaster and vaster extent, in finer sub
tlety; as they demand an inconceivable infinity of
space, so an equally inconceivable infinity of time for
their evolutions ; may not that spirituality be be
coming, if less and less comprehensible, not less cer
tain; if, not throwing off its personality, yet dis
encumbering that personality of all which is not
necessary to its being ?
The worship of God ! Like the conception of God
Himself, may it not be becoming more purely spiri
tual, more absolutely the intercommunion between
the Spirit of God and the spirit of man ; less, if I
may so say, familiar, less expectant of providential
interferences, hardly below the miraculous ; more
humbly submissive to those universal laws which
regulate, it should seem, as they do the rest of crea
tion, so God's dealings with mankind? It will not
disdain those more solemn ceremonials, the splendid
cathedral, the heart-enthralling music, the devout elo
quence, the voices of assembled thousands mingling
and strengthening each other in their heavenward as
pirations, these subsidiaries of devotion which, though
perhaps material as addressed to the senses, tend to
exalt and estrange from this world our spiritual being,
which by the sympathies and kindred emotions they
awaken, may knit our souls more closely together,
and so spread around us that atmosphere of love
which true Christian religion and true Christian
morality delight to breathe together.

HEBREW PROPHECY. 35
The unworldly kingdom of Christ ! May there not
be growing up a more entire absorption of that alliance
with temporal power and secular interests, to which
human ambition still clings with desperate tenacity ;
entire freedom of conscience, full recognition that the
soul of every man is in his own keeping, and that
force, even that which is not physical force, may
make men hypocrites, conformists, but cannot make
believers or worshippers; that the kingdom of God
is within; that the true genuine apostles of the
Christian faith are gentleness, candour, forbearance,
tender argument, which loses not its strength by its
tenderness, quiet expostulation, friendly admonition,
words which springing manifestly from love awaken
love? The soul's immortality ! As the spiritual being of
God, as the spiritual worship of God, as the spiritual
kingdom of God in Christ, work themselves clear from
the human agglomeration which has so long clung
around them, surely the spirit of man will not on the
whole be less assured in its purer spiritualism, it will
be more inwardly conscious of its own enduring, un
dying nature. The more absolutely all material images
are dismissed, may we not more entirely enter into,
though we comprehend not, the great change inti
mated by St. Paul, when "this corruption shall put on
incorruption, this mortal immortality ?"
The Mediator between God and man ! At least it
may be presumed that the advancing knowledge of man
will confine his hope and trust to the sole Mediator ;
the intercession which he will continue to implore
will be that of the One Intercessor. And the higher
the moral sense of man, the more fully, if with a deep
ening awe of the more mysterious mystery, will he

36 HEBREW PROPHECY.
recognise and acknowledge that sole Mediator in
Christ Jesus, "the Son of Man" and "the Son of
God." With increasing wonder, with increasing re
verence, as man knows himself more intimately, will
he behold the perfect example of human righteous
ness in the man Christ Jesus, in His life and in
His death, His immeasurable superiority over all that
has been seen, imagined, wrought up by the noblest
philosophy on earth. Human nature surveys the
whole course of her own development, summons the
loftiest, the most transcendant, of those to whom she
has given birth throughout the ages, but veils her
head before the peasant of Galilee. She will not
believe that by the evolution of her own powers, the
spontaneous coalescence of traditions, and thoughts,
and opinions, and imaginations, she has herself created
this one unapproachable model of excellence, kindred
to herself in form, functions, language, growth, joys,
sorrows, yet how much more in all else above herself?
Will she believe it, if human, nothing more than hu
man ? She will follow out not only this actual ap
parition upon earth, but the consequence also of its
appearance. She will acknowledge (how much more
readily the clearer her perceptions) how the love of
God and of man taught by Jesus, the charity preached
by Paul and John, if it had free and unchecked scope,
by subduing the evil, would allay more than half the
misery upon earth, and abolish death itself by the
promises of pardon and peace. And so in thus es
teeming the transcendent moral beauty, the super
human humanity of Christ, she will aspire at once to
beholding God in Christ, the reconciliation of the
world to God by Christ. The moral attributes of God
— I will not say all that we can apprehend (not com.-

HEBREW PROPHECY. 37
prehend), for His power we cannot but apprehend, the
more His creation and His laws expand before us —
the moral attributes are all of God that we can em
brace with our love, all that can take root in our
hearts. In these, so exhibited in Christ Jesus, we
recognise and adore the manifest divinity, " He that
hath seen Me, hath seen the Father." Uttering these
words in more profound humility, we acquiesce in that
other axiom, " No man hath seen the Father."
I confess that I am jealous of all theories which
would place the moral attributes of God above the
cognizance and inward vision of man. I like not the
metaphysical air-pump, which, however fine the in
strument and however dextrously handled, would
exhaust, and subtilize away the ordinary meaning of
the words of Scripture, and leave them without clear
signification to the conscience. If of these attributes
the moral sense of man has not a distinct, if imperfect
and inadequate, perception, I know not what guardian,
what perpetual intelligible advocate, what vindicator
of the great truths of Christianity remains to mankind.
It is of this and through this perception alone that
the " Spirit of God beareth witness with our spirit,
that we are the children of God."
Of all this, of the simultaneous purification of the
moral sense of man, and of the conservation, the ex
pansion of the one true religion, I seem, as I have
said, to hear prophecies. I see signs of Christ's
havins come, in the clearer vision of the nature and
character of our faith. Think not that I suppose that
this world will no longer be a world of trial ; that sin
will cease to be strong* and obstinate ; that I do not
fairly estimate the evil as well as the good of pro
gressive civilisation. Think not that I am deaf to

38 HEBREW PROPHECY.
that Pyrrhonism necessarily consequent on free en
quiry, without which we cannot have the inestimable
benefit of free enquiry. To some it may be a formid
able, a distressing, a discouraging sight — a German
Professor, with all his boundless learning, his honest
industry, undermining what many of us have thought
the very foundations of our faith ; a distinguished
French man of letters, with all the brilliancy of his
world-wide language, sentimentalising the Saviour
(not without homage to His moral greatness) to the
central figure of a Galilean Idyll. Still, I believe
firmly, we are on the advance ; each of these is less
anti-Christian, than a Spanish bishop on the tribunal
of the Inquisition, dooming to the fire a holocaust of
victims, perhaps of the meekest and holiest lives.
Christianity has survived the one, Christianity will
survive the other.
A few words, a very few, to my younger brethren.
"Art Thou the Christ?" Is Jesus indeed the Re
deemer of mankind ? Is His religion the one true
and saving faith ? These are questions which must
occur to every thinking man, to every responsible
man. They may be dismissed for a time in careless
ness, in contemptuous indifference, it may be in the
innocent gaiety of youth. But they will come back
upon us, they cannot but come back upon us, the more
importunate perhaps when least welcome ; they will
flash when least expected across our involuntary souls.
An answer they will have, and that answer will mainly
depend on the state of our hearts and minds. All
wickedness, all absorbing passions, all habits of sin,
pride, avarice, cruelty, sensuality, selfishness in all
its forms, are like the blinding prepossessions which
we deplore, shudder at, compassionate in the Jewish

HEBREW PROPHECY. 39
Sanhedrin. God may grant us time for penitence,
for profounder thought, for riper wisdom ; but think,
on the other hand, on the hardening effects of all
unchristian unrighteousness ; think of those from
whom these opportunities of grace seem to be with-
holden. When these momentous questions are forced,
force themselves upon us, God vouchsafe to us all the
power and the will "to judge righteous judgment !"
God awaken, and strengthen, and purify within us
all, that undying moral sense, which may enable us to
read aright the gracious words of reconciliation and
peace, make us "wise unto salvation;" and may our
answer to this solemn interrogatory be in the spirit of
the apostles of Christ, of all who have lived and died in
the sure and certain hope of everlasting life, through
Christ Jesus, our Lord !

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