power of their own, but solely because "the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it" (verse 5); because "the word of our God shall stand for ever" (verse 8); because "the LORD God [Himself] shall come, and His arm shall rule for Him" (verse 10). "The glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together" (verse 5). But "all flesh is grass" (verse 6), weak and perishable, and Israel is no exception. "Surely the people is grass" (verse 7), and can accomplish nothing of itself; nevertheless, "the word of our God shall stand for ever" (verse 8).

How exactly the prophet had his whole plan in his mind from the first, and how systematically he carries it out, may be seen from the detailed references we now give.

I. References to CYRUS in the central trilogy of Book I. (chaps. xliii. to xlv.).

In chap. xliii.: "For your [Israel's] sake I have sent to Babylon" (verse 14).

In chap. xliv.: "That saith of CYRUS: He is My shepherd, and shall perform all My pleasure; even saying of Jerusalem: She shall be built; and to the temple: Thy foundation shall be laid" (verse 28).

In chap. xlv.: "Thus saith the LORD to His anointed, to CYRUS, I will go before Thee . . . and break in pieces the doors of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron . . . that thou mayest know that I am the LORD, which call thee by thy name. I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known My name. I am the LORD, and there is none else beside Me, there is no God . . . that they [not only Thou, but all the Gentile world (see Ezra i. 1-4)] may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside Me (verses 1-7). I have raised him up in righteoushe shall build My city, and he shall let My exiles go free, not for price nor reward, saith the LORD of Hosts" (verse 13).

ness

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II. References to MESSIAH in the central trilogy of Book II.

In chap. lii.

the feet of him

(chaps. lii. to liv.).

"How beautiful upon the mountains are that bringeth good tidings" (comp. xl. 9), "that saith unto Zion: Thy God reigneth" (comp. xl. 9-10). In chap. liii. (which should begin with chap. lii. 13 to 15, and thus show the connexion of lii. 15 with liii. 1): He shall sprinkle many nations [as their High Priest]; kings [of the Gentiles] shall shut their mouths at Him:

For that which had not been told them, they have seen; And that which they had not heard, they have considered.

Who [of us Jews] have believed what we heard? And to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed?

III. References to ZION glorified in the central trilogy of Book III. (chaps. Ixi. to lxiii.)

1n chap. lxi., the Messiah assures ZION that the LORD [Himself] hath anointed Me to preach glad tidings to the meek, to proclaim liberty to the captives, the opening of the prison to them that are bound". These are the promises. made to Israel in xlii. 7 (cf. verse 22), but for the attainment of which they proved themselves unequal through unbelief, and which, therefore, Messiah, as the true "Servant of the LORD," takes their place (xlviii. 16) to fulfil, in the first instance, that they may be prepared, by entering into His mind and spirit, to follow the example of their Head at a future period (Rom. xi. 15, and 25 to 27).

In chap. lxii.: "For ZION's sake will I not hold My peace" (verse 1). "Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken, neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate; but thou shalt be called Hephzi-bah (= my delight is in her), and thy land Beulah (= married); for the LORD delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married" (verse 4).

1

With chap. lxiii. 1-6, the prophecy ends with the destruction of Israel's most inveterate enemy, Edom (exactly as in the earlier prophecies, chap. xxxiv.), who, in the moment of Israel's lowest depression, had raised the malignant cry: "Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof " (Ps. cxxxvii. 7).

But how, it will be asked, could our orthodox critics have been so far carried away by the representations of the Naturalistic critics as to imagine that Isaiah could have thought that, with the return from Babylon, all God's purposes with Israel were on the eve of being accomplished? Perhaps the view propounded by Hitzig furnishes the best representation of the difficulty. His view is that "prophets were bounded like other men by the horizon of their own age they borrowed the object of their soothsaying from their present, and, excited by the relations of their present, they spoke to their contemporaries of what affected other people's minds or their own, occupying themselves only with that future whose rewards or punishments were likely to reach their contemporaries. For exegesis the position is impregnable that the prophetic writings are to be interpreted in each case out of the relations belonging to the time of the prophet; and from this follows as a corollary the critical canon: that that time, those time-relations, out of which a prophetic writer is explained are his time, his time-relations; to that time he must be referred as the date of his own existence" (Hitzig, pp. 463-468).

A most ingenious mixture of truth and fallacy is here presented to us, which it is essential to disentangle. The truth which it contains, and under cover of which the fallacy hopes to pass undetected, we have already endorsed,

1 All that follows (chap. lxiii. 7 to the close) is a confession of Israel's sin, and a prayer for forgiveness, which the prophet offers up in their name, with the answer given him by God. Compare Daniel's confession and prayer for his people in chap. ix., and the answer given him by God.

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that a prophet speaks specially to those of his own time-in other words, that it will be no unconnected event in the distant future which he is commissioned to reveal, but one which has a distinct and apposite bearing on the immediate occasion which causes him to speak. The fallacy lies in asserting that "prophets were bounded by the horizon of their own age," and that they can occupy themselves," or others, "only with that future whose rewards or punishments were likely to reach their contemporaries". This assertion runs directly counter to what experience had taught to be the general characteristic of prophecy from the earliest down to the latest-namely, that scarcely any great prophecy has been fulfilled in the generation to which it was spoken. Take, for instance, the first prophecy, in Gen. iii. 15. Was the "head" of the serpent "bruised" in the lifetime of Adam and Eve? Were "all the nations of the earth blessed" before the death of Abraham? In the song attributed to Moses, in Deut. xxxii., we find an explicit prediction that, in consequence of Israel's addiction to idolatry, provoking Jehovah "to jealousy with that which is not God," and by their obstinate resistance to His claims to their individual allegiance, the time would come when He would reject and move them to jealousy with those which are not a people (verse 21), by the adoption of the Gentiles in their stead, as St. Paul explains it. If this canon of prophetic exegesis is to be our rule, our critics have sadly erred in bringing down the date of Deuteronomy only to the age of Josiah. It must have been written in Christian times. Some Christian Jew, living at the time when they "were moved to jealousy," must have been its author, who was desirous of magnifying the prophetic foresight of the great lawgiver of Israel by passing off his own composition as his! St. Paul, again, in revealing the "mystery" why "blindness in part is happened to Israel," in Rom. xi., where he sketches in prophetic outline the whole course of Israel's history from his own day down to their ultimate conversion and restora

tion again to a place in the kingdom of God, must have known that ages were to elapse before the prophecy he uttered could be fulfilled, since the destruction of their city had not yet taken place, nor their dispersion, which was to continue until "the fulness of the Gentiles be come in (verse 25), when only the time would come that "all Israel shall be saved" (verse 26). How does the "critical canon square with such a prophecy, that "to that time must he [the prophet] be referred as the date of his own existence"? And yet St. Paul was speaking to those of his own time, and this prediction of an event in the far-distant future had an immediate bearing on those whom he addressed, as his own words testify: "I speak . . . if by any means I may provoke to jealousy them that are my flesh, and may save some of them" (verses 13, 14, Rev. Ver.).

The main object of prophecy is not to foretell the future, but to prepare men for entering into the purposes of God in His dealings with them, and in His government of the world. Prophecy, therefore, will ever tend to pass beyond the limits of the immediate future, and to point the thoughts and hopes of the hearers to the final triumph of good over evil, and the complete consummation of God's gracious plan for the redemption of a fallen world. It is to our confining our views too much to the return of the captive Jews from Babylon, as if this were the principal subject of the last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah, in place of its being a mere preliminary and subordinate topic, that is to be ascribed in great measure, I believe, the failure to comprehend and interpret aright the grand and far-reaching conceptions of the evangelical prophet.

One of the passages much insisted upon as carrying us far beyond the age of Isaiah, is chapter Ixiv. 10, 11. "Thy holy cities are a wilderness, Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised Thee, is burned up with fire; and all our pleasant things are laid waste." This appears at first sight