-^^f$-^^^ 
 
 Jim ^ im *] 
 
 Divisioa _tj ^ G T" O 
 
 .5. VilZ 
 
 Section 
 
PROPHECY 
 
,IUN 5 1911 
 
 A, .^.-..^ 
 
 PROPHECT 
 
 JEWISH AND CHRISTIA 
 
 CONSIDERED IN A SERIES OF 
 
 WARBURTON LECTURES AT 
 
 LINCOLN'S INN 
 
 v/ 
 
 BY HENEY WAGE, D.D. 
 
 DEAN OF CANTEEBURY 
 SOMETIME PREACHER OF LINCOLN'S INN 
 
 MILWAUKEE 
 
 THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO. 
 
 1911 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction ..... i 
 
 I. The Prophetic Character of the Jew- 
 ish AND Christian Religions . . 17 
 
 II. The General Character of Old Testa- 
 ment Prophecy . . . -34 
 
 III. The Value of Prophecy as an Evidence 
 
 OF Revelation . . . -55 
 
 IV. The Development of the Messianic 
 
 Hope ..... 74 
 
 V. The Principle of Faith in Prophecy . 92 
 
 VI. Prophecy and the Kingdom of Heaven 113 
 
 VII. The Use of Old Testament Prophecy 
 
 in the New Testament . . 131 
 
 VIII. Prophecy in Our Lord's Ministry . 149 
 
 IX. Prophecy in the Epistles of the New 
 
 Testament. . . . .171 
 
WARBURTON LECTURES 
 ON PROPHECY 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 These lectures were preached in the Chapel 
 of Lincoln's Inn, on the foundation of 
 Bishop Warburton, in the course of the 
 years 1894 to 1898. Their publication has 
 been delayed, partly by the constant pressure 
 of public duties, and partly because I wished 
 to consider whether the development of the 
 criticism of the Old Testament would 
 materially affect the traditional point of view 
 from which, in the main, Scripture prophecy 
 is here treated. The result has been to 
 Sfive me reason for satisfaction that I have 
 improved upon the Horatian rule of reserving 
 serious writings for at least nine years. 
 The course of archaeological discovery since 
 these lectures were preached has, without 
 exception, tended to confirm the historical 
 
 1 A 
 
4 
 
 2 INTRODUCTION 
 
 truth of the Old Testament Scriptures, from 
 the Book of Genesis onwards ; and the 
 remarkable lectures delivered last year by 
 Professor Kittel of Leipzig to the National 
 School Teachers of Saxony ^ exhibit a 
 remarkable reversion towards old views from 
 the theories which were popularised twenty 
 years ago. Those theories, of course, still 
 find their adherents In various degrees, but 
 each year seems to cut the ground from 
 under them. Every year seems to afford 
 new encouragement to those who have all 
 along ventured to retain the conviction, that 
 it would ultimately prove that there is good 
 foundation for the universal and continuous 
 belief of the Jewish and Christian Churches, 
 for about two thousand years, respecting 
 their sacred Scriptures. 
 
 I am happily able to appeal to an unim- 
 peachable authority In starting from that 
 belief. Dr Sanday, the eminent Margaret 
 Professor at Oxford, has told us In his 
 Bampton Lectures, pp. 392-393, that the view 
 of the Holy Scriptures which was prevalent 
 
 1 A translation has just been published by Messrs 
 Williams & Norgate, under the title of The Scientific 
 Study of the Old Testamenty Its Principal Results a7id 
 their Bearing upon Religious Instruction : 1910. 
 
THE TRADITIONAL VIEW 3 
 
 in this country about fifty years ago was 
 substantially the same as that which is 
 exhibited in early Christian writers about 
 the year 200 a.d., and moreover that, in 
 respect to the Old Testament, it was the 
 same as that which prevailed in the time 
 of Christ ; so much so that one of the 
 chief supports on which it rested was the 
 extent to which it is represented in the 
 teaching of our Lord and of the Apostles. 
 Now, quite apart from the Divine authority 
 which is thus given to the traditional belief 
 respecting the Scriptures, I would submit that 
 as a mere matter of evidence that is a fact of 
 momentous importance. At the time of our 
 Lord, and consequently before it, the Jews 
 regarded the books of the Old Testament, 
 as we now have them, as containing the 
 inspired record of their history, and enter- 
 tained the same general view of that history 
 which has prevailed in their own Church and 
 the Christian Church until quite modern 
 times. Now, a part of that view was that 
 the ceremonial as well as the moral law of 
 the Pentateuch, the portion of the Penta- 
 teuch now called '' P," and the Book of 
 Deuteronomy, proceeded at least in the main 
 from Moses himself. But the critical theory 
 
4 INTRODUCTION 
 
 which has been generally accepted of late is 
 that Deuteronomy must be ascribed to about 
 the year 600 B.C., and that P, or at least a great 
 part of the ceremonial law, was drawn up 
 during the exile about 500 B.C., so that we are 
 required to suppose that the Jews of the 
 generation into which our Lord was born 
 had somehow been persuaded that laws and 
 writings which were only some 400 years old 
 were really 1000 years older. I ask whether 
 that is conceivable ? Is it conceivable that an 
 acute, tenacious — to use the description of 
 them in Deuteronomy — a " stiff-necked " race 
 had allowed a whole code of laws, and the 
 solemn enforcement of those laws on alleged 
 Divine authority, to have been imposed on 
 them as having been given by God to Moses, 
 when they were really no older than times 
 which had been in the memory of their 
 great-great-grandfathers ? 
 
 That single consideration seems to me to 
 render the prevalent critical theory quite in- 
 conceivable, but I must needs carry the 
 same consideration further. The theory is 
 beyond dispute absolutely contradictory to 
 the view of the Old Testament history 
 which is represented by the Old Testament 
 itself It is the view that, broadly speaking. 
 
THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS 5 
 
 the prophetic period of Israel's religious 
 development is anterior to the legal period. 
 But there can be no doubt that the effect and 
 the intention of the Old Testament is, aoaln 
 broadly speaking, to teach that the legalistic 
 period preceded the prophetic period, and 
 that the work of the prophets was in great 
 measure to recall the people to the principles 
 of the law of Moses and of the Patriarchs. 
 Now I ask once more with confidence whether 
 it is conceivable, on the ordinary principles 
 of human evidence, that any nation, and 
 especially the Jewish nation, can have allowed 
 their whole historic tradition to be falsified — 
 falsified not merely In respect to some details 
 or secondary points, but in respect to its main 
 course and its cardinal characteristics ? This 
 theory rests upon the supposition that the 
 final compilers of the Pentateuch presented to 
 their nation, and successively imposed upon 
 it, a view of its religious development which 
 was the direct opposite of the facts. Could 
 this have been possible, or is it reasonably 
 probable ? 
 
 The matter may be considered from 
 another and an even more solemn point of 
 view. The account given of the course of 
 the history of Israel in the Pentateuch, and 
 
 A 2 
 
6 INTRODUCTION 
 
 in the rest of the Old Testament, created 
 the Jewish reHgion, that ancient and solemn 
 religion under which our Lord Himself lived, 
 which was in full force before His time, 
 and which has sustained the religious life of 
 that ofreat and sacred race down to the 
 present day. But, if this theory be true, that 
 religion was from the first based on a 
 deliberate falsification of sacred history at 
 its very centre. It has been a charge 
 advanced by some unbelieving writers that 
 religion was the invention of priests. If 
 this theory could be established, that charge 
 would be proved in the case of the sacred 
 religion from which Christianity sprang. 
 If a theory, however plausible in some 
 respects, brings us face to face with con- 
 sequences of this character, is it not surpris- 
 ing that earnest Christian men, like many 
 supporters among us of these theories, do 
 not feel compelled to recognise that they 
 must have been pursuing a mistaken track, 
 and that there must be something wrong 
 in the German leadership which has led 
 them into so strange a position ? 
 
 But it might possibly be objected to part 
 of this argument that, though such a falsifi- 
 cation of tradition is inconceivable in modern 
 
ANTIQUITY OF WRITING 7 
 
 times, it was possible in days when it was 
 not customary to keep written records. But 
 when were those days ? Certainly not 
 within the period of history which extends 
 from the days of Abraham to the days of 
 our Lord. It has been proved of late that 
 during the whole of that period writing was 
 in common use, even for private transactions, 
 and that records of public events were 
 carefully preserved in the civilisation amidst 
 which the people of Israel lived. I venture 
 to doubt if the theory in question could 
 possibly have arisen if the facts which have 
 come to light in our generation had been 
 known in the days of the scholars with 
 whom it originated. An extraordinary 
 revolution in this respect has come to 
 pass within our own generation. Ten 
 years after I entered Holy Orders the first 
 volume of The Speaker s Commentary was 
 published, in which the introduction to the 
 Pentateuch was written by a very eminent 
 scholar of that date, Bishop Harold Browne ; 
 and at the outset of his introduction he 
 finds it necessary to discuss the question 
 whether the art of writing was in use so early 
 as Moses. That was a point for argument 
 even in the year 1870. But what is the 
 
8 INTRODUCTION 
 
 case now ? Every scholar has on his table 
 a complete code of laws, comparable in 
 extent and character to one of the books of 
 the Pentateuch, which is ascribed to King 
 Hammurabi or Amraphel, w^ho lived about 
 2000 years b.c, and who was probably a 
 contemporary of Abraham. But if a com- 
 plete code of laws could be inscribed on stone 
 in the days of Abraham or near his time, how 
 many centuries before him must not the art 
 and practice of writing have existed, so as 
 to have attained the flexibility and the 
 accuracy required for such a purpose ? But, 
 if so, it is at least a perfectly unwarrant- 
 able supposition that written memorials of 
 important occurrences did not exist from 
 Abraham onwards, particularly of events 
 at the time of Moses and Joshua, and 
 throughout the whole course of Israel's 
 history in Palestine. 
 
 But we are told that the Pentateuch has 
 been analysed into some half-dozen docu- 
 ments which are assigned by the majority of 
 scholars to dates which vary from 850 B.C. 
 to 300 B.C. Be it so. Whatever may be 
 my own reserves on that subject, it is quite 
 unnecessary, for this argument, to question the 
 literary opinions on such a point of eminent 
 
ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE 9 
 
 critical authorities. The question I ask goes 
 behind that literary theory. The real question 
 is whether these writers of the year 800, or 
 any later date you please, were writing on the 
 basis of mere loose popular reminiscences, or 
 whether it is reasonable to suppose that they 
 possessed ancient documents and memorials, 
 which had been handed down to them from 
 former generations. Or, to put the matter 
 in another form, since it is certainly possible 
 that such materials existed, since it is 
 admitted even by the most hypercritical 
 scholars that at all events ancient ballads 
 and sayings had come down from a distant 
 antiquity, is there any justification for 
 assuming that these writers were not able 
 and desirous to act the part of faithful 
 historians and chroniclers, so as to hand 
 on to us, in the language and form of their 
 own day, the recorded traditions of their 
 nation ? 
 
 The present bishop of Bristol, whose 
 authority as a historian is well known, has 
 drawn a most interesting parallel between the 
 ancient Books of the Scriptures and our own 
 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. That Chronicle, 
 which is an invaluable record of early English 
 history from the first Saxon times in England 
 
10 INTRODUCTION 
 
 to about the year 1 150, was first collected and 
 brought into its present form by Plegmund, 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, about the year 
 900, and was continued under his successors. 
 No doubt he brought the ancient records into 
 a somewhat new form, and their style varied 
 as time went forward ; but thus collected, 
 thus edited, thus perhaps varied in style, 
 they are treated by all historians as a faithful 
 record of the many centuries of our history 
 to which they relate. Similarly with the 
 Jewish records, with the Pentateuch, as well 
 as with the later historical books, criticism 
 is no doubt justified in its view that, in 
 speaking of the Books of Moses, we are not 
 to be supposed to imply that they were 
 entirely written by him, any more than the 
 Psalms of David are all to be ascribed to 
 David, or the Proverbs of Solomon entirely 
 to Solomon. It is a fair, and a very interest- 
 ing, subject of critical enquiry how much of 
 the Pentateuch can be directly ascribed to 
 Moses himself, and how far it has been 
 compiled from other documents. But that 
 does not determine the question, which is 
 the main question, whether those documents 
 contained true history, and whether, in sub- 
 stance, the view which the Pentateuch, as a 
 
INSPIRATION 11 
 
 whole, presents of the history of the people of 
 Israel up to the time of the conquest of 
 Canaan is a true history. That which the old 
 view of the Jews, the traditional view of both 
 Jews and Christians, asserted is, that it is true 
 history. It asserted also, and it clings 
 tenaciously to the belief, that the compilation 
 was made under the superintending influence 
 of the Spirit of God, Who, without super- 
 seding all the characteristics of human 
 agency, guided the writers to the essence of 
 the history, gave them the prophetic instinct 
 which led them to trace and disentangle, 
 with so sure a hand, the history of the 
 Children of Abraham and Israel from the 
 mass of the confused life around them ; until 
 Saint Matthew was also divinely guided to 
 announce the fulfilment of the history of 
 2000 years by commencing his Gospel with 
 the announcement, *' The book of the 
 generation of Jesus Christ, the son of 
 David, the son of Abraham." 
 
 Let it be added that every discovery of 
 the last few years has either given greater 
 probability to the traditional view or has 
 removed difficulties from it, like the grand 
 discovery of the antiquity of writing. I 
 cannot but mention one. It has been con- 
 
12 INTRODUCTION 
 
 eluded from the discovery of the Book of 
 the Law under Josiah that the Book of 
 Deuteronomy, to which that description is 
 supposed to refer, was therefore written 
 about that time. But it was recently 
 announced by Professor Naville that a record 
 of Thothmes III., 1500 years b.c, has been 
 discovered, showing that, during structural 
 alterations in the Temple of Denderah, he 
 had found in a brick wall the great Rule of the 
 Temple, or in other words its Ceremonial 
 Law ; so that there is a distinctly parallel case 
 to the discovery of the Book of the Law of 
 the Jewish Temple, in its reparation under 
 Josiah ;^ much in the same way, it may be 
 supposed, as we, in the present day, place 
 in the foundation stones of our buildings 
 documents of contemporary date. The 
 possibility is thus proved, by independent 
 historical fact, that the Book of the Law 
 found in Josiah's time was an ancient, and 
 not a recent, book. 
 
 I have no hesitation, therefore, in offering 
 
 1 See The Discovery of the Book of the Law under 
 King Josiah ; an Egyptian Interpretation of the Biblical 
 Account^ by E. Naville, Hon. D.C.L., &c. ; translated 
 by M. L. M'Clure, with an Introduction by Professor 
 Sayce: S.P.C.K., 191 1. 
 
PRINCIPLES AT ISSUE 13 
 
 a broad and confident opposition on principle 
 to the critical views which have been 
 in favour of late ; not from the slight- 
 est hostility to criticism in itself, but 
 because I am deeply convinced that 
 those views rest on a totally mistaken, 
 and in the strict sense of the word, pre- 
 posterous application of criticism. I doubt 
 not that criticism will in the end render not 
 less service to the understanding of the Old 
 Testament than to that of the New, as in 
 many respects it has already done, but a 
 criticism which, in the phrase of Dillmann 
 (one of the greatest of Old Testament 
 critics), turns the whole Old Testament 
 topsy-turvy: '* Alles auf den Kopf stellt," 
 is not to be regarded as an established 
 hypothesis. Dillmann also said of an English 
 book which directly opposed these theories, 
 Professor Robertson's Baird Lectures, that 
 it **hits the nail on the head," and until that 
 contention is answered, the old belief holds 
 its ground. 
 
 I must add that spiritual principles and 
 truths of the most vital consequence are 
 involved in the conflict between these two 
 theories — that which is presented as the 
 critical theory on the one side, and the 
 
14 INTRODUCTION 
 
 theory of the Bible on the other. The 
 narrative of the Bible represents God Him- 
 self as the great Author and Inspirer of His 
 own revelation, not leaving men gradually to 
 find Him out, as they would discover prin- 
 ciples of science, or of ethics, or of theology, 
 but as Himself finding them out, entering 
 personally into relations of covenant with 
 them at the very outset of the revelation in 
 the person of Abraham, and leading them on 
 by successive words, prophecies, rebukes, 
 deliverances, to know Him better, to trust 
 and to follow Him. The other view repre- 
 sents men as struggling for centuries with 
 crude thoughts of God, without any sure, 
 clear, or authoritative revelation from Him. 
 It is all the difference between a natural evolu- 
 tion and a positive supernatural education. 
 
 The language for instance, which is com- 
 mon under the new theory respecting the 
 imperfect morality of the Old Testament mis- 
 states the question. There is, indeed, an 
 imperfect morality in the men of the Old 
 Testament, but there is nothing imperfect in 
 God's messages to them, in His guidance of 
 them, in His education of them. Under the 
 old belief of the Church we see God from the 
 first, wdth our first parents, with Noah, with 
 
SUCCESSIVE REVELATIONS 15 
 
 Abraham, with Moses, with the priests and 
 the prophets, and we hear His voice in distinct, 
 positive, definite words, appealing to their 
 consciences, and, in the order and the method 
 recorded and described, opening their minds 
 and hearts and evoking their faith and 
 love.^ It was by those successive revelations, 
 as described in the Bible, in that order, 
 that Apostles like St Paul and St Peter, 
 following our Lord Himself, realised the 
 hand, the arm, and the voice of God. If 
 they were wrong in their conceptions of the 
 order of that revelation, their authority as 
 spiritual teachers is dangerously, if not 
 fatally, shaken. But I submit that we have 
 abundant reason, in the best criticism and in 
 the most striking discoveries of our day, for 
 adhering firmly to the old belief, and for 
 trusting the Bible's own account of the 
 history of God's people ; — for believing, in 
 short, in the words of the psalm, — '' In the 
 covenant that He made with Abraham, and 
 the oath that He sware unto Isaac, and 
 appointed the same unto Jacob for a law, and 
 to Israel for an everlasting testament." 
 
 1 See Dr A. B. Davidson's Old Testament Prophecy^ 
 Lecture II., p. 20. 
 
16 INTRODUCTION 
 
 In this belief, an endeavour is made in the 
 following lectures to enter into the real 
 meaning of Prophecy, in the Old and New 
 Testament, in accordance with the inspired 
 teaching of the Scriptures ; and I shall be 
 thankful if they contribute in any degree to 
 vindicate the ancient belief of the Jewish and 
 Christian Church, and to show, in a memor- 
 able phrase, that ''it is not after all so 
 certain that there is nothing in it." 
 
 Canterbury, December 1910. 
 
 H. Wace. 
 
I 
 
 THE PROPHETIC CHARACTER OF 
 THE JEWISH AND CHRIS- 
 TIAN RELIGIONS 
 
 " Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written 
 for our learning ; that we, through patience and comfort of 
 the Scriptures, might have hope."— ROM. xv. 4. 
 
 It is specially Instructive that one of the 
 Collects of the Advent season Is a prayer for 
 the due use of the Holy Scriptures. Having 
 regard to the Epistle for the same Sunday, 
 it cannot be doubted that this Is due to the 
 fact that the season is pre-eminently marked 
 by prophetic associations. It reminds us of 
 the most Important of all prophecies which 
 still remain to be fulfilled — that of the second 
 Advent of our Lord. There is not, perhaps, 
 a greater Instance of the essentially super- 
 natural and miraculous character of the 
 Christian revelation than the fact that one 
 of the very corner-stones of our faith 
 
 17 B 
 
18 PROPHECY IN THE CREED 
 
 respecting the future, which we reassert 
 whenever we recite the Apostle's Creed, is a 
 prophecy respecting an event wholly out of 
 the range of our natural faculties, and of the 
 most distinct and definite character. It is a 
 prophecy that our Lord will return in glory 
 and power to judge the quick and the dead. 
 The Christian life depends no less on that 
 prediction respecting the future, than upon 
 the facts of our Lord's life when He was 
 upon earth. He and His Apostles have 
 assured us that He will so come again, in 
 like manner as He was seen to go into 
 heaven, in order to assert in a final judg- 
 ment the truths and the laws He has given 
 us for our guidance ; and that Judgment 
 may be regarded as the effective sanction of 
 the Christian law. But this is no surmise 
 of our natural faculties ; no ordinary reason- 
 ing could suffice to give it validity, as a great 
 truth on which our action must be founded. 
 It is a simple prediction of plain matter of 
 fact, resting solely upon the word and 
 promise of our Lord Himself and His 
 Apostles. 
 
 The case, as we are reminded throughout 
 the Advent season, is precisely similar to 
 that of our Lord's first coming. That 
 
THE SECOxND ADVENT 19 
 
 coming had similarly been predicted and 
 looked forward to, though, from the nature 
 of the case, with less definiteness than the 
 second coming can be foreseen. But here 
 also certain assurances had been given 
 which were sufficiently plain in their broad 
 outlines ; and as these were exactly fulfilled 
 in the first coming of our Lord, so are we 
 encouraged to believe that the predictions of 
 His second coming will be similarly fulfilled. 
 Such is the practical argument of St Paul in 
 the fifteenth chapter of the Epistle to the 
 Romans, in assuring us that "whatsoever 
 things were written aforetime were written 
 for our learning ; that we, through patience 
 and comfort of the Scriptures, might have 
 hope." He is dealing with what was the 
 great difficulty to the Jews of his time — 
 namely, the admission of the Gentiles to all 
 the privileges of the chosen people of God ; 
 and he is supporting himself and them, 
 amidst the opposition and misunderstanding 
 they had to encounter, by reminding them 
 that this admission had been distinctly 
 predicted in their Scriptures, and that the 
 wonderful development of the kingdom of 
 God which they were witnessing was thus, 
 beyond all doubt, in harmony with the 
 
20 APOSTOLIC PROPHECY 
 
 Divine will and purpose. Without this 
 evidence from previous prophecy, the diffi- 
 culty of breaking through the Inveterate 
 prejudice of the Jews of the Apostle's time 
 might, indeed, have been well-nigh insuper- 
 able ; and accordingly almost every argu- 
 ment addressed by the Apostles to the Jews 
 at the foundation of the Christian Church is 
 based upon prophecy and prophetic history. 
 The memorable argument of St Stephen, 
 which formed the very basis of St Paul's 
 subsequent thought, simply recounts those 
 facts of past Jewish history and prophecy 
 which bore upon the charge against him, 
 with the view of showing that they involved 
 the principles which he was proclaiming. 
 The essence of the early Christian argument 
 is thus an argument from prophecy, and it is 
 upon the fulfilment of that prophecy that the 
 Apostles took their stand in appealing to 
 their own countrymen. 
 
 An arcfument which held this momentous 
 place at the foundation of the Christian 
 Church can never be otherwise than of the 
 highest importance to us, and it is well to 
 endeavour, from time to time, to refresh our 
 apprehension of its overwhelming force. It 
 may be of advantage at the outset to observe 
 
THE MESSIAH 21 
 
 that it is in great measure independent of 
 discussions respecting the exact interpreta- 
 tion and appHcability of particular texts. 
 There is one fact which, taken by itself, is 
 sufficient to establish and illustrate the 
 prophetic character of the Old Testament, 
 and which was the main element in the 
 preaching of the Apostles. This is the 
 undoubted fact, that when the Apostles 
 preached to the Jews that Jesus was the 
 Christ, every Jew knew sufficiently what the 
 word ''Christ," or ''Messiah," meant. The 
 Apostles did not go to the Jews to tell them 
 that our Lord had come to assume new 
 functions of which they had no conception ; 
 but that He had come in a character, and 
 had assumed an office, of the nature of which 
 they were well aware, and for the realisation 
 of which they were looking forward with the 
 utmost eagerness. Our Lord's position 
 differs essentially, in this respect, from that 
 of all other great religious leaders, such, for 
 example, as the Buddha, or Mahomet. 
 They created their own positions. The 
 idea of the Buddha was initiated by Sakya 
 Muni ; and although Mahomet's idea of his 
 office was in some degree due to Jewish 
 tradition, still, in its specific character, it is 
 
 B 2 
 
22 THE SEFPUAGINT 
 
 the result of his own action. But the idea 
 of the Messiah, with the conception of the 
 Messianic office, existed, beyond all question, 
 long before our Lord came ; and its sole 
 ultimate source was the Scriptures of the 
 Old Testament. The origin of the idea is 
 to be found nowhere else ; but there, as a 
 plain and broad matter of fact, it exists ; and 
 it had been consolidated into a great living 
 ideal in the minds of men who derived their 
 religious beliefs from the Old Testament, 
 and from the Old Testament alone. 
 
 For the purpose of this aspect of the 
 argument there is no necessity to enter into 
 critical questions, as to the date of the 
 various parts of Isaiah's prophecies, for 
 example, or of the Book of Daniel. Two 
 facts alone are sufficient to enable us to 
 establish the prophetic character of this 
 great conception — one, the fact of the 
 existence of the whole Old Testament in at 
 least the third century before Christ ; so that 
 translations of great parts of it were com- 
 pleted and in use among Jews in various 
 parts of the ancient world at that date ; the 
 other, the fact of the expectation of the 
 Messiah having been produced by it. That 
 the Septuagint translation began to be pro- 
 
MESSIANIC HOPES 23 
 
 duced In the third century and was completed 
 in the second is beyond controversy ; and 
 we have in our hands not less conclusive 
 evidence of the interpretation which was 
 placed by Jews, before the birth of our Lord, 
 upon the general tenour of these sacred 
 Scriptures. Out of them, long before His 
 advent, had arisen a whole literature of 
 Messianic expectations, and the very air of 
 Jewish thought was full of anticipations of 
 His coming. 
 
 This fact is so important that it is no 
 wonder some rationalistic critics have 
 endeavoured to dispute it. If it could be 
 shown that the belief in a coming Messiah 
 was an after-thought of the Christian 
 Church, great suspicion would justly be 
 thrown on the interpretation of the 
 Messianic prophecies. It would be easy 
 to urge that the meaning assigned to them 
 by Christian divines is not one v/hich would 
 naturally have been suggested by them, but 
 has been forced into them in the interests of 
 the Christian argument. It is therefore 
 deserving of particular notice that these 
 attempts to dispute the existence, before the 
 time of our Lord, of Messianic hopes and 
 Messianic interpretations of prophecy are 
 
24 MESSIANIC HOPES 
 
 rejected by the writer — himself sufficiently 
 rationalistic in tendency — who is recognised 
 among scholars of all schools as the greatest 
 living authority on the circumstances of our 
 Lord's time — I mean Dr Schiirer, the author 
 of the great work on the history of the 
 Jewish people in the time of our Lord, of 
 which the fourth edition was completed in 
 1909. He says (vol. ii., p. 589) that '*in 
 reality the Messianic idea had never entirely 
 died out, at least not in its more general 
 form, as the hope for a better future for the 
 people. In any case, in the last centuries 
 before Christ, and particularly in the time of 
 Christ, it became again very active, as 
 indeed is shown by the course of the Gospel 
 history. Without Jesus doing anything for 
 its revival, it appears as in full life among 
 the people. Moreover, in the last centuries 
 before Christ it appears, as a rule, not only 
 in its general form as a hope for a better 
 future for the people, but specifically as a 
 hope for a Messianic King." From the 
 interesting historical sketch in which he 
 justifies this statement it will be sufficient 
 here to quote two references. He says 
 (p. 593) that '' the stream of Messianic pre- 
 diction is poured forth in rich fullness in the 
 
PSALMS OF SOLOMON 25 
 
 oldest Jewish Sibylline verses, which appeared 
 about the year 140 B.C." But in the Psalter 
 of Solomon, which he assigns to the time of 
 Pompey (63-48 B.C.) he says (p. 597) that 
 ''the form of the Messianic King appears 
 in fuller colours and in sharper outlines. 
 These psalms are particularly instructive 
 in one point — namely, that the author 
 emphasises not only that God Himself is 
 Israel's King, but also that the kingdom of 
 the House of David will not cease before 
 God. ... He hopes that God will raise up 
 a King out of David's House, who will 
 reign over Israel, annihilate his enemies, and 
 purify Jerusalem from the heathen. . . . 
 Apparently what is expected by the author 
 is not, in a general sense. God-fearing Kings 
 from the House of David, but one unique 
 King — the Messias, endowed by God with 
 wonderful powers, who is holy and pure from 
 sin, whom God has made mighty and wise 
 by the Holy Spirit, and who consequently 
 will smite His enemies, not with external 
 weapons, but with the word of His 
 mouth." 
 
 This evidence affords a valuable confirma- 
 tion, in the present day, of the fact that the 
 appeal of the Apostles, as recorded in the 
 
26 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 Acts of the Apostles, and of the Evangelists 
 in their references to prophecy, is perfectly- 
 true to the ideas of their contemporaries. 
 But the main consideration which arises 
 upon such facts is that they appear to afford 
 conclusive proof of the reality of Messianic 
 prediction in the Old Testament. If the 
 prophecies of the Old Testament were not 
 Messianic, how came they to give rise, 
 before the Messiah had come, to an expecta- 
 tion of His coming, and to a general appre- 
 hension of His office in its broad features? 
 We may venture, in fact, to put the matter 
 in this form — that our Lord came, not to 
 create a new office, but to fill one which had 
 been already created, and which was vacant. 
 Thoughtful Jews looked forward to the 
 coming of a perfect Prophet, Priest, and 
 King, and the office of the first preachers of 
 the Gospel was to show that our Lord's 
 character answered, and more than answered, 
 to these lineaments. In view of this broad 
 fact, the general Messianic character of the 
 Old Testament becomes independent of con- 
 troversial details. One great central reality 
 did, as a matter of fact, emerge, by the 
 natural influence of the Old Testament 
 Scriptures, and that reality is the great 
 
THE OLD TESTAMENT 27 
 
 character and office which our Lord claimed 
 to fulfil. 
 
 This consideration becomes the more im- 
 pressive when we bear in mind the continuous 
 development of this conception. It does not 
 depend upon a few specific passages, or 
 even upon one or two authors, but is, so to 
 say, the total result of a long and varied 
 national literature. The Old Testament is 
 the work of many different authors, w^ho 
 wrote in different ages^'and in different places. 
 The lapse of time between Moses and 
 Malachi is nearly a thousand years, or 
 about the same period which separates us 
 from Saxon times ; and the books of the 
 Bible arise gradually in the course of this 
 long and varied succession of centuries. 
 What an extraordinary thing it would seem 
 to us if we had a national literature bepfin- 
 ning with King Alfred, extending through 
 Norman, Plantagenet, and Tudor times, all 
 of which exhibited a general unity in the 
 conception it presented of the destinies of 
 our nation, and w^hich pointed with more 
 and more clearness to the appearance of a 
 certain personage, with specific powers and 
 offices, about our own time ! But this, as 
 is proved, not only by Christian, but by 
 
28 EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 
 
 Jewish testimony, is the case with the Scrip- 
 tures. So the late Bishop of Durham, Dr 
 Westcott, in a remarkable discussion, in his 
 edition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, on 
 the use of the Old Testament in that Epistle, 
 observes (p. 480) that generally it may be 
 said '' that Christ and the Christian dispensa- 
 tion are regarded in it as the one end to 
 which the Old Testament points, and in 
 which it finds its complete accomplishment." 
 That Epistle, as he shows, reviews with 
 singular comprehensiveness the record of 
 the revelation of the Old Testament, from 
 Abraham to the later prophets, depicts by 
 means of that record the personal Messiah 
 with singular completeness of portraiture, 
 and shows that every stage of the Old Testa- 
 ment history affords some anticipation of 
 Him (p. 489). So when St Stephen begins 
 his defence to the Jewish rulers, he goes 
 back to the records of the patriarch Abraham, 
 and traces through him, and through Moses, 
 David, and the prophets, the thread of pre- 
 diction, the prophecy of national destiny, to 
 which his people clung. His argument 
 would have had no weight had he not been 
 appealing to promises which were fully 
 admitted by those whom he addressed. 
 
CONTINUOUS PROPHECY 29 
 
 Their position, like his, was based on the 
 conviction, which their history and their 
 prophets had wrought in them, that from 
 first to last they were the subjects of a 
 special Divine dispensation, which assured 
 them of a great office in the economy of the 
 world, and of the advent of a great prophet 
 like unto Moses, who would be their leader 
 in the fulfilment of this destiny. Ancient 
 patriarchal records, prophecies, psalms, na- 
 tional troubles and deliverances, all pointed to 
 this great central promise, and were felt to 
 possess by virtue of it an indissoluble unity. 
 This, perhaps, is the greatest marvel of Old 
 Testament prophecy. A single prediction, 
 such as Isa. liii., is wonderful enough. But 
 ten centuries of continuous prophecy, often 
 unconscious — ten centuries of literature, 
 springing from different hands in different 
 countries and ages, all converging, as un- 
 questionable matter of fact, in one central 
 prediction, that of the Messiah — this is a 
 prophecy which bespeaks the continuous 
 action and inspiration of One, with whom 
 one day is as a thousand years, and a 
 thousand years as one day. 
 
 Nor, although this great fact constitutes 
 the chief point in the predictive character of 
 
30 SPECIFIC PREDICTIONS 
 
 the Old Testament, must we forget that, 
 apart again from controversial details, it is 
 marked throughout by specific predictions 
 of definite facts. Long before it could have 
 occurred to any natural observation that 
 the Jews were destined to play that moment- 
 ous part in the subsequent history of the 
 world, which we know now they have played 
 and are still fulfilling, the sacred historian, in 
 the Book of Genesis, picks out the thread 
 of the Patriarchal history from the mass of 
 the confused drama which the world pre- 
 sented ; and from the time when Abraham 
 appears in the narrative of that book, every- 
 thing, throughout the Scriptures, is narrated 
 in relation to, and in harmony with, the 
 history of his race. The Jews might be 
 crushed by the great Assyrian, or Babylonian, 
 or Persian monarchies. It makes no differ- 
 ence to the point of view from which the 
 prophetic historians survey the scene. They 
 are inspired by an unwavering conviction 
 that the stream of their national life is con- 
 tinuous and can never be broken, and that 
 the destinies of all those mighty nations are 
 of comparatively transient interest compared 
 with their own. In spite of their apparent 
 dissolution as a nation, we know how com- 
 
THE HOUSE OF DAVID 31 
 
 pletely those hopes have been justified, and 
 that while all the glory of man, by which 
 they were surrounded at Nineveh or Babylon, 
 has passed away like a dream, the Word of 
 the Lord, spoken by apparently insignificant 
 prophets, has endured for ever. Nor is it 
 simply in the definite prediction of the 
 importance of their race to the history of 
 the world that prophecy is of this specific 
 character. Through the darkest ages, when 
 the seed of David had apparently disappeared, 
 as the royal blood of many an ancient 
 dynasty has been submerged in history, did 
 the prophets persistently recall the old 
 promises which had been made to David's 
 house, and predict that the great king of 
 their nation should be born of David's line. 
 There can surely be no question that these 
 definite and detailed promises have received 
 in the coming of our Lord, and in the 
 momentous office which, whether men will 
 hear or whether they will forbear. He holds 
 towards the human race, a specific fulfilment 
 of the most conspicuous and marvellous 
 character. A great Ruler and Law-giver, 
 Prophet, and Priest of the seed of David 
 is now the most potent power in the history 
 af the world, and all thoughtful eyes are 
 
32 PROPHECY FULFILLED 
 
 turned on His ever-growing influence and 
 kingdom. 
 
 If, then, we find that the Scriptures have 
 predicted, in long past ages, the main course 
 and current of human affairs ; that they 
 have indicated where the centre of all human 
 history would be found to lie ; that they 
 have designated, out of all the families of 
 the earth, not merely the race, but the 
 specific house, from which the King should 
 arise who should be ''a light to lighten the 
 Gentiles " ; if they have thus in the past 
 been, in the words of St Peter, " as a lamp 
 shining in a dark place, until the day dawn 
 and the day-star arise in our hearts," what 
 comfort and patience ought we not to derive 
 from them in their assurances respecting 
 those blessed realities to which they point 
 us in the future! If St Paul, in the diffi- 
 culties of his time, when the fulfilment of 
 the promises made to his people was only 
 dawning on his vision, could base his hope 
 upon those Scriptures, what trust and what 
 assurance ought we not to derive from them 
 in our spiritual life I With what reverence 
 ought not all their intimations respecting 
 the future, as well as the past and the 
 present, to be received ; and with what 
 
FUTURE HOPE 33 
 
 thankfulness should we not accept their 
 guidance respecting our duties here and 
 our destinies hereafter ! In particular, what 
 "comfort and patience" ought we not to 
 learn from them with respect to those solemn 
 and blessed realities which are associated 
 with the promise of our Lord's second 
 coming ! We should surely be encouraged 
 to live with the deepest confidence and hope 
 in the prospect of His appearing hereafter as 
 our Lord and Saviour, and at the same 
 time ''to pass the time of our sojourning 
 here in fear," in the belief that He will then 
 appear also as our Judge. In this faith in 
 His prophetic word, we shall strive so to 
 abide in Him, ''that when He shall appear 
 we may have confidence, and not be ashamed 
 before Him at His coming." 
 
II 
 
 THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF 
 OLD TESTAMENT PROPHECY 
 
 " He said, Men, brethren, and fathers, hearken : the 
 God of Glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he 
 dwelt in Mesopotamia." — Acts vii. 2. 
 
 The speech of St Stephen is one of the most 
 momentous documents in the Scriptures of 
 the New Testament and in the early history 
 of the Church. It was spoken by him at 
 the time when the full scope of the Gospel 
 was about to be realised, and when the 
 Church was, consequently, on the point of 
 taking a new departure ; and it was delivered 
 in circumstances of peculiar solemnity and 
 authority. The fact was beginning to be 
 clearly recognised that the Gospel was inde- 
 pendent of the Mosaic ordinances and ritual. 
 Stephen's enemies understood him to say 
 that "Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this 
 place, and shall change the customs which 
 
 S4 
 
ST STEPHEN'S SPEECH 35 
 
 Moses delivered unto us." How much truth 
 there was in that charge St Stephen was 
 called upon to explain and to justify, and his 
 endeavour to do so cost him his life. His 
 martyrdom, at the close of his speech, was 
 witnessed by St Paul, at whose feet the 
 witnesses, by whom he was stoned, laid down 
 their clothes ; and there can be no reasonable 
 doubt that in the account of the speech and 
 of the scene, which we have from the pen of 
 St Luke, we have the very reminiscences of 
 St Paul himself. We are specially assured 
 of the supernatural spirit in which St Stephen 
 spoke. At the commencement of his speech : 
 *' All that sat in the council, looking stead- 
 fastly on him, saw his face as it had been 
 the face of an angel," and at its conclusion : 
 *' Being full of the Holy Ghost, he looked 
 up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the 
 glory of God, and Jesus standing on the 
 right hand of God." The speech, therefore, 
 must be taken as an expression, not only of 
 the highest Christian thought, but of in- 
 spired Christian thought, at this crisis of the 
 history of the Church, and as stamped, in a 
 special manner, with the sanction of the 
 Saviour Himself. No wonder that it became 
 the seed from which the whole thought of St 
 
36 TRUTH OF SCRIPTURE HISTORY 
 
 Paul started, and that it thus proved to be 
 the point of departure of Gentile Christianity. 
 Now, apart from the particular question 
 then at issue, the general character of the 
 argument in such a speech cannot but be of 
 profound instruction. We see there what 
 were the kind of arguments on which an 
 inspired man relied when he had to justify, 
 before representatives of the Old Law, the 
 cardinal principles of the New Dispensation. 
 We may observe, in the first place, and in 
 passing, as a matter of great interest in 
 relation to current controversies respecting 
 the Old Testament, that speaking on the 
 verge of heaven, and with the light of it 
 shining upon his brow, St Stephen builds 
 his whole case on the substantial truth of 
 that account of the history of the Jews which 
 is handed down to us in the historical books 
 of the Old Testament. There may be one 
 or two variations in detail, but the speech 
 records the main facts in the story of 
 Abraham and the Patriarchs, the bondage 
 in Egypt and the deliverance, the giving of 
 the Law by Moses, the entrance under 
 Joshua into Canaan, and the establishment 
 of the kingdom and the temple under David 
 and Solomon, and treats them as primary 
 
PROMISE TO ABRAHAM 37 
 
 facts in determining the will of God and the 
 duty of the Jews. In this primitive and 
 inspired Christian argument, therefore, the 
 recorded facts of Jewish history are treated 
 as bound up inseparably with the truth of 
 the Gospel, and any view of that history, 
 and of the records of that history, which 
 would undermine those facts would, at the 
 same time, cut the ground from under St 
 Stephen's argument. 
 
 But what I am more immediately con- 
 cerned to observe, for the present purpose, is 
 that the speech is based, not only upon the 
 recognition of the truth of the received facts 
 of Jewish history, but, still more, upon the 
 truth that that history had been foretold by 
 prophecy, and had been directed in accord- 
 ance with that prophecy. The corner-stone 
 of Jewish history, according to St Stephen, 
 was a prophecy, and a very remarkable one. 
 ''The God of Glory," he says, ''appeared 
 unto our father Abraham, when he was in 
 Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Charran, 
 and said unto him : Get thee out of thy 
 country, and from thy kindred, and come 
 into the land which I shall show thee. Then 
 came he out of the land of the Chaldseans, 
 and dwelt in Charran ; and from thence, when 
 
 c 2 
 
38 SOLOMON'S PRAYER 
 
 his father was dead, God removed him into 
 this land wherein ye now dwell. And he 
 gave him none inheritance in it — no, not so 
 much as to set his foot on : yet he promised 
 that he would give it to him for a possession, 
 and to his seed after him, when as yet he had 
 no child." Then came a further prophecy — 
 that this seed should be in bondage in a 
 strange land 400 years. St Stephen goes 
 on to relate how this promise was fulfilled, 
 especially through Moses, and how the 
 kingdom was at last established under David, 
 and a temple was built by Solomon, which 
 God condescended to accept as His abode. 
 But St Stephen observes that, at the very 
 time when these old prophecies were thus 
 fulfilled, a new prophecy pointed forward to 
 something greater and larger. It was Moses 
 himself who said unto the children of Israel : 
 '' A prophet shall the Lord your God raise 
 up unto you of your brethren like unto me ; " 
 and at the very dedication of Solomon's 
 temple, the King, in his grand prayer, ac- 
 knowledged the truth that '' heaven and the 
 heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee ; 
 how much less this house that I have 
 bullded," in accordance with the words which 
 St Stephen quotes from Isaiah : ** Heaven 
 
JEWISH HARDNESS 39 
 
 is my throne, and earth is my footstool : 
 what house will ye build me, saith the Lord, 
 or what is the place of my rest ? " As the 
 prophecy, accordingly, had pointed forward 
 from Abraham for hundreds of years, through 
 the bondage in Egypt to the settlement of 
 his seed in Canaan, and to the establishment 
 of God's worship there, so through the 
 mouths of Moses, David, and Solomon, by 
 whom those prophecies had at last been 
 realised, did it again point forward to the 
 appearance of a greater prophet, and to the 
 recognition of the truth that **God is a 
 Spirit, and they that worship Him must 
 worship Him in spirit and in truth." 
 
 The cardinal principle, therefore, on which 
 St Stephen rests his case is that, from the 
 commencement of their history and at its 
 great crises, the Jews had been granted pro- 
 phetic indications of the Divine Will for the 
 future, which were sufficient for their guid- 
 ance if they had been received honestly and 
 without self-will. It was due to persistent 
 obstinacy and malice that those prophecies 
 were rejected, either in the first instance or 
 in the result. *'Ye stiff-necked and uncir- 
 cumcised in heart and ears, ye do always 
 resist the Holy Ghost : as your fathers did 
 
40 PROPHECY AND FULFILMENT 
 
 so do ye. Which of the prophets have not 
 your fathers persecuted ? and they have slain 
 them which showed before of the coming of 
 the Just One, of whom ye have been now the 
 betrayers and murderers." The severity of 
 the censure thus passed on the Jews is a 
 measure of the distinctness and the authority 
 of the prophecies which they thus rejected. 
 It needed, according to St Stephen, no 
 extraordinary subtlety, but only honest and 
 good hearts, for the Jews to have seen, in 
 the word of prophecy, an adequate assurance 
 of the Divine Will as the facts foretold came 
 to be realised. 
 
 Now, this inspired argument of St Stephen 
 involves the principle, that the truth of 
 Christianity can be evidenced from the fulfil- 
 ment of the prophecies of the Old and New 
 Testaments ; and in illustrating that truth we 
 have but' to vindicate St Stephen's argu- 
 ment, and to mark its application to other 
 points besides those which were immediately 
 within his survey. But it will be found to 
 be of great importance, in the first instance, 
 to realise distinctly the view of the nature and 
 office of prophecy which is thus exhibited to 
 us. The reality and the momentous nature 
 of prophecy are sufficiently established by the 
 
PROPHECY AS A WHOLE 41 
 
 fact that our religion, as was well expressed 
 by the late Dr Leathes in his Bampton 
 Lectures, is "The religion of the Christ" — 
 the religion, that is, of One who was, beyond 
 all question, expected before He came, and 
 the idea of whose office was deeply fixed in 
 the mind of the whole nation of the Jews by 
 the Old Testament Scriptures ; though, when 
 its spiritual conditions were really set before 
 their eyes, they revolted from them. But 
 the full force of prophecy, even in this 
 cardinal instance — its function, and, if I may 
 so say, its reasonableness — will be better 
 understood if we contemplate its operation 
 as a whole under the principle suggested and 
 authorised by St Stephen, and if we regard 
 it, not merely as pointing forward to one 
 great event and serving one particular use, 
 but as an essential and organic part of the 
 Divine method of revelation, and of the 
 providential government and guidance of 
 God's people. 
 
 There has been a disposition of late to 
 reproach Christian theologians of a former 
 school with regarding prophecies as isolated 
 miracles, proving a revelation by the mere 
 manifestation of a supernatural marvel ; and 
 in the recoil from the supposed narrowness 
 
42 DAVISON ON PROPHECY 
 
 of this view of the office of prophecy there 
 has been a disposition to concentrate atten- 
 tion, almost wholly, upon the profound re- 
 ligious and moral instruction, or, rather, 
 revelation, which the books of the greater 
 prophets contain. Now, it is a misfortune, 
 perhaps, of the present day that men find it 
 more and more difficult to read what their 
 predecessors have written ; but in order to 
 vindicate the older theology from any charge 
 of narrowness of this kind, it is only neces- 
 sary to refer to a once famous volume of 
 Warburton lectures preached some seventy 
 years ago by the Rev. John Davison. It is 
 a volume illuminated by the best thoughts of 
 the ancient Fathers, but affording an inde- 
 pendent and most striking review of the whole 
 range of Old Testament prophecy. There 
 are few books equally instructive to an earnest 
 student of the Scriptures ; and though it 
 now requires to be supplemented, or sup- 
 ported, on various points, in consequence of 
 the discussions of the last fifty years on 
 the authenticity and interpretation of the 
 Scriptures, the main facts elucidated by the 
 author afford an indispensable foundation 
 for an adequate discussion of this subject. 
 Now, this authoritative writer commences 
 
MORAL PROPHECY 43 
 
 by noticing that the prophetic volume really 
 distinguishes itself into two parts, which may 
 be called the moral, or doctrinal, and the 
 predictive. *' Prophecy," he says,^ *'is not a 
 mere series of predictions. Far from it. It 
 abounds in matter of another kind ... the 
 most frequent subjects of the prophets are 
 the laws of God, His supreme dominion and 
 universal providence, the majesty of His 
 nature, His spiritual being, and His holiness, 
 together with the obligations of obedience to 
 Him . . . and of justice and mercy to man. 
 These original principles of piety and morals 
 overspread the pages of the Book of Pro- 
 phecy." But after an ample recognition of 
 this vital part of the work of the prophets, 
 we are reminded that the direct and proper 
 evidence of the inspired origin of prophecy 
 consists in the series and fulfilment of its 
 predictions : '' By which medium it is that 
 prophecy bears its most emphatic testimony 
 to the truth of the Jewish and Christian 
 religions" (p. 68). But that upon which the 
 author chiefly lays stress is the fact that 
 Scriptural prophecy offers ''a continuous and 
 connected series of predictions." '' It is not," 
 he observes, ''a collection of insulated predic- 
 1 Discourses on Prophecy, 5th ed., 1845. 
 
44 PREDICTIVE PROPHECY 
 
 tions, but it is, in several parts, a connected 
 order of predictive revelation carried on 
 under distinct branches " (p. 69). As it thus 
 embraces **not merely detached events, but 
 a series and combination of them, the proof 
 of a Divine foreknowledge dictating the 
 whole will be the more conclusive." Thus, 
 in the view of the older expositors of pro- 
 phecy, in accordance with the spirit of St 
 Stephen's defence, its primary value consists, 
 not in the bare fact of its affording a mani- 
 festation of miraculous power or knowledge, 
 but in its exhibiting manifestations of Divine 
 prescience and Divine providence throughout 
 the whole of a long and mysterious course 
 of history, and being adapted to the exi- 
 gencies of each successive period of that 
 history. 
 
 It is notorious that some modern criticism 
 professes to invalidate many of the docu- 
 ments and facts on which this ancient view 
 of prophecy — a view as ancient, we have 
 seen, as the first inspired utterances of 
 Christian teachers after the Ascension — is 
 based, and to its pretensions in this respect 
 attention must be paid in the proper place. 
 But let us be content for the present to have 
 before us simply the case, so to say, of 
 
ABRAHAM'S PROMISE 45 
 
 Scripture prophecy, as generally stated by 
 such a writer as I am quoting, in accordance 
 with the best traditions of the Christian 
 Church. That case is this — that from the 
 first dawn, under Abraham, of that great 
 dispensation of things which led up to the 
 coming of our Lord and the establishment 
 of the Christian Church, and which will be 
 brought to a consummation at his Second 
 Coming, the predictive voice of prophecy 
 was heard at every considerable step in the 
 development, giving such a degree of light 
 on the future as was needed, in order that 
 men might have sufficient encouragement 
 for their faith in the particular duty or trial 
 which was laid upon them ; so that it is 
 exactly described in St Peter's exhortation : 
 '' We have also a more sure word of 
 prophecy ; whereunto ye do well that ye 
 take heed, as unto a lamp that shineth in a 
 dark place, until the day dawn, and the 
 daystar arise in your hearts." 
 
 First, in the case of Abraham, in order that 
 he may have faith ''to sojourn in the land of 
 promise, as in a strange country," he is given 
 an assurance which embraces the twofold 
 contents of all subsequent prophecy, temporal 
 and spiritual — That his descendants should 
 
46 JACOBUS VISIOxNS 
 
 inherit the land of Canaan ; and that in his 
 seed should all nations of the earth be 
 blessed. Beyond this he was only informed 
 that his descendants would undergo a 
 servitude of 400 years ; but, in the faith of 
 these two promises, as the writer of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews says, '' He looked 
 for a city which hath foundations, whose 
 builder and maker is God." Next, on the 
 eve of Jacob's entry into Egypt, a vision is 
 vouchsafed him, by which he is assured that 
 his going there was under God's direction, 
 and that he and his seed would be brought 
 up again. Next, at Jacob's own death, 
 when his descendants are about to enter 
 on a long period of humiliation, he is 
 inspired to give a prophetic sketch of their 
 future prerogatives as distinct tribes, and 
 they are thus assured of a special destiny 
 being reserved for them all ; while at this 
 stage, whatever interpretation may be given 
 to a much-disputed text, it is at least clear 
 that a special distinction is assigned to the 
 tribe of Judah. 
 
 Prophecy then ceases until the moment 
 arrives for Moses to come forward to deliver 
 the people from Egypt. It is his mission to 
 revive the old prophecies made to Abraham, 
 
LAW OF MOSES 47 
 
 Isaac, and Jacob, but to attach the permanent 
 enjoyment of them to the faithful obedience 
 to the Law which he is commissioned to 
 declare. He leaves the people on the border 
 of the promised land with a great destiny 
 before them, and, at the same time, with a 
 heavy charge and responsibility — the charge 
 and responsibility of a Law, solemnly revealed 
 by God, to be their guide and their protection 
 throughout the temptations of their national 
 career. At this time, accordingly, he is 
 represented in the Book of Deuteronomy as 
 endorsing that Law by a prophetic revelation 
 of the blessings which would follow the people 
 if they obeyed it, on the one hand, and of the 
 punishments which would fall upon them if 
 they disobeyed it — punishments which have, 
 at all events, been fulfilled to the letter in 
 the subsequent history of the people. About 
 the same time, in the prophecies of Balaam 
 — delivered, as they were, on the verge of 
 the promised land — a vision is opened, 
 which was undoubtedly cherished among 
 them, of the rise of a Star cut of Jacob, 
 and of a sceptre out of Israel, and of the 
 wide influence which was designed for them. 
 With these prophecies the children of Israel 
 settled in the promised land — prophecies 
 
48 SAMUEL AND PROPHECY 
 
 sufficient to assure them that they had been 
 under the Divine guidance hitherto, and that 
 that guiding hand was still over them, expect- 
 ing their continued obedience, and opening a 
 further destiny before them if they obeyed it. 
 After this, predictive prophecy is again 
 silent for the 400 years previous to the time 
 of Samuel, and this silence, as Mr Davison 
 points out, corresponds to the fact that no 
 new turn or prospect in their history was 
 opened during that period. There was no 
 change or movement in their course, and, 
 consequently, no special Divine voice was 
 required. But, at the time of Samuel that 
 great change in their condition begins, which 
 is marked by the establishment of the 
 kingdom, and their subsequent coming into 
 connection with the increasing movements 
 and consolidations of the other kingdoms 
 around them. The 500 years which follow 
 Samuel are the years in which the nation is 
 brought to its fullest development, and put 
 to Its great trial in its relations with the 
 powerful monarchies, the seductive religions, 
 and the corrupting civilisations around it. 
 At this point, accordingly, to meet these 
 emergencies, the predictive prophet reappears, 
 and his functions attain their greatest height. 
 
THE FAMILY OF DAVID 49 
 
 Every step and stage in the drama is 
 attended by Divine voices, which, in the 
 first place, mark out sufficiently the course 
 immediately designed by the Divine Will, 
 and, in the second place, indicate more and 
 more clearly the ultimate destiny towards 
 which everything is being directed. First 
 of all, it is laid down as a fixed point in the 
 subsequent development that David's house 
 will be the permanent centre for the nation, 
 occupying the throne provided his descend- 
 ants are faithful, but in any case the centre 
 of God's promises to the people. Next, the 
 temple on Mount Zion is marked out as the 
 local centre of God's providence. "Now," 
 it was said, "have I hallowed this 
 house, to put my Name there for ever, 
 and Mine eyes and Mine heart shall be 
 there perpetually." Accordingly, for the 
 next looo years — until the Son of David 
 was finally cast out from the Temple of 
 Jerusalem by the malice of its priests — 
 around that one spot of earth did the 
 development of the Divine revelation turn ; 
 but even amidst the glorious scene of the 
 dedication of the temple, a clear and distinct 
 foresight of its ultimate doom is impressed 
 upon the vision of Solomon. 
 
 D 
 
50 COxNTINUOUS PREDICTION 
 
 From this point, as we pass through the 
 subsequent disturbed history, it is un- 
 necessary to recall in detail how every event 
 — the rebellion, for instance, of Rehoboam ; 
 the successive disasters of the kingdom of 
 Israel ; the destruction of the house of 
 Ahab ; the final overthrow of Samaria, and 
 the dispersion of the ten tribes — are all 
 announced in solemn warnings by a succes- 
 sion of prophets, from Ahijah to Isaiah. 
 Kings and people were warned beforehand 
 of the consequences of their conduct, and 
 those consequences were definitely, and not 
 merely generally, predicted. In particular, 
 the restoration of Judah, as distinct from 
 the entire destruction which was to be the 
 fate of Israel, is distinctly marked. In 
 short, it does not seem too much to say, 
 **that there was no one considerable 
 ordinance or appointment of God under 
 the first dispensation"' — neither the gift of 
 Canaan, nor the Mosaic Covenant, nor the 
 Mosaic worship, nor the temporal kingdom 
 of David, nor the Temple — which was 
 permitted to pass away without definite 
 prophecy (p. 224) ; and, further, that be- 
 tv>^een the commencement of the monarchy 
 and the return of the people from the 
 
VISION OF THE GOSPEL 51 
 
 Babylonian captivity, there is no known 
 event of any magnitude, by which they were 
 affected as a people, which was not announced 
 by some prophetic warning-. 
 
 Finally, as the time approaches when the 
 kingdom of Judah, no less than that of Israel, 
 is to be overthrown, and the promises of 
 God to His people are for a time to receive, 
 to human appearance, a complete defeat, 
 prophecy, which from the time of David 
 and Solomon had commenced to point, with 
 increasing clearness, to a Diviner kingdom 
 and a more perfect temple, concentrates its 
 light more and more on that great spiritual 
 future ; and as the temporal hopes of the 
 nation are obscured, the spiritual glories of 
 the Gospel, which were to arise upon their 
 ruins, become more and more clearly revealed. 
 In other words, it is at the moment when 
 the promises of the first dispensation are 
 visibly fading, and when the faith of those 
 who believed in the promises given to 
 Abraham and David must have been 
 strained almost beyond endurance, that the 
 words of evangelistic comfort begin to 
 occupy almost the whole of the prophetic 
 voice, and the vision is more and more 
 clearly seen of those last days when "many 
 
52 THE FLNAL PROPHECIES 
 
 peoples shall go and say, Come ye, and let 
 us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to 
 the house of God of Jacob ; and He will 
 teach us of His ways, and we will walk in 
 His paths ; for out of Zion shall go forth 
 the law, and the word of the Lord from 
 Jerusalem." Then, too, amidst the suffering 
 of the people, was seen the vision of that 
 Great Sufferer who should bear their sins, 
 and by whom their stripes should be healed. 
 Finally, after the return from the Captivity, 
 prophecy points forward to the return of the 
 Lord to His temple ; it predicts that then 
 would be the great and dreadful day of the 
 Lord — as it proved, indeed, to the Jews of 
 our Lord's time — and that it would be 
 preceded by the advent of one who would 
 come in the spirit and power of Elijah ; and 
 thus, in the striking expression of Mr 
 Davison, *' resigning its charge to the 
 personal precursor of Christ, Old Testament 
 prophecy expired with the Gospel upon its 
 tongue" (p. 347). Such is the living and 
 original conception of the nature and office 
 of ancient prophecy, as believed by the 
 Church, and urged by ancient interpreters. 
 Now let it be asked whether this be not a 
 very different conception of the nature and 
 
TWO THOUSAND YEARS 53 
 
 office of predictive prophecy from the narrow 
 notion of it, as of a set of fragmentary- 
 marvels, which has been sometimes errone- 
 ously attributed to ancient interpreters. In 
 a subsequent lecture an endeavour will be 
 made to illustrate more fully its importance 
 as a proof and test of Divine revelation. 
 But meanwhile, let us contemplate for a 
 moment the grand spectacle which is pre- 
 sented to us by such a review. Let us 
 conceive ourselves listening across a space 
 of nearly 2000 years, from Abraham onward, 
 to the Divine voice, heard behind the vast 
 and mysterious scene of history, uttering 
 the end from the beginning, pronouncing 
 few, but pregnant, words of command and 
 of warning to its chosen ministers at the 
 great crises of their own destiny, or the 
 destiny of their nation, or the destiny of the 
 world ; declaring to them that the way in 
 which they were called upon to walk, though 
 often dark and mysterious, was tending 
 towards the vindication of righteousness, 
 and the establishment of truth and justice 
 on the earth ; bidding them watch with 
 their own eyes how those promises of 
 righteousness were fulfilled, and so encourag- 
 ing or warning them in every great struggle 
 
 D 2 
 
54 FROM FIRST TO LAST 
 
 and every moment of temptation. The 
 historian, if gifted with a more than human 
 insight, might possibly, from the mere facts 
 themselves, trace backward the evidences of 
 a Divine hand ruling this obscure drama ; 
 but the devout student of the Scriptures is 
 privileged in prophecy to hear the Divine 
 Ruler issuing His commands, and thus to 
 follow the history from within and from 
 above, as it is being made. Much in the 
 same manner may the natural philosopher 
 laboriously trace back the stages of the 
 Divine workmanship in the creation ei the 
 heavens and of the earth, while the Christian 
 student is admitted to the very vision of the 
 scene when the morning stars sang together, 
 and hears simultaneously the utterance of 
 the Divine voice and its fulfilment — '*God 
 said. Let there be light ; and there was 
 light." 
 
Ill 
 
 THE VALUE OF PROPHECY AS 
 AN EVIDENCE OF REVELATION 
 
 " And now I have told you before it come to pass, that, 
 when it is come to pass, ye might believe." — St John, 
 xiv. 29. 
 
 The final discourses of our Lord to His 
 disciples afford a remarkable illustration 
 of the practical value of prophecy as an 
 evidence of revelation. Three times in 
 these discourses does He impress on them 
 the fact that He was warning them before- 
 hand of what was about to come to pass, 
 in order that, when it had come to pass, 
 they might believe. The first instance is 
 when He is referring to His approaching 
 betrayal. ''The Scripture," He said, ''will 
 be fulfilled : he that eateth bread with 
 Me, hath lifted up his heel against Me. 
 Now, I tell you before it come, that, 
 when it is come to pass, ye may believe 
 that I am He." The second instance is in 
 
 reference to His approaching departure. 
 
 55 
 
56 OUR LORD'S WARNINGS 
 
 " Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go 
 away and come again unto you. . . . And 
 now," He adds, *' I have told you before it 
 come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, 
 ye might believe." The third follows in the 
 same discourse, when He is warning His 
 disciples of the persecution which awaited 
 them. ''These things," He said, ''will they 
 do unto you because they have not known 
 the Father nor Me. But these things have 
 I told you, that, when the time is come, ye 
 may remember that I told you of them." 
 The Apostles were about to witness and 
 to experience circumstances of the strangest 
 and most painful nature. They were to see 
 their Master, whom they believed in as the 
 Christ of God, betrayed by one of them- 
 selves, and delivered over to a shameful 
 death ; and though He rose again and 
 ascended to heaven in glory, yet when 
 they came forward to proclaim His exalta- 
 tion, they would be excommunicated by the 
 leaders of their people, and whosoever killed 
 them would think that he did God service. 
 Their hopes and their convictions were thus 
 to undergo a succession of the most grievous 
 disappointments, and the most severe strain 
 would be put upon their faith. What con- 
 
THE OFFICE OF PROPHECY 57 
 
 siderations were to sustain them under it ? 
 Our Lord gives them various assurances 
 of comfort ; but the one which He thus 
 reiterates three times over must have been 
 intended by Him to be of special importance. 
 This was, that nothing would happen to 
 Himself or to them which He had not fore- 
 told. They might, therefore, be assured that 
 it was compatible with other truths which 
 He proclaimed to them, and particularly with 
 their belief that He was their Divine Lord 
 and Master. They would have good reason 
 to feel that the trials which befell them, 
 however distressing, were part of a dis- 
 pensation foreseen and intended by their 
 Master, and their confidence in Him and 
 His guidance ought thus to be the more 
 firmly established. 
 
 In these simple words our Lord has supplied 
 the key to the question of the office and use 
 of prophecy. In the two previous lectures 
 the cardinal facts of prophecy and its general 
 nature have been considered. It has been 
 shown how, as a matter of fact, long before 
 our Lord's appearance, it had pointed to the 
 coming of a Person who should fulfil towards 
 mankind the offices which He came to dis- 
 charge, and also that it had not merely 
 
68 GENERAL JEWISH BELIEF 
 
 pointed forward to this supreme fact, but 
 that its voice had accompanied every step in 
 the history of the people of Israel, from 
 the time when Abraham was called 
 to leave his Father's house, to the time 
 when Malachi uttered the concluding pre- 
 dictions of the old dispensation. Accord- 
 ing to the conviction of the Jews of our 
 Lord's day, as illustrated in St Stephen's 
 speech, the whole life of the Jewish people 
 depended on the truth that the God of glory 
 had from time to time appeared to their 
 fathers, declaring to them at once their 
 destiny and their duty ; and upon those 
 revelations of prophecy St Stephen rested 
 his belief in the truth he proclaimed, that 
 our Lord had established a spiritual worship, 
 which was independent of the local and tem- 
 porary ordinances of the Jewish sanctuary. 
 This was the settled belief of the Jews of 
 our Lord's day, alike of St Stephen and the 
 Apostles on the one hand, and of those who 
 rejected their message on the other. The 
 only point in dispute between them was as 
 to the application of those prophecies, not 
 as to their reality. 
 
 But let us next consider what is the use 
 which such prophecies serve in the proof of 
 
WITNESS OF PROPHECY 59 
 
 our religion. That they are of momentous 
 importance to it would seem evident from 
 the place which they fill in the sacred 
 volume. Prophecy occupies a larger space 
 there than miracles — it should rather be said 
 than other miracles, for prophecy itself is a 
 miracle, and a standing miracle. But, be- 
 sides the great place which the books of the 
 prophets hold in the records of the Divine 
 revelation, it is a very striking fact, as Paley 
 has observed, that in the preaching of the 
 Apostles, as recorded in the book of their 
 Acts and in their Epistles, much less stress 
 is laid upon the miracles wrought by our 
 Lord than upon the fulfilment of prophecy 
 in His life, death, and resurrection. The 
 miracles are referred to in passing as things 
 well known. The Jews are reminded that 
 our Lord went about doing good and healing 
 all that were oppressed with the devil. But 
 the main point on which an Apostle like 
 St Peter lays stress is that ''to Him give all 
 the prophets witness." 
 
 This fact suggests the main argument 
 in a series of lectures on this subject, 
 which are not less instructive than 
 those of Mr Davison — the '* Propae- 
 deia Prophetica" of Dr Lyall, sometime 
 
60 DR LYALL'S LECTURES 
 
 Dean of Canterbury. He says ^ that 
 Paley has correctly observed "that the 
 Apostles must have taken for granted that 
 the miracles ascribed to Christ were known 
 to all their hearers ; but he does not add 
 that the medium of proof by which they 
 endeavoured to demonstrate that those 
 miracles had God for their author was 
 altogether drawn from the prophecies of the 
 Old Testament " (p. 157). " The invariable 
 purport of all their arguments, and which 
 they kept always in view, was to prove that 
 the Gospel which they preached was the 
 subject of the prophecies with which the 
 Jewish Scriptures were filled, and, so far as 
 appears, it was only this which the Jews 
 denied." He adds that " the early fathers 
 of the Church do not found the controversy 
 upon the miracles of Christ any more than 
 do the writers of the New Testament. Both 
 of them take these wonderful facts for 
 granted, but, for the explanation of them, 
 recourse is had only to the Old Testament " 
 (p. 158). Take the leading fathers of the 
 two or three centuries after the death of our 
 
 1 The references are to the edition of the " Propaedeia 
 Prophetica," published in 1885 by the Rev. G. C. Pearson, 
 M.A., Honorary Canon of Canterbury. 
 
EVIDENCE OF PROPHECY 61 
 
 Lord, and he observes with truth that, 
 "while all of them, either directly or by 
 implication, attribute their own conversion 
 to the study of the Old Testament, not one 
 — if we except Arnobius — appeals to the 
 miracles as a proof of Christ's Divine 
 authority" (p. 159). In short, the early 
 apologists of Christianity, though alluding 
 to the miracles of Christ as substantiating 
 their belief, yet vindicate their belief itself, 
 not on this ground, but on the fulfilment of 
 the Hebrew prophecies. It was not, in 
 other words, only the performance by our 
 Lord of wonderful works, but the corre- 
 spondence of those works, and of the claims 
 by which they were accompanied, with the 
 continuous series of prophecies throughout 
 the course of Jewish history, which con- 
 clusively evidenced His Divine character 
 and authority. 
 
 In illustration of this view of the import- 
 ance of prophecy, it may be observed, in the 
 first instance, that the simplest prophecies, 
 if fulfilled, afford an unquestionable revela- 
 tion more direct and more intelligible than 
 any other miracles. Abraham, for instance, 
 according to the Book of Genesis, received 
 the promise that a son should be born to 
 
62 ABRAHAM AND ISAAC 
 
 himself and Sarah beyond the ordinary 
 course of nature, and this promise was ful- 
 filled. But its fulfilment at once afforded 
 Abraham an assurance that he was in com- 
 munion with a supernatural Being. Who 
 that Being was, what was His character 
 and will, he would learn by other communica- 
 tions, but the one fulfilled prophecy assured 
 him that a Being had spoken to him in 
 whose hands were the springs of his life, 
 who compassed his path and his lying down, 
 and who was acquainted with all his ways. 
 The birth of Isaac, however marvellous or 
 miraculous, if occurring without any ex- 
 planation and standing by itself, would 
 simply have told him that he was in contact 
 with some mysterious force beyond the range 
 of ordinary experience ; but it would not of 
 itself have revealed to him either the nature 
 of the force or the character of his relation 
 to it. But when it occurred in accordance 
 with the promise which had been made to 
 him, it at once revealed to him the fact that 
 his life and his destiny were subject to the 
 knowledge and control of the Being by 
 whom that promise was made. As a general 
 rule, in fact, it is not the miracle by itself, 
 but the miracle combined with the command, 
 
THE BASIS OF FAITH 63 
 
 or the prediction, that it should occur, which 
 constitutes the revelation. In the two com- 
 bined we witness, not merely a supernatural 
 manifestation, but the manifestation of a 
 supernatural and intelligent will, and it is 
 this which constitutes the essence of a 
 religious revelation. 
 
 It was, we may observe, a mode of revela- 
 tion which was peculiarly appropriate, and 
 even necessary, to the foundation of 
 religious life and faith in the world. It is 
 possible in the present day, from our intimate 
 acquaintance with Nature, for very powerful 
 arguments to be constructed on a basis of 
 purely natural theology to convince us that 
 the world was made, and is sustained, by a 
 Being of supreme wisdom and goodness. 
 But in the early days of the religious history 
 of mankind such arguments were scarcely 
 possible ; and the statement in the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews was peculiarly true, that by 
 faith it was believed that the worlds were 
 framed by the word of God. But nothing 
 could contribute more to produce that faith 
 than that men should have tangible evidence 
 that the course of their own lives and the 
 destinies of their nation were foreknown to, 
 and directed by, a living Being who, in all 
 
64 PROMISES FULFILLED 
 
 His communications to them, spoke as the 
 God of all righteousness as well as of all 
 knowledge. A child in a distant country 
 may never have seen its father ; but if it 
 receives letters from him from time to time, 
 directing it what to do and telling it what 
 provision will be made for it, and if the 
 promises thus held out to it are fulfilled, it 
 can have no doubt of its being under its 
 father's guidance and control. The case of 
 the Jews, from Abraham downwards, is 
 closely parallel. They were under divine 
 education, and they received communications 
 from time to time telling them what was the 
 destiny immediately intended for them, and 
 imposing certain duties on them ; and when 
 they found those destinies realised — when, 
 according to the promise, they were brought 
 into Egypt ; when according to the promise, 
 they were brought out of Egypt ; when, 
 according to the promise, they v/ere settled 
 in Canaan ; when the course of their history 
 there was accompanied by successive predic- 
 tions, which were successively fulfilled — there 
 could be no doubt to the thoughtful Jews, and 
 there can be no reasonable doubt to ourselves 
 if we believe these facts, that a living God was 
 among them, governing and directing them. 
 
EFFECT OF THE EXILE 65 
 
 It was, above all things, the prophecy that 
 revealed Him. It was this which revealed 
 the design, the will, the wisdom, and the 
 righteousness which were at work among 
 them, and assured them that they were not 
 in contact with blind forces, or with unknown 
 gods, but with the God of Abraham, Isaac, 
 and Jacob. 
 
 It may be worth considering whether this 
 does not afford, in great measure, an explana- 
 tion of one of the most striking circum- 
 stances in the history of the Jews — the 
 alteration in their religious character after 
 the exile. Until the time of the exile they 
 had been perpetually falling back into 
 idolatry, but when they returned from the 
 exile every trace of this tendency seems to 
 have disappeared. They have become a 
 nation of unbending believers in one God, 
 the God of their fathers ; and their danger 
 lies no longer in a temptation to worship 
 other gods, or to be false to their law, but in 
 a contrary tendency, to exalt their belief and 
 their obedience to the law into a new idolatry. 
 Is it unnatural to suppose that the exile had 
 been to them, as the fulfilment of prophecy, 
 the final proof that the God of whom their 
 prophets had spoken to them was the one 
 
 £ 
 
Q6 THE FINAL PROOF 
 
 living God, and that their whole welfare 
 depended, as had always been proclaimed 
 to them, on obedience to His will and His 
 law? The predictions of the exile, first of 
 Israel and then of Judah, were the culminat- 
 ing prophecies in respect to ancient Jewish 
 history ; and their fulfilment, in all the bitter- 
 ness of the terrible reality, was at least well 
 fitted to set the seal upon all previous pro- 
 phecies, and to stamp upon the mind of the 
 Jew those truths respecting the nature and 
 the will of the God of his fathers which a 
 less severe discipline had been insufficient to 
 teach him. At every turn of Jewish history 
 the prophetic voice is heard bespeaking the 
 loving guidance and will of God. Those 
 voices, together with their fulfilment, afford 
 the revelation of a living being as distinctly 
 and unmistakably as any distant person not 
 seen by ourselves — to take our Lord's image, 
 as a king in a far country — is revealed by 
 his commands and promises when we see 
 them acted up to and fulfilled. To the Jews 
 after the exile, to the Jews of our Lord's day, 
 this revelation was complete ; and nothing 
 was so certain to them as that, at sundry 
 times and in divers manners, God had spoken 
 unto their fathers by the prophets, and that 
 
THE NEW DISPENSATION 67 
 
 they owed to Him and to His law their 
 absolute allegiance and obedience. 
 
 Now, these considerations will further 
 explain the reason why, as we have seen, the 
 arguments of the Apostles are so predomi- 
 nantly concerned with the evidence of pro- 
 phecy. It was their mission to proclaim a 
 new dispensation, which would, in great 
 measure, supersede the old. The truth was 
 realised more and more by themselves and 
 by others that, in accordance with the charge 
 against Stephen, Jesus of Nazareth would 
 change the customs which Moses, and God 
 through Moses, had delivered to the Jews. 
 Now, it may be admitted that it would have 
 been possible for some stupendous manifesta- 
 tion to have authenticated beyond all doubt 
 this assertion of the close and supersession 
 of a Divine dispensation. It might even be 
 argued that the miracles, the moral authority, 
 and the resurrection of our Lord, did con- 
 stitute such a manifestation, and were of 
 themselves sufficient warrant for the abroga- 
 tion of the Mosaic ordinances. That, indeed, 
 would be a stronger argument to the Gentile 
 than to the Jew, whose whole soul was steeped 
 in the belief of the Divine character of those 
 ordinances. But, at all events, it will be 
 
68 CONTINUITY WITH THE OLD 
 
 seen that it adds enormously to the force of 
 the works and words of our Lord if it can be 
 shown that those works and words, and the 
 revolution of religious practice which He and 
 His Apostles proclaimed, were themselves 
 not only not contrary to the old law and to 
 the existing dispensation, but actually in 
 harmony with them, and predicted by them 
 as much and as distinctly as the previous 
 revolutions in Jewish history from first to 
 last. If this were so, then, though the 
 Gospel might change the customs which 
 God through Moses had delivered to the 
 Jews, it was not the subversion of them, but 
 the fulfilment of them. It put the coping- 
 stone upon the great temple of Divine revela- 
 tion, and revealed a perfect harmony from 
 first to last in the Divine will and govern- 
 ment. The Jew, after all, was right in 
 demanding some momentous evidence before 
 he consented to the supersession of the law, 
 of which the Divine origin and authority had 
 been stamped upon his mind by so terrible 
 an experience ; and it was at least a most 
 merciful, if not a necessary, dispensation that 
 that evidence should be afforded by the very 
 prophecies to which he clung. If those 
 prophecies and that law themselves predicted 
 
SEALED CREDENTIALS 69 
 
 the Gospel, and foretold the life, the death, 
 and the resurrection of the Saviour, with the 
 spiritual dominion which He was to establish, 
 then the Divine character of the new dis- 
 pensation was one with that of the old, the 
 purposes and the will of God were unchanged, 
 and the preaching of the Apostles was 
 authenticated by the very Divine oracles to 
 which the Jews appealed. 
 
 To quote the striking illustration of Dean 
 Lyall (pp. 171-173), the case maybe com- 
 pared to that of an ambassador, who comes 
 from a king in a far country bringing a 
 communication to his subjects, which seems 
 at first of so perplexing and unwelcome a 
 character that they are inclined to doubt his 
 credentials. But suppose, to quote an 
 expression both of Isaiah and Daniel, a sealed 
 document was in the possession of the people, 
 which was not to be opened until such an 
 ambassador arrived, and suppose that on its 
 being opened and read it was found to sub- 
 stantiate the ambassador's credentials, no 
 doubt of his authority would then remain. 
 Prophecy was in the position of that sealed 
 document — or perhaps, we may say, of a 
 document in cipher — which could not be 
 understood until the key was supplied. It 
 
 E 2 
 
70 ITS PRESENT IMPORTANCE 
 
 at once afforded the Apostles an adequate 
 guarantee that, as the ambassadors of 
 Christ, they v/ere also the ambassadors of 
 the God of their fathers and of the prophets ; 
 and that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and 
 Jacob had sent them, no less than He had 
 sent Moses formerly, with a commission from 
 Himself 
 
 In a word, prophecy, if not the only 
 possible proof, is at least the best and most 
 effective proof that the Christian revelation 
 comes from that one living God who has 
 manifested Himself to us by a continuous 
 series of revelations from the early patri- 
 archal ages down to the time of our Lord 
 and of His Apostles. These things were 
 told us before they came to pass, that when 
 they did come to pass we might believe. 
 Let me further point out that even if, as 
 some writers, like Paley, seem to have 
 thought, the evidence of prophecy be in 
 some respects of less crucial importance to 
 ourselves than it was to the Jews of our 
 Lord's day or to those who lived in the 
 infancy of revelation, yet it still affords a 
 testimony to the primary and cardinal truths 
 of revelation which is of supreme value. 
 What is there for which men ask more 
 
REVEALS A LIVING BEING 71 
 
 anxiously at the present day than for evi- 
 dence of the presence, and of the action In 
 the course of life, of a living and personal 
 God ? Some philosophers and men of science 
 would relegate us to the bare acknowledgment 
 of some supreme but unknown energy from 
 which all things have ultimately proceeded ; 
 but they allege that there is no proof of its 
 direct interposition and control in the course 
 of the world of nature, still less in that of 
 life and history. We are tempted, under 
 the influence of this philosophy, to acknow- 
 ledge a God as a hypothesis, an ultimate 
 law, but to lose the apprehension that He 
 is the Lord our God, and that we are the 
 people of His pasture and the sheep of His 
 hand. But if the facts of prophecy are true, 
 they afford us the most direct and positive 
 evidence of this cardinal truth. We hear in 
 them the voice of a Being who has beset us 
 behind and before and laid His hand upon 
 us ; who has declared beforehand, in all the 
 great crises of the central history of our race, 
 the end to which that history was tending, 
 and the purpose by which it was governed. 
 You listen to the declaration, before the 
 event, of a deliberate and a righteous design 
 in the history of the world, pointing forward 
 
72 ASSURANCE TO OURSELVES 
 
 from patriarchal ages to the Christian dis- 
 pensation under which we now Hve. 
 
 There has been much dispute whether the 
 mere fact of the adaptation of the parts of a 
 structure to one end constitutes an adequate 
 proof of its being the product of deliberate 
 design ; but if you add to such an adaptation 
 the fact that the end was announced at the 
 very commencement of the adaptation, and 
 that each advance in the growth or develop- 
 ment of the structure was similarly announced, 
 and the explanation of its purpose given 
 beforehand, there can then surely remain 
 no reasonable doubt that the structure is 
 the work of deliberate wisdom, and that we 
 are in communion with the mind and will of 
 the designer. The voice of such prophecy 
 as that of the Scriptures is the unmistakable 
 voice of the living Being, by whom the life 
 and the history which it predicts are con- 
 trolled, and it forces us to recognise, not 
 merely the existence of God, but His living 
 presence and action. Let me only add that 
 it gives us an invaluable assurance that we 
 ourselves in our daily lives are similarly in 
 the presence and under the guidance of that 
 living God. It affords us a sure and solid 
 ground for our faith in the conviction of the 
 
DIVINE OMNIPRESENCE 73 
 
 Psalmist : '* Thine eyes did see my substance, 
 yet being unperfect, and in Thy book were 
 all my members written, which day by day 
 were fashioned when as yet there was none 
 of them." It must enable us to exclaim 
 with him : " Whither shall I go from Thy 
 Spirit, or whither shall I flee from Thy 
 presence? If I ascend up into heaven, 
 Thou art there : if I make my bed in hell, 
 behold, Thou art there. If I take the wings 
 of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost 
 parts of the sea, even there shall Thy hand 
 lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me." 
 
IV 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE 
 MESSIANIC HOPE 
 
 "Thy kingdom come." — Matt. vi. lo. 
 
 "From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, 
 Repent : for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." — Matt. 
 iv. 17. 
 
 In this and the succeeding lectures it is 
 proposed to trace the development of pro- 
 phecy from the seed sown in patriarchal 
 times until it becomes the great tree under 
 whose wide-spreading branches the Christian 
 Church found its earliest shelter, and still 
 finds an abiding protection. Such an 
 attempt must of course assume the general 
 historical trustworthiness of those early 
 books of the Bible in which the truths of 
 Jewish and Christian belief, and particularly 
 of Jewish and Christian prophecy, are so 
 deeply fixed ; and this trustworthiness may 
 in turn derive confirmation from the veri- 
 74 
 
JEWISH EXPECTATION 75 
 
 similitude of that development. Now, it will 
 be advantageous in entering on this considera- 
 tion of the course of prophetic development, 
 to endeavour to take at the outset a general 
 view of the manner in which the central idea 
 and hope of all Jewish prophecy^ — that of 
 the Messiah — was gradually aroused in the 
 minds of the people of Israel. It appealed 
 to the deepest and most familiar conception 
 of our Lord's hearers, and we must bear 
 this conception in mind if we would under- 
 stand His position. 
 
 It is a trite observation that the Jews at 
 our Lord's day were eagerly expecting the 
 coming of the Messiah and the establish- 
 ment of His kingdom ; but the full depth 
 and import of this Messianic expectation is 
 liable to be obscured, at least to some minds, 
 by the undue importance attached to the 
 controversial interpretation of some Mes- 
 sianic texts, and its intensely moral and 
 practical bearing may thus be lost sight of. 
 To appreciate it duly, it is to be remembered 
 that the whole of Jewish history starts 
 from a promise, and looks forward to a 
 great hope. Independently of all questions 
 relating to the date of particular parts of the 
 Old Testament, it remains a fact that the 
 
76 THE ORIGINAL PROMISE 
 
 time cannot be shown in the history of the 
 Jews when they did not look back to 
 Abraham, and to the promijses connected 
 with his name, as the germ of all their life 
 and the prophecy of its destiny. That in 
 his seed all nations should be blessed — this 
 throughout, was the corner-stone of Jewish 
 consciousness. Their God is, from the first, 
 the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not 
 merely in the sense that He had been the 
 God of those patriarchs, but in the sense 
 that His character and His purposes were 
 those which He had revealed to them, and 
 that His truth was bound up with the fulfil- 
 ment of the hopes in which they had lived 
 and died. The experience of the Jews is in 
 this respect unique. Other nations have had 
 great hopes in the future and have indulged 
 in visions of a great destiny, at least for a 
 time. But no other nation had its whole 
 existence and its whole career based upon a 
 specific promise, which enabled and compelled 
 it to look forward to a definite destiny. 
 How that destiny was to be fulfilled remained, 
 indeed, mysterious to the last, and the 
 mystery is still being gradually unveiled 
 before our eyes. But that the promise sub- 
 sisted as an immovable corner-stone, and 
 
NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT 77 
 
 that the destiny would be realised, no 
 thoughtful Jew for a moment doubted. 
 
 Their history, however, consists of the 
 gradual unveiling to them of the meaning of 
 this primary promise and prophecy. It is a 
 prolonged answer to the question how the 
 seed of Abraham were to be blessed, and 
 how all nations of the earth were to be 
 blessed in them. In patriarchal days no 
 other blessing is discernible than that of a 
 peaceful pastoral existence, endued with the 
 simple wealth of that mode of life and with 
 all the happiness of the family. But as soon 
 as the sojourn in Egypt has fostered the 
 children of Israel into a considerable nation, 
 other necessities for the blessings of existence 
 are felt to be requisite. Then they become 
 sensible, by a bitter experience, of all the 
 miseries entailed by injustice, arbitrary power, 
 and the luxuries and vices which are indis- 
 soluble from an imperfect civilisation. The 
 superstitious and cruel practices engendered 
 by idolatry had brought the people under a 
 severe and bitter bondage, and had in great 
 measure broken their own spirit and corrupted 
 their characters. Never in their long history 
 could the blessing promised to their fore- 
 father Abraham have seemed further off 
 
78 THE FAITH OF MOSES 
 
 than towards the close of their bondage in 
 Egypt. But the history of Moses is evidence 
 of the fact that, in the midst of this bitter 
 experience, the faith of the greater spirits in 
 the old promise remained. As is said in the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews, the faith which rose 
 to so great a height in Moses animated his 
 parents. For " by faith, when he was born, 
 he was hidden three months of his parents, 
 because they saw he was a proper child, and 
 they were not afraid of the king's command- 
 ment." But above all, by faith did " Moses, 
 when he was come to years, refuse to be 
 called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choos- 
 ing rather to suffer affliction with the people 
 of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for 
 a season." After much trial he is at length 
 rewarded by God's appearance to him in the 
 character of **the God of Abraham, Isaac, 
 and Jacob," who would fulfil the promises 
 which He had made to those patriarchs. 
 In that character Moses was commissioned 
 to go to his people, saying unto them, " The 
 Lord God of your fathers hath appeared 
 unto me, saying, I have surely visited you ; 
 . . . and I have said I will bring you up out 
 of the affliction of Egypt unto a land flowing 
 with milk and honey." It is the old promise, 
 
A PERSONAL DELIVERER 79 
 
 recalled to their recollection with a new 
 pledge of its fulfilment. 
 
 But the mode of its fulfilment adds a 
 further momentous element in the experience 
 and the intelligence of the Jews. They 
 learn that, if they are to realise the promise 
 made to their fathers, if they are to be 
 blessed as a nation and to be a blessing, 
 they need a deliverer, a personal deliverer — 
 one who should, in the first place, break the 
 power of their enemies, and, in the next 
 place, be a guide and leader to them. This 
 personal deliverer they were taught to see in 
 God Himself, by the miracles, wonders, and 
 signs which He wrought in Egypt, and 
 which were performed in His name by virtue 
 of its solemn invocation. But to their com- 
 paratively rude intelligence, this personal 
 deliverance was in great measure embodied 
 in the character of Moses, so much so that, 
 when he disappears for a time while he was 
 with God in the mount, they compel Aaron 
 to make gods who shall go before them in 
 his place. It is evident, even from this 
 offence, how deeply their bitter experience in 
 Egypt and their subsequent deliverance had 
 impressed upon them this conviction of the 
 need of a personal deliverer. They realise 
 
80 THE NEED OF LAWS 
 
 that, as a nation, they cannot be safe unless 
 there is someone at their head to unite them, 
 to organise them, to provide for their 
 protection. 
 
 At the same time, two supreme lessons 
 are impressed upon them. They are given 
 a code of laws. By circumstances of most 
 solemn and impressive character, they are 
 taught that they can have no blessing, either 
 individually or nationally, except in obedience 
 to laws imposed upon them by Divine 
 authority. The full significance of those 
 laws is beyond their comprehension. Such 
 a law as that of the Sabbath could not, in 
 the first instance at least, if at any time, 
 rest safely on men's inherent apprehension 
 of what is desirable. Other laws, if not 
 beyond their comprehension, are at least in 
 opposition to their passions and impose a 
 severe curb upon their wills. But they are 
 taught, amidst thunders and lightnings, that 
 the blessings promised to their fathers can 
 never be enjoyed by them except so far as 
 they are in obedience to those laws. This 
 leads immediately to the second of the two 
 great lessons which are impressed upon 
 them. They violate the laws which have 
 been given them. They find them too 
 
ATONEMENT AND PRIESTHOOD 81 
 
 severe a strain upon their passions, their 
 patience, and their faith, and they are taught 
 at once, by the establishment of a solemn, 
 and even terrible, ritual of sacrifices that 
 they must either suffer the full enforcement 
 of those laws upon them in punishments, and 
 even in destruction, or some amends, some 
 atonement, must be made for their violation. 
 The torrents of blood which were shed in 
 the ancient Jewish sacrifices had the effect 
 of impressing on the mind of the people, in 
 the most vivid manner, the imperative need 
 of propitiation for the violation of law. 
 Laws do not deserve the name unless they 
 are avenged in one way or another ; and the 
 Jewish sacrifices and the Jewish Priesthood, 
 particularly the High Priest, are the 
 appointed instruments by which, for tem- 
 porary purposes, that atonement is made. 
 Further, they are made to feel that they 
 need the continued favour of God, and His 
 constant protection, for their national and 
 personal welfare, and, if this is to be enjoyed, 
 that their continual sins need continual 
 propitiation. 
 
 Thus, at this early stage of their career, 
 certain necessities for the fulfilment of the 
 patriarchal blessing are already deeply im- 
 
82 LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 pressed upon them. A personal deliverer to 
 save them from their enemies, a law-giver to 
 prescribe conditions of life, a judge to apply 
 those laws, the prophetic spirit of a Moses 
 to interpret them to their consciences, and 
 finally a priesthood, with constant sacrifices, 
 to offer propitiation for their sins — these, it 
 will be observed, are no arbitrary require- 
 ments. They grow out of the inevitable 
 experience of the nation, as it is seeking for 
 the blessing promised to its fathers under 
 the discipline of the Divine hand. Blessing 
 can only be obtained on these terms and in 
 this way. Surrounded as they are by 
 enemies, liable to oppression and slavery, 
 corrupted by sins, and hampered at every 
 turn by their own ignorance and passion, 
 they are brought to feel the indispensable 
 necessity of the functions of deliverer, law- 
 giver, prophet, and priest. All these concep- 
 tions, all these cravings, start into full vigour 
 the moment the nation is full grown, and is 
 brought into contact with the stern realities 
 of existence. 
 
 These personal acts of salvation — for that 
 is what they amount to — bring the people 
 through the most critical period of their 
 existence, and they are at length established 
 
THE DIVINE RULER 83 
 
 in the promised land. Here they seem in 
 possession of all that is essential to the 
 enjoyment of the blessing promised to their 
 fathers ; all material necessities are provided 
 for them in a land '' flowing with milk and 
 honey " ; the law, with adequate guidance in 
 all the essentials of life, a priesthood, with an 
 authoritative commission to mediate between 
 them and God, and endued, as occasion 
 arises, with supernatural capacity for inter- 
 preting His will. God was their living ruler ; 
 and, had they realised His perpetual presence 
 and rule among them, and lived in humble 
 and faithful submission to it, the way was 
 fairly open for the gradual and complete 
 fulfilment of the promises made to their 
 fathers. But they were unequal to this 
 life of faith, and are consequently left to 
 learn their necessities through further sad 
 experience. 
 
 The next great point in this experience is 
 the necessity forced upon them, by their 
 difficulties and sufferings in the time of the 
 Judges, of the continuous personal rule em- 
 bodied in the office of a king. So far from 
 there being anything necessarily wrong, there 
 was profound truth in the craving, which they 
 expressed to Samuel, that they might have a 
 
84 THE OFFICE OF KING 
 
 king to reign over them. The error con- 
 sisted simply in their failure to recognise the 
 fact that they had such a king, that the 
 Lord their God was their king, and that, if 
 they maintained a due spirit of faith and 
 obedience to Him, they enjoyed in the 
 highest form all the blessing which a kingly 
 rule could give them. But it was none the 
 less a perfectly true experience that, if the 
 nation was to be blessed, if the old promises 
 were to be realised, if their God was the God 
 of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and if their 
 destiny had been truly prophesied by those 
 patriarchs, a king, a living king, a perpetual 
 king, they must have. 
 
 Now, it is a peculiar privilege in the 
 experience of the Jews that, whenever a 
 necessity for an office of this kind is 
 apprehended, a character is granted to the 
 nation who brings out the ideal of such an 
 office with especial vividness. Moses, for 
 example, was an ideal lawgiver and deliverer; 
 Joshua was an ideal leader in war ; Samuel 
 exhibits the highest type of a judge. Ac- 
 cordingly, in response to this craving, the 
 character of David arises, who, notwithstand- 
 ing his grievous sin, nevertheless impressed 
 upon the minds of the people the ideal 
 
THE KINGLY IDEAL 85 
 
 character of a king, and who has expressed 
 that ideal in Psalms, which have embodied 
 the highest hopes, not only of Jews, but of 
 Christians, and of the noblest spirits in the 
 world. No question of Davids personal 
 merits can obliterate or alter the fact that, in 
 him and through him, the ideal of a righteous 
 king is embodied, in a form in which it 
 fascinates the eyes of all subsequent genera- 
 tions, or that his Psalms express in the 
 loftiest strains the characteristics of a perfect 
 rule. The loist Psalm, for instance, is 
 traditionally ascribed to him, and is regarded 
 as embodying the functions which he felt to 
 be entrusted to him as king. '' I will sing 
 of mercy and judgment : unto thee, O Lord, 
 will I sing. ... I will walk within my house 
 with a perfect heart. I will set no wicked 
 thing before mine eyes : . . . A froward 
 heart shall depart from me : I will not know 
 a wicked person. . . . Mine eyes shall be 
 upon the faithful in the land, that they may 
 dwell with me : . . . I will early destroy all 
 the wicked of the land ; that I may cut off 
 all wicked doers from the city of the Lord." 
 It is peculiarly observable, with respect to 
 the ideal of a king thus conceived by David, 
 however imperfectly realised, that the concep- 
 
 F 2 
 
86 THE PROPHETIC OFFICE 
 
 tions of power and warlike success, which 
 were the predominant characteristics of the 
 royal office in other nations, are entirely sub- 
 ordinate to the office of asserting and main- 
 taining righteousness. ** Give the king thy 
 judgments, O Lord, and thy righteousness 
 unto the king's Son;" "he shall judge thy 
 people with righteousness, and thy poor with 
 judgment" — such was the idea inherited by 
 his son Solomon. Such was the further 
 addition made by Jewish experience to their 
 apprehension of the conditions for the fulfil- 
 ment of their ancestors' blessing. 
 
 Two more requisites remained to be 
 brought out into full consciousness by the 
 national experience. As the kingly power 
 failed, like all others in mortal hands, to 
 fulfil its ideal, the prophetic office rose into 
 still higher importance, as that of a living 
 voice interpreting the law, and enforcing it 
 upon the conscience. Finally, amidst their 
 own sufferings and in those of their nation, 
 the prophets discerned in clearer and clearer 
 lineaments that vision which was not dimly 
 foreseen by the prophet philosopher of 
 Greece, of the sufferings of the true servant 
 of God, the perfectly just and righteous man, 
 the destined deliverer of his people. To the 
 
THE SACRIFICIAL OFFICE 87 
 
 later prophets the history of their people 
 must have seemed like one long failure. 
 All had been given in vain — the miracles and 
 wonders in Egypt, the law, and the ritual ; 
 the grand succession of prophets, priests, 
 and kings, Moses, Samuel, David, Elijah, 
 all had apparently lived to no purpose ; the 
 people had utterly failed to realise their own 
 ideals, and instead of the blessing promised 
 to their fathers they were enduring the 
 bitterest misery in a foreign land. Amidst 
 this experience, the conviction seemed forced 
 upon them of the need of an expiation for 
 their sins, by suffering endured on their 
 behalf by their best representatives ; and of 
 a servant of the Lord, who by his patient 
 submission to sorrow and death would bear 
 a more powerful and penetrating testimony 
 to the will of God, than could be borne by 
 any exhibition of power and awe. So the 
 conception arises — not artificially by isolated 
 and mysterious predictions — but naturally, 
 continuously, and in the course of a living 
 experience, of the realisation of the original 
 promise of blessing in a Divine Kingdom, 
 under the rule of a perfect Prophet, a perfect 
 Priest, and a perfect King ; who, in those 
 various capacities, should satisfy the needs, 
 
88 A COMPLETED EXPERIENCE 
 
 control the passions, and illumine the minds 
 of his people, and overcome their enemies. 
 His supreme function, it was felt by the most 
 earnest hearts, would be that by all these 
 offices, and not by one only, he would save 
 his people from their sins, and establish a 
 righteous rule, within them and without 
 them. Accordingly, in the mind of an 
 inspired man like Zacharias, the fulfil- 
 ment of the ancient hope of the people 
 is expressed in the words, ''that we should 
 be saved from our enemies, and from the 
 hands of all that hate us, to perform the 
 mercy promised to our fathers, and to 
 remember His holy covenant ; the oath 
 which He sware to our father Abraham, 
 that He would grant unto us, that we, being 
 delivered out of the hands of our enemies, 
 might serve Him without fear, in holiness 
 and righteousness before Him, all the days 
 of our life." 
 
 Such in its main outlines was the Mes- 
 sianic hope of the Jews. At each period of the 
 history, their greatest men are inspired with 
 visions of the ideal after which they were 
 craving ; and the various traits of this 
 perfect Prophet, Priest and King — in a word, 
 of this Messiah, are revealed to them, and 
 
AN EVOLUTION 89 
 
 are recorded in prophecy and song. It is 
 of secondary importance whether particular 
 texts have been rightly regarded, by Jewish 
 or Christian interpreters, as specially appli- 
 cable to the Messiah. The Messianic pre- 
 diction, the vision of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, is rooted in the very life, and in the 
 intensest experience of the Jewish people. 
 It was inevitable their literature should 
 be full of it ; and the spirit of Christ, 
 which was given to their prophets, did 
 but furnish the interpretation of these 
 experiences, and assure the fulfilment of 
 these hopes. 
 
 This, it may be said, is the sketch of an 
 evolution — the evolution of the idea of the 
 Messiah. But it is an evolution accom- 
 plished throughout by the hand and the 
 voice of the Evolver. That, perhaps, would 
 prove to be the real character of any other 
 apparent evolution. It consists in the use 
 and application of natural circumstances and 
 natural developments to a fixed purpose, 
 in the turn given at great crises to the play 
 of natural forces, always with an eye to 
 the end in view. In this case a Divine 
 government led the people from one stage of 
 experience to another ; first into Canaan, 
 
90 THE CHRIST 
 
 then into Egypt, then into Canaan again, 
 then into their relations with the great 
 monarchies of the East ; then into exile, and 
 again to their own land for their final trial. 
 But side by side with this governing hand 
 was the guiding voice, illuminating by pro- 
 phetic utterances the nature of each succes- 
 sive experience, and pointing forward to 
 the future. Every one of the prophecies 
 which we are considering has thus its 
 roots in the past, its exhortation and en- 
 couragement for the present, and its hope 
 and promise for the future. It has no private 
 or isolated interpretation, and can only be 
 understood in connection with that central 
 idea and guiding light, the idea of the 
 Messiah and the light of His countenance, 
 by which the people of Israel were accom- 
 panied throughout their mysterious career. 
 All this it is, moreover, all these varied 
 offices, all this manifold salvation, for which 
 it is our privilege to look to Christ. As 
 He was with the Jews, revealing Himself 
 to them throughout their long history, and 
 by means of it, so let us be assured His 
 hand and His voice are with ourselves ; 
 and if we will open our hearts to Him, 
 He will teach us more and more, by the 
 
THE SAVIOUR 91 
 
 experience of our lives, to realise that He is 
 ever present, as a living Saviour, leading 
 us through all our trials, and even through 
 all our sins, to rest, in entire faith, on His 
 salvation. 
 
THE PRINCIPLE OF FAITH 
 IN PROPHECY 
 
 " These all died in faith, not having received the promises, 
 but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, 
 and embraced them." — Heb. xi. 13. 
 
 " These all died in faith, not having received the promises, 
 but having seen them and greeted them from afar." — R.V. 
 
 This is a passage which exhibits in its 
 highest form a characteristic method of 
 scriptural argument — the argument from 
 facts. In several critical moments in the 
 Acts of the Apostles, for instance, as in the 
 speech of St Stephen, or in St Paul's defence 
 of himself on various occasions, the argu- 
 ment consists of a simple exhibition of facts 
 — of the past history of the Jewish people, 
 or of St Paul's actual experiences ; and these 
 facts, thus placed in their true bearings, are 
 left to produce their natural result upon the 
 mind, and to shed their illumination upon 
 the question under discussion. It seems to 
 
 92 
 
THE ARGUMENT FROM FACTS 93 
 
 be of the nature of what is called, in modern 
 scientific language, the argument from in- 
 duction. The facts thus duly weighed may 
 not afford a strict or logical proof, but they 
 bring to light some law of the Divine action, 
 or of human nature, and thus illustrate to us 
 what are the realities with which we have to 
 deal. " The analogy of religion, natural and 
 revealed, with the constitution and course of 
 nature," is an argument of the same kind. 
 Such and such facts may be observed in the 
 actual working of the world in which we 
 daily live, and analogy leads us to anticipate 
 their action in similar though wider spheres. 
 Thus the Apostolic writer, in this chapter, 
 recalls to the Hebrews whom he addresses a 
 long series of facts, illustrating the operation 
 of the great principle of faith which he is 
 urging upon them. They were on the eve, 
 or in the midst, of a fiery trial, which would 
 put to the severest test their allegiance to 
 their new profession. They had need of 
 patience, they had already endured a great 
 fight of afflictions, and another was immi- 
 nent ; and the Apostle had resorted in the 
 previous chapter to the most solemn warnings 
 drawn from the perils and the punishment of 
 apostasy. '* It is a fearful thing," he had 
 
94 THE PRINCIPLE OF FAITH 
 
 warned them, ''to fall Into the hands of the 
 living God." But having done this, he pro- 
 ceeds, in a spirit which may well be that of 
 Barnabas, that '' Son of Consolation " to 
 whom this Epistle was in very early times 
 attributed, to urge reasons for the deepest 
 comfort and hope amidst any trials, however 
 keen and bitter. For this purpose he con- 
 centrates into one chapter the spirit of all 
 Hebrew history — or rather of the history of 
 the servants of God from the beginning of the 
 world — and thus impresses on his hearers the 
 fact, that they are not called to any excep- 
 tional course of conduct or endurance, but 
 only to act on that principle of faith, as 
 distinct from sight, which animated all the 
 great saints of the past whom they were 
 proud to follow. " These all," he says, ''died 
 in faith, not having received the promises," 
 but being assured that the fulfilment of them 
 was reserved for them hereafter. They 
 confessed that they were strangers and 
 pilgrims on the earth, and so declared plainly 
 that they were seeking another country. 
 
 Now it adds peculiar force to this record 
 of facts and to this argument to bear in mind 
 with what comprehensiveness it follows the 
 whole history of the people of God from 
 
THESE ALL DIED L\ FAITH 95 
 
 the days of the patriarchs to the date at 
 which the Apostle wrote. That to which 
 the Apostolic writer calls attention is the fact 
 that there has been a continuous history, 
 stretching back to the very dawn of human 
 life, far beyond even the commencement of 
 Hebrew times, of men and women whose 
 lives were guided, not by the circumstances 
 around them, or the hopes which might be 
 based upon such circumstances, but by the 
 promise and prophecy of things afar off and 
 as yet only heard of. It was not merely that 
 a few individuals in successive ages had 
 exhibited this life of faith — not only that, as 
 in the heathen world, there had been bright 
 luminaries of truth and faith, appearing at 
 intervals to keep alive the torch of true 
 life and thought. But there had been in 
 the people of God a continuous succession 
 of men, handing down from generation to 
 generation the same hope, and building up 
 their own lives and the lives of their children 
 upon the same invisible foundation. It is 
 the history of that Church of God which 
 commenced with the faithful patriarchs, and 
 of which the succession was continued in the 
 line of Abraham throughout the Jewish 
 people. One future hope animated this long 
 
96 APPARENT DEFEATS OF FAITH 
 
 historic line of saints ; and a whole system 
 of human life was continuously maintained, 
 of which this was the organising principle. 
 
 To do justice to it, moreover, it must be 
 remembered that this long history of faith, 
 stretching back, if we go no further than 
 the time of Abraham, for about as many 
 centuries before Christ as we are living 
 after Christ — for as we live in the twentieth 
 century a.d. so he lived about the twentieth 
 century B.C. — this long history had been to 
 a large extent one of continuous disappoint- 
 ment. The experience of Abraham, called 
 at the very culmination of his hopes to 
 sacrifice his only-begotten son, and thus 
 apparently to forego all visible realisation, 
 or means of realisation, of the promise on 
 which he had lived, is eminently typical of 
 the whole history of the Church of God as 
 here recorded. First of all a long, and 
 apparently hopeless, bondage in Egypt of 
 some four centuries — four centuries of 
 absolute eclipse of every circumstance that 
 could be deemed to correspond to the 
 promises made to Abraham. Instead of 
 any prospect of possessing the land of 
 Canaan, his seed were bond-slaves in Egypt, 
 under the tyranny of the mightiest military 
 
MICAH AND ISAIAH 97 
 
 power of the day. Then, when emancipated 
 from Egypt, they were wandering for forty 
 years in a wilderness. Then followed 
 another 300 years of precarious independ- 
 ence and great national confusion under 
 the Judges. At length the promise received 
 some visible realisation in the brilliant period 
 of the Jewish kingdom under David and 
 Solomon. Yet this was but a brief gleam 
 of brightness in the long agony of the 
 people. The kingdom soon breaks up, and 
 in less than three centuries both Israel and 
 Judah became the prey of the great military 
 monarchies of Assyria and Babylonia. They 
 had apparently been placed in possession of 
 the promised land only to be deprived of it 
 again ; and there was certainly no visible 
 means of their restoration. 
 
 Yet the old hope was still kept alive and 
 raised to even greater heights. The prophet 
 Micah describes in one passage the circum- 
 stances of desolation which were imminent. 
 " Therefore," he says, '' for the iniquity of the 
 people shall Zion ... be plowed as a field, 
 and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the 
 mountain of the house as the high places 
 of the forest." But having thus seen in 
 prophetic vision, so soon to be realised, the 
 
 G 
 
98 FAITH IN THE PROMISE 
 
 royal city of David with its palaces levelled 
 to the ground and ploughed as a field, 
 Jerusalem in ruins, and the sacred mountain 
 of the temple of Jehovah no longer 
 thronged by worshippers coming up from 
 every part of the land, but lonely and 
 deserted as the peaks of Hermon, the 
 prophet immediately turns to another and 
 more distant scene, to which he looks 
 forward with a confidence undiminished by 
 the bitter experiences of the present. *' In 
 the last days it shall come to pass, that the 
 mountain of the house of the Lord shall be 
 established in the top of the mountains, and 
 it shall be exalted above the hills ; and 
 people shall flow unto it. And many 
 nations shall come, and say. Come, and let us 
 go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to 
 the house of the God of Jacob ; and he will 
 teach us of his ways, and we will walk in 
 his paths : for the law shall go forth of Zion, 
 and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. 
 And he shall judge among many people, and 
 rebuke strong nations afar off . . . for the 
 mouth of the Lord of Hosts hath spoken 
 it." It was in those dark and desperate 
 moments of the Jewish state that these 
 briljiant promises were proclaimed. They 
 
FAITH OF THE CHURCH 99 
 
 are reiterated word for word by Isaiah, and 
 through the five centuries which followed 
 they were the beacon of the nation's hopes. 
 Nothing sufficed to destroy their force and 
 their encouragement, and we know, as a 
 matter of fact, that at the time when our 
 Lord appeared there were many devout 
 souls waiting for the consolation of Israel, 
 living on the inheritance of these promises. 
 
 But another still more bitter experience 
 was to come. When the seed came to 
 whom the promise was made, when the king 
 of Israel, in whose person all these assur- 
 ances were to be fulfilled, came to his temple, 
 when the lav/ began to go forth of Zion, and 
 the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, in 
 that sense which has since been fulfilled so 
 wonderfully in the Christian dispensation — 
 the first experience was again one of bitter 
 disappointment. *' We trusted," said the 
 desponding disciples after the Crucifixion, 
 "that it had been he which should have re- 
 deemed Israel " ; and even those who 
 believed in His Resurrection had still to 
 endure the intense trial of seeing their 
 Lord's hand withheld and His arm appar- 
 ently shortened, and of being called upon to 
 submit in their own persons to sufferings 
 
100 THINGS NOT SEEN 
 
 and contempt like His own. It was in 
 weakness and in suffering that for several 
 generations the saints of the Christian 
 Church carried on the tradition of the 
 Jewish Church, finding no recognition in 
 this world of their hopes, and seeking for 
 another country. 
 
 It is essential, if we would appreciate 
 the function of prophecy, that we should 
 bear in mind the evidence thus afforded 
 that the principle, by which the truth and 
 trust of which we are the inheritors has been 
 maintained in the world, has never been one 
 of demonstration, but that of hope and faith, 
 resting on promises believed to be divine. 
 Even since the time when Christianity 
 became predominant in a portion of the 
 world, the condition of things around it and 
 within it has been in a large degree too 
 similar to that by which the Jewish Church 
 was surrounded. The great promises of the 
 New Testament have seemed but partially 
 fulfilled. Wickedness has abounded, and 
 the love of many has waxed cold ; and it is 
 even now a reproach against the Gospel that 
 it spreads so slowly, and that its influence is 
 so inadequate to its claims. Take external 
 circumstances alone, and there have been 
 
THE SOURCE OF FAITH 101 
 
 comparatively few periods of time, or regions 
 of the world, in which those circumstances 
 have been sufficient to lend substance to 
 Jewish or to Christian hopes. Sometimes 
 the apparent defeat of those hopes has 
 been overwhelming ; and there are not 
 obscure intimations in the New Testament 
 that a time is in store for the Christian 
 Church when it may encounter external 
 defeat and oppression, not dissimilar to that 
 which the Jews underwent at the darker 
 periods of their history. 
 
 What was it then that sustained the people 
 of God through all the trials we have been 
 reviewing.'^ The very facts we have been 
 considering remind us that it was not by 
 the continuous manifestation of supernatural 
 powers, or by frequent supernatural signs, 
 that the faith of the ancient fathers was thus 
 sustained. For long centuries, natural forces 
 were left undisturbed and uninterfered with, 
 to oppress and crush them. Circumstances, 
 mere facts, were as adverse to their expecta- 
 tions as the ambassador of the King of 
 Assyria once urged that they were. The 
 text states what was the real source of their 
 spiritual life. They lived upon promises. 
 Prophets like Micah and Isaiah came to 
 
 2 G 
 
102 LIVING ON PROMISES 
 
 them from time to time, with the declaration 
 that the mouth of the Lord of Hosts had 
 uttered such and such assurances, that He 
 had renewed the promises of a thousand 
 generations ; and these promises became 
 more and definite, as time drew on, until (as 
 explained in the last lecture) a distinct 
 expectation of a Messiah, to arise from the 
 house of David and to be born at Bethlehem, 
 and to be the deliverer of His people from 
 all their evils, became the positive assurance 
 on which they relied. But it was always a 
 promise, no more, although authenticated in 
 an increasing degree by the measure of 
 fulfilment which had been realised in the case 
 of the older prophecies. It was a promise 
 uttered by the mouth of prophets who were 
 often, like Micah and Jeremiah, in the most 
 humble and humiliating circumstances, and 
 in whose favour and attestation the Divine 
 hand was but partially and occasionally 
 exerted. But these prophets came to the 
 people from time to time with the unqualified 
 and unhesitating assurance that they 
 brought a message from the Most High. 
 '' Hear, O heavens," says Micah's co- 
 temporary, "and give ear, O earth: for the 
 Lord hath spoken. . . . The ox knoweth 
 
GROUNDS OF BELIEF 103 
 
 his owner, and the ass his master's crib : " 
 and it was Israel's part, likewise, to know 
 their Creator, and to recognise their Master's 
 voice. These were the promises which the 
 true-hearted people of Israel gradually 
 embraced, greeting them (as the text has 
 been translated) from afar, and in which they 
 found sufficient support through all their 
 desperate trials. Through such a long 
 period of distress, for instance, as the 
 Captivity, there was nothing but these 
 promises, handed down from generation to 
 generation, to sustain the faith of the people. 
 But they were sufficient. The people were 
 convinced that they had the promise and 
 assurance of the Lord God of their fathers, 
 and they believed it and acted on it through 
 any apparent discomfiture. 
 
 It is instructive to inquire, why did they 
 believe it ? There must have been some- 
 thing inherently convincing in the prophecy, 
 or the mode of its deliverance, to produce so 
 profound and enduring an effect. They 
 believed it because it commended itself to 
 them as the voice of God. The true hearts 
 among them recognised, by that instinct 
 which the prophet Isaiah compares to the 
 instinct of animals towards their master, 
 
104 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 man, that the prophet spoke the truth when 
 he said that he brought a message from 
 God, and that the promise they heard was a 
 divine promise. As has been said, it was by- 
 no means ahvays attested by miraculous 
 signs. Such attestation was from time to 
 time afforded as need might require. But 
 for the most part, the prophet's witness 
 stood, so to say, on its own merits ; and just 
 as we know the voice of our fellows when 
 they address us, so those to whom the 
 prophetic message came were able, in propor- 
 tion to the soundness and purity of their 
 moral and mental instincts, to recognise the 
 voice which spoke by the prophets as that 
 of God. 
 
 One characteristic of it we may at once 
 perceive. It was invariably associated with 
 the voice of their conscience. It was con- 
 tinually reasserting truths which they had 
 been neglecting, and duties which they had 
 been violating. It was the echo of that 
 which they knew was the Divine voice 
 within their own souls, and thus carried its 
 authentication in their own hearts. Add to 
 this that its threats and promises were, from 
 time to time, sufficiently verified in 
 experience to convince them that it pro- 
 
A DIVINE VOICE 105 
 
 ceeded from the ruler of heaven and earth, 
 and these influences alone might have 
 sufficed to induce them to submit themselves 
 to it, in proportion to the truth and simplicity 
 of their hearts. The voice itself was and is, 
 in the first instance, its own witness. There 
 is something in the voice of God which to an 
 uncorrupt mind, in proportion as it is 
 uncorrupt, is unmistakable. The words of 
 Amos vividly express the main reason why the 
 voice of God commands this belief and sub- 
 mission. *' The lion hath roared, who will 
 not fear ? the Lord God hath spoken, who can 
 but prophesy? " The psalm quoted by the 
 author of this Epistle warns men against 
 hardening their hearts, and that dreadful 
 possibility is in every man's power. But if 
 a man's heart be not hardened, the word of 
 God, the voice of God, will bespeak the 
 awful being from whom it proceeds, as our 
 voices betray our characters, or as the lion's 
 roar bespeaks a mightier force than that of 
 ordinary nature. Dryden has to some extent 
 expressed this truth in his famous lines : — 
 
 " Then for the style, majestic and divine, 
 It speaks no less than God in every line : 
 Commanding words, whose force is still the same 
 As the first fiat that produced our frame." 
 
106 A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 The Bible and the prophets are thus their 
 own best witness ; there is a voice there 
 which asserts itself above all the noise of 
 doubt and controversy, and above all the 
 contradictions of human arguments, and 
 which compels men to recognise that they 
 are in the presence of the living God. Then, 
 as they listen, this voice reveals them more 
 and more to themselves, penetrating their 
 consciences, convincing them of sin, of 
 righteousness and of judgment, and they 
 tremble, and listen still further. This indeed 
 is the characteristic which is always pre- 
 dominant in it. But it was these voices — 
 often, as is vividly described in the case of 
 John the Baptist, like the mere voice of one 
 crying in the wilderness — by which the 
 trust of the faithful was sustained through 
 centuries of bitter disappointment ; and it 
 was the force of promises which enabled them 
 to live a life of trust in the Unseen. 
 
 Moreover, as has been forcibly shown by 
 one of the most eminent of recent writers 
 on Old Testament prophecy in Germany, 
 Dr Riehm, in his work on Messianic 
 Prophecy, the assurances of the prophets 
 were rooted in the fundamental conceptions 
 and truths of Jewish revelation. The 
 
THE DIVINE COVENANT 10^7 
 
 primary truth, which was at the base of 
 the life of the whole nation, and still more 
 of every thoughtful Jew, was that God had 
 entered into a covenant between the nation 
 and Himself. To the nation that covenant 
 had been sealed by the grand act of redemp- 
 tion from Egypt, which was to the Jew that 
 which the redemption wrought by our Lord's 
 Death and Resurrection is to ourselves ; and 
 God's relation to each Jew was stamped upon 
 his very flesh by the sign of circumcision. 
 The deep conviction created by that 
 deliverance, and by this personal sacra- 
 mental sign, dominated his whole existence ; 
 and, in proportion to his lofty and awful 
 conception of the nature of God, he was 
 assured that God must make that covenant, 
 in an ever-increasing degree, a living reality. 
 He might fail, but God would not ; God 
 had pledged His own honour and power 
 to the fulfilment of all which that covenant 
 implied ; and consequently, when prophet 
 after prophet renewed the assurance that 
 God would fulfil it, the heart of the Jew 
 responded with a deep Amen of belief 
 and hope. 
 
 It was the same with the truth of the 
 divine kingship over Israel. The con- 
 
108 THE DIVINP: IDEALS 
 
 viction that the Lord their God was 
 their king, if for a moment clouded when 
 they sought for an earthly king, was 
 never lost ; and if God was their king, it 
 was inconceivable that He should not in 
 some way, and at some time, assert His 
 kingship, manifest His power within Israel 
 itself and to the world, enforce His laws, 
 execute judgment and justice, and fulfil the 
 ideal which the Psalms depict of the perfect 
 king. Finally, the Jewish institutions, the 
 institutions of the priesthood and of sacrifices, 
 bear vivid witness to ideals, without the 
 realisation of which they would have been 
 almost mockeries. For this reason, as 
 Riehm observes, the very disappointments 
 on which I have dwelt became themselves 
 roots of the faith of the people, and induced 
 them to lend a ready ear to the assurances 
 of the prophets. Such truths, such hopes, 
 such ideals, as they had been granted could 
 not be permanently disappointed ; and con- 
 sequently they clung with ever - increasing 
 tenacity to assurances, marked by those 
 divine stamps of which I have spoken, that 
 they would hereafter be realised. Without 
 such prophetic voices indeed the disappoint- 
 ment would have been too great ; but when 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 109 
 
 they were met in their falls, their defeats, 
 their despondencies, by gracious voices, 
 which promised them deliverance and the 
 fulfilment of their ideals, and when those 
 voices had that divine tone in them which 
 we have been considering, they could not 
 but spring up at their encouragement and 
 follow them. Thus it was, let me repeat, 
 in all these ways, that these voices — some- 
 times, as has been said, like the mere 
 voice of one crying in the wilderness — 
 sustained the life of the faithful through 
 those long centuries of doubt ; and it was 
 by the force of prophecies that they were 
 enabled to endure, as seeing that which 
 was invisible. 
 
 We are reminded, moreover, in to-day's 
 Epistle that this characteristic of the life of 
 God's ancient people is also the chief stay 
 and comfort of the Christian life. ''What- 
 soever things," says St Paul, " were written 
 aforetime were written for our learning, 
 that we, through patience and comfort of 
 the Scriptures, might have hope ; " and so we 
 pray in the Collect that "by patience, and 
 comfort of God's holy word, v/e may embrace 
 and ever hold fast the blessed hope of 
 everlasting life which he has given us 
 
110 THE DIFFICULTIES OF FAITH 
 
 through Jesus Christ our Lord." It may 
 perhaps be questioned whether the difficuhies 
 of faith are not comparatively as great at 
 the present time, in some respects, as in the 
 days of the prophets. There is a greater 
 revelation of the extent, the intensity, and the 
 persistency of evil than was, perhaps, open 
 to the eyes of any one at that time. On 
 the other hand, the promises, on which 
 the patriarchs of old relied, have received, in 
 many respects, a fulfilment which affords us 
 a stronger guarantee of their divine reality 
 than any evidence they could then appeal 
 to. It is probable that the call made upon 
 faith has been much the same in every 
 generation ; the claims and evidences of 
 faith, on the one hand, and its opposing 
 difficulties, on the other, being adjusted to 
 our capacities by God's merciful hand. But 
 in the main, when confounded by the 
 problems presented by the evils of the 
 world or our own troubles, it is upon the 
 promises of the Saviour and of his Apostles 
 that we must rely ; it is on them that we must 
 ever fall back. The question of faith, both 
 with respect to the general evidences of the 
 gospel and with respect to our private trials, 
 is ultimately this : Can we trust the Saviour's 
 
THE ASSURANCES OF LENT 111 
 
 promises in His word ? Arguments on 
 Christian evidences may be of value for 
 the removal of preliminary difficulties, but 
 they can never do more than bring us face 
 to face with the Saviour Himself and His 
 Apostles, and enable us to face the simple 
 question whether we will trust Him ; and 
 then, to the Christian heart, the answer is 
 always the same : ** Lord to whom shall we 
 go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life." 
 
 Let me add, as this is the first 
 Sunday in Lent, that it is our privilege 
 in our private lives to use these voices for 
 our elevation and encouragement, when, 
 in the contemplation of the sins of which 
 this season reminds us, we too feel our 
 defeats and our failures, and our lament- 
 able falling short of our ideals. We too are 
 in covenant with God ; we too have a Divine 
 Lord and King who desires to bring us 
 into harmony with His perfect rule ; and for 
 His own sake He will fulfil the promises 
 and hopes He has held out to us, if we, in 
 reliance on those promises, will but return to 
 Him continually with a true heart, in full 
 assurance of faith. Let us not be dis- 
 couraged in our falls and failures ; but, 
 though our full deliverance from evil can 
 
112 RENEWAL OF LIFE 
 
 only be seen in the distance, let us be 
 persuaded of those promises and embrace 
 them, and in the persuasion of that divine 
 embrace, renew our moral and spiritual 
 life. 
 
VI 
 
 PROPHECY AND THE KINGDOM 
 OF HEAVEN 
 
 " From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, 
 Repent ; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." — Matt. 
 iv. 17. 
 
 In the two preceding lectures, I have 
 endeavoured to illustrate two critical points 
 in the nature and the development of the 
 main features of prophecy ; first, the manner 
 in which the vision of the divine kingdom 
 and the Divine Messiah arose gradually, out 
 of the actual experience of the Jev/ish people, 
 in the various vicissitudes of their history ; 
 secondly, the manner in which the prophetic 
 word interpreted that experience to them, 
 step by step, sustaining their hopes and 
 deepening their faith, amidst the various 
 temptations, falls, and trials which they had 
 to encounter. Under this combined influ- 
 ence of experience and prophecy, experience 
 
 118 II 
 
114 THE DIVINE KINGDOM 
 
 supplying the materials which prophecy 
 interpreted, the constituent elements of the 
 great conception of a perfect divine kingdom, 
 under a Divine Messiah, had combined to 
 create a general expectation, which existed 
 at the time our Lord appeared among the 
 Jews. Step by step, they had learnt the 
 necessity for their welfare, both individually 
 and socially, of laws by which they should 
 be directed and controlled, of a prophet to 
 interpret those laws and bring them home 
 to their conscience, of a king to enforce 
 and uphold them, and to protect them by 
 his power from their enemies, and of a 
 priest to mediate between them and the law- 
 giver whom they have offended, and to make 
 atonement by sacrifices for their trespasses 
 and sins. All these offices, moreover, as 
 was more and more clearly illustrated by 
 the prophets, came to be recognised as 
 essentially divine. God alone could be the 
 true lawgiver of the people ; God alone 
 could adequately interpret His own laws ; 
 a Divine Saviour alone could adequately 
 make atonement for their sins ; and a Divine 
 King alone could effectually, and with perfect 
 justice, enforce His laws, and protect His 
 people from the enemies and evils by which 
 
THE KINGDOM AT HAND 115 
 
 they were surrounded. When, then, our 
 Lord and his forerunner came forward to 
 utter the final prophecy of the Jewish dis- 
 pensation, and to announce that the king- 
 dom of heaven was at hand, what they 
 proclaimed was that these great offices 
 were about to be fulfilled. The Divine King 
 who, in the image of the parable, had, as 
 it were, retired into a far country, was about 
 to return. His laws were about to be 
 enforced ; they were to be explained and 
 urged home on the conscience by a Divine 
 voice ; and the Divine priest would make an 
 atonement for his people. The announcement 
 of the approach of the kingdom of heaven 
 implied that it was at hand in its reality 
 and efficacy. Its laws would take effect, 
 its judgments would be executed, and its 
 mercies would at the same time be revealed. 
 
 Such was the prophecy ; let us proceed 
 to compare it with its fulfilment, and then 
 consider some of the lessons the comparison 
 affords as to the function and practical 
 character of prophecy. As a matter of fact, 
 what was it that ensued upon this announce- 
 ment of our Lord ? He at once proceeded 
 by direct discourse, such as that in the 
 Sermon on the Mount, by indirect instruction 
 
116 ITS PROCLAMATION 
 
 such as that of His parables, to declare 
 anew, and with more explicitness, the laws 
 of the Divine Kingdom ; to illustrate with a 
 prophetic force, never before or afterwards 
 exhibited, their profound spiritual meaning, 
 and to warn His hearers that their enforce- 
 ment by Divine judgments was inevitable. 
 He took up the old laws, the old Scriptures, 
 treating them as the eternal expressions 
 of the Divine will, and expounded them in all 
 their spiritual breadth and penetration ; and 
 He declared that the day was coming when 
 He would enforce them, in this deep spiritual 
 sense, against all who had not obeyed them 
 in actual practice. "Not everyone" He 
 declared, " that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, 
 shall enter into the kingdom of heaven ; but 
 he that doeth the will of My Father that is in 
 heaven." By such declarations and appeals 
 as these. He brought home to the consciences 
 of all classes the meaning and the severity 
 of the Divine laws which they outwardly 
 acknowledged. Some rebelled against such 
 teaching, and some repented at it. The 
 Scribes and Pharisees rejected the counsel 
 of God against themselves, while many 
 of the publicans and the sinners accepted 
 it. But it was felt that the voice of God 
 
REJECTION OF THE KING 117 
 
 was among them, wielding the two-edged 
 sword of His word, piercing to the dividing 
 asunder of the very soul and spirit, and dis- 
 cerning the thoughts and intents of the 
 heart. Here was the Divine Prophet mani- 
 festly standing before them, bringing home 
 God's words and God's laws to their souls — 
 a new power, in short, was among them, the 
 great Prophet of the Kingdom of Heaven 
 was at hand. 
 
 The manner, moreover, in which He was 
 received, and its consequences, led to the 
 manifestation of another grand element in the 
 constitution of the Divine Kingdom. The 
 people, as a whole, with their leaders, rejected 
 Him, and thus committed the greatest sin 
 which history records, a sin in which the evil 
 of the human heart manifested itself in its 
 worst and most fearful form. The Divine 
 Prophet of all truth and justice had appealed 
 to their hearts, and they had rebelled against 
 Him. He had appealed in the most various 
 tones, in language of persuasion, of expostu- 
 lation, of indignation, of tenderness as well 
 as of anger. Every word that He spoke 
 breathed truth and light and love, but 
 because this truth, light, and love rebuked 
 the darkness and hatred of their own hearts, 
 
 2 H 
 
118 OUR LORD'S SELF-SACRIFICE 
 
 they hated Him, and determined to drive it 
 from them and to crush It. They took 
 counsel to put Him to death. He was their 
 King and their God, and it was in His 
 power, instead of being crushed by them, to 
 crush them. It was only to be expected, it 
 would have been In accordance with all 
 principles of justice, that they should be 
 at once overwhelmed by his righteous judg- 
 ments, and punished with everlasting de- 
 struction. When men reject truth and light 
 itself as incarnate in our Lord, they oppose 
 themselves to the eternal truth and will of 
 God, and nothing remains in the ordinary 
 course of nature, but that they should suffer 
 the inevitable penalty. But, at this stage, 
 our Lord, instead of defending and asserting 
 Himself by power, chose, by an act of infinite 
 condescension, to suffer His enemies to inflict 
 their hatred and violence upon Him. 
 Instead of putting them to death. He 
 submitted to be put to death by them, and 
 thus He himself suffered the penalty which 
 their evil necessarily involved. 
 
 When truth and light and love are in 
 deadly conflict with falsehood, darkness, and 
 hatred, some terrible convulsion must ensue, 
 some victim must be sacrificed. This was 
 
THE SHEDDING OF BLOOD 119 
 
 what the greatest of the ancient prophets 
 depicted so clearly in his description of the 
 servant of God who was despised and rejected 
 of men, who was wounded for our transgres- 
 sions and bruised for our iniquities, who 
 poured out his soul unto death, and bare 
 the sin of many, and made intercession for the 
 transgressors. All the power of God was and 
 is on the side of right and truth, but before 
 asserting it by force our Saviour resolved 
 to let the awful effect of sin and falsehood 
 be directed against Himself, and thus to 
 afford in His own person the awful example 
 which justice required of the natural conse- 
 quences of sin. He thus became at once 
 the Victim and the Priest of a supreme and 
 divine sacrifice for evil. Sin requires and 
 extorts its sacrifices day by day, and some 
 supreme sacrifice was needed for the sin of 
 the whole world, exhibited, as that sin was 
 in its highest form, in the rejection of our 
 Lord by His own people. The incessant 
 bloodshed, day by day and year by year, of 
 the ancient Jewish ritual, was, after all, but 
 too true an illustration, as we have lament- 
 able reason to know, of that perpetual shed- 
 ding of human blood, by which, under the 
 present constitution of things, the progress 
 
120 THE PROPHET AND THE PRIEST 
 
 of the world is maintained ; and it was at 
 the same time, the most impressive of all 
 prophecies, in pointing forward to the 
 shedding of that sacred blood, respecting 
 which the Apostolic writer exclaims : "How 
 much more shall the blood of Christ, who, 
 through the eternal spirit, offered Himself 
 without spot to God, purge your conscience 
 from dead works to serve the living God ? " 
 This element, therefore, of the kingdom of 
 heaven was also at hand, and was realised. 
 After the prophet came the priest ; after the 
 Sermon on the Mount, by a natural develop- 
 ment, by the simple action and reaction of 
 human sin and divine graciousness, came 
 the sacrifice of Calvary ; and thus, less than 
 three years after our Lord's announcement 
 that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, 
 these momentous elements of the divine 
 constitution of things were fully manifested. 
 Henceforth the Divine Prophet, through His 
 recorded words and by means of His spirit, 
 has been ever exerting His penetrating and 
 purifying influence upon our hearts, and the 
 Divine Priest has made the one sufficient 
 oblation and satisfaction for the sins oi^ the 
 whole world. 
 
 There remains the third function, that of 
 
THE KINGDOM MANIFESTED 121 
 
 the king. This office, moreover, our Lord 
 conspicuously exerted during His Hfe on 
 earth. By His miracles. He manifested 
 His possession of complete command over 
 all the forces of nature. Even the winds 
 and the waves, the constitution of the human 
 frame, the spiritual and the natural world, 
 obeyed Him, and He showed that He could 
 command all the elements at His will. He 
 established, moreover, a Society of which 
 He was and is the Lord, and of which 
 His will is the sole rule. After His death 
 He rose again, declaring that all power was 
 given unto Him in heaven and in earth ; 
 and His possession of the same power, 
 after His ascension to heaven, was mani- 
 fested by the performance in His name, by 
 His Apostles, of precisely the same works 
 of healing and of judgment as those which 
 He Himself executed when He was upon 
 earth. As a matter of fact, since that 
 time, in His own words, the kingdom of 
 God is preached and every man presseth 
 into it. As a matter of fact, there has 
 existed since that time a Society in which 
 Christ is the recognised ruler, in which 
 His will is acknowledged to be the supreme 
 law, in which He is recognised as at once 
 
122 THE CHURCH 
 
 the supreme Priest and the supreme Sacrifice, 
 the mediator between man and God, and 
 the propitiation for our sins — a Society which 
 is united by His ordinances and inspired 
 by His spirit, and which confidently looks 
 forward to the future assertion of His final 
 authority by a last judgment. It existed 
 thenceforth as the greatest visible reality 
 by which the world since our Lord's day 
 is distinguished from the world before it. 
 Though more or less disorganised by the 
 sins of its subjects, and imperfectly realised, 
 it is still a real Kingdom, owning the rule of 
 one King, and looking to him for all the 
 functions necessary for the welfare of the 
 kingdom as a whole and its individuals in 
 particular. 
 
 This was the sequel, and the immediate 
 consequence, of our Lord's life on earth. 
 It was this which followed in a few short 
 years upon His proclamation and upon 
 that of His forerunner. There is no 
 clearer and more momentous example of 
 the fulfilment of prophecy. A voice was 
 heard in the deserts of Judsea proclaiming 
 that the kingdom of heaven was at hand ; 
 the prophet by whom it was uttered was 
 soon thrown into prison and silenced ; but 
 
THE PROPHECY FULFILLED 123 
 
 the message was reiterated by one whom 
 he had announced as about immediately to 
 follow him ; it was repeated by that greater 
 voice throughout the land of Israel, and in 
 two or three years it was fulfilled to the 
 letter ; the long and eager expectations 
 entertained by the Jewish people of the 
 advent of their Prophet, Priest, and King 
 were realised, and His kingdom was actually 
 established in the hearts of men, and realised 
 in a visible society. 
 
 Nothing can assist us so much to appreci- 
 ate at once the reality and the spiritual 
 character of prophecy, as to realise the 
 relation between this culminating prophecy 
 of the kingdom of God and its immediate 
 fulfilment. We have only to recall the 
 circumstances of the times in order to 
 appreciate the supreme prescience which 
 the prophecy reveals. Observe the strong 
 contrast between the external appearance 
 of things as they presented themselves to 
 human eyes and the reality as proclaimed 
 by our Lord. An uninspired observer of 
 the world, at that time, would have had 
 his attention chiefly engrossed by the vast 
 historic drama which was being enacted — 
 the complete establishment and extension 
 
124 THE VISIBLE REALITIES 
 
 over the world of the Roman Empire ; in 
 Judaea itself the confused political struggles 
 between Herod and the Priesthood and the 
 Roman Authorities ; and his attention would 
 soon have been engaged by the external 
 aspects of the terrible tragedy which followed, 
 in the overthrow of the Jewish polity and 
 the destruction of Jerusalem. The minds 
 of men were, for the most part, engrossed 
 in these external and temporal affairs. But 
 what was really happening was that the 
 Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. The 
 Divine Lord, the King, the Prophet, and 
 Priest of men, was displaying His authority, 
 and exercising a ministry, which was to be 
 the turning-point of hum.an history ; and 
 the fate of the Jews themselves depended 
 upon the manner in which they received 
 Him. Their rejection of Him was the 
 consequence and the manifestation of that 
 utter corruption of heart and mind, v/hich 
 produced those intestine dissensions which 
 rendered them the inevitable prey of the 
 Roman power ; and their sins thus drew 
 upon them, in another generation, their 
 natural punishment, in the most fearful 
 sufferings. But little as it was recognised 
 by the natural eye, whether of statesmen 
 
THE INVISIBLE REALITIES 125 
 
 or historians, the real key to the public 
 and external history of the world lay in 
 the manifestation and operation of that 
 Kingdom of God, which attracted so little 
 attention in the world around. The one 
 message which required attention, and which 
 would have saved the Jews, even at that 
 moment, was the message of repentance, 
 in view of the appearing of that kingdom. 
 Could they have bowed their hearts before 
 their Lord as their prophet and their priest, 
 even at that moment — even at that last 
 hour if the hearts of the disobedient had 
 turned to the wisdom of the just, their 
 sins might have been checked before they 
 had reached so fearful a development. But 
 because they neglected this deep spiritual 
 message, they were necessarily given over 
 to increasing corruption, until their doom 
 fell upon them. 
 
 So had it been throughout the long years 
 of their history as the people of God. To 
 an external observer in the days of the 
 prophets, the great monarchies with which 
 they were surrounded, the mighty powers 
 of Egypt, or of Babylonia, or Assyria, were 
 the main factors in the history of the time. 
 But voices like those of John the Baptist 
 
126 THE FINAL REALITY 
 
 were heard, sometimes in the deserts, some- 
 times in the streets of Jerusalem or Samaria, 
 warning them that the one great reality 
 with which they were concerned, and on 
 which their whole destiny depended, was 
 the will of God, their King and Lord : 
 that, if they would return to Him in re- 
 pentance and obedience, they might be saved ; 
 but that, if not, their sins and corruptions 
 would be left to work out' their natural 
 consequences, and that they would fall under 
 the sword and the tyranny of their oppressors. 
 The kingdom of God, the rule of God, was 
 the great reality behind all this visible scene, 
 controlling and determining its results. Its 
 influence was manifested from time to time 
 in some great judgment, and it came nearer 
 and nearer. At length in the time of our 
 Lord its final approach was proclaimed ; 
 it entered into the world in its complete 
 reality, and its judgments were enforced 
 upon God's own people. 
 
 Moreover, we are called upon to recognise 
 that the essential position in which we stand 
 at this day is the same, and to repent, in the 
 sense of turning our minds, hearts, and souls 
 to these eternal realities. So far as the 
 course of the world itself is concerned, we 
 
PRESENT REALITIES 127 
 
 are warned by prophets and Apostles that, 
 through all the apparent external vicissitudes 
 of men and of affairs, God is steadily- 
 advancing the great purposes of His king- 
 dom, and guiding everything to that grand 
 consummation, when all the kingdoms of 
 this world shall become the kingdoms of our 
 Lord and of His Christ. The convulsions 
 of nations, the progress of discovery, the 
 influences of literature — all are tending to 
 the same great result, to make the person, 
 the character, and the will of Christ more 
 widely known, and to lead to the general 
 establishment of His authority. The King- 
 dom of Heaven stands behind this visible 
 scene at the present day, as it did in the time 
 of the Jews ; and it will some day stand 
 revealed, as it did after their time, as the one 
 great force of history. 
 
 For each of us individually, the call to 
 repentance involves a call to recognise our 
 relation to this Divine King, this Divine 
 Prophet and Priest, as the one eternal reality 
 of our lives. We play our parts here, from 
 year to year, in the various occupations which 
 He has given us, serving Him in the develop- 
 ment of one part or another of His purposes. 
 But these are only the particular behests in 
 
128 PERSONAL REALITIES 
 
 which our faithfulness, our love, and our trust 
 towards Him are being tried and developed. 
 They will pass, with those bodies which are 
 our instruments in discharging them. The 
 question then will be how far we have done 
 His will, and have lived in His true faith 
 and fear. Let us, while striving to do our 
 duty in them all, as His servants, yet have 
 our eyes ever fixed upon Him, as the eyes of 
 servants upon the hand of a master, turning 
 inwardly from this external world, and living, 
 in the abiding realisation of His presence, 
 for Him alone. Then may we look forward, 
 with hope and confidence and joy, to the 
 final realisation of His kingdom, in that last 
 day of the Lord, when His judgments and 
 His mercies shall alike be finally revealed. 
 
 Such is the aspect of prophecy considered 
 as a whole and in its main current and pur- 
 pose. Its application in detail, especially by 
 the writers of the New Testament, forms 
 a separate subject of great importance, 
 which I hope to consider in subsequent 
 lectures. But as we view it in reference 
 to its goal, from the beginning to the end, 
 prophecy presents itself clearly as the one 
 clue to the labyrinth of history. Beginning 
 with but slight threads in early patriarchal 
 
THE CLUE TO HISTORY 129 
 
 times, it has sufficed to lead those who traced 
 it, through the long and mysterious windings 
 of Divine providence, to the open space of 
 Christian light, and Christian life, in which 
 we stand at the present day. While men 
 were working at a thousand objects of their 
 own, founding empires, developing commerce, 
 elaborating philosophies, with their eyes 
 closed to all but the immediate material and 
 intellectual and temporal interests in which 
 their energies were absorbed, the Divine 
 purpose, which had been indicated from the 
 first in the family of Abraham, was working 
 silently towards its own ends, and gradually 
 using for its purposes all the other elements 
 and creations of human energy and thought. 
 It was concerned mainly with that moral and 
 religious principle, on the vitality of which 
 ultimately depends the whole fabric of human 
 society. That moral and religious principle 
 is the seed of which our Lord spoke, which 
 at first is the least of all seeds, but when it 
 is grown it becomes a great tree and the 
 fowls of the air lodge in the branches thereof. 
 As prophecy appeals to this principle, so 
 it is only in proportion as men's hearts 
 are alive to it and to its supremacy, that 
 they are prepared to recognise and to follow 
 
 I 
 
130 THE ONE THING NEEDFUL 
 
 the voices of the prophets when addressed to 
 them. It was because most of the Jews of 
 our Lord's day were alive to everything 
 except that moral and religious principle, 
 alive to their own temporal interests, but not 
 to the need of repentance, that they failed to 
 acknowledge the voice of our Lord, and that 
 the Kingdom of God was consequently carried 
 forward to its final establishment, against 
 them, and not by means of them. 
 
VII 
 
 THE USE OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 PROPHECY IN THE NEW TESTA- 
 MENT 
 
 " Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which 
 was spoken of the Lord by the prophet."— Matt. i. 22. 
 
 To Christians, who submit to our Lord's 
 teaching as of supreme authority, and who 
 accept the writings of EvangeHsts and 
 Apostles as inspired, the use of Ancient Pro- 
 phecy in the New Testament must afford 
 decisive guidance ; while, at the same time, 
 the fresh series of prophecies afforded by the 
 New Testament fall, in some respects, better 
 within the range of our observation and 
 judgment than many of those in the Old 
 Testament. In respect both to the use of 
 Ancient Prophecy and to the gift of New 
 Prophecy, the New Testament is perfectly 
 continuous with the Old ; and no interpreta- 
 tion of prophecy can be compatible with the 
 claims of the Christian faith which is not in 
 
132 HIGHEST POINT OF PROPHECY 
 
 harmony with that of our Lord, and of the 
 Evangelists and Apostles. If it should be 
 requisite, as some seem to have thought, to 
 explain away the use of the Old Testament 
 by the Evangelists, or to apologise for it, 
 they may still afford us, of course, invaluable 
 instruction, but their authority as inspired 
 teachers would be gone, and some of the 
 cardinal positions of Christian belief would 
 have to be reconsidered. It is of the highest 
 importance to us, therefore, alike for our own 
 spiritual instruction, and for the defence of 
 our Christian position, to understand their 
 point of view, to be satisfied of its reason- 
 ableness, and of its harmony with the whole 
 analogy of our faith. It must reveal to us, 
 as nothing else can, the real Christian prin- 
 ciples of the interpretation of prophecy. At 
 the same time, in prophecies uttered by our 
 Lord, and by His Apostles, we may expect 
 to see prophecy at its highest point of de- 
 velopment. They themselves tell us that, in 
 their utterances, the last word of prophecy 
 has been spoken, and that we have simply 
 to look for its gradual unfolding and ultimate 
 development. In a word, in the New Tes- 
 tament we have, from the Christian point 
 of view, at once the highest interpretation 
 
ST MATTHEW'S FIRST WORDS 133 
 
 of prophecy, and the highest examples of 
 prophecy. 
 
 In the present lecture it is on the first of 
 these subjects — the Interpretation of pro- 
 phecy In the New Testament — that it is 
 proposed to offer some observations ; and 
 this subject can hardly be examined in a 
 more crucial instance than in the Gospel of 
 St Matthew — in such expressions, for in- 
 stance, as that which is familiar to us at 
 Christmas. '' Now all this was done that it 
 might be fulfilled which was spoken of the 
 Lord by the prophet, saying," etc. St 
 Matthew, it is clear, wrote primarily for his 
 fellow Jews, and his account of the Gospel is 
 specially adapted to meet their position and 
 their beliefs. The opening words of his 
 Gospel, which are too often, perhaps, passed 
 over as a mere summary of a genealogy, are 
 among the most pregnant words in the New 
 Testament, and must have embodied to a 
 Jew the whole of his past history and of his 
 present and future hopes. *' The book of 
 the generation of Jesus Christ, the Son of 
 David, the Son of Abraham." Those words 
 told the Jew, at once, that in Jesus, whose 
 birth and life and death the Evangelist was 
 about to narrate, would be found The 
 
 I 2 
 
134 A GOSPEL TO JEWS 
 
 Christ, the Messiah for whom he and his 
 whole nation had been longing for centuries, 
 the King who had been promised of David's 
 Royal Line, the descendant of the Patriarch 
 in whom it had been promised that all 
 nations of the earth should be blessed. The 
 whole of Jewish history and the profoundest 
 beliefs of the nation are flashed before the 
 mind of a Jew in that brief phrase. It was 
 as much as to say to him : " Listen as I 
 proceed to tell you how the promises made 
 to Abraham, and the oath which was sworn 
 unto David, are at last fulfilled ; how the 
 Divine unction has at last fallen upon the 
 heir of that great line, and how the Prophet, 
 Priest, and King of your nation stands re- 
 vealed." That, we may venture to say, was 
 the only way in which a Gospel to the Jews 
 could begin. To a Gentile it might be 
 enough to tell him of a Divine Saviour in 
 human form. A Gospel for him might 
 commence, like that of St Mark, with the 
 declaration : '' The beginning of the Gospel 
 of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." But to a 
 Jew there could be no revelation which was 
 not in harmony with his old revelations, and 
 which was not a fulfilment of them. If he 
 was to accept a Messiah who was the Son of 
 
THAT IT MIGHT BE FULFILLED 135 
 
 God, that Messiah must be also, as a first 
 condition, the Son of David and the Son of 
 Abraham. Thus, in this short phrase, does 
 the EvangeHst at once sum up the whole of 
 his Gospel, and at the same time indicate to 
 us the prophetic point of view from which he 
 presents it. 
 
 Accordingly he goes on, in passage after 
 passage, to illustrate the manner in which 
 the prophecies of the past, their promises 
 and experiences, had been fulfilled in the 
 person and the work of the Christ whom he 
 proclaimed. At His birth, all that came to 
 pass was done ''that it might be fulfilled 
 which was spoken of the Lord by the pro- 
 phet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with 
 child, and shall bring forth a son, and they 
 shall call his name Emmanuel." He was 
 born at Bethlehem, "for thus it is written 
 by the prophet, And thou, Bethlehem, in the 
 land of Juda, art not the least among the 
 princes of Juda, for out of thee shall come a 
 Governor, that shall rule My people Israel." 
 His parents had to flee into Egypt "that it 
 might be fulfilled which was spoken of the 
 Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt 
 have I called My Son." His escape was the 
 occasion of the slaughter of the children of 
 
136 THAT IT MIGHT BE FULFILLED 
 
 Bethlehem, in which '' was fulfilled that which 
 was spoken by Jeremy the prophet," of 
 Rachel weeping for her children. He came 
 and dwelt in a city called Nazareth, *'that it 
 might be fulfilled which was spoken by the 
 prophets : He shall be called a Nazarene." 
 When the time came for Him to enter on 
 His public ministry, He was preceded by 
 John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness 
 of Judsea, ''and saying, Repent ye, for the 
 kingdom of heaven " — the kingdom to which 
 all the prophets had looked forward — "is at 
 hand. For this is he that was spoken of by 
 the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one 
 crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way 
 of the Lord." He opened His ministry at 
 Capernaum, '* that it might be fulfilled which 
 was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying. 
 The land of Zabulon and the land of Neph- 
 thalim, . . . Galilee of the Gentiles, the 
 people which sat in darkness saw great 
 light." He charged the people, after His 
 deeds of mercy, that they should not make 
 Him known, " that it might be fulfilled which 
 was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying. 
 Behold My servant, whom I have chosen. 
 . . . He shall not strive nor cry ... a 
 bruised reed shall He not break, and smok- 
 
THE EVANGELISTS VIEW 137 
 
 Ing flax shall He not quench." His parables 
 are in harmony with another prophecy of 
 Esaias, which said, '' By hearing ye shall 
 hear, and shall not understand ; and seeing 
 ye shall see, and shall not perceive." When 
 He entered into Jerusalem before His pas- 
 sion, ''all this was done that it might be 
 fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, 
 saying. Tell ye the daughter of Zion, Behold, 
 thy King cometh unto thee, meek and sitting 
 upon an ass." In His betrayal, and the 
 price put upon it, "was fulfilled that which 
 was spoken by Jeremy the prophet." His 
 final words on the cross fulfilled an utterance 
 of the Psalms ; and His last words before 
 He left the earth are a solemn declaration 
 that that kingdom of God, which He had 
 begun by proclaiming, was finally established. 
 '' All power is given unto Me in heaven and 
 in earth." 
 
 These characteristic passages from the 
 Evangelist have been recited in order that 
 we may have before our minds, not merely 
 some particular instances of alleged prophecy 
 and its fulfilment, but the whole spirit and 
 purpose of his message. The impression 
 which they leave is not that the Evangelist 
 is seeking for prophecies to which he can 
 
138 A WORLD OF PROPHECY 
 
 appeal in support of his cause, but that his 
 mind is moving in a world of prophecy which 
 is familiar to those for whom he writes, and 
 that he notices naturally, in passing, one 
 point after another in which the life and the 
 Gospel of Jesus Christ answer to it and fulfil 
 it. He does not stay to prove his instances ; 
 his reference is sometimes vague and general ; 
 it may be enough for him to say, generally, 
 '* that it might be fulfilled which was spoken 
 of the Lord by the prophets," without speci- 
 fying which, or their particular words. It 
 is like the case of a man looking at the 
 picture of some great scene he has witnessed, 
 and saying to his companion: ''There is 
 such a point in the landscape, and there is 
 another " — a hill, or a stream, or a house, or 
 a familiar face — except that here the position 
 is reversed, and the Evangelist is looking at 
 the reality, and recalling points in the pro- 
 phetic picture which he and his readers had 
 long been contemplating. Before them is 
 the picture, at last realised, even to many of 
 its minute details; and the Evangelist lingers, 
 even amidst the absorbing interest of the 
 real life and character he is describing, over 
 those features which help to assure him that 
 he has at length found what he and his 
 
HEREDITARY LIKENESSES 139 
 
 fellows had so long looked for — all the more, 
 perhaps, because in some cases such features 
 are of the nature of those slight touches 
 which cannot be artificial, and which bespeak 
 what is genuine and natural. 
 
 In other words, the conviction in which 
 the Evangelist's mind moves is that the 
 whole history and prophecy of the past, 
 all through those three series of fourteen 
 generations which he enumerates — from 
 Abraham to David, and from David to 
 the carrying away into Babylon, and 
 from the carrying away into Babylon to 
 the Christ — had been one continuous 
 growth, steadily unfolding the germ from 
 which it started ; and that as the traits of 
 the father and of the father's father are to 
 be seen in the son, so the principles and the 
 methods, and even the external character- 
 istics of past Jewish life and thought are 
 reproduced in this final birth of the sacred 
 history. If you would understand and do 
 justice to him, you must not begin by con- 
 centrating your attention on a few secondary 
 particulars, questioning this, that, and the 
 other small details : you must look at his 
 principle and his position as a whole ; and 
 then you may judge whether the details are 
 
140 THE LIKENESS AS A WHOLE 
 
 in harmony with it and are justified by it. 
 Is it not a common matter of experience that 
 a number of details in a story, or inferences 
 in an argument, may seem strained and un- 
 natural if you begin with them, and look at 
 them one by one independently ? But when 
 the story or the argument is viewed as a 
 whole, you see their naturalness ; they fall 
 into their places, and incidental points of 
 verisimilitude which, standing alone, you 
 would have regarded as fanciful and worth 
 very little, become some of the most vivid, 
 life-like, and convincing features of the whole 
 transaction. 
 
 Such is the spirit in which St Matthew 
 writes, and the cardinal principles of Jewish 
 history and prophecy are his vindication. 
 On those principles, the whole of that history 
 had been guided by one Divine will, and 
 moulded by one Divine hand, towards one 
 great goal — the establishment of the kingdom 
 of God among men, under the rule of One 
 who is both God and man. The way had 
 been prepared for it ; the race in and through 
 whom it was to be established had been 
 disciplined and educated. Great spiritual 
 and moral truths had to be planted in their 
 souls, before they could produce represen- 
 
PROLONGED BIRTH OF TIME 141 
 
 tatlves capable of a mission such as was 
 entrusted to Apostles and Evangelists. For 
 that purpose, they not merely had to undergo 
 certain painful experiences — the captivity in 
 Egypt, conflict with bitter enemies, severe 
 temptations and consequent defections, exile 
 and oppression — but they needed to be lifted 
 and sustained from time to time by Divine 
 guidance and comfort ; above all, by glimpses 
 of the goal towards which they were tending, 
 sufficient to assure them that all they were 
 suffering and experiencing was in harmony 
 with their ultimate destiny, and that the 
 Person who would at length be manifested 
 as the Captain of their salvation was one 
 with them in their nature and their struggle, 
 though infinitely superior to them. Such 
 was the combined effect of Jewish history 
 and prophecy, growing as experience grew, 
 and brightening under an ever-increasing 
 illumination. What is recorded for us in 
 the Scriptures of the Old Testament is not 
 a mere natural history, interrupted from time 
 to time by isolated prophetic voices, but one 
 grand birth of time — the prolonged travail 
 pangs of the daughter of Israel giving birth 
 to her Messiah, sustained by continuous 
 Divine assurances of the blessed issue, 
 
142 REHEARSAL AND REALITY 
 
 constantly increasing in clearness and cer- 
 tainty. 
 
 In this long travail, moreover, the essential 
 circumstances remain the same, or similar, 
 from age to age : the comparative insignifi- 
 cance of Israel ; the great military monarchies 
 by which she was surrounded ; the necessity 
 of a flight into Egypt or a sojourn in the 
 wilderness ; the unexpected appearance of 
 some deliverer, born, it might be, in a humble 
 station, but bringing God and God's help 
 once more near to the people in their sin 
 and distress ; or a prophet deserted and 
 betrayed, wounded in the house of his 
 friends, and put to death. As this experience 
 grew and the light of prophecy brightened, 
 the vision and the conviction grew also that 
 all this was but the rehearsal of a great and 
 final reality ; that the divine kingdom, for 
 which all this was a preparation, would at 
 length be established by a Member of the 
 great representative line, who would combine 
 all the experiences through which the nation 
 itself had passed — in an humble and unex- 
 pected birth, in a lowly state, in flight, 
 persecution, temptation, struggle, betrayal, 
 and death, but gaining at length the final 
 victory, for Himself and for the people of 
 
ANALOGIES OF PAST AND PRESENT 143 
 
 God, and establishing for ever a divine 
 kingdom. 
 
 This is the root from which the whole 
 thought of an Evangelist springs who 
 proclaims a gospel for Jews. The Christ's 
 wonderful birth and His Divine nature had 
 been foreshadowed by the mysterious words 
 of the prophet — that a virgin should conceive 
 and bear a Son, and that His name should 
 be called God with tis. Those mysterious 
 words had unquestionably been uttered 
 centuries before ; that marvellous name had 
 been given ; and whatever it may have 
 referred to in the prophet's time, here at 
 least was a reality which answered to it. If 
 He had to flee into Egypt, so had the nation 
 done in its early distress ; if His escape had 
 been accompanied by the slaughter of the 
 Innocents, so had many a Jewish mother in 
 past times bewailed her innocent children, 
 slaughtered, in the course of God's mysterious 
 purposes, by the ruthless Assyrian or Baby- 
 lonian invader ; if He was to live at Nazareth 
 and share the reproach of a despised people, 
 had it not been foreseen that the Servant of 
 God would be a mere branch or shoot, of no 
 form or comeliness, despised and rejected of 
 men, so that the general effect of the 
 
144 THE IJVLNG PARALLEL 
 
 predictions concerning Him was that He 
 should be no better than a Nazarene? In 
 the same way, did not our Lord's whole 
 career — the manner in which He was 
 heralded by a voice in the wilderness, His 
 union of gentleness with power, the mysterious 
 nature of His teaching, and eventually the 
 character of His betrayal and of His suffer- 
 ings — recall the visions of ancient prophets 
 and the experiences of ancient saints ? 
 What they had seen and what they had felt, 
 however dim and mysterious in their case, 
 had been fulfilled in Him ; and so, as the 
 living parallel passes before the Evangelist's 
 eye, and the deep spiritual similitude is fixed 
 on his mind by the Spirit who inspired him, 
 the exclamation rises, as it were involuntarily, 
 to his lips — sometimes in view of a profound, 
 and sometimes of an almost external, resem- 
 blance — "that it might be fulfilled which 
 was spoken of the Lord by the prophet." 
 
 In fact, if we are to appreciate the use of 
 prophecy in the New Testament, the truth 
 appears to be that we must directly reverse 
 the aspect of the matter which is too often 
 pressed upon us from a mere human point of 
 view. We are told that the prophets looked, 
 in th^ first instance, to something in 
 
VISION OF THE FUTURE 145 
 
 immediate relation to the events of their day, 
 and to the circumstances with which they 
 were deaHng, and that the primary meaning 
 of prophecy is to be sought in those contem- 
 porary events, although from them it may, 
 in some instances, be extended — some say 
 by way of type, some by a sort of double 
 sense — to the final Messianic realities. But, 
 in the view of the New Testament writers, 
 that which was primarily vouchsafed to the 
 prophet was a vision, or a glimpse, of the 
 ultimate reality, of the final purposes of God, 
 of His ultimate judgment, of His final salva- 
 tion, of the character of the Person through 
 whom that salvation was to be wrought, of 
 His sufferings, and of the glory which should 
 follow. In proportion as that great 
 Deliverer, that final judgment, and that 
 ultimate salvation, gleamed for a while upon 
 the prophet's eye did their light and their 
 example illuminate the present, and was he 
 enabled to see the purpose and the will of 
 that Saviour and that Judge in respect to 
 the events and the struggles of his own time. 
 To the prophet, in short, it was the great 
 reality of the future which illuminated the 
 present ; it was not merely a few sparks of 
 light from the present which enabled him to 
 
 K 
 
146 IMMANUEL PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 penetrate the dim and distant future. After 
 all, we may well observe this striking and 
 unquestionable fact, that the chief difficulties 
 in connection with a prophecy like that of 
 Immanuel relate to its meaning in the past 
 rather than to its applicability in the present. 
 The birth of Christ and the work of Christ 
 are, beyond question, aptly described by the 
 words which the Evangelist quotes from 
 Isaiah ; but commentators of all schools, 
 conservative or critical, old and new, are in 
 much perplexity and confusion as to the 
 reference which the words may bear to any 
 event in the time of Isaiah himself. What- 
 ever such contemporary reference they may 
 have had, it seems to baffle our present 
 knowledge and resources ; but that the Son 
 of the Blessed Virgin has proved to be God 
 with tcs, this is a matter which all Christian 
 hearts, and some hearts which are not 
 nominally Christian, will thankfully acknow- 
 ledge. In the same way, if we can but lay 
 aside what a great writer on this subject has 
 called " our cold, pedantic way " of measuring 
 the visions and the thoughts of inspired men 
 by our own range of insight and our own 
 apprehensions, we shall recognise it as un- 
 questionable that the realities of the gospel, 
 
THE EVANGELIST JUSTIFIED 147 
 
 the life and the words of our Lord, and the 
 facts of the Christian Church, do, as a 
 matter of fact, answer to the visions and the 
 words of the prophets, although, at this 
 distance of time, it may be impracticable for 
 us to discern, in detail, the circumstances on 
 which they threw a partial light in the days 
 of those who uttered them. 
 
 If, then, prophecy be such a great reality 
 as we have been contemplating ; if, as the 
 Prophets, the Apostles, and the evangelists 
 believed, not a hair fell to the ground 
 throughout the long history of the Jewish 
 nation without the knowledge of its God and 
 Saviour ; if every event, and every inspired 
 utterance, was controlled and directed by 
 that God and Saviour towards the establish- 
 ment of a divine kingdom, under a Divine 
 and human Messiah ; if human nature 
 remained the same throughout, and the 
 divine methods of discipline and guidance 
 were the same also ; if our Lord, as the 
 great Head and Representative of the nation, 
 was to share their experience — or, rather, if 
 they, in their degree, were to share His — 
 then the Evangelist was justified in his 
 quick eye for resemblances between the story 
 of the Messiah and the history of his nation, 
 
148 THAT IT MIGHT BE FULFILLED 
 
 in his deep conviction that all that happened 
 in our Lord's life — not only the great 
 features of His character, but the very 
 circumstances of His career — had been in- 
 timated and foreshadowed in the past, and, 
 in a word, in believing and teaching that 
 '*all this was done that it might be fulfilled 
 which was spoken of the Lord by the 
 prophet." 
 
VIII 
 
 PROPHECY IN OUR LORD'S 
 MINISTRY 
 
 "Behold, I have told you before."— Matt. xxiv. 25. 
 
 In a previous lecture the manner was dis- 
 cussed in which the Evangelists interpreted 
 and applied the prophecies in the Old Testa- 
 ment in relation to our Lord ; and the pur- 
 pose of the present lecture is to consider the 
 prophetic, or rather the predictive, character 
 of our Lord's own teaching. He is the 
 supreme example of the double aspect of the 
 prophet's office, both in interpreting and 
 enforcing divine and eternal truths, and also 
 in predicting the future. In the former 
 of these two prophetic capacities, He illumin- 
 ated, with the divine light, the depths of 
 the ancient law, bringing home to men's 
 consciences, in the Sermon on the Mount, 
 and in parables like that of the Pharisee and 
 the Publican, its profound moral and spiritual 
 penetration, and their miserable failure to 
 
 149 K 2 
 
150 JOHN THE BAPTISTS PREDICTIONS 
 
 fulfil it. But we are concerned here with 
 the other aspect of His prophetic office — 
 that of prediction — and it will be found very 
 impressive to observe how large, and even 
 paramount, a place is held in His teaching 
 and His work by this predictive prophecy. 
 His Advent was heralded by prophecy, and 
 His own first word was a prophecy — viz., 
 that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. 
 The preaching of John the Baptist may, in- 
 deed, be instructively considered from the 
 same point of view. He, too, was pre- 
 eminently a prophet, in the sense of a 
 preacher and interpreter of righteousness; 
 but he was also, in a most conspicuous and 
 striking degree, a prophet, in the sense of 
 foretelling future events of the most momen- 
 tous nature. His declarations respecting our 
 Lord foretold his character. His office, and 
 His death, with inspired prescience; but, 
 apart from this, his mere declaration that the 
 Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, and that, 
 with it, the judgment of the Jewish nation 
 was approaching, is sufficient testimony to 
 his inspired vision. He based the whole of 
 his preaching on that solemn prediction, 
 warning the people that the axe was now 
 laid to the root of the tree, and that One 
 
OUR LORD^S PREDICTIONS 151 
 
 was coming immediately after him, in whose 
 presence he would become insignificant, 
 whose fan was in His hand, and who would 
 thoroughly purge His floor. His preaching 
 was not a merely general warning of the 
 certainty of the just judgment of God upon 
 national and personal sin ; it was a specific 
 prediction that a certain Person was immedi- 
 ately at hand who would Himself enforce 
 those judgments, and who would set up a 
 kingdom which would be that of God Himself 
 — a kingdom, not of earth, but of heaven. 
 There is no clearer or stronger instance 
 of definitely predictive prophecy than the 
 fact that, before our Lord had been so much 
 as heard of, John the Baptist should thus 
 have predicted His immediate coming, and 
 the great spiritual, moral, and national 
 revolution which was to ensue. 
 
 Now, our Lord takes up this prediction of 
 the Baptist and makes it His own. When 
 He had heard that John was cast into prison 
 He departed into Galilee, and **from that 
 time He began to preach, and to say. Repent, 
 for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." His 
 own exhortation to repentance, like that of 
 John, does not rest simply upon general 
 moral, and spiritual considerations, but is 
 
152 PREDICTION OF THE KINGDOM 
 
 founded upon the declaration, the prophetic 
 declaration, that a new kingdom is about to 
 be set up ; and He calls upon men to change 
 their minds in view of that imminent fact. 
 As the subsequent history has shown, that 
 prophecy corresponded to a great and 
 momentous reality. From the time of our 
 Lord's departure from earth, or from within 
 a few days after His Ascension, a new 
 authority has existed in the world, a new 
 personal authority, that, namely, of our 
 Lord Himself, acknowledged as the Son of 
 God, acting by various agencies, in the 
 Church or the Churches which are called 
 by His Name. 
 
 This, it is important to remember, con- 
 stitutes the grand distinction between the 
 state of the world before Christ and the 
 state of the world after Christ — a dis- 
 tinction conspicuous to outward observa- 
 tion as well as to spiritual insight. Since 
 that time there have always been great 
 societies in the world looking up to Jesus 
 Christ, not merely as their Guide, but as 
 their Lord and Master, regarding themselves 
 as bound, in all things, by His authority, as 
 revealing to them the will of God and the 
 laws of heaven ; they have asserted that 
 
THE KING'S AUTHORITY 153 
 
 authority against the authorities of this 
 world, and have made the laws of this 
 world's authorities bend to it ; they speak 
 of Him in their Creed not only as their 
 Master, but as their Lord, and they believe 
 that everything they do, and everything that 
 is done in the world, is subject to His judg- 
 ment, and will ultimately receive His sen- 
 tence. It is, therefore, in a proper sense a 
 kingdom in which men and women recognise 
 that they are subject to Jesus Christ, as to a 
 King whose laws are supreme, in life and in 
 death. According to His own illustration. 
 He has gone into a far country for a while, 
 and men may for a time forget or disregard 
 Him, without being immediately recalled to 
 His allegiance by force ; but He, and He 
 alone, is their eternal King and Lord, and 
 they will some day have to answer to Him. 
 Our Lord, as has been said, claims this 
 office of King, because He is the Son of 
 God, to whom the Father has entrusted all 
 rule and all authority and power ; and, in 
 this respect, He assumes a position which 
 is not so much as claimed by the founder of 
 any other religion. Such, then, in its ele- 
 mentary conception, is the great institution 
 which was about to be set up, and which 
 
154 THE CENTRAL TRUTH 
 
 John the Baptist and our Lord predicted. 
 They announced the coming of a new 
 authority, the advent of a new King, the 
 creation of a new Society, the revelation of 
 a Judge and a judgment not hitherto known, 
 and they called on men to accommodate 
 themselves to this supreme and imminent 
 reality. 
 
 This was the central truth of our Lord's 
 teaching. In this great central prediction 
 everything else was included, and to this, 
 as we shall see, everything returned. But 
 He proceeded to delineate the nature and 
 the general history of this kingdom in a 
 number of parables, which, as uttered before- 
 hand, constitute a most remarkable series 
 of predictions, which have received in history 
 an ever-increasing verification. Take, for 
 example, those which are collected in the 
 thirteenth chapter of St Matthew. It is 
 there described how the chief means for 
 the spread of the kingdom is the Word, 
 which works in men's hearts like a seed, 
 which grows in one soil and not in another, 
 but where it takes good root brings forth 
 abundant fruit. We are told that, ''the 
 kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man 
 which sowed good seed in his field ; but while 
 
PREDICTIVE PARABLES 155 
 
 men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares 
 among the wheat, and went his way. But 
 when the blade was sprung up and brought 
 forth fruit, then appeared the tares also," 
 and the householder gives orders that the 
 wheat and the tares shall grow together 
 until the harvest ; so that the Society, which 
 is to be known as the Kingdom of God, is, 
 until the end of the world, to include bad 
 men as well as good. Again, the kingdom 
 of heaven was to be *' like a grain of mustard- 
 seed . . . which indeed is the least of all 
 seeds, but, when it is grown, it is the greatest 
 among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that 
 the birds of the air come and lodge in the 
 branches thereof" ; that is, its beginning 
 was to be slight, and its growth gradual, 
 but its ultimate extent immense. Again, 
 it was to be like leaven, gradually permeating 
 the whole mass of human life. These and 
 similar similitudes exactly describe what has 
 been the character and the mode of growth 
 of the Church in all ages ; and if we were 
 not so familiar with them, we should be the 
 more impressed with the divine foresight, 
 which, instead of anticipating for the Divine 
 Kingdom either rapid progress or perfect 
 results, predicted its slow growth by the 
 
156 PREDICTIONS OF HIS DEATH 
 
 humblest of means, and the imperfection 
 with which its ideal would be realised, until 
 the day came for its final and complete 
 realisation. The life of that earthly society, 
 which acknowledges Christ as its King, has 
 been, throughout history, exactly what our 
 Lord predicted it would be, and the Church 
 is thus, even in her defects and disappoint- 
 ments, a witness to the truth of her Divine 
 Lord. 
 
 But our Lord's preaching contained other 
 predictions of a still more specific and far- 
 reaching character. In the first place, as is 
 acknowledged even by modern critics who 
 do not fully acknowledge His Divine nature 
 and authority. He clearly predicted to His 
 disciples both His death and His resurrec- 
 tion. These predictions were not, indeed, 
 put prominently forward in His general 
 teaching ; and it obviates many difficulties 
 to bear in mind that they could not have 
 been so put forward without reducing His 
 work among the Jews to an unreality. He 
 came to His own people, making a real 
 appeal to them to receive Him, and He 
 exerted all His power, wisdom, and grace 
 to win their hearts to Himself. It is evident, 
 from His intimations to His disciples, that 
 
EPISTLES AND THE ATONEMENT 157 
 
 He knew it would be all in vain ; but if 
 He had said so to the Jews, to whom 
 He appealed, He would have rendered the 
 appeal unmeaning. In the end, when all 
 hope is gone. He does say as much, even 
 to them ; but not until every motive and every 
 warning is exhausted, and He is obliged to 
 declare, in bitter grief and tears, *' Behold, 
 your house is left unto you desolate." 
 
 This is the explanation of the circumstance 
 which, though often much exaggerated, is 
 to a considerable degree true, that the aton- 
 ing death of our Lord does not receive so 
 much prominence in His teaching as in that 
 of the Apostles. He could not give it that 
 prominence without openly and constantly 
 assuming that the appeals He was making 
 to His people would be in vain, and that 
 they would reject Him and put Him to 
 death. When they had done so, when 
 the dreadful event was accomplished, then 
 it stood out in its awful reality and supreme 
 significance, and the vision of that Blood of 
 Christ, which the Apostles themselves had 
 beheld, occupied the centre point of their 
 view, and was interpreted to them by weighty, 
 though reticent, predictions of their Master. 
 If the prediction of His death had thus to 
 
158 PREDICTIONS OF RESURRECTION 
 
 be guarded, and, so to say, confidential, the 
 case could not but be the same with His 
 predictions of His resurrection. If, indeed, 
 He predicted His death at all, it would seem 
 essential that He should also have predicted 
 His resurrection. That death, without the 
 resurrection, would have been a message of 
 despair, alike in the prospect and in the 
 retrospect, and to both our Lord's saying 
 eminently applies : " Now I have told you 
 before it come to pass, that when it is come 
 to pass ye might believe." The Apostles 
 could not but believe in One who had thus 
 calmly predicted two events so utterly in- 
 credible to them as His murder and His 
 resurrection, and whose predictions, in each 
 case, had been so exactly fulfilled. 
 
 But though there was thus a certain 
 reserve in our Lord's predictions respecting 
 Himself, He expanded more and more clearly, 
 and more and more fully, as His ministry 
 proceeded. His prediction that the kingdom 
 of heaven was at hand, particularly in its 
 relation to the Jews. Gradually, as their 
 resistance to Him deepened. He explained 
 to them more distinctly the meaning of 
 His precursor's declaration that ''Now the 
 axe is laid unto the root of the trees ; there- 
 
FATE OF THE JEWS PREDICTED 159 
 
 fore every tree which bringeth not forth 
 good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the 
 fire." Here, again, it is in His parables that 
 we find some of His most remarkable predic- 
 tions respecting the fate which was in store 
 for the Jews. Such, for instance, is the 
 parable of the householder, who let his vine- 
 yard out to husbandmen, and went into a 
 far country, and sent his servants to receive 
 the fruits of it ; and last of all he sent his 
 son, but '' they said among themselves, This 
 is the heir, come, let us kill him, and let us 
 seize on his inheritance ; and they caught 
 him, and cast him out of the vineyard and 
 slew him. When the Lord, therefore, of the 
 vineyard cometh, what will he do unto those 
 husbandmen? They say unto Him: He 
 will miserably destroy those wicked men ; 
 and He said unto them : . . . Therefore say 
 I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be 
 taken from you, and given to a nation 
 bringing forth the fruits thereof." We are 
 told that when the chief priests and Pharisees 
 had heard these parables, ''they perceived 
 that He spake of them." So, again, in the 
 parable of the king who made a marriage for 
 his son ; but the guests refused to come, and 
 the remnant took his servants and entreated 
 
160 DESTRUCTION OF TEMPLE FORETOLD 
 
 them spitefully and slew them ; but when 
 the king heard thereof he was wroth, and 
 sent forth his armies, and destroyed those 
 murderers, and burned up their city. Even 
 among the parables which, in their more 
 general meaning, are peculiarly preci- 
 ous to Christians, as containing the very 
 essence of the Gospel, such as that of the 
 Prodigal Son, several have a clearly pre- 
 dictive character in reference to the Jews 
 and the Gentiles. Even if our Lord had 
 not uttered more direct predictions respect- 
 ing the fate of the Jews and of Jerusalem, 
 these parables alone would have been a 
 marvellous record of supernatural foresight 
 and prophecy. 
 
 But I need only remind you briefly of the 
 clear and terrible prediction He uttered, to- 
 wards the close of His ministry, respecting 
 the doom which was to fall upon the Temple 
 and the Holy City. His disciples came to 
 Him, we read, to show Him the buildings 
 of the Temple, and Jesus said unto them : 
 "See ye not all these things. Verily, I say 
 unto you there shall not be left here one 
 stone upon another that shall not be 
 thrown down;" and soon afterwards His 
 disciples came to Him privately, saying: 
 
FATE OF JERUSALEM FORESEEN 161 
 
 *' Tell us when shall these things be ? and 
 what shall be the sign of thy coming and 
 of the end of the world ? " In answer to this 
 question, He delivered a prophecy which, 
 although in some respects, to be presently 
 noticed, very mysterious, predicted, in the 
 most unmistakable manner, the fearful scenes 
 of the destruction of Jerusalem which ensued 
 about forty years later. "When ye shall 
 see," He said, "Jerusalem compassed with 
 armies, then know that the desolation thereof 
 is nigh. Then let them which are in Judaea 
 flee to the mountains ; and let them which 
 are in the midst of it depart out ; and let 
 not them that are in the countries enter 
 thereinto. For these be the days of 
 vengeance ... for there shall be great 
 distress in the land, and wrath upon this 
 people, and they shall fall by the edge of 
 the sword, and shall be led away captive into 
 all nations, and Jerusalem shall be trodden 
 down of the Gentiles until the times of 
 the Gentiles be fulfilled." Attempts to 
 post-date either the Gospels, or these por- 
 tions of them, so as to reduce these refer- 
 ences, as a whole, to vaticinations after the 
 event, have failed, and they stand upon the 
 page of Jewish history like the words of 
 
 L 
 
162 DOUBLE PROPHECY 
 
 warning written by the finger of God upon 
 the walls of the palace of the King of 
 Babylon. 
 
 But they were not uttered as mere displays 
 of our Lord's prophetic power, but with a 
 momentous moral and religious purpose. 
 They were intended to direct the thoughts 
 and hopes of His disciples, and of the 
 Church, to the course and the method in 
 which the kingdom of God, which our Lord 
 had from the first announced, would be 
 developed and manifested. It is a character- 
 istic feature in these predictions that they 
 are wrapped up in a prophecy which looks 
 far beyond them, to the final coming of our 
 Lord in His full power and glory. It is this 
 which constitutes that mystery in the dis- 
 course to which I have referred, and which 
 no interpretation has fully succeeded in 
 dissipating. Endeavours have often been 
 made, for instance, to apply the whole 
 discourse to the destruction of Jerusalem, the 
 dispersion of the Jews, and the abolition of 
 the Old Covenant ; but although those events 
 were undoubtedly of far more momentous 
 importance in the divine economy of history 
 than we sometimes realise. It Is quite im- 
 practicable to explain some of the language 
 
IMMEDIATE AND DISTANT 163 
 
 as referring to them only. We cannot 
 possibly, for instance, regard as fulfilled in 
 those events such language as this : ''Im- 
 mediately after the tribulation of those days 
 shall the sun be darkened, and the moon 
 shall not give her light, and the stars shall 
 fall from heaven, and the powers of the 
 heavens shall be shaken : And then shall 
 appear the sign of the Son of Man in 
 heaven ; and then shall all the tribes of the 
 earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of 
 Man coming in the clouds of heaven with 
 power and great glory. And He shall send 
 His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, 
 and they shall gather together His elect from 
 the four winds, from one end of heaven to 
 the other." It is manifest — and the con- 
 sideration is one of importance in reference 
 to the whole subject of prophecy — that we 
 have here precisely the same phenomenon as 
 in Old Testament prophecy — viz., a com- 
 bination of the immediate and of the distant 
 future, so entwined with one another that it 
 is difficult to disentangle them. It is the 
 same phenomenon, for instance, which per- 
 plexes us in some of the prophecies of Isaiah, 
 where the happy prospect of a return from 
 the exile seems swallowed up in the far larger 
 
164 THE UNKNOWN DAY 
 
 and grander visions of the final redemption 
 of mankind. 
 
 But in the case of this grand prophecy of 
 our Lord, we may, perhaps, see more clearly 
 both the nature, the reason, and the purpose 
 of His method. It would seem clear that 
 the main and ultimate scope of the prophecy 
 is to direct His disciples and His Church to 
 be living perpetually in a state of watchful- 
 ness, and consequent preparation for His 
 return, and for the final realisation and 
 coming of His kingdom. He said to them, 
 again and again, that the time of the final 
 return could not be revealed to them. *' Of 
 that day and hour," He said, ''knoweth 
 no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but 
 My father only." He even disclaims any 
 knowledge of it Himself. '' Of that day and 
 that hour knoweth no one," as St Mark 
 records it, *'no, not the angels in heaven, 
 neither the Son, but the Father." He re- 
 peated the same warning after the resurrec- 
 tion. *' It is not for you," He said, **to 
 know the times or the seasons, which the 
 Father hath put in His own power." That 
 is a great mystery ; but there could be no 
 stronger assertion of the principle that the 
 time of our Lord's final coming is absolutely 
 
PRESENT AND FUTURE COMBINED 165 
 
 shrouded from all but the Father's own know- 
 ledge. This being so, it became impossible 
 for our Lord to say that the final manifesta- 
 tion of His kingdom would not occur at the 
 time of the destruction of Jerusalem. It was 
 impossible, it was forbidden even to Him, to 
 declare before the event, that that which was 
 immediately imminent was only the destruc- 
 tion of Jerusalem, and that the final revela- 
 tion of His kingdom was reserved for a 
 subsequent time. For all that was revealed, 
 the two events might have fallen together in 
 the same great catastrophe, and it was there- 
 fore impracticable to make a sharp chrono- 
 logical line of distinction between them, when 
 looking forward to both. The destruction 
 of Jerusalem was one great step in the 
 manifestation of the divine kingdom. It 
 was the final doom of the past ; and for all 
 that men, or angels, or even the Son knev/, 
 it might have been the final doom of the 
 present. The consequence is that the two 
 momentous events are seen in vision as 
 inextricably blended. The grand result of 
 the discourse is that both events would 
 happen, though whether they would happen 
 together, or at an interval of time, long or 
 short, no one, not even the Son, could tell. 
 
 L 2 
 
166 WARNING TO OURSELVES 
 
 The same principle will apply to the prophetic 
 visions of the Old Testament. From the 
 prophets, too, the times and the seasons were 
 hidden, but they were granted a vision of 
 the glory of the ultimate future, and at the 
 same time of nearer events which were steps 
 towards its realisation. They saw them 
 both, but they could not tell whether, in 
 point of time, they were closely associated, 
 or separated by a long interval, and they 
 described them as they saw them, projected 
 in one plain and prophetic revelation. 
 
 But to us, the course of events has now 
 separated the catastrophe of the Jewish 
 nation from the remainder of the predictions 
 in this solemn discourse of our Lord, and it 
 remains to us the great prophecy in which 
 the whole of His message is summed up. 
 He began, as you have been reminded, by 
 proclaiming that the Kingdom of Heaven is 
 at hand. He concludes in this discourse, 
 uttered at the very threshold of His cross, by 
 warning us that that Kingdom, which has 
 already come in so remarkable a degree, that 
 realm in which He is acknowledged as the 
 sole King and Lord, and of which we are 
 professed members, will certainly come still 
 nearer to us ; and though He cannot tell us 
 
REASON FOR REPENTANCE 167 
 
 the day or the hour, yet the day and the 
 hour will come, when He will reveal Himself 
 in His full majesty and power, to enforce, 
 fully and finally, the laws of His kingdom ; 
 when the Tabernacle of God shall be with 
 men, and He will dwell with them, and they 
 shall be His people ; . . . but the fearful, and 
 unbelieving, and the abominable . . . shall 
 have their part ... in the second death. 
 He tells us that that great consummation will 
 come with consequences of awful convulsion 
 physical, moral, and political, of which the 
 convulsions which accompanied the over- 
 throw of the Jewish nation were a type ; and 
 He calls on us, by virtue at once of the 
 certainty of the result and the uncertainty of 
 the time, to be perpetually on the watch for 
 Him, and to be in a state of preparation for 
 His coming. " Be ye also ready," He says, 
 **for in such an hour as ye think not the Son 
 of Man Cometh." '* Watch, therefore, for ye 
 know not what hour your Lord doth come." 
 Such, then, in conclusion, is the nature 
 and office of prophecy, as exemplified in its 
 highest form in our Lord Himself. It is the 
 very basis on which He builds His work ; it 
 is the ultimate and supreme motive on which 
 He relies. '* Repent," He says at the out- 
 
168 THE FUTURE KINGDOM 
 
 set, **for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." 
 *' Watch," He says at the conclusion of His 
 ministry, **for ye know not what hour 
 your Lord doth come." In fact, what our 
 Lord has done, in respect of the motives 
 to be brought to bear upon our characters 
 and upon our conduct, may be illustrated by 
 the famous phrase that He "called a new 
 world into existence to redress the balance 
 of the old." He announced a Kingdom, 
 present in some degree now, but hereafter to 
 be revealed in infinite glory, in which every- 
 one will be judged according to the moral 
 and spiritual laws He proclaimed ; and He 
 warns us that our relation to that kingdom 
 is of such momentous importance as to over- 
 shadow every interest and every desire of 
 this world. This Prophecy is the fulcrum, 
 with which He would lift the heavy weight 
 with which our souls are bound to this earth ; 
 and the experience of human nature tends to 
 show that no other leverage is adequate to 
 lift the burdens which hold us down. 
 
 In the other great religions of the world 
 also it is the future which is the motive power. 
 Perhaps the chief weakness of the Jewish 
 religion lay in the remarkable fact, that its 
 laws were not enforced by the sanction of a 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE 169 
 
 future life. Why that sanction was withheld 
 from them has been the subject of great 
 debate ; but perhaps the reason is a more 
 simple one than has been generally supposed. 
 The future life could not be disclosed by a true 
 revelation, until the Judge and the Saviour 
 had been revealed, on whose mercy, as well 
 as on whose judgment, that life is mainly 
 dependent. Any attempt to depict that 
 future without placing in the forefront the 
 Saviour, for whose sake forgiveness is be- 
 stowed upon us, and by whom, at the same 
 time, our judgment is pronounced, would 
 have been necessarily misleading ; it must 
 either have obscured the divine justice or 
 the divine mercy. But from the moment 
 when the Saviour's Death had made atone- 
 ment for us, and the Saviour's Resurrection 
 and Ascension had assured us of His office 
 as our Lord and Judge in that eternal realm 
 — from that moment the vision of the eternal 
 future, the everlasting Kingdom of our Lord, 
 lay open to human eyes ; and its prophetic 
 revelation by Him furnished, to all who 
 followed Him, a motive of transcendent 
 power. So, accordingly, St Peter, who had 
 heard this great discourse, summed up the 
 gospel in his old age. ** Blessed," he ex- 
 
170 THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 
 
 claimed, "be the God and Father of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ, which, according to His 
 abundant mercy, hath begotten us again 
 unto a lively hope, by the resurrection of 
 Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance 
 incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth 
 not away. . . . Wherefore, gird up the loins 
 of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end 
 for the grace that is to be brought unto you 
 at the revelation of Jesus Christ." 
 
IX 
 
 PROPHECY IN THE EPISTLES 
 OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 "How that by revelation he made known unto me the 
 mystery ; (as I wrote afore in few words: Whereby, when ye 
 read, ye may understand my knowledge in the mystery of 
 Christ)."— Eph. iii. 3, 4. 
 
 In this concluding lecture it remains for me to 
 offer some observations on the predictive ele- 
 ment in the Epistles of the New Testament. 
 In the last lecture the momentous place held 
 by prediction, and by warnings and exhorta- 
 tions founded on prediction, in our Lord's 
 teaching was illustrated ; and it was shown, in 
 particular, that the proclamation with which 
 He and His forerunners commenced their 
 ministry — that the Kingdom of God, or 
 the Kingdom of Heaven, was at hand — was 
 really a summary of the whole of our 
 Lord's message, a brief account of the 
 work He accomplished and is still accom- 
 plishing. He established a Society of which 
 
 171 
 
172 THE NEW KINGDOM 
 
 He is the acknowledged King ; the existence 
 of that Society constitutes the great difference 
 between the world before the coming of 
 Christ and the world since His coming ; and 
 He taught His disciples and ourselves to 
 live in a constant state of watching for the 
 complete and final revelation of that kingdom. 
 He explained, also, in various parables of a 
 predictive character, what would be the 
 general nature and history of His Kingdom. 
 But much in this subject was left by Him, as 
 it were, in outline, and dimly shadowed forth, 
 for the simple reason, as was pointed out, 
 that it could not be clearly revealed or 
 understood until the two great events had 
 occurred, on which it was mainly dependent 
 — His atoning death and His resurrection. 
 Those two events entirely transformed the 
 relation of men to Himself, to God and to 
 one another, and until they had actually 
 occurred, their significance could not be 
 explained or appreciated. His atoning 
 Death at once superseded and abolished the 
 Jewish sacrifices, with the whole economy 
 which those sacrifices represented ; and His 
 Resurrection and Ascension, followed by the 
 gift of the Holy Spirit, introduced new 
 spiritual forces into the world, and supplied 
 
NEW LIGHT IN THE EPISTLES 173 
 
 the means of life and growth to the new 
 society. 
 
 Accordingly, when we pass to the Epistles, 
 we find a new light thrown, by the Passion 
 and Resurrection of our Lord, alike on the 
 present and on the future, on the eternal 
 spiritual relations of men to God, and on 
 their mutual relations in the Christian society 
 or Church. I cannot but remark again 
 that it is strange it should be often made a 
 complaint against the theological teaching, 
 not merely of the Church but of the Apostles, 
 that it gives prominence and importance to 
 considerations which are less prominent in 
 our Lord's own teaching. How could it be 
 otherwise? Is it conceivable that such 
 momentous events as the Passion and the 
 Resurrection of our Lord could have 
 occurred without leaving a deep and a new 
 mark upon the Apostles' thoughts and lives, 
 and without altering the proportion in which 
 truths, old and new alike, appeared to them ? 
 It is by great actions that in the last resort 
 life and history are moulded ; and even our 
 Lord's words, divine and regenerating as 
 they are, were overshadowed by the supreme 
 effect of His final actions — -His Passion, His 
 Death, and His Resurrection. 
 
174 RISE OF THE CHURCH 
 
 For our present purpose we are mainly 
 concerned with but one of those effects — the 
 creation and development of the Christian 
 Church. It Is evident from the Book of the 
 Acts that the disciples and Apostles had at 
 first very little Idea of what that Church was 
 destined to become, and In particular that 
 they were far from appreciating the manner 
 in which our Lord's sacrifice, and the conse- 
 quent abolition of the Jewish dispensation, 
 had done away with the division between Jew 
 and Gentile, and rendered possible a universal 
 society. The effect of our Lord's Atonement, 
 and of His assumption of Royal and Judicial 
 authority over all mankind, had to be 
 gradually disclosed ; but as soon as this 
 becomes clear to them, after the Council at 
 Jerusalem and the preaching of St Paul, the 
 nature of that Church and Its future history 
 are revealed to them In great prophetic out- 
 lines, similar, In their combination of what is 
 clear and what is obscure, what Is Immediate 
 and what Is distant, to prophecies In the Old 
 Testament respecting the dispensation of the 
 Gospel. In St Paul's writings, in particular, 
 the vision of the Christian Church, of Its 
 character and of Its future, emerges into 
 more and more distinct vision and becomes 
 
ST PAUL'S PROPHECY 175 
 
 more and more prominent. The prophetic 
 vision of the future Church grows upon 
 him, and gives a new colour to his later 
 Epistles. 
 
 Take, as a striking example of this pro- 
 phetic view of the Church, the Epistle to the 
 Ephesians from which the text is taken. 
 If you recall the conditions under which 
 those words were written, it will justly be 
 considered one of the most astonishing, and 
 most indisputable, instances of inspired and 
 prophetic utterance to be found through- 
 out the Scriptures. That the Gentiles are 
 fellow heirs and of the same body, and 
 partakers of the divine promise in Christ 
 through the Gospel — this is to us a common- 
 place, and we may often listen to such 
 passages without their making any startling 
 impression upon us. But vastly different 
 would have been their effect upon any reader 
 at the time St Paul wrote them, whether 
 Gentile or Jew. Bear in mind that there 
 existed at that date the most absolute sep- 
 aration — and not merely separation but 
 antagonism — between the Jews and all other 
 races. In the Roman Empire, though the 
 Jews were already spread throughout it, with 
 much of that cosmopolitan genius they have 
 
176 THE JEW AND THE ROMAN 
 
 always displayed, they were nevertheless a 
 people within a people, a world within a 
 world. It would not be too much to say 
 that the Jews and the Roman world con- 
 stituted two independent civilisations and 
 systems of life. The Jew lived upon his 
 traditions and upon the promises made to the 
 fathers ; he had his own kingdom and laws ; 
 and he existed, not for the present, but for the 
 future, for that time, foretold by his prophets, 
 when the Messiah should be revealed, and 
 the everlasting kingdom of the Son of David 
 be set up. All that he saw was temporary, 
 and simply subservient to this grand result, 
 and he made no secrect of his contempt for 
 it, and sense of superiority to it. It was but 
 natural that this feeling should be recipro- 
 cated by the Gentiles amidst whom he lived ; 
 and the Jew was to them a member of a race 
 whose habits and thoughts were incom- 
 patible with those of ordinary human society. 
 He was tolerated, he was used ; but he was 
 regarded as an alien, almost as an enemy of 
 the human race. There was thus on both 
 sides an insuperable sense of antagonism. 
 The Jew and the Gentile dwelt apart ; each 
 feeling that the other had no share in his 
 hopes, his sympathies, his interests, and each 
 
ST PAUL AN EARNEST JEW 177 
 
 expecting, if not desiring, the overthrow, if 
 not the extermination, of the other. 
 
 Now the Apostle who penned the words 
 of the text was a representative member 
 of this Jewish race, "of the tribe of 
 Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, as 
 touching the law a Pharisee." To us 
 he is a Christian, and we do not easily 
 realise him in another capacity. But the 
 disciples were called Christians in Antloch 
 by those who looked at them from without ; 
 the word Is not used in St Paul's Epistles. 
 He did not for one moment cease to be a 
 Jew because he became a follower of Christ. 
 On the contrary, he became more Intensely, 
 more profoundly, more heartily and sincerely 
 a Jew, if possible, than ever before. He was 
 more thoroughly a Jew because, unlike the 
 mass of his people, he was a Jew full of hope 
 and assurance, instead of a Jew depressed by 
 disappointment and despair. Tenaciously 
 as the Jews clung to their traditions and 
 their prophecies, the sense of their destiny 
 being persistently baffled created a bitterness 
 and desperation among them, inconsistent 
 with an enthusiastic faith and pride in their 
 vocation. But to St Paul it was the reverse. 
 He discerned, with the rapt and enthusiastic 
 
 M 
 
178 THE CHRISTIAN JEW 
 
 vision of a prophet, that the promises made 
 to his nation had, as a matter of fact, at last 
 been fulfilled, that the Messiah for whom 
 his people had been yearning throughout 
 their long history had come, and that the 
 moment of their highest glory had arrived ; 
 to him the words of the prophet Isaiah were 
 no longer a mere prophecy ; they were a 
 realised fact : ''Arise, shine; for thy light is 
 come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon 
 thee. For, behold, the darkness shall cover 
 the earth, and gross darkness the people : 
 but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his 
 glory shall be seen upon thee. And the 
 Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings 
 to the brightness of thy rising." His 
 spiritual eye discerned in our Lord the 
 real King and Saviour of His people, who 
 would establish a dominion more real and 
 more powerful than any that had yet been 
 conceived. His soul is filled, therefore, not 
 merely with the faith of a Christian, but 
 with the faith of a Christian Jew ; and he 
 speaks in all his Epistles in the spirit, and 
 from the point of view, of a Jew whose 
 national hopes have at length been fulfilled. 
 In this very Epistle to the Ephesians, for 
 instance, he seems, in the chapter immedi- 
 
THE JEW AND THE GENTILE 179 
 
 ately preceding this, to address the Gentiles 
 with something of the old sense of superiority. 
 "Wherefore," he says, ''remember, that ye 
 being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who 
 are called Uncircumcision by that which 
 is called the Circumcision in the flesh, made 
 by hands ; that at that time ye were without 
 Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth 
 of Israel, and strangers from the covenants 
 of promise, having no hope, and without 
 God in the world : " — the very description 
 which any devout Jew would have given of 
 the Gentiles — " But now in Christ Jesus ye 
 who sometime were far off are made nigh 
 by the blood of Christ. For He is our 
 peace, who hath made both one, and hath 
 broken down the middle wall of partition 
 between us." 
 
 Such was the position of the Apostle, 
 and from this point of view it is that 
 he utters the predictions (for such they 
 are) in the text. He is a prisoner 
 at Rome ; regarded by the Romans as 
 simply the leader of a new sect of Jews, 
 promising in some respects to be more 
 troublesome than the Jews themselves. He 
 feels visibly impressed upon him, in every 
 possible way, that antagonism between the 
 
180 ANTAGONISM OF JEW AND GENTILE 
 
 two peoples of which I have spoken. He 
 was the one man of that day who knew both 
 worlds thoroughly, and could, therefore, best 
 appreciate the separation between them. A 
 Jew who was only a Jew might shut himself 
 up among his own people, and might fail to 
 appreciate the intensity of the opposition 
 which his name and faith produced. A 
 Gentile Christian who had not happened to 
 live amidst a community of Jews might 
 similarly fail to appreciate the intense indig- 
 nation and aversion with which they regarded 
 one who, as they deemed, was intruding with 
 unhallowed foot into the sanctuary of their 
 faith. But St Paul could be under no such 
 misconception. By Gentiles he had been 
 persecuted as a Jew : by Jews he had been 
 stoned as a renegade to the Gentiles. He 
 stood, as it were, between two worlds, each 
 protesting against him, and declaring that 
 he had neither part nor lot with them. To 
 proclaim to the Jews that the Gentiles 
 would become one with them — to proclaim to 
 the Gentiles that they would become of the 
 same body as the Jews, and joint partakers of 
 the Jewish promises — each was at that day a 
 paradox — and an equally offensive paradox ; 
 to proclaim it, moreover, not merely as a possi- 
 
THEIR FUTURE UNION 181 
 
 blllty, but as the most unquestionable of 
 certainties, as a Divine Revelation, and as 
 announcing the greatest glory of Jew and 
 Gentile alike — this must have seemed to the 
 men of that day little less than madness. 
 "Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learn- 
 ing hath made thee mad," was no unnatural 
 exclamation. 
 
 Such, however, was the deliberate and 
 constant message of the Apostle. He 
 declared, in face of all this contradiction, 
 of this seeming Impossibility, that to him 
 had been supernaturally revealed the 
 mystery which had been up to that time 
 hidden in the consciousness of God. '* By 
 revelation," he said, ** He made known 
 unto me the mystery ; . . . Which In other 
 ages was not made known unto the sons of 
 men, as it is now revealed unto his holy 
 Apostles and Prophets by the Spirit." He 
 felt himself standing at the turning point 
 in the history of the world, and he claimed 
 to see unveiled before him the main and 
 essential design which, from thenceforward, 
 was to be carried out by the Divine hand. 
 He claimed to discern, not merely the revela- 
 tion of the grace and truth of the Saviour's 
 character, he claimed not merely to be the 
 
 M 2 
 
182 THE PROPHETIC MYSTERY 
 
 messenger of a new spiritual truth, but he 
 did not scruple to avow that the main scope 
 of the divine purposes in succeeding history- 
 had been made known to him. " Unto me," 
 he says, '* who am less than the least of all 
 saints, is this grace given, that I should 
 preach among the Gentiles the unsearch- 
 able riches of Christ ; and to make all 
 men see what is the fellowship of the 
 mystery which from the beginning of the 
 world hath been hid in God, who created 
 all things by Jesus Christ ; to the intent that 
 now unto the principalities and the powers 
 in heavenly places might be known through 
 the Church the manifold wisdom of God, 
 according to the eternal purpose which He 
 purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord." The 
 very principalities and powers of heaven are 
 regarded by him as looking on with wonder 
 at this mysterious unveiling of divine 
 purposes, and at this utterly unforeseen and 
 scarcely conceivable birth of time. A result 
 the most improbable, the most offensive in 
 idea to all but a handful of people then 
 living, is solemnly declared by him to be the 
 ultimate design of God. 
 
 Let us endeavour to realise what we may 
 venture, from a human point of view, to 
 
A BOLD PREDICTION 183 
 
 call the sublime audacity of such a predic- 
 tion. It is not a hope, It is not an idea 
 of a possible development ; it is a positive 
 assurance of the future course of history. 
 But this prediction has been realised. It 
 has been so abundantly realised that, as I 
 remarked at the outset, we sometimes fail to 
 appreciate the extent to which it was a pre- 
 diction. That which the Apostle declared 
 has become true to the letter, alike In 
 relation to the Gentiles and to the Jews. 
 We of the Gentiles have entered into the 
 spiritual inheritance of the ancient Jewish 
 people. The prophets, the psalmists, the 
 historians, the Messiah of the Jews are all 
 ours. We are consciously, in spirit, of the 
 same body as David and Isaiah ; our spirit- 
 ual life is sustained by their words, our 
 hopes are fed by their promises. It Is of 
 the essence of our position as Christians to 
 claim that we have become of one body with 
 God's ancient people, and that all His 
 promises to them are fulfilled to us. Our 
 highest pride and privilege Is that we are 
 no longer aliens from the commonwealth of 
 Israel, but that in Christ Jesus we are the 
 subjects of the King of the Jews, and belong 
 to His people, whom He came to save from 
 
184 EXACT FULFILMENT 
 
 their sins. St Paul, as a Hebrew of the 
 Hebrews, has brought us to share his fellow- 
 ship and his glory. On the other hand, his 
 predictions respecting the Hebrews have simi- 
 larly been fulfilled. " I would not," he says, 
 "brethren, that ye should be ignorant . . . 
 that blindness in part is happened to Lsrael, 
 until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. 
 And so all Israel shall be saved." These 
 wild dreams of the Apostle, as they must 
 have seemed at that time to Jew and Gentile 
 alike, were the sober visions of a divinely 
 inspired foresight ; and within ten years of 
 the time when Jerusalem was to be trodden 
 down of the Gentiles, and the division 
 between the two peoples made more visible 
 and more bitter than ever, the Apostle fore- 
 saw the intercommunion of the two, and the 
 most essential element in the history of the 
 next 1800 years. 
 
 But there is another great element of 
 prediction respecting the Christian Church 
 which especially claims notice at this point, 
 as it had a peculiar interest for the founder 
 of these lectures. Bishop Warburton. The 
 purpose of his foundation was ''to prove the 
 truth of revealed religion in general, and of 
 the Christian in particular, from the com- 
 
BISHOP WARBURTON'S VIEW 185 
 
 pletion of prophecies in the Old and New- 
 Testaments which relate to the Christian 
 Church, especially to the apostasy of papal 
 Rome." The prophecies respecting the 
 Christian Church generally, on which we 
 have just been dwelling, appeared to him 
 to receive an addition of extraordinary force 
 in the intimations, by which they were accom- 
 panied, of the corruption and apostasy which 
 W'Ould arise in the Christian society. His 
 biographer. Bishop Hurd, who was the first 
 to fill the office of lecturer in this Trust, 
 says, in his Life of Bishop Warburton, that 
 some particular prophecies had struck his 
 attention as furnishing the most decisive 
 argument for the truth of Christianity. And 
 he quotes from one of Bishop Warburton's 
 works the following observation — *' I have 
 ever thought," he says, *'the prophecies 
 relating to Antichrist, interspersed within 
 the Old and New Testaments, the most 
 convincing proof of the truth of Christian 
 religion that any moral matter is capable 
 of receiving." And again, '' This question, 
 what individual power is meant in the 
 prophecies, is one in the right determination 
 of which alone I am persuaded you might 
 rest the whole truth of the Christian religion " 
 
186 PREDICTION OF ANTICHRIST 
 
 (p. 90). Among his works is an interesting 
 discourse on the rise of Antichrist, in which 
 he points out that the conviction, which pre- 
 vailed in the Protestant Church at the 
 Reformation, that the Papacy was the Anti- 
 christian power predicted by St Paul and St 
 John, had been discredited by the exaggerated 
 light in which it had been placed by the 
 Puritans, as well as by the violence with which 
 it had been employed in controversy, to dis- 
 credit every ceremony or custom which was 
 in the least degree connected with the Roman 
 Church — an extravagance of which we have 
 too much evidence even at the present day. 
 A whole series of these Lectures has before 
 now been devoted to the investigation of this 
 subject, particularly in connection with the 
 Revelation of St John, and no less than a 
 whole course of Lectures would suffice to deal 
 with it satisfactorily. 
 
 One observation may be made, in passing, 
 in reference to the problems presented by that 
 book, which seems to have an important bearing 
 upon the general principles of prophetic inter- 
 pretation. It is often laid down by modern 
 interpreters of prophecy, as an unquestion- 
 able canon, that all prophecy is to be inter- 
 preted, in the first instance, in relation to 
 
THE APOCALYPSE 187 
 
 the events of the prophet's own age, so that 
 prophecies Hke those in the latter part of 
 the Book of Isaiah, which deal with events 
 after Isaiah's age, cannot be attributed to 
 him. But if so, what are we to say of the 
 Apocalypse ? A large part, at all events, of 
 that book deals with subjects so entirely 
 out of the range of observation in the age 
 in which it was written, or in any sub- 
 sequent age, that after 1800 years its 
 meaning remains, in great measure, a 
 profound mystery. That the last book 
 of the New Testament should be a pro- 
 phecy of supreme awe and grandeur, is a 
 final illustration of the predominant import- 
 ance of prophecy in the scheme of divine 
 revelation ; and that it should be so mysteri- 
 ous illustrates, not less forcibly, the principle 
 that prophecy is really only interpreted by its 
 fulfilment, that as it came not of old time by 
 the will of man, its meaning may not be 
 open to the understanding of men, or even to 
 that of the prophet himself, until history 
 has supplied the key to its interpretation. 
 The prophecies relating to our Lord's first 
 coming were not clearly understood before 
 the event, and those which predict the cir- 
 cumstances of His Second Advent will 
 
188 PREDICTED APOSTASY 
 
 similarly receive their only adequate illumina- 
 tion as that Advent approaches. 
 
 But, without attempting a detailed inquiry 
 into this subject, which would be inconsistent 
 with the scope of the present course of lec- 
 tures, it must be recognised that Bishop War- 
 burton was at least justified in this general 
 observation, that St Paul, in his Epistles to 
 the Thessalonians, and St John, in his Revela- 
 tion, clearly reveal the broad fact that a 
 great apostasy would appear in the Christian 
 Church, which would mislead Christians in 
 the most disastrous degree, and which would 
 only be overthrown at the final appearance 
 of our Lord Himself The Apostles looked 
 forward to our Lord's coming, and did not 
 know how soon that consummation might 
 arrive ; but St Paul expressly warned the 
 Thessalonians not to be " soon shaken in 
 mind, or be troubled ... as that the day 
 of Christ is at hand. Let no man " he 
 said, "deceive you by any means: for that 
 day shall not come, except there come a 
 falling away first, and that man of sin be 
 revealed, the son of perdition." Similarly 
 St John warns his children again and again 
 that, within the Christian Church, false pro- 
 phets and Antichrists would come, and that the 
 
PAPAL CORRUPTIONS 189 
 
 spirit of Antichrist was already in the world. 
 St Paul, again, speaks of a distinct revela- 
 tion — that **the Spirit speaketh expressly, 
 that in the latter times some shall depart 
 from the faith, giving heed to seducing 
 spirits . . . ; speaking lies in hypocrisy ; 
 having their conscience seared with a hot 
 iron ; forbidding to marry, and command- 
 ing to abstain from meats." 
 
 Now little as we may be disposed to 
 denounce another communion, we cannot, 
 as Protestant Churchmen, disguise our be- 
 lief that a great apostasy, and an apostasy 
 bearing a great resemblance to some of 
 the marks indicated by St Paul, has 
 arisen in the Christian Church, and has 
 attained what we must needs regard as 
 monstrous and pernicious proportions. It is 
 certainly a most striking fact that, side by 
 side with the grand picture of a universal 
 Church, comprising both Jews and Gentiles, 
 and constituting the very body of which the 
 vSaviour Himself is the head, the Apostles 
 drew also a picture of a profound corruption 
 within that body, and that the latter pre- 
 diction has been fulfilled as sadly as the 
 other has been fulfilled gloriously. St John 
 in his Revelation leads us to expect that that 
 
190 FUTURE CONFLICTS 
 
 apostasy will not be overcome without 
 tremendous religious, moral, and political 
 convulsions, and there is certainly enough in 
 the state of the world at the present day to 
 render such a prediction only too probable. 
 Such is the general character of the Apostolic 
 predictions with respect to the future of that 
 visible Church of God which it was their 
 mission to establish. The predictions they 
 uttered respecting it were utterly beyond all 
 human expectation ; but they have been 
 already fulfilled to a most remarkable degree, 
 and nothing has occurred in the history of 
 the Church which is not in harmony with 
 their prophetic statements. We have the 
 more reason to fear that the worst and 
 most terrible of those predictions will be 
 verified, and that we ought to live in pre- 
 paration for those supreme conflicts which 
 both our Lord and His Apostles prophesied 
 would conclude the present dispensation. 
 
 Let me only add, in laying aside this great 
 subject, that, however imperfectly and un- 
 worthily it may have been treated, its con- 
 sideration cannot fail to be profitable if it 
 only ends in directing our thoughts to those 
 supreme and final realities, those last things, 
 as Christian writers have been wont to call 
 
PERSONAL ENCOURAGEMENT 191 
 
 them, which we all as individuals, and not 
 merely as members of a Church, have to 
 meet. We are all, alas, familiar — all at least 
 who are old enough, as is the case with most 
 of us, to have stood by the side of many a 
 grave — too familiar in one sense, though we 
 cannot be too familiar in another, with those 
 grand prophecies of the future destiny of our 
 souls and of our bodies, which St Paul was 
 inspired to write for the lasting consolation 
 of Christian hearts in mourning and in death. 
 To every one of us the most important of all 
 the apostolic prophecies is his declaration, 
 ** Behold, I show you a mystery : We shall not 
 all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a 
 moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the 
 last trump : for the trumpet shall sound, and 
 the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and 
 we shall be changed." If the predictions of 
 our Lord and of His Apostles have already 
 received so large a degree of fulfilment, we 
 have the stronger ground for faith in these 
 solemn prophecies of what we may, each one of 
 us, hope to experience in the future. God 
 grant that we may so live in that faith as to 
 be able to join in the concluding exclamation 
 of that great prophecy — '' O death, where is 
 thy sting ? O grave, where is thy victory ? 
 
192 THE PREDICTED VICTORY 
 
 The sting of death is sin ; and the strength 
 of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, 
 which giveth us the victory through our 
 Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore^ my beloved 
 brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always 
 abounding in the work of the Lord, foras- 
 much as ye know that your labour is not in 
 vain in the Lord." 
 
 PRINTED BY OLIVER AND BOYD, KDINBURQU. 
 
Date Due 
 
 f 1 6 '40 
 
 j^w^rw* 
 
* • •;. . 
 
BS648.5W12 
 
 Prophecy, Jewish and Christian 
 
 Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library 
 
 1 1012 00055 9593