THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
I?
tfmr
SERMONS
PREACHED DURING
THE SEASON OF LENT, 1869,
IN
OXFORD.
THE LORD BISHOP OF OXFORD. H. P. LIDDON, M.A.
W. J. IRONS, D.D. T. T. CARTER, M.A.
THE LORD BISHOP OF LINCOLN. THE LORD BISHOP OF DERRY.
J. R. WOODFORD, M.A. J. MOORHOUSE, M.A.
E. B. PUSEY, D.D. W. R. FREMANTLE, M.A.
VEN. ARCHDEACON BICKERSTETH.
WITH A PREFACE
BY
SAMUEL, LORD BISHOP OF OXFORD.
AND 377, STRAND, LONDON :
JAMES' PARKER AND CO.
1870.
V
V-V77
ii i ?ii
PREFACE.
^HE subject of this year's Lenten Sermons is
not only of the deepest interest in itself, but
it has a most direct bearing upon the special
needs and temptations of the present times. For
it is one great temptation of the day to forget
that with the Church of all ages she, too, is the
inheritor of that " spirit of prophecy which is the
testimony of Jesus." Nothing can more give her
boldness in dealing with all truth, breadth of
view to contemplate without shrinking all God's
counsel and God's ways, and unflinching courage
to stand for Him before a hostile world, than
a thorough realization of the great truth that she
does possess this prophetic gift. The Sermons
in this volume can, I think, scarcely be read with
care without their awakening this conviction :
may it please God to arouse, strengthen, and
quicken it.
I cannot this year finish these prefatory re-
marks without remembering that I shall not
again preside over the preaching of these Lenten
Sermons, or select their subjects or their preachers,
and I cannot remember this without desiring to
1236182
IV PREFACE.
thank thus publicly those who year by year have
helped me with these Sermons. The days we
have spent together each year at Cuddcsdon, in
prayer and consultation for their preparation, have
been amongst the happiest of my life. To the
preachers who have freely helped me, men of
the highest station and of the greatest gifts in
the Church, I return my cordial thanks for their
ready aid. I believe that in many ways and to
many souls these Sermons have been eminently
blessed, and I pray God to return to all who
have taken part in the work blessings of His
Fatherly mercy for what they have thus ren-
dered to Him.
S. OXON.
CUDDESDON PALACE,
Nov. 15, 1869.
CONTENTS.
SEEMON I,
(P- i.)
The Prophet that " came out offudah"
i KINGS xiii. 26.
BY THE LORD BISHOP OF OXFORD.
SEEMON H,
(P- I3-)
Daniel.
DANIEL xii. 10.
BY W. J. IRONS, D.D.
SEEMON m.
( P . 29.)
Jeremiah.
JEREMIAH i. 18.
BY THE LORD BISHOP OF LINCOLN.
SEEMON IV,
(P- 47-)
Ezekiel.
EZEKIEL i. i 3.
BY THE LORD BISHOP OF LINCOLN.
VI CONTENTS.
SEBMON V,
(P- 63.)
The Prophet at Bochim.
Jl'DGES ii. 4.
BvJ. R. WOODFORD, M.A.
SERMON VI
(P- 75-)
Isaiah.
ISAIAH vi. 8 10.
BvE. B. PUSEY, D.D.
SERMON VH
(P- 95-)
Jonah.
JONAH i. 10.
BY H. P. LIDDON, M.A.
SEBMON VTH.
( P . 125.)
Elijah.
i KINGS xviii. 21.
BY T. T. CARTER, M.A.
SEBMON IX.
(p. I37-)
<
Elisha.
i KINGS xix. 12 16.
BY THE LORD BISHOP OF DERRV
CONTENTS. Vll
SERMON X,
(p. 151-)
Job.
JOB xiii. 15.
BvJ. MOORHOUSE, M.A.
SEEMON XI.
( P . 169.)
ffaggai, Zechariah^ Malachi.
EZRA vi. 14.
BY W. R. FREMANTLE, M.A.
SEEMON XII.
( P . 183.)
Enoch.
HEBREWS xi. 5.
BY THE YEN. ARCHDEACON BICKERSTETH.
SERMON I.
ftfje $ropfjet fljat " came out of Sfutoafj."
1 KINGS xiii. 26.
"It is the man of God, who was disobedient unto the word
of the Lord."
"~*HE subject of this course of sermons has been
-* chosen with special reference to some of the chief
needs and difficulties of the present time. It will bring
you into close contact with a great and most important
part of the Word of God : for of it the utterances of
the Prophets form a large element. And whilst it does
this, it will, I believe, be found to bring out in the most
striking manner many of the practical lessons which we
at this time most eminently need to strengthen us
against our peculiar temptations, and to instruct us in
the ways of holiness. Further, it will lead us to ex-
amine, and I hope to remove, some special difficulties
of the present day. For there is no part of God's Word
in which these difficulties are oftener found than in the
lives, miracles, and words of the prophets ; and as many
of these difficulties are based on misapprehensions of the
real place and purpose of the prophetic element in the
book of God, they are to a great degree capable of
removal.
Men often, for instance, speak as if the mere pre-
diction of future events with a view chiefly to the
fulfilment of these predictions furnishing an evidence
for the truth of the revelation which the Bible con-
B
2 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
tains, was the chief function of the prophetic office.
Now this is itself a great mistake. Fulfilled prophecy
is of course an evidence for the truth of the revelation
in which it is contained, for none but God can really
foreknow the future. But this is by no means the direct
end of the prophet's office. Rather is it an accident,
though a necessary accident, of its exercise ; and it can-
not be treated as the main purpose for which the pro-
phets were raised up, without degrading their office into
that of formal and somewhat capriciously appointed
witnesses to one particular truth. Their true place in
the divine economy is a far grander one than this.
From first to last they were raised up, primarily for their
own generation, as peculiar witnesses for God ; witnesses
of His being ; witnesses of Him as a personal God,
ruling ever amongst men ; witnesses for Him against
all the false notions of deity which issued from the
darkened heart of fallen humanity, and impersonated
themselves in the gods many and lords many of hea-
thendom ; witnesses amongst His own people against
the formalism which is ever ready to congeal ap-
pointed means of grace into charms, and to degrade
words and commandments which are pregnant with life
into a dull literalism. The prophets in their own day
and generation did all this. They witnessed that this
living, personal all-directing God was the Father of all
spirits. That He was Truth and no lie. That His will
was no capricious autocratic rule, but that law in ful-
filling which the creatures He had made could only find
their own true blessedness. They came forward to de-
clare against the present temptations and promises of
the world, that only in doing that will of His faithfully
and thoroughly could any true peace be found. They
were ever shewing forth to men the past, the present,
I.] The Prophet that " came out of Jiidah" 3
and the future as one connected whole in which the
personal God was with His servants. Their predictions
of the future were not like the utterances of the old
oracles, the declaration of some simple disjointed event
which should come to pass, but the revelation of the
typical character of the past and the present, and so of
what that present would become in the future. Pro-
phecy from their mouths was history carried on into
futurity. Thus they were evermore raising men from
the letter to the spirit, from the seen to the unseen, from
the accidental to the necessary. This strictly practical
mission formed the very basis of their whole office.
They came as living men instinct with the Spirit of
God, to the men to whom they spake, and addressed
themselves to them, to their temptations, their needs,
their darknesses, their sins, their possible deliverances.
And it is just because they did in very deed speak thus
to those to whom they were first sent, that they speak
now to us. For evermore heart answereth to heart, as
the features to the glass in which their outlines lie
mirrored forth.
In this their true character as God's witnesses through-
out the passing and ever-varying ages, we may find the
key to all those recurring variations which we may trace
in the particulars of prophetical development. Thus in
exact keeping with his character as God's witness, the
prophet sent to those outside the covenant bears some
single warning, to the enforcement of which his pre-
dictive power is strictly limited. So Jonah preached to
Nineveh when he called the sinful city to repentance,
and declared that yet forty days and Nineveh should be
overthrown. For this was practically all the prediction
which the enforcement of his summons needed. So
when prophets were sent to the ten separated tribes,
B 2
4 The Prophets of the Lord: [SERM.
it was with some special message ; and it was by the
requirements necessary for their fulfilling this special
mission that the predictive power committed to them
was meted out. We may trace this in all the prophetic
course of those mighty witnesses for God, Elijah and
Elisha. Great as were the miracles they wrought, and
which it was requisite that they should work, as visible
credentials of their message, there is no record of their
predictive power reaching beyond the comparatively
narrow circle of the lives or fortunes of the kings or
people whom they were bidden to rebuke or to with-
stand. Contrast with these the prophecies of those on \
whom the gift fell in the comparatively faithful king- i
dom of Judah. What an horizon opens, for instance,
before Isaiah. How is every fact around him a type of
the future ; how do the sufferings, the fears, the hopes,
the deliverances of the righteous king and the faithful
people lead on his eye to the great kingdom of God's
grace, to the true Son of David on His throne, and to
the deliverance of the whole race in the day of the con-
summation of all things. And how accordant with all this
is the fact that in the Christian Church, where the Spirit
is given in much larger measure, the direct predictive
power of the undying line of prophets is altogether
absent. For the prophet, if he was to be the bearer of
a special message to the men of his own day, must
of necessity be himself a part of what was as yet an im-
perfect revelation. And so prophet after prophet would
reveal something more ; some new type would be ex-
pounded ; the horizon of prophecy would widen ; its
voice would more and more prepare the way of the
Great Prophet yet to come, whose revelation by Him-
self, and by His inspired Apostles, would give the last
direct utterances of the prophetic spirit concerning the
I.] The Prophet that " came out ofjudahr 5
future which thenceforth the prophetic Spirit in the
Church would verify and explain, but never add to.
For when the whole message was delivered, and the
whole spiritual system completed, there was no room
for that gradual development which had been hitherto
the special work of prophecy. Still out of the old cen-
turies would then come forth, as now they do to us, the
voices of the old prophets, who in witnessing to those
around them, witnessed also unto us, and left, like
charmed voices hanging in the middle air, messages
for all time, which the ever-present Spirit of the Highest
should wake up into fresh sounds of warning, of pro-
mise, and of teaching, as the weary ages needed their
ever-living application.
Now all this seems in a very special manner to be set
before us in the history of " the man of God who came
up out of Judah by the word of the Lord unto Bethel a ."
How that "word" was spoken unto him we are not
told ; the special charges from " the mouth of the
Lord," to eat no bread nor drink water in the evil city,
and to return by another way, all imply that it was in
some way more immediate and direct than by the
awakening the righteous anger of his soul against Je-
roboam's calf worship. However conveyed to him, he
receives the charge, and he obeys it. He sets out to
bear his witness. We can picture to ourselves that
journey' from Judah, probably from Jerusalem to
Bethel. It involved the extremest peril. Of all men
living, Jeroboam was one of the last to whom such
a message could be delivered with impunity. He was
so remarkable even in his youth for vigour, strength,
and determination, that he had attracted the special
notice of Solomon the king, and had by him been set
1 I Kings xiii. I.
6 T/tc Prop/iets of the Lord: [SERM.
in the difficult post of the exactor of taxes from the
tribe of Ephraim. Since that time all the events of his
life had tended to deepen the lines of his character.
His sympathy with those whom the hard rule of So-
lomon oppressed had roused within him the ardent
spirit of a reformer. Then, as there swept over that
purer flame the risings of ambition, there blazed forth
from his soul longings even for the throne of Israel.
After this came the prophetic message reading out to
him this secret of his heart's desire, and promising him
its future fulfilment: " Thou shalt reign according to all
that thy soul desireth, and shalt be king over Israel 1 *."
Then there fell on his young ambition the blight of
Solomon's suspicion, and his own exile into Egypt.
There for years he had to wait the slow wearing out
of the wise king's life, with all the bitterness of de-
layed expectation eating ever more and more into his
heart and souring his proud spirit. With the accession
of Rehoboam he returned to the Mount of Ephraim,
where he had lived of old in all but kingly magnificence.
The folly of the young monarch, stirred up by his in-
experienced advisers, raised at once a popular disorder,
and Jeroboam became the head and leader of the dis-
contented people. From that post it had been but
a step to the throne of the new northern kingdom of
the ten tribes of Israel. So far, with whatever debasing
motives of personal ambition in the actors, the revo-
lution had been "of the Lord." He was punishing at
once the house of David and the tribes of Israel for
their sins. Jeroboam had got the throne, and he would
keep it, and not trusting with all his heart in the God
of Israel, he sought, like other worldly men in whom
some sense of religion still survives, to strengthen God's
b I Kings xi. 37.
I.] The Prophet that " came out of Judah." 7
arm by the arm of flesh. And so he fell into the great
sin which at last, canker like, ate out his whole house.
He feared that if the ten tribes according to the old
law went up perpetually to worship at Jerusalem, their
hearts would by degrees be weaned from the new
throne and turn to the ancient dynasty of David. It
was the natural fear of an usurper, and he set himself
to guard against it with the most consummate skill of
earthly policy. The new kingdom should have a new
centre of national worship. He would build a temple
which should rival that of Solomon, and establish a ritual
which should surpass that of Aaron. He would consult
for the .ease of his people by sparing them these long
journeys to Jerusalem, and he would gratify their taste
for sensuous worship by letting them bow down before
their fathers' God under the image of the sacred calf of
Egypt. This, then, was the key of his whole system.
Whatever threatened this, threatened the throne for
which he had waited so long and suffered so much.
And now he had come down himself to open with royal
magnificence the new temple in this great border town
of Bethel.
This was the man, at this crisis of his reign, in this
very agony of his great device, whom the prophet of
God was sent down to confront, reprove, and humble.
Doubtless, as he trod that solitary upland road from
Judah unto Bethel, he forecast within himself all the
coming struggle. Doubtless he committed the keeping
of his soul to the God whose message he was bearing.
Doubtless as he drew near to Bethel, and thought of the
abominations which were turning the house of the Lord
into the house of shame, his heart burned within him with
righteous indignation. Doubtless there passed before
that opened eye visions of Jacob's communing at Bethel
8 Tht Prophets of tht Lord : [SERM.
with his fathers' God, of the ladder reaching up to
| heaven, of the altar of remembrance, and of all that God
had done there for the house of his fathers. All this
doubtless was given to him to nerve him for his work
of daring. See him thus prepared as he stands before
the king. He is not a mythical utterer of oracles, he
is a man of God ; he is a witness, a witness for the God
of Israel ; a witness against sin ; a man to whom the
mouth of the Lord has spoken, that he may witness in
his day, as you and I must witness in ours, against all
unrighteousness and wrong. And he bears his witness.
As before the great altar on the great feast-day of the
king's own devising the king's own arm is raised to
offer incense, from the dark unbidden form which, with
the freedom that eastern licence for the whole prophetic
family made possible, had thrust itself into the inmost
circle of worshippers there woke up the awful voice of
uttermost denunciation. It is the work of a moment,
and quick as thought the arm of the wrathful king is
stretched out to seize the prophet of evil, and the eager
cry "lay hold on him" interrupts the settled course of
the idol worship. Then Jehovah's power is seen. The
arm reached forth against His messenger cannot be
drawn back, and the doomed altar before the eyes of
all is rent asunder. Only when the king's pride is
humbled, and only in answer to the prophet's prayer,
is the withered arm restored.
One phase of the prophet's trial had passed by, but
another follows. He is bidden to the palace feast, and
offered a guerdon of royal gifts. But his faith endures,
he sternly rejects both, for it has been charged him " by
the word of the Lord eat no bread nor drink water, nor
turn again by the same way that thou earnest. So he
went another way." What a triumphant departure how
I.] The Prophet that " came out ofjudahr 9
soon, alas, to be turned into shame. For he who had borne
so much for the witness of Jehovah, whose ear had been
deaf alike to the threatenings and the bribes of the open
enemy of God, king though he was, listens self-deceived
to the old prophet's voice, who wanted, doubtless, to re-
fresh his own waning influence by the presence of the
man of God ; and who overtook him resting with linger-
ing step beneath a wayside tree instead of flying from
the city of destruction. He comes back, and eats the
forbidden bread and drinks the forbidden water, and at
once the soft suggestions of the tempter turn into the
stern utterances of the accuser and the judge, for the
dried-up bed of prophetic utterance in the old man
flows again with now unwonted words of prophecy as he
speaks God's sentence on His unfaithful messenger. To
that sentence, it seems, he humbly bows ; resumes, but
with how altered a spirit, the sadly interrupted journey
and in the roar of the lion which beset his way, heard
yet once again the voice of God's righteous jealousy for
the honour of His great Name.
So the history ends, not with dooming the man of God
to final rejection. The old prophet's craving to have his
own bones laid beside his victim's seems to say how far
more hope there was in such a death of chastisement
than in his own hollow life of falsehood ; and yet it does
end with a deeply mournful " Alas, my brother !" with
a fall from noble and high-souled obedience ; with the
tragedy of a sudden death of violence ; with a carcase
coming not into the sepulchre of his fathers ; with his
name dropped out of the record of the saints ; to shew
alike in his failure and in his success that the prophet
was a special witness of Jehovah, and must from first to
last discharge his high office, with all the glory or all
the loss of such a high companionship.
I o The Prophets of the L ord : [SER M.
Now from all this, surely, our great lessons are plain.
First. There is from the beginning of the history to
its end a witness of the presence with us all our life
through of the God of truth and righteousness. Surely
these words arc breathing everywhere, " God is a right-
eous Judge, strong and patient ; and God is provoked
every day." We can see how hidden at the time by
the throng of men's plans, passions, strivings, and sins
the veiled form is ever amongst them, overruling all,
judging all, succouring His own, most present with them
in their greatest need ; we can see the security of every
one who does indeed serve Him ; how danger and
threatening only make that security the more evidently
certain. We see the impotence of the greatest might
when it raises itself up against Him. We see how schemes
of the most subtle craftiness involve in themselves some
unforeseen element of failure if they have not God's
sanction ; and we may read for ourselves that the life
which looks the most prosperous and successful is, if
He is slighted or opposed in it, in very deed an utter,
certain, perpetual failure.
Again, beyond these general lessons there are one
or two of most searching specialty of application. For
next, II. How terribly distinct are the evil features
of the old prophet who dwelt at Bethel. What a his-
tory is his of illuminations of grace darkened ; of visit-
ings of the Spirit resisted and banished ; of the trans-
ition so easily accomplished from being a teacher to
being a seducer, from being a prophet of the Lord to
being a prophet of lies. Surely a terrible but a most
needful lesson. For where are there not these " old
prophets ?" Men who came up it may be to this Uni-
versity with some high purposes and true aspirations ;
who meant to witness for God but who have grown
I.] The Prophet that " came out of Judahr 1 1
cold, idle, indolent, sensual, or unbelieving ; who now
meet younger men who come up here what they once
were, and who meet them to destroy them ; who can
say, " I also am a prophet of the Lord, as thou art ;"
I had these high aims, but I found there was no main-
taining them ; who if not in open word, in not less open
deed, prophesy against a life of prayer, and watching,
and rule, and self-denial ; who have a sneer for Lenten
observances, and frequent services, and often commu-
nions, or for a life of purity, or for a simple childlike
faith in God's Word and in His Church ; who would
bring back escaped souls to eat bread and to drink
water in the resting-places of iniquity.
The teaching of such tempters is in very deed a doc-
trine of devils : and yet they abound, and do on all sides
their work of death. Everywhere respectable godless
elders, with a lowered standard and lying sneers, are
amongst men and women of all ages, in all professions,
and in none worse than in the holy ministry, the mur-
derers of souls. Such a man chills the prayers, disarms
the watchfulness, overcomes the scruples of others, and
so leads them to the brink of the pit ; and then, when
it may be they have fallen into some more overt iniquity
than that to which the teacher, with his cold tem-
perament and respectable habit of sinning, is himself
tempted, he is the first piously to fold his hands and
say his " alas, my brother !" over the souls that he has
slain. Terrible beyond all imagining in the great day
of the account will surely be the opening of the old pro-
phet's tomb ; terrible the rising up beside him of the
souls which he has slain.
III. And but once again. Is there not written as in
a legend of fire on this nameless tomb the glory or the
shame which must be the portion of every prophet of
12 The Prophets of the Lord. [SERM. I.
the Lord ? How great are his ventures, how grand his
triumphs, how irresistible his strength, how strict his
account. This it is, this it must be, to serve the Lord
of hosts, the jealous God. And this, my brother, is, as
a baptized man, thy service ; this must be thy risk. This
may be thy glory or thy fall. Oh let us be in earnest
in discharging it ! Let us watch and be sober. Let us
watch especially after successes. Let us beware of
resting under wayside trees. Let us press on. Let
this Lent see us crying mightily for God's grace ; aim-
ing blows at our besetting sins ; resolutely determining
to conquer some old evil, to win some new grace, to be
more than we have been, prophets, witnessing amongst
our brethren for the great God of righteousness, and
truth, and love.
SERMON II.
Mantel.
DANIEL xii. 10,
" Many will be purified, and made white, and tried ; but the
wicked will do wickedly: and none of the wicked will under-
stand ; but the wise will understand."
WE possess in the Old Testament what have been
described as the " remains of the ancient lite-
rature of the people of God." Their destiny involv-
ing indeed the blessing of the world seems primarily
brought before us in this sacred volume : it describes to
us, throughout, their origin, their development, their falls,
and their future. To a great extent no doubt they are
isolated, the people "dwell alone," and the special Reve-
lation of the heavenly will seems to be theirs.
But after many ages we reach an epoch in their his-
tory, and they are providentially placed in contact with
the outer world of the Gentiles ; and in one part of their
Scriptures which refers to that time, we learn that the
message of divine Revelation was, in some wise, brought
to the heathen. The great problem of human probation
was doubtless being worked out under other conditions
in previous ages, yet it is very slightly glanced at in the
Hebrew Scriptures until the chosen people had been
carried captive into Babylon ; but in the book of Daniel,
which dates from that captivity, it is broadly stated, and
may even be said to be, at first, its subject-matter.
14 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
The former half of this book, extending to the end of
the sixth chapter, covers the "seventy years" from the
siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar to Cyrus, and
these chapters bring into prominence the Babylonian
kings, and court, and people much more than their cap-
tives. It would almost seem as though the object of
the presence of the Jews in Babylon had been to force
their divine revelation on the attention of their con-
querors. Glance a moment at these first six chapters
of the prophet, reserving the remaining half of the book
at present.
The first chapter represents four Jewish youths, Daniel
and his friends, as trained for three years in the Chaldee
language and literature, and introduced to the royal pre-
sence. The second chapter, with no further preface, records
a dream of the heathen monarch, which had the result of
discrediting the Chaldean religion, and shewing that the
God of Israel was " God of gods and King of kings."
An interval then occurs, of many years. Nebuchadnezzar
had revisited Palestine, and destroyed the Temple of
God ; and returning home flushed with victory, forget-
ting his old dream, and probably despising his twice-sub-
dued captives, he inaugurated a stately idolatry on the
old site of Babel, the plains of Dura. The third chapter
tells us simply how this attempt issued in the discom-
fiture of idolatry, and the proclamation throughout the
empire, that honour should be given to the God of
heaven as the Ruler of nations. The chapter closes,
time passes, the captivity wears on, probation is pur-
suing its silent course, the same king is on the throne,
and there comes another Divine interference ; and this
is the subject of the fourth chapter. The king is cast
down, and is obliged at the end of his seven years'
humiliation to record the whole event, and say at the
II.] Daniel. \ 5
close, " now I Nebuchadnezzar praise and extol the God
of heaven, all Whose works are truth ; and those that
walk in pride He is able to abase." We hear no more
of that great monarch. At the end of another gene-
ration his grandson Belshazzar, who had been reigning
many years, is cast down, for his defiance of God. The
fifth chapter is wholly occupied with this ; and the sixth
completes the vindication of the Divine truth in the per-
son of the delivered Daniel, spared to watch all the
events of the seventy years, from first to last.
I. At this point, the middle of our prophet's roll, let
us pause, for we have here by itself a kind of whole. We
see the ancient Church, long separated from the rest of
the world, brought into contact with it by Providence, to
live and work with it a while : and we are here told no-
thing of the events during all that sojourn in Babylon,
except the sacred message brought, in such reiterated
and significant ways, to that mighty empire of hea-
thenism.
Those messages tell us that a great trial of men had
ever been, and was yet going on, though beyond the
pale of Revelation : doubtless " many had, from time to
time, been purified and tried, and the wicked had done
wickedly : and the wicked did not understand ; but the
wise did understand." We may well mark the varied
phases of human trial in that old-world probation, in its
governments, its religions, its disasters, and its revolu-
tions, as one by one they are laid out by the Prophet,
and here given for our instruction, in all these things,
as well as for the teaching of those to whom first the
lesson came.
i. For Government was a need of the world : it was
a part of the plan of man's probation on earth. Power-
ful rulers of the growing human family had risen, from
1 6 The Prophets of the L ord : [SERM .
the earliest days, proclaiming by their very existence
this great human need of organization and rule. The
development ought to have been good and wise, but
became corrupt and oppressive ; and the strong acquired
rule for the mere love of rule, and then followed the
brute desire of conquest for conquest's sake, until every-
where the social and moral ideal of patriarchal days
was unknown. Then the Nebuchadnezzars "dreamed,"
while the " darkness was over the face of the world."
Uncouth visions of false grandeur haunted the slumber
of the ages. Those " who would be great, and were
even called benefactors," aimed simply at "power,"
and the animal instinct of domineering strength super-
seded that higher moral aim, Government for the
good of all.
For mere love of power, as such, has injustice and
baseness in it ; it belongs rather to our inferior nature *,
and is repugnant to those rights of personal respon-
sibility which should be reverenced in every man. To
bring back to men the moral origin of social rule, the
moral meaning of government was a first necessity for
that oppressive heathendom. Thrones, sceptres, crowns,
were something more than aggrandisements of tyranny ;
and the mighty monarch of Babylon, and all around
him, needed to have that truth brought nigh to them ;
needed to have their waking hallucinations dissipated.
They were disturbed by their own dream, and seemed
to have lost the whole meaning of existence. The dream
was incoherent in its structure, a " head of gold," and
other parts of " brass and silver, iron and clay." This
The coarse popular maxim that "knowledge is power" is a sign of
the debased moral condition of many who aim to "know" not for the joy
of wisdom, but for the use to be had of certain knowledge in the struggles
of the lower life.
II.] Daniel. 1 7
could not last. A better Dominion for man was surely
in the Future. Now the sacred secret of this true rule for
men was that which alone would solve the dream which
the wisest of Chaldea could not even express. And this
was the Revelation now first brought to this world's con-
queror, that all true "power is of God." Nebuchad-
nezzar had come in contact with the people of God to
learn from their prophet that which none of his wisest
and best could teach him, the meaning of himself and
his high dreams : " Thou, O king, art a king of kings,
for the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, and
power, and strength, and glory ;" and the great Baby-
lonian felt perhaps for the first moment of his career
the moral meaning of his own position as he acknow-
ledged to the Hebrew captive : " Of a truth it is that
your God is a God of gods and a Lord of kings, and
a revealer of secrets, seeing that thou couldst reveal
this secret."
2. But it is not only to interpret the world's imperfect
dreams that the Church is sent into its midst. There
is that which is every-day reality, and no dream at all.
The world has always some object of homage of its own,
some lofty and overbearing Idolatry to which it would
compel worship. Its organized habit of life may be
changeable indeed from time to time ; it is not there-
fore any true result of conscientiousness, it even takes
the place of conscience, and for the time asserts de-
spotic sway over the individual. Sometimes it is yet
more systematic, and meddles directly in the province
of religious conviction. Perhaps the necessity of con-
trolling the untaught religious instincts of the multitude
led to the attempt in various ways to direct so powerful
an agency as religion. But sooner or later a true con-
science everywhere would have to refuse homage to the
C
1 8 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
" image of gold in the plain of Dura," and dare the
furnace. Now, to confront the world's idolatries aright,
and with success, this also was the captive Church's
sacred work.
But it was necessary that the worldly power, thus
overstepping its own limits, should be made to see and
feel that the opposition to its idolatry had something
more in it than bravery, something more than even
a conscientious heroism. And there was a grace in that
ancient Church of God that could achieve this. It not
only could resist for any stubborn zeal is equal to re-
sistance but it could touch the conscience of Nebu-
chadnezzar. Those three men were not alone in the
furnace of the persecutor, and he saw the fact ; tra-
dition, memory, fear, ill-treated conscience, all may have
quickened his gaze ; and " Lo, I see four men in the
midst," cried the amazed monarch, "and the form of
the fourth is like unto the Son of God." Yes, it is
God's grace to His true people that the light with
them which is divine, flashes, at such moments, even
on the conscience of the world, and wins the victory
for His truth.
3. But warnings against the heathen oppressions and
idolatries were not the only lessons which Israel taught
in Babylon. There was something more to be done
than interpreting the dreams, more than transitorily
touching the conscience of the world. Even the pros-
perities of empire, the action of government when doing
in a large measure its real work, must be regarded as
moral. There was something to be taught, then, far
beyond the elevation of first principles as to the use of
power, and even beyond the correction of conscience.
There might be " a tree whose top reached to heaven,"
and whose "leaves and fruit were fair, and the shadow
IT.] Daniel. 19
thereof was a refreshment for all," and yet when it was
surveyed by the "holy one and the watcher that came
down from heaven," it was seen to be a luxurious
growth, a social system unfavourable to the progress and
health of man, and at Heaven's bidding it might need
to be shorn of its secure luxuriance, not indeed de-
stroyed as yet, but " cut down," so " that it might
sprout again." From time to time, the truth must be
brought close to men by startling social events, that
there is a Special Providence in our highest affairs
a power constantly over our own a happy guidance
now, or now a severe Nemesis. There is a perpetual
Government of Heaven, and rulers, if wise, will learn
that they have a part under that Providence which orders
the world. If in the hour of present prosperity this is
forgotten, some disaster will soon mark the moral crisis,
and remind the world of the Higher Power than its own.
And thus was the king of Babylon in the greatness of
his glory struck down to the dust. Seven years of con-
fusion for his people, and humiliation for himself, taught
both him and them that there is a " Divinity that shapes
men's ways." He was overawed, he was made " wise,"
by the present Deity. " The wise shall understand."
4. But finally ; it is evident that there is a limit be-
yond which special providences may not adjust a decay-
ing civilization. Probation must not be superseded. And
there may come a time when what men call a Revolution,
a total change of the social condition, becomes a neces-
sity for human well-being. When luxury has reached
its fulness and the passions and selfishness of the powers
that are dominant are in full revelry, "their time is
come." It may be a reign of softness and indulgence,
so much acknowledged that history seems to pause on
its few materials. No furnace is lighted now for con-
C 2
20 Ttu Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
science ; no questions of conquest are stirred ; Belshaz-
zar's day is the close of a smoother prosperity. Daniel
had been practically forgotten and his friends out of
sight. The queen-mother remembered him, and in a
moment of perplexity thought that the prophet of God
might be of service. Religion, far from being perse-
cuted, was rather utilized by the court, and Daniel was
put forward " to interpret" a little, and promised a " gold
chain," and to be "third ruler in the kingdom." And
what of those past interferences of Heaven ? Are they
so forgotten that they have afresh to be brought to
mind ? And what of those past messages which the
king's ancestor had felt ? Are they subsided ? And
where those former dreams of greatness, and their in-
terpretation ? Linger they only as warnings which, un-
heeded, have but accumulated wrath ? Then, nothing
remains but to terminate a society and government so
powerless for all the high ends of human good. Nothing
remains but " Mene, mene, tekcl, upharsin," 'Thou art
weighed in the balance and found wanting !'
When that came to pass in that old heathen empire,
it was not only the ruler, but society itself, that had
become corrupt ; for no sooner had a Darius been placed
on the throne whence Belshazzar had fallen, than the
people and the courtiers would gladly have thrown God's
prophet to the lions only that God's work could not be
so undone by man. That seventy years of Hebrew cap-
tivity had been the seventy years of the closing pro-
bation of Babylon ; and the Median conqueror had to
begin by writing afresh the old decree, that " in all pro-
vinces of his kingdom men tremble and fear before the
God of Daniel, for He is the living God and stedfast for
ever, and His Kingdom that which shall not be de-
stroyed, and His Dominion shall be unto the end."
II.] Daniel. 2 \
Wont as we are to read those graphic stories of the
dreams of the Babylonian, and the fiery furnace, and
the den of lions, we may too easily lose sight of the
world-sent Revelation which they convey. We forget
that it was worth a long captivity of God's Church, to
bring to the world the lesson, that our probation here
is all watched, all subject to the plan of " Him Who
ruleth the armies of heaven, and among the inhabit-
ants of earth," all leading onwards to the Kingdom
"of righteousness, the Kingdom of the Son of Man."
And though now, awhile, the wicked are free "to do
wickedly, yet the wise may be purified, and the wise
may understand."
II. It is time that we turn now to the last half of
the prophet's book from the Revelation for Babylon
to Revelation for expectant Israel, as the close of her
captivity drew nigh, and the eyes of the faithful among
them were lifted to heaven for aid.
The remaining six chapters of Daniel are rather like
episodes than connected series, though they belong to
each other. Here we have visions, not of heathen
kings, but of the favoured prophet himself, interpreted
to him by an angel of God. There are, in the seventh
and eighth chapters, visions of events which were al-
ready beginning to unfold themselves ; and they are
expressed in mystic imagery, (familiar among the pro-
phets from Joel, Micah, and Isaiah onwards to the
Apocalypse ;) and the interpreting angel is here part
of the vision in each case. In the ninth and three con-
cluding chapters, we have what may be described as
four prolonged extatic interviews. In these, the more
immediate future of Daniel's own people, and the prin-
cipal object in the remote future, viz. the Kingdom of
22 The Prop/tets of the Lord: [SERM.
Messiah, are opened to the prophet. A symbolical lan-
guage of heaven seems used by Gabriel and by a super-
natural Personage, whose revelations were partly under-
stood, and partly such as " the prophet could not un-
derstand." Nor need we wonder, if those also who now
read what Daniel saw in vision, or in that angelical inter-
course, "understand but in part," if it appears by the
record itself that much of the meaning was intended
to be " closed up, to the time of the end."
The visions of the seventh and eighth chapters oc-
curred (we are first significantly reminded) early in the
reign of Belshazzar ; and this suggests that we should
mark what was the position of events when there were
yet some sixteen or eighteen years of captivity to run
out. Belshazzar succeeded two predecessors whose
brief careers had been cut short by Cyrus. That con-
queror did not proceed at once to take possession of the
empire of Babylon. There were other conquests to be
first made, and difficulties to be overcome, before he
would be ready for the final assault, for which both his
own prowess and Belshazzar's effeminacy were pre-
paring the way. Causes both moral and dynastic were
at work, and the anxious Israelites and their prophets
and elders must have been intent on the issue. Daniel
saw at this crisis, in the " deep sleep" which fell on him,
the approaching break-up of the empire of Babylon :
but he saw more. He saw that there was no hope after
that event, of such immediate triumph for his people
as he had longed for. Beyond the coming kingdoms of
Media and Persia and Grecia, which are described by
name, a long vista of other monarchies, and events of
a remoter future, are spread out and so described that
Daniel could understand nothing but the great post-
ponement of the final glory. It was all to be "shut
II.] Daniel. 23
up," for it was to be " for many days," and the prophet
"fainted, and was sick." "His cogitations troubled
him," and "his countenance changed V
It appears, however, from the ninth and following
chapters, that notwithstanding this heavenly teaching
as to the delay of the kingdom of Messiah, the
prophet hung over the possibility that prayer might
find such favour with God, at the end of the se-
venty years, that events might yet "be shortened."
He had pondered the prophecy of Jeremiah, and "he
set his face to seek the Lord God " with renewed
fasting and supplication, as set forth in the ninth
chapter. This was probably just after his encouraging
deliverance from the den of lions. As some answer to
his prayer, he lived to see the decree of Cyrus issued,
and slightly acted on ; but his grander hopes were. not
gratified c . The same angel whom he had seen in vision,
early in Belshazzar's reign, revisited him once more,
giving the prophet in yet stronger terms God's message
to him, that the "time was long," "seventy weeks"
of years. Daniel fully understood this, he says, at
last ; but he " mourned three full weeks d ."
The prophet revived from this inaction in consequence
of some mysterious strength communicated to him ; but
the extatic state continued. It is described as a being
touched by One " like unto the similitude of the sons of
men," which enabled him to listen to the angel's talk.
In great amazement he watches while the story of the
" times of the end" is unrolled, until he is able to see no
more, and he is told to " shut the book." He says, " I
heard and understood not" The certain future of the
Divine plan, and his own peace, are all that he is able
to discern. And thus the prophetic visions end : " Go
b Dan. vii. 15, 28; viii. 17, 27. Ibid. xii. 6. rt Ibid. x. i, 2.
24 The Prophets of the Lord: [SERM.
thy way, Daniel, for thou shalt rest and stand in thy
lot at the end of the days ."
i. Who sees not here, in this contrast between the first
and the second parts of this prophet, that while present
duty and past failure fill the revelation to Babylon, the
Future, nothing but the Future, is set before the heart
and mind of God's Israel ? Alike before the old world
and before God's people, there lay the one same great
future all events must lead up to that " the Kingdom
that cannot be moved," " the Throne of the Son of Man,"
the Eternity of the "Ancient of days :" but the world has
to pause, and in some sense be passive, in its outer
court ; the people of God must reach onward, according
to the law of a spiritual life.
The first half of our prophet's book deals with no
details of the world's remote future, save only that it
foretells that " Kingdom of God." Its message was to
the present conscience, for present duty, in the scheme
of moral Providence. But the second half of the
book has, very gradually, to open to our faith an
unknown Future. It begins with present events, and
those already springing out of them. But as the pros-
pect lengthens the imagery grows more dim, and the
description more intricate. Still Daniel is able, not-
withstanding his depression, to follow for a time the
angel's teaching. At length, it becomes too hard for
mortal mind, and he fails. As the scene fades off into
the future, the language becomes more mystical, the
scope for human responsibility more wide. Much might
appear certain, when seen at the river Ulai, which had
a halo of the Son of Man when transfigured at Hid-
dekel f . And then the Ministry of Angels in the future
providential dealings with the world is sublimely spoken
c Dan. xi., xii. ' Ibid. viii. 16 ; x. 7 10.
II.] Daniel. 25
of, as never before. The mystery of Evil, as interfering
for a time with the plans of good, strikes down the pro-
phet's soul. He found there would be hindrances in the
invisible world as well as in the visible more things
done than were " dreamt of in man's philosophy."
Angels could only speak in their own angelic way of
those frustratings for a while of the Church's future.
Gabriel said, that certain pending issues had to be
waited for, before he could do his part : and after this,
all subsequent events swim before the eye of man as in
a mist. One thing is clear in the farthest distance,
alike to the vision of Nebuchadnezzar and the vision
of Daniel : the final overthrow of this world's empires,
and the final glory of the empire of God, " the King-
dom that cannot be moved."
2. And let us learn the great lesson for the Church,
which is indeed our own, while moving onwards to that
Day, when they " that are wise shall shine as the sun,
and as stars for ever ;" (to which our glorious Master
adds, they shall "shine in the Kingdom of their Father.")
Ten thousand thousand incidents of that Future must,
to the last, wait on human wills. Nor let us be seduced
by heathenish soothsaying, to think that things are so
fixed beforehand as to anticipate man's Responsibility.
It has been the snare of the Evil one in every age to
persuade rnen to regard the future as mechanically or-
dered, and not morally. No falsehood of power more
truly diabolical than that of fixed Predestination of
moral issues has ever been imposed on bewildered con-
science. For it was true to the heathen monarch, that
he might have "lengthened his tranquillity by repent-
ance g ." It was true to the prophet of God, that the
seventy years of His people's captivity might need to
s Dan. iv. 27.
26 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
be followed by seven times seventy years of further
trial, before the glorious end should come as foretold h .
It was true to the angel of heaven, that the "prince
of the power of the air" might withstand him, and hin-
der his work, " for twenty-one days '."
Faith is guided by the visionary index of the angel's
finger. It assures us, from a loftier view than ours, of
the glorious end towards which all is morally working,
beneath the eye of God. Things at no time proceed at
random : at all times they work both according to the
lower wills, and the higher plan. And " the crises and
seasons are in the Father's power," though not expres-
sible according to created forms of finite knowledge.
'Not even the Son,' (as St. Athanasius says k ,) 'in His
creatureship, could know the unfixed future.' He only
Who knows all the possibilities of being can have clear
and sure design as to the future of moral agency. While
in these visions of God panorama after panorama passes
before the prophet's faith, it may be that extatic sense
alone could discern all that he saw, and that the mea-
surements of the future may have to do with other
than earthly modes of thought ; while yet enough is
apprehended to mark the heavenly chronology, and
teach both the prophet and us the lesson of a real
Divine arrangement.
3. Even to the most passing gaze the representation of
this volume of our prophet has a marvellous unity and
order, in itself, and harmony with all the revelations of
God. It does the inspired work for the world and for the
Church alike ; aweing the world to its present duty, and
raising to the future (" in the Father's power") the faith
of His elect. Those mighty monarchies, and their huge
struggles of old ; the working in them (as they knew)
11 Dan. ix. 23, 24. ' Ibid. x. 12, 13. > Contr. Ar., iii. 28.
II.] Daniel. 27
of human wills, and also (as the prophet saw) of evil
" spirits of the air ;" the parallel fact, co-existing with
the outer world's probation, of a chosen people working
out a heavenly design, then, their intermingling with
the outer world's empires even to the end ; and the
coming of the Kingdom of Righteousness, and the Ever-
lasting KING ! who feels not, while he sees this tu-
multuous ocean of moral being as if tossing and foam-
ing around him, that there comes to him a sound across
the flood, of " Everlasting Life" for some, and " Ever-
lasting Shame and Contempt" for others! Who feels
not, as he grows in emotion while he reads, that he
himself has a personal interest in all this ! Who feels
not that he will have to stand in his own immortal lot,
" at the end of the days ! "
" Many will be purified and made white and tried ;
and the wicked will do wickedly : and none of the
wicked will understand, but the wise will understand."
Abide calmly, O believer, with the prophet and the
angel and the Son of Man, " to the end of these won-
ders." "Angels, principalities, powers, all are thine, if
thou art Christ's," for " Christ is God's." It is thou
who shalt "stand in thy lot," "purified," and by trial
"made white !"
"... And when the mighty ones go forth,
And from the east, and from the north,
Unwilling ghosts shall summon'd be
I in thy lot would stand with thee ! "
SERMON III.
Jercmtafj,
JEEEMIAH i. 18,
" Behold I have made thee this day a defenced city, and an iron
pillar, and brasen walls against the whole land, against the
kings of Judah, against the princes thereof, against the priests
thereof, and against the people of the land."
THERE are two prophets in the Hebrew Canon of
Holy Scripture, whose history and writings may
best be studied in connexion, as mutually illustrative of
each other. Both of them were priests as well as pro-
phets ; both foretold the destruction of Jerusalem by
the armies of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon ; both
were contemporary with that event ; both survived it.
The one dwelt among Hebrew exiles and captives at
the river Chebar in Babylonia, and echoed the voice
of the other, prophesying at Jerusalem. Both were
signal types of the Lord of all the prophets, the Incar-
nate Word of God ; both pre-announced the graces and
glories of His Advent, and the building up of His Church
Universal ; both are exemplary and instructive to all,
especially to pastors and priests of the Church of Christ,
who are commissioned to maintain and to declare the
truth in evil days, and to cheer fainting hearts with
hopes of future victories, and who, though feeble in
themselves, are assured of strength and support from
above, if they are faithful witnesses to Him Who has
called them to their work.
3O The Prophets of the Lord: [SERM.
One of these two prophets is Jeremiah : the other
Ezekiel.
It is my purpose now to speak of the former : the
latter will claim our attention on another occasion.
The prophetic mission of Jeremiah at Jerusalem lasted
about forty years, dating from the thirteenth year of the
good King Josiah a , and closing with the fall of Jeru-
salem in the eleventh year of his son Zedekiah.
These forty years of probation granted to Jerusalem,
during Jeremiah's prophetic ministry, may be compared
with the forty years, beginning with our Lord's mission
inaugurated at the river Jordan, and continued in His
Apostles sent by Him and filled by the Holy Ghost
given by Him from heaven, and preaching of coming
judgments to Jerusalem, until the time of its destruc-
tion by the armies of imperial Rome.
After the capture of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans,
Jeremiah prophesied in a heathen land, Egypt ; and,
similarly, after the destruction of Jerusalem by the
Romans, the prophetic work of Christ was extended to
the heathen world.
There is no Hebrew prophet with whose personal
character and history we are so intimately acquainted
as Jeremiah. And yet the time, place, and manner of
his death are not known. He vanishes from the sight
in a mysterious manner. The Jewish rabbis supposed
that he would re-appear as a herald of the Messiah 1 *,
and in the ancient Christian Church it was a prevalent
opinion, that Jeremiah would come again in the latter
days to fight against Antichrist c .
There is a moral significance in these popular tradi-
B.C. 627. Jer. i. 2, xxv. 3. b Cp. Matth. xvi. 14.
" Victorinus Pet., in Apocalypsim, xi. 3; Sixtus Senensis, Bibl. Sanct.,
vi. ann. 346 ; Neumann, Einlfit., pp. 68 72.
III.] Jeremiah. 3 r
tions. The spirit which animated Jeremiah still breathes
and moves in all faithful witnesses, who prepare the way
for the Second Coming of Christ ; and among the pro-
phets of the Old Dispensation none affords more
instruction than Jeremiah, both by his history and
writings, how they may best contend against the Anti-
christianism of the last times.
Let us contemplate him in this light.
I. First, then, we may observe that Jeremiah teaches
us to plant our feet firmly on the solid and sure founda-
tion of God's written Word.
You are aware that it has been alleged by some in
our own days, especially by one d , who has revived in
England the sceptical speculations of some Biblical
critics of Germany e , that Jeremiah, being a priest, and
having easy access to the Temple, and whose father's
name was Hilkiah, (supposed by them to be the same
Hilkiah the high-priest who is related in the Second
Book of Kings to have found the Book of the Law in
the Temple in the reign of Josiah f ,) was himself the
writer of the book which was said to have been found
there, and that the book in question was no other than
the Book of Deuteronomy, which the Hebrew and
Christian Churches have agreed for many centuries in
attributing to Moses, and which was received as the
genuine work of Moses by Christ and His holy Apostles.
Such theories as these, however groundless they may
be, yet have their uses to the reverent and thought-
ful student of Holy Writ The allegations just speci-
fied may serve to remind us of an important truth. Not
only is there in fact a striking resemblance between the
prophecies of Jeremiah and the Book of Deuteronomy,
d Bishop Colenso. e Von Bohlen, De Wette, and others. See the
Author's Introduction to Deut., pp. 195 201. f 2 Kings xxii. 8.
32 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
but the spirit of Moses lived and moved in Jeremiah *.
Jeremiah's mission began as the mission of Moses began,
and as the mission of all true prophets begins in a con-
fession of personal weakness, and in words of humility :
44 Ah ! Lord God, behold I cannot speak, for I am
a child h ." Jeremiah's prophecies are impregnated with
the Pentateuch. Many of the phrases and portions of
them are not intelligible without reference to it, espe-
cially the Book of Deuteronomy '. The Book of Deu-
teronomy is like that written roll, of which his brother
prophet Ezekiel speaks, which he was commanded to
take into his hands and eat k . Deuteronomy was such
a roll to Jeremiah. He took it and ate it. It passed
* Compare Genesis i. 2 ; Jer. iv. 23 : Gen. i. 28 ; Jer. iii. 16 : Gen. vi.
7; Jer. ix. 9 : Gen. viii. 22 ; Jer. xxxi. 36 : Gen. xi. 3 ; Jer. li. 25, &c. : Gen.
xv. 5 ; Jer. xxxiii. 22, cap. xxxiv. : Gen. xviii. 14 ; Jer. xxxii. 17 : Gen.
xix. 15 ; Jer. li. 6, 50 : Gen. xix. 25 ; Jer. xx. 16 : Gen. xxv. 26 ; Jer. ix.
3: Gen. xxx. 18, 20; Jer. xxxi. 16, 17: Gen. xxxvii. 35, xlii. 36; Jer.
xxxi. 15 : Gen. xlix. 17 ; Jer. viii. 16.
Compare Exodus iv. 10, &c. ; Jer. i. 6, 7, xv. 19: Exod. vii. 14; Jer.
1. 33 : Exod. xvi. 9 ; Jer. xxx. 21 : Exod. xx. 8, xi. ; Jer. xvii. 21 : Exod.
xxii. 2O ; Jer. v. 28 : Exod. xxxii. 9 ; Jer. vii. 26 : Exod. xxxii. 16 ; Jer.
xvii. i : Exod. xxxiv. 7 ; Jer. xxx. II, xxxii. 18.
Compare Leviticus xiii. 45 ; Thr. iv. 15 : Lev. xix. 12 ; Jer. v. 2 : Lev.
xix. 16 ; Jer. vi. 28, ix. 3 : Lev. xix. 27 ; Jer. ix. 25 : Lev. xix. 32 ; Lam.
v. 12 : Lev. xxvi. 6; Jer. xiv. 13: Lev. xxvi. 13; Jer. ii. 20: Lev. xxvi.
33 ; Jer. iv. 27.
Compare Numbers v. n 31 ; Jer. ii. : Numb. vi. 5, &c. ; Jer. vii. 29 :
Numb. xvi. 22; Jer. xxxii. 27: Numb. xxi. 6; Jer. viii. 17 : Numb. xxi.
28, xxiv. 17, &c. ; Jer. xlviii. 45, 46, xlix. 16 : Numb. xxiv. 14, 16 ; Jer.
xxvi. 8, 9 : Numb, xxxvi. 7, 8 ; Jer. vi. 12, viii. IO.
" Vides, nullam Pentateuchi esse partem, quin in usum vocata sit. Sinuil
consequitur, omnia, quae de lege divina antiquitus data apud Prophetam
dicantur, ad Pentateuchum referenda esse, ita ut Jeremia- saltern .ttate
Judceis nihil de posteriori legis origine compertum esse potuerit." Kueper,
Jeremias Librorum Satrontm Interpres atque 1'index, p. 48. Berlin, 1837.
k Jer. i. 6 ; compare the words of Moses, Exod. iv. IO, vi. 12, 30.
1 See the excellent work of Aug. Kueper just quoted, and Konig, das
Deuteronornium it. d. Prophet Jeremia, Berlin, 1839; Delitszch on the
Psalms, p. 606, ami on Isaiah, p. 27.
k Ezek. iii. I ; for example, ii. 19. 34, vi. 2, &c.
in.] Jeremiah, 33
into his very life-blood, and assimilated itself to his
whole spiritual being. Jeremiah had a special mission
to shew to the Hebrew nation that the Pentateuch had
a living power for himself and for his own age. He
throws himself back upon the Law, and grounds him-
self upon it ; he appeals to its code as a divine standard
of moral and spiritual truth ; and he declares that the
curses for disobedience which had been denounced in
Deuteronomy nearly a thousand years before were now
growing up and springing forth in vigorous energy, and
were about to be fulfilled in all their terrible reality.
But he also comforts them with the assurance that the
promises made in Deuteronomy would be accomplished,
if they turned to God with contrite hearts. Hence the
prophecies of Jeremiah ring with a clear note of power
which sounded forth in the book of the Law at Horeb
and in the wilderness of Arabia.
2. A like use may be made of another sceptical
allegation of modern times, with regard to Jeremiah's
prophecies.
It has been observed with truth, that a great portion
of these predictions, especially those concerning Baby-
lon, Moab, and Edom, are reiterations or amplifications
of the prophecies of his great predecessor Isaiah.
Hence it has been inferred by some, that either the
prophecies of Isaiah were interpolated by the author of
those predictions in Jeremiah, or that those prophecies
in Jeremiah are due to an unknown author whom some
critics dignify by the name of "the second Isaiah 1 ;"
but who never had any existence m .
1 For an account of these theories of De \\ 7 ette, Eichhorn, Ewald, Hit-
zig, Movers, and others, see Havernick, Einleit., pp. 223 236 ; Keil, Ein-
hit- 75 ; Kueper, 79 98, 106155.
m See the Author's Introd. to Isaiah, pp. xvi. xxi.
D
34 The Prophets of the Lord : [sERM.
Such theories as these vanish before the light of truth.
Jeremiah, in the latter days of Jerusalem, stood forth
in the midst of an unbelieving age, and asserted the
divine authority of the written Word. He affirmed
the Inspiration of Holy Scripture, and he did this by
repeating the solemn accents of the Law and the Pro-
phets, especially of Isaiah n . He did it by adopting
those accents as utterances of the Holy Spirit, by
Whom he himself spake ; and by recalling the mind of
a rebellious nation to their commands and threatenings,
and in endeavouring to disabuse his contemporaries at
Jerusalem of the fond presumption, that because they
enjoyed great spiritual privileges, and were inhabitants
of the holy city, and had access to the courts of the
Temple , and offered sacrifices there, and observed
the forms of its Ritual, they would be saved from the
sword of Babylon ; and in warning them that all the
threatenings of the Law and the Prophets would now
be executed upon their own heads p by the Chaldean
armies, if they did not shew their reverence for God
and His Holy Word, by confessing their sins, and by
humbling themselves before Him, and by practical
amendment of life.
Jeremiah, in the last days of Jerusalem, discharged
a sacred office in repeating and authenticating the pro-
phetic oracles of former generations. By his ministry
the Holy Spirit gathered together His own words,
uttered by former prophets, and gave them new life
and light. Jeremiah's prophecies are like a beautiful
tessellated pavement, in which the enamelled glass-
work, and precious stones, and rich jewels of divine
" Sec Caspari, Jrrcniia ein Zftige f. See on Jer. xlviii. i. r Matt. iv. i 10.
D 2
36 The Prophets of the Lord: [SERM.
ders it specially instructive and exemplary to the cham-
pions of the truth in days of trial and distress.
It has been alleged, that some of the prophetic por-
tions of Holy Scripture which foretell the sufferings of
Christ, especially the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah ', and
the sixty-ninth Psalm l , have no reference to Jesus of
Nazareth, but were fulfilled in the person of Jeremiah.
True it is, that the language of that fifty-third chapter
of Isaiah, and of that sixty-ninth Psalm, had a remark-
able applicability to Jeremiah. But why was this ? Be-
cause Jeremiah was not only a prophet, but a prophecy.
Jeremiah is among the prophets what Job is among the
patriarchs". Jeremiah is the suffering- prophet. He
was a signal type of "the Man of sorrows." He was
a figure of Him who suffered on the cross, and who
conquered by suffering.
When therefore we read in Isaiah, "He is brought
as a lamb to the slaughter" ;" and when we hear Jere-
miah saying, " I was a lamb brought to the slaughter r ;"
and when we hear the Psalmist say, " I sink in deep
mire where is no standing 7 ," and "let not the pit shut
her mouth upon me ;" and when we read of Jeremiah
the prophet, that " they took him and cast him into
the dungeon or rather the pit (it is the same word in
the original as in the Psalm, and is repeated no less
than six times in the seven verses of that narrative con-
Runsen, Ewald ; see the Author's Commentary on Isaiah liii.,
Prelim. Note. ' Ilitzig.
" As the writer has endeavoured to shew in his Introduction to the Book
of Job, p. xii. Jeremiah is called by the Christian fathers the iroAi/ira0'isf., 298; and this qualified
him to be what he is also called by them, the <7y/tnra0/ Ibid. xvii. 15. m Ibid. xii. I. " Ibid. xv. 18.
4O T/tf Prophets of t lie Lord: [SERM.
the prophetic office, and had not desired to be a mes-
senger of woe to his people", and that he had been
constrained to utter his prophecies by the overpowering
force of God. " I said, I will not make mention of
Him, nor speak any more in His Name. But His
word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in
my bones, and I was weary with forbearing and could
not stay. For I heard the defaming of many, fear on
every side. All my familiars watched for my halting p ."
And in a moment of despondency and anguish of soul,
like another Job, he cursed the day of his birth :
"Cursed be the day wherein I was born; let not the day
wherein my mother bare me be blessed. Cursed be the
man who brought tidings to my father, saying, A man
child is born unto thee ; making him very glad 1."
Nor was this all. Jeremiah was commanded to go
forth and declare God's sternest judgments on Jeru-
salem ; and yet he was a man of the most loving spirit,
and tender affection. His heart was well-nigh bursting
with sorrow when he thought of the terrible message
which he was ordered to deliver. What a wonderful
4
depth of sympathy is there in that piteous ejaculation,
" Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain
of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain
of the daughter of my people r !"
5. Brethren, these things are full of instruction to our-
selves. Each of us, whatever our calling, has a com-
mission from God. Each has a message from Him to
deliver, in evil days. In a certain sense, we are all
Jeremiahs. And this is specially true with regard to
some among us. You, my younger hearers, who are
candidates for the sacred ministry, will often feel as he
felt. You may often find yourselves saying within
Jer. xvii. \(\ v H>j,]. X x. 9, to. 1 Ibid. xx. 14. ' Ibid. ix. I.
III.] Jeremiah. 41
yourselves, " I am a child and cannot speak." When
you are called upon to encounter dangerous error and
to reprove deadly sin ; when it is your duty to stand
forth as Jeremiah among the many, the powerful, and
the great ; whenever it is your mission to denounce God's
judgments upon that dangerous error or deadly sin,
although that error and sin may be patronized by some
who are greatly your superiors in age and station, and,
it may be, in intellectual gifts, and literary and scien-
tific attainments, you may then perhaps feel your heart
sink within you, and may ask yourself the question,
Who am I that I should do this ? You may long to
retire from your post at Anathoth or Jerusalem, and
may sigh for some lodge in the wilderness s . You may
perhaps be tempted to repine at your lot, and even
to murmur at God, for calling you to the priestly and
prophetical office ; and to arraign the dispensations of
His providence in allowing wickedness to prosper, and
in seeming to forsake His ministers, and to allow His
truth to fail. Do not be surprised at this. Strange it
would be, if in times of severe trial such emotions as
these did not sometimes arise within you. They were
felt by Jeremiah. But remember him : think of his
sufferings. He stood alone in a godless age. God did
not allow him to take to himself a partner of his sor-
rows. He had no wife to comfort him l , as Isaiah had u .
His own flesh and blood forsook him. His own fellow-
townsmen of Anathoth sought his life and hooted at him
in the streets x , and went about to kill him as a false
prophet. He was smitten and put in the stocks by
Pashur, who had chief authority in the house of God.
The sanguinary King Jehoiakim sought his life, and
' Jer. ix. 2. ' Ibid. xvi. 2. u Isa. vii. 3, viii. 3.
r Jer. xi. 1921, xii. 6.
42 The Prophets of the L ord : [s E R M.
the weak and vacillating Zedekiah surrendered him to
his enemies. At first some of the princes interceded
for him ; but they also forsook him, and conspired with
the priests and false prophets against him. At the
close of his forty years' mission, when the Chaldeans
were at the gates, and Jerusalem was near her fall, they
cast the prophet into the pit, or cistern, of the state
prison, and left him there to sink in the mire and
starve. And the only person in the holy city, Jeru-
salem, who was found to have pity on God's prophet
Jeremiah was a stranger, an Ethiopian eunuch, Ebed-
melech.
Observe now this. Jeremiah's words of weakness,
timidity, and impatience belong to the earlier stage of
his career. As his sufferings became more intense he
received more grace from God, and gained fresh cou-
rage, and derived inspiration from difficulty and dan-
ger. As time passed on, he who once himself had
faltered was enabled to encourage others. His dear
friend and secretary, Baruch, seems to have been a per-
son of honourable family ; Baruch's brother Seraiah at-
tained to a high position as chamberlain >' in the court
of Zedekiah, and enjoyed the royal favour ; and Baruch
appears to have had some ambitious desires, and to
have aspired to advancement in public life. But his
connexion with Jeremiah, the stern reprover of courtly
and princely vices, frustrated his hopes and obstructed
his rise. Baruch was a faithful and steadfast friend to
Jeremiah, and executed his commands in writing and
reading the prophetic roll which denounced woe on the
princes and people of Jerusalem 2 . Baruch's life was
threatened as well as that of Jeremiah ; and he mur-
mured for the failure of all earthly hopes, and he shrank
> See l>clow on Jcr. li. 59 6l. * Jer. xxxvi. 4 32.
III.] Jeremiah. 43
back with fear, and said, " Woe is me ! the Lord hath
added grief to my sorrow : I fainted in my sighing, and
I found no rest a ." Then Jeremiah assured him of pro-
tection, and consoled him for the loss of worldly ad-
vancement: "Seekest thou great things for thyself? seek
them not b ."
6. Yet further, Jeremiah the prophet of suffering, not
only was enabled by God to triumph over difficulty
and danger, and to give comfort to his own friends in
distress, but he was also a divine minister of consola-
tion and joy to the whole Hebrew nation, whether in
the city of Jerusalem or scattered throughout the world.
He cheered them with bright hopes of the future, and
with glorious promises of Him, Whose Gospel was to go
forth from Zion to gladden the hearts of all nations.
And it is surely a marvellous thing, that the most
glowing prophecies of Jeremiah, concerning the future
triumphs of the Gospel of Christ, and the glory of
God's Church, (which was to have its origin at Jeru-
salem,) and the infinite joy and eternal splendours of
the coming kingdom of Christ c : all blaze forth from
the darkest cloud of the woes of Jerusalem, and from
the thickest darkness of Jeremiah's sufferings. The
midnight of his human sorrow was the noonday of his
prophetic glory. The twenty-eighth to the end of
the thirty-third chapters of Jeremiah, which foretel the
graces of the Incarnation of the Son of God, and our
justification in Him who is "the LORD our RIGHTE-
OUSNESS d ;" and the extension of the Church of God
from Jerusalem to enfold all nations ; and the eternal
monarchy and priesthood of Christ 6 ; and His victory
over sin and death ; and our resurrection to glory
a Jer. xlv. 3. b Ibid. xlv. 5- e See on Jer. xxxi. 22.
d See on Jer. xxxiii. 16 ; cp. xxiii. 6. e Jer. xxxiii. 17 22.
44 The Prophets of the Lord : [SKRM.
through Him'; and the spiritual graces of His Church ;
and the pouring forth of the Holy Spirit ; and the
blessings of the new Covenant of grace, and love, and
peace", all belong to the last days of Jerusalem, when
the magnificent fabric of its Temple was about to sink
into the dust, and its walls and princely palaces were
about to be thrown prostrate on the ground.
Whence was this light from darkness ?
It was the work of God's grace, given to the pro-
phet's prayer, and working together with his will.
The name of Jeremiah, like that of the other Hebrew
prophets' 1 , is significant. Some have supposed that it
implies that he was exalted by the Lord 1 . Others assert
with more probability that it means set by the Lord,
as a solid foundation ; or sent forth by the Lord, as
lightning from the cloud, or as an arrow from a bow k .
Whichever etymology we adopt, the name Jeremiah
intimates, that whatever he did and whatever he suf-
fered, all was from tlic Lord. The Lord worked in
him, and by him. The Lord had said to him, " Thou
shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I
command thee thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of their
faces : I am with thee to deliver thee. I have set thee
over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out,
to pull down and destroy, and to throw down, to build
and to plant. Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and
arise, and speak unto them all that I command thee :
be not dismayed at their faces, lest I confound thee be-
fore them. For behold I have made thee a defcnced city,
' Sec Jer. xxxi. 15 17. * Ibid. xxxi. 30, 31.
k Enoch, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Joel, Micah, Nahum, Malachi.
1 S. Jerome, Simonis, Ililler, Venema ; sec Neumann, Jercmias von
Anathoth, p. 8.
k (icsenius, 369 ; cp. Carpzov., fntr., p. 130.
III.] Jeremiah. 45
and an iron pillar, and a brasen wall against the whole
land, against the kings of Judah, against the princes
thereof, against the priests thereof, and against the peo-
ple of the land. And they shall fight against thee, but
they shall not prevail against thee, for I am with thee,
saith the Lord, to deliver thee 1 ."
This was the mission of Jeremiah, and he had grace
to accomplish it ; he stood firm for forty years, alone
in a rebellious and godless nation of adversaries and
persecutors. He was set by God's hand as a solitary
beacon on a lofty tower, in a dark night, in a stormy
sea ; lashed by waves and winds, but never shaken from
his foundations. He was insulted, mocked, beaten and
imprisoned. His warnings were despised and rejected,
but they were the words of God ; his prophecy con-
cerning the false prophet Hananiah m , his prophecies
concerning the last four kings of Judah Shallum, Je-
coniah, Jehoiakim, and Zedekiah", were all exactly
fulfilled in his own age ; his predictions that Egypt, to
whom the kings of Judah resorted for aid against Ba-
bylon, would not be able to succour her ; and that
Jerusalem would be destroyed by the Chaldeans, and
that Egypt itself would be subdued by them p , were
accomplished in his own times. The armies of Babylon,
w r ho burned the Temple and the city of Jerusalem, wrote,
as it were, in characters of fire the evidence of Jere-
miah's mission from God. Jeremiah was strengthened
by these proofs of his own divine legation ; but he was
not elated by the abundance of his revelations, and by
these signal tokens of God's special favour to him. No ;
though as a prophet he had been strengthened by God,
1 Jer. i. 7 19; cp. vi. 27, xv. 20, 21. m Ibid, xxviii. I 17.
n Ibid. xxii. I 30. Ibid. xxv. 19, xxxvii, 5 10. P Ibid.
xliii. 2 19, xliv. 29, 30.
46 The Prophets of the Lord. [SERM. III.
and raised to a lofty eminence above all his contem-
poraries in Jerusalem, yet he still felt as before. He
was still the same tender-hearted and sympathising
man, the same loyal subject, and the same devoted
patriot. His own sufferings made him more compas-
sionate for those of others. The destruction of Jeru-
salem was the proof of his mission from heaven, but after
that terrible catastrophe, Jeremiah went down from the
heights of Mizpah, to which he had been conducted by
Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, and he there sat down on
the ground as a mourner amid the ruins of Sion, and
poured forth his Lamentations over her.
SERMON IV.
EZEKIEL i. 13.
" Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month,
in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by
the river of Ohebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw
visions of God. In the fifth day of the month, which was the
fifth year of king Jehoiachin's captivity, the word of the Lord
came expressly unto Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, in the
land of the Chaldeans by the river Ohebar ; and the hand of the
Lord was there upon him."
names of the Hebrew prophets have a sacred
-*- significance. Of the four greater prophets, two
prophesied at Jerusalem Isaiah and Jeremiah ; and
two prophesied in Babylonia Ezekiel and Daniel. The
names of the two who prophesied at Jerusalem, Isaiah
and Jeremiah, are compounded with the divine Name
JAII or JEHOVAH, the appellation of God as the Lord
of the covenanted people, Israel. The names of the
other two prophets, Ezekiel and Daniel, who prophesied
in the land of Babylon the great Empire of the world
as distinguished from Sion, the Church of God, are
compounded with the sacred Name EL, which desig-
nates God in His universal supremacy as Creator and
Ruler of all things, and which bears the same relation
to ELOHIM as JAH does to JEHOVAH.
This assignment of names to these four great He-
brew seers was providential. As we have already
48 The Prophets of the Lord: [SERM.
seen, Jeremiah reiterates and authenticates the words
of Isaiah, and, as may readily be shewn, not only did
the prophet Daniel at Babylon and at Susa study the
book of Jeremiah and refer to it in his own prophecies*,
and act upon the revelations made therein, and thus set
his own seal upon the writings of Jeremiah, but the pro-
phecies of Ezckicl are like a responsive echo b to those
of Jeremiah. Both Jeremiah and Ezekiel were priests
as well as prophets. Jeremiah is the prophet of the
tenderest affections, Ezekiel is the prophet of the most
fervid imagination ; Jeremiah is more than the Euri-
pides, Ezekiel is more than the ^Eschylus, of Hebrew
prophecy. Ezekiel, at the river Chebar in northern
Mesopotamia, bore witness to the divine utterance
which came from Jeremiah at Jerusalem. The prophet
Jeremiah at Jerusalem was set there by God to be
a faithful witness in an evil generation : " I have made
thee to be a defenced city, an iron pillar, and brasen
walls against the whole land, against the kings of Judah,
the princes, and the priests, and the people of the land c ."
And to the prophet Ezekiel, among the Hebrew cap-
tives in Babylonia, God said, " Behold, I have made thy
face strong against their face, and thy forehead strong
against their foreheads ; as an adamant harder than
flint have I made thy forehead ; fear them not, neither
be dismayed d ." The two prophets stood like two oppo-
site cliffs hanging over intervening straits such as
Calpe and Abyla, or Sestos and Abydos, confronting
one another, rising above the swell of the ocean, and
dashed upon by a stormy sea rolling between them.
m Dan. ix. 2. Compare Jer. xxv. II, xxix. 10.
b Compare Jer. i. 13 with Ezek. xi. 3, 8, xxiv. 2 ; Jer. iii. 6 II with
Kzc-k. xvi. 46 5' xxiii. II; and see the present writer's notes on Ezek.
iv. 3, xi. 16, xiii. 2, 3, \iv. 14, xxxii. 19.
l ' Jer. i. iS. ' K/ek. iii. 9.
IV.] Ezekiel. 49
This phenomenon displays a truth which ought ever
to be present to the mind of the student of Hebrew
prophecy. All the prophets, in whatever time and in
whatever land they lived, prophesied by one and the
same Spirit ; and, as St. Peter affirms, that Spirit was
the Spirit of Christ. St. Peter says that the prophets
"searched diligently, what the Spirit of Christ, which
was in them, did signify, when it testified beforehand the
sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow e ."
This apostolic sentence is the clue to all right pro-
phetic interpretation. The Spirit in all the prophets
was the Spirit of Christ, and it testified of His sufferings
and of the glory that would follow from them.
This truth is displayed in the names, persons, and
prophecies of the four greater Hebrew prophets. Isaiah,
which means the salvation of Jehovah, is the first He-
brew prophet who calls the Messiah the servant of the
Lord, and he sets before us more clearly than any
other of his predecessors the Passion of Christ. Jere-
miah, as we have seen, is the prophet of suffering, and
his prophecies are followed by a national dirge in his
Lamentations. He is the type of the Christus patiens.
But Ezekiel is the prophet of the glory that would fol-
low the suffering. The prophecies of Ezekiel are intro-
duced with a revelation of glory. He himself a priest,
called to his prophetic office at the river Chebar in his
thirtieth year f , and designated by God throughout his
prophecies as Son of Man, (which no Hebrew pro-
e i Pet. i. n.
* Ezek. i. i. Ezekiel began to prophesy on the fifth day of the fourth
month of the fifth year of the captivity at Babylon of king Jehoiachin or
Jeconiah (B.C. 595) ; the fifth year of his successor, Zedekiah ; and about
seven years before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans in the
thirteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar (B.C. 588). Ezekiel continued to pro-
phesy for at least twenty-two years. See xxix. 17, xl. I.
E
5O The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
phct who prophesied at Jerusalem ever is *) ; and seeing
the heavens opened, and beholding visions of God's
glory, is a signal type of the Incarnate God, "the Son
of Man," standing, in His thirtieth year, at the river
Jordan, and inaugurated there as Prophet, Priest and
King, when, as the Gospel says, "the heavens opened
unto Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending
like a dove and lighting upon Him, and lo ! a voice
from heaven, saying, This is My beloved Son, in whom
I am well pleased h ."
Jeremiah's prophecies begin and end with a vision of
suffering ; Ezekiel's prophecies begin and end with a
vision of glory. The last nine chapters of Ezekiel de-
scribe the visionary Temple and the ideal Holy Land,
in a mysterious transfiguration, and are prophetic repre-
sentations of the grace and glory of the Catholic Church,
and are like a prelude to the visions of the Apocalypse,
and the splendours of the new Jerusalem.
His brother prophet, Daniel, at Babylon completes
this glorious picture, by his descriptions of the Second
Coming of Christ, and the general Resurrection, and the
Judgment of quick and dead 1 , and the bliss of the saints
in glory. And thus the two great prophets of the exile
and the captivity of Israel are also the two great pro-
phets of everlasting peace and heavenly joy of the
Church of Christ.
The sufferings of Christ as revealed by Isaiah and
Jeremiah, the two greatest prophets who prophesied at
Jerusalem, and whose names are compounded with the
sacred appellation of JAH or Jehovah, the Lord God
of Israel, the God of the Hebrew Church, lead on by
* Daniel, who did not prophesy at Jerusalem, is once so called, viii. 17.
h Matt. iii. 16, 17; Mark i. 10, 11 ; Luke iii. 2123.
1 Dan. vii. 9 14, xii. 2.
V.] Ezekiel. 5 1
a beautiful transition to the glories of Christ, which fol-
lowed those sufferings, and which are revealed in Eze-
kiel and Daniel, who prophesied in a heathen land, and
whose names, one, that of Ezekiel, referring to the
strength of God, and the other, that of Daniel, to the
judgment of God, are compounded with EL, the He-
brew designation of God the Creator in His Universal
Supremacy, and who unfolded in their prophecies the
gracious assurance that although the material Jeru-
salem was levelled in the dust, and though the Church
of God was in exile and captivity, hanging up its harp
on the willows which overhung the waters of Babylon,
yet the glory of the Lord can never fall away, nay, it
gleams forth more brightly from the gloom of sorrow
and suffering, it derives fresh life from death, and a new
creation from destruction. Although banished from Je-
rusalem, it is diffused into the heathen world, which has
become a temple and city of God, and is a place of pre-
paratory probation for the Church glorified in heaven.
Ezekiel, whose prophetic designation is " Son of Man,"
is the priest and prophet, not of the temple and city of
Jerusalem, but of the spiritual temple of universal hu-
manity. This is his great value : he catholicizes He-
braism. He leads us on to contemplate and adore the
Lord God of the Old Testament in all the breadth and
depth and height of His divine attributes, as Univer-
sal Father and Saviour of all.
Observe how he displays God's Omnipresence and
Omniscience.
A short time before the destruction of Jerusalem,
Ezekiel, the captive prophet in exile on the banks of
the river Chebar, being severed, at a distance of more
than 400 miles on the north-east, from Jerusalem, was
enabled, by the Holy Spirit, to behold and to describe
E 2
5 2 Tlie Prophets of the L ord : [SERM.
the strange mysteries of impure worship which were
celebrated in the secret chambers and dark crypts of the
Temple there ; his inner eye was illumined by the Spirit
of God, and he was enabled to specify by name the men
who were standing there with censers in their hand, and
raising a thick cloud of incense, through the misty veil
of which he descried the vermilion paintings on the
wall, of grotesque figures of creeping things and abo-
minable beasts of Egyptian idolatry in the chambers
of their imagery ; he was enabled to see the women
mimicking the ritual of Phoenicia and weeping for the
Syrian Thammuz, or Adonis, in the courts of the Lord
God of Israel ; and he saw the men between the porch
and the altar in Sion turning their backs on the Temple
of Jehovah, and bowing down their heads in lowly ado-
ration to worship the rising sun k .
The prophet Ezekiel, dwelling in exile in Babylon, was
also enabled to foresee and describe the scene of that last
fatal night of Jerusalem besieged by the Chaldean army,
when the last king of Judah, Zcdekiah, who had mocked
the warnings of the prophet Jeremiah, stole secretly out
of his palace with a few attendants, and passed along
through the gate between the two walls which were by
the king's garden, with his face muffled up in his mantle 1 ,
and was caught, as it were, in a net, with his companions,
by his Chaldean enemies in the plain of Jericho.
Not merely was Ezekiel enabled to see these things,
and to describe them, but he was commanded to shew
his faith in his own inspiration by enacting them in the
presence of the captives in Babylon. He was com-
manded to pourtray the siege of Jerusalem by a picture
drawn with chalk on a dark brick of Babylon m , and to
k Sec Kzck. viii. 8 16. ' See Ezek. xii. 12, 14.
m See Ezek. iv. i, 3.
IV.] Ezekiel. 53
represent its blockade by visible actions ; and he was
commanded to shew his faith in his own revelations
from God by removing his own furniture from his own
house in Babylon n in the dim twilight, as a token that
Zedekiah, the king of Judah, would in like manner go
forth in the dusk of the evening from his palace ; and
he was ordered to declare the meaning of these pro-
phetic actions to those who were with him in Chaldaea,
so that, if these symbolical actions had not been realized
by that which they were intended to symbolize, Ezekiel
would have become a laughing-stock to the captives,
and been rejected with scorn by the Hebrew nation, and
have never been received by them as an inspired pro-
phet of God.
Ezekiel was recognised as such by the Hebrew
Church ; he was owned as such by Christ and His
Apostles. And therefore these words and acts of
Ezekiel preach to us and to all the world the great
doctrines of the Divine Omnipresence and Omniscience,
and of our own personal responsibility.
If Ezekiel, at the river Chebar, was enabled by God
to reveal the hidden things of the secret chambers of
the Temple at Jerusalem, and to specify by name the
persons who were there engaged in those unhallowed
mysteries, and to see through the thick cloud of the
incense which enveloped them ; can it be supposed
that there is anything in the inmost recesses of our
own hearts which the eye of Ezekiel's God does
not penetrate and pierce ? Can it be imagined that
there is any idolatry carnal, intellectual, or spiritual
which we ourselves practise in the secret crypts and
subterranean chambers of the imagery of our own
thoughts, which is not clear as noon-day to His view ?
" See Ezek. xii. 3 15.
54 The Prophets of the Lord ': [SERM
And can it be imagined that there is anything which He
will not bring forth to judgment as He brought forth
the men of Jerusalem to be judged by the Man, an im-
personation of Christ, whom flzekiel saw clothed in linen,
with a writer's ink-horn at his side, to note down, in
a book, the actions of the princes and people at Jerusa-
lem, and who executed sentence upon them, and who
also set His mark a mark, it was, of the cross on the
forehead of every one, who sighed, cried, and mourned
over their hateful abominations, in order that they
might be spared in the terrible slaughter which de-
stroyed the rest p ?
This prophetic representation of the divine attri-
butes of Omnipresence and Omniscience is combined in
Ezekiel with a solemn declaration of the utter hollow-
ness of all mere formal, ceremonial, worship ; and of the
necessity of a deep sense of our own individual respon-
sibility ; and of the duty of searching self-examination
and practical repentance, and of spiritual, vital, per-
sonal religion.
In the latter days of Jerusalem, before its destruction
by the arms of Babylon (as afterward in the time of
our Lord and His Apostles, before its destruction by
Rome), the inhabitants of the Holy City relied on their
religious privileges, and were elated with spiritual pride
and presumptuous self-confidence. They vaunted them-
selves to be the national depositories and guardians of
the sacred oracles of God. They were possessors of the
Law, the Prophets, and the Priesthood. They dwelt in
the Holy City, and worshipped in the courts of the
Temple. They thought themselves safe there ; they
imagined, that because they themselves had been
spared, while king Jehoiachin and the queen mother,
Sec Ezek. ix. 4. P Sec E/ek. ix. I 7.
IV.] Ezekiel. 55
and many thousands of their countrymen had been
carried away captive to Babylon, they themselves must
be special favourites of the Lord God of Israel. They
disparaged their captive brethren and extolled them-
selves : " The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of
the Lord, the Temple of the Lord" are we q . Theirs
was an hypocritical religion of 'external ceremonies, of
arrogant self-conceit, and vainglorious self-righteous-
ness ; joined with censorious and rash judgments of
others ; with malignant scorn, bitterness, and strife, and
with supercilious disdain and virulent hate of all who
spake to them the plain truth in homely language, such
as the prophet Jeremiah, calling them to the exercise of
the moral virtues of justice, righteousness, mercy, and
truth, and rebuking them for their neglect of those
virtues, and denouncing God's judgments upon them
for their hypocrisy. They were a barren leafy fig-tree
a fig-tree rustling in the breeze with luxuriant green
foliage, but bearing no fruit and therefore to be
blighted and withered by the breath of God ; and
Jeremiah represented to them their own corrupt moral
and spiritual condition by a prophetic parable that
of the two baskets of figs r : the bad figs in the
one basket symbolizing themselves, Jerusalem and its
people ; while the good figs in the other basket were
emblematic of their captive brethren at Chebar, whom
they despised.
The prophet Ezekiel completed the picture. He
beheld the glory of the Lord, enthroned upon the
cherubim, forsaking the Temple of Jerusalem, which
was profaned by the sins of priests, princes, and people.
He saw the glory of the Lord rising aloft and floating 8
'' Jer. vii. 4. r Ibid. xxiv. I 10.
s See Ezek. x. 122, xi. 22.
56 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
away over the cast gate of the Temple to the Mount of
Olives, and toward the land of Chaldnca l .
Brethren, these things are profitable to us. They
warn us that the true strength and glory of a Church
docs not consist in the magnificence of its sacred fabrics,
nor in the splendour of its religious ritual, but in the
hearts and lives of its people. They teach us that the
verdict of Ichabod may be pronounced over us, and cer-
tainly will be, if we do not cherish those inner graces
of holiness, gentleness, meekness, love, truth, and peace,
without which the most splendid Minsters and most
pompous Ceremonial are abominable in the sight of
Him Who searcheth the heart, and Who requires the
moral, intellectual, and spiritual sacrifice of the whole
inner man.
Both Ezekiel and Jeremiah were priests, as well as
prophets. As such they had a special reverence for the
Temple at Jerusalem and its Ritual, and for all the re-
quirements of the Levitical Law. They cannot be sus-
pected of any bias towards that fanatical Puritanism
which disparages outward forms of religion, and resolves
all devotion into a mere subjective spiritualism. And
therefore the language of these two Hebrew priests and
prophets on this subject is more entitled to our atten-
tion u . The message of Ezekiel to Israel, a message re-
peated with earnest solemnity 31 , was this, " the soul that
sinneth it shall die." He declares that though the great-
est saints were collected together from the Hagiology
of every age, and were concentrated as contemporaries
in a Church in one age "though Noah, Daniel, and Job
1 Ezek. x. 2022.
" See, for example, Jer. iv. 4, and vii. 22, ix. 25, 26 ; and on Ezek.
xviii. 31, xxxi. 18, xxxii. 19, 20, xxxvi. 26, on the necessity of the true cir-
cumcision, the circumcision of the heart.
1 Ezek. xviii. 4, 20.
IV.] Ezekiel, 57
were in it * they shall deliver neither sons nor daugh-
ters, they shall deliver only their own souls by their
righteousness, saith the Lord God."
What is this, brethren, but to teach us that we may
not rely for our acceptance with God on the privileges
of Church-membership, except so far as we are making
those privileges our own by a right use of them, and by
bringing forth their fruits in our lives ? What is this,
but to remind us that each individual soul among us is
to be brought singly, one by one, into personal commu-
nion and contact with God, and to stand, as it were,
confronted, face to face, with Him, and to be left alone
with Him, disentangled from all the intertwinings and
interweavings of all other souls, and to bear its own
burden, and to be placed in independent isolation by its
divine Judge, and to be scanned and scrutinized through
and through by His divine eye, and to receive its own
sentence from Him, for everlasting bliss or woe, at the
great Day.
Surely it is an awful thought, and it is made more
awful by the view which the prophet presents to us of
the sinfulness of sin : " The soul that sinneth it shall
die." This is the burden of Ezekiel's prophecy.
The practical comment which he gives on these words
is full of meaning. Ezekiel at the river Chebar had by
divine illumination a vision of the siege of Jerusalem :
" Son of man, write the name of the day, even of this
same day; the king of Babylon set himself against Jeru-
salem this same day z ." Ezekiel had also a prophetic
revelation of the miseries of that siege, and of its woeful
catastrophe. And soon afterwards, probably on the
same day in which Jerusalem was taken, he had an-
other message, " Son of man, behold I take away from
>' Ezek. xiv. 14, 20. ' Ibid. xxiv. 2.
$8 The Prop/icts of the Lord: [SERM
thce the desire of thine eyes with a stroke, yet neither
shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run
down." He was forbidden to put on the attire, or utter
the lamentations, of a mourner. So (he adds) " I spake
unto the people in the morning; and in the evening my
wife died ; and I did in the morning as I was com-
manded a ."
The Hebrew captives at Chebar were astounded at
such demeanour as this, and asked the reason of it.
The prophet answered them that he himself he, Ezc-
kiel, was to be a sign to them ; and that what he
himself did, they must also do. They had hoped for
a speedy return to Jerusalem, their own home their
whole hearts were there. Jerusalem was the desire of
their eyes; it was dear to them as a wife; but Jeru-
salem was to be suddenly smitten. God would take
it away from them by an unexpected death-stroke. In
them were to be realized the words, " I spake unto the
people : in the evening my wife died." The fall of
Jerusalem was the death of their wife. And yet they
must not weep nor mourn for its fall b . " Ye," says the
prophet, " shall do as I have done." They were not to
weep or mourn even for the destruction of Sion by the
armies of Babylon ; but they must mourn and weep
for something else. All their tears were to be reserved
for that : all their sorrow for the destruction of Jeru-
salem was to be merged and absorbed in sorrow for
that. And what was it ? It was their own sin, and the
sin of their countrymen ; for this it was which caused
her fall. Ye shall not mourn nor weep for the de-
struction of the city and the Temple, dear as they are
to you. No ; but what does the prophet add ? " But
yc shall pine away for your iniquities and mourn one
toward another''
11 Ezck. xxiv. 1 8. h Ibid. xxiv. 21, 22.
IV.] Ezekiel. 59
Brethren, here is instruction for us all. No sufferings,
however great, not the loss of a dear wife, not the dis-
establishment of a national Church, not the ruin of
a beloved Country, although these things are entwined
with all our tenderest affections, are to draw forth
from our eyes a single tear, in comparison with our
own sins, which are the real source and well-spring of
all our miseries in Church and State. We must pine
away for our own iniquities and mourn towards one
another.
At this present time we ourselves may be trembling
for the safety of our own Sion. And we have cause to
do so. Let us therefore look inward. Let us examine
our own hearts and own hands. Let us scrutinize our
own lives. Let us seek and pray earnestly for grace,
that we may feel more deeply the heinousness of our
own sins. Let us put away all envy, strife, hatred and
malice, and be at one among ourselves. Let us cleanse
the sanctuary of our own hearts. Let us cherish
the graces of faith and love, truth and peace, kindness
and equity, which are its best ornaments ornaments
far more lovely than the sculptured lilies and carved
cherubim and palm-trees which decorated the Temple
of Solomon. Then God will be with us. Then the
glory of the divine Shekinah will not float away from
the courts of our Sion to the lonely river of some dis-
tant Chebar. And no armies of Babylon will ever be
able to destroy the walls, and to profane the Holy
Place of the Temple of our Jerusalem.
Once more ; whatever in God's providential visitation
may be in store for our own Country, and for our own
Church whatever may befall other Nations and other
national Churches Ezekiel, at the river Chebar, pro-
vides comfort for the faithful in every age and clime.
60 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
The destruction of the city and Temple at Jerusalem
was like the death of a beloved wife. It was a sadder
pang to them than the death of his dear Rachel to the
patriarch Jacob at Bethlehem. The expatriation of
the citizens of Jerusalem from that dear, dear home,
their dispersion as wanderers and captives in a far-off
heathendom, was like a national widowhood and a na-
tional orphanhood. But yet the Lord God of Israel
was the God of all true Israelites in Chaldaea as well
as in Judah. He is the God of every land and every
age. He is JEHOVAH ELOHIM. And this great truth
was brought out more clearly by the destruction of
Jerusalem and its Temple, and by the scattering of her
princes, priests, and people into the far-off regions of
the East. They learnt thus to realize God's Omni-
presence. They learnt that true religion does not de-
pend on the material fabric of a Temple, however glo-
rious ; nor on its religious Ritual, however gorgeous, and
even though it be prescribed by God Himself; but that
it depends on the presence of God in the hearts of His
people. The glory of the Lord God had been seen by
the prophet Ezekiel riding away in the clouds on the
winged chariot of the Cherubim from the Temple of
Jerusalem. And why ? Because that Temple was pro-
faned by the sins of the worshippers in it. And this
migration of the God of the Temple was a signal that
He had given it up to destruction. But that glory of
the Lord was seen by the prophet in the wilderness of
Chaldaea on the banks of the river Chebar, four hun-
dred miles from Jerusalem ; and God had said to him,
" I will be your Sanctuary ."
Thus it was revealed to the world, that though Thrones
may totter and fall, though Cities may be thrown pros-
c Ezck. xi. 16.
IV.] Ezekiel. 61
trate on the ground, though Dynasties, Empires, and
Kingdoms pass away like visionary shadows and spectral
phantoms, though Nations may be scattered, and na-
tional Churches may fall, yet there is the same JEHOVAH,
the same Triune God ever sitting enthroned on the
cherubim, ever riding on His winged evangelic chariot
of the fourfold Gospel throughout the world ; and
though we be exiles and prisoners in Chaldsea with
Ezekiel, or with St. John at Patmos, yet with them we
may have visions of God. And this blessed assurance
is confirmed to us by the Holy Spirit speaking to us by
Ezekiel, and revealing to us in the last nine chapters d
of his sublime prophecy the glories of the Church of
Christ Universal, which is our indestructible Sion, and
summing up all with those memorable words, "the
name of the city from that day shall be JEHOVAH
SHAMMAH," the LORD is THERE e .
d Ezek. xl. xlviii. Ibid, xlviii. 35.
SERMON V.
fropfjet at 230cf)im.
JUDGES ii, 4,
"And it came to pass, when the angel of the Lord spake these
words unto all the children of Israel, that the people lifted up
their voice, and wept,"
' I ^HE Prophet at Bochim ! It is perhaps the most
-*~ wonderful incident in the whole history of pro-
phecy to which your thoughts are to be turned to-
night. There are concentrated around this narrative
the leading features of all other prophecy; whether
we regard the speaker or the listeners, the nature of
the message or the manner of its reception, only in
a higher and intenser form. "And an angel of the
Lord came up from Gilgal to Bochim, and said." The
startling abruptness of the beginning of the history is
paralleled but scarcely equalled by the suddenness
with which the great prophet of an after age is brought
before us : "And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the
inhabitants of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the Lord
God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall
not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my
word." In both cases there is the same absence of
preliminary information as to the person of the witness
who suddenly lifts up his voice for God. Out of the
thick darkness in either instance he stands before us
reproving, warning. We shall see presently that Elijah
64 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
himself, in all the majesty of his stern mission, in all
the loneliness of his separate life, is but a dim shadow
of the mightier one of Bochim. It is, however, to be
observed in the outset, that this second chapter of the
Book of Judges, which commences so abruptly, is to
be read in close connection with the first chapter.
After the death of Joshua, the Israelites proceeded to
go up, it is related, against the Canaanite inhabitants
of the land to take possession of their several allot-
ments. Here occurred the first national sin. From vari-
ous motives sloth, avarice, eagerness to enter upon the
enjoyment of the rich country they did not thoroughly
exterminate the divinely-doomed nations. Judah drave
out the inhabitants of the mountain, but could not
drive out the inhabitants of the valley. The children
of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites that in-
habited Jerusalem, but the Jebusites dwelt with the
children of Benjamin. Neither did Manasseh drive
out the inhabitants of their lot, but the Canaanitcs
would dwell in that land. And it came to pass, when
Israel was strong, that they put the Canaanites to tri-
bute. So with the other tribes ; they reduced the ori-
ginal possessors so far as to turn them to their profit
by making them tax-payers, and no further. This was
a breach of the original covenant with God. In the
very opening of their history they wholly lost sight of
the supernatural character of their mission as a peo-
ple, of the repeated charge that they were to enter
into no compact with the native races. Stripped of its
special accessories, the sin was that of conniving at and
patronizing idolatry. And now they are gathered to-
gether, probably at Shiloh, for one of the chief reli-
gious festivals. Little thought was there in that as-
sembly that in their remissness they had laid the
V.] The Prophet at Bochim. 65
foundation of interminable disasters ; we may rather
imagine the prevailing temper to have been one of
self-gratulation. They had entered on their heritage,
they had made good and lucrative conditions of peace
with their enemies ; they had saved themselves much
of ^oil and suffering by accepting their tribute, instead
of pursuing a war of extermination. So tribe passed
on to tribe the language of rejoicing, and exulted in
the speedy and easy acquisition of the honey-land,
when lo, into their midst, unheralded, unforeseen, came
one whom they knew not. He counted kindred with
none, he claimed not to be priest or prince. Like
Melchisedec, he stood before them without father or
mother, but a curse on his lips instead of a bless-
ing : he professed not even to speak in the Name of
the Lord. More than this, as he poured forth against
them the tremendous charge of having broken their
covenant and forfeited God's promise, he declared
himself to be their deliverer from Pharaoh, himself the
giver of the good land. "/ made you to go up out of
Egypt. / said / will never break my covenant with you.
But ye have not obeyed my voice." Wherefore I also
said, "/ will not drive them out from before you, but
they shall be as thorns in your sides." The conscience
of the people at once responded to the rebuke. The
true words, the awful assumption of underived authority
in the speaker, fell with irresistible force upon the hearts
of the assembled multitudes. The arrow went straight
to the mark. At once that summer day of mutual con-
gratulation went down in gloom. "And it came to
pass, when the angel of the Lord spake these words
unto all the children of Israel, that the people lifted up
their voice, and wept. And they called the name of
that place Bochim," that is, " the place of weepers."
F
66 T lie Prophets of tlic Lord : [SERM.
Here is the story, let us examine it closely. And,
first, as to the prophet who spake.
I. Now it is to be here observed that the reprover of
the people is termed an angel. It need not surprise us
to find that, taking the word in the lowest sense, some
have understood by it only a prophet sent by God as
His messenger. But as Bishop Patrick says, no in-
stance can be given of an ordinary prophet being
called an angel of the Lord. If, however, we take
the natural and higher sense of the word, another
question arises, Are we to consider the speaker to
be one of the heavenly host sent like Gabriel to
Daniel ? Now there are several things which militate
against this. In the Book of Judges are two other
recorded visits of an angel, and in both those in-
stances the language is such as to lead us to a higher
conception of his nature. Thus we read, " And the
angel of the Lord appeared unto Gideon ;" but a few
verses further on it is written, "And the Lord looked
upon him." The passage is thus very similar to that
which relates that the " angel of the Lord appeared
unto Moses in a flame of fire out of the midst of
a bush'," whilst immediately afterwards it is said
" God called unto him out of the midst of the bush."
So we read how " Jacob was left alone, and there
wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the
day b ." Yet Jacob himself declares that on that won-
derful night he had seen " God" face to face. And
the prophet Hosea describing the event, says, " He had
power over the angel, and prevailed c ;" and in the same
verse, " He found him in Bethel, and there he spake
with us, even the Lord God of hosts." The man is
first described as an angel, and then identified with
Ex oil. iii. 2. b Gen. xxxii. 24. e Hosea xii. 4.
v.] The Prophet at Bochim. 67
the Lord of hosts. Again, in this Book of Judges' 1 ,
we are told of an angel of the Lord appearing to
Manoah and Manoah's wife. And upon Manoah de-
manding "What is thy name?" the reply is, "Why
asketh thou after my name, seeing it is secret, or wonder-
ful, the very name given by the prophet Isaiah to the
Messiah e ." So with the text. An angel of the Lord
came up from Gilgal, but the first utterance carries us
to the thought of One higher than angel or archangel.
The speaker at once describes Himself as the deliverer
of Israel out of Egypt, who had sworn unto them, who
had made a covenant with them, and finishes with the
denunciation, " Ye have not obeyed my voice" All
this is said without the prefixing any such words as,
"Thus saith the Lord," which would have been the
form if the speaker had spoken in God's Name, and
not in his own.
Again, it is to be noted whence the angel-preacher is
said to have come. "An angel of the Lord came up
from Gilgal." Why from Gilgal ? Turn to the fifth
chapter of Joshua, and you find that it was in the
camp at Gilgal that there appeared unto Joshua the
mysterious vision of the armed man, who described
himself as captain of the host of the Lord, i.e. leader
or prince of the angelic hierarchy, whose presence, like
the Presence in the burning bush, made the very soil
around Him holy. The coming up from Gilgal seems
to connect at once the prophet of Bochim with the
vision of Joshua. And the vision of Joshua again
links itself with the appearance to Moses in the bush.
To what, then, does all this tend ? Why to the con-
clusion that in these places, and in many others, we
have a previous manifestation of the second Person in
d Judges xiii. e Compare Bishop Patrick in loco.
F 2
68 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
the Trinity in the form of that manhood which in the
latter days He was about to take into God. The Old
Testament is full of these pre-rcvclations. They are
the visible, bodily exhibitions of the truth conveyed
in the words, " Behold, I send an angel before thec to
keep thee in the way. Beware of him, and obey his
voice ; do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon
your transgressions, for My Name is in him." The
angel is here invested with the whole majesty of God.
In other passages he is called the Angel of the Pre-
sence, The face of God, (what is this but in St. Paul's
language the " express image of God ?") the angel of
the Lord, the angel which redcemcth from all evil.
There is, if we may so say, a wonderful symmetry and
harmony in the passages thus interpreted. They are
a marvellous witness to the unity of the Bible. We
see one truth pervading the whole framework of in-
spiration, one thought ever kept before the minds of
the devout, to be consummated in the fulness of time.
" God made Man."
But if we thus identify the angel at Bochim with the
angel of the covenant, the eternal Word or Logos, then
have we here a. very remarkable pre-manifestation of
him in one of his three great offices, viz. that of pro-
phet or teacher. We must here recall to our minds
the moral element of prophecy. Popularly a prophet
is one who foretells future events, but this is a very
partial conception of the office of the old prophets of
Israel. Primarily the prophets were men raised up by
God to enforce the moral law upon the national con-
science, and to carry out further than the law of Moses
had done the revelation of God's attributes, and the
relations of man to Him and to the Eternal Word. It
is not that the ancient prophets stood forth to foretell
V.] TJte Prophet at Bochim. 69
things to come, and occasionally intermingled their
predictions with lessons of holiness. The converse is
rather the fact. The prophet was inspired to arouse
and waken the hearts of the people, and he was oc-
casionally enabled to enforce his religious teaching by
u nfolding the roll of coming events.
So it has been said the prophets of Israel occupy
a middle position between the Law and the Gospel ;
rising above the former in their disclosures of the life
everlasting, of the spirituality of the divine nature, of
the principles of personal holiness, but falling short
of the latter in its complete unveiling of the mystery
of godliness.
" The prophets," says Bishop Horsley, "spake under
the influence of the Spirit when they had no predic-
tions of the future to deliver." They were the ordinary
preachers of righteousness. The mind of the prophet
seems to have been very differently affected with these
moral subjects, and with the visions of futurity. The
counsel he was to give was presented naked, without
the disguise of imagery, to his thoughts, and he gave
it utterance in perspicuous phrases, carrying a definite
and obvious meaning. The whole mission of Elijah
is an instance of this. His greatness consists not in
the clearness of his predictions of distant events, but
in the force with which he withstood Ahab and stem-
med the tide of idolatry.
And of this great company of the reprovers of
national sin from generation to generation, we have
the shadow cast before at Bochim. The mysterious
Being unto whom all the prophets bare witness, in
whose teaching with authority the profoundest verities
of God all their teaching was to be consummated,
appears before the gathered thousands of Israel at
70 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
the outset of their career, Himself face to face the
Rcbukcr of their sin ; Himself as it were setting the
note of that great anthem of prophecy, whose majestic
strains were to follow age after age the generations of
His people until, not in the semblance of man, but
verily made man, He should teach daily in the Temple.
And the burden of the prophecy at Bochim is worthy
of the divine speaker, for it is the simple enunciation
of the foundation truth of all religion, " Man in covenant
with God," bound to comply with the terms of the
covenant, even when, like the extermination of the
Canaanite tribes, passing his understanding to account
for. It was no message of temporary interest with
which the angel-preacher stood before the people.
The whole germ of revealed religion was in his words.
" The goodly fellowship of the prophets praise thee, oh
Christ," All the after-utterances of that great confra-
ternity were but the prolonged echo of the prophesy-
ing at Bochim. Elijah at the mouth of the cave,
Jeremiah beholding in the spirit the shattered ruins
of Jerusalem, Ezekiel in the land of his exile, did but
bewail the same broken compact which formed the
burden of the first prophetic cry which fell like a voice
from heaven upon the astonished multitude, when the
angel of the covenant stood among them in the plain
of Bochim.
II. And now we turn for a few minutes to the result
of this prophesying. "And it came to pass, when the
angel of the Lord spake these words unto all the chil-
dren of Israel, that the people lifted up their voice, and
wept. And they called the name of that place Bochim :
and they sacrificed there unto the Lord." If the angel-
prophet is a manifestation of Christ Jesus as the great
prophet of the Church, so that we have in his reproving
V.] The Prophet at Bochim. 71
the people at Bochim a type of one of His perpetual
offices, so in the result of that reproof have we a re-
presentation of the general effect of the prophetic
mission. Doubtless individual Israelites in that vast
assembly were touched with the words of their re-
prover ; doubtless as they heard him bring out clearly
the fact of the covenant of God broken by their sloth
and avarice, some sorrowed with a sorrow unto salva-
tion, and souls were recovered from the snare, and the
light of devotion rekindled in many a household. Yet
the general result was but transitory. " The people
lifted up their voices and wept," and they sacrificed
unto the Lord. But no amendment ensued. There
was no forsaking their ease, no turning with fresh
courage to the sacred warfare \vith the Canaanite, no
loosing the league with the idolaters. The next verses
tell us of the Israelites themselves "serving Baalim,"
" forsaking the God of their fathers," " worshipping
Ashtaroth." The whole effect was a momentary out-
burst of feeling, and a hasty sacrifice. Most true pic-
ture of the reception of God's Word in after times !
" They lifted up their voice and wept." It is sensa-
tional or emotional religion against which Bochim is
our warning. There is in every soul not hardened by
a long course of sin an instinctive sense of truth, which
echoes the remonstrances of God's messenger ; a chord
which vibrates at once to the breath of the Divine
Word. This instinctive appreciation of truth shewed
itself in the impulsive Eastern nature by an out-break
of tears ; it shews itself amongst ourselves in analogous
ways, but equally profitless and vain. As the solemn
utterances of God's truth drop upon the ear, and the
weighty words of one whom God has gifted with per-
suasive power force home the reality of wasted energies
72 T/te Prophets of tJie Lord: [SERM.
and lost opportunities, there is often awakened in the
listener a keen sorrow, flowing (it may be) out of regret
regret for loss of character and influence ; a sense of
increasing loneliness as this life is felt to be ebbing, and
no foundation laid for the next ; a sad remembrance of
earlier years, in their purity and freshness, when the
covenant with God was unbroken. He will go away
from the church, sobered, saddened, depressed, and yet
in how many instances no change of life ensues. There
is no resolute amendment of evil habits. The man will
seem to himself even to have been religiously impressed,
yet indeed there may have been no true religion in
what he has experienced. The sorrow ending in itself
is but the weeping of Bochim ; a sorrow that, by mis-
leading, worketh only death.
There are two principal elements of this fruitless
sorrow : the first is want of depth of soul. There are
hearts which answer readily to every movement, be it
glad or painful, selfish or generous, yet never retain
any impression, but pass with a revolting fickleness
from one extreme to another; "Because it had no
deepness of earth it withered away." It is our Lord's
own description of the fate of the good seed sown in
those men of shallow soul.
A second element of the transitiveness of such half-
religious impressions is the "after revolt of the human
mind against the supernatural." When the angel-pro-
phet stood suddenly in the midst of the gathered Israel,
and poured forth the burning rebuke for a broken cove-
nant, for awhile the hearts of the people bowed before
him. "Just as in the garden of Gethsemane, when those
who came forth with swords and staves to take our
Lord first saw Him, they went backward and fell to
the ground," and yet immediately after they laid hands
V.] The Prophet at Bochim. 73
upon Him. So was it at Bochim. In either case there
was, we may believe, an ineffable majesty, a shadow of
deity, unseen but felt about the Divine Being, which
for an instant subdued all to itself. But very soon the
mind, which is so elastic under the heaviest burden,
roused itself against the true impulse, and fell back to
its own purpose of evil. As the last words of the un-
known prophet died upon the hushed air, and he de-
parted into the mystery out of which he had come,
the heart of the people was broken. Then after awhile
they doubtless asked themselves, "Was there really
anything supernatural in it ? was it not only some mad
fellow who had assumed the tone of an inhabitant of
heaven?" It is ever so. "If another, said our Lord,
should come in his own name, him ye will receive."
Talk to many a man about virtue on the grounds of
worldly interest, philosophy, moral dignity, and you
may get a hearing ; found your argument upon the
Revelation of God in Christ, claim to have a message
from heaven to earth, and the same listener will ques-
tion and doubt and cavil. Hence, again, the fruitless-
ness so often of religious emotion. The heart for a
moment quails under the sword of the Spirit. Then
comes the after-recoil against the supernatural claim,
and the sorrow proves the sorrow of Bochim, giving
birth to nothing. And they offered sacrifice to the Lord.
Yes, here was one issue of that national weeping. Not
amendment, but a burnt-offering. What have we here
again but the type of that emotional piety which is not
strong enough to produce a turning away from sin, but
satisfies itself with a few devotional practices, a prayer
repeated, it may be, with some additional fervour ;
a sacrament received with a little more attention,
and then goes back to the old habit of idleness, or
74 The Prophets of the Lord. [SERM. V.
profligacy, having added only to its list of offences
another quenching of the Spirit of Grace.
Would God, men and brethren, as we look back
through the dimness of 3,000 years to that plain of
the weepers, and hear, as it were, the prolonged Eastern
wail which follows the retiring steps of the angel-pro-
phet, and mark the uprising smoke of the sacrifice, and
then sec that whole multitude, recovering from their
transitory awe, and instead of going forth with renewed
ardour to battle with the Canaanite, subsiding into their
former apathy and ease, aye, sinking into the profounder
depth of utter apostacy, that we might take alarm at
the religious feeling which is awakened only to sleep
again, at the piety which says, "I go, Sir," but goes
not, contenting itself with its own tears, whilst shrink-
ing from the warfare of Christ.
The plain of tJic weepers ! Every age of the Church
has its Bochim. Every place has it in a greater or
less degree. Susceptibility of emotion varies infinitely.
It varies according to physical constitution, or nerv-
ous temperament, according to peculiarities of race or
manners. Hence is it no test of godly sorrow, which
is one and the same, like the nature of God Himself.
And this is its great characteristic. Godly sorrow issues
in a repentance not to be repented of ; in that thorough
turning of the life to God's service, from which, in the
hottest fire of temptation, there is never a turning back
to the way of evil again.
SERMON VI.
Esatajj.
ISAIAH vi. 810.
" I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and
who will go for us ? Then said I, Here am I ; send me. And
He said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand
not ; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of
this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes ;
lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and under-
stand with their heart, and convert, and be healed."
C UCH was the heavy burden laid upon Isaiah in his
fresh youth, probably at much your age. Like
St. Paul he had seen the glory of God ; he had seen,
as man could in the flesh see and live, God Himself;
he had witnessed the burning love of those fiery spirits
of love, the Seraphim ; he had felt, in that aweful Pre-
sence of the All-Holy, the sinfulness of man and his
own. Holy and pure he must have been ; for even in
that dread Presence, while shrinking abashed into him-
self as " undone," from his unfitness to behold It, nothing
flashes into his mind, even in that all-revealing light,
no spot of sin is visible to him in his God-enlightened
memory, except some words. " Woe is me, for I am
a man of unclean lips." Sins of words, as well as sins
of deeds, were one wide offence of his people. He had,
in his prophetic office, often to warn against them. But
a national sin is infectious. Individuals partake of it
more or less, at least in its lighter shades, because it
76 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
is the national character. It is, perhaps, the last to
be extirpated. For an impatient, God-unhonouring not
God-dishonouring, word, Moses had lost the hope of those
fourscore years, that he should bring his people into the
land which God had promised them. " By thy words
shalt thou be justified," says our Lord, "and by thy
words shalt thou be condemned." Isaiah did not excuse
himself, that they were only words. The words (not
such as men now think nothing of), whether they were
of impatience, or untempered zeal, or harsh reproof, or
whatever they were, rose in his soul, and called out the
penitential cry, " Woe is me ! for I am undone ; because
I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst
of a people of unclean lips : for mine eyes have seen the
King, the Lord of Hosts." Perhaps God, as He often
does in those whom He early calls, had awakened in
him the longing to speak to his God-forgetting people
in the Name of God. Perhaps, as God had awakened
in Moses, while yet in Pharaoh's court, the conscious-
ness that he was to be God's instrument in delivering
his people, and had so filled his soul with the thought,
that he wondered that they understood not the meaning
of his slaying the Egyptian ; so He had kindled in
Isaiah the burning longing to be employed by God
to His degenerate people. God discloses Himself to
the hearts which He has prepared. And now at the
sight of God, he felt how all-unfit he was to speak in
the Name of the All-Holy God. "Woe is me! for I
am undone." His longing must have lived, if he could
but be fitted for the mission which he longed for. But
the sight of God had pierced his soul with the conviction,
how holy His words must be, because they are the words
of the All-Holy ; how holy ought to be the lips which
would take those words upon them ; how pure he should
vi.J Isaiah. 77
be, who would be the messenger of God the All-Holy
to sinful man. Job defended himself long against the
unjust inferences of his friends from his miseries. When
God revealed Himself to him, he said, " I heard of Thee
by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee ;
wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes."
And now, like him, Isaiah is as one dead. The sen-
tence, which guilty man of himself deserves from the
Holy God, was, already in his feeling, fulfilled on him,
" I am cut off." Then followed that wondrous type, of
the Incarnation first and then of the Holy Eucharist,
the living heavenly Fire in a visible form, the Coal from
the Altar ; and that, which the incorporeal Seraph out
of reverence touched not, was approached to his lips,
the type of Him " by Whom the guilt of the world
is purged a ." " This has touched thy lips, and thine
iniquity is gone, thy sin is atoned for." And then God,
the Holy Trinity, Whose praises he had heard, sung by
the Seraphim in their Trisagion, which the Church has
caught up from them, willing that he should have the
reward of a spontaneous self-oblation, elicit in words
the devotion which They had inspired, and ask, " Whom
shall I send, and who will go for Us ?" And Isaiah
summed up his whole future life in those two words b ,
" Behold me ; send me." Then on his ardent soul was
poured the heavy message, " Go, and thou shalt tell
this people," (God speaks of them no more as His own,)
" Hear ye on, and understand not ; and see ye on, and
know not. Make thou dull the heart of this people,
and its ears make thou heavy, and its eyes close thou ;
lest it see with its eyes, and with its ears hearken, and
its heart understand, and it return and one heal it."
a See passages of Fathers in "Doctrine of the Real Presence,"
pp. irgsqq. b vjnbttf "MPT.
78 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
Startling office for one so sanguine and so young ! heavy
burden to bear for probably sixty-one years of life, to
be closed by a martyr's excruciating death ! Outside
of that commission there was hope ; hope, because the
promises of God could not fail of fulfilment ; hope, be-
cause in the worst times of Israel there had been those
seven thousand which the Prophet knew not of, but of
whom God revealed to him, who had stood faithful to
God amid the national apostacy ; hope, because when
God pronounces not a doom, we may take refuge in the
loving mercy of Him Who swears by Himself, " As I
live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the
death of the wicked, but," (the "but" says, "in this I
have pleasure," on this Almighty God dwells with plea-
sure,) " in the turning of the wicked from his way, and
that he live ; turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways ; for
why will ye die, O house of Israel c ?"
The message was to the people, not to individuals :
" Go ye to this people, and say." It related to indi-
viduals, only as they were such as the mass of the nation
was, as they themselves made up that mass. But a burn-
ing zeal enters into the mind of God, Who " willeth that
all men should be saved, and should come to the know-
ledge of the truth d ." A burning love entered into the
mind of Him, in thought of Whom Isaiah found his
solace, " Who died for all e ." Yet we know how St. Paul f
attests, " my conscience bearing me witness in the Holy
Ghost, that I have great grief and unintermitting sorrow
in my heart," so that he could wish even to be severed
from the Presence of Christ, never to behold Him Who
had died for him, in Whom was his life, Who was his life
within him, if so be Israel might be saved. And now
c lizck. xxxiii. II. d I Tim. ii. 2. 2 Cor. v. 14.
' Rom. ix. i.
vi.] Isaiah. 79
this, in all seeming, was the thankless office to which
Isaiah was called, to be heard, to be listened to, by
some with contempt, by others with seeming respect,
and to leave things in the main worse than he found
them. Even with our little love, we know what heavi-
ness it is, to pass along any of our crowded places of
concourse, in the streets of any of those centres of
human activity, and to see undying souls, with their
master - passions impressed upon their countenances,
living for the world, and not for God. But they have
their own one talent, whatever it may be : their souls
may, we trust, be saved. Isaiah's commission was far
harder, to act towards a loveless faith. His office was
towards those, in part at least, who were ever-hearing,
never-doing, and so never understanding. And so, (so
to speak,) he was only to make things worse. So St.
Paul says , " The earth which drinketh in the rain which
cometh oft upon it if it bring forth thorns and briars,
is accounted worthless and nigh unto cursing," not yet
accursed, (thanks be to God,) yet nigh unto it, " whose
end," if it remains such unto the end, " is to be burned."
There were better among the people ; there were worse ;
but such was the general character ; it was an ever-
hearing, hearing, hearing (such is the force of the
words, " hear ye hearing on h ," evermore,) never wearied
of hearing, yet never doing ; ever seeing as they thought,
yet never gaining insight, and so becoming ever duller,
their sight ever more and more bleared, until to hear
and to see would become well-nigh and to man impos-
sible. The more they heard and saw, the further they
were from understanding, from being converted, from
healing reaching to them. Such they were, God says,
a little later, in Ezekiel's time. You know how they
* Heb. vi. 7, 8.
80 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM .
came to the prophet of God, but had set up every man
his idol in his heart, (who was indeed his god,) and how
God says, " Are ye come to enquire of Me ? As I live,
saith the Lord God, I will not be enquired of by you '."
Nay, so coming, they should only be the more deceived.
And of this Isaiah was to be the occasion and the in-
strument. So it was when He came, of Whom Isaiah
prophesied. They thought that they knew the law, but
only to allege their interpretation of it against Him.
The more they heard, the more they were blinded.
And their imagined seeing and their real blindness, was
their condemnation. " If ye were blind," our Lord says,
"ye should not have sin ; but now ye say, We see,
therefore your sin remainethV This is inseparable from
every revelation of God, from every preaching of the
Gospel, from every speaking of God inwardly to the
soul, from every motion of God the Holy Ghost, every
drawing or forbidding of that judge which He has
placed within, our conscience, every hearing of God's
Word. All and each leave the soul in a better con-
dition or a worse. Not by any direct hardening from
God, not through any agency of the Prophet, but by
man's free-will, hearing but not obeying, seeing but not
doing, feeling but resisting, the preaching of the Pro-
phet would leave them only more hopelessly far from
conversion, that God might heal them.
And what said the Prophet ? Contrary as the sentence
must have been to all the yearnings of his soul, crush-
ing to his hopes, he knew that it must be just, because
"the Judge of the whole world" "must do right k ." He
intercedes, but only by those three words, " Lord, how
long ?" He appeals to God. Such could not be God's
ultimate purpose with His people ; not for this could
1 Ezck. xx. 3. J St. John ix. 41. k Gen. xviii. 25.
VI.] Isaiah. 81
He have taken them out of all nations to be a peculiar
people to Himself. The night was to come ; sin de-
served it ; but was it to have no dawn ? Hope there is
yet, but meanwhile a still-deepening night, a climax of
woe; and that in two stages. In the first, "cities left
without inhabitants ;" and not cities only, as a whole,
but "houses too tenantless ;" nor these alone, but "the
whole land desolate, and God removes the inhabitants far
away, and there shall be a great forsaking in the midst
of the land." Nor this only, but when, in this sifting-
time, nine parts should be gone, and one-tenth only
remain, this should be again consumed : only, like those
trees which survived the winters and storms of a thou-
sand years, while the glory wherewith God once clad
it was gone, its hewn stem was still to live ; " a holy
seed" was to be the stock thereof.
The vision, opened before him, stretches on until
now and to the end. His question, " How long ? Until
when ?" implied a hope that there would be an end ; the
answer " until," declared that there would be an end.
We have, in one, that first carrying away, the small rem-
nant which should return ; its new desolation ; the holy
seed which should survive ; the restoration at the end,
of which St. Paul says, then " all Israel shall be saved V
And this message fell on one of the tenderest of
hearts in its early freshness. As he is eminently the
Gospel-prophet, the Evangelist in the old covenant, so
he had already been taught by the Holy Ghost the
Gospel-lesson, " Love your enemies." He denounces
God's judgments ; but, himself the type of Him who
wept over Jerusalem, "My heart," he says, "shall cry
out from Moab m ," who was ever banded against his
people. " I will water thee with my tears, O Heshbon ;
1 Rom. xi. 26. '" Isa. xv. 5, xvi. 9, 11.
G
82 The Prop/icts of the Lord: [SERM.
my bowels shall sound like a harp for Moab, and my
inward parts for Kir-harcsh." Even Babylon, whom he
foreknew as God's appointed waster of His people, the
world-power who should uproot His people, and carry
them far away, even Babylon moved him in its fall.
Present in spirit at a doom which was to come nearly
two centuries later, he was himself in spirit as one of
the sufferers. " My loins," he says, " are filled with reel-
ing cramp ; writhing pangs have laid hold of me, as the
pangs of a woman in travail. I am bowed down, that
I cannot hear ; I am terror-stricken, that I cannot see.
My heart reeleth ; horror hath terrified me : the even-
tide of my desire hath He made into terror to me n ."
If Isaiah so felt for the destroyer of his people, was so
horror-stricken for the woes of those yet unborn, what
for their sufferings who were flesh of his flesh and bone
of his bone, whose woes he had to tell them, face to
face, and which would come upon them because they
would not hear! O what a woe it is, to see certainly
before one those judgment-fires, into which people are
rushing madly, because they will not believe them or
look at them !
And in this his general grief for his people, there were
so many particular griefs, as many as there were forms
of evil. All confronted him. For his office lay in the
heart of the material prosperity, the intellect, the cor-
ruptions, the rebellions, the oppressions of his people,
the city of David , once "the faithful, now the harlot-
city, where righteousness once dwelt, and now murder-
ers 11 ." There, in Jotham's sixteen years, there was all
the insolence of human pride, "high and lifted up q ;"
in Uzziah's next sixteen years the whole weight of the
king's authority was thrown in against the faith, from
Isa. xxi. 3, 4. " Ibid. xxix. I. >' Ibid. i. 21. '' Ibid. ii. 6, 7.
VI.] Isaiah. 83
his first scarce-veiled insolence in rejecting the pro-
phet's offer in the name of God to give him what sign
he would of the verity of his promise in his trouble, to
his naked apostacy, when he closed the Temple, sus-
pended its worship, burned his sons in the dreadful
worship of Moloch, made every corner of Jerusalem
a shrine of idolatry, and desecrated every city by its
own idol-chapel r . Then came Hezekiah's reformation, in
himself personally devout, but powerless over his people ;
the thickening troubles of his country, unconverted by
each successive scourge. " The people turneth not to
Him that smiteth them, neither do they seek the Lord
of Hosts 8 ." And so his burden still had to be, " For all
this His anger is not turned away, but His Hand is
stretched out still V Under Manasseh, the tide of evil,
which Hezekiah's personal influence had stayed, burst
out uncontrolled ; it swept along with it the boy-king
of twelve years also, thereafter himself to give fresh im-
pulse to the current, to flood Jerusalem with monstro-
sities of cruelty and lust, as worship of their gods u , and,
(too late for his land though not for his soul,) to turn to
God. Martyrdom crowns those only who resist. In
witnessing then for God, though in this reign he uttered
no recorded prophecy, God, after his threescore years
of service, ordered that he should close his life's long
martyrdom with a martyr's death. Strange likeness
to our Lord, of Whom he spake so much, if, in that
reign of terror and of blood, occasion was found for
slaying him through distortion of his words x !
This great outline of suffering was filled up variedly.
Ahaz' scornful rejection echoed on in the unbelieving
r 2 Chron. xxviii. 2, 3, 23 25. ' Isa. ix. 13. * Ibid. xii. 17, 21.
2 Kings xxi. ; 2 Chron. xxxiii. 26. * See Yebamoth, iv. fin. ,
quoted by Martini, Pug. fid., f. 700, (p. 899, 900, Carpz.)
G 2
84 The Prophets of the Lord: [SERM,
taunts of the great or the learned. They ridiculed the
simplicity of his teaching. It was but fit for babes ;
they were men, and had outgrown it ! " line on line, rule
on rule ; a little here, a little there. Whom should he
teach knowledge y ?" They challenged the Almighty to
fulfil His prophet's threats : " Let Him make speed,
hasten His work, that we may see ; and let the counsel
of the Holy One of Israel draw nigh and come, that we
may know it ! "
" Bricks fell, hewn stone will we build ;
Sycomores are hewn down, cedars will we replace *."
Present judgments, they said, they would more than
recover ; against threatened judgments they had made
their covenant with death, and their agreement with
hell a ; if imminent, they looked to strengthen themselves
with human help, not to their Maker b ; if inevitable, they
would enjoy themselves to the end ; it was, " Eat, drink,
and to-morrow die c ." The leaders misled d , the judges
judged unjustly 6 , the rich left no space for the poor f ,
their women had lost modesty?, their men were op-
pressors h ; evil they called good, good evil ' ; chastise-
ment but engendered increased rebellion k ; the whole
head was sick and the whole heart faint k .
Isaiah could but weep for those who wept not for
themselves. " I will be bitter in my weeping," he says ;
" press not on me to comfort me for the desolation of
the daughter of my people 1 ."
Yet where there is desolation for the sake of God,
there is also consolation. Wherein was Isaiah's ? Not
in the solace of his married life. His daily dress was
i Isa. xxviii. 9, ID. ' Ibid. i.x. 10. Ibid, xxviii. 15. b Ibid,
xxii. 9 II. r Ibid. 13. '' Ibid. ix.i6. ' Ibid. i. 17,
2} ; v - 33- ' H''^- v - ^- 5 I' 1 ' 1 '- '"' '^ "/'' h "''^- '''
^, 12. ' Ibid. v. 2O. k Ibid. i. 5. ' Ibid. xxii. 4.
vi.] Isaiah. 85
like John Baptist's, the hair-cloth pressing upon his
loins, wearing to the naked flesh, although mentioned
only when he was to put it off and himself to become
a portent to his people, walking naked and barefoot" 1 .
His two sons were, by their names, the continual pic-
tures of that woe on his people ; the one spoke only
of " the speed of the prey, the haste of the spoil n ," the
other was that sad dirge which so echoes through the
Prophets, " a remnant shall return ," a remnant only
of that people who were to be as the sand of the sea,
the stars of heaven P. What, then, was Ms solace ?
St. John tells us, in connection with that heavy mes-
sage, " These things said Isaiah, when he saw His glory
and spake of Him 9." Of whom ? Of Christ, of Whom
St. John was speaking. Isaiah had seen, as man can
see, His Deity. He had seen Him, the Brightness of
the Father's Glory and the express Image of His Per-
son ; yet he had not seen the Son Alone. He himself
says, " Mine eyes have seen Him Who Is, the Lord of
Hosts." And the Holy Ghost says by St. Paul, that
He spake by Isaiah in these words : " Well said the
Holy Ghost by Esaias the Prophet unto our fathers,
saying, Go unto this people and say, Hearing, ye shall
hear, and shall not understand 1 "." Isaiah had not yet
the Beatific Vision : " No man hath seen God at any
time a ." Yet he says, " Mine eyes have seen the Lord
of Hosts." Not with his bodily eyes did he behold
God, nor with his bodily ears did he hear His words,
but to his inward sight did God disclose some likeness,
whereby he should understand the nature of the Divine
Essence, how God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in-
m Isaiah xx. 2. " Ibid. viii. 3. Ibid. vii. 3 ; x. 21.
P Gen. xv. 5 ; xxii. 7. ? St. John xii. 41. r Acts xxvi. 25, 26.
s St. John i. 1 8.
86 The Prophets of the Lord: [SER\L
exists in Himself, although the Beatific Vision, as He
Is, was reserved for the life to come. He had, in his
inmost being, in some way, unimaginable to us who
have not beheld it, seen the Holy Trinity in Their Unity
of Essence, and that in the Person of the Son Who said
of Himself, " He that hath seen Me, hath seen the
Father 1 ." For It was a Human Form which he be-
held, sitting enthroned as the Judge, and receiving the
worship of the glowing love of the Seraphim. He had
seen Him in His own glory and the glory of the Father,
transfiguring tlie likeness of that Human Form, Which
is now, with the Father, the light of Heaven ; Which,
amid the Uncreated Light which God Is, illumines
Heaven also with an Uncreated Light, (as St. John
says, "The Lamb is the Light thereof",") because "in
Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily x ."
How should not this Vision live in him for those
threescore years, who knew that thereafter, not through
some created image, not by similitude, but face to Face
he should behold the End of our being, God ? So God
prepared him to be, above all others even of those
God-inspired men, those men of zeal and longing and
love, "the goodly company of the Prophets" the
Evangelic Prophet, in that he had seen the glory of
the Lord.
God's Word is consistent with itself. We need not
marvel (as some have done) that he should speak so
plainly as he does, that that Child to be born to us was
to be " the Mighty God, the Everlasting Lord - v ," or that
the Virgin's Son should be called " Immanuel 7 ," when
he had himself seen a Human Form in the ineffable
Glory of God. No wonder that he should speak of
1 St. John xiv. 9. u Rev. xxi. 23. * Col. ii. 9.
i Isa. ix. 6. * Ibid. vii. 4 ; viii. 8.
VI.] Isaiah. 87
Him Whom he had seen enthroned as Judge, smiting
the earth with the rod of His mouth, and with the
breath of His lips slaying the wicked.
This, then, is ever his consolation ; this his joy in
trouble ; this his life in death. The surges of this world,
higher and higher as they rose, only bore his soul up-
ward toward his God. He, too, was a man of longing.
In the darkness of the world God ever brings this light
before him ; his darkest visions are the dawn-streaks
of the brightest light. Does he describe darkness the
image of that outer darkness a ? Then follows, " The
people that walked in darkness have seen a great light."
Has he to denounce the utter desolation of all the pride
and glory and luxury of the mighty and the beautiful ?
" Zion, clean-emptied, shall sit on the ground." God
teaches him straightway to add, " In that day shall the
Branch of the Lord be beauty and glory b ." And then
follow the holiness and peace which He would bestow.
Has he to say that the refuge of lies, under which the
scornful hoped to hide themselves, shall be swept away ?
He first says, in the Name of God, " Behold, I lay in Zion
for a foundation a Corner-stone, a tried stone, a precious
corner-stone : he that believeth shall not haste ." Has he
to denounce woe on all the houses of joy, in the joyous
city d ? It is but " until the Spirit be poured out from
on high," " and the wilderness shall be a fruitful field,
and the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the
fruit of righteousness quietness and assurance for ever 6 ."
Has he to speak of the house of David as the stump of
a tree hewed down to the ground ? " From that hewn
stump of Jesse," he says, "there shall come forth a rod,
and a Branch shall grow out of his roots, and the Spirit
a Comp. Isa. viii. 22 with ix. I. b Ibid. iii. 1 6 26 ; iv. 2.
c Ibid, xxviii. 16 18. d Ibid, xxxii. 13. Ibid. 1517.
88 The Prophets of the Lord : [SKRM.
of God shall rest upon Him f ;" and then follow the peace-
ful and peace-giving glories of His reign, and the re-
storation of the remnant of His people. Has he to tell,
how in the captivity of Babylon " they that rule over
them make them to howl, and Thy Name every day
is blasphemed?" Forthwith he bursts into a jubilee of
joy : " How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet
of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace,
that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth sal-
vation, that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth *."
Never does that sad message part from his sight. He
is like our own loved poet,
" Ready to give thanks and live
On the least that Heaven may give. "
He does not live in a bright, ideal future, in Messianic
hopes, as men tell you of. His future is as his present,
until " death shall be swallowed up in victory." It is
still " the remnant shall return ; the remnant," he repeats,
" shall return to the Mighty God u ;" they are " the glean-
ing-grapes left in it ; as the shaking of an olive-tree, two
or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough, four
or five in the outmost fruitful branches thereof, saith the
Lord God of Israel 1 ;" "the shaking of an olive-tree,
as the gleaning-grapes when the vintage is done k ." It
is what we see before our eyes now, "Ye shall be
gathered one by one, O ye children of Israel '." And
when the Messiah came, it was to be so still. He was
to be at once " a sanctuary, but for a stone of stumbling
and a rock of offence to both the houses of Israel. And
many among them shall stumble, and fall, and be broken,
and be snared, and be taken m ." The words of the aged
' Isa. xi. I. Ibid. lii. 5, 7. h Ibid. x. 21. ' Ibid. xvii. 6.
k Ibid. xxiv. 13. ' Ibid, xxvii. 12. "' Ibid. viii. 14.
VI.] Isaiah. 89
Simeon but summed up the prophecies of Isaiah : "This
Child is set for the fall and rising again of many in
Israel, and for a sign which shall be spoken against,
that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed 11 ."
For such as they were, such did Christ become to them,
for the fall of the proud and self-satisfied, for the rising
again of those who owned themselves fallen. So Jesus
Himself said, " For judgment I am come into this world,
that they which see not might see, and that they which
see might be made blind ."
And so his soul was prepared for that great paradox
of prophecy which God revealed through him, the way
of whose accomplishment, St. Peter says, was a mystery
to them, whose meaning they searched into the " suf-
ferings of Christ, and the glory which should follow p ."
He, as no other, spake of the buffeting, the spitting
upon, the malefactor's death, the counting with the
transgressors, the contempt, the constant companion-
ship with grief i. He, as few did, spake of the glorious
reign, the everlasting rule ; how He should reign in
righteousness, and be a hiding-place from the storm
to those who seek Him, the shadow of a great Rock
in this weary and dry land of our banishment from
Him. For these should the message for his people be
repealed : " The eyes of them that see shall not be dim,
and the ears of them that hear shall hearken T ."
In this hope and longing he lived, in a future for him-
self, a future which God had promised to the remnant
of his people. He was a man of longing : " In the way
of Thy judgments have I awaited Thee, O Lord ; to Thy
Name and Thy memorial is the longing of my soul.
With my soul have I longed for Thee in the night ; yea,
11 St. Luke ii. 34, 35. St. John ix. 39. P I St. Peter i. II.
* Isa. 1. 6 ; liii. ' Ibid, xsxii. 3.
9O The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
with my spirit within me I will seek Thee early * ;" " This
is our God, we have waited for Him, and He will save
us; this is the Lord, we have waited for Him, we will
rejoice and be glad in His salvation l ;" " Thou wilt
keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed in
Thee, for on Thee is it rested u ." For he looked on
beyond this world of disappointment and of shadows.
He longed to see Him Who had at the beginning re-
vealed Himself to him, the King on His Throne. " Thine
eyes," he says, "shall see the King in His beauty v ."
The grave was to him but a chamber where he should
hide himself for a little while x ; then, to behold what
"ear hath not perceived nor eye seen, O God, beside
Thee, what He hath prepared for him who waiteth for
Him?." For for Him had his whole life been one long
waiting, and He Himself is the everlasting bliss of
those who wait for Him.
Every time has its own pressure in this world of trial.
And since we feel most what presses on ourselves, each
time seems to those who live in it a time of special trial.
Sixteen centuries ago it seemed as if the world was
reaching its old age 7 -. It attests, they said, its own
ruin in the tottering state of things. The time of Anti-
Christ seemed to be approaching a ; faith seemed to be
in a declining or almost slumbering state ; priests were
wanting in religious devotcdncss, ministers in entire-
ness of faith ; there was no mercy in works, no disci-
pline in manners ; modesty was violated in both sexes ;
the world was renounced in words, not in deeds ; men
were eager about property and their gains b , sought to
exalt themselves ; gave themselves up to emulation and
Isa. xxvi. 8, 9. ' Ibid. xxv. 9. u Il>id. xxvi. 3. ' Ibid,
xxxiii. 17. m Ibid. xxvi. 19, 20. > Ibid. Ixiv. 4 (3 Itcb.)
1 S. Cypr. ad Dcmctr., Oxf. Tr., n. 2, p. 200. " Id. ad Fortun. de
Martyr. Pref., p. 278. '' Id., lip. xi. p. 24.
VI.] Isaiah. 91
dissension, were careless about single-mindedness and
the faith ; they were sundered by unabating quarrels ;
bishops were engaged in secular vocations, relinquished
their chairs, deserted their people, hunted the markets
for mercantile profits c .
But for this last trait, one might think that the Martyr-
Bishop of the third century was describing our own times
in the nineteenth. Sore as moral and religious evil are,
because of that horrible risk of human souls, the Gospel
(which is impossible) would be false if they existed not.
The presence of unbelief and of moral evil is a con-
firmation of faith. " Now I have told you, before it
comes to pass," our Lord says of men's rejection of
Him, " that when it is come to pass, ye may believe d ."
This chequered aspect of good and ill is but what the
Prophets, what our Lord, forewarned us of : it does but
verify to us His knowledge of the human heart Only
all good is evidence of His power ; the evil is evidence,
not of His weakness but of ours. All evil is natural, all
good is supernatural. Vice, selfishness, crime, impurity,
ambition, covetousness, unbelief, are but the natural
growth of the human heart. Faith, self-denial, chastity,
content, lowliness, meekness, charity, are supernatural,
the working of the Spirit of God. Start not back, then,
as if some strange thing had happened, if iniquity
abound, if faith seems rare, if zeal looks chilled or well-
nigh extinct, if high aims or devotedness lie hid, if a low
standard seem to have supplanted the measure of Christ.
All this is but of nature. What should we look for in
what is mere nature but the works of a corrupt nature,
or from the flesh but the works of the flesh, of which
the Apostle tells us ? The Gospel, and the grace of
God in it, has to lift us above nature. And it does. But
c Id. de lapsis Treatises, p. 156, O. T. d St. John xiv. 29.
92 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
God respects the free-will of the creature which He made
in His own Image; He will not destroy what is essen-
tial to our likeness to Himself. He will lift us above
nature, but only if we, by our God-enfreed will, will it.
In our mixed selves, we are evidences at once of the
fall and of the restoration. We have too much noble
in us, not to have been consistent once in the good, in
which God created us and endowed us with supernatural
grace. We have too much capacity of good not to be
destined for something much nobler than we at the best
are. But " He who made thee without thee, will not
save thee without thee." The mass of evil is but the
refuse which will not be restored. The simplest self-
conquest is the presence of a supernatural power, a fruit
of the Passion of Jesus, a triumph of. His love and of
His hallowing Spirit.
Be not dismayed, then, though men who think that they
see, see not, or though they see not, because they think
that they see. It is but the condition of the victories of
faith over the soul, free, if it will, to be disbelieved. Be
not discouraged, if iniquity abound, or mankind seem to
deafen itself in its pleasures or gains, or at the stupidity
of an intellect which will not acknowledge a God Whom
it does not see, or own its own free-will, which it has
used against God continually, and, by repeated choices
of its own evil against God's good, has well-nigh en-
slaved to its master-passion, which God would have sub-
jected to it. Jesus foretold at once His victories and
His sorrows ; His victories in those who willed to look-
to Him as their Master, their Saviour, their Regenerator,
their Life, their Resurrection, their Immortality of Joy ;
His sorrows, in those who would not be redeemed.
O that we looked, or that we may look, more to Jesus,
" the Author and Finisher of our faith !" O that we had
VI.] Isaiah. 93
His interests more at our hearts ; that we longed with
a burning love, with a fiery zeal, to win more souls to
love Him, and to find rest and peace in believing and
loving Him ! Disappointment there will be, but
" E'en disappointment Thou canst bless,
So love at heart prevail."
Disappointments there will be ; but look to Jesus. Ask
of Him a heart of fire ; pray Him to touch thy lips with
that fiery coal. Thou knowest not what He will do in
thee, through thee. Look to Him, simply for Him, that
the travail of His soul may be accomplished, and He
will work in thee and through thee more than thou
darest ask or think. What will it be in that Day to
have won one soul to His endless glory and His love !
And now in these poor wanderers 6 who have, we trust,
after all their weary, miserable straying, returned to the
Good Shepherd, and have been by Him brought back
into His fold, remember Him, remember the price of
thy own soul, remember thyself.
c For a penitentiary.
SERMON VII.
JONAH i. 10.
" Then were the men exceedingly afraid, and said unto him, Why
hast thou done this ? Por the men knew that he fled from the
presence of the Lord, because he had told them."
V\ /"HEN we take up the Book of Jonah, that which
strikes us first of all as lying upon the very sur-
face of the book is the degree in which miracle pervades
the whole narrative. In this respect the book is unlike
any other among the minor Prophets. Zechariah's earlier
prophecies take the form of a series of visions ; Jonah's
is a history of wonders patent to sense. Jonah thus
seems to belong less to the minor Prophets than to the
narratives of the Prophets Elijah and Elisha, preserved
in the historical books of the Old Testament. His life
is a tissue of preternatural occurrences. " Nothing is
impossible with God," observes a clever sceptical Com-
mentator, " and hence Jonah lives in the belly of the sea-
fish without being suffocated ; hence the Palm springs
up during the night to such a height that it overshadows
a man in a sitting posture. As Jehovah bends everything
in the world to His own purposes at pleasure, these mar-
vellous coincidences of his book had nothing in them to
96 The Prophets of the Lord : [SEkM.
astonish the Author. The lot falls upon the right man ;
the tempest rises most opportunely and is allayed at the
proper time ; and the fish is ready at hand to swallow
Jonah and vomit him out again. So, again, the tree is
ready to sprout up, the worm to kill it, and the burning
wind to make its loss perceptible*."
Between commentators of this temper and the writer
of the Sacred Book the real difference is, that the Scrip-
ture writer believes seriously in a living God, and
I must say it, reluctantly but distinctly the Commen-
tator does not. The Scripture writer certainly takes it
for granted that He Who made and Who rules the
world, is not precluded from acting on it and in it by
any iron laws which fetter His liberty ; and that to
control creatures and events is not more difficult for
Him than to have given them being. Whereas in the
mind of the Commentator, the dead abstraction which
he calls God is the slave of the living, sensible reality
which he names Nature ; or rather Nature forms a screen
between human life and God, which keeps God very ef-
fectively at a distance, and surrounds man with agencies
and laws, supposed to do their work like a self-moving
clock, and upon whose motion a living Omnipotent
Will is never suffered to innovate. For the writers of
Holy Scripture miracle is always possible, and the only
question is whether there is sufficient evidence for as-
serting its existence in a particular case. For writers
like this Commentator miracle is always impossible, and
the only question is, how most easily to get over the
authority and statements of Scripture on the subject.
Beyond all doubt the Book of Jonah does raise this ques-
tion as directly as any book in the Bible ; perhaps more so.
" Hitzig Kinl. qu. by Kcil. Kinlciton^ in das I>uch. Ton. Biblisch
< 'omm.
vil.] Jonah, 97
Although the preservation of Jonah in the belly of the
sea-fish, and the growth of the Palma Christi to a suf-
ficient height to overshadow a sitting man, have well-
attested analpgies in nature which go to make the possi-
bility of such miracles at least conceivable b even to the
most purely naturalistic imagination ; yet the whole
narrative is instinct with the presence of a living, all-
governing God, Who makes the material world subserve
the moral, and Who acts through the lower creatures
on the souls of man. In the early ages of Christianity
the Book of Jonah was appropriately ridiculed by the
heathen Lucian ; and in one of his Epistles St. Augus-
tine combats the faintheartedness of some Christian be-
lievers who were disposed on this point to wince at
hearing of jests current among the pagans. The vir-
tual substance and upshot of St. Augustine's remarks
is this, that a man either believes in the Resurrection
of Christ or he does not. If he does not ; he is not
a Christian, at least in any sense known to the New
Testament. If he does ; he believes in a stupendous
miracle which ought to make it logically impossible
for him to take exception at other well-attested mira-
cles, such as that of Jonah's sojourn in the belly of the
sea-fish c . The question is thus in reality a wider and
deeper one than any connected with this particular
book ; and the history of Jonah will be respected and
believed by those who are not prepared to make short
work with the most solemn and important portions of
the Gospel narratives. For our Lord Himself attests
the truth of Jonah's history, and makes it a sign or
warrant of the miracle which was to prove His own
mission to the world: "As Jonah was three days and
b Keil Einl., and in loc.
c Ep. 106, qu. by Dr. Pusey, " Minor Prophets,'' Introd. to Jonah.
II
98 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
three nights in the whale's belly, even so shall the
Son of Man be three days and three nights in the
heart of the earth."
Thus much upon a question which could not be
entirely passed by, but which we may here brush out
of the way of this evening's proper subject. To his
own age, doubtless, not less than to ours, Jonah's life
was an announcement of the presence and power of
the living God in this His own world, which is the
work of His Hands, and which most assuredly He has
not deserted. But besides this, there are two messages
which are spoken to our age and to all from the pages
of this book ; one of them concerning the love and
large-heartedness of God, the other the history of a
human soul, which is by no means singular in the
moral aspects of its agitated destiny.
I. This will appear if we follow awhile the guidance
of the history, and accordingly begin by asking the
question, why Jonah was sent to Nineveh ?
" Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son
of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city,
and cry against it ; for their wickedness is come up
before Me d ."
This commission, it has been observed, was in keep-
ing with God's ordinary providence respecting heathen
nations 6 . God always blessed those of the heathen
who were brought into contact with His chosen people
by a certain knowledge of Himself. The Egyptian
kings and people learnt much of Him from Joseph
in one generation, and from Moses in another. The
Canaanites heard of Him from the Spies ; the Philis-
tines by the capture of the Sacred Ark ; the Phoenicians
on the Mediterranean coast through Hiram of Tyre ; the
' Jonah i. I. e 1'uscy, "Minor Prophet*.," p. 247.
vii.] Jonah. 99
Syrians of Damascus through captives like Naaman's
servant and the miracles of Elisha ; the Babylonian and
Persian kings through Daniel, and the Persians later
through Esther. The truth which was already "the
glory of God's people Israel," was, in a measure, " a light
to lighten the Gentiles." The Synagogue anticipated
some features of the Gospel, as the Church has incor-
porated and will always retain certain elements of the
Law. It is true now that Christians are, in the Apo-
stle's words, " a chosen generation, a royal priesthood,
an holy nation, a peculiar people f ." It was true, then,
that " God is no respecter of persons ; but in every
nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteous-
ness, is accepted with Him &." The laws of the Divine
Government are invariable ; only in one age prominence
is given to one law or principle, in another to another.
Jonah was sent to Nineveh in the meridian of As-
syrian greatness. Two monarchs had just died whose
reigns had been a succession of victories. Pul, or Iva-
lush, the first assailant of Israel, was yet to come.
Nineveh was great both in its extent and in its power.
The circuit of its walls was sixty miles ; and although
within the large area thus enclosed, as at Babylon, there
would have been a considerable acreage of ground under
cultivation, and there is an allusion in this very book
to the vast quantities of cattle herded there, the popu-
lation of the city was at least 600,000. If, among
European capitals, it could not compare as to popula-
tion with Paris, much less with London ; Nineveh must
have equalled, if it did not exceed, Berlin or St. Peters-
burg. Nineveh was a city in which human nature was
brutalized by a long career of successful violence ; bru-
talized to a point which degraded it even below the
1 i Pet. ii. 9. * Acts x. 34, 35.
H 2
loo The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
average heathen level. The Prophet Nahum finds the
natural image which will do justice to its moral cha-
racteristics, only in the lions' den : Nineveh, he says,
" is the dwelling of the lions, and the feeding-place of
the young lions, where the lion did tear in pieces
enough for his whelps, and strangled for his lionesses h ."
Nineveh was the home of rapacity, injustice, violence,
cruelty, conducted on a truly imperial scale ; and God,
speaking to Jonah, says, " Their wickedness is come up
before Me." God is brought before us in these words,
as He sits above this waterflood of crime, as He re-
maineth in the moral world a King for ever. He is
the Great Judge unseen by man, but witnessing all
human acts and words and motives, seated even now
upon His Throne of Judgment ; and each crime of each
member of that vast community mounts upwards, and
is registered in His Heavenly Court '. The same phrase
had already been used of the murder of Abel, and of
the iniquity of Sodom and Gomorrha ; it marks that
special notice of sin which precedes a judgment. God
had waited long in His Patience and His Mercy, but
the cup at length was full to overflowing. The great
city of the East must perish ; and yet, only forty days
before the appointed day of ruin, a voice of warning
should reach it, proclaiming the justice yet implying
the tenderness of God.
Of that message of mercy Jonah was to be the bearer.
Other Prophets might prophesy the future conversion
of the heathen to the true God, following upon the
surrender of Israel to the heathen power, and upon
the appearance and Death of the Messiah ; Jonah was
to anticipate the Gospel in another way. Jonah's book
contains no predictions of the remote future in words ;
h N.ih. ii. II, 12. ' Sec Puscy in /la. Ephcs. iii. IO.
IX.] Elisha. 1 39
And so Elisha is not a new Elijah. The " still small
voice" of which we read, just before his call, is the
emblem of the younger prophet. Gentleness is his
characteristic ; help, and deliverance, and salvation, are
his work.
His very name signifies "God's Salvation." That
name involves a blessed statement, which almost every
action of his marvellous life might have recalled to the
mind of his people. The last doings of his life, some
of his last recorded words, possibly contain an allusion
to it, " The arrow of the Lord's deliverance, and the
arrow of deliverance from Syria V
His miracles run on in rapid succession, until they
have been called with over freedom the " Acts of
Elisha," as if we were reading the legendary doings
of some medieval saint. They are stamped with one
peculiar and consistent impress. The very first is the
merciful healing of the waters of Jericho. Among the
last in the cluster which relates to the sons of the pro-
phets is the feeding of the hundred with the twenty
loaves c , the faint prelude of the miracle in the Gospel
for Refreshment Sunday.
There is something also in the homeliness of many of
these miracles which contrasts with the mysterious awe
that broods round the path which is trodden by the
elder prophet. We may trace it in the restoration of
the poor man's borrowed axe d , in the oil that fills vessel
after vessel, like water from some abundant spring .
Above all we may trace it in those fresh and tender
pages, pathetic with a pathos that puts fiction and
rhetoric to shame, in the history of the Shunammite.
Of course we cannot forget that in the history of
b 2 Kings xiii. 17. c Ibid. iv. 42. d Ibid. iii. 6.
Ibid. iv. 5, 6.
1 40 The Prophets of the L ord : [SERM .
Elisha moments come, when God's glory and the good
of His people demand a sterner dealing; when the
gentle prophet of salvation must utter the truth that
burns, or even wield the weapon that destroys. Yet,
even in these cases, we seem to feel as if he had been
breathing in an alien element. After that terrible in-
cident, that one miracle of destruction which punished
the guilty parents of a guilty town, and perhaps saved
the forty-two who perished from a deeper sin and more
dreadful punishment ; after that solemn curse in the
name of the Lord ; the thought seems to press upon
the prophet's loving heart. He must have time to
recover : he must bathe his fevered brow in the lonely
air, and breathe in the mountain solitude. " And there
came forth two she bears "out of the wood, and tare
forty and two of them. And he went from thence to
Mount Carmel, and from thence he returned to Sa-
maria f ." In the campaign of the three kings against
Moab, he speaks with unwonted, yet surely not with un-
becoming wrath. We hear once again the mighty voice
of Elijah : "As the Lord of Hosts liveth, before whom
I stand, surely, were it not that I regard the presence
of Jehoshaphat the king of Judah, I would not look
toward thee, nor see thee*." Yet it would appear as
if he doubted whether the calm vision of God might
pass across the mirror of a spirit that had been
clouded by the hot breath of human anger. And he
calls for sacred music to allay his perturbation. One,
and one only could be angry, and yet contract no
more defilement than the lucid water from sweeping
over a bed of stainless marble.
He is no cloistered ascetic, no head of the Carmelite
brothers, no monk of the Old Testament. It cannot
' 2 Kings ii. 24, 25. Ibid. iii. 14 ; cf. I Kings xvii. i.
IX.] Elisha. 141
be truly said by any of these, Elisseus noster. Ascetic
his little chamber may be, with bed, and table, and
stool, and candlestick ; ascetic compared with the club-
rooms, where scientific luxury gives you the most
comfortable seat, and the most feathered footfall, and
the best-dressed dinners upon the most economical
principle, where you can live like a noble upon little
more than the income of a clerk, and learn the art
of the graceful and systematic selfishness that has
the softest voice and the hardest heart. Ascetic it
may be, compared with rooms in this place, (unless
Oxford be much changed,) where luxury and extra-
vagance are to be found that may help to break the
strong heart of some self-denying parent. But in Elisha
the practical and the contemplative are exquisitely ba-
lanced. " Carmel fits him for Samaria, and Samaria
for Carmel." There seems to be some special attrac-
tion which draws him to towns. " If Elijah," it has
been said, " enters a city, it is only to deliver his mes-
sage of fire, and be gone. Elisha, on the other hand,
is an inhabitant of cities V He is found in the cam-
paign of the kings of Israel, Judah, and Edom i ; for
even in an army the everlasting Presence can go forth
with us, and fill us with unfailing peace. He pauses
in the Shunammite's house, as if he loved to hear the
stream of family life rippling beside him, and to feel
its spray upon his face k . For he has no unworthy
fear that he will lose dignity or influence by the curious,
and not always kindly, inspection of intimacy. There
is one great difference between the works of nature and
of art. The latter, however gentle and graceful they
h Mr. Grove's Article on Elisha in "Dictionary of the Bible." See
2 Kings ii. 18, 25 ; v. 32 ; vi. 32, 24 ; vi. 14 ; v. 9, 24 ; vi. 32 ; xiii. 17.
' 2 Kings iii. n. k Ibid. iv. 10.
1 42 The Prophets of the L ord : [SERM.
may appear to the naked eye, when looked at under
the microscope exhibit coarseness and want of con-
summate finish. The delicate lace-work is a collection
of lines that have the rigidity of wire. But the minu-
test piece of God's workmanship, leaf, or feather, or
beetle's wing, is soft and exquisite to the lowest point
at which we can trace it down the abyss of littleness.
And so an unreal spiritual life, a hollow morality, an
adventitious holiness, looks coarse and ugly under the
microscope of intimacy. How many preachers are
there whom it is better not to know ! O for the quiet
unpretending holiness which grows upon us as we in-
spect it ; of which, as its possessor passes by oft,
and turns in to eat bread, men and women are con-
strained to say, " I perceive that this is an holy man
of God which passeth by us continually." For such,
intimacy is not inconsistent with the unstudied dignity
that will neither cringe to a patron, nor bow before the
great and honourable, borne, like Naaman, in chariots.
To complete the view of Elisha's character. He is
full of the most refined humanity. He can recognise
in an afflicted woman the feelings that are too deep
for words, because the loving God, the maker of the
subtly-chorded instrument, has reserved their music
for Himself. He can sympathise with a conscience at
once weak and scrupulous. He can bear patiently
with the long-continued cross of a weak and unprin-
cipled attendant, who cannot understand his purity
and self-denial. He loves to appear with good news,
to assure the childless woman that a little babbling
voice shall yet make music in her home, to tell the
besieged, whose carrion-fare costs them so dear, that
the abundance of the harvest shall yet be poured upon
them, as if from the windows of heaven. The fuller
IX.] Elisha. 143
morality of the Gospel makes us exacting. We criti-
cise holy men of old by the purer and more searching
light which we possess. We sometimes claim from
them a chivalry which they do not possess. Shall
we forget that answer, worthy of the gentlest record
of Christian chivalry, " Thou shalt not smite them.
Wouldest thou smite those whom thou hast taken cap-
tive with thy sword and with thy bow ?"
Consider, too, how deeply, how almost passionately,
with what surpassing human love, he can love his
sombre and awful master. " My father, my father !
the chariots of Israel, and the horsemen thereof. And
he took hold of his own clothes, and rent them in
two pieces." Glorious as is that departure of Elijah,
we yet feel that there is in it something of the sorrow
that clings to the partings of mortality. It is a radiant
sunset, but there is a trouble round about it. Even
here, where there are so many young men present,
there must be some who know how last looks are
graven upon the memory. Once, and once only, did
a separation for life between loving hearts leave joy
behind it. It was after the stone had been rolled
away from the sepulchre, when the great Forty Days
were over, and the risen Lord was taken up in the
cloud out of sight. "And they returned to Jerusalem
with great joy." With joy, because evermore there
dwelt with them the memory of the pierced Hands
that were lifted up to bless. But here, at the ascen-
sion of Elijah, we see of how much love and sorrow
the prophet was capable.
II. We now consider the message to this age which
is conveyed in Elisha's message to his own age.
i. The first, and not the least important of these,
is directly connected with his prophetic office. Let us
144 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
first form to ourselves a clear notion of that office
in general, and of Elisha's peculiar relation to it. The
lesson which we are seeking will then follow without
effort.
(a.) I need, perhaps, scarcely caution you against
that restricted view of the prophet's office, which would
make him simply a foreteller of future events. He is,
indeed, that, and especially in reference to the suffer-
ings of Christ, and the glory that shall follow. Dim,
indeed, and mysterious are the images of the Sufferer
with pale and dying lips, and of the risen King.
Yet as we know some shape in a mirror in the grey
winter morning, because we have known it before by
seeing it a hundred times in the broad daylight ; so
we recognise Christ in the clear obscure of prophecy,
because we have seen Him in the sunlight of the
Gospels. If we have no Messianic prophecy falling
from the lips of Elisha, yet we find that he can read
the future ; that he can see the absent ; that he can
pierce the veil of flesh which hangs between his soul
and that of other men ; that he can peruse the bloody
lines of Hazael's face, and read the story of his life by
a supernatural light.
But the idea of the Nabi is not to be limited to that
of the foreseer or foreteller. The root from which it
comes denotes that which jets or boils up, and comes
forth with precipitate motion. It means an interpreter
between God and man, who in words that well and
gush forth, foretells future events, or unfolds divine
mysteries, or enforces everlasting moral laws. The
Greek word irpo<^i]rris with its double meaning of fore-
telling and annunciation is no inadequate rendering.
We should also remember that the prophets of Israel
are to be divided into two eras. In the first we have
IX.] Elisha. 145
their historical action, in the second we have their
writings. There are prophets who have never penned
their inspiration. The era of unwritten prophecy ends
with Elijah and Elisha in the tenth and ninth cen-
turies before Christ. The era of written prophecy has
been divided by modern critics, the enemies of the
theocracy, as Syro- Assyrian, Chaldean, and Persian.
Now you will remember that in the era of the un-
written prophets, to Avhich Elisha belongs, the prophet
is mainly this, the interpreter of God, " the organ of
all that is most pure and loving in the popular con-
science," the solemn witness against wrong, the re-
membrancer of right. His office is the inverse of that
which modern statesmen claim for themselves. They
claim to be the exponents of the popular will, and
thus to enjoy the privilege of being always on the
winning side. But the prophet of old is the stern
opponent of popular or royal will, and is always for
a time on the losing side.
And unbelief now does not fail to whisper what was
doubtless said by their contemporaries. Impracticable
men ! their zeal becomes fanaticism. Their fidelity
to unpopular principles degenerates into narrowness.
Living for an ideal, they exact that which is impossible
from men who live in the regions of reality. Trouble-
some Puritans whom their enthusiasm renders incor-
ruptible, and who on religious questions will listen
only to the inexorable logic of a truth which they
believe to be divine.
Brethren, though we be not prophets, nor prophets'
sons, we need something of this part of the prophetic
spirit ; we need to remember Elisha in Dothan.
The character of Englishmen seems to have altered
strangely in the last twenty years. They used to
L
146 The Prophets of the Lord: [SERM.
believe and construct ; they now doubt and destroy.
They used to be quiet and practical ; they are now
a restless race, a horde of minute philosophers. In-
tellectual modesty was the characteristic of our more
distinguished students. One hears now of vain and
clever young men, who tell the world that Descartes
and Leibnitz, Plato and Aristotle, do not answer to
their thought ; that Bishop Butler is not a philosopher,
and Augustine deficient in the critical faculties, and
that the Gospels are not so spiritual as a new Gospel
which they patronise. It was the characteristic of an
indomitable race never to know when it was beaten.
Its characteristic now seems to be that it should always
know when it is beaten, and give up in time. We
have arrived at moral and political pantheism. We be-
lieve in laws of society working out the will of the
majority by a fatality that cannot be resisted. We
fold our hands, and say each one, " We must submit.
What am I, but a single grain of sand ? Can I heave
up the mountain which is above me?" Ah, brethren,
a million "I wills" cannot make a single "I ought."
From voices which are local, though they rise from
a nation, and transitory, though they are pronounced
by a generation, we must look up with the prophets
to the everlasting right. And still, as in the beleaguered
city of the Church we are tempted to swell the faith-
less cry, "Alas, how shall we do?" we should pray
for opened eyes, that we may see the horses and
chariots of fire, stretching in unending line from the
feeble wall to the steps of God's throne, and filling
the mountain with the splendour of their presence.
2. There are other lessons which Elisha seems to
announce to our time, and which may be readily
indicated.
IX.] Elisha. 147
(a.) A warning against the spirit of mockery, so pre-
valent among the young.
Nothing so unsuitable to youth, the season for re-
verence and admiration.
We of this day want something to admire. We
may have grown wise, but a mocking Mephistophelic
spirit walks by our side. Some flaw in every gem,
some speck in every fruit, something base in every
apparent virtue, some selfish sediment in every appa-
rent self-denial ; some physical or moral defect, some
baldness upon the head of every prophet or man of
God (perhaps the mark of the circlet of the crown
of thorns) which makes you meet his solemn voice
with some contemptuous cry.
We may also find a warning against two spiritual
evils of vast extent upon opposite sides.
(/3.) A warning against the spirit of irregularity in
religion. If ever there were men who might have
claimed to have been above rules in religion, they
were these prophets of Israel. Why they were raised
up in the ten tribes mainly to supply to the faithful
people of Israel a substitute for the Church from which
they were unavoidably severed. Yet see how Elijah
upon Carmel offers up his prayer in communion with
the Church "at the time of the offering of the even-
ing sacrifice." See how Elisha's prayer brings down
the thunder-burst upon the far hills of Moab "in the
morning, when the meat-offering was offered." So
all faithful hearts keep time with the great pulsation
of the Church's mighty heart.
(7.) A warning against the opposite spirit of formality.
This is conveyed by an incident in connection with
Gehazi \ Who and what was he ? one of those men
1 2 Kings iv. 29 31.
L 2
148 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
so often met with, living upon the surface of society,
an outward superficial existence, touched by religion
upon the surface, not at the centre of their being,
a sort of spiritual Boswell or Eckcrmann, pleased to
gain consequence for himself by his connection with
Elisha. Bear with me if in Gehazi carrying the staff
I see the very type of some young dilettante priest,
going from a university to his parish. Gehazi bore
the prophet's staff, and laid it upon that pale face,
and he expects that it will flush again with the glow
of life. It was not a dead staff that was wanted. It
was a living man with God's living spirit in his heart.
A young man thinks that he will introduce this or
that service, this or that change. He will borrow this
from Herbert, or that from Suckling, or that from
some Church which he has admired. It may be well.
But you want something more than a dead thing which
has belonged to a prophet. The virtue is in the grasp.
You want the knowledge gained in the schools of the
prophets, and the chastening self-denial, and the earnest
communions. And you must hold strongly the one
staff which is long enough to knock at the gate of
heaven. And you must breathe your own very living
breath down into those dead souls ; so only they
shall live.
I know not whether it may seem over-fanciful, if I
add that two other warnings seem to be conveyed, one
by the first miracle of Elisha, the other by the latest
incident of his life.
(8.) A warning against over-addiction to old modes
of conveying religious truth.
Of this great Church of ours it may be said, " The
situation of the city is pleasant." And yet at this mo-
ment, when currents from " welling fountain-heads of
IX.] Elisha. 149
change" are streaming over to us, and meeting in the
denial of the very preamble of religion, in the nega-
tive of the supernatural and of a personal God, must
we not add, " From these waters there is death, and
barren land ?" And what shall heal them ? Nothing
but the old salt, the old Creed, and the old Gospel ;
only as we reverently place the sacramental wine in
a golden cup, so let the bread be given in the best and
choicest vehicle which our labour can frame. Does not
the prophet cry, " Bring me a new cruse ?"
(e.) A warning against trusting in new and sublimated
forms of Christian thought.
In that incident in 2 Kings xiii., it was the hand of
an old man, nearly ninety years of age ; it was a weak
and withered hand. But if the Prophet's hand had not
been on the sinewy hand of the young king, the bow
had been drawn in vain. So this Creed that has no
form or comeliness, this Book which some would have
us believe to be but an old and withered Jew's hand,
must be on the bow that shall shoot the arrow of our
deliverance from the enemies of the human spirit.
III. Brethren, in this our day there will not be
wanting those who will smile at Augustine's favourite
thought. How the dead child figured our fallen hu-
manity dead in Adam. How the staff laid upon the
pale cold face, " but there was neither voice nor hear-
ing," shewed that the Law could never give life. How
the great eternal God came to him who was little, the
Saviour to him who was to be saved, the living to the
dead. How He contracted His greatness, and fitted
Himself to our littleness, that He might make the
body of our vileness like the body of His glory. How
He signified all the impotence of the law in the staff,
all His loving-kindness, and compassion, and sympathy,
1 50 T/te Prophets of the L ord. [SERM. I X .
in Elisha. But if we shrink from this as mystical, in
one point, as Christians, we shall agree. No single
type fully represents Him. But all these isolated
types of moral beauty in king, or priest, or prophet,
find their centre in the incarnate God. And " the still
small voice" of Bethlehem and Calvary, of the shrouded
glory, and the miracles of compassion, and the broken
heart ; and the gentleness of Elisha, which is so human
and domestic, so tender and so strong ; leads us on
toward the gentle Humanity of Him who is meek
and lowly in heart. To Him may you all come for
pardon, for sympathy. There are strange possibi-
lities in the future. A man of genius has recorded
that once in his youth, in a vision he saw a haggard
man turn and look upon him with a face of hatred.
At last he saw that it was himself twenty years older,
himself with the fatal lines of dissipation ploughed into
his face. Who, indeed, in a congregation like this, can
imagine the difference between the gay young man
and " the grey and gap-toothed old man, lean as
death ?" May you be saved from this. May you
prepare yourselves each to lay one stone of that
pyramid, of which each generation plants one course
in the shadow, waiting for the eternal morning to strike
upon the topmost row.
SERMON X.
JOB xiii. 15.
" Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him."
"O ESPECTING the general character of the Book of
Job, the opinions of critics and philosophers have
exhibited a remarkable unanimity. One calls it "the
Melchizedec among the Old Testament books ;" another
says of it, " that it hovered like a meteor over the old
Hebrew literature, in it, but not of it ; ... never alluded
to, and scarcely ever quoted, till at last the light which
it had heralded rose up full over the world in Chris-
tianity." Yet a third (one of the most eminent amongst
modern philosophers) remarks concerning its hero,
" Job, maintaining his virtue, and justifying the utterance
of the Creator respecting him, sits upon his heap of
ashes, as the pride and glory of God. . . . He conquers,
and his victory is a triumph beyond the stars ! Be it
history, be it poetry, he who thus wrote was a Divine
Seer!"
Of such a Book as this, breathing a spirit thus lofty
and majestic, and carrying on its forefront the visible
imprint of Divine inspiration, the question of the age
and authorship is one of but secondary consequence.
Two things, however, seem to be almost universally
1 52 The Prophets of t/u Lord : [SERM.
admitted. First, that the hero of the Book, whenever he
lived, was not its author ; and secondly, that the Book
was written long after the days of Moses, and long
before the period of the exile.
Further than this I should deem it inexpedient (as it
is certainly unnecessary) to speculate, but for two con-
siderations. First, because it adds greatly to the in-
terest and significance of a book, if we can determine,
even approximately, the circumstances under which it
was written ; and secondly, because, with the critical
direction I have indicated, such approximate determina-
tion seems far from difficult. If, indeed, it be allowed
that the Book was written between the death of Moses
and the period of the exile, the epoch towards which we
are irresistibly led, as that of its probable composition,
is the great age of David and Solomon. In that period,
the people of Israel, almost at a single bound, passed
from the condition of a loose fraternity of lawless clans
to that of a powerful heroic monarchy. Nor when
we read the Book of Psalms does this brilliant trans-
formation appear any longer inexplicable. For there
we are smitten at once by that mighty wing-stroke of
spiritual power which bore Israel aloft in a single gene-
ration to the height of a commanding secular dominion,
and of a world-wide spiritual ascendancy.
But all the more, therefore, do we look anxiously for
the breaking forth of this spiritual power in the direc-
tion of intellectual speculation. Has the spirit of Israel
force enough to construct a monarchy, and to create the
hymnody of all time ? and can we suppose, that when
confronted with the terrible problems of action and
existence, it will have no power to stimulate the intellect
to their consideration ? Mighty in action and devotion,
can it be impotent in thought alone ?
x.] yob. 153
It may be deemed by some a sufficient answer to this
question to point to the recognised literature of the days
of Solomon to the practical wisdom of the Proverbs,
and the vanitas vanitorum of the Preacher. But yet,
excellent, and even necessary, as are these products of
pious prudence and worldly experience for the comple-
tion of Divine wisdom, few can have failed to feel that
they march, at best, with unequal step beside the rapt
and lofty spirit of the Psalms. It is not in the strong
bright secular satisfaction of the practical moralist, it is
not in the weary dissatisfaction of the palled pleasure-
seeker, who, having played experiments with life and
failed, has only strength to tell his own sad tale as
a warning to mankind, it is not in these that we can
match the profound spiritual emotion, the awful moral
earnestness, of the Psalms. We want something as wide
in the sweep of its thought as the Psalms in the range
of their feeling ; something which, like them, shall sound
the utmost depth of our fears, and soar to the utmost
height of our aspirations ; which, like them, shall be as
spiritual as it is wise, as strong as it is tender ; and
that we meet with what we seek nowhere in the whole
range of inspired philosophy but in the Book of Job,
this surely (taken in connexion with the critical conclu-
sions I have mentioned) furnishes a presumption of no
inconsiderable force, that for the age of its author we
must look to the great days of the undivided kingdom.
One thing, however, is certain, that whether written
in those days or not, the Book of Job is at least worthy
of them.
Passing on now to inquire into the central purpose of
the Book, we soon discover that it is the object of the
writer to discuss a question which, from its interest, no
less than its obscurity, has been the subject of debate
I 54 T/ie Prophets of the Lord: [SERM.
and anxiety in all ages ; What, viz., is the precise con-
nexion between sin and suffering ? A question which
loses itself, in turn, in the still more mysterious inquiry,
How could a God of love permit the existence of evil ?
In order to give precision and reality to this inquiry,
the author avails himself of the existing and well-known
history of Job. Avoiding merely abstract inquiries,
which would have presented little of interest and less of
profit, he states, in the simplest and briefest manner, the
facts of the Patriarch's life. Born in Arabia, in patri-
archal days, Job was a just man, and devout, fearing
God and loving his neighbour. The story of his earlier
life is a delightful picture of pastoral simplicity, domestic
affection, and pious prosperity ; of wealth employed to
promote the reasonable happiness of its human owners,
and sanctified by the continual remembrance of the
Divine Giver. The only drawback is, that this godly
home is built upon the earth ; is reared above the beat-
ing of a fiery subterranean heart, which, as experience
too sadly testifies, may at any time shake it into ruins
by the mighty fever-throb of some spiritual earthquake.
In the ordinary case we know of such catastrophes
only that they have occurred, but here we are permitted
to witness the gradual accumulation of those hidden
forces which are to be the terrible agents of ruin. We
get a glimpse of that spiritual world, which, arching above
us, on the one hand, as a bright beneficent heaven of
Divine love on the other stretches deep beneath the
thin crust of our mortal existence into those dark and
secret abysses where the volcanic forces of moral evil
lie stored.
Satan appears in heaven to question Job's piety, and
to suggest that he serves God only for what he can gain
by it. In answer to this malicious suggestion, the
x.] Job. 155
Accuser is permitted to deprive him first of property,
then of children, and then of bodily health and comfort,
till at length, stripped of all which had made life dear
and precious, the stricken patriarch seats himself amongst
the ashes, naked and destitute, his body corrupted by
the awful black leprosy of Arabia, and his miserable
spirit darkened throughout the whole circuit of its hea-
ven by the storm-cloud of his unparalleled woes.
And yet " in all this," we are told, " Job sinned not,
nor charged God foolishly." Deprived of a fortune
which had no parallel in the East, he answers never
a word. Stricken in a more vulnerable place by the
death of his children, he pours forth the fulness of his
chastened spirit in the sublimest words of resignation
which ever fell from the lips of a mourner ; and even
when cast down upon the ashes, in the prostration of
a mortal and disgusting sickness, he exclaims only, in
the meekness and calmness of a self-possession strong
and sublime enough to have dignified a throne, "shall
we receive good at the hands of the Lord, and shall we
not receive evil ?"
Satan then was sufficiently answered. It was proved
already that at least his accusations were false, and
accordingly he disappears altogether from the scene
convicted and vanquished.
Job is left alone with his afflictions ; to sustain their
burden and ponder their meaning in the light of such
truth as he possessed.
Now it was a doctrine of that age and country (a doc-
trine not without an element of truth, and one naturally
growing up in a primitive form of life), that God propor-
tioned a man's sufferings to the heinousness of his per-
sonal transgressions. If this doctrine were true in the
case of Job, it plainly proved that he was a perfect
1 56 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
monster of iniquity. But the author has already allowed
us to sec that this is not the fact ; and therefore we
must look upon the case of Job as a conclusive refuta-
tion of the popular Arabian theory.
Perhaps, if the patriarch had been left in peace, he
might have attained to this conclusion without any-
severe internal conflict. But matters were ordered
otherwise. He was visited by three of his friends
men pious, upright, and had in reputation, who had met
together by appointment "to mourn with him and to
comfort him." Approaching him at first with the ten-
derest and sincerest sympathy, they are yet impelled,
by the very orthodoxy of their views, to bring him to
a sense of (as they conclude) his extraordinary guilt.
According to the popular doctrine (which Job had
hitherto believed no less than they) God could justly
inflict suffering only on account of sin. If, then, suffer-
ing existed, they must either assume that its subject was
a sinner, or that God was unjust. But to pious men the
latter was, of course, an impossible supposition, and the
more clearly they saw this, the more precisely were they
prepared to affirm the alternative.
On the other hand, the patriarch knew that this as-
sumption of theirs was untrue. Of his own moral recti-
tude, or at least of the sincerity and whole-heartedness of
his endeavour after moral rectitude, he had the most in-
dubitable evidence which a man can possess, viz., that of
his own inward experience. Of the trustworthiness of
this experience he was all the more convinced in propor-
tion to the extravagance of the friends' assumption ; for
they were logically bound to affirm, and did affirm, not
only that Job was a sinner, but that he was one of the
most notorious sinners who ever lived. This Job utterly
denied. A sinner he was, and was ready to admit that
x.] Job. 157
he was ; but a sinner whose iniquity was enormous in
comparison with that of his fellow-men he was not, and
would not acknowledge himself to be.
This honesty of Job, his friends regarded as spiritual
hardness and hypocrisy, and met it with an ever-increas-
ing harshness of accusation which did but increase the
sufferer's anguish and deepen his perplexity. Much
could be said on the side of the friends, and all that
could be said for them is urged with the utmost possible
force. And hence the great difficulty of perceiving at
a superficial glance the error of the friends, and the
justice of the patriarch's complaints against them. All
upon their part is so correctly conceived, and so justly,
eloquently (even sublimely), expressed, that it requires
the closest attention to detect what is false or exag-
gerated therein ; while again, on the part of Job, all is
at first so chaotic and impassioned, so wildly daring in
thought, so carelessly impetuous (almost to blasphemy)
in expression, that it is difficult (at least for a western
mind) to follow the development of his feeling and faith.
On a closer study, however, of the Book, all this is
reversed ; and the more it is studied, the more one's ad-
miration grows of the vast range of its thought, of the
deep fervour of its inspiration, even of the consummate
art of its construction.
Bend over that turbulent chaotic mind of Job, and
you will perceive at length, seething in its fiery depths,
the elements of a new creation. Sift and analyze, on
the other hand, the eloquent commonplaces of his
friends, and in their application, at least, you will find
them as unfruitful as they are false.
The friends turn about everywhere within the narrow
circle of their original syllogism. Personal suffering is
the punishment of personal sin. Job suffers ; therefore
1 5 8 The Prophets of the Lord : [SE R M .
he has sinned. That is the whole. Words are multi-
plied, illustration is piled upon illustration, and meta-
phor on metaphor, with an inexhaustiblcncss truly
oriental, but of progress or variety in thought there is
absolutely nothing. There is one narrow dogma. It is
defended on different grounds ; now on that of revela-
tion, again on that of tradition, and still again on that of
personal experience but the thing, the doctrine, never
once enlarges, or even alters in the process.
Again it is passed through different minds : through
that of Eliphaz, the grave and dignified patriarchal
chieftain, the man of practical wisdom and large charity ;
through that of Bildad, the man of precedent and tradi-
tion, distrustful of talent and apprehensive of change ;
finally, through that of Zophar, the passionate and un-
reasoning conservative, narrow in his conceptions, bitter,
and sometimes even coarse and offensive, in his invec-
tive. The minds are different, through which the one
doctrine is passed, and they tinge it with their own
colour in the passage, but of other change it suffers ab-
solutely nothing. Urged, now tenderly as in the first
controversy, now furiously as in the second, and now
doggedly and uncharitably as in the third, it is still the
same narrow, hard, uncompromising dogma the dead
weight of unelastic authority which presses on the writh-
ing and struggling spirit of the patriarch with the piti-
less persistence of an unchanging condemnation.
Now it is out of the terrible struggle thus produced
in the heart of Job, as he storms forth for light and com-
fort from this prison of condemnation, first in one direc-
tion and then in another, now in the form of complaint,
now of appeal, and now again of believing triumph, that
the life and sufferings of the patriarch yield up to us
their instruction. Tried beyond endurance by his own
x.] Job. 159
inward perplexity, and the solemn blundering of his
friends, he is driven to appeal from time to eternity,
from the God of a rigid lex talionis, to the God who is
just even to the suffering. Thrust back by his friends,
he clings to God ; and thrust back (as it seems) by God,
he soars away above time and its prejudices to a higher
truth and a better world.
Job's faith in the popular doctrine has been shattered
against his own bitter experience. And now, feeling
out anxiously in the darkness, he discovers three par-
ticulars, with respect to which it has become matter of
imperative necessity that he shall get new light. First,
as to the meaning of human suffering ; secondly, as to
the duration of human existence ; and thirdly, as to the
true character of God.
First, the old doctrine affirmed that personal suffering
always meant personal sin ; but this Job knew to be
false, not only through the teaching of his own experi-
ence, but through observation of the course of the world.
It was not only the guilty, but far more frequently the
helpless, who suffered ; it was not only the righteous, but
very frequently, at least, the notoriously wicked who
prospered. Job urged these facts with a point and force
which ought to have extorted, at least, concession from
his adversaries ; and when they still persist in urging
their terrible accusation, with even more bitter asperity,
he does not hesitate to charge them with cowardice and
hypocrisy.
' ' Will you speak what is wrong for God ? (he cries)
Will you talk deceitfully for Him ?
Will you accept His person ?
Or play the part of God's advocates ?"
You plead (as you imagine) for God, and yet you
know that your heart trembles within you while you
1 60 The Prophets of the Lord: [SERM.
plead. You say that there is no doubt, and you know
that there is. You say that it is monstrous to call in
question this judgment which has befallen me ; and you
know that you yourselves have only not questioned the
like because you dare not. There is difficulty, there is
mystery, there is the appearance of injustice ; and do
you think you can do God honor by denying that which
is ? Were it a man's doing you would call it in ques-
tion, but, because it is God's, and He is great, you ac-
cept His person, you favor Him, you wink at His ques-
tionable doings ; you say that that is right in Him which
you don't think to be right in itself, which you would
declare to be wrong in another.
No doubt God is right ! I believe that far more pro-
foundly than you do ; but the action which we attribute
to Him (you and I), viz. that He has punished me for
my sins, that is not right ! You say it is out of a par-
tial favoring of God, but I, on the contrary, who know
that God would hate to be favored, to be called right at
the expense of being thought wrong, I dare not imitate
you. Nor can I even be content to be silent, or to drown
the fatal whisper of doubt in loud-voiced hollow obse-
quiousness. No ! I want light, I want deliverance, I
want peace ; and if in seeking these I must needs perish,
lo ! I take my life in my hands, and freely offer it up as
the sacrifice. He may slay me ; I may be consumed in
the kindling of His anger, even as the insect is extin-
guished in the flame, but yet, though He slay me, even
then will I trust in Him and wait for His salvation.
Words over bold, perhaps, for a frail mortal, but words
as real and pathetic as ever were thrown up out of the
depths of a suffering and passionate heart ; words which
breathe and burn and live ; which make us feel the living
heart throbbing beneath them, or rather pouring itself
x,] Job. 161
forth upon them, in a real masterful wrestling with God.
Would God, my brethren, we met the difficulties of
our own day with an honesty as determined, and a faith
as confident as that of Job. Would God that we had in
our hearts ever such a spark or scintilla of his heaven-
compelling earnestness, even though at the cost of ten
times his boldness of speech. For it is not the word
that God notices in our prayers, but the impassioned
and spirit-driven soul which is yearning and struggling
to find Him ; which, having seized the outstretched
hand of His love, refuses to loosen its hold for all the
terrors and lightning of Omnipotence, crying with Jacob
"I will not let Thee go, unless Thou bless me;" yea,
with Job, " I will trust Thee though Thou slay me."
But we remarked in the second place, that the rejec-
tion of the popular doctrine opened up another pos-
sibility in connexion with the future. That doctrine
(declaring the earthly life of man to be a rounded and
self-explanatory whole) left it possible to take a dreary
view of theology, such a view of it as is expressed by
Job in the seventh chapter and elsewhere. But if our
earthly life did not present this imaginary moral com-
pleteness (and that it did not was to Job self-evident),
then the question might be started, whether perhaps
there might not be wider spaces of time, and freer con-
ditions of existence, in which the tangled beginnings of
our life might be worked out, through a gradual un-
ravelling, to more beautiful and comprehensible issues.
The idea which was thus left possible to Job gradually
took more and more definite shape. It comes up in the
fourteenth chapter as a mere conception, in the sixteenth
as a demand, and at length, in the nineteenth, as a con-
fident and triumphant belief. Very suddenly does the
celestial afflatus descend on the patriarch's spirit at last,
M
1 62 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
but yet we can already discern, I think, in the sadden-
ing, pleading tone of verse 21, that some great change is
at hand.
" Have pity on me," cries the sufferer, " have pity on
me, O ye my friends, for the hand of Eloah hath touched
me." These words seem to bespeak that softening of
the heart into an unusual tenderness ; that strange fusion
of the feelings into an inexplicable yearning mobility,
into an exceeding sensitiveness and apprehensiveness,
which so strikingly precedes the ecstatic rapture of some
conversions. One who knew anything of this condition
of spirit, and had watched narrowly the successive
phases of Job's feeling, might almost have anticipated
that sudden check, and sob as it were, of exultation
with which at length he bursts forth.
" Oh that my words were written in a book, with an
iron pen, graven in the rock for ever !" Ye may revile,
misunderstand, distrust me, but I know that my Re-
deemer (my Vindicator) liveth ; and as the Last one
whose word (and not yours) shall be decisive, He shall
arise for me upon the dust in which I have mouldered
away, and vindicate my innocence ; yea, and after my
skin, now torn to pieces by disease, and without my
flesh (which is nothing better than a torture and burden
to me), I shall stand up in the presence of my Divine
Avenger, " whom mine eyes shall behold, and not an-
other." Thus, out of the dark night of Job's sorrow, there
had shone forth for him the bright day-spring of immor-
tality. He had seen it like a vision of Paradise ; he had
felt it like a breathing of the Blessed ; he had heard
it like a murmur of angels' songs ; like the whisper of
a hope, so full of love and holiness, that it must needs
have come forth from the very heart of God.
And thus ever is sorrow the ministering priest which
x.] Job. 163
lights the dark taper of truth in the arcanum of the spi-
ritual sanctuary. The heart lies often dull and voiceless
in the meaner satisfaction of a mere earthly prosperity,
like an aeolian lyre unstrung. But then the loose strings
of feeling are gathered into the hand of affliction ; they
are drawn tight into the straining sensitive tension of
pain ; and lo ! every breath of heaven, as it sweeps
along, draws from them divinest music.
Job's heart had been strained to such painful spiritual
sensitiveness, that it responded, in wailing sadness, to
every touch of the Breath of God. But, anon, there
came the sound to him, as at Pentecost, of a mighty
rushing wind, and as it swept across the sorrow-tuned
heart, waking its fullest and deepest vibrations, there
rung forth into the heaven such glorious chords so full
of a triumphant and majestic sweetness, that the very
angels might have bent down to listen from the shadow
of the heavenly throne. It was the first articulate ut-
terance of the blessed hope of immortality.
But now, lastly, there was opened, in the rejection of
the popular explanation, the third and grandest question
of all ; viz., what was to be concluded, under the new
conditions of thought, about the nature and character
of God ?
The old doctrine had conceived of the Divine Justice
as a something merely judicial ; as a quality which dis-
pensed in this world (with even-handed impartiality)
earthly rewards to the good, and earthly punishments
to the evil. That was not true. But, then, what was
true ? Something better ? or something worse ? That
God was unjust ? or only that this was a mean and nar-
row conception of the nature of His justice ?
In this new disorder and divergence of the patriarch's
thoughts in this decisive separation of the hitherto
M 2
164 The Prophets of tlie Lord : [SERM.
single current of his devout feelings into two divergent
streams there would seem almost to arise for him the
image of two Gods, the God of the old time and the God
of the new ; the God of whose injustice he complained,
and the God to whom he appealed for vindication.
A duality involving that seeming contradiction between
justice and love which only the sacrifice of the Cross
could abolish.
And hence there follows (from this peculiarity in his
spiritual position) that striking, almost startling, resem-
blance between Job and the suffering Messiah which
a man must almost be blind to overlook. For Job is
the innocent man, suffering as if he were guilty, for the
confusion of Satan and the glory of God. Men cannot
see this, and so they misapprehend and revile him, add-
ing thus a deeper poignancy to his anguish, and forcing
forth from him utterances of woe which are almost re-
peated word for word in the passion cries of the Psalms
and Gospels. " They have gaped upon me with their
mouth," he cries; "they have smitten me upon the
cheek reproachfully ;" " he hath made me a by-word of
the people." Expressions which, I need not remind you,
find their exact counterpart in the Passion Psalms and
the Messianic portions of Isaiah.
To this outward coincidence of expression there cor-
responds, as we might have expected, a striking inward
coincidence of spiritual experiences.
Job suffered so poignantly, because there was laid
upon his consciousness the burden of a sin which was
not his, and which did not seem natural to him. Had
he deserved the wrath of God, he would have felt a cer-
tain fitness in its incidence ; would have crouched under
it, most likely as the hardened do, in sullen defiance or
abject fear. But now it was not so. He loved God, and
x.] Job. 165
yet God looked away from him ; he was comparatively
innocent, and yet he was thrust forth into the outer
darkness and companionship of the ungodly. It was
this incongruity which distressed him. It was his own
horror of sin which gave the sting to its imputation ; it
was his own ardent love of God which gave to the with-
drawal of God's love its bitterness.
It is this circumstance which makes Job's experience
so highly typical and instructive ; for though it be com-
mon enough for men to stand consciously beneath the
frown of God, it is not common for them to do so with
the bright assurance and undimmed spiritual sensitive-
ness of conscious innocence.
Of course the type falls infinitely short of the anti-
type ; for even as Job's holiness and love of the Father
came short of his Saviour's, even so greatly, so almost
infinitely, did his sense of identity with the world's sin,
and consequent subjection to the Divine wrath.
But still, however great the distinction, we may be
enabled, I think (by throwing on the type the light of
the antitype), to discern at once the solution of all Job's
perplexities, and the deepest lesson of his life.
For thus we are enabled to perceive that God's Justice
is an attribute, not merely which doles out gifts to the
good, but which seeks to transform all men into its own
likeness. Justice seeking to revenge itself; that was the
old, bad, inadequate idea even of Christian men. Justice,
seeking to make all men just ; Justice, preparing the
possibility of this through the honoring of the law in its
own vicarious sufferings ; Justice, going forth in the mes-
sage of the Cross, and working in men the remorse of
a just hatred of sin. That is the Redeeming Justice of
our God and Father in Christ Jesus. And that Justice
can inflict pain in mercy. It can inflict physical suffer-
1 66 Tlie Prophets of the Lord : [s E R M.
ing to break down an apathetic animal indifference ; it
can inflict inward remorse to make sin hateful and ab-
horrent ; yea, it can inflict suffering to be borne vicari-
ously for the good of others ; for it knows that its
chosen ministers, its consecrated priests, those who stand
nearest the vision, waiting with straining ears for the
whisper from within, will rejoice, like their Divine
Master, to take up the Cross for the salvation of the
world.
Oh ! to be the crystal pavement beneath Christ's feet
of flame ! to be the living bridge of pain He crosses by
in passing forth from the outward heaven to the inward
spirit of the lost ; to be the medium of throbbing flesh
and blood, which transmits, through the anguish of its
own nerve-thrill, the electric spark of life to the spiri-
tually paralyzed and dead. This is to go up to Calvary
to the Master ; it is to catch upon the pale fevered brow
the very glory of Paradise ; it is to realize that grandest
truth that "to serve God and to love Him is higher and
better than happiness, though it be with wounded feet
and bleeding brows, and hearts loaded with sorrow."
And, my brethren, however unfamiliar this thought
may be to some of us, does it not express a state of soul
which ought to be that of every living Christian ? If we
live at all, we live through a personal participation of
that very life of Christ which He sanctified through suf-
fering. And if so, must it not necessarily follow, that
every real Christian will experience the fundamental im-
pulses of that life, and display its characteristic proper-
ties ; that there will be found in him a mode of feeling
and action corresponding (in however low a degree) to
every mode of feeling and action displayed by the
Divine Master Himself?
True, we cannot offer a satisfactory atonement to God,
x.] Job. 167
as Christ our Master did ; and yet we can feel, we ought
to feel, that same self-sacrificing love which moved Him
to offer one. We may not be able, with a love deeper
than that of the Swiss patriot, to bury the whole spear-
sheaf of the Divine fury in our single heart ; but if we
be Christians we can at least feel the rapture of the
redeeming Passion which prompted that unparalleled
sacrifice.
Is there a plague in the land, a plague of spiritual
ignorance and indifference, of spiritual formalism and
doubt, of fleshly pride and sensuality ? Are the black
arrows of that pestilence destroying their thousands of
every class and age, until, to the seeing eye, the streets
and squares, yea, the homes and churches, of our guilty
cities are filled with the ghastly heaps of the dying and
dead ? Then, my young friends, if you have the fearless
spirit within"~you of Christ's atoning, propitiating love,
you will not steal aside into some safe spiritual covert
where the danger cannot reach you, but you will run in,
like Aaron with the censer of ministration, there, where
the poisoned darts fly thickest, and at all risk, or even
certainty, of suffering for yourself, will stand between
the living and the dead. This is the spirit of the Lord
Jesus ; the spirit of that faith which overcometh the
world ; the spirit which, living and burning in the heart
of Christ's faithful people in all ages, "determines to
know nothing," in all its work and all its life, but "Jesus
Christ and Him crucified."
SERMON XL
fftaggat, Eecfjartafj, fHalacfji.
EZBA vi. 14.
" And the elders of the Jews builded, and they prospered through
the prophesying of Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the son of
Iddo. And they builded, and finished it, according to the com-
mandment of the God of Israel, and according to the command-
ment of Cyrus, and Darius, and Artaxerxes king of Persia."
IN reading these words the question very naturally
arises as to what part the prophets Haggai and
Zechariah took in the secular and material work of
building the Temple.
The previous verses record how Darius caused a search
to be made in the house of the rolls at Babylon for the
decree of Cyrus, which had been in abeyance for about
twenty years through the opposition made to the re-
building of the Temple by the adversaries of the Jews.
The roll was discovered, and Darius at once confirmed
and renewed all its provisions, commanding that with-
out delay materials for the fabric, money for the pay-
ment of the workmen, and all that was required for
the restoration of the service of the sanctuary, and the
maintenance of the priests, should be supplied by the
governors of the district at the king's cost, in order that
they might offer sacrifices of sweet savour unto the God
of heaven, and pray for the life of the king, and of
his sons.
We are to note in this the fact that the imperial
170 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
power was responsible for the whole of the expense,
and the imperial authority ordained by very severe
penalties "the work to be done with all speed a ."
What more was wanted ?
We read in the verse preceding the text that prompt
obedience was paid to the decree. The governor on
this side the river, and his companions, did speedily
according to all that which Darius had sent. "And
the elders of the Jews builded." They had the royal
authority to encourage them, they were protected from
their enemies, and money for the payment of the la-
bourers was provided, and yet the inspired historian
adds, " they prospered through the prophesying of
Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the son of Iddo.
And they builded, and finished it, according to the
commandment of the God of Israel, and according to
the commandment of Cyrus, and Darius, and Artax-
erxes king of Persia." What is the inference we are
to draw from this ?
A great work was to be done for the national re-
establishment of the worship of Almighty God. All
that patronage, wealth, and power could do, was pro-
vided, but one thing was lacking, it was the spiritual
clement The spiritual must co-operate with the se-
cular, in order that success may attend the work. The
governors and officers of the State might supply men,
money, and materials, but until the religious feeling to
obey the commandment of God, as well as the com-
mandment of the king, was excited, the workmen would
have had no heart in the building. The blessing of the
Lord prospered their handiwork.
This reference to the influence excited by the pro-
phets Haggai and Zechariah marks very plainly the
E/m vi. 12.
XI.] Haggai, Zcchariah, Malachi. 171
nature and object of the prophetic office. The word
which God in time past spake by the mouth of His
holy prophets was no empty sound or mystical fore-
telling of future events, the interpretation of which was
to be found when the events were fulfilled ; it was then
what it is now, the voice of God to His Church stirring
up zeal, and love, and faith, and obedience to every
good word and work. It was the fresh spring of moral
and religious life to the nation. And this is just what
we shall find to have been the effect of the prophecies
\vhich have been selected for our consideration this
evening.
For if we read and compare their writings with those
of an earlier date, we shall not trace in these latter pro-
phets of the old dispensation any evidence that the
spirit of prophecy had degenerated from the time of
Joel and Isaiah, or that the divine gift was gradually
dying out ; on the contrary, as the time drew near when
a large portion of prophecy was to be accomplished, the
predictions became, if possible, more plain, literal, and
precise.
Take for example the last chapters of Malachi, which
close with an unmistakeable prediction of St. John the
Baptist, the messenger to prepare the way, and of
Christ the Messenger of the covenant, to perfect the
work of salvation.
In order, therefore, to mark the perfect harmony and
identity and completeness of the divine inspiration, the
four Evangelists commence their history with the event
to which this prophecy refers. The last prophet of the
Old Testament predicts the coming of the first prophet
of the New. St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John, in the
first chapter, and St. Matthew in the third, refer to this.
" The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of
1 72 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
God ; as it is written in the prophets, Behold I send My
messenger before Thy face, which shall prepare Thy way
before Thee." The indenture fits the original document,
and proves that the Old Testament is not contrary to
the New. Wherefore they are not to be heard which
feign that the old Fathers did look only for transitory
promises. The preaching of Haggai and of Zechariah
in the time of Zerubbabel, and of Malachi in the time
of Nehemiah, was as much the voice of God to the
Church then as the preaching of John the Baptist was
at the coming of Christ, or of the Apostles after the
day of Pentecost. And this will be more plain, if we
refer to a few details of the prophecies, in the order in
which they are placed in Holy Scripture.
And, first, we find Haggai, in the second year of
Darius, on the first day of the sixth month, reproving
the indolence and selfishness of the people who said,
" The time is not come that the Lord's house should
be built," and who were furnishing and inhabiting their
ceiled houses while the house of God laid waste. The
appeal was not made in vain ; we read in ver. 12, chap i.,
" Then Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, and Joshua the
son of Jozedech the high-priest, with all the remnant of
the people, obeyed the voice of the Lord their God, and
the words of Haggai the prophet, as the Lord their God
had sent him, and the people did fear before the Lord."
In three and twenty days after the preaching of that
sermon they commenced the work ; there was a bless-
ing upon it ; the divine power was conveyed by the
appeal to the congregation of Israel ; there was an in-
fluence from above which did not exist before. We
read, " The Lord stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel,
and the spirit of Joshua, and the spirit of all the rem-
nant of the people, and they came and did work in the
XI.] Haggai, Zechariah, Ma lac hi. 173
house of the Lord of Hosts their God." Feeble, then,
was the commencement ; the decree came from Darius,
the will and the zeal to execute it from the God of
heaven.
A month passed away, the work prospered, but the
spirit of the people began to flag. As the building rose
from the old ruins, they who saw the house in her first
glory were moved to tears. It was in their eyes in
comparison of it as nothing, and in their grief their
hearts began to fail, their hands grew feeble, the work
had well-nigh ceased. The Prophet is sent to en-
courage them. He tells them that although the out-
ward appearance of their building might not equal that
of former days, yet it should not be inferior in the
divine favour, for the Lord had purposed to fill it with
glory. " For the silver and the gold is mine," saith the
Lord of Hosts. " The glory of this latter house shall
be greater than of the former," saith the Lord of Hosts.
Again, the divine Word raises their minds from the
visible to the invisible, from the natural to the super-
natural, "And the builders prospered through the pro-
phesying of the prophet Haggai."
And next in chronological order we find the prophet
Zechariah commencing his prophecy one month later
than his predecessor. He had witnessed the laying of
the foundations, and the zeal of the people, but as the
work approached completion, his mission was to pre-
pare the worshippers for the Temple, or rather to pro-
mote the building of the spiritual temple, to bring
about a moral reformation, a religious revival among
the people. In seven visions made to him on the night
of the twenty-fourth day of the eleventh month the
typical character and spiritual meaning of the Divine
purpose towards the restored nation was revealed to
174 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
him. Thus in good words, and comfortable words, he
expounds the parable of the overthrow of the empires ;
the establishment of the worship of the true God ; the
sacredness of the office of the two anointed ones the
prince and the priest, who conjointly prefigured the
Branch which should grow out of his place, who should
build the Temple of the Lord, who should bear the
glory, and should sit upon His throne, and be a priest
upon his throne. With such heaven-sent teaching Ze-
chariah put a real and spiritual significance upon the
daily labour of the builders, and taught them that they
were not labouring for time, but for eternity, and that
their labour would not be in vain.
At the end of two years, when it seems the ordi-
nances and discipline of the Temple worship had been
resumed, certain Jews came to enquire whether the
fasts of the fifth month in remembrance of the cap-
ture and desolation of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar,
which had been observed during the captivity, should
be still observed. Zechariah is commissioned to tell
the people that their mourning was turned into joy.
The fasts of their exile were to be exchanged for
cheerful feasts of joy and gladness. That what the
Lord required was holiness of life. "Speak ye every
man truth with his neighbour." " Execute the judg-
ment of truth and peace in your gates." " Thus saith
the Lord, I am returned unto Zion, and will dwell in
the midst of Jerusalem ; and Jerusalem shall be called
a city of truth, and the mountain of the Lord of Hosts,
the holy mountain." Zechariah nowhere encourages
the pride of the nation with promises of worldly great-
ness : his object is to produce faith and holiness. When,
therefore, he predicts the final glory of the kingdom, he
preaches first the advent of Christ in humiliation ; and,
XI.] Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. 175
with a distinctness which no Jewish controversialist has
ever been able to gainsay, describes the King who is
God's fellow coming to the daughter of Jerusalem, "just
and having salvation, lowly and riding upon an ass,
and upon a colt the foal of an ass." Then he describes
the value put upon Him by the nation; "the goodly
price that He was prized at," and the potter's field which
was purchased with the thirty pieces of silver. Then in
wonderful words the manner of His death is set forth :
" They shall look upon Me whom they have pierced."
How the sword is awakened, how the Shepherd .is
smitten, the blood is shed, but "a bone of Him is not
broken." Thus the "fountain was opened for sin and
uncleanness," and the spirit of grace and supplications
promised, trials and judgments shall prepare for the
great and terrible day, when His feet shall again stand
upon the Mount of Olives, and the Lord shall be King
over all the earth.
With such evangelical teaching did the prophet pre-
pare the people for the dedication of the Temple, and
the reformation which for a few years was brought
about by Ezra and Nehemiah. By his visions, by pre-
cept, and by prophecies, the Gospel of the grace of
God was preached to the builders, "and they pros-
pered through the prophesying of Zechariah the son
of Iddo."
But, further my text speaks of Artaxerxes, King of
Persia, who began to reign about fifty years after the
Temple was finished. What, then, is his connexion
with the prophets Haggai and Zechariah ? The book
of Nehemiah supplies us with information which shews
what must have been the moral state of the Jews during
that period. For it seems that after the building and
ordinances of the sanctuary had been restored, the re-
1 76 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
ligious excitement which had been awakened lasted
but a short time, the people relapsed into a state of
apathy. It is probable that the successor to Darius
did not take the same interest in the welfare of the
Jews, nor value the prayers of the Temple worshippers
as his father had before him, and the voice of the pro-
phets may have been silent ; whatever may have been
the cause, there is evident proof of religious declension.
Mixed marriages with the border-nations, neglect of the
Sabbath, oppression of the poor, and corruption both
of doctrine and practice, and the seeds of those doc-
trines which were shortly to be developed in the rival
sects of the Pharisees and Sadducecs, were among the
evils which marked the period when the Lord stirred
up the spirit of Nehemiah to visit the city, and under-
take the work of re-building its walls.
Nehemiah commenced his work in the second year
of the reign of Artaxerxes, and having completed it,
returned to Persia ; then twelve years afterwards he
returned to Jerusalem to reform the vices which had
been fostered by a corrupt priesthood, and practised
by a corrupted people. Notwithstanding all his zeal,
authority, and pious example, notwithstanding his
courage, and self-denial, and unbending firmness in
the cause of truth, the civil governor failed to influ-
ence the people. He needed the higher influence of the
prophets the Ezra, the Zechariah, and the Malachi-
te convince the disobedient of their error, and to en-
courage the good in holiness. As this was specially
the mission of Malachi, he was the preacher to a back-
sliding people. It is highly probable that Malachi
began to prophesy about the thirty-second year of Ar-
taxerxes, when the Jews had been as long in possession
of their religious ordinances, as they had been deprived
XI.] Haggai, Z cellar iah, Malachi. 177
of them during the captivity : seventy years of bondage
had humbled them, seventy years of prosperity had
puffed them up.
It must have been a melancholy and humiliating
spectacle to the good Nehemiah, when he returned
to Jerusalem the second time, to find Tobijah the
Ammonite occupying an apartment in the holy Tem-
ple, the Levites deserting the house of God for the
cultivation of their fields, and the tithe of oil and
corn and wine not brought into the treasuries. It
needed a sterner and more authoritative voice than
that of the civil governor to awaken an unfaithful
priesthood. The gentle and encouraging appeals of
Zechariah were not suited to this state of things, the
prophet's harp must strike a harsher chord ; and thus
we find Malachi by the word of the Lord rebuking
the sins of the nation, as Elijah had done before, and as
John the Baptist did after him. What civil governor
would have ventured to utter such a denunciation as
this to the ordained priests of the Temple : " And now,
ye priests, this commandment is for you. If ye will
not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart, to give glory
to My Name, I will even send a curse upon you, and I
will curse your blessings : yea, I have cursed them
already, because ye do not lay it to heart. Behold,
1 will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your
faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts ; and one
shall take you away with it." Who but an inspired
prophet could have warned the Levites that because
they had offered polluted bread upon the altar, and
the sick and blind and lame for sacrifice, the Lord
would make His Name great among the Gentiles ? Who
but one commissioned from above would answer the self-
excusing question, " Will a man rob God ?" with such
N
1 78 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
a sweeping reply as this, " Ye have robbed me in tithes
and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse : even this
whole nation." Who but one speaking in the power
of the Holy Ghost could expose the unbelief and
hypocrisy of the nation which professed to delight in
the messenger of the covenant, and yet would not
abide the day of His coming ? Who in His first ad-
vent would be like " a refiner's fire and like fuller's soap,"
in His second advent as "a burning oven." Such was
the closing testimony of the prophets to the Jewish
nation. The last word of Malachi threatens with a
curse, the first word of the Gospel is blessing.
And now what are the great lessons we are to learn
from this review of the last canonical period of Jewish
history.
i. The place which the spiritual element must oc-
cupy in all national and social organization for the
good of the people. Laws may be passed to prohibit
vice, schools may be instituted to educate the ignorant,
a police force may be trained to detect and restrain
offenders, and reformatories may be encouraged to re-
claim criminals, nay, there may be the outward frame-
work of a Church, with its ministers and ordinances,
but if the voice of prophecy be silent, and the presence
of God ignored, Phariseeism will take the place of reli-
gious power, and Sadducceism sap the foundations of
revealed truth. This was the teaching of Haggai : " Be
strong all ye people of the land, for I am with you,
saith the Lord of Hosts ; My Spirit rcmaincth among
you, fear yc not." And this was the teaching of Ze-
chariah : " Not by might, nor by power, but by My
Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts." Secular power, Act
of Parliament power, intellectual power, public opinion
power, philanthropic power, have been tested and tried
XI.] Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. 179
to the uttermost, but no one of them, nor all of them
put together, have ever succeeded in regenerating a
nation or converting a soul. That people is on the
high road to apostacy which teaches for doctrines the
commandments of men.
2. But we learn, secondly, that the religious teaching
must be of the right stamp. It must be revealed truth.
Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi preached by inspiration
of God. They spake of Christ, they preached Christ ;
not a Socinian Christ, not an ideal Christ, not a spiritual
Christ, but a personal, divine, and human and everliving
Christ ; One who is God's fellow, and yet meek and
lowly, and more humble than the humblest of the sons
of men ; a Priest to offer sacrifice, and yet a King to
rule "all nations ; a foundation-stone laid in tears, and
yet "a top-stone put on with shoutings, crying, Grace,
grace, unto it :" a pierced and bleeding sufferer, a living
and glorious Judge of the whole earth. In these and
similar statements, the great doctrines of the Incarnation,
of the Atonement, of substitution, of imputed righteous-
ness, of perfected salvation, are expressed ; and by such
motives it pleased God to mark the distinction between
those who feared and served Him, and those who served
Him not. The teaching of Scribes may expose and
condemn all disobedience to the letter of the Divine
Law, but conviction of sin will only be produced by the
Gospel. " They shall look upon Me whom they have
pierced, and mourn," is the language of the prophet of
the Old Testament ; " He shall convince of sin, because
they believe not on Me," is the language of the New
Testament. In both it is the work of the Holy Spirit
And is not this a matter of most deep and solemn im-
portance in a day when the inspiration of prophets and
the recorded facts of revelation are questioned and con-
N 2
180 The Prophets of the Lord: SERM.
tradictcd ? If we are to repent, and become as little
children, that we may enter the kingdom of heaven,
then is there but one way by which we may attain to
this grace of humility. It is by the cross of Jesus we
must win the crown : " Except a man be born of water,
and of the Spirit, he cannot see the kingdom of God."
3. But, finally, when the outward organization has been
established, the temple worship restored, the city walls
re-built, civil and religious liberty secured, what shall
be done if declension and backsliding come in upon
a people ? This is what took place in Jerusalem, this
is what may occur again. St. Paul has spoken of a
similar apostacy in the latter times, when " men shall
be lovers of their own selves, covetous boasters, proud
blasphemers, despisers of those that are good, heady,
high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of
God, having a form of godliness, but denying the power
thereof." Where is the voice, loud, and bold, and strong
enough to silence the adversaries, and convince the
gainsayers ? This is no imaginary hypothesis. There
may be outwardly a blameless observance of the cere-
monial, and yet inwardly a spirit of blasphemy, perse-
cution, and injury. Where is the remedy to be found ?
What appeal can be made to awaken fear and arouse
the torpid conscience ? " Behold, the day cometh which
shall burn like an oven" is no myth. The doctrine of
everlasting punishment from the presence of the Lord
is as certain as the hope of being with Him and like
Him for ever. If Malachi's prophecy of the first ad-
vent found its literal fulfilment in John Baptist and the
Lord Jesus, why should his awful prophecy of the second
advent be ignored ? " All the proud, yea, and all that
do wickedly, shall be stubble, and the day that cometh
shall burn them up, saith the Lord of Hosts ; that it
XI.] Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. 181
shall leave them neither root nor branch. But unto
you that fear My Name shall the Sun of righteousness
arise with healing in His wings." This, then, is the great
subject for the latter days of the Gentile as it was for
the latter days of the Jewish dispensation. " The day
of the Lord will come as a thief in the night." " The
trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised in-
corruptible." The final separation will be made be-
tween the sheep and the goats, the restitution of all
things, the solution of all mysteries, the triumphs over
sin, and death, and hell, and the establishment of a
kingdom of righteousness and peace, all this will be
accomplished, and Jesus will be obeyed, and loved, and
honoured worshipped, adored, and praised from sea
to sea, and from pole to pole.
This is the last appeal. If this fails, all will fail.
The rejection of the judgment to come is the wilful
rejection of scoffers, walking after their own lusts, deny-
ing the Lord that bought them, and doing despite
unto the Spirit of grace. For such, nothing remains
but the blackness of darkness for ever. " Knowing the
terrors of the Lord, we persuade men ; for we must all
appear before the judgment-seat of Christ, that every
one may receive the things done in his body according
to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad."
Such, my brethren, was the relation in which the
spiritual element stood to the secular in the old dis-
pensation, and such is its high and sacred position
now. The powers that be are ordained of God. And
although in the last days the democratic movement
may supersede the monarchical system, and rationalism
trample revelation under foot ; although the two
anointed witnesses, the Zerubbabel and the Joshua,
the Church and the State, may witness in sackcloth ;
1 82 The Prophets of the Lord. [SERM. XL
yet they are witnesses for God, and the period of
their trial is limited. The three and a-half days will
speedily be accomplished, and their resurrection will
usher in the last woe, when the seventh angel will
proclaim the kingdoms of this world to be the king-
doms of our Lord and of His Christ, who will reign
for ever and ever.
SERMON XII.
iEnocfj.
HEB. xi. 5.
" By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death ; and
was not found, because God had translated him."
THESE words occur in the glowing description
given by the Apostle of the triumphs of faith.
After having defined this wonderful principle, he goes
on to furnish these Hebrew Christians with certain
familiar instances of its results and rewards. The first
on the noble catalogue is that of Abel, whose accepted
sacrifice (while that of Cain was rejected) proved his
faith in the Divinely appointed method of salvation,
and was a conspicuous type, in that early period, of
the " Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the
world." The next example is that of ENOCH, of whom
we are told in the text that " by faith he was trans-
lated, that he should not see death." He was translated
by faith, because faith enabled him to please God, while
his pleasing of God was the cause of his translation a .
The Old Testament notices respecting Enoch are sum-
med up in a few short verses in the fifth chapter of
Genesis, a chapter which contains little more than a
record of the generations of Adam. And yet, barren
of interest though this chapter might at first seem, it
is recorded somewhere of some penitent, that it was
* Hois S-- TT/crrei pfTfTtOii ; on rrjs yueTafleVe us rj evapecmjffis ah la, TTJS 5e
eiiis ri Tr/cTTis. St. Chrysostom.
1 84 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
the means of his conversion to God. That which af-
fected him on reading this summary of human life was
this, that the notice of each individual concludes with
the words, "and he died." However long the life, it
had an end ; and this truth, through the power of God's
grace, so wrought within him, that he resolved thence-
forth so to live that he might not fear to die.
But is this chapter after all so very uninteresting ?
I read the record of these generations, and I ask my-
self how it was that the lives of these patriarchs were
so marvellously prolonged. Some have supposed that
this length of days was granted to them in order that
the world might be sooner peopled, or that the know-
ledge of God might be better preserved. Others have
thought that this protracted existence was a special
mark of the Divine goodness vouchsafed to them on
account of their piety. But though it is true that
length of days is not unfrequently promised in Holy
Scripture as the reward of piety, I nowhere read that
a long life is a certain criterion by which to judge of
the favour of God. Indeed the example of Enoch
seems to point the other way ; for he was removed
from earth after a life comparatively short, and that,
too, as a special reward for his holiness.
The real truth would seem to be this, that in the
long lives of Adam and his immediate descendants,
we may see the great and blessed gift of immortality,
yet delaying, as it were, and retiring with reluctant
footsteps, as though unwilling to withdraw itself from
the creature for whom it had been designed. The
gradual decline of man's life is an evidence of the
original intention of God. Man in his condition of
uprightness was destined for eternal life b . But no
b See Kalisch on Gen. v.
XII.] Enoch. 1 85
sooner had " sin entered the world, and death by sin,"
than those amazing physical powers which must have
belonged to Adam in his state of innocence began
gradually to deteriorate ; and so, as one succession of
the race after another was produced, it was propagated
with something less of the original vigour. As gene-
ration succeeded generation, the vital force was gra-
dually weakened ; the contest with death became less
and less equal ; and so life shortened, and the days of
man became fewer and fewer, until they had dwindled
down from many centuries to threescore years and
ten. It is well worthy of our notice to trace the gra-
dual contraction of human life in the generations from
Adam to Moses. The now forfeited immortality seems,
as it slowly departed, to have flung its lingering shadow
over those primaeval men, as though to teach them from
how high an estate they had fallen. And thus, when
we read in this chapter the record of what appear to
us such marvellous ages, we are forcibly reminded of
that immortal state which was lost by sin, but which
shall be recovered in the regeneration, when those who
have been born anew in Christ, and have made their
calling and election sure, shall cast off all marks of
feebleness and imperfection ; and " this mortal shall
put on immortality," with powers and faculties even
nobler than those which Adam lost ; through Him who
is "the Resurrection and the Life."
It is of course difficult for us, whose days are but " as
it were a span long," to estimate fully the circumstances
of those who lived in this early period, when man's days
ran out to several hundreds of years. Enoch, the son
of Jared, was the seventh in lineal descent from Adam ;
and yet Adam was not only alive when Enoch was
born, but lived on till within sixty years of Enoch's
i86 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
translation. Again, Scth the son of Adam, born to
him after his fall, was also living, and outlived the time
of Enoch's removal many years. These facts alone are
very interesting and suggestive. We picture to our-
selves these grand old patriarchs, the mighty forefathers
of our race, still handing on as living witnesses the tra-
ditions of our history from its beginning. There is
Enoch with his six progenitors in direct succession, all
living as his contemporaries, and in the fulness of their
strength ; and stretching back in an unbroken line,
through what seems to us a dim vista of six hundred
years, to the creation of Adam. Six centuries had
passed since Adam was formed ; and there Adam still
was, with three hundred more years to run, when Enoch
was born. Four hundred and fifty years had passed
since the birth of Seth ; and Seth had not then lived
out half his days. What a wonderful fellowship must
those early patriarchs have formed ; of how much would
they have to tell. We think of Adam's vast experience
in his threefold condition of innocence, and transgres-
sion, and repentance unto life c . We think of Seth, the
beginning of the holy seed from which the Second
Adam was to spring, and of his son Enos, whose birth
marked a new era, when men began to call on the
name of Jehovah. And we may believe that as they
"spake often one to another," those God-fearing men,
and saw the gradual advances of Sin and Death in this
fair creation, they were comforted with ever-brightening
assurances of a coming day when all things shall be
made new.
In such a companionship was the life of Enoch spent.
But he lived in a far higher fellowship than this. His
name is handed down to us with the brief but emphatic
c See Evans' "Scripture Biography."
xii.J Enoch. 187
eulogy that he " walked with God." Six hundred years
of sin and evil had now done their work in the world ;
the stream of corruption was running broad and deep ;
and the time was approaching when God was about to
send a flood of waters on the earth. In the midst of
these aboundings of evil, and high above other exam-
ples of holiness, there towered up the noble character
of Enoch, or the " Dedicated," as the word in the ori-
ginal implies. Less could not be affirmed of him, and
hardly more could be added, to mark his saintly cha-
racter, than this, that " Enoch walked with God." " Can
two walk together," asks the Prophet, " except they be
agreed d ?" And this question carries with it its own
self-evident reply. We know that in human relations
there can be no hearty fellowship where there is no
similarity of taste or feeling. There must be some con-
geniality in order to real friendship. And thus, com-
paring human things with Divine, we gather from this
expression that the mind and heart of Enoch had been
brought into agreement with his Creator ; and this,
again, implies that he had been wonderfully purified
from sin, and endowed with affections which found
their full satisfaction in God. He had become hea-
venly-minded. He loved what God delighted in, and
hated what God abhorred. And as, day by day, he
moved onwards in this blissful companionship, his heart
was more and more lifted above the world, and fixed
upon the "inheritance undefiled, and that fadeth not
away." Nor was it only in moments of high aspira-
tion and of deeper yearnings, such as I doubt not
most of you have sometimes experienced, that he thus
walked. It was the habit of his life, even in its most
private and ordinary details. " Enoch lived," we read,
d Amos iii. 3.
1 88 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
" sixty-five years, and begat Methuselah. And Enoch
walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hun-
dred years." Did he walk with God the first sixty-five
years of his life ? Were his boyhood and his early man-
hood " dedicated" to God ? We can hardly suppose it
otherwise. But we may almost infer from the narrative,
that if he walked with God before, the walking with
his Creator became yet closer and more marked from
that time. Yes ; as his great and yet living progeni-
tors communed with him, and as his family multiplied,
still did he move in the world as the great pattern of
undeviating, ever-increasing holiness. There was no
slip, no painful discordance between his profession and
his practice. Through no inconsiderable portion of the
first great epoch of the world, from the Fall of Man to
the Deluge, while " the wickedness of man was becom-
ing great in the earth," there was at least one bright
example to shew that even then the Holy Spirit strove
with men ; and that the human will was yet free to
" refuse the evil and to choose the good." See, then,
what faith wrought in Enoch, even its blessed fruits of
a righteousness extending over at least three hundred
years. Ah, brethren, when we compare our advan-
tages with his, living as we do in the full light of the
Gospel, and under all the influences of the ministration
of the Spirit, and then contrast our fitful chequered
life, our periods of better thought and holier endeavour,
broken, alas ! and interrupted by so many negligences
and inconsistencies, with Enoch's stately and consistent
march in holiness, are we not humbled by the reflec-
tion upon how much it wrought in him, compared with
the little that it has produced in ourselves.
But Enoch was not merely a man of meditation ; he
was also a man of action. Our great philosopher, Lord
XII.] Enoch. 189
Bacon, says, speaking in reference to his example,
that "for contemplation, which should be finished in
itself, without casting its beams upon society, assuredly
divinity knoweth it not c ." And so Enoch was not
contented only to exhibit a silent example of holi-
ness ; nor was his a life of mere dreamy abstraction.
He opposed himself with great force and energy to
the wickedness of that turbulent and atheistic age,
and prophesied with no faltering accents of judgment
to come. St. Jude tells us, speaking in reference to
the profligates and unbelievers of his time, that "Enoch
also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, say-
ing, Behold the Lord cometh with ten thousands of
his saints ; to execute judgment upon all ; and to con-
vince all that are ungodly among them of all their
ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed,
and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners
have spoken against him f ."
You observe that in this quotation St. Jude speaks
of Enoch as the " seventh from Adam." This may
have been merely to mark the great antiquity of the
prophecy, and to shew that in no age of the world
has God left Himself without an outward and sensi-
ble witness to the second Advent of Christ. But may
we not find in this expression a higher and deeper
meaning ? Seven is the number of completion and of
rest. And in Enoch, thus taken in the seventh age
from the strife and tumult of a wicked world to a holy-
rest, we seem to behold a type of that heavenly Sab-
bath which remains for the people of God g . Then, fur-
ther, there was an Enoch in the race of Cain, the first-
born of the ungodly seed ; and Cain built a city, and
e Bacon's "Advancement of Learning," book ii. * St. Jude 14, 15.
K See Wordsworth, in loc.
1 90 The Prophets of the L ord : [SER M .
called it Enoch, or "the dedicated," after the name of
his son. Thus the unholy build themselves up on the
uncertain foundations of the life that now is. This is
their "dedication," the beginning and the end of their
life. But to the elect, Enoch is born, so to speak, in
the seventh generation, because they look to the eternal
city, the city which hath foundations, as their great and
festal dedication. Therefore they now willingly bear
poverty and reproach, and suffer worldly ills, that in
the seventh age, that is, in the final retribution, they
may be gloriously crowned h .
But observe, further, the language of the prophecy,
" Behold the LORD, i.e. JEHOVAH, cometh." Long, then,
before the time of Moses was that mysterious name of
Jehovah known, Enoch did not proclaim His coming
merely as that of Elohim, the God of Providence, but
as that of Jehovah, the covenant God, who in the ful-
ness of time was to assume man's nature in Christ.
And observe yet once more the words, "Behold, the
Lord cometh!" They might be rendered according to
the historic sense of prophecy, " Behold, the Lord came /"
The Prophet sees the event as though it had already
taken place. Full of the Spirit of God he predicted the
coming of the Deluge then at hand, and not impro-
bably prefigured in the name of his son Methuselah '.
But he looked onwards also to that greater judgment
h "Ilinc cst, quod Cain primum filium Enoch vocat, atque ex ejus no-
mine civitatcm, quam conclklit, appellat. Enoch, quippc, dcdisatio dici-
tur. Iniqui ergo se in primordiis dedicant ; quia in hac vita quod ante est,
cordis radiccin plantant, ut hie ad votum floreant, et & sequent! patria ares-
cant. Unde et c contra in clectomm parte Enoch septimus oritur, quia
eonim vita- festa dcdicatio in fine servatur," &c. (S. Gregorii, in Gcnesim,
vol. iv. p. 19.
1 The word Methuselah in the original means, "man of offspring, or of
sending forth (of waters)." He died, most probably, in the year that the
l-'lood came.
XII.] Enoch. 191
of fire, of which this judgment of waters was a rehearsal.
Gifted as he was with the spirit of prophecy, the inter-
vening ages were in his estimate lessened to a point.
His faith took firm hold on Christ, and overleaping
what seems to us a vast interval of time, he saw and
proclaimed the final overthrow of evil, and the glo-
rious Advent of the Redeemer, sitting upon His
throne, and girt about with the countless multitude
of his saints.
But whence did St. Jude obtain this prophecy ? There
is indeed an Apocryphal book called the " Book of
Enoch," with which many of the early Fathers were
familiar. It was known to Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, St.
Augustine, and others, and was actually quoted by
Tertullian. For several centuries this book disappeared
from sight. But at the close of the last century, the
well-known Oriental traveller, James Bruce, brought
three copies of an entire ^thiopic translation of it
from Abyssinia. This ./Ethiopic version, which was
translated into English a few years ago by Archbishop
Laurence 11 , is apparently made from the Greek, the
Greek itself being but a translation from a Hebrew
original. For words and phrases occur in it of an evi-
dent Aramaic origin ; and a Hebrew "Book of Enoch"
was known and used by the Jews as late as the thir-
teenth century. The book would appear from internal
evidence to have been written not earlier than the times
of the Maccabees, or of Herod the Great, and not later
than the early part of the second century. It was pro-
bably compiled from traditionary fragments, amongst
which are to be found the words here quoted by
St. Jude. We may on the whole infer that the pro-
k "The Book of Enoch," by Archbishop Laurence. (Oxford: J. II.
Parker. 1838.)
1 92 The Prophets of the Lord : [SERM.
phccy here imported into the Canonical Scriptures
was a known and common tradition of the Jews, which
St. Jude was Divinely guided to enshrine in the written
Word of God ; and if so, there is something very strik-
ing in a floating tradition of twenty-five centuries being
thus at last arrested, and fixed in the Canon, and so
handed on as one of the inspired utterances of the
great Prophet of old l . It shews how in every age the
Second Advent is the one great event to which faithful
men have looked, and around which their highest hopes
and interests have revolved.
The life of Enoch was marked, then, by a constant
walking with God, and by an active ministry against
sin, in the preaching to that wicked age of the great
truth of judgment to come. Faith enabled him to be
true to God, and to overcome the world, whether in
its frowns or in its smiles. Nor did it pass unrewarded.
" He was not, for God took him." While yet " of middle
1 Archbishop Laurence ("Book of Enoch," Oxford, 1838) is of opinion
that this book was compiled in the time of Herod the Great. Professor
Volkmar, of Zurich, contends, however, that it was written as late as A. n.
132, and thence raises a doubt as to the genuineness of the Epistle of St.
Jude. This might be important, if it was necessary to suppose that the
writer of that Epistle actually quoted from the " Book of Enoch." But
the genuineness of St. Jude's Epistle is altogether unaffected by the date of
this Apocryphal production, if with Dr. Lightfoot (" Harmony of the
New Testament," p. 339,) we assume that St. Jude was " citing and referring
to a known and common tradition" of the Jews.
One of the copies of the "Book of Enoch" brought home by Bruce was
found by him amongst the books of Holy Scripture, standing immediately
l>eforc the Book of Job, which, he adds, "is its proper place in the Abys-
sinian Canon." But all the early Fathers, excepting perhaps Tertullian,
regard it as Apocryphal ; and even Tertullian admits that it was never
received into the Jewish Canon: " Scio scripturam Enoch, non recipi
a quibusdam, quia nee in armarium Judaicum admittitur." (De cultu fcv-
minarum. )
For further information see Canon Wcstcott's Article in Dr. Smith's
"Bible Dictionary," and Dean Alford's "Prolegomena on St. Jude."
XII.] Enoch. 193
age," for his life was short compared with those of his
contemporaries, he vanished suddenly from earth. It
may have been that in some moment, when with more
than his wonted earnestness he was proclaiming the
"odious truth" that Jehovah was coming to judge the
world, at some great crisis of evil, when he
'' spake much of right and wrong,
Of justice, of religion, truth, and peace,
And judgment from above, him old and young
Exploded, and had seized with violent hands,
Had not a cloud descending snatched him thence,
Unseen amidst the throng
to walk with God,
High in salvation and the climes of bliss,
Exempt from death, to shew (men) what reward
Awaits the good ; the rest what punishment m ."
Silently, mysteriously, majestically, he passed away.
Already "in heart and mind" he had ascended. He
had moved on earth with so buoyant and elastic a step,
with affections so fixed on heaven, that he was ready,
when God was pleased to set him free, to soar upwards,
like a liberated bird, to his heavenly home. And God
took him away in body and soul, so that he passed from
mortality to immortality without tasting death. Thus
he shewed how it is possible for the body to live for
ever and not see death. Thus also he became the type
under the Patriarchal, as Elijah afterwards under the
Jewish dispensation, of the Ascension of the glorified
Body of Christ. Thus, moreover, he became the first-
fruits of the saints who shall be found alive on the
earth at the Second Advent. He was the first illustra-
tion of the truth more fully revealed in a later age ;
" we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed."
m Milton's "Paradise Lost," book xi. line 667, &c.
O
1 94 The Prophets of the L ord : [siiR M.
Such, my brethren, is the example of Enoch. And
it teaches us this first, (i.) that that habit of life is most
conducive to holiness which combines with active la-
bours for God the opportunities of retirement and me-
ditation. The contemplative life without action tends
to make a man dreamy and unpractical. A busy, bust-
ling life without reflection tends to make him worldly
and secular. And here is one great temptation of these
times. The world goes on so fast, and we live in such
a whirl, that " things present" are too apt to absorb
us. In an age so restless and feverish, albeit so full of
life and action, we specially need to be reminded that
true spirituality cannot well be maintained without ap-
pointed times for self-examination, for acts of penitence
and of communing with our own hearts. And for this, our
Sundays and other Holy Seasons, such as that through
which w r e are now passing, arc a great help. Happy
are they who have been early taught and trained to
spend these seasons well. They will find them to be
"times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord."
" They will go from strength to strength," till they reach
the hill of Sion, and behold the fair beauty of the Lord.
Then (2.) secondly, the translation of Enoch reminds
us that the body no less than the soul is redeemed by
Christ. Shall we not then strive to glorify God in our
bodies which are His? Shall not our bodies be watch-
fully maintained in their relation to the Body of Christ,
the mind influencing the body, and the body obeying
the sanctified will, till through the mercy of God they
both arc brought into a mcctness for His presence
Surely the cheerful open countenance, the calm con-
templative brow, the mild expression of holiness, the
genuine deep-seated smile of charity, are the evidences
of a spiritual life, and the foreshadowings of the glori-
XII.] Enoch. 195
fied body with which he who " walks with God" on earth
shall hereafter be " clothed upon" in heaven.
But (3.) lastly, and above all, the ascending patriarch
teaches us that we must first "walk with God" here, if
we would walk with Him hereafter. Heaven is, indeed,
but the consummation and perfection of that "walking
with God" which commences on earth. If, then, you
really hope for heaven, put this question honestly be-
fore you this night. Am I now in any measure walk-
ing with God ? Am I desiring agreement with Him ?
Am I stedfastly resisting sin, overcoming infirmity,
practising self-denial, loving what is true, and pure,
and excellent ? Am I submitting myself to the will
of God, and using constantly the means which He has
appointed for my sanctification, as prayer, and medi-
tation, and Holy Communion ? Am I " looking for that
blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great
God and our Saviour Jesus Christ ?" If you can answer
these questions hopefully, then may you trust that " He
which hath begun a good work in you, will perform it
until the day of Jesus Christ ;" and having, like Enoch,
walked with Him, it may be amidst trial and reproaches
here, you shall be translated at the last to walk with
Him amidst the glorious company of His saints, in bliss
ineffable for evermore.
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