rise of that Sun of Righteousness whose disk already tips the horizon, and out of which he will rise in splendour and in beauty, like a giant ready to run his race, and shine from a meridian throne, and never know a western setting or declension.

Ir is really a perplexing question to what fact in the history of the children of Israel, or to what trial in their spiritual experience, this chapter actually refers. If you open the pages of Barnes, you find there that all is explained as referring to an epoch that has long passed away, and in which as a historical epoch we can have very little personal interest, and from which, indeed, as far as I can see, we could derive very little spiritual advantage. But if you take others who have written upon this prophet, and who believe, I think with great justice, and on grounds that seem extremely probable, that the vast proportion of Isaiah relates to the future, and that those very chapters that portray the judgments of Israel, and their conflicts with heathen, or pagan, or hostile powers in the midst of which they are set, are all yet to be fulfilled, it does seem to me that the latter have probability, to say the very least, upon their side,

and that this chapter, relating to God's ancient people, may refer to a period not yet come, to complications that have not yet arisen, and to an experience, which shall be realized in the history of that remarkable, scattered, broken, trodden-down, but not extinguished and never to be extinguished people. He begins, therefore, the chapter by saying, "Woe to the rebellious children, saith the Lord, that take counsel, but not of me." If that refer to the Jew, and to the Jew in the present day, nothing can be plainer than that he has never yet learned to take counsel of the Lord; he retains in his synagogue the exhausted and the shrivelled forms of ancient and once divine ceremonies, out of which all vitality and all virtue have fled; and he takes counsel of gold, he takes counsel of the kings of the earth, he takes counsel of every oracle except that divine oracle which tells him that the hope of a Messiah to suffer is a vain one; that the Messiah has already been born, and suffered, and been sacrificed; and that his next advent will not be to die an atonement for a people's sins, but to separate the sheep from the goats, and to assign to each, according to the way in which he has exercised his talent, everlasting and inexhaustible retribution. The Jew thinks if he can only be appointed to this, if he can only be admitted to that, if he can only obtain this, if he only can escape that, then he will have peace. There is no peace for the children of the weary foot, except that peace which the Prince of Peace waits to bestow, and at this moment, even to the scattered children of Israel. The truth is, I do not think there are many hundreds, to take the most charitable opinion, of

thoroughly earnest Jews. I suspect, that to remain an earnest, impartial, unprejudiced Jew, is almost an impossibility. I have conversed with many, and I have talked to them about the Messiah; they all seem to throw off the subject as if they did not like it to come near to their hearts, or to be made too much a matter of personal responsibility. And in their synagogues I am persuaded there is very little of spirituality, of life, or of earnest belief of the Old Testament Scripture. Once in worshipping with them in the synagogue in Duke Street, and in joining in singing the psalms which they were singing, after the service was concluded and the psalter had been sung, I turned round to a very gentlemanlylooking and, apparently, educated person, a Jew, who sat behind me in the synagogue, and I said to him, "Is your Messiah come, do you think?" He shook his head, and said, "I don't know." "Do you expect that the Messiah will soon come?” I cannot say." "Then," I added, pressing him rather, for he was trying to get rid of me, are you quite certain, now, that the Messiah has not come?" He said to me, what shocked me, "You see, sir, you had better consult the rabbi; I have my business to attend to, I cannot enter into these things at all." And yet these were the very things which he had come to the synagogue to inquire into; and the evidence forced itself upon my mind, that if he—my friend shall I call him-though a stranger in that synagogue, be a type of the Jewish mind, they are no more Jews than they are Christians; for I am persuaded that were Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, the world's grey fathers, to come upon the stage of

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the nineteenth century, and to read this Old Testament of theirs, looking at it in the light of this New Testament of ours, they would with one voice say, Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah whom Abraham saw from afar, and rejoiced to see, of whom Moses wrote, the outlines of whose image Levi was inspired to sketch, and whose sorrows, and tears, and triumphs, and victories, and universal dominion are the subject of psalms, and prophecies, and songs, from Genesis to the close of Malachi. But the Jew, as I told you, has lost the Lord; he does not take counsel of him. "Woe unto them that walk to go down into Egypt, and have not asked at my mouth; to strengthen themselves in the strength of Pharaoh." All prophecy leads us to believe that Egypt is to occupy an important place in the complications of the future; and no one can look at that kingdom, and at the views cherished by cabinets, and potentates, and powers as to Egypt, which is closely related to our intercourse with the East, without seeing that difficulties, though no bigger at present than a cloud the size of a man's hand, may soon overspread the European sky, and precipitate what some powers wish to precipitate, a conflict, the limits and the issues of which no man can possibly calculate. If this chapter, therefore, relates to a future, then Egypt, which is here spoken of, in connection with the Jews and with their destiny, will play an important part in the history of the world. And the Sultan, I may mention, and Mahometanism, are essentially connected with the Jewish history; and its retreat, or the reflux of the waters of the Euphrates, and the waning of the crescent, is associated with the deliverance of that

people. It is not unreasonable to suppose that this chapter may not refer, as Barnes thinks, a most unsafe commentator upon prophecy, to events that have passed away, but may have a relation to a futurity into which we have not yet plunged.

Then again God speaks to them, and says not only that they are a rebellious people, but that when people come and tell them the truth, like a good many Christians, for human nature, whether Jew or Gentile, is very much the same till sanctified by the Spirit of God," They say to the seers, See not; and to the prophets, Prophesy not right things; speak to us smooth things; get you out of the way, turn aside out of the path; cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before us." Do not tell us of judgment; do not speak to us of troubles that may be coming upon the earth; we do not want to hear these things; we want to make ten, twenty, twenty-five per cent.; we want to get richer and richer; we want to buy estates, and build houses, and call them by our own names; we want to make a family; and as for these fanatics, these fools, these agitators, these alarmists, it is shocking; they ought to be seized and imprisoned; and if there be not an inquisitor or a pope to light a bonfire for them, there ought at least to be laws of some sort to restrain these people from telling us such things, and to make them prophesy to us smooth things; to make the Lord's presence to cease. We do not want to hear of a God; we do

not want to hear of a judgment. "But that day shall come as a thief in the night; for when men are saying, Peace, peace, sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child.”