XXXV. 44 Χ]..2,.0,. 10. t Isa, ix. 6.

a yoy be. These two words must clearly be connected, although they do not stand in the relation of the status constructus, Gen. xvi. 12. Yrv designated the attribute here concerned, x95 the superhuman Possessor of it. ¥ q271x, Bp. Lowth’s Transl. of Isa‘ah in loc.
¥ This is the plain literal sense of the words. ‘The habit of construing 122" as ‘strong hero,’ which was common to Gesenius and the older rationalists, has been abandoned by later writers, such as Hitzig and Knobel. Hitzig observes that to render W12->x by ‘strong hero’ is contrary to the usus loquendi. “γι, he argues, ‘is always, even in sueh passages as Gen. xxxi. 29, to be rendered ‘“‘God.” In all the passages which are quoted to prove that it means “‘ princeps,” ‘‘ potens,” the forms are,’ he says, ‘to be derived not from 5x, but from 9x, which properly means ‘‘ram,” then “leader,” or ‘‘ prince” of the flock of men.’ (See the quot. in Hengst. Christ. ii. p. 88, Clarke’s transl.). But while these later rationalists recognise the true meaning of the phrase, they endeavour to represent it as a mere name of Messiah, indicating nothing as to His possessing a Divine Nature. Hitzig contends that it is applied to Messiah ‘by way of exaggeration, in so far as He possesses divine qualities;’ and Knobel, that it belongs to Him as a hero, who in His wars with the Gentiles will shew that He possesses divine strength. But does the word ‘El’ admit of being applied to a merely human hero? ‘EI,’ says Dr. Pusey, ‘the name of God, is nowhere used absolutely of any but God. The word is used once relatively, in its first appellative sense, the mighty of the nations (Kzek, xxxi. 11), in regard to Nebuchadnezzar. Also once in the plural (Ezek. xxxii. 21). It occurs absolutely in Hebrew 225 times, and in every place is used of God.’ Daniel. p. 483. Can we then doubt its true force in the present passage, especially when we compare Isa. x. 21, where 111s is applied indisputably to the Most High God? Cf. Delitzsch, Jesaia, p. 155. On the whole passage see J. Frischmuthi, De Prosopo- graphiaé Messiz ad Esai. ix. 6, Diss. in Thesaur. Theol.-Philolog. p. 754.
x Jer. xxiii. 5,6. This title is also applied by Jeremiah to Jerusalem in the Messianic age, in other words, to the Christian Church, Jer, xxxiii,
π]
90 Divinity of Messiah in the prophets.
as Isaiah had called Him Emmanuel ¥. Micah speaks of His eternal pre-existence’, as Isaiah had spoken of His endless reign*, Daniel predicts that His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away. Zechariah terms Him the Fellow or Equal of the Lord of Hosts¢; and refers to His
15, 16. The reason is not merely to be found in the close fellowship of Christ with His Church as taught by St. Paul (Eph. v. 23, 30), who even calls the Church, Christ (1 Cor. xii. 12). Jehovah Tsidkenu expresses the great fact of which our Lord is the author, and Christendom the result. That fact is the actual gift of God’s justifying, sanctifying righteousness to our weak sinful humanity. As applied to the Church then, the title draws attention to the reality of the gift; as applied to Christ, to the Person of Him through Whom it is given. It cannot be paralleled with names given to inanimate objects such as Jehovah Nissi, nor even with such personal names as Jehoram, Jehoshaphat, and the like. In these cases there is no ground for identifying the kings in question with the Exalted Jehovah, or with Jehovah the Judge. The title before us, of itself, may not necessarily imply the Divinity of Christ ; it was indeed given in another form to Zedekiah. Its real force, as applied to our Lord, is however shewn by other prophetic statements about Him, just as He is called Jesus, in a fundamentally distinct sense from that which the word bore in its earlier applications. But cf. Pye Smith, Messiah, i. 271, sqq. Hengst. Christ. ii. 415, sqq. Reinke, Messianischen Weissagungen, iii. 510, sqq. Critici Sacri, vol. 4, p. 5638, J. Frischmuthi de Nomine Messie glorioso ad Jer. xxiii. 6, Diss. in Thesaur. Theol.- Philolog. p. 832. Ὁ. Kimchi in loc., Talm. in Tr. Baba Batra, fol. 79; Midrash. Thehillim in Ps. xxi. Pearson on Creed, ii. 181, ed. 1833.
y Isa, vii. 14; St. Matt. i. 23. Like Jehovah Tsidkenu, Emmanuel does really suggest our Lord’s Divine Person, as Isa. ix. 6, would alone imply. That ΓΙῸΣ» means a literal virgin, that the fulfilment of this prophecy is to be sought for only in the birth of our Lord, and that this announcement of God’s mighty Salvation in the future, might well have satisfied Ahaz that the lesser help against the two kings in the immediate present would not be wanting, are points well discussed by Hengstenberg, Christ. ii. 43-66. Reinke, Weissagung von der Jungfrau und von Immanuel, Miinster, 1848. Even if it were certain that the Name Emmanuel was in the first instance given to a child born in the days of Ahaz, it would still be true that ‘then did God in the highest sense become with us, when He was seen upon earth.” St. Chrys. in Isa. ch. vii. s. 6, quoted by Hengst. Christol. ubi supra. See too, Smith’s Dict. of Bible, art. ‘Isa‘ah,’ i. p.879; Dr. Payne Smith, Proph. of Isaiah, pp. 21-27. C. Lochner, De loco classico ad Esai. vii. 14. Diss, in Thesaur. Theol.-Philolog., p. 691.
* Mic. v. 2, cf. verse 4. See Chandler’s Defence of Christianity, p. 124; Mill on Mythical Interpr. p. 318; Pusey, Minor Prophets, in loc.
a Isa. ix. 6. But see also Mic. iv. 7.
νυ Dan. vii. 14.
© Zech, xiii. 7. m*oy does not mean only an associate of any kind, or aneighbour. ‘The word rendered “ My fellow” was revived by Zechariah froia the language of the Pentateuch. It was used eleven times in Leviticus, and then was disused. There is no doubt then that the word, being
[LxcT.
A thtude of the negative criticesn. QI Incarnation and still more clearly to His Passion as being that of Jehovah Himself4, Haggai implies His Divinity by fore- telling that His presence will make the glory of the second temple greater than the glory of the first®. Malachi points to Him as the Angel of the Covenant, as Jehovah, Whom Israel] was seeking, and Who would suddeuly come to His temple ἢ, as the Sun of Righteousness &.
Read this language as a whole; read it by the light of the great doctrine which it attests, and which in turn illuminates it, the doctrine of a Messiah, Divine as well as Human ;—all is natural, consistent, full of point and meaning. But divorce it from that doctrine in obedience to a foregone and arbitrary placitum of the negative criticism, to the effect that Jesus Christ shall be banished at any cost from the scroll of prophecy ; —how full of difficulties does such language forthwith become, how overstrained and exaggerated, how insipid and disappoint- ing! Doubtless it is possible to bid defiance alike to Jewish and to Christian interpreters, and to resolve upon seeing in the prophets only such a sense as may be consistent with the theoretical exigencies of Naturalism. It is possible to suggest that what looks like supernatural prediction is only a clever or chance farsightedness, and that expressions which literally anticipate a distant history are but the exuberance of poetry, which, from its very vagueness, happens to coincide with some feature, real or imagined, of the remote future.
revived out of Leviticus, is to be understood as in Leviticus; but in Leviticus it is used strictly of a fellow-man, one who is as himself. Lev. vi. 2, xviii. 20, xix. 11, 15, 17, xxiv. 19, xxv. 14, 15, 17... The name designates not one joined by friendship or covenant, or by any voluntary act, but one united indissolubly by common bonds of nature, which a man may violate, but cannot annihilate.... When then this title is applied to the relation of an individual to God, it is clear that That Individual can be no mere man, but must be one united with God by an Unity of Being. The “ Fellow” of the Lord is no other than He who said in the Gospel, “T and My Father are One.”’ Pusey, Daniel, pp. 487, 488. Hengst. Christ. iv. pp. 108-112.
4 Zech. li. 10-13, xi. 12. 13, xii. 10; St. John xix. 34, 37; Rev. i. 7. See Frischmuth’s Dissertations, ‘De vili et abjecto xxx argenteorum pretio quo Salvator noster Messias a Judeis estimatus fuit,’ and ‘De Messia Confixo,’ in Thesaur. Theol.-Philolog. p. 1031, 1042. Pusey, Univ. Serm. 1859-1872, p. 143.
9 Hag. ii. 7,9. See J. Frischmuthi de Gloria Templi secundi. Diss, in Thesaur. Theol.-Philolog. p. 994.
f Mal. iii. 1. See J. Frischmuthi, De Angelo Federis, Diss. in Thesaur, Theol.-Philolog. p. 1058.
& Mal. iv. 2.
n |
92 Last Period of Messianic prophecy.
It is possible to avoid any frank acknowledgment of the im- posing spectacle presented by converging and consentient lines of prophecy, and to refuse to consider the prophetic utterances, except in detail and one by one; as if forsooth Messianic prophecy were an intellectual enemy whose forces must be divided by the criticism that would conquer it. It is possible, alas! even for accomplished scholarship so fretfully to carp at each instance of pure prediction in the Bible, to nibble . away the beauty and dim the lustre of each leading utterance with such persevering industry, as at length to persuade itself that the predictive element in Scripture is insignificantly small, or even that it does not exist at all. That modern criticism of this temper should refuse to accept the prophetic witness to the Divinity of the Messiah, is more to be regretted than to be wondered at. And yet, if it were seriously supposed that such criticism had succeeded in blotting out all reference to the Godhead of Christ from the pages of the Old Testament, we should still have to encounter and to explain that massive testimony to the Messianic belief h which lives on in the Rab- binical literature; since that literature, whatever be the date of particular existing treatises, contains traditions, neither few nor indistinct, of indisputable antiquity. From that literature it is clear that the ancient Jews believed the expected Messiah to be a Divine Personi. It cannot be pretended that this belief came from without, from the schools of Alexandria, or from the teaching of Zoroaster. It was notoriously based upon the language of the Prophets and Psalmists. And we of to- day, even with our improved but strictly mechanical apparatus of grammar and dictionary, can scarcely undertake to correct the early unprejudiced interpretation of men who read the Old Testament with at least as much instinctive insight into the meaning of its archaic language, and of its older forms of thought and of feeling, as an Englishman in this generation
h If however the Book of Baruch was expanded into its present form at Alexandria from an earlier Hebrew document, written probably by Baruch himself, this statement must be partly qualified. Baruch iii. 35-37; cf. St. John i. 14.
1 For the Rabbinical conception of the Person of Messiah, see Martini, Pugio Fidei, Pars iii. Dist. 3, cap. 1; 2. 86 ad fin. § 8. With reference to some recent attacks upon the value of Martini’s citations from Jewish writers, consult ‘The Book of Tobit,’ ed. by A. Neubauer, Oxf. 1878, pp. Xvili-xxiv. Compare also Schéttgen, Hore Hebraice, tom ii. lib. 1, c. I, 2; lib. 3, Thesis 3; Drach, Harmonie, &c., pt. 2, 6. 1. tom. ii. 385, 544.
[Lect.
Popular degradation of the Messianic Ideal. 93
can command when he applies himself to the study of Shake- speare or of Milton.
(5) The last stage of the Messianic doctrine begins only after the close of the Hebrew Canon. Among the Jews of Alexandria, the hope of a Messiah seems to have fallen into the background. This may have been due to the larger attractions which doctrines such as those of the Sophia and the Logos would have possessed for Hellenized populations, or to a somewhat diminished interest in the future of Jewish nationality caused by long absence from Palestine, or to a cowardly unwillingness to avow startling reli- gous beliefs in the face of keen heathen critics *. The two latter motives may explain the partial or total absence of Messianic allusions from the writings of Philo and Josephus; the former will account for the significant silence of the Book of Wisdom. Among the peasantry, and in the schools of Palestine, the Mes- sianic doctrine lived on. The literary or learned form of the doctrine, being based on and renewed by the letter of Scripture, was higher and purer than the impaired and debased belief which gradually established itself among the masses of the people. The popular degradation of the doctrine may be traced to the later political circumstances of the Jews, acting upon the secular and materialized element in the national character. The Messianic belief, as has been shewn, had two aspects, corresponding re- spectively to the political and to the religious yearnings of the people of Israel. If such a faith was a relief to a personal or national sense of sin, it was also a relief to a sense of political disappointment or degradation. And keen consciousness of political favour became a dominant sentiment among the Jewish people during the centuries immediately preceding our Lord’s Incarnation. With some fitful glimpses of national life, as under the Asmoneans, the Jews of the Restoration passed from the yoke of one heathen tyranny to that of another. As in succes- sion they served the Persian monarchs, the Syrian Greeks, the Idumean king, and the Roman magistrate, the Jewish people cast an eye more and more wistfully to the political hopes which might be extracted from their ancient and accepted Messianic belief. They learned to pass more and more lightly over the prophetic pictures of a Messiah robed in moral majesty, of a Messiah relieving the woes of the whole human family, of a
® Yet in Tobit xiv. 6, 7, the reference to the conversion of the heathen world belongs to the highest religious hopes of Messianic prophecy. Ps, xxii. 27. The book is placed by Ewald at B.c. 350, and may be earlier.
0 |]
94 Christ claimed to be the Messiah of prophecy.
Messiah suffering torture and shame in the cause of truth. They dwelt more and more eagerly upon the pictures of His world- wide conquest and imperial sway, and they construed those promises of coming triumph in the most earthly and secular sense; they looked for a Jewish Alexander or for a Jewish Cesar. The New Testament exhibits the popular form of the Messianic doctrine, as it lay in the minds of Galileans, of Samaritans, of the men of Jerusalem. It is plain how deeply, when our Lord appeared, the hope of a Deliverer had sunk into the heart both of peasant and townsman ; yet it is equally plain how earthly was the taint which had passed over the popular apprehension of this glorious hope, since its first full proclamation in the days of the Prophets. Doubtless there were saints like the aged Simeon, whose eyes longed sore for the Divine Christ foretold in the great age of Hebrew prophecy. But generally speaking, the piety of the enslaved Jew had become little else than a wrong-headed patriotism. His religious expectations had been taken possession of by his civic passions, and were lable at any moment to be placed at the service of a purely political agitation. Israel as a theocracy was sacrificed in his thought to
Israel as a state; and he was willing to follow any adventurer |
into the wilderness or across the Jordan, if only there was a remote prospect of bringing the Messianic predictions to bear against the hated soldiery and police of Rome. A religious creed is always impoverished when it is degraded to serve political purposes; and belief in the Divinity of Messiah na- turally waned and died away, when the highest functions attributed to Him were merely those of a successful general or of an able statesman. The Apostles themselves, at one time, looked mainly or only for a temporal prince; and the people who were willing to hail Jesus as King Messiah, and to conduct Him in royal pomp to the gates of the holy city, had so lost sight of the real eminence which Messiahship involved, that -when He claimed to be God, they endeavoured to stone Him for blasphemy, and this claim of His was in point of fact the crime for which their leaders persecuted Him to death],
And yet when Jesus Christ presented Himself to the Jewish people, He did not condescend to sanction the misbelief of the time, or to swerve from the tenor of the ancient revelation. He claimed to satisfy the national hopes of Israel by a prospect which would identify the future of Israel with that of the world.
1 Cf. Lect. IV. pp. 193, 194. [ LECT.
oo are τς
Hebrew Monotheism, a (οἱ to Messtah’s Divinity. 95
He professed to answer to the full, unmutilated, spiritual ex- pectations of prophets and of righteous men. They had desired to see and had not seen Him, to hear and had not heard Him. Long ages had passed, and the hope of Israel was still unfulfilled. Psalmists had turned back in accents wellnigh of despair to the great deliverance from the Egyptian bondage, when the Lord brake the heads of the dragons in the waters, and brought foun- tains out of the hard rock. Prophets had been assured that at last the vision of ages should ‘speak and not lie,’ and had been bidden ‘though it tarry, wait for it, because it will surely come, it will not tarry.’ Each victory, each deliverance, prefigured Messiah’s work; each saint, each hero, foreshadowed some separate ray of His personal glory; each disaster gave strength to the mighty cry for His intervention: He was the true soul of the history, as well as of the poetry and prophecy of Israel. And so much was demanded of Him, so superhuman were the proportions of His expected actions, that He would have dis- appointed the poetry and history no less than the prophecy of Tsrael had He been merely one of the sons of men. Yet when at last in the fulness of time He came, that He might satisfy the desire of the nations, He was rejected by a stiff-necked generation, because He was true to the highest and brightest anticipations of His Advent. A Christ who had contented himself with the debased Messianic idea of the Herodian period, might have precipitated an insurrection against the Roman rule, and might have antedated, after whatever intermediate struggles, the fall of Jerusalem. Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be the Divine Messiah of David and of Isaiah; and there- fore He died upon the cross, to achieve, not the political en- franchisement of Palestine, but the spiritual redemption of humanity.
1. Permit me to repeat an observation which has already been hinted at. The several lines of teaching by which the Old Testament leads up to the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity, are at first sight apparently at issue with that primary truth of which the Jewish people and the Jewish Scriptures were the appointed guardians. ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord™.’ That was the fundamental law of the Jewish belief and polity. How copious are the warnings against the surrounding idolatries in the Jewish Scriptures"! With what
τὰ Deut. vi. 4; cf. ibid. iv. 35, xxxii. 39; Ps. xevi. 5; Isa. xlii. 8, xlili.
10-13, xliv. 6, 8, xlv. 5, 6, 18, 21, 22, xlviii, 11, 12; Wisd. xii. 13; Ecclus. i. 8. n Deut. iv. 16-18.
u |
96 The Divinity of Messiah ἐς tmpled in the:
varied, what delicate, what incisive irony do the sacred writers lash the pretensions of the most gorgeous idol-worships, while guarding the solitary Majesty and the unshared prerogatives of the God of Israel°! ‘The specific distinction of Judaism,’ says Baur, ‘marking it off from all forms of heathen religious belief whatever, is its purer, more refined, and monotheistic conception of God. From the earliest antiquity downwards, this was the essential basis of the Old Testament religion P.’ And yet this discriminating and fundamental truth does but throw out into sharper outline and relief those suggestions of personal distinctions in the Godhead; that personification of the Wisdom, if indeed the Wisdom be not a Person; those visions in which a Divine Being is so closely identified with the Angel who represents Him; those successive predictions of a Messiah personally distinct from Jehovah, yet also the Saviour of men, the Lord and Ruler of all, the Judge of the nations, Almighty, Everlasting, nay, One Whom prophecy designates as God. How was the Old Testament consistent with itself, how was it loyal to its leading purpose, to its very central and animating idea, unless it was in truth entrusted with a double charge; unless, besides teaching explicitly the Creed of Sinai, it was designed to teach implicitly a fuller revelation, and to prepare men for the Creed of the day of Pentecost? If indeed the Old Testament had been a scmi-polytheistic literature ; if in Israel the Divine Unity had been only a philosophical specu- lation, shrouded from the popular eye by the various forms with which some imaginative antiquity had peopled its national heaven ; if the line of demarcation between such angel ministers and guardians as we read of in Daniel and Zechariah, and the High and Holy One Who inhabiteth eternity, had been indistinct or uncertain; if the Most Holy Name had been really lavished upon created beings with an indiscriminate profusion that de- prived it of its awful, of its incommunicable value 4,—then these intimations which we have been reviewing would have been less startling than they are. As it is, they receive promi- nence from the sharp, unrelieved antagonism in which they seem to stand to the main scope of the books which contain them. And thus they are a perpetual witness that the Jewish Revela- tion is not to be final; they irresistibly suggest a deeper truth
° Ps. exv. 4-8; Isa. xxxvii. 19, xliv. 9-20, xlvi. 5 sq.; Jer. ii. 27, 28, x. 3-6, 8-10, 14, 16; Hab. ii. 18, 19; Wisd. xiii. xiv. Ρ Christenthum, p.17; cf. Lect. I. 26. 4 On the senses of Hlohim in the Old Testament, see Appendix, ee B. LECT.
Julness of prophecy respecting His Manhood. 97
which is to break forth from the pregnant simplicity of God's earlier message to mankind; they point, as we know, to the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel and to the Council chamber of Nicwa, in which the absolute Unity of the Supreme Being will be fully exhibited as harmonizing with the true Divinity of Him Who was thus announced in His distinct Personality to the Church of Israel.
2. It may be urged that the Old Testament might con- ceivably have set forth the doctrine of Christ’s Godhead in other and more energetic terms than those which it actually employs. Even if this should be granted, let us carefully bear in mind that the witness of the Old Testament to this truth is not confined to the texts which expressly assert that Messiah should be Divine. The Human Life of Messiah, His super- natural birth, His character, His death, His triumph, are pre- dicted in the Old Testament with a minuteness which utterly defies the rationalistic insinuation, that the argument from prophecy in favour of Christ’s claims may after all be resolved into an adroit manipulation of sundry more or less irrelevant quotations. No amount of captious ingenuity will destroy the substantial fact that the leading features of our Lord’s Human manifestation were announced to the world some centuries before He actually came among us. Do I say that to be the subject of prophecy is of itself a proof of Divinity? Certainly uot. But at least when prophecy is so copious and elaborate, and yet withal so true to the facts of history which it predicts, its higher utterances, which lie beyond the verification of the human senses, acquire corresponding significance and credit, If the circumstances of Christ’s Human Life were actually chronicled by prophecy, prophecy is entitled to submissive attention when she proceeds to assert, in whatever terms, that the Christ Whom she has described is more than Man.
It must be a robust and somewhat coarse scepticism which can treat those early glimpses into the laws of God’s inner being, those mysterious apparitions to Patriarchs and Lawgivers, those hypostatized representations of Divine Attributes, above all, that Divinity repeatedly and explicitly ascribed to the pre- dicted Restorer of Israel, only as illustrations of the exuberance of Hebrew imagination, only as redundant tropes and moods of Eastern poetry. For when the destructive critics have done their worst, we are still confronted by the fact of a consider- able literature, indisputably anterior to the age of Christianity, ΕῚ foretelling in explicit terms the coming of a Divine and u Es
98 Christ, and the Sacred literature of Israel.
Human Saviour. We cannot be insensible to the significance of this broad and patent fact. Those who in modern days have endeavoured to establish an absolute power over the conduct and lives of their fellow-men have found it necessary to spare no pains in one department of political effort. They have en- deavoured to ‘inspire,’ if they could not suppress, that powerful agency, which both for good and for evil moulds and informs popular thought. The control of the press from day to day is held in our times to be among the highest exercises of despotic power over a civilized community; and yet the sternest despot- ism will in vain endeavour to recast in its own favour the verdict of history. History, as she points to the irrevocable and un- changing past, can be won neither by violence nor by blandish- ments to silence her condemnations, or to lavish her approvals, or in any degree to unsay the evidence of her chronicles, that she may subserve the purpose and establish the claim of some aspiring potentate. But He Who came to reign by love as by omnipotence, needed not to put force upon the thought and speech of His contemporaries, even could He have willed te do so? For already the literature of fifteen centuries had been enlisted in His service; and the annals and the hopes of an entire people, to say nothing of the yearnings and guesses of the world, had been moulded into one long anticipation of Himself. Even He could not create or change the past; but He could point to its unchanging voice as the herald of His own claims and destiny. His language would have been folly on the lips of the greatest of the sons of men, but it does no more than simple justice to the true mind and constant drift of the Old Testa- ment. With His Hand upon the Jewish Canon, Jesus Christ could look opponents or disciples in the face, and bid them ‘Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of Me’
ὁ Lacordaire.
7 Te A ἐσ Be te i
LECTURE III.
OUR LORD’S WORK IN THE WORLD A WITNESS TO HS DEVUNELY,
Whence hath This Man this Wisdom, and these mighty works? Is not This the carpenter’s Son? is not His mother called Mary? and His brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas? And His sisters, are they not all with us? Whence then hath This Man all these things?
Sr. Marr, xiii. 54-56.
A SCEPTICAL prince once asked his chaplain to give him some clear evidence of the truth of Christianity, but to do so in a few words, because a king had not much time to spare for such matters. The chaplain tersely replied, ‘The Jews, your majesty.’ The chaplain meant to say that the whole Jewish history was a witness to Christ. In the ages before the Incarnaticn Israel witnessed to His work and to His Person, by its Messianic be- lief, by its Scriptures, by its ritual, by its rabbinical schools. In the ages which have followed the Incarnation, Israel has wit- nessed to Him no less powerfully as the people of the dispersion. In all the continents, amid all the races of the world, we meet with the nation to which there clings an unexpiated, self-impre- cated guilt. This nation dwells among us and around us Englishmen; it shares largely in our material prosperity; its social and civil life are shaped by our national institutions; it sends its representatives to our tribunals of justice and to the benches of our senate: yet its heart, its home, its future, are elsewhere. It still hopes for Him Whom we Christians have found; it still witnesses, by its accumulating despair, to the truth of the creed which it so doggedly rejects. Our rapid sur- vey then of those anticipations of our Lord’s Divinity which are furnished by the Old Testament, and by the literature more im- mediately dependent on it, has left untouched a district of history fruitful in considerations which bear upon our subject. But it must suffice to have hinted at the testimony which is thus ΠΩΣ yielded by the later Judaism ; and we pass to-day toa ΤΠ H 2
100 Our Lord's ‘plaw’ of founding
topic which is in some sense continuous with that of our last lecture. We have seen how the appearance of a Divine Person, as the Saviour of men, was anticipated by the Old Testament ; let us enquire how far Christ’s Divinity is attested by the phe- nomenon which we encounter in the formation and continuity of the Christian Church.