IN passing from the subject of Divination to that of Hebrew Prophecy and its characteristic doctrine of Providence, we do not escape from the world in which the spirit of soothsaying bore sway. That spirit exercised an evil dominion over the Semitic peoples not less than over the Greeks and Romans, from the most ancient times. And Hebrew prophecy stood to Semitic divination in a relation partly of development, but mainly of uncompromising antagonism. The prophet therefore will be all the better understood when he is placed in the light of a contrast with his Pagan kinsman. The picture of the diviner already hangs on the wall; let us place beside it that of the seer of Israel. And as the picture of the Stoic philosopher hangs immediately to the left of the picture of the diviner, it will make our comparative study complete if we allow our eye to wander to it also for an instant.

The resemblances and contrasts between the three types of men may be broadly stated thus. The Hebrew prophet agreed with the diviner against the Stoic philosopher in attaching great, though not supreme, importance to outward prosperity. He agreed with the Stoic philosopher against the diviner in attaching sovereign value to virtue or righteousness. He differed from both in regarding outward good as dependent on, and attainable through and only through, righteousness.

As the Stoics came centuries later than the prophets, we do not expect to find in the pages of the latter any allusions to them and their tenets. But as the diviner was a contemporary, and by race a kinsman, of the prophet, we do expect to discover occasional references to him. We do find such, and they are so frequent and so emphatic that we are not only entitled but bound to have regard to them, and to use the class they so freely characterise as a foil to set off by contrast the thoughts and ways of the diviner's relentless critic.

The diviner and the prophet, or to describe them more antithetically, the old Pagan type of prophet and the new reformed type, are set in sharp antagonism to each other in the Book of Deuteronomy. The Hebrew legislator is represented, in one remarkable passage, as warning the people, conceived as about to enter the land of promise, against the abominations they will find prevailing there. Of these, two are selected for special mention: human sacrifice and the practice of divination. Some of the forms under which that practice was carried on are enumerated. The black list is as follows: ‘There shall not be found among you any one . . . that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.’1 What arts are alluded to under these various terms it may be difficult precisely to determine;2 but one cannot fail to be struck with the detailed enumeration, as indicative of wide baleful prevalence at the time when the Deuteronomic code took shape: that is to say, according to modern critics, in the seventh century B.C., when Josiah reigned in Judah, and Jeremiah exercised his prophetic functions. It was the dark hour of the diviner's power in the Pagan Semitic world; and that it was not confined to that world, but extended its malign influence within the pale of the chosen people, may be inferred from the anxious manner in which evil commerce with the unholy thing is interdicted. ‘Thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations’;3 i.e. thou shalt neither practise divination thyself, nor consult the diviners that swarm among thy heathen neighbours. But what then? Is the Deuteronomic policy one of mere suppression? Is there to be no substitute for the diviner, no one who shall in a happier and holier way satisfy the craving which gives the diviner his chance of power? Yes, a substitute is provided; the Prophet is his name, and his prototype is Moses. ‘The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken.’4 Unto him, not unto those practisers of black arts who mislead to their hurt those who consult them, by their pretended knowledge of the future.

This sharp antithesis of itself suggests inferences as to the characteristics of the new type of mantis. He also will be able in his way to divine; that is, to make shrewd forecasts of the future. He will also use signs for this purpose. But the signs on which he will base his predictions will not be those of the heathen soothsayer. He will draw his significant tokens, not from the stars of heaven, or from the fowls of the air, or from the spirits of the dead, but from human conduct. ‘Tell me how you live,’ he will say to those who consult him, ‘and I will tell you how you will thrive.’ He will regard prosperity, not as a matter of luck, determinable beforehand by the skilful interpretation or manipulation of curious natural occurrences, but as a matter of reward for right behaviour, in accordance with a fixed moral order. Only when thus conceived does the new type of diviner, the prophet, present a radical contrast to the old one, such as justifies the hailing of his advent as a great reformation.

That our conjectural conception is correct, the reference to Moses proves. ‘A prophet like unto me.’ What sort of a prophet was Moses? The long discourse in the first eleven chapters of Deuteronomy, forming a hortatory introduction to the following body of laws, supplies the answer to this question. The burden of that discourse, put into the mouth of Moses, is: ‘Do God's will and you will prosper.’ The statutes of the Lord in general, and the Decalogue in particular, are the preacher's text. ‘Keep these statutes, these Ten Words,’ he says to his hearers, ‘and it will go well with you throughout all generations.’ ‘It shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God, and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul, that I will give the rain of your land in its season, the former rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil. And I will give grass in thy fields for thy cattle, and thou shalt eat and be full.’5 Here is a very simple and definite programme: Do right and ye shall fare well. This is the doctrine of Moses as the Deuteronomist conceives him. Hence the prophet after the type of. Moses, who is to supersede the diviner, must be one who teaches the same doctrine. He believes in a connection between conduct and lot, such that from conduct lot can be inferred. Therefore he tells all men that the one thing needful is to give heed to their ways, to be righteous. And it is obvious that if he be right the diviner's occupation is gone. The prophet after the manner of Moses will not only be a great improvement on the diviner; he will sweep the diviner and all his craft off the face of the earth. To what end consult the omens if all depends on conduct?

The occasional utterances of the prophets of Israel concerning the future fortune of their nation and its causes show how thoroughly they believed in the creed ascribed to Moses, and how utterly futile the practices of the soothsayer appeared in their sight. Exhaustive citation is unnecessary here; two examples will suffice, one taken from Jeremiah, the other from an older prophet, Micah. Jeremiah has before his mind the hard problem of Israel's duty and destiny in connection with the overshadowing power of Babylon. The diviners also, as the prophet knows, are busy with the problem, and they deal with it suo more. To king, princes, and all others consulting them they speak smooth words, saying in effect: ‘The omens are favourable; no need to cringe to the great despot of the East, ye may defy him with impunity.’ Jeremiah's counsel, on the contrary, is: ‘Submit to the king of Babylon; submission is inevitable, it is the penalty of your sin; and it is your wisdom; you will fare worse if you obstinately resist his power.’ ‘Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Let not your prophets that be in the midst of you, and your diviners, deceive you, neither hearken ye to your dreams which ye cause to be dreamed. For they prophesy falsely unto you in my name. I have not sent them, saith the Lord. For thus saith the Lord, After seventy years be accomplished for Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word towards you, in causing you to return to this place.’6 Micah, a contemporary of Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah, and representing their point of view, preaches a similar doctrine and with the same conscious antagonism to the diviners. Full of power by the spirit of the Lord, and of judgment and of might, he declares unto Israel her sin, and tells her that while she sins she must suffer, whatever diviners may say to the contrary. These false prophets he contemptuously describes as biting with their teeth, and crying peace; in other words, as selling predictions of good fortune for bread or money. As for him, all the signs in the world cannot make him believe that the ways of transgressors can conduct to any other end than disaster. To such as do evil his stern message is: ‘Night shall be unto you, that ye shall not have a vision; and it shall be dark unto you, that ye shall not divine.’7

As to the other side of the doctrine connecting lot with conduct, the great prophets of Israel were equally well assured. They were firmly convinced that while their countrymen walked in God's ways, and in some considerable measure realised the ideal of a chosen people, no serious harm could come to them. Isaiah voiced the common prophetic sentiment when he said: ‘Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation,’8 having in his view not so much the actual material fortress, but ‘the ideal Zion, built upon righteousness and justice.’9 A nation doing righteousness had no occasion, according to the prophetic theory, to fear either Sennacheribs or soothsayers. The daughter of Zion might laugh the invader10 to scorn, and as for the fortune-teller, his mercenary lying arts were utterly impotent. ‘Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither is there any divination against Israel.’11 These words are put into the mouth of Balaam, the Aramæan prophet, as a confession of his inability to curse the chosen people. Critics may dispute their authenticity, and suggest that the oracles ascribed to Balaam in the Book of Numbers reflect not so much his thoughts as the self-consciousness of the people to whom they refer.12 However this may be, one thing is certain, that the particular oracle quoted expresses an important article of the prophetic creed. The Hebrew prophet believed that blessing and cursing did not belong to diviners, but to the moral order of the world. ‘Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse; a blessing, if ye obey the commandments of the Lord your God; . . . a curse, if ye will not obey the commandments of the Lord your God.’13

The prophetic theory of Providence represents a great advance of religious thought when compared with that which underlies the practice of divination. Its supreme merit lies in its profoundly ethical character. It has its origin in an intense personal sense, on the part of the prophet, of the sovereign worth of righteousness, and its issue in a firm conviction that righteousness has not only subjective but objective value, is the law not only of the individual conscience but of the universe. The diviner, as such, shared neither the prophet's personal estimate of righteousness nor his conviction that justice and judgment are the habitation of God's throne. He assumed that to obtain good fortune was the chief end of man, and that the end was attainable irrespective of character. The system of signs on which he founded his forecasts had no inherent connection with the moral order. It was a merely physical apparatus for determining the future; skill, not character, was required for its interpretation. And as the diviner's knowledge had no connection with personal morality, so the future which he professed to know had no connection with morality in the recipient of the predicted fortune. It was a matter of luck, not of character. It might even be obtained by immorality. The crown promised to Macbeth by the witches was gained by murder; and that is by no means the solitary instance in which the fortuneteller's predictions have found fulfilment through crime. If we were to regard the criminal as the dupe and victim of designing persons more culpable than himself, we should in many cases not be far from the truth. But without making the diviner responsible for the moral aberrations of his clients, we may at least assert that he predicts a future which, he cannot but know, may be associated with crime as its procuring cause. He is thus put on his defence, and we may conceive him making for himself an apology of this sort: ‘If my prognostications should be fulfilled by crime I cannot help it. What I am responsible for is the matter of fact. My science enables me to foretell certain events that are to happen in a particular man's life, such as that he is to become a king or a very wealthy man. How the result is to be brought about I do not profess to know, nor, as a diviner, do I care. Murder, fraud, and other crimes may lie on the path that conducts to the goal. The way may not be desirable, but, observe, the end is reached, and my prescience is vindicated. The fact turns out to be as I predicted.’14 It is a lame apology, but it is the utmost that can be said, and it is a virtual confession of the non-moral, if not of the immoral, character of divination.

In the light of this imaginary confession we can see clearly how impossible it is for any one to believe in divination who firmly grasps the truth that morality has value for the divine Being. It is not credible that a God who cares for righteousness would introduce into the frame of nature a system of signs, possessing significance irrespective of moral interests. Such a system, as has already been admitted, may be abstractly possible from a merely speculative point of view, but in a theory of the universe which makes the ethical supreme it can find no place. The moral order of the world crowds out the diviner's order. It is the abiding merit of the Hebrew prophets that they understood this and chose the better part. They saw that there was not room in the world for the two orders, and they preferred the order of universal righteousness to the order of omnipresent non-moral signs. Their vision was clear and their preference decided because their hearts were pure. The fundamental fact about these seers of Israel is that they were men in whose breasts burned the passion for righteousness. Out of this pure fountain sprang, in vigorous flow, the limpid stream of their religious faith. How easy for men, with that sacred passion burning in their souls, to believe in a God who loveth righteousness and hateth iniquity! And how natural for men believing in such a God to seek and find in human history traces of that divine love and hatred; to see in the good and ill of men's lot the reward and penalty of righteous and unrighteous conduct! And just because the prophet's creed was the natural outcome of his ethical spirit, it has a presumption of truth on its side. It is worthy to be true. The passion for righteousness needs no apologist. It is its own witness. It is the noblest thing in the world. Were it universal it would go far to rid the world of the many curses under which it groans. But this noble passion, which needs no apology, is the best apology for the creed which is congenial to it. It demands, and therefore justifies, faith in an ethical deity, and in a moral order revealing itself in the lives of men and nations.

But how stands the fact? Is the order of the world as moral as the prophetic theory requires? Are there not many things which seem to show that the lot of men is merely a matter of good or evil fortune, and that events happen either in accordance with a purely physical fate or by an utterly incalculable, inexplicable fortuity? And, if the order of the world be so non-moral in appearance, what guarantee is there that the universe is not presided over by a non-moral deity? The phenomena which raise such anxious questions did not escape prophetic observation. How could they? The phenomena are not new, a mere peculiarity of exceptional modern experience. They are as old as the world, and must always have been noticed by every person of ordinary discernment, not to speak of men of rare moral insight, like the prophets. Just because they intensely desired that the moral order should be perfect, the prophets would be keenly sensitive to everything that seemed to contradict their theory. It is, of course, a too common infirmity to shut the eyes to unwelcome facts, or to interpret them in harmony with theory. In the case before us that would mean reasoning back from lot to conduct, so inferring goodness from prosperity and wickedness from adversity. A pedantic theorist might do that, but hardly a Hebrew prophet. He was much more likely to feel acutely the pressure of the problem arising out of antagonism between theory and experience, and to be as one walking in darkness, simply trusting when he could not see. For a time, indeed, the problem might not exist in an acute form even for a prophet. The attention might be directed chiefly to broad aspects of providence confirmatory of theory, and facts of an opposite character might be simply overlooked, or there might not happen to be any such of a very arresting nature. But when once the problem had fairly announced itself, and become a subject of reflection, it would create a sense of ever-deepening perplexity, leaving the prophetic mind no rest till it had found some clue to the mystery. The faith of the earlier prophet might thus be comparatively confident and cheerful, while that of his brother belonging to a later generation might be overshadowed with doubt, and for a third seer of a still later time the darkness might pass into the dawn of a new light upon the very phenomena which had brought on the eclipse of faith.

Such differences in mood can be discerned in the prophetic writings; when we compare, e.g. Isaiah with Jeremiah, and with the unknown prophet of the Exile whose oracles form the later half of the canonical Book of Isaiah. In their respective views concerning the providential order these three prophets are related to each other somewhat after the manner of the three great tragic poets of Greece. Isaiah, like Æschylus, has an unclouded faith in the retributive justice of God; Jeremiah, like Sophocles, believes devoutly in the moral order, but not without a keen perception of the mysterious, inexplicable element in human life; the prophet of the Exile, like Euripides, sees in the sufferings of the good, whereof Jeremiah had complained, not merely a dark fate, but an experience that is turned into a joy for the sufferer when he accepts it as incidental to a redemptive vocation.15

For the first of these prophets, the sphere within which divine justice displays itself is the nation as a whole. His firm conviction is that the nation which does God's will shall prosper, and that, on the contrary, the nation which fails to do God's will cannot prosper. His theory is formulated in the first chapter of the book which bears his name in these precise terms: ‘If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land; but if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword.’16 The actual moral state of Israel when Isaiah uttered his prophecies was such as to demand insistence mainly on the latter of these alternatives; but the prophet had equal faith in the validity of the other, given the requisite moral conditions. When the spirit of righteousness was poured out upon the community, there would come a happy change in the social state comparable to the transformation of a wilderness into a fruitful field. ‘The work of righteousness shall be peace; and the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance for ever. And my people shall dwell in a peaceable habitation, and in sure dwellings, and in quiet resting-places.’17 Other prophets of the same period say the same thing. The message of Amos to his countrymen is, ‘Seek ye the Lord, and ye shall live,’ or alternatively, ‘Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live,’18 the life promised including all that makes for national wellbeing. Hosea reveals his faith in the certainty of the connection between conduct and lot in national experience by employing the figure of sowing and reaping to convey his thought. ‘They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.’19 ‘Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy.’20

A hundred years later an altered tone is observable. The prophetic temper has become less buoyant and hopeful, more sombre and dubitating. The change may have been in part an effect of the sore discouragement inflicted on the loyal worshippers of Jehovah during the long, sinister reign of Manasseh, by whom all the interests dear to the heart of his father Hezekiah were treated with ungodly and unfilial contempt. The very length of that reign, as compared with the duration of the one preceding, was of itself a trial of faith in Providence. The godly father reigns only twenty-nine years, dying at the early age of fifty-four; the unworthy philopagan son wears his crown for the exceptionally long period of fifty-five years. What a blow to the sacred interests of religion and morality, and how hard to explain on the hypothesis that Jehovah cares for the right. That dreary half-century of misrule was an evil time for the faithful in the land. For them there was nothing but the cold shade of neglect or the fire of persecution, the royal favour being reserved for those who obsequiously followed a bad example. The anavim, the poor afflicted ones of those dismal years, would be forced by their own experience to meditate on a comparatively new problem, the reality of a Providence in the individual life. That the divine care for the right should show itself there also, as well as in the nation at large, was a very natural thought. Still more natural was it to expect that the divine care should show itself there at least, when it was not apparent anywhere else. Hence we are not surprised to find that in the pages of Jeremiah the fortunes of the individual righteous man have become a prominent subject of reflection. These fortunes, in the case of Jeremiah himself, not less than in the case of the like-minded of a previous generation, were of a distressing character; hence the urgency with which he asks the question, ‘Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?’21 It is a question which he cannot answer. He is simply astonished that prosperity should so often be on the wrong side; bad men faring as if God loved them, good men faring as if God hated, or at least cared not, for them.

The matter could not end there. Deep thought on so vital a theme must issue in one or other of two results. Either the theory of a righteous Providence must be abandoned as untenable, or the sufferings of righteous men must be discovered to serve some good purpose in harmony with the supposed aim of Providence. In the golden oracles of the unknown prophet of the Exile we find the dialectic process coming to rest in the latter of these alternatives. The fifty-third chapter of the Book of Isaiah is the classic formulation of the new doctrine. A question vividly expressing the marvellous nature of the statement about to be made forms an appropriate prelude. ‘Who hath believed our report?’ asks the prophet, not by way of complaint that no one believes, for no one but himself yet knows what he is going to say, but by way of hinting that what he is about to declare is of so unheard-of a character that surprise and incredulity on first hearing will be very excusable. ‘Who can credit what I am going to tell? it is a great wonder; listen!’ And what then is the wonder? Is it that the righteous servant of Jehovah is a great sufferer? No! that for a good while, ever since the evil days of King Manasseh, has been a familiar commonplace, known to all men through the unwritten tradition of the sorrow of pious forefathers, and through the outspoken complaints of Jeremiah. Not that the servant of Jehovah suffers is the marvel, but that through suffering he passes into world-wide renown.22 The glory that is to follow the suffering, not the suffering in itself, is the main theme of the prophecy. It is true, indeed, that the picture of the man of sorrow, exhibiting in sombre colours the tragic details of his woful experience, is what chiefly catches the eye of the reader. But the prophetic artist spends his strength here not merely to elicit the sympathetic exclamation, How great a sufferer! but to communicate insight into the source and the issue of the suffering. Three things he desires to teach those who can understand: that the suffering of the righteous one is due to the sin of the unrighteous; that there shall be a great reversal of fortune for the sufferer, humiliation passing into exaltation; and that those who made him suffer will participate in the honour and felicity awaiting him. ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities’; ‘Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all’23—there is the first lesson. ‘Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong’24—there is the second. ‘He bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors’25—there is the third. When these three truths are taken together, light dawns on the connection between the suffering and the subsequent glory, the humiliation and the exaltation. It is seen to be a connection not merely of sequence but of causality, the exaltation having its root in the humiliation. For what is the state of humiliation? Viewed from the outside, it is simply the state of one very miserable: despised of men, stricken, abandoned, cursed by God. But from the prophet's point of view it is the state of one who suffers unjustly through the sin of the very men who despise him, and who is all the while, in spite of appearances to the contrary, not the accursed, but the beloved servant of Jehovah. It is only a question of time when the prophetic view will be accepted as the true one. And when that time arrives the great reversal shall have begun. The new view of the old fact, embodied in the confession, ‘surely he hath borne our griefs,’26 will bring about the grand transformation: the despised one taking his place among the great, and winning divine favour even for the unworthy.

Such, in meagre outline, is the import of this unique oracle concerning the redemptive virtue of the sufferings of the good. The use made of it by Christian theologians, following apostolic example, to express the significance of Christ's death, is well known. That use has its own rationale, but it does not concern us here. We have to take this sublime utterance of an unknown Hebrew prophet, not as a miraculous anticipation of the theological theory of atonement, but as a vital part of the prophetic doctrine of Providence. It is an attempt at a solution of the problem: How are the sufferings of the righteous to be explained and justified, so that they may no longer be a stumbling-block to faith in a righteous providential order? As such it must be understood as of universal application. It is the announcement of a general law, not the explanation of one exceptional case coming under no general law of the moral world. Whether the prophet had a dim vision of One in whose unique experience should be absolutely realised his ideal picture of the Man of Sorrow is a question which cannot be authoritatively answered. In any case, it may safely be assumed that there were phenomena belonging to his own age to which he deemed the language of this oracle applicable: a suffering servant of Jehovah, collective or individual, whose strange tragic experience could be made intelligible and even acceptable to a believer in a Divine Providence by investing it with redemptive virtue. It may further be assumed that he would have used the same key to unlock the mystery of righteousness suffering, in whatever time or place it might make its appearance. Every instance of the kind demanded explanation, in his judgment, because on the face of it it seemed, of all the dark facts of human life, the one most incompatible with earnest faith in the righteousness of God. It is such faith, deep-rooted in his soul, that has set his mind to brood on the facts which seem to give it the lie, as he sits in sad exile by the rivers of Babylon. And here at last is the solution which brings rest and joy to his spirit: To every suffering servant of God are appointed ample compensations; not merely a happy change of outward personal fortune, as in the case of Job, but the power of bringing blessing to a world unworthy of him, whose ignorance and perversity have been the cause of all his woes.

This great thought is a splendid illustration of the power of strong faith in a providential order to give birth to new fruitful ideas. It is not a solitary example of its fertility. The whole group of prophetic oracles usually designated ‘Messianic’ may be regarded as a fruitage springing out of that faith as its seed. To this class belong those pictures of a better national future which abound in the pages of Isaiah, predicting a time when, under a king reigning in righteousness, the people will also be righteous and therefore happy.27 These bright pictures of a time when God's providential action will take the form of blessing the good have all to be relegated to the future, because the present is prevalently bad, and affords scope mainly for the punitive display of divine righteousness. That there will ever be such a happy time is a matter of faith for the prophet. But it is an essential part of his creed. For he cannot but feel that a divine Ruler who never does anything but punish is a very unsatisfactory object of worship. The theory of a righteous government of God in the world can command acceptance only when there is a supply of illustrations on both sides. If there are no beneficent exemplifications in the present or the past, they must be forthcoming in the future. In the future accordingly they are placed by the believing imagination of the prophet. In the future of this present world, for that, not a world to come beyond the grave, was the object of the Hebrew prophet's hope. He believed that there would come a time in the history of the people of Israel when it would be possible for God to show Himself on a grand scale as the rewarder of righteousness by inaugurating a state of general felicity.

This good time coming might, for a while, appear an object of reasonable expectation even in the ordinary course of things. Why should there not come a day when an instructed people like Israel should begin with one heart to seek the Lord and to do His will, and so at length obtain the long-deferred blessing? Times did vary for better as well as for worse; why should there not arrive a time of general and signal goodness, when it might be said without much exaggeration that all the people were righteous? But when generation after generation had passed without the golden age making its appearance, when what at first promised to fulfil hope had turned out a chilling disappointment, when the lapse of one hundred and fifty years, from the time when Isaiah uttered his oracles of the mountain of the Lord's house, and the rod out of the stem of Jesse, had brought, not a millennium but a Babylonian captivity, then men might begin to reason to an opposite intent and say: Since the good time has been so long in coming, what ground is there for thinking it will ever come at all? Such seems to have been the mood of Jeremiah when he uttered the famous oracle of the New Covenant. Only that oracle is not the expression of doubt pure and simple, but of faith victorious over doubt, arguing in this wise: ‘There is indeed no hope of the good time coming in the natural course of things. One might indeed expect the captives to return from Babylon taught wisdom effectually by a severe lesson; but there is too much reason to fear that the exiles will come back only to repeat the follies of their fathers, possibly in a new and worse form. Yet God's purpose in Israel's election cannot fail; there must be a people on the earth keeping His commandments and reaping the appropriate reward. How can this be? Only on the footing of a new Covenant. The law must be written on the heart, not merely on tables of stone, so that men shall not only know their duty but be disposed and enabled to do it. Yea, and the law shall be written on the heart! The time will come when that greater boon, eclipsing the achievement at Sinai, shall be bestowed.’

Here was a great, bold, romantic idea born of faith tried by doubt, a new hope springing out of despair. Even if it were only a sweet dream, as the prophet's own description of the thoughts which filled his mind at that season might suggest,28 yet it would be worthy to be regarded with reverence as one of the noblest dreams that ever visited the mind of man. It was a dream possible only for one who, with all his heart and soul, desired God's will to be done, and believed that will to have for its supreme object righteousness. It was a dream inevitable for one cherishing such a desire and such a faith. For if there be truth in the Hebrew idea of God as, before all, an ethical being, righteousness must be forthcoming in this world somehow. God cannot be conceived as cherishing an impotent desire for a thing supremely good in itself, but beyond His reach. Either He does not care for the right, or the right will enter into the world of reality. If one means of bringing it about does not suffice, another must be tried. Let Sinai, with its stone tablets, if you will, be the first experiment, but if it fail, then we must have the new Covenant with its law written on the heart. You may, with some, call that idea of Jeremiah's, and the whole apparatus of Messianic prophecy, extra belief, Aberglaube, or, in plain terms, superstition. For naturalistic agnosticism it can be nothing else. But the prophets raise a clear issue, and we must face the alternatives. If God's chief end in this world be the reign of righteousness, then a Messianic King and a Messianic Kingdom, and the law written on the heart as a means towards its realisation, are natural corollaries. If these things are mere unrealisable ideals, then the prophetic idea of God and of Providence was a great, though a creditable, mistake. There is no God who cares for righteousness, no Providence having for its supreme aim the establishment of a kingdom of the good.

There are some who do not hesitate to affirm that the prophetic idea of God and of Providence was a mistake. I cannot accept this view. In saying this, however, I do not mean to assert that the prophetic theory of Providence was without defects. The prophet had the defects of his qualities, among which three may be specified.

1. The first of these defects was a tendency to assert in an extreme or crude form the connection between the physical order and the moral order of the world. That a close connection exists between these two orders must be held by all who believe in Divine Providence. This faith postulates that physical facts and laws shall serve moral ends. But in the application of that general principle we must be on our guard against setting up arbitrary relations, by attaching every event in the physical world to some particular action or habit in the moral world as its reward or penalty. The moral government of God, as Butler long ago pointed out, does not consist of a number of single, unconnected acts of distributive justice and goodness, but is a vast connected scheme which can only be imperfectly comprehended, and ought therefore to be cautiously interpreted. No one duly mindful of this truth would feel warranted in regarding seasonable rains and good crops as sure marks of divine favour towards a virtuous community, and disastrous storms as the unquestionable sign and punishment of prevalent misconduct. It cannot justly be affirmed that the Hebrew prophets indulged in such superficial logic. They reasoned, indeed, with confidence, from conduct to lot, present or prospective, but they did not reason with equal confidence from lot to conduct. They were kept from doing so, partly through the keenness of their moral perceptions, partly through well-balanced views of the character of God. They did not need outward events to tell them who were good men, and who bad; they could discern between the righteous and the wicked by direct spiritual insight. And they were forced to acknowledge that those whom they perceived to be good did not always fare well, and that those whom they perceived to be evil did not always fare ill. Long life, e.g. a highly valued blessing, was not, they could see, a monopoly of the godly. The godly Hezekiah did not live much more than half his days, while his godless son, Manasseh, reached a comparatively old age. Then well-instructed conceptions of the divine character also preserved the prophet from adopting blindly the precarious logic of events. They knew that God was patient as well as righteous, and that He dealt with no man after his sins. In view of that truth prosperity could not be certainly interpreted as a sign of goodness; it might only mean that, in any particular instance, God was ‘slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy.’

Nevertheless, it may be admitted that there was a tendency in the prophetic mind to assert with excessive emphasis the connection between conduct and lot, as if the two categories covered each other, and the character of either might be inferred from that of the other. Moses, as represented by the Deuteronomist, confidently promises to Israel hearkening diligently to God's commandments, ‘the first rain and the latter rain,’29 and when a dearth happens Jeremiah appears to take for granted that it is a divine visitation for sin.30 Without seeming to disparage the prophets, we may acknowledge frankly that they did not grasp firmly, and apply consistently, the truth proclaimed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount that God ‘maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.’31 In that respect the great ones of the Old Testament come far behind the greater Teacher who speaks to us in the New.

2. A second characteristic defect of the prophets was a tendency to lay a onesided emphasis on the punitive action of divine providence. They placed judgment above mercy. The ‘day of Jehovah’ in the prophetic dialect meant chiefly a day of judgment. This was not due to any ignoble vice of temper; it was rather an infirmity arising out of the passion for righteousness. The prophet loved right so intensely that he could not bear the sight of evil. ‘Away with it!’ he exclaimed impatiently, ‘let the stormy wind of divine judgment sweep it off the face of the earth.’ Then unhappily evil was usually more plentiful than good. What the prophet longed to see, justice and mercy, was too often conspicuous by its absence. Can we wonder if, weary to death of the monotonous dominion of bad custom, the devotee of righteousness gave utterance in grim tones to the sentiment, ‘Let the sinners be consumed out of the earth, and let the wicked be no more.’32 Then it has to be remembered that the theatre of divine justice for the prophet was this present world. He did not relegate the guerdons of good and evil to a life beyond the grave, and take philosophically the prevalence of any amount of moral confusion in the present life. He desired to see divine justice and goodness now, in the land of the living. And when he did not see them, when especially justice tarried long, and wickedness flourished like a green bay tree, he was wroth, and demanded a judgment day in terms fierce and peremptory, sounding possibly to our delicate modern ears savage and brutal. This was partly his merit, partly also his weakness. It was the infirmity of John the Baptist, who could not imagine the Christ coming without the axe of judgment to cut down barren fruit-trees. John was great in his holy rage against sin, but also little; the least in the Kingdom of Heaven was greater than he.

3. One other defect of the prophets remains to be mentioned. It is the tendency to attach too much value to outward good and ill as the reward and penalty of conduct. Herein they went to the opposite extreme from the Stoics. The Stoics reckoned outward good and ill matters of indifference; to the Hebrew prophet, on the other hand, these things appeared almost the summum bonum and the summum malum. Such a view reveals moral crudity, for the thoroughly instructed conscience cannot possibly attach so high a value to anything external. It also creates difficulty for one who desires earnestly to believe in a providential order. For character and outward lot are not so uniformly correspondent as theory requires. The theory that God loves the righteous and hates the wicked breaks down unless marks of divine favour and disfavour can be found elsewhere than in external experience. That it is ever well with the good man can be maintained only when felicity is placed within, and made to consist in what a man is, not in what he has. At this point the doctrine of Jesus shows a great advance as compared with that of Hebrew prophecy. In the Gospels the method of outwardness gives place to the method of inwardness, and goodness becomes its own reward. Outward good has still some value. But it is secondary, not primary; a means to an end, not an end in itself. And outward ill can serve spiritual ends as well as outward good, nay, even in a higher degree. A man may have cause to rejoice in tribulation more than in wealth, or health, or length of days.

To this purer vision Hebrew prophets did not attain, though some came near to it, e.g. Habakkuk, when he sang his triumphant song, ‘Although the fig tree shall not blossom.’33 But though they fell short, their very limitations rendered service to the higher faith. They did the utmost possible for their own theory, and prepared the way for a better by making it manifest that, on their view of the connection between lot and conduct, the problem of Providence was insoluble.

While frankly acknowledging these defects, we must not permit them to blind our minds to the inestimable service rendered by the prophets to the higher interests of humanity. Their characteristic passion for righteousness was a virtue of such transcendent worth that of itself it might cover a multitude of infirmities. Their idea of God as an ethical being is worthy of all acceptation, and intrinsically fit to survive all other conceptions. They might be mistaken as to the precise mode and measure in which divine righteousness reveals itself in the world, but their imperishable merit is to have seen clearly that the only Divinity worthy of homage is one who careth for the right, and who can be acceptably served only by doing justly and loving mercy. Their broad assertion of the reign of retributive law in this present world, if too unqualified, was and will continue to be a much-needed moral tonic for the conscience of men. Let us not complain of them because they had so little to say about a future life and its compensations. It is possible to make a bad use of these; to be too meekly resigned to iniquity on earth because all things will be put right in the great Hereafter. The prophets were not guilty of this sin. They said: If divine justice be a reality, let it show itself here and now. It will be a bad day for the social and moral well-being of communities when their emphatic utterances to this effect come to be treated as antiquated delusions. They were not, as has been sometimes asserted, ‘socialists’ but they strenuously insisted on social well-being as a thing to be earnestly promoted by all, according to their power; and they were never weary of advocating the claims of the poor. ‘Do justly and love mercy’ was the burden of their prophesying. Lastly, we owe a debt of gratitude to the great seers of the Hebrew race for so strongly affirming a connection between conduct and lot in the history of nations. Their declarations are, if you will, over-peremptory, onesided, extreme. That is the way of prophets. All things considered, this prophetic onesidedness is a very excusable fault. The truth they proclaimed is habitually overlooked by many, and neglected truths need vehement, monotonously reiterated, assertion to win for them an open ear. And what they thus asserted, though much disregarded, is true. It is a fact that righteousness makes for the well-being of a people, and that prevalent unrighteousness is not only disgraceful but ruinous. Let him that hath an ear hear!

• 1.

  Deuteronomy xviii. 10-15.

• 2.

  Vide Driver's Commentary on Deuteronomy, in loc.

• 3.

  Deuteronomy xviii. 9.

• 4.

  Deuteronomy xviii. 15. ‘Prophet’ is to be taken here as referring to a class, not to one individual, e.g. Christ. The reference to Christ may be ultimately justifiable, but an exclusively Christian interpretation does away with the whole point of the statement, which consists in a contrast between two classes of men who profess ability to reveal God's will as to future fortune.

• 5.

  Deuteronomy xi. 13-15.

• 6.

  Jeremiah xxix. 8-10.

• 7.

  Micah iii. 6.

• 8.

  Isaiah xxviii. 16.

• 9.

  Renan, Histoire du Peuple d'Israël, vol. ii. p. 522.

• 10.

  Isaiah xxxvii. 22.

• 11.

  Numbers xxiii, 23.

• 12.

  Renan, Histoire du Peuple d'Israël, vol. ii. p. 45.

• 13.

  Deuteronomy xi. 26, 27.

• 14.

  Vide Lecture V.

• 15.

  Vide Lecture III.

• 16.

  Isaiah i. 19, 20.

• 17.

  Isaiah xxxii. 17, 18.

• 18.

  Amos v. 6, 14.

• 19.

  Hosea viii. 7.

• 20.

  Hosea x. 12.

• 21.

  Jeremiah xii. I.

• 22.

  Vide B. Duhm, Das Buch Iesaia, p. 367. Duhm thinks that the servant of Jehovah prophecies, including Isaiah lii. 13-liii. 12 are post-exilian.

• 23.

  Isaiah liii. 5.

• 24.

  Isaiah liii. 12.

• 25.

  Isaiah liii. 12.

• 26.

  Isaiah liii. 4.

• 27.

  Isaiah xi. and xxxii.

• 28.

  Jeremiah xxxi. 26: ‘Upon this I awaked, and beheld; and my sleep was sweet unto me.’

• 29.

  Deuteronomy xi. 14.

• 30.

  Jeremiah xiv.

• 31.

  Matthew v. 45.

• 32.

  Psalm civ. 35.

• 33.

  Habakkuk iii. 17-19.