exactly corresponding to that which he had known in his youth, even down to minute details, but on a gigantic scale. And from under the Temple porch he sees the perennial spring which lay hid within the rocky vault burst forth into a full and overflowing stream,' which pours down the terraces towards the Eastern gate. The dry bed of the Kedron is filled with a mighty torrent, which rises higher and higher till it becomes a vast river, and the rugged and sterile rocks which line its course break out into verdure, and through the two deep defiles the stream divides and forces its way into the desert plain of the Jordan, and into the lifeless waters of the Salt Sea, and the Sea of Death begins to teem with living creatures and with innumerable fish, like the Sea of Tiberias or the Mediterranean, and the fishermen stand all along its banks to watch the transformation, and, according to the sight so common in Eastern countries, the life-giving water is everywhere followed by the growth of luxuriant vegetation-trees for food, whose leaf shall not fade, neither shall the fruit thereof be < consumed.' 3 How the outward form of that vision was left to pass away, how its inward spirit was fulfilled beyond all that Ezekiel could have dreamed, is the story reserved for the next epoch of the Jewish history, but is yet, not dimly, foreshadowed even in Ezekiel's own lifetime. 6 One other voice begins to make itself heard as Ezekiel's words die away-a voice' rather than a living manthe last swan-like song of the Prophets of the monarchy -a voice sounding in the barren wilderness between the Captivity and the Return, between Babylon and Jerusalem. It is that wonderful strain which, by likeness of thought The germ of this thought had already appeared in Zech. xiii. 1, xiv. 8. 2 Ezek. xlvii. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (Heb.). Ezek. xlvii. 12. and language seems a continuation of the great Isaiah, by its connexion with the sufferings and the fall of the nation links itself to the fortunes' of Jeremiah or of Baruch, and by its mysterious origin and independent character well claims the title of the Great Unnamed.' 2 second Isaiah. Those six and twenty chapters of the Book of Isaiah-the The most deeply inspired, the most truly Evangelical of any portion of portion of the Prophetical writings, whatever be their date, and whoever their author-take their stand on the times of the Captivity, and from thence look forward from the summit of the last ridge of the Jewish history into the remotest future, unbroken now by any intervening barrier. 6 The Both worlds at once they view, Who stand upon the threshold of the new. warfare of Jerusalem is already accomplished.' 3 She has received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins.' The princes of the sanctuary are profaned.' The holy land is waste and desolate.' Zion is forsaken and for'gotten.' ' The holy cities are a wilderness, Zion is a 6 desolation, Jerusalem is a desolation.' The holy and beautiful house wherein their fathers had worshipped is 'burned up with fire, and all their pleasant things are laid ' waste.'' This is the retrospect to which the Prophet looks back. The times not only of Manasseh but of Jehoiachin and Zedekiah are far behind him. The exiles to whom he appeals are already planted in Babylon; to them, and not to any former generation of Israelites, is the consolation addressed, which streams in one continuous flow, uninterrupted by the 'Compare Ezra i. 1; Baruch iii. 1— v. 9. Grotius on Isa. liii. See also Bunsen's argument connecting this portion of Isaiah with Baruch (Gott in der Geschichte, 207-221). So Ewald, Propheten (ii. pp. 403410); Geschichte (iv. pp. 55–58), 'Der grosse Ungenannte.' * Isa. xl. 2. Ibid. xliii. 28. Ibid. xliv. 26, 28, li. 3, lxii. 4, xlix. 14, 19, 21. • Ibid. lxiv. 10, 11, lii. 9. Compare ibid. 24, lii. 2. CYRUS. B. C. 560. multiplied incidents which, on the right hand and the left, had broken the course of the earlier Prophetic appeals. From this bondage of the Captivity a new Exodus is to begin for the Chosen People-a new return through the wilderness. But this revival of Isaiah's spirit, this new epoch for Israel, is to coincide with a new epoch in the history of the world. The primeval period of mankind is drawing to its close; the ancient gigantic monarchies and religions, known to us only through their mighty conquerors, or their vast monuments, are, as we have seen, passing away; the great catastrophe which is to wind up their long career, the fall of Babylon, is already imminent. And in the place of this giant age is to begin that second period of history, which we term classical. Its commencement may be fixed almost to a year. It is with the clearest right that the first date of the Fasti Hellenici,' the Grecian annals of our English chronologer, is fixed in the year 560. It is the date of the accession of the two famous potentates in Greece and amongst the Grecian colonists, from whose reigns commences our distinct knowledge of Grecian life and literature:-Pisistratus at Athens, Croesus at Sardis. It is the date which coincides with the appearance of the first authentic characters of Roman history in the reign of the Tarquins. From this time forward that Western world of Greece and Rome rises more and more steadily above the horizon, till it occupies the whole view. It was a true insight into the inmost heart of this vast movement, which caused the Prophet to see in it not merely the blessing of his own people, but the union of the 'distant isles of the Western Sea with the religion hitherto confined to the uplands of Asia. And, further, in the East itself, the time was come, when from beyond the northern mountains the power was to descend which should accomplish this vast catastrophe. To that power-not merely to the quarter of 1 Isa. xlv. 1., lx. 9. the world, or to the nation, or to the hour, but to the mandid the Prophetic indications of this period point, with a significance worthy of the grandeur of the occasion. One such had arisen-in that same great year, the year 560, just twenty years after the Jewish exile had begun-Koresh or Cyrus, the Persian. On him the expectation of the nations was fixed. Concerning him the question rose whether he would, like the chiefs and princes of former times, be a mere transient conqueror? or would he indeed be the deliverer who should inaugurate the fall of the old and the rise of the new world? Out of the darkness of suspense came the welcome answer which marked him out as the 'One Anointed Hero-alike of the Chosen People and of all the nations of the then known world. Amply was that Prophetic intimation justified. To us looking back at the crisis from a distance which enables us to see the whole extent of the new era which he was to open, the fitness of Cyrus for the place which the Prophet. assigns to him is full of meaning. The history of the civilized world was entering on an epoch, when the Semitic races were to make way for the Indo-Germanic or Aryan nations, which were thenceforth to sway the fortunes of mankind. With those nations Cyrus, first of Asiatic potentates, was to be brought into close relation. With Greece henceforward the destinies of the Persian monarchy would be inseparably united. Nay, of all the nations of Central Asia, Persia alone was of the same stock as the Greco-Roman and Germanic world. Cyrus, first of the great men whom Scripture records, spoke the tongue not of Palestine or Assyria, but of the races of the West. First, too, of the ancient conquerors, Cyrus is known to us as other than a mere despot and destroyer. It can hardly be without ground that he who, by the Hebrew Prophet, was hailed not merely as a liberator and benefactor Isa. xlv. 1. of Israel, but as an inaugurator of a reign of Righteousness and Truth, should, in Grecian literature, alone of the barbarian kings, have been represented as the type of a just and gentle Prince. In contact also with Cyrus the Israelite found, for the first time in the heathen world, not a temptation to idolatry, but a protection of that belief in the Unity of God, which now as never before began to take hold of the national mind. Of all the Gentile forms of faith the religion of the Persians was the most simple and the most spiritual. Their abhorrence of 2 idols was pushed almost to fanaticism. In Egypt, the scattered statues and broken temples still bear witness to the furious zeal of Cambyses. And In Greece, the approach of Xerxes to Delphi was the invasion not merely of a hostile army, but of a band of terrible iconoclasts. so the advent of Cyrus was now hailed by the Prophet as the doom of the gigantic idols of Babylon which should totter and fall before his approach: the bitter scorn with which the old Polytheism was assailed by the Israelite captives was strengthened by the corresponding scoffs which it awakened in the Persian conquerors. 3 Such was the outward framework of the prospect which opened before the Prophet's mind. The prospect itself was vaster and wider still. It is the same as that of Ezekiel, but cleared almost entirely from that material imagery of priestly ritual and stately sanctuary, of fierce war and sweeping conquest, with which Ezekiel's visions were so deeply tinged. It expands into the pure and bright anticipations of a reign of Love and Justice, which needs hardly any outward figure to represent it. In the past, not the regal magnificence of David and Solomon, but the patriarchal simplicity of Abraham, |