vast multitude from whom breath has just departed. Again he raised his wild chant, and the wind1 on which he himself had been borne was swelled as by a rushing blast from the four corners of the wilderness, and the corpses lived and stood on their feet, and the lonely desert was peopled with an exceeding great army. Even without the Divine interpretation which followed, the meaning of the vision was clear. Those bones in the desert were, indeed, an apt emblem of the race of Israel, scattered, divided each from each, their "bones "dried," "their hope lost." 2 That revival — the pledge and likeness of all revivals for all future ages was a fit likeness of that to which they were now to look forward, when the grave of their captivity would be opened, when the skeleton of Judaism would come out from its tomb, and be inspired with the invigorating blast of the Divine Spirit, and be clothed with fresh and living beauty. Yet more encouraging is the closing vision of the Prophet's life. Again, as in his earlier days, but now with a wholly different purpose, the same Divine hand seizes him, and transports him to his native country. In the visions of God he stands on the summit of a high mountain, and there is revealed to him the mysterious plan of a city and Temple, 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

1 Ezek. xxxvii. 1, 5, 8, 9, 10. The same Hebrew word is in the A. V. rendered by "spirit," "wind," and "breath."

2 Ezek. xxxvii. 11.

3 The germ of this thought had already appeared in Zech. xiii. 1,

xiv. 8.

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." 2

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.

One other voice begins to make itself heard as Ezekiel's words die a way-a "voice" rather than a living man—the last swanlike 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 and language seems a continuation of the great Isaiah, by its connection with the sufferings and the fall of the nation links itself to the fortunes of Jeremiah or of Baruch, and by its mysteri

1 Ezek. xlvii. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (Heb.). 2 Ezek. xlvii. 12.

3 Isa. xl. 3, 6.

4 Ibid. xl.-lxvi.

5 Compare Ezra i. 1; Baruch iii.

1-v. 9. Grotius on Isa. liii. Sec also Bunsen's argument connecting this portion of Isaiah with Baruch (Gott in der Geschichte, 207-221).

ous origin and independent character well claims the title of the "Great Unnamed." 1

Isaiah.

Those six and twenty chapters of the Book of Isaiah -the most deeply inspired, the most truly The second Evangelical of any portion of the Prophetical portion of 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.

Both worlds at once they view,

Who stand upon the threshold of the new.

3

The "warfare of Jerusalem is already accomplished." 2 "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 for"saken and forgotten." "The holy cities are a wilder"ness, Zion is a 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." 5 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 multiplied incidents which, on the right

66

1 So Ewald, Propheten (ii. pp. 403 -410); Geschichte (iv. pp. 55-58), Der grosse Ungenannte."

2 Isa. xl. 2.

Ibid. xliii. 28.

4 Isa. xliv. 26, 28; li. 3; lxii. 4; xlix. 14, 19, 21.

5 Ibid. lxiv. 10, 11; lii. 9. Comp Ibid. 24, lii. 2.

Cyrus.

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 B. C. 560. 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 isles1 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

1 Isa. xlv. 1; lx. 9.

from beyond the northern mountains the power was tc descend which should accomplish this vast catastrophe. To that power-not merely to the quarter of the world, or to the nation, or to the hour, but to the man

did 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 Hero1-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,

1 Isa. xlv. 1.