THE EARLIER PROPHECIES 40 ISAIAH. BY JOSEPH ADDISON ALEXANDER,,, PROFESSOR IN THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY. NEW-YORK & LONDON: ENTERED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1846, by JOSEPH ADDISON ALEXANDER, in the Clerk's Office of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey. 56890 To prevent misapprehension and facilitate the use of the following work, some explanation may be needed with respect to its design and execution. The specific end at which it aims is that of making the results of philological and critical research available for purposes of practical utility. In attempting to accomplish this important purpose, it was soon found indispensable to fix upon some definite portion of the reading public, whose capacities, acquirements, and wants might be consulted in determining the form and method of the exposition. Some learned and ingenious works in this department have been rendered to a great extent practically useless, by the want of a determinate fitness for any considerable class of readers, being at once too pedantic for the ignorant and too elementary for the instructed. In the present case there seemed to be some latitude of choice, and yet but one course on the whole advisable. Works exclusively adapted to the use of profound orientalists and biblical scholars are almost prohibited among ourselves at present, by the paucity of competent writers and congenial readers. Works designed for the immediate use of the unlearned must of necessity be superficial and imperfect, and are proved by experience to be not the most effective means of influencing even those for whom they are expressly written. The obscurer parts of Scripture, or at least of the Old Testament, can be most effectually brought to bear upon the popular mind by employing the intermediate agency of an intelligent and educated ministry. The people may be best taught in such cases through their teachers, by furnishing a solid scientific basis for their popular instructions. Under the influence of these considerations an attempt has here been made to concentrate and economize the |