As regards the application of Prophecy to Christ, and the confutation of Jewish commentators, I think it a duty to say that in many details, and to some extent in the point of view from which Prophecy has been regarded, the widening thoughts and studies of men have shewn that Christian commentators as well as Jewish commentators have often been mistaken. It has long been felt by the most competent Christian critics, that what is called the Evidence from Prophecy needs careful restatement; and that its evidential value, though in our judgment just as strong, nay, in reality far stronger because far more real and tenable than before, is yet different in character from that to which the appeals of Christian apologists have been often made. The whole argument has often been vitiated by the untenable and vulgarising misconception that the main object of prophecy was prediction, and that роητew meant to foretell rather than to forth-tell. We now at least know that the grandeur and glory of Jewish prophecy lay, not as has often been stated in minute details, real or imaginary, of supernatural vaticination, but in its glorious faith, its indomitable fearlessness, its divine spirituality, its inextinguishable trust in the promises of God, its lofty disdain for all that is merely mechanical and nonessential in religious organisation, its utter contempt for "the unknown voices which bellow in the shade, and swell the language of falsehood and of hate." The evidence of prophecy is not thaumaturgic, like that which, as Herodotus tells us, convinced the Lydian king about the Delphian oracle; it resembles in no wise the lucky guesses or ambiguous phrases of the laurel-shaded cave. It is as divinely superior to these as the Light of Christ is more glorious than that which gleamed

"on Aaron's breast Ardent with gems oracular."

Its glory is not that of minute anticipation of minute. facts, announced centuries beforehand by conscious prediction, but that of declaring the great and world wide laws of the Divine Providence. It furnishes the supreme revelation of God in history, before He who had spoken to Israel by the prophets spake in a Son to all mankind.

Is it not of infinite importance that we should hold, and state, no false or partial view of this truth? "How many soever be the promises of God, in Him is the Yea❞—the Eternal Verity. If we juggle with,

Part of the annual sermon on The Jewish Interpretation of Prophecy delivered in the University Church, Oxford, on March 19, 1893.

and manipulate these promises, and put forth mere erroneous and traditional half-truths about them, how can there be in us the glad Amen of upright and assenting hearts to the glory of God in Him?

The Jews, till recent times, have as a body been as fully convinced as the Christians that large portions of their ancient Scriptures pointed to the Messiah. Of the ninety-four passages of the Old Testament which are applied to our Lord Jesus Christ in the New, forty-four are accepted as Messianic in the Talmud, the Targums, and the Midrashim; and the total number of passages to which a Messianic sense was given by the mass of earlier and later Jewish writings does not fall far short of 500. In fact the Evangelists and Apostles, trained from infancy in the Rabbinic schools, did not differ from the Jews as to the general principle of the application of prophecy to the Messiah: they only denied, as we see in the argument of the Jew Trypho with St. Justin the Martyr, that those passages were fulfilled in Jesus. The whole object of St. John's Gospel was not to prove that all the prophets prophesied of the Christ, but first that JESUS was the Christ, and then that believing we may have life through His name. The clue to the right method of interpreting prophecy comes to us far more from the words of Christ Himself than from the peculiar method-it might almost be called the Jewish-Christian Targum-of St. Matthew. But for the clue which Christ gives us we might easily misinterpret the real significance of the Old Testament references which are appealed to in the New. It is only when we look at prophecy as a whole, on the general principles which Christ laid, that we can rightly understand St. Matthew's use of "He shall be called a Nazarene." It is only when we regard the whole Old Testament as a Præparatio Evangelica that we see the meaning of St. Peter's words, "To Him give all the prophets witness."

What, then, is the mistaken view, and what the true view of the evidence from prophecy?

I. The mistaken view long prevalent, and still sometimes relied upon, is to treat the prophets as though they were "astrologers, star-gazers, monthly prognosticators" to select here and there a number of isolated phrases and texts, and, tearing them violently out of their context, and, ignoring their primary historic reference, to tesselate them together as though they were a conscious, intentional, homogeneous prediction, down to the minutest details, of the life of Christ. Thus treated, the separate application of many of the

flat contradiction of the entire spirit of the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Not so! Prophecy traces the progress of a divine education. It shows us that the Messianic hope was always imperfect, fragmentary, intermittent, often erroneously misdirected, sometimes completely dead. "Some Christian theologians," says a wise and able writer, "have expressed themselves almost as though they thought that all Christian doctrine was present to the minds of the prophets, and as though the Jews were severely to be blamed if they did not gather it from their prophecies alone. Such language is unwarrantable. Illusion, followed by the discipline of experience and disappointment, played no unimportant part in the formation and definition of the Messianic hope of Israel."

That hope constantly varied in its outlines. It more or less died away after the Exile. "The Apocryphal books, as is well known, contain no reference to a personal Saviour." It revived in the ancient parts of the Sibylline verses, and of the Book of Enoch, and in the spurious Psalms of Solomon. These offer us the first clear and indisputable examples of the specific use of the term "the Christ," as the title of a single person yet to come. "The limited application of the title to the Divine King and Saviour of Israel," says the Bishop of Durham, "is (with the exception of one late and disputed passage) post-Biblical." The same high authority adopts the now almost demonstrable opinion that the notion of a suffering Messiah had no existence in the minds of the Jews till the close of the first century after Christ. All this would have been inconceivable had the predictions stood as clearly and minutely on the sacred page

as

Christian apologists have often represented. The Apostles themselves-before Divine illumination had revealed to them that "the contents, and disjecta membra, and many-coloured, complicated threads of Old Testament prophecy," shrank far short "of the God intended and God-ordained reference to their ultimate fulfilment "-were as little able as the Jews to read prophecy aright. They too found it, at first, immensely difficult to reconcile the splendid and burning ideals of a hope inextinguishable even in disappointment with the terrible reality of the Cross. They too, till He opened their eyes, thought as did the Jews, that prophecy pointed, and only pointed, to some magnificent victor

"Armed in flame, all glorious from afar,

Of hosts the captain, and the lord of war,"not to the hunted outcast whom Pharisees hated and Priests slew, at whom mobs yelled, whom Gentiles buffeted, and who had not where to lay His head.

II. But if, for many scholars, the old method of handling Messianic prophecy has become dishonest, what is the true view? It is-and here we stand on irrefragable premisses-that all Scripture, and all the history of the chosen people, is one long type and prophecy, which partially, and fragmentarily, and multifariously, pointed to the ultimate mystery of Christ, by which first, and by which alone, its true

interpretation was rendered possible. It is that the great Hebrew prophets were not diviners, but that they were pure moral and spiritual teachers, whose words had "springing and germinal developments," because their hearts were kindled by divine inspirations and eternal hopes. In that sense it is most literally true that "of Him have all the prophets spoken as many as have spoken;" and, that, as St. Augustine says, almost every page of the Old Testament-not openly, not distinctly, not consciously, but in yearning confidence, and vivid symbol, and pregnant type-speaks of Christ and of His Church. Profound and true also is that other saying of the great African Father, "In Vetere Testamento Novum latet; in Novo Testamento Vetus patet." In this sense, too, Christ was the Word of God, since in Him and Him alone was found the interpretation of all the other words of God.

To

Do we lose by this wider view of prophecy? my mind to the minds, I should have thought, of all who would escape from shifting dogmatism, mistaken exegesis, and dubious minutiæ, to the large azure of God's horizons-we quite indefinitely gain. There is new force, new light, new beauty in the utterances of the prophets when we uplift them from the arena of oracles and astrologies into the pure atmosphere of those eternal laws whereby God governs the world.

And this is exactly the use made of the Old Testament by the learned and impassioned writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

III. And be it observed that, though, in comparison with this nobler truth, we should lay but little stress on them, we do not lose by this method so much as one of the minor correspondences between Messianic prophecy and its fulfilment in the Christ. It remains true that Micah had pointed to Bethlehem as the place where should be born the Messianic King; and that in Bethelem Christ was born. It remains true that Isaiah had pointed to the Sea of Gennesaret, and the lands of Zabulon and Naphtali, as the first to see the great light, and on them first it shone. It remains true that the 22nd Psalm offers a striking picture of the suffering Saviour. It remains true that, as in the page of Zechariah, the King of Zion rode to her meek and sitting on an ass. Uttered in every instance with reference to historic circumstances or near expectations, yet such passages, in their close correspondence with ultimate fulfilments, were as beacon lights to guide us to the wider principles. And on those principles of interpretation Christ Himself flung a broad gleam of light. Old Testament prophecy had ended with the words, "Behold, I send you Elijah the prophet, before the great and terrible day of the Lord." Elijah came not, nor the final consummation; but Christ Himself pointed out to the perplexed disciples that the true line of fulfilment was ideal, was typical; that, in that type and ideal, John the Baptist was the intended Elijah, and the close of the old covenant, in the frightful siege of Jerusalem, was the great and terrible day of the Lord. It is not by

details, then, it is not by isolated minutiæ, that we are to judge the meaning of the Old Testament, and the mighty sweep and orbit of Messianic prophecy. It is by the certainty that there is not one foreshadowing of the destinies and hopes of man since the oldest records of his fall, which does not point to the divine facts which kings and prophets desired to see, and saw not, or only saw in the dimmest distance, and were glad. The stream of prophecy sometimes dwindles into a trickling thread, yet even then it includes Christ. It sometimes expands to illimitable horizons of time and space, yet even then it cannot contain His infinitude for of Him, and through Him, and unto Him (to an extent infinitely wider than any prophet dreamed) are all things; and He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.

To conclude. There are many other questions which I must here put aside; but I have argued that Prophecy was not a curiously articulated enigma, but a divine, progressive, far-reaching type; that it sprang always from contemporary historic facts though it was not limited by them; that its evidential cogency lies very little in scraps of text and snippings of metaphor, but almost wholly in ruling principles; that "the words of it had a perfect and fully intelligible meaning when they were first used, and that this meaning is at once the germ and vehicle of the latest and fullest meanings." But the divine foreshadowings of the Mediator of the New Covenant, in their manifold apparent contradictions neither were, nor could be, understood until He came. The Old Testament analogies to which the Evangelists refer were not always literal predictions; but still less were the references to them in the New Testament mere linguistic misinterpretations and arbitrary fancies. They pointed to the complete realisation of an essential idea, clothing itself often in words which burst like fire through their literal expression. If I may quote in its grand original language the deep saying of Herodotus:

πολυμαθίη νόον οὐ διδάσκει ἡ δὲ Σίβυλλα, μαινομένῳ στόματι ἀγέλαστα καὶ ακαλλώπιστα καὶ ἀμύριστα φθεγγομένη χιλίων ἑτῶν ἐξικνειται διὰ τὸν θεόν.

"It is not mere knowledge that teaches the understanding, but the Sibyl," (and by the Sibyl he means the true voice of inspiration,) "the Sibyl with wild mouth, uttering things serious, and unperfumed, and unadorned, reaches to a thousand years through the power of God."

IV. If those deep words apply to the unconscious prophecies of heathendom, how far more deeply do they apply to the prophecies of Scripture! And as for the conversion of the Jews, is there any possibility that we shall ever convert one of them unless we can show them that Christianity is something better than their own abrogated Levitism? unless they can see in Christendom a more splendid spectacle-loftier characters and nobler lives-than Judaism can produce? History, alas! has not converted them. Judaism was the religion of a temple, of a priesthood, of sacrifices,

of a Messiah. God gave them the first three, and He has now for 1,900 years abolished them, and for ever. He hallowed their temple, and of their temple etiam periere ruina, and the followers of the false prophet suffer them not to set foot in its desecrated area. He gave them a Priesthood and he has rendered absolutely impossible the fulfilment of so much as one of the smallest functions for which their priesthood was set apart. He appointed for them sacrifices; and all possibility of offering those sacrifices-even their Passover, even their Atonement offerings-He has abrogated and annulled. He enriched, and consoled, and inspired the long centuries of their national life with the hope of a Messiah; and, because they rejectd and crucified that Messiah when He came, they have now, for the most part, turned their backs on the inspiring hope to which their fathers clung. And all this, and more than this misery and humiliation and millions of broken hearts-have come upon them since those awful cries, "We have no king but Cæsar," and "His blood be on us and on our children!" "No king but Cæsar!" and their Cæsar crucified them outside the walls of their own city till wood for crosses failed. "His blood be on us and on our children!"-alas ! have they not sunk beneath billow after billow of that multitudinous tide? Is there no voice for them in the prophecy that it should be so? Is there no meaning for them in the history that so it has been? If so, can prophecy, can history have any meaning at all? "Incomprehensible people," so wrote De Lammenais in the fierce spirit of his arrogant Catholicism, "cease a moment from the toil wherewith thou consumest thyself under the sun; gather thyself from the four winds, whither the breath of God hath scattered thee; come forth and answer! O Jew, not in vain hast thou made the demand 'His blood be on us and on our children.' Thy desire hath been fulfilled. His blood is upon thee; it will for ever be! Go, return! Back to thy punishment, that the whole world may be witness thereof, until, detesting thy crime, that blood, out. Not in language such as this not in language that same blood which thou hast shed, shall wipe it which at all resembles it would we address the children of God's ancient people. Far rather would we plead with them to share the peace, the grace, the blessedness, the sense of His continued indwelling Presence, which God has vouchsafed to us in Jesus Christ our Lord. Far rather would we pray for them and with them, as a poet of your own has written,.. "O Thou, their God, their Father, and their Lord, Loved for Thy mercies, for Thy power adored, If at Thy name the waves forgot their force, And refluent Jordan sought her trembling source. If at Thy name like sheep the mountains fled, And haughty Sirion bowed his marble head, To Israel's woes a pitying ear incline, And raise from earth Thy long-neglected Vine !"

Farrar

A CAREER of signal service to the present generation was brought to a close at Hastings on Monday, March 27th, when the Rev. Samuel Cox, D.D., was called into the higher life. The average reader of newspapers, who judges of a man's worth by the pitch of noisy notoriety to which he has attained, will have little or no idea of the eminence of Dr. Cox's character and usefulness. Few modern English theologians have lent more valuable assistance than he in the task of diffusing through our pulpits the habit of faithful exposition of Scripture, and of preparing the religious teachers of the people for more generous, because more liberal, views of Revelation. This solid merit has been too largely hid from the public by reason of his beautiful unobtrusiveness. The personal capital which others have made out of their "advanced" theology, either in the way of applause from the Philistines, or in well-advertised "martyrdom" of the cheap sort, Dr. Cox resolutely disdained. He did the work and left others to make the hubbub. This personal reticence of his, however much it adds to the beauty of the life, detracts necessarily from its external eventfulness. As he remarked quite recently in reference to Tennyson: "Every great man has to surround himself with an atmosphere of reserve in order to protect himself from those who approach him from purely personal and selfish ends "-so it may be said of Dr. Cox that he lived in an atmosphere of reserve. He was pre-eminently a man of the study and the pulpit. By no means devoid of sympathetic interest in the great social and political movements of his time, he was probably as much without the liking, as he was without the voice, for platform work. It was undoubtedly his function to minister in the making of men by the faithful supply of spiritual instruction with a directly practical aim. He did not strive nor cry, neither did any man hear his voice in the streets; but for his instruction the teachers of these isles did wait.

The outer story of his life can soon be told. Samuel Cox was the son of Rev. John Cox, pastor of the Baptist Church at Shacklewell, and was born in 1826.

He was trained at Stepney (now Regent's Park) College under Dr. Angus, and entered the ministry as pastor of the church at Southsea in 1852. He was minister at Ryde from 1855 to 1860, and then, owing to the failure of his voice, he became a journalist until 1863, when he succeeded the late Dr. J. F. Stevenson (recently of Brixton Independent Church) as pastor of Mansfield Road Baptist Church, Nottingham. There he continued for a quarter of a century until, a martyr to asthma, he was compelled to retire in June, 1888, and thenceforward he was a resident in Hastings. He was not married until somewhat more than twenty years ago. His wife, who survives him,

was Miss Eliza Tebbutt, sister of Mr. C. P. Tebbutt, J.P., of Bluntisham, Huntingdonshire. There are no children of the marriage. His learning was almost simultaneously recognised by the three Scotch Universities of Aberdeen, St. Andrew's, and Edinburgh, all of which, in the year 1883, offered him the degree of Doctor of Divinity. He accepted the degree of St. Andrew's. It was conferred on him at the instance of the Principal, Dr. Tulloch.

But the life of thought and service, which are packed within this brief and simple outline, and which may be represented by a complete list of his published works, is rich and manifold. In the "recollections of his friends, and in his personal correspondence, there should be material for a charming biography. As a record of struggle against physical infirmity and theological prejudice, it ought to possess no common degree of interest.

As a theologian, Dr. Cox was intensely Evangelical. It is true he was "broadly Evangelical," but his belief in the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and in essentially related truths, was deep and abiding. His friend, the late Professor Goadby, of Nottingham College, used to tell him that his very advocacy of "The Larger Hope" was to be traced back to his early Calvinistic environment. For Principal Goadby regarded every form of "Universalism" as necessitarian or fatalistic, and held that when Dr. Cox would consign the entire race, nolens volens, to eternal blessedness, he must, for