The kingdom of David and of Solomon has begun to decay; Judah and Israel are separating; both kingdoms have their prophets, who at one time struggle against the crimes and evils of their respective ages, and, at another, occupy themselves in disclosing prospects of the future.
"Hear ye now, O house of David. …
"Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. …
"The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. …
"For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. …
"And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots:
"And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord;
"… and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears:
"But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity, for the meek of the earth. …
"Listen, O isles, unto me; and hearken, ye people, from far; The Lord hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name. …
"And said unto me, Thou art my servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified.
"Then I said, I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain: yet surely my judgment is with the Lord, and my work with my God.
"And now, saith the Lord that formed me from the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob again to him, Though Israel be not gathered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the Lord, and my God shall be my strength.
"And he said, It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth. …
"Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.
"… For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
"He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
"Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
"But he was wounded for our trangressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
"All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.
"He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.
"He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken. …
"Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
"He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.
"Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors." [Footnote 81]
[Footnote 81: Isaiah vii. 13-14; ix. 26; xi. 14; xlix. 1-6; Zechariah ix. 9; Isaiah liii.]
Whatever controversies may arise out of these texts, and many others which I might cite, one fact subsists and rises above all question and all controversy. Seventeen centuries passed in the interval between the Decalogue being received by Moses upon Mount Sinai, and the actual approach of the Messiah announced by the prophets; and at the end of these seventeen centuries, the God, from whom Moses received the Decalogue, He who defined himself to be "I am that I am." Jehovah, still is, has never ceased to be the God, the sole God of Israel. Israel has passed through all governments, undergone all vicissitudes, fallen into all the errors to which it is possible for a nation to succumb: the Jews have had a hierarchy, and judges, and kings; they have been alternately conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves; they have had their days of power and their days of humiliation, their temptation to idolatry and paroxysms of impiety; still they have ever returned to the One God: to the true God; their faith has survived all their faults and all their misfortunes; and after those seventeen centuries, Israel is waiting at the hand of Jehovah a Messiah, to be, according to the affirmation of its greatest prophets, the Liberator and the Saviour, not of Israel alone, but of all nations. Fact without parallel in history! In vain shall men exhaust against it all their science, and all their scepticism: there is here more than the work of man; the fact itself is not human. But what more shall that fact become, and what shall be our belief, when all shall have received its consummation,—the prophecies their accomplishment,—when Jehovah shall have given to the world Jesus Christ?
Eighth Meditation.
Jesus Christ According To The Gospel.
Need I say that by the words, "the Gospel," here used, I understand the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, all the books, in fact, which compose the Canon of the New Testament as it is received by all Christians?
These books have been variously studied: now with the design of disproving, now of explaining the life of Jesus Christ; now with the object of a Controversialist, now with that of a Commentator. I approach the subject in neither character. I would wish to study Jesus Christ in the New Testament solely to know Him well, and to make Him well known; to place Him before the reader, and to depict Him faithfully according to the evidence of his history. I propose hereafter, in a second series of these Meditations, to examine its authenticity, and the degree of credit to which it is entitled. For the moment I assume the testimony as good and valid. Beyond all doubt, at the outset, it is at least entitled to this respect. The powerful influence of these books, and of the accounts which they contain, such as they remain to us, has been put to the test and proved. They have overcome Paganism. They have conquered Greece, Rome, and barbarous Europe. They are actually overcoming the world. And the sincerity of the authors is no less certain than the virtue of the books: however possible it may be to contest the enlightenment, the critical sagacity of the original historians of Jesus Christ, their good faith is beyond all question: it appears in their language; they believed what they said; they sealed their assertions with their blood: "I believe," said Pascal, "only those histories, the witnesses to which confirm their attestation by submitting to death." Although not always a sufficient reason to believe an account, it constitutes a decisive motive to believe in the sincerity of the witness.