prophets as true seers, beholding and applying eternal moral laws, and,
therefore, seeing the future in the present and in the past. They must
be the mere utterers of an irreversible arbitrary fate; and that fate
must, of course, be favourable to their nation. So now arose a school
who picked out from their old prophets every passage which could be made
to predict their future glory, and a science which settled when that
glory was to return. By the arbitrary rules of criticism a prophetic
day was defined to mean a year; a week, seven years. The most simple
and human utterances were found to have recondite meanings relative to
their future triumph over the heathens whom they cursed and hated. If
any of you ever come across the popular Jewish interpretations of The
Song of Solomon, you will there see the folly in which acute and learned
men can indulge themselves when they have lost hold of the belief in
anything really absolute and eternal and moral, and have made Fate, and
Time, and Self, their real deities. But this dream of a future
restoration was in no wise ennobled, as far as we can see, with any
desire for a moral restoration. They believed that a person would
appear some day or other to deliver them. Even they were happily
preserved by their sacred books from the notion that deliverance was to
be found for them, or for any man, in an abstraction or notion ending in
-ation or -ality. In justice to them it must be said, that they were
too wise to believe that personal qualities, such as power, will, love,
righteousness, could reside in any but in a person, or be manifested
except by a person. And among the earlier of them the belief may have
been, that the ancient unseen Teacher of their race would be their
deliverer: but as they lost the thought of Him, the expected Deliverer
became a mere human being: or rather not a human being; for as they
lost their moral sense, they lost in the very deepest meaning their
humanity, and forgot what man was like till they learned to look only
for a conqueror; a manifestation of power, and not of goodness; a