sobs; and then the wondrous change, in the latter part, to victory
_through_ this terrible experience. And the scanty but vivid lines in the
Sixty-ninth Psalm. There is that great throbbing fifty-third of Isaiah,
with its beginning back in the close of the fifty-second, and the striking
ahead of its key-note in the fiftieth chapter.

Daniel listens with awe deepening ever more as Gabriel tells him that the
coming Prince is to be "_cut off_." To the returned exiles rebuilding the
temple Zechariah acts out a parable in which Jehovah is priced at thirty
pieces of silver, the cost of a common slave. And a bit later God speaks
of a time when "they shall look upon Me (or Him) whom they _have
pierced_." And later yet, a still more significant phrase is used, as
identifying the divine character of the sufferer, where God speaks of a
sword being used "against the man that is _My Fellow_," adding, "Strike
the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered." It is God's Fellow--one
on a par with Himself--against whom the opposition is directed.

Such is the great vision in these Hebrew pages of the plan for the coming
One. There is a throne on a high mountain peak bathed in wondrous sublime
glory, but the writers are puzzled at a dark valley of the shadow of
death through which the king seems to be obliged to pick His way up to the
throne.

Jesus is to be God's new Man leading man back on the road into the divine
image again, with full mastery of his masterly powers, and through mastery
into full dominion again; but the road back seems to be _contested_, and
the new Man gets badly scarred as He fights through and up to victory.