the Lord was upon HIM"--Isaiah--"because the Lord had appointed HIM
to preach good tidings to the meek, to bind up the broken-hearted,
and deliverance to the captives, to preach the acceptable year of the
Lord." Isaiah must have spoken truly about himself. He could not
have meant to tell a falsehood, to say a thing was true of himself
which was only true of Jesus, who did not come till 800 years
afterwards. And he did speak the truth: you cannot read his
prophecies without seeing that the Spirit of the Lord was indeed upon
him; that the words which he spoke must have comforted all those who
were sorrowing for their sins and the sins of the nation in their
time. We know, for a fact, that his prophecies came true; that the
Jewish captives were delivered and brought back out of Judaea to
Jerusalem again, and that Jerusalem was rebuilt as Isaiah prophesied,
and the Jewish nation raised to far greater holiness, and prosperity,
and happiness than it had ever been in before. And yet 800 years
afterwards the Lord took those very same words to Himself, and said,
that HE fulfilled them. He read them aloud once in a Jewish
synagogue, out of the book of the prophet Isaiah; and then told the
congregation, "This day is the Scripture fulfilled in your ears."
And again, as we read in the Gospel for this day, when John the
Baptist sent to ask Him if He was really the Christ, He made use of
another prophecy of Isaiah, and told John's disciples that He WAS the
Christ, because He was fulfilling that prophecy; because He WAS
making the deaf hear, and the blind see, and preaching the gospel to
the poor. Now, how is that? Could Isaiah be right in applying those
words to himself, and yet Christ be right in applying them to
Himself? Can a prophecy be fulfilled twice over?

No doubt it can, my friends, and two hundred times over. No prophecy
of Scripture is of private interpretation, says St. Peter. That is,