and transient reforms of King Josiah, perceives how superficial and transient they are, and utters the one word of warning against the hopes which are built upon them; Nahum, with a fine scorn of imperial greatness inspired by the spirit of cruelty, foretells the siege and fall of Nineveh, city of blood and of ceaseless rapine; Habakkuk is a skeptic with clinging faith, whose verse begins with the skeptic's cry, "O Lord, how long shall I and thou wilt not hear," and ends with the answer of faith, "Though the fig tree shall not blossom neither shall fruit be in the vines, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation; "1 Obadiah is an outraged idealist, whose indignation in the hour of his nation's apparent ruin cries out against the apathy of a kindred people gloating over his brother's misfortune; Jeremiah is the first distinctive individualist among the Hebrew prophets, a Huguenot in cry an age ruled by the Medici, a Savonarola in an age of Alexander VI., execrating himself, at times execrating his age and his people, at other times pleading with them for Jehovah and with Jehovah for them, with infinite pathos, and amidst the ruins of the old covenant destroyed by Israel's sin and Jehovah's consequent repudiation of it, prophesying a new covenant with the elect individuals saved from the nation's wreck, — strange, sad, self-contradictory, eloquent, pathetic, despairing, brave, a Protestant before Protestantism, a Puritan before 1 Nah. iii. 1; Hab. i. 2; iii. 17, 18. Puritanism; Ezekiel is the prophet of the Exile, endeavoring to preserve the faith of his people by solidifying their religious institutions and codifying their ecclesiastical laws, the first of the prophets to prophesy in writing, the literary prophet, therefore, churchman among prophets, prophet among churchmen, unlike most churchmen of later history, emphasizing the universal Presence where there is neither Temple nor ritual, and the divine Immanence as the secret of all life and the hope of all the future; the Great Unknown is the most catholic of all the prophets, recognizes even in the pagan Emperor Cyrus the Great a messenger and servant of Jehovah, foresees the coming of pagan peoples to share Israel's future glory, is the first of Hebrew teachers to see that suffering is not a sign of divine displeasure but a commission to divine service, first to see that the suffering for sin is to be cured by sinless suffering, first to foresee a Suffering Servant of Jehovah yet to come, out of the travail of whose soul a new Israel will be born, - of all the Hebrew prophets the one with the widest horizon and the deepest insight; Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi are prophets of the restoration: Haggai, a churchman who urges on the rebuilding of the Temple; Zechariah, a contemporary of the same school, whose mystic visions are as untranslatable into prose as those of Percivale in Tennyson's "Holy Grail;" Malachi, a Puritan prophet who protests against those corruptions of life and doctrine which always accompany an ecclesiastical - revival: men of contrary temperament these, but belonging to the same epoch and produced by the same influences as Loyola and Luther by the Renaissance, or Laud and Cartwright by the Puritan revival; Joel is a moral poet of uncertain date who draws from so simple an incident as a devastating flight of locusts a symbol of the judgment day of Jehovah; Jonah is a satire written by an unknown author on the narrowness of Israel and a testimony to the universality of Jehovah's lovingkindnesses and tender mercies; and Daniel is latest of all the prophets, and his apocalyptic visions, like those of his antitype in the New Testament, are still a perplexity to the spiritual and a peril to the literalist. If we attempt to combine in a single sentence the message of these prophets it will be something like this: we learn from Amos that God is a just God who will not spare the guilty; from Hosea that he is a merciful God, tender, patient, and longsuffering; from Micah that he is the God of the poor, and will punish those who wrong his poor; from Isaiah and Nahum that he is the God of nations, the real power in all history and behind all powers; from Zephaniah that he cannot be deceived by pretentious and superficial reforms; from Habakkuk that the soul can trust in him when it cannot understand his ways; from Jeremiah that he is the God of individuals and that no nation can be righteous in his sight whose individual members are unrighteous; from Ezekiel that he is the Universal Presence, in the desert as in the Temple; from the Great Unknown that he is the God of all hope and will redeem the world from sin and suffering by sinless suffering; from Jonah that he is a God of all peoples, Jew and Gentile; from the prophets of the restoration, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, that the religion of form and the religion without form are both acceptable to God, if there be the real spirit of faith and hope and love in either the one or the other; and last of all, from Joel that God will come to judge the world with righteousness and the people with his truth. But the prophets have another function to perform than to testify to the meaning of righteousness in God and in man; the consideration of that function must be reserved for another chapter. CHAPTER XV PREACHERS OF REDEMPTION "By religion," says John Henry Newman, “I mean the knowledge of God, of his will, and of our duties toward him."1 By religion the ancient Hebrew included also the acceptance of reliance upon God's promises. The relation of man to God is one of dependency; but a relation of dependency involves mutual obligations, those of the dependent to his superior, those of the superior to the one who is dependent upon him. It is the distinctive characteristic of the religious teachers of the ancient Hebrews that they frankly recognize this mutuality of obligation between God and man, between the Creator and the creature; between the divine Sovereign, Father, Husband, and the human citizen, child, wife; to speak more accurately, they represent Jehovah himself as recognizing it. Jehovah is a King: the citizens owe loyalty to the king, but the king also owes protection to the citizens; Jehovah is a Father: the child owes obedience to the father, but the father also owes counsel and sustenance to the child; Jehovah is a Husband: the wife owes fidelity to her husband, but the husband also 1 Grammar of Assent, p. 378. |