of Jehoiada and the priests; and the ground upon which the writer of the chronicle (2 Chron. xxiv. 22) condemns the king's long subsequent crime in putting to death Zechariah the priest for reproving him; which was not the sacred character of the priest, but his being the son of Jehoiada, the king's early and best friend; are, equally with Jehoiada's act, marked manifestations that not the positive but the moral was in the common sentiment, the essential matter in religion. It was a recognition by the common mind that their divine King ruled and reigned in righteousness.

of the

12. The religious knowledge, the revealed wisdom of Sol- Influence omon's time, like all sowings of the seeds of faith, failed of Psalms. fruitfulness in the recognised ways (Matt. xiii. 19-22), and part of its fruit was to be reaped only many days after. We cannot hold that anything like the whole riches of thoughts of God, put on enduring record in the Psalms, was the common faith of the nation in the time of their authorship. Though three thousand years old, they contain much that is still up to or above the religious consciousness of the most of spirituallyminded Christians. They were the utterance of revealed as well as spontaneous thoughts, and anticipated as they were to lead the religious thinking of the sacred nation and of mankind. Yet their spiritual ways of thought were to a considerable extent possessed by the writers, who, without doubt, were not isolated saints; most of their devotional and moral language has the ring of well-appreciated words, expressive of thoughts that were familiar, and has not the strangeness of compelled unapprehended utterances, phrases not revealed to the speakers (1 Pet. i. 11), which had to stand waiting their recognised sufficient meaning until the fulness of times. The psalmists' language of near, confided-in relationship, if it was not the expression of thoughts familiar to the common mind. of Israel at the time, was the seed of a fruit of such faith which we can see after it had received the providential cultivation of succeeding reigns. Long-continued thoughts of Jehovah as a "Father," a "Father the guide of youth," a "Father of the fatherless," became prepared to hear Isaiah speak of Him as the Everlasting Father as well as the Mighty

Prophets.

God, the Wonderful, the Counsellor. Jehovah-Shalom, Gideon's
Jehovah of Peace, was coming to be thought of as the "Prince
of Peace," for higher than national interests; taking man's
spiritual troubles upon Himself. David's Psalms concerning
that King's (Jehovah's own King's) suffering for His people, as
well as His protecting love of them, contained language which
David's history only slightly expounded. It fructified, how-
ever, in the multitude of thoughts which, in succeeding dark
times, God's servants were comforted to have within them,
preparing the place for the evangelical prophet's thoughts, the
completing thought of Jehovah's love as a suffering as well as
a ruling, providing, preserving love. The reigns of several
heavy-laden, righteous princes had passed ere then, and He-
brew faith had a large history to look back upon-from David
to Hezekiah-of chastisements, and griefs, and self-devoting
labours, in which the religious king was beheld, ever the
central sufferer of anxiety and endurance, crying unto Jehovah
and receiving strength from Him to toil and suffer on to
struggling but triumphant success, to deliver his people from
heathen oppression, or to heal their backslidings and bring
them back to the pleasure of the Lord. And that teaching
of their religious history had prepared the time for Isaiah's
speaking, not wholly to ears dull of hearing, the anticipatory
history of Immanuel, God with us. "Surely He hath borne
our griefs, and carried our sorrows.
The chastisement of our
peace was laid upon Him. 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. 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" (Isa. liii.)

Progress of
13. Isaiah's teaching of the thoughts of faith was, however,
institu-
tions. The the brightness of the revelation of God's nature and His
grace to man by a new dispensation, the PROPHETIC ORDER,
which was sent forth to supersede the kingly in the religious
government of the sacred people, in the same manner and
degree as the kingly authority had superseded the early su-

premacy of the priesthood. Prophets had always been among the means of faith; inspiring or breaking through the forms of ceremonial worship to teach the spirit of true religion. In Samuel and the schools of the prophets known by his time, they became something of an established institution for such correction and instruction, even of the forms and ministers of Jehovah's worship; and for general correction of public morals; by opportune declarations of the will of Jehovah immediately commissioned, like Samuel's messages to Eli in his childhood, or spoken spontaneously in appearance like his reproof of Saul, "Hath the Lord more delight in burnt-offerings than in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams." These teaching prophets, resident at court, or in known dwelling-places, like "Gad, David's seer," and Nathan, like Jeremiah and Daniel of the captivity, and Haggai and Zechariah of the restoration, or appearing suddenly, no one could tell whence, in times of profligacy and dereliction of Jehovah's worship, like the awful Elijah, the dread of Ahab, are the figures that draw the eye after the disruption of the monarchy, far more than the kings of that tumultuous period, and almost to the exclusion of the priests, the primitive religious authority. They are the only permanent lights that shine in the so frequently darkened generations between fallen Solomon and the captivities; the monitors, correctors, and scourges of the idolatrous kings; and the mighty bulwarks of the courage of faithful monarchs, when such arose to stem the tide of false worship and corrupt morals which made the last two centuries of the kingdoms so akin to the dark ages known to Christian faith.

of moral

14. The denunciations of these great teachers exhibit a Advance much-developed moral thought, an ongoing unveiling of the teaching. holiness of God. Were their words the only history of true religion during their times, we would learn nothing of the religious importance of the ceremonial law. Their mission was to lift up the thoughts and consciences of the chosen people higher than the forms which they had self-deceivingly come to make serve as the essentials of Jehovah's will. Even in the northern kingdom, the prophetic reproofs we find

Coincident extension of field.

directed, not against the heretical form of worship leading to
idolatry established by Jeroboam in the reigns when that was
the national worship of Israel, but against the oppression of
the poor by the rich, the drunkenness of priests and prophets,
the licentiousness of general morals-sins against the moral
law, the service of holiness. And these they reproved and
corrected, to the ignoring even of all the ceremonial life at first
ordained, which the emancipated slaves of Pharaoh had needed
to confine and shape their minds to right thoughts and guid-
ing habits, and which the unspiritual, immoral religionists of
the last Jewish days returned to confine religion to again.
"Rend your hearts, and not your garments," is the tone of
their calls to repentance. "Shall I come before the Lord with
thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth
the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and love mercy,
and walk humbly with thy God?" (Micah vi. 7, 8; comp. Jer.
vii. 22, 23.)
"Behold, the day's come, saith the Lord, that I
will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with
the house of Judah; not the covenant I made with their
fathers, which they brake. I will put my law in their inward
parts, and write it in their hearts" (Jer. xxxi. 33).

15. Coincident with this expansion of the prophetic teaching in the dark times of Hebrew history beyond the bounds of Moses' formal ordinances, sacred history shows an instructively congruous expansion of it beyond the bounds of the sacred people. Not only Israel and Judah, but Tyre on the west and Moab on the east knew the form of Elijah in the days of Ahab and his Tyrian queen. Elisha was the monitor of Benhadad and Hazael, as well as of Jehu. During the great empire of the second Jeroboam, Jonah's preaching of the holiness of the God of the whole earth was carried, by the tragical events of his history, to the farthest bounds of the Mediterranean. He carried it himself to the centre of Assyria.

Apprecia- 16. The prophetic institution continued the divine agency tion of for the education of the instructor - people to faith in God's prophetic authority. holiness during the corrupt decay of the kingdoms, when the institutions of the priesthood and kinghood had fallen into

uselessness or hurtfulness to the truth; and throughout the captivities, when these regular means of faith were suspended. Upon the restoration, the prophets had much to do with the organising of the second temple service, and in the popular faith seem then at least to have been conjoined with the priests as oracles of religious guidance (Zech. vii. 3). The continuance of that faith seems indicated by Luke ii., and in the popular sentiment as to prophets in our Lord's days. The union of the kingly and priestly authority, which appears in Zechariah's vision (Zech. vi. 11, 12), a forelight of the Messiah, may be compared by us with the history of the Maccabees, and with the union of both the magisterial and prophetic functions with the priestly in Caiaphas at the close of Hebrew faith.

tion of

to the

17. The long reign of Uzziah saw the culmination of the Culminaprophetic work, by the inspiration of a band of those teachers prophecy-of contemporary religion to execute a new and permanent work salvation -namely, to put in writing, for the whole world of nations world. destined to receive their writings by one channel or another, visions of the relation and designs of God towards man, which were to be unfolded in the fulness of times. The prophetic books mark a grand stage in that unveiling of the salvation of God, the progress of which is traceable in the subjects of the earlier writings of the Word. The religious history of the Pentateuch, long the source of faith's thoughts of the ways of God with man, might be read as the Jews of the fulness of times read it, so as to see nothing, or hardly anything, the object of Jehovah's loving care, beyond the boundary of Israel's seed. The writings of David and Solomon, and others of the middle period of the separation of a peculiar people of Jehovah, were books for human nature's religiousness, more than for Israel's national views of faith. In the prophetic books, future religious history is the subject; and a developed faith appears, thinking of a God well known, hiding Himself no more in clouds, unveiling His face to speak with His people as a man with his friend; and now Israel's fortunes are no more the whole system of religious history, as in the Pentateuch, but around them, on every hand, arises a mundane system, dis