XVII.]

THE CONQUEROR FROM BOZRAH.

"Behold my servant whom I

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whole before his spirit. hold, mine elect in whom my soul delighteth. I have put my Spirit upon him. He shall bring forth judgment unto the Gentiles." Here is the beginning of a stream of prophecy which runs on gathering new strength and sweeping away countless obstacles before it. I will stop at one point in that stream, at the words which we shall be reading to-morrow. "Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah, this that is glorious in his apparel, travelling in the greatness of his strength ?" The Jew asks whether this is not the description of a triumphant conqueror returning from the defeat of the Heathen. Unquestionably. The Church which appointed the service for Passion-week did not wish us to forget that all the symbols of the prophet pointed to such a Person. Only she would have us remember that He is the same person whose visage is said to be marred more than any man's; who is declared to be the despised and rejected of men-a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. She asks us to understand that out of that contempt, sorrow, and humiliation, all might comes; that the nations could never be subdued except by one who wrestled with the death aud sin which all nations share together. The Jew asks again whether the man of sorrows may not be Isaiah or Hezekiah, the deserted prophet, the humbled king; whether he may not exhibit the condition of the Jewish race? Unquestionably. Isaiah was a man of sorrows; throughout the most blessed periods of Hezekiah's life he was a man of sorrows. The Jewish race is represented throughout the prophecy as crushed, helpless, broken;-by its misery and desolation, the channel of blessings to mankind. The more Isaiah, Hezekiah, the Jewish nation understood this great secret,

304 THE MAN OF SORROWS. (C. LIII.) [Serm. XVII. this divine paradox, the more was each enabled to do the work which they were appointed to do in the world. And this because the image of a higher and more perfect sorrow, of the man who could alone be called the man of sorrows, of Him who enabled them to be true sorrowers, of one sympathising with the mind of God and the woes of His creatures, rose then more clearly and brightly and perfectly before them. Christian brother! if thou believest in such a man of sorrows, ask how thou mayst exhibit His image by suffering with thy fellows. Let Passion-week be indeed a witness to thee that thou art the heir of the same nature, of the same death, of the same redemption with them. Jew, Turk, Heretic, Infidel brother! try whether thou canst not be what in thy best hours thou desirest to be; then thou wilt believe that thou needest a sacrifice offered for the sins of the whole world; that thou needest a brother, a king, who can make thee at one with thy Father in Heaven, and so enable thee to be at one with His children upon earth.

SERMON XVIII.

THE JEW CONQUERING THE NATIONS.

LINCOLN'S INN, EASTER SUNDAY.-APRIL 11, 1852.

ISAIAH LXIII., 16.

Doubtless Thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not. Thou, O Lord, art our Father, our Redeemer; Thy Name is from everlasting.

THE last passage in Isaiah's prophecies to which I alluded, was that which begins with the words, "Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah ?" I could not doubt that these words contained the description of a mighty conqueror; I could not deny the Jewish assertion, that the whole scenery of the passage, as well as the context of it, led us to think of a Jewish conqueror returning from a victory over Gentile hosts.

This being admitted, the question to be considered was, what is the nature of the triumph here described, how was it or will it be won, in what sense and upon what terms has the Gentile world, represented by these cities of Edom and Bozrah, done homage or will it do homage to the Jewish race and to a sovereign of Jerusalem? With the consideration of this question, I shall conclude what I have to say upon this great prophet. Without it I believe we could

X

THE CLIMAX OF ISAIAH'S HOPES.

306 [Serm. neither understand the visions which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem-when he declared that God had nourished and brought up children and that they had rebelled against Him, that God would ease Him of His adversaries and avenge Him of His enemies, that the strong should be as tow, and the maker of it as a spark, and that they should both burn together and none should quench them-nor that vision of a new heavens and a new earth, when Jerusalem should be a rejoicing and her people a joy, when the voice of weeping should no more be heard in her nor the voice of crying, which cheered him, as we have been wont to believe, before his race was run and the torch of prophecy was given into some other hand.

I am aware that an argument may be drawn from those allusions to Gentiles upon which I propose to speak, in favour of the notion that the later chapters of this book were not written by Isaiah. Why, it will be asked, should such allusions be so much more frequent in these discourses than in the others? Must not we suspect that they belong to a later stage of the history when the Jews had been groaning under Gentile government, as in the seventy years' captivity, rather than to the time of Hezekiah, when they had had no such experience? To the first suggestion I answer, that the relations into which Samaria was entering with the heathen Syria, and Ahaz with the heathen Assyria, were the hint and occasion of Isaiah's earliest inspirations; that a struggle between heathendom concentrated in the person of the Assyrian monarch, and the holy city ruled by Hezekiah, is the subject of the chapters preceding the fortieth; that what one finds in the succeeding chapters is not the record or anticipation of a conflict of a different kind, but a clear intimation that the same conflict would be prolonged for

XVIII.] THE APOSTLE AND THE PROPHET.

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many generations. To the reason given for referring these discourses to the later years of the captivity, I answer that the symbols of the warrior who fights with Edom and Bozrah, are the symbols of a native prince, and that I cannot see why upon any view of Isaiah's mission these should have been more natural in a time when there was no native prince and no prospect of any-when the restoration of the city, of the temple, of the order of the priests and sacrifices, not the establishment of a throne in Jerusalem, was that which patriots and holy men were expecting-than to one living in a time when there was such a throne, an actual heir of David sitting upon it, a righteous ruler, one who had been permitted to assert the glory of Israel and of the Lord God of Israel.

I do not refer to the authority of St. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans to decide this question. It may be said reasonably enough, that he would of course quote any prophecy by the title which it ordinarily bore in his day, and that he was too much occupied with his subject to engage in a discussion which had no direct bearing upon it. But I refer to him for the light he throws upon the actual intention of the passages which I am considering.

In the ninth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans he had been speaking of the great heaviness and continual sorrow which he had in his heart when he thought of the condition of his countrymen. They were his kinsmen according to the flesh; to them pertained the adoption and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the law and the promises. Their's were the fathers; "of them," he adds, " as concerning the flesh, Christ has come, who is over all, God blessed for ever." The inheritors of all these mighty blessings it seemed to him, cutting themselves off from them.

were,