The Great Messianic Prophecy [pp. 419-438]

428 The Great Messianic Prophecy. [July,
But the Ethiopian meant more than this by his question.
Has this prediction been fulfilled? All attempts to find in
any possible development from our sinful race the original of
this clearly defined and heavenly portrait have been self-contradictory and vain. But has one come down from heaven,
stood upon the earth, and been recognized as the substance of
this photographic shadow thrown forward upon the sensitive
page of prophecy?
It is a relief to observe that D6derlein's theory of the later
composition of this part of Isaiah, from the fortieth chapter to
the close, is no embarrassment to the discussion of this question. It is admitted by all that if the prediction be Messianic,
it was not fulfilled until hundreds of years after the exile.
The few Jewvish scholars who hold it to be Messianic are looking for its fulfillment still. It was absolutely necessary for
those who denied the possibility of miracles to invent this theory, that an unknown prophet of the exile added to Isaiah's
work the marvelous disclosures of Israel's two-fold deliverance
from Babylon and from the guilt of sin, after the former had
been accomplished. But the latter was not accomplished by
the return from captivity. Nothing at all resembling these descriptions occurred for many centuries after the latest date assigned by destructive criticism to their publication. To our
argument it is a matter of complete indifference whether
Isaiah or some other prophet wrote this chapter; whether it
was written eight hundred or only six hundred years before
its fulfilment.
For it has been fulfilled to the letter! This is the startling
fact which we have still to point out. On any hypothesis of
the date of the work before us, we are in the presence of an incontestable miracle. Let us try to get some adequate impression of it. Go back in the centuries, not eight hundred years,
as we might, but the six hundred years conceded to this prophecy by unbelievers themselves. Six hundred years ago England was beginning the struggle for civil liberty; the Magna Charta had just vindicated the great principle of Anglo_
Saxon legislation-no taxation without representation; the
first regular parliament'had just assembled. Now, what if in
that germinal period of liberty and equality before the law,
more than two hundred years before the discovery of America,