earthly loom, and whose thread could only be broken when it was completed, no genuine rescue from the depth of national misery would have been possible; and every hope directed to that object must have remained as fruitless in result as it was idle in conception, and could only have served to embitter still further the sufferings of the age. But the texture of the great divine work which (as already explained) had now been centred in Israel for a thousand years, had only become more and more tangled during the last centuries, without ever seeing itself completed. Its inner genius, therefore, had already been directed with increasing force towards extricating itself from these embarrassments, and had gained a clear perception of the manner in which the knots must be untied and the commencement of a genuine progress secured. The destruction of the kingdom of Israel, as constituted and developed in Canaan, and the total dispersion of the people, which through the whole period of the monarchy had wandered further and further from its higher calling, had for centuries been proclaimed by the true prophets, with ever-increasing severity, as a necessity before God; but the same seers had always foretold, at the same time, that Israel was only to be purified by this divine chastisement in order that the great and eternal work of God, starting from a fresh and pure commencement, might be the more sure of being completed in it. The first or threatening half of these prophecies was now fully realised; and even if the sufferers of the time as yet bore with them no distinct consciousness of the nature or spirit of the divine work which had now been broken off in an unfinished state, at least the light of the second branch of the prediction, giving assurance of its consummation, must have shone before them; and the certainty of the fulfilment of the first would guarantee that of the second.

And so this ever progressive work of God itself, since it was still far from its completion, could not suffer the scattered members of the nation to rest. They themselves were not willing to be estranged from it; and in the midst of the deep gloom of the age it flashed upon their souls with fresh glory the brightest visions of its own accomplishment, which should surely come. It is true that the desolation of this period echoes to the lament, amongst a thousand others, over the decay of prophetic activity and the cessation of divine teaching; but in general nothing further is meant by this than the heavy blow which the powers of prophecy and instruction, in common with all other national.

1 Lam. ii. 9, cf. 20; Ezek. vii. 26.

developments, must certainly have felt with great violence. The host of prophets and teachers which had often swept through the kingdom with such tumultuous vehemence in the last days of Jerusalem,' had suddenly vanished; and the prophetic activity was entirely shut out from the field in which it had hitherto worked with the greatest force, viz. the complete publicity of popular life. The circumstances of the time were such that the fundamental power of the ancient community could only rise under the heaviest burdens and the deepest sorrow of heart. Nevertheless it did rise once more; and even when the people of Jahveh, and with them every oracle and lesson from their God, seemed to have perished from off the earth, its deep spring, incapable of exhaustion, never quite ceased to flow, but rather rose up with a strength proportioned to the pressure which it had to resist. Moreover, at a time when all public discourse and instruction had become impracticable, the high perfection which had long been reached (as has been frequently explained) by the peculiar genius of the literature of Israel, came to the assistance of the impulse of prophetic communication; and, indeed, literature had never before possessed such profound significance for Israel, or rendered such immediate service, as at this juncture.

In the midst, then, of the heavy oppression and the severe chastening of these decades, the fundamental power of the ancient community rose once more with increased force and purity by its own inextinguishable genius, and became necessarily the true and all-efficient instrument of that spiritual renovation and inner conversion without which the community could never have rallied from its extreme desolation and distress and risen to the beginning of a useful external life. Here, therefore, we meet with the most striking repetition of that phenomenon which we have so often been enabled to recognise in the course of this history. At every great crisis of the history of Israel it was prophecy, as the original and fundamental power of the community, which had brought on the decisive moment, and, whether quite alone or in alliance with some other dominant power, had given beforehand the new direction to affairs. Whenever the result had been healthy, one or more great prophets had invariably been at work, and had also left traces of their spirit in immortal writings or in renowned successors; and where the result had been

1 Vol. iv. p. 245 sqq.

purest and most salutary, there too in every instance the prophetic spirit at work had been purest and most divine. This is also the case with the last great phase. Sighing, indeed, most deeply under the darkness and the burdens of the day, the prophetic power is still the first to wake into renewed activity the spirit which the times required, and it was this which, with inexhaustible energy, conducted its work through every stage, in spite of every oppression, until the new order of things issued victoriously from the dreadful struggle. This is the last occasion on which the ancient community offers the spectacle of the true religion, still pure and free from all foreign admixture, exerting its utmost possible strength in the effort to reach its goal; and it would be strange if the Old Testament itself did not still contain the most significant and distinctive monuments of the exalted spectacle, since this victory and transition to the last great phase must be placed among the most important and permanently instructive passages of Old Testament history. Such monuments do, however, as a fact exist in sufficient number and clearness, although it is not always easy to recognise them at first sight.

3

For the first ten or twelve, perhaps, of these years of disaster, the hoary prophet Jeremiah,' who has been previously described," still survived from the midst of the preceding period, with his stern sentence on all the past and present, with his deep sorrow, with his lofty confidence as he looked upon Israel's eternal destiny and on the promise of a new covenant, with his unwearied zeal even under the heaviest blows of that heavy time, and his wise counsels under the grave difficulties of the new situation. We have already seen how his constant and impartial care embraced both near and distant members of the community, and how he endeavoured to warn them against the snares of heathenism, which were now far more dangerous than before; but his prudence was too great, and his insight into the future too penetrating, to permit him ever to recommend to the existing generation any other course than quiet resignation to the divine destiny and tranquil obedience to the Chaldean supremacy. This truth had long taken the shape in

The orthography Jeremjah, which partly follows the Hellenists, is the only correct one, unless we get still nearer the original by following the Masôra in reading Jirmejah. It is the same with Hézegiel, except that this is a somewhat different formation from the simple combination of words in (God's strength)

instead of the fuller spin! (God is strong). But the orthography 'IeÇekinλos gives an inadmissible mixture of the two forms, and yet it has become the most

common with the Hellenists.

2 See vol. iv.

3 P. 7, note 1.

his mind of a settled anticipation that the exile of Israel would last seventy years-that is, a complete generation.' It was, then, only to a distant future, and to an Israel thoroughly regenerated by the fiery chastisement of long years of suffering, that this last of the great prophets looked for salvation. Yet, even when the fate of the moment was the most terrible, he clung with the firmest trust to the expectation of this future salvation, and the completion of the divine work which had been begun in Israel; and as a citizen of his day he brought all the actions and decisions of his life, which, coming from him, readily assumed a higher or prophetic significance, into entire accordance with this faith. Thus by the example of his own conduct and the power of his tranquil confidence, he conducted the whole better consciousness of the nation, with the most salutary results, from the former period to the new one, and in extreme old age, though placed between two very different epochs, continued to be a stay and exemplar of Israel even in the second. Yet that distant future to which he looked forward in spirit with such yearning love, owed still more to his profound declaration that an entirely new covenant must be entered into, in which the divine commands must no longer be engraved, as in the ancient narrative, on simple wood or stone, and stand over against mankind as an instrument of external compulsion, but must be written on the very heart of man, redeemed from the power of sins which had waxed strong in the course of history, and must ever work from the free impulse of the heart itself.3 This brief utterance draws to a focus at once the highest result of all Israel's previous history, and the highest problem to be solved by the great future which was now unfolding itself. Henceforth all the profounder minds of the community make their deepest aspirations and most decisive objects and efforts depend upon it; and, in its glorious truth, with a claim which cannot be escaped, it maintains itself in living power through every subsequent age, until at the end of this whole epoch it is at length fulfilled.

Ezekiel, the younger contemporary and successor of Jeremiah, is a complete example of a prophet of the captivity. Since he had already begun his prophetic ministry among the

1 Jer. xxv. 11 sq., xxix., 10; cf. xxvii. 7, and more below.

2 Jer. xxxii. sq., and many other passages.

3 Vol. iv. p. 290 sqq.

Not only does Ezekiel repeat it on

every suitable occasion and explain it elaborately, xi. 19 sq., xviii. 31, xxxvi. 25– 28; cf. xvi. 60, xxxvii. 26; but the great Unknown also returns essentially to it as to the loftiest and final utterance, Is. xlii. 1-4, liv. 9-lv. 13.

exiles seven years before the destruction of Jerusalem, he experienced most acutely, even in this his dearest and holiest occupation, the full pressure of the burden of those days which was ever growing more intolerable; and he felt his action more and more cramped and clouded by the rising unbelief and increasing despair of the majority of his fellow-exiles, as well as by the fearful issue of public affairs, and even by domestic affliction. He is, moreover, far from hurrying the scattered members of his nation into any vain expectation as to the present or any insurrection against the Chaldeans. But the glorious and eternal hope of Israel ever burns in his soul with the same brightness, and after each disturbance and interruption in his prophetic activity he turns to it again with yet greater zeal, and finds means enough to cherish and to heighten the glow of the true fire in the hearts of others too, if no longer by public discourse, at all events by private communication and pre-eminently by his writings. And although in the deepest and most decisive truths he only follows his great predecessor Jeremiah, there is yet a great deal about him which strikes us with the most original force and clearness. As the most indefatigable prophet of the first and severest half of the exile he occupies a unique position in the development of this age of transition. By the very fact of his first rising as a prophet during the exile, he fitted himself in the best possible manner to become a true labourer in the thorny field of prophetic activity for the whole of this new period. In fact, although he shows less originality and depth than Jeremiah, yet there is more even tranquillity and assiduity both in his literary method and artistic arrangement and (as far as it falls within our knowledge) his life also. Seven years had already elapsed since the commencement of his prophetic activity when Jerusalem was completely destroyed, and while from that time his fate required more and more patient endurance, it was with the greater calm (though his zeal burned highest in the deepest calm) that his contemplative spirit directed itself to the task of setting forth the manner in which the future Israel, purified and ennobled, should rise again with genuine life and undergo a new development. Even under the iron heel of the Chaldean supremacy he already foresaw with lofty assurance the final victory of the future Jerusalem.1 While the Temple with the holy city and all the kingdom lay in ruins, this prophet strove to delineate with the utmost vivid

1 Ezek. xxxviii. sq.