surprise. But such adversaries are not to be answered by silence; and contempt is no part of the Christian's armoury. Our duty is to hear them with patience and candour, and to answer them as truth shall require.

The celebrated Dr. William Gesenius, (Divinity Professor in the University of Halle, and whose reputation as the great Hebrew scholar of the age has eclipsed that of Eichhorn,) has stated the arguments of the Anti-Messianists; and it may well be supposed that he has not failed to represent them in all the strength that they are capable of, as unhappily he is a partisan of their opinion. I shall copy them from his Philologisch-Kritiker und Historischer Commentar über den Jesaia; vol. iii. p. 162–164. Leipzig, 1821. He, with De Wette and others of their kind, maintains that the object of the pathetic passage before us is to depict, under the figure of an imaginary person, the neglect and ill-treatment which the faithful and patriotic prophets met with from their ungrateful countrymen.

As a prophecy of the sufferings, death, and exaltation of Christ, this passage cannot be admitted; for the following

reasons.

Obj. "i. The application to the Messiah which the New Testament makes of the place, is no proof of this being its original historical sense; because the established principle of interpretation in the period of the New Testament, was to expound and apply the Old Testament in a prophetic sense, without the least regard to the proper and genuine meaning of a passage. Moreover, this passage is not made use of in application to the doctrine of an expiatory death, and Matt. viii. 17 is quite contrary to such an application."

Reply. 1. That accommodations of Old Testament sentences are, in the New Testament, occasionally made to occurrences and occasions, as they arose, and to which there had been no reference in the original passage, we readily admit. But this admission does not involve any denial or doubt of the solid grounds on which Jesus and his inspired followers declared passages of the Old Testament to have been uttered by the Holy Spirit expressly with a reference to the subjects

to which they are attached. It is as clear as the noon-day sun, that, if this be not admitted, the claims of our Lord and Saviour to be a messenger from God, or even to be an honest man, are exploded; and there is an end of Christianity as a divine institution. Truly, it is a very melancholy exhibition of moral character that, with this consequence fully before their eyes, men should be found who pertinaciously maintain the antecedent, and yet persist in calling themselves Christians, and usurping the offices of Clergymen and Theological Professors!* The position itself we oppose in three ways.

(1.) By appealing to the great general evidence of the supernatural origin of Christianity, and the divine inspiration of the Apostles.

(2.) By a train of argument upon the nature and design of the dispensations of God under the Old Testament; tracing a unity of plan from the beginning; observing the progress of this plan of gracious restoration; marking the comprehensive and admirable system of preparative instructions, institutions, and events; and evincing that Christianity is no other than the completion of the whole, the accomplishment of that one and sole method of reconciling a lost world to God, which his infinite mercy had put into operation as soon as sin deformed and ruined our nature. An enlarged view of this grand plan of God, constantly illuminated by the increasing discoveries of revelation, discloses innumerable points of reference and contact, between the dispensation of the patriarchs and prophets, and that of the blessed Jesus; to the effect that the closest connexion is shewn to subsist between the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian; and those individual instances of correspondence, which a purblind, narrow-minded, self-inflated rationalist dares to call inconsistent with hermeneutic and exegetical rules, are evinced to stand upon the strongest ground of reason and evidence.

(3.) By a sincere examination of the single passages, in which the New Testament writers affirm a fulfilment of the

* See an article in the Eclectic Review, for July, 1827, on "The Neologists of Germany;" and another in that for November, on "Dr. Bretscheider's Vindication of the Modern Theology of Germany."

Old Testament, with all the lights that we can obtain from philology and history, and "comparing spiritual things with spiritual." In this way, the result of each process of investigation, to a mind imbued with a true spirit of piety, will be found most satisfactory. Others, alas! whose proud hearts will not "receive the love of the truth that they may be saved," embrace "strong delusions," and believe their own falsehood. In them is verified the divine proverb, "A scorner seeketh wisdom, and findeth it not." Prov. xiv. 6. On which saying Michaelis remarks: "The scorner finds fault with everything which the ordinary and sound understanding of men esteems as wisdom. He seeks wisdom with Diogenes's dark lantern; he confuses everything, and fancies that he sees folly everywhere. He makes difficulties and objections in things which all men believe, especially where religion and morals are concerned. It is quite the reverse with the man of good understanding. Even the very doctrines in which the scorner finds so many difficulties, are to him easy and evident. A striking observation, in relation to the difficulties which the scorner studies to collect against religion and morality." Anmerkungen.

2. With respect to the instance so confidently alleged; if these interpreters had the comprehension of mind to which they make pretension, it might easily occur to them that the mercy of Christ in healing men's diseases was an indication and promise of his powerful grace in the removal of all moral disorders, in saving from the guilt and power of sin. If the objection had any weight, it would go to the length of proving that Jesus was only a country-physician in Judæa, and not a Divine Saviour for all mankind. Even the Polish Socinian Wolzogenius has dispersed the difficulty, if there were any: "The prophet applied these words to the pains and infirmities which Christ had to feel and sustain, in his own body and soul, on our account. That Matthew applies them to the bodily diseases of the people, was because the maladies of the body are often a sign of those which are spiritual, that is, of sins. So that this passage of the prophet was twice fulfilled; once, when Christ delivered men from diseases, and that with

extreme fatigue and distress on his own part, labouring from morning till evening in healing the sick; so that, in a sense, he took their sicknesses upon himself: again, when, by his sufferings and death, he took away our spiritual diseases, our sins, when he himself bore our sins, in his own body, upon the cross.' 1 Pet. ii. 24." Cited in Witsii Meletemata Leidensia, p. 403.

Obj. "ii. Great as is the resemblance between the pious sufferer in the prophet, and the circumstances of Christ, still there are several circumstances which do not apply to him. Kings were personally to honour him; lii. 15. comp. xlix. 7. -Verse 8. 'The stroke is upon him,' ought to be in the plural, upon them, for in is never singular. He was to have 'his grave among the wicked,' v. 9, but Jesus had his from Joseph of Arimathaa. He was to share the spoil with the mighty, v. 11, which belongs to worldly triumphs."

Reply. 1. Is there the shadow of a difficulty in understanding the reverence of kings and the sharing of the spoil, as a most easy and obvious metaphor, denoting the spread of the gospel, and the religious obedience paid to the Saviour and Lord of the world? Has not the imagery been abundantly and gloriously answered by facts? And is it not proceeding to greater triumphs still? The circumstance of his burial, so far from containing a difficulty, is an admirable coincidence of the prediction with the event: for, though "a grave had been assigned to him with the wicked," in the intention of his enemies, who undoubtedly would have buried his body ignominiously, as they did those of malefactors in general, yet the peculiar providence so ordered it that the rich man's honourable tomb received his body.

2. The pronoun in v. 8 is certainly a grammatical difficulty, if taken to refer to the chief person spoken of. But (not to rest upon the reading of the LXX. eis eávaтov, shewing that they read to death; and approved by Capell, Houbigant, Lowth, Kennicott, and Koppe ;) the sense yielded by the proper plural rendering is perfectly consistent with the connexion, the design, and the reference to the suffering Messiah. The reader may have observed it in the Discourse to which

this Note is appended. It adds, indeed, one more circumstance of marked recognition to the evidences of that designed reference; and thus shews the passage to coincide with many other Old Testament predictions, in which the final stroke of divine judgment upon the Jewish nation for their rejection of Jesus, forms a distinguished feature.

Obj. "iii. It is perfectly clear that the servant of God' in this place is the same person that is the subject of discourse in the parallel passages, ch. xlii. 1-7. xlix. 1—9. 1. 4—10. li. 1-3. All these passages are commonly thus understood. But in them there is much more matter still, which cannot be applied to Christ; for example, that he should proclaim the opening of the prison, and the return from the captivity, (xlii. 7. xlix. 5, 9. lxi. 1—3,)—that kings should personally honour him, (xlix. 7,)—also, in xlix. 1-5. 1. 4-9. lxi. 1-3, he speaks in the first person."

Reply. Thus, then, Professor Gesenius takes advantage of his own and his party's perversions and misinterpretations of other parts of this sacred book, to fortify himself in the abuse of this! To answer him thoroughly would require an analysis and investigation of the last twenty-six chapters of the Book. But the serious and truly Christian reader, who is acquainted with Lowth and our best English Commentators on this Prophet, is abundantly competent to do this for himself. In particular, he will observe the system of transition and parallelism, by which the temporal mercy shewn to the Jews in their return from the captivity, is made the vehicle of illustrating the infinite and eternal mercies of redemption and salvation to the world. Were a party to come into an English court of law, with pleadings like those of the Professor's, he would be driven out of court with ignominy, upon the honest principle, that "no man can take advantage of his own wrong."

Not unconnected with this, is the hypothesis, first advanced by Koppe, and generally maintained by the Neologists; that the whole latter part of this book, ch. xl.-lxvi. was written by some unknown Jewish poet, upon the conquests of Cyrus, and his liberating edict to the captive Jews; an hypothesis,