Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/391

Rh xv i. pictures the Israel of the restoration no longer as an earthly state but as a world-priesthood, a mediatorial people gathered round the sanctuary and holding forth amidst the nations the true pattern of the knowledge and service of the living God till all the ends of the earth shall look to Him and be saved. Under the limitations of the old dispensa tion neither seer nor people could separate the realization of this great conception from the restoration of the visible centre of Israel s worship in the temple at Jerusalem. The prophet had pointed to Cyrus by name as the rebuilder of Jerusalem and the founder of the temple (Isa. xliv. 28 ; lii. 11); and the captives whose hearts were touched by his burning words, and who availed themselves of the decree of that monarch to repeople the desolate places of Judah, looked for the speedy advent of the time when the glory of Jehovah displayed in His house on Zion should draw to Jerusalem the willing homage of all nations (Isa. IvL; Ix. 7; Ixvi. 1-6). The actual experiences of the returning exiles fell as far short of these bright hopes as the Israel of Zerubbabel and Joshua fell short of the ideal regenerate nation to which the prophet had promised the heritage of Jehovah s glory. Scarcely was a settlement effected when difficulties and misfortunes began to thicken about the little colony. The anger of the Lord seemed still to rest on Jerusalem and the cities of Judah (Zech. i. 12), whose inhabitants soon ceased to find favour from the Persian court, and had to struggle with penury and famine as well as with the hostility of their neighbours. Amidst such discouragements the first zeal soon grew cool, and the work of rebuilding the sanctuary lay practically untouched till Haggai arose sixteen years later.

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Such indifference to the undertaking which held a chief place in the first ardour of the returning exiles had a deeper significance than at once occurs to our modern habits of thought. The restoration of the temple and its worship was connected in every mind with the doctrine that the service of Jehovah was the true national vocation of Israel, and the apathy that Haggai rebukes showed the people to have forgotten in the struggle for material welfare their ideal calling as the nation of the true God. His reproofs touched the conscience of the Jews, and the book of Zechariah enables us in some measure to follow the course of a religious revival which, starting with the restoration of the temple, did not confine itself to matters of ceremony and ritual worship. On the other hand, Haggai s treatment of his theme, practical and effective as it was for the pur pose in hand, moves on a far lower level than the aspira tions of the great evangelical prophet who inspired the people at their first return. To the latter the material temple is no more than a detail in the picture of a work of restoration eminently ideal and spiritual, and he expressly warns his hearers against attaching intrinsic importance to it (Isa. Ixvi. 1). To Haggai the temple appears so essential that he teaches that while it lay waste the people and all their works and offerings were unclean (Hag. ii. 14). In tbis he betrays his affinity with Ezekiel, who taught that it is by the possession of the sanctuary that Israel is sanctified (Ezek. xxxvii. 28). In truth the new movement of re ligious thought and feeling which started from the fall of the Hebrew state took two distinct lines, of which Ezekiel and the anonymous prophet of Isa. xl.-lxvi. are the respec tive representatives. While the latter developed his great picture of Israel the mediatorial nation, the systematic and priestly mind of Ezekiel had shaped a more material con ception of the religious vocation of Israel in that picture of the new theocracy where the temple and its ritual occupy the largest place, with a sanctity which is set in express contrast to the older conception of the holiness of the city of Jerusalem (cf. Ezek. xliii. 7 seq. with Jer. xxxi. 40, Isa. iv. 5), and with a supreme significance for the religious life of the people which is expressed in the figure of the living waters issuing from under the threshold of the house (Ezek. xlvii.). It was the conception of Ezekiel which permanently influenced the citizens of the new Jerusalem, and took final shape in the institutions of Ezra. To this consummation, with its necessary accompaniment in the extinction of prophecy, the book of Haggai already points.

1em  HAGUE, (in Dutch, s Gravenhage or den Haag ; in French, La Haye ; and in Modern Latin, Ilaga Comitis), a town of the Netherlands, in the province of South Holland, 13 miles N.W. of Rotterdam, 10 miles S.W. of Leyden, and 2 miles inland from the German Ocean. It is con- 