Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/842

Rh 818 time a really broad and fruitful conception of the moral government of the whole earth by the one true God. 1 It is impossible to read the books of the older prophets, and especially of their protagonist Amos, without seeing that the new thing which they are compelled to speak is not Jehovah s grace but His inexorable and righteous wrath. That that wrath must be followed by fresh mercies is not in itself a new thought, but only the neces sary expression of the inherited conviction that Jehovah, whom they preach as the judge of all the earth, is never theless, as past history has proved, the God who has chosen Israel as His people. That this is so appears most clearly in the fact that with Amos the prophecy of restora tion appears only in a few verses at the end of his book, and in the still more instructive fact that neither he nor Hosea attempts to explain how the restoration which they accept as a postulate of faith is to be historically realized. 2 One point only in their picture of the great restoration appears to present the germ of an historical principle. The Israel of the future is to be one united nation as in the days of David. The Davidic kingdom is accepted by both prophets, and by Hosea even more explicitly than by Amos, as the type of the future kingdom of Jehovah. But one sees from the way in which this thought is bandied that it is the idea of that kingdom as it was in days of old which is before the prophet s mind ; the actual state of Judah, which was not religiously better than the greater Israel, though it perhaps still possessed elements of greater political and social stability, was not such as to suggest the thought that when Samaria fell the continuity of Jehovah s relations with His people could be preserved at Jerusalem. It was in the great northern kingdom still Israel par excellence not in the petty region that had remained loyal to David, that the drama of divine justice and mercy was to be acted to its end : to Hosea, at least in his later prophecies, the fate of Judah does not appear separable from that of the northern realm- when Israel and Ephraim fall by their iniquity Judah must fall with them (Hos. v. 5). Thus even on this side there is no real bridge over the chasm that separates the total ruin impending over the Israel of the present from the glorious restoration of the Israel of the future. There is a unity in the divine purpose, of which judgment and mercy are the two poles, but there is as yet no conception of an historical continuity in the execution of that purpose, and therefore no foundation laid for the maintenance of a con tinuous community of faith in the impending fall of the nation. From this we can see the enormous importance of the work of Isaiah as it has been exhibited in the article ISRAEL, vol. xiii. p. 413 sq. ; his doctrine of the remnant, the holy seed, never lost to the nation in the worst times, never destroyed by the most fiery judgments, supplies the lacking element of continuity between the Israel of the present and of the future. Jehovah s kingdom cannot perish even for a time ; nay, Isaiah argues that it must remain visible, and visible not merely in the circle of the like-minded whom he had gathered round him and who 1 It must not be supposed that this conception necessarily came into force as soon as it was recognized that Jehovah was the creator of the universe. That the national or tribal god is the creator is an idea often found in very low religions. To us God s sovereignty over nature often seems the hardest thing to conceive ; but to primi tive peoples who know nothing of laws of nature His moral sove reignty is a much more difficult conception. In the older literature of the Hebrews the nearest approach to the thought of Amos and Hosea is not Gen. ii., iii., but Gen. xviii. 25. pears from their metaphorical form. They tell us that Jehovah will call His people and that they will answer ; but this is only putting in an other form the axiom that the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. formed the first germ of the notion of the church, but in the political form of a kingdom also. Zion at least, the sacred hearth of Jehovah, the visible centre of his king dom, must remain inviolable ; it can never be delivered into the hands of the Assyrian. Thus, with Isaiah in the days of Sennacherib s invasion, the prophetic word became again, as it had been in the days of the Syrian wars, &quot; the chariots and horsemen of Israel,&quot; the stay and strength of all patriotic hope. Yet even at this crisis the resemblance between Isaiah and Elisha, between the new prophecy and the old, is more apparent than real. Elisha still stands firmly planted on the old national conception of the religion of Jehovah ; his ideals are such as do not lie beyond the range of practical politics. In doing battle against the Tyrian Baal he is content with a reformation for which the whole nation can be heartily won, because it makes no radical change in their inherited faith and practices of worship. And in stimulating resistance to Syria he is still the prophet of the old &quot; God of the hosts of Israel &quot; a God who works deliverance by the thews and sinews of His earthly warriors. But Isaiah s ideal of religion was one which could never have been realized by a political move ment ; to root out all idols, all superstitions inconsistent with his lofty conception of the just King of Israel, who cares not for sacrifice and oblation, who can be acceptably approached through no religion of rote, whose sovereignty can receive practical recognition only by a thoroughgoing reformation of all parts of social life- -this was an ideal which could not be carried out by the mere education and concentration of any forces inherent in the nation. The true Israel of Isaiah is not an historical possibility ; it is a transcendental ideal for which he himself demands as a preliminary condition an outpouring of Jehovah s spirit on king (Isa. xi. 2) and people (Isa. xxxii. 15), working an entire moral regeneration. And so too it is not through the material organization of the Judsean kingdom that Isaiah looks for deliverance from Assyria. He sees with absolute clearness the powerlessness of the little realm against that great empire : the Assyrian must fall, and fall before Jerusalem, that Jehovah alone may appear to all the earth as the one true God, while all the idols appear as vain to help their worshippers ; but he falls by no earthly sword, but before the direct interposition of Jehovah Himself. These conceptions break through the old particularistic idea of Jehovah and His religion at every point. Zion is now not the centre of a mere national cult, but the centre of all true religion for the whole world ; and more than once the prophet indicates not obscurely that the necessary issue of the great conflict between Jehovah and the gods of the heathen must be the conversion of all nations, the disappearance of every other religion before the faith of the God of Israel. But this all-conquering religion is not the popular Jehovah wor ship ; why then can the prophet still hold that the one true God is yet the God of Israel, and that the vindica tion of His Godhead involves the preservation of Israel? Not because His providence is confined to Israel it embraces all nations ; not because He shows any favour itism to Israel He judges all nations by the same strict rule. If Israel alone among nations can meet the Assyrian with the boast &quot; with us is God,&quot; the reason is that in Zion the true God is known 3 not indeed to the mass, but to the prophet and to the &quot; holy seed &quot; which forms the salt of the nation. The interpretation which Isaiah puts 3 We should be apt to say &quot; the true idea of God, &quot; but that is a way of putting it which does not correspond with prophetic thought. To the prophets knowledge of God is concrete knowledge of the divine character as shown in acts knowledge of a person, not of an idea.
 * Hosea ii. 14 sq. ,, xi. 10 sq. are not solutions of this difficulty, as ap