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In that aspect, and looking at this Sermon on the Mount as the programme of the King Himself, what a bucket of cold water such words as these must have poured on the hot Messianic expectations of the carnal Jew!
Although gifted with much native intelligence, she was not sufficiently educated to understand that a person's religious faith can be affected because he has discovered that the Messianic explanations of the Psalms are erroneous, and that Gesenius, in his commentary upon Isaiah, is in nearly every point right when combating the arguments of the orthodox.
The sermon dwelt on the Messianic aspect of Christ's mission, on the mystery and poetry of that long national expectation, on the pathos of Jewish disillusion, on the sureness and beauty of Christian insight as faith gradually transferred trait after trait of the Messiah of prophecy to the Christ of Nazareth.
Hence the constant appeals to the supposed predictions of the Old Testament; hence even the imagining of special events in the life of Jesus to fulfill those predictions. The Old Testament as conceived by the writers of the New is fantastically unlike the original writings. The Evangelists found Messianic prophecies everywhere.
What was the reason of this deprivation? It was simply because they were imitating fathers and ancestors in forms of belief instead of turning toward the Sun of Divinity. For this reason they were deprived of the bounty which dawned in the Messianic dayspring. Holding tenaciously to the former dawning point, they still remain in this position of deprivation.
Israel is High-Priest, and can only fulfil his mission in the close neighbourhood of those to whom he is elected to minister. This, no less than the non-Messianic Zionism, is a considerable change from older beliefs. As a Messianic hope it transcends the visions of Isaiah. The prophet looks forward to an ideal future, a reign of peace and felicity, but the nations are to flow to Zion.
At any rate, the only occasions on which we hear of her are occasions when she is with his brethren, and is joined with them in endeavoring to influence, apart from his own purposes and authority, his messianic course.
This pretended discovery is on a par with the earlier one that there never was such a person as Jesus at all, but that his personality is simply a myth that gradually grew up in the minds of some Jewish fanatics who sought a fulfilment of Messianic prophecy. We might treat these perverse and subversive conclusions as only curious instances of a wrong method of criticism.
Israel is conceived of as dwindled in number by deportation and war. But the process of depopulation is arrested and reversed, and numerical increase, which is always a prominent feature in Messianic predictions, is predicted.
The really Messianic prophecies appeared to me to be far fewer than is commonly supposed. I found such in the 9th and 11th of Isaiah, the 5th of Micah, the 9th of Zechariah, in the 72nd Psalm, in the 37th of Ezekiel, and, as I supposed, in the 50th and 53rd of Isaiah.
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