i8 7 o] PROPHECY IN CRITICAL SCHOOLS 181 



may be able to explain what he cannot understand. But, 

 meanwhile, we cannot deny him the right to test the 

 phenomenon in his own fashion, to transpose the un 

 intelligible utterance into a different historical setting, 

 to ask whether, so transposed, it may not become doubly 

 resplendent with the twofold brilliancy of an eternal 

 Divine thought and a manifest historical propriety. The 

 principle on which the modern criticism herein acts is 

 carefully to be distinguished from the old rationalistic 

 absurdity of bringing down all prophecy post eventum : 

 not the aim to which the prophet tends, but the starting- 

 point from which he advances, affords to the historical 

 inquirer the basis of his critical activity. Take, for 

 example, the second half of Isaiah, the grand trilogy that 

 describes the restoration from the captivity in Babylon. 

 It is not the prediction of the return that makes these 

 chapters be placed by all critics in the later years of the 

 captivity itself, for a prediction as precise was certainly 

 uttered by Jeremiah ; it is not the conception of a 

 captivity of Babel that is viewed as impossible to Isaiah, 

 for Micah we know anticipated such an event ; it is not 

 even the mention of Cyrus by name that is urged, for 

 those who are puzzled by that fact could much more 

 readily suggest an interpolation. But the author of 

 these chapters speaks everywhere to the exiled people ; 

 he speaks to them face to face, with the pathos, the hope, 

 the indignation of one who shared their sufferings and 

 beheld their sins : he speaks to them in conceptions fitted 

 to an age when Jerusalem stood no longer, and the Davidic 

 House had ceased to reign : he has dropped, for example, 

 the notion of a Davidic Messiah, and gives a still deeper 

 and more wondrous picture of salvation through the 

 suffering and death of the Servant of Jahveh, followed up 

 by a glorious triumphal appearance of the Covenant God 

 in person, filling His land and illumining His people with 

 eternal radiance : in one word, if Isaiah wrote these 

 chapters he lived two lives not a natural and a prophetic 



