i8 7 o] PROPHECY IN CRITICAL SCHOOLS 201 



It is from a criticism that has learned this lesson, that 

 can approach the weighty problems of prophecy from the 

 human side without ignoring the hand of God, that we 

 look for real fruit. Already, indeed, the results of such a 

 criticism extend through the whole field of prophecy, and 

 are ignored by no school of theologians. 1 Readers of last 

 year s Bampton Lectures cannot have failed to observe 

 how great an influence recent inquiry into the Old Testa 

 ment from the human side has exerted on a theologian 

 so little disposed as Dr. Payne Smith to do homage to the 

 spirit of criticism, or to yield to the temptations by which 

 even believing Continental thought is so readily beset. 



The way in which the fundamental ideas, which are now 

 the common property of the more positive criticism, are 

 grasped and developed by believing inquiry, may be best 

 illustrated by a few brief extracts from the third of our 

 typical books Gustav Baur s careful and learned History 

 of Old Testament Prophecy, unhappily still unfinished : 



&quot; The peculiar interest of the Old Testament prophecies 

 is due, purely, to their connection with the greatest fact 

 in the world-history, the appearance of Christianity, and 

 to the question, Have they found their fulfilment in 

 Christianity or not ? . . . The religion of Israel stands to 

 Christianity in the relation of its nearest positive prepara 

 tion, and as the true sense of a riddle cannot be understood 

 till its answer is known, so the full understanding of Old 

 Testament prophecy is only possible from the Christian 

 standpoint. . . . We are willing that our standpoint 

 should be called theological, if it is only conceded that, 



1 Our limits forbid us to dwell on detailed results of critical investiga 

 tion. Many questions of Prophecy are so difficult, whether approached 

 critically or theologically, that we must thankfully accept the smallest 

 additional insight into them. But almost all these questions have 

 gained something from critical treatment. We may refer in particular 

 to the subject of prediction, which critics have sometimes treated 

 rather lightly, but which has again begun to receive the attention it 

 deserves. The Essays of Bertheau, in the Jahrbucher fur Deutsche 

 Theologie (1859-60), in which a most interesting attempt is made to 

 define the conditional element in prediction, while the results of this 

 inquiry are applied to the long -vexed chiliastic problems, deserve 

 special mention. 



