80 THE REV. J. J. LIAS, M.A., ON THE UNITY OE ISAIAH. 



Arid was there ever a prophecy which, even already, has 

 received so glorious — and so unexpected — a fulfilment ? 



Discussion. 



The Chairman said that they had listened to a remarkable 

 paper, one which, when it appeared in print, he would like to study 

 carefully point by point. He did not know whether anyone there 

 had had his mind unsettled by higher critical theories ; for himself 

 he had been kept to the view as to the authorship of the book of 

 Isaiah which had been held by the Christian Church from the 

 earliest times. The Jews had also always in the past considered 

 the prophecies of Isaiah to be a single book ; if it were not so, then 

 there was the strange fact that the greatest of all the prophetic 

 writers was an unknown and nameless man, and his work tacked on 

 to the prophecies of another writer. The Jewish Canon included 

 sixteen prophets, and each prophecy began with the name of the 

 prophet. But on the new theory the rule was broken in the case of 

 the greatest prophet of all. 



The critics refuse to accept the latter part of the book as genuine, 

 because Cyrus was mentioned by name before his birth ; yet Ezra 

 mentions and quotes Isaiah in this very connection. 



He had been greatly indebted to a little book by a learned and 

 venerable lady, Mrs. L. D. Jeffreys, entitled The Unity of Isaiah, and 

 published by Deighton Bell and Co., Cambridge. The book points 

 out that three objections had been brought against the Isaiah 

 authorship of chapters xl-lxvi. It had been assumed that the 

 historical background of the early part of the book had been 

 Palestine, but of the last part Babylon, but here critics differed 

 hopelessly among themselves as to details. A second difficulty was 

 the change in the theological aspect, which appeared to be different 

 in the earlier and later portions of the book ; that simply meant, 

 however, that emphasis was laid on different doctrines or topics as 

 the occasion required, and a similar change might be found in 

 most of the Epistles of St. Paul, as, for example, the Komans and 

 the Ephesians. Lastly, there was the difficulty of the alleged 

 differences of vocabulary and style, but a writer might vary his style 

 from time to time, especially when he wrote under different 

 conditions. 



