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well as of Israel. And that which He is to Israel as God of Israel, He must be to the nations also as their God. His purposes, which are in the main purposes of grace, must extend to the peoples also as well as to Israel. Yet Jehovah is primarily God of Israel, and He remains so always. His relation to the nations is manifested only through Israel. Israel is His servant to make Him known to the nations, to mediate His grace to all mankind.

The doctrine of Jehovah is stated in the broadest and most developed manner in this section of prophecy. Still this is done with such religious fervour, and in a way so brilliant with all the hues of a poetical imagination, that to state the several points in that doctrine in cold and naked propositions of the mere intellect, seems to desecrate them. We need only mention a few things, and refer to one or two passages.

Jehovah, God of Israel, is God alone. This is frequently stated explicitly and in so many words; usually, however, it is based on certain kinds of evidence, or it takes the form of contrasting Jehovah with the idols. In chap. xli. Jehovah challenges the idol worshipping nations to meet Him before a tribunal, that a question whether He or the idols be God may be decided: "Let the nations renew their strength; let us come near together to judgment!" Opening the plea on His own side, He asks them two questions: "Who raised up Cyrus?" and, "Who predicted it from of old?" The idol gods of Babylon have hardly brought Cyrus on the stage of history, who will lead Bel and Nebo away captive (chap. xlvi.). And if they are gods, let them show what will happen. Let them point to former things, prophecies already uttered, that they may be compared with events, and be seen to be true predictions; or let them now in the present declare things that are to come; yea, let them do good or do evil, that they may be seen to have life in them. They are silent, and judgment is passed on them that they are of nothing and their work of nought (Isa. xli. 21).

In a word, Jehovah appeals to history and to prophecy in proof of His sole Godhead.

This appeal to prophecy fully justified Apologetics in making the same appeal, however arguments of another kind may be used now in addition to this order of evidence. And no doubt the argument from prophecy has considerably changed its form; it is now less an argument based on the literal fulfilment of predictions of contingent individual events. It has become more an argument from prophecy than one from prediction, an argument based on a broad, general movement of the religious mind taught of God in Israel, a movement that revealed itself in religious presentiments, in aspirations of the pious heart, in momentary flights of faith too lofty to be sustained, in a certain groaning and travailing under the sense of inadequate life and a cry for fuller life, in a sense of imperfection that was often far from seeing clearly how it was to be satisfied, how the imperfection was to be removed. It is all these things and many more put together now that form the argument for prophecy; for with the widening of the conception of prophecy as not mere prediction, the argument from prophecy has widened in proportion.

And in this prophet the reference to prophecy is more for the purpose of showing that Jehovah is, unlike the idols, a living, intelligent Being, who is working a work the end of which He foresees and declares from the beginning. Being living and conscious, He has before Him the whole scope of His great operation; and He might carry it on, leaving men in darkness as to what it is. But from the nature of His operation men must be enabled to enter into it also with intelligence. Israel is His Servant in carrying it out, and it is Jehovah's relation to Israel that makes them prophesy. Men cannot live unless they have some knowledge of what the end of life shall be. They cannot strive unless a goal be set before them, nor run for the prize unless there be a mark. Prophecy was an absolute necessity in a redemptive history;

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though, of course, it might be enough to give great general conceptions of the future, and less necessary to supply knowledge of contingent occurrences. This prophet evidently refers to special events in history, such as the destruction of the Babylonian empire. But what makes his general conception of interest is that he connects prophecy and history together as but the inner and outer sides of one thing. History is Jehovah in operation; prophecy is His mind, conscious of its purpose, breaking out in light around Him, and enabling men to see Him operating.

The prophet's references to prophecy in proof of Jehovah's sole Godhead are confined to chaps. xl.-xlviii. After these chapters this argument, being sufficiently well developed, is no more pursued. I need not do more. than mention a few of the passages where the sole Godhead of Jehovah is explicitly stated: xliv. 6 ff.: "I am the first, and I am the last; and besides Me there is no God"; "Is there a God besides Me? yea, there is no rock; I know not any." Being God Himself, He thinks He would know the other gods; but He has no acquaintance with them. Similarly xlv. 6, 21, xlvi. 9; cf. also lxiv. 4. In xliii. 10 it is said: "Before Me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after Me beside Me there is no saviour." Besides prediction and history, the Creation in its unity is proof of the sole Godhead of Him that formed it: "Thus saith the Lord that created the heavens: He is God" (xlv. 18).

Such passages as these indicate why it is that the prophet so much insists on the Godhead of Jehovah alone. It is no mere formal intellectual Monotheism that He preaches. To Him the knowledge of the true God is the source of all truth and all life to men, that alone which allows the nations of the earth to have any destiny before them. Having no true God in the midst of them, the nations have no goal before them, no elements of true progress; they are without the conditions of attaining the destiny set by God before men. Yet they are included

in His purpose of grace, and they shall be brought into the stream of it by His servant Israel: "Behold my Servant, . . . he shall bring forth right to the nations. . . . He shall not faint . . . till he have set right in the earth, and the countries shall wait on his instruction" (xlii. 1). It is here that to the prophet lies the significance of the sole Godhead of Jehovah; the knowledge of it is the condition of salvation for mankind. Hence Jehovah says: "Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else" (xlv. 22). This fortyfifth chapter is one of the most important in the prophecy in this point of view.

5. The Personality and Spirituality of God.

The question which naturally follows that of the Unity of God, is that of the Personality and Spirituality of God.

Unquestionably the most distinct and strongly marked conception in regard to God in the Old Testament is that of His personality. This appears on every page. A God identical with nature, or involved in nature, and only manifesting Himself through the blind forces of nature, nowhere appears in the Old Testament. He is always distinct from nature, and personal. In the first chapter of Genesis He stands over against nature, and perceives that it is good. He stands also over against man, and lays His commands upon him: "Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat." He puts Himself as a moral person over against men as moral persons, and enters into covenant of moral conduct with them. Not only is He conscious of men, but He is conscious of Himself: "By Myself have I sworn" (Gen. xxii. 16; Isa. xlv. 23). He is not only conscious of Himself as existing, but of what character He Himself is. He resolves with Himself to make man, and to make him in His own image.

In Amos He swears not by Himself, but by His holiness (iv. 2). The idea of some modern writers, that the conception of God among the people of Israel was first that of

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some power external to themselves which they perceived in the world, a power making for a moral order or identical with it, and which they afterwards endowed with personality and named God, inverts the Old Testament representation, according to which the personality of God was the primary idea, and the secondary idea the moral character of this person; for this latter idea, no doubt, became clearer and more elevated. This representation of modern writers to which I have referred is not a historical account of the origin of the conception of God's personality among the people of Israel,-at all events in the historical period which the Old Testament embraces. It is rather a description of movements of thought in regard to God, peculiar to modern times, when men, having lost the idea of God's personality which once prevailed, are making a new effort to regain it.

From the first historical reference to God in Scripture the idea of His being a person is firmly reached, and little advance takes place along this line.

This is so much the case that, on the other hand, the question arises whether this very vividness with which the personality of God was realised in Israel did not infringe upon other conceptions necessary to a true idea of God, such as His transcendence and ubiquity and spirituality. Did not Israel so strongly conceive God as a person, that He became to them a mere magnified human person, subject to the limitations of personality among men, so that true attributes of Deity were obscured? Now, in going to the Old Testament and seeking to estimate its statements about God, we have to remember that it is not a piece of philosophical writing, that its statements about God are all given in the region of practical religious life, and that they are the expressions of this vivid religious life among a people strongly realistic and emotional. A theology of the schools, where the laws of exact thought prevail, was unknown in the Old Testament period.

We observe, indeed, the beginnings of such a theology in the Alexandrian translation of the Scriptures, and in the