and gainsaying folk, was the promise that God would raise up a prophet from among his brethren unto whom the people should hearken.1 Blot out that prediction of Christ, and Moses stands as an embodiment of failure, a leader who emancipated the nation and condemned the race, -the messenger of a divine law which was broken even while he was carrying it down from the burning mount.

Turn from history and law to poetry and The music experience. In the Psalms the thunders of of Psalms. Sinai are set to music and translated into

song.

But what is that song? It is the song of the unattainable. It is the lyric utterance of desire and disappointment, shame and penitence. Those broken-hearted Psalms! How they ring the changes on human frailty and suffering and remorse! How sad and searching the light with which they are illuminated in the story of David's life!

He could sing divinely, but he could not live as he sang.

Sin is the shadow on genius.

Literature full of beauty and harmony: life The discord full of ugliness and discord. A book written of life.

1 Deut. xviii. 15.

The gleam

of mercy lost.

with simplicity and purity and noble sentiment: a writer touched with vanity and selfishness, impurity and vengeful passion. How often has that strange contrast been discovered!

David knew his own infirmity and guilt. He knew the corruption and disgrace of his house. He laid hold on the promise of divine mercy in the Christ. He looked and longed for the coming of that King who should reign in righteousness forever. He did not understand the full meaning of that hope. He held fast to it as a drowning man clings to a rope in the night. He does not see it. He feels it.

Take away that rescuing hope of divine help laid upon one who is mighty to save,1 and what is left in the Psalms? A passion of longing for inaccessible holiness.

"The desire of the moth for the star,

Of the night for the morrow;

The devotion to something afar

From the sphere of our sorrow."

The poetry of the Bible without Christ is a musical confession of the impossibility of getting out of God's sight, and of the hopelessness of being pure enough in heart to have sight of God.

1 Psalm lxxxix. 19.

Does the philosophy of the Bible bring us Solomon's any different message, apart from Christ?

Solomon stands in the Old Testament as the representative of wisdom. In the books that bear his name the divine commandments are cut and polished into the jewels of an ethical system. They become brilliant, symmetrical, memorable; compact treasures of morality, fit to keep in a storehouse.

A hundred epigrams flash from the divine law, in the hands of Solomon, like rays of light. Its wisdom, reasonableness, and beauty are exhibited from every side. We see how prudent, how profitable, how admirable it is to be perfectly good, and how impossible!

wisdom.

The king who made these diamond proverbs Solomon's was the man who showed us how easily they folly. may be burned to coal in the flame of passion.

The eleventh chapter of the First Book of Kings is the record of an experiment in the reduction of philosophy to ashes. The lover of wisdom chooses folly for his bed-fellow. The sage whose shining words rise like an airy ladder toward the skies, finds, like other men, that the downward path is the easiest. The wisest of mankind, in theory, becomes the meanest, in practice, an idolater despising

idols, a sensualist praising virtue, a tyrant

Solomon's epitaph.

The mount

extolling justice, an unchained prisoner of his own despair.

The book of Ecclesiastes, whoever wrote it, contains the epitaph of Solomon. "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." It is the hand-book of pessimists; the tragic monodrama of man's self-betrayal; the epic of the suicide of hope. Close the book, and write upon it this sentence, "The world by wisdom knew not God."1

Beyond philosophy rises prophecy, — the of prophecy. mount of vision, whose top touches the stars and whose horizon spreads beyond the encircling ocean-stream of time.

The human name that is graven highest on this mountain is the name of Isaiah. Whether that name represents the prophetic elevation of only one among the sons of men, or of more than one, matters little to us in our present study. The Isaiah-spirit is the same, whether the mount was climbed but once, or more than once. The loftiest point reached in the Old Testament is that at which we see, in lonely grandeur, a human figure called Isaiah.

There he stands, above the confusions and perturbations, the wrecked hopes, and the onrushing calamities, the shames and fears, the

11 Cor. i. 21.

desolations and disasters of his people.

He

looks around him, with unsealed eyes, and what is it that he beholds?

He sees "one that cometh from Edom, with Isaiah's dyed garments from Bozrah, glorious in his hope. apparel, travelling in the greatness of his strength, speaking in righteousness, mighty to save." But this vision, if there is no Christ in the Old Testament, is a delusion, a mirage, a Brocken-spectre. It vanishes. And what is left?

An unbroken shadow of disgrace, despair, The residue and gloom, resting like night upon the world. of despair. "Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evil doers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward."2 Burden after burden, in the prophet's song,—the burden of Babylon, the burden of Moab, the burden of Damascus, the burden of Egypt. Doom after doom, around the prophet's horizon, the doom of Israel, the doom of Judah. "The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores." 3

1 Is. lxiii. 1.

2 Is. i. 4.

8 Is. i. 5, 6.