righteousness, a plantation of Jehovah to glorify himself. And they will build up the ruins of old times, they will restore the desolations of former days; and they will renew desolate cities, the ruins of generation upon generation. And strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and the sons of foreigners shall be your husbandmen and your vine-dressers. And you shall be called 'Priests of Jehovah;' 'Servants of our God,' shall be said to you; the riches of the Gentiles you shall eat, and into their splendor you shall enter" (Is. lxi. 1-6). Had Jesus concluded the passage he had begun, he could scarcely have said, "This day is the scripture fulfilled in your ears." The contrast between the prediction and the fact would have been rather too glaring.
Perhaps the most striking apparent similarity to Jesus is found in the man described in such beautiful language by an unknown prophet in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. But these words could hardly be applied to him by the Jews; in the first place, because they would not be construed to refer to him until after his crucifixion, seeing that they describe oppression, prison, judgment, and execution; in the second place, because there was no reason to believe that he bore their diseases, and took their sorrows upon him. And although the familiar words—doubly familiar from the glorious music of Handel,—"He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief," may seem to us, who know his end, to describe him perfectly, they could hardly describe him to the Jews, who saw him in his daily life. In that, at least, there was nothing peculiarly unhappy.
Failing the prophecies, which were plainly two-edged swords, Jesus could appeal to his remarkable miracles. He and his disciples evidently thought them demonstrations of a divine commission. But, in the first place, it is clear that the evidence of the most wonderful of these consisted only of the rumors circulating among ignorant peasants, which the more instructed portion of the nation very properly disregarded. Their demand for a sign (Mt. xii. 38) proves that they were not satisfied by these popular reports, if they had ever heard them. And in the second place, those miracles which were better attested were not convincing from the fact that others could perform them. Jesus, charged with casting out devils by Baäl-zebub, the prince
