depart, with varying fortune, as it appears, with time and chance happening unto all. Look a little deeper, and you will see that one strain runs through it all: nations and men, whoever is shipwrecked, is shipwrecked on conduct. It is the God of Israel steadily and irresistibly asserting himself; the Eternal that loveth righteousness.
In this sense we should read the Hebrew prophets. They did not foresee and foretell curious coincidences, but they foresaw and foretold this inevitable triumph of righteousness. First, they foretold it for all the men and nations of their own day, and especially for those colossal unrighteous kingdoms of the heathen world, which looked everlasting; then, for all time. 'As the whirlwind passeth, so is the wicked no more;'—sooner or later it is, it must be, so. Hebrew prophecy is never read aright until it is read in this sense, which indeed of itself it cries out for; it is, as Davison, again, finely says, impatient for the larger scope. How often, throughout the ages, how often, even, by the Hebrew prophets themselves, has some immediate visible interposition been looked for! 'I looked,' they make God say, 'and there was no man to help, and I wondered that there was none to uphold; therefore mine own arm brought salvation unto me. The day of vengeance is in mine heart, the year of my redeemed is come.'[1] O long-delaying arm of might, will the Eternal never put thee forth, to smite these sinners who go on as if righteousness mattered nothing? There is no need; they are smitten. Down they come, one after another; Assyria falls, Babylon, Greece, Rome; they all fall for want of conduct, righteousness. 'The heathen make much ado, and the kingdoms are moved; but God hath showed his voice, and the earth doth melt away.'[2]
