AN EXAMINATION OF MODERN CRITICISM 267
prophetic books, and portions of books, where they can say to themselves that they do not involve such prophecy. To believers it has, obviously, no religious interest at what time it pleased Almighty God to send any of His servants the prophets. Not the dates assigned by any of these self- devouring theories, but the grounds alleged in support of those dates, as implying unbelief of God s revelation of Himself, make the question one of religious interest, namely, to show that these theories are as unsubstantial as their assumed base is baseless." l
That it is not unjust to say that to most of these critics either prophecy in the Christian sense of the term does not exist ; or, to quote one of them, that " all definite prophecy relates to an immediate future " and has reference to events which, as men imbued with the ethical principles which determine God s dealings with men and nations, and as careful observers of the signs of the times, the prophets could well conjecture, or " anticipate," as likely to come to pass the following quotation from one of the chief fathers of the modern criticism shows :
" That which is most peculiar in this prophet " (writes Ewald, of the supposed unknown author of the last six chapters of Zechariah) " is the uncommon high and pious hope of the deliverance of Jerusalem and Judah, notwith standing all visible greatest dangers and threatenings. At a time when Jeremiah, in the walls of the capital, already despairs of any possibility of a successful resistance to the Chaldees and exhorts to tranquillity, this prophet still looks all these dangers straight in the face with swelling spirit and divine confidence ; holds, with unbowed spirit, firm to the like promises of older prophets, as Isa. xxix. ; and antici pates that, from that very moment when the blind fury of the destroyers would discharge itself on the sanctuary, a wondrous mtght would crush them in pieces, and that this must be the beginning of the Messianic weal within and without." 2
1 Pusey.
2 Professor H. Ewald, Die Propheten des Alten Bundcs.
