without particular notice; but shall make a few comments on the rest. 1. The first is the action of Isaiah, chap. xx., appointed to symbolize the coming disgrace and humiliation of Egypt and Ethiopia. What is the action, according to the description of the prophet? Not as Dr Turner and others make it, "stripping off a part of his clothing," but "loosing the sackcloth from off his loins, and putting off his shoe from his foot," and for three whole years "walking naked and barefoot;" and this expressly as a sign of the people of Egypt and Ethiopia being doomed ere long to become captives, rendered "naked and barefoot, even with their buttocks uncovered, to the shame of Egypt." The thing signified was a shameful uncovering, or a disgraceful humiliation of those proud worldly powers, on whose support Israel was idolatrously inclined to lean; and the sign, which was appointed to foreshadow it, was a shameful uncovering of the prophet's person. This alone could be a proper sign; and to talk of his putting off only a part of his garments, as if the object had been merely to lessen the comfort or gracefulness of his attire, is quite beside the purpose. Nothing less than a shameful exposure of the person was required to satisfy the conditions of the prophecy. And if the affair was conducted amid the realities of daily life, the prophet must necessarily have made himself a spectacle of aversion to every right-thinking person. In the very act of fulfilling his mission, he must have given a shock to the interests of piety; such, nay greatly more than was done in our own land by the early Quakers, who were led by a mistaken view of this and similar passages in the prophetical writings, to exhibit in actual life what had been transacted by the prophets in vision. The universal disgust produced in Edinburgh by some of that sect running through the streets without clothing, and crying out that they were "the naked truth," or by one in Aberdeen (Andrew Jaffray) who, stript to the middle, and with filth in his hand, walked about proclaiming himself to be "a spectacle and a sign among the people," on account of the offensiveness of their sins, may convince us how impossible it was for God to have commanded His servant Isaiah to present himself in such an attitude to the people, even for a day, to say nothing of three whole years. Besides, if such painful results could anyhow have been averted, an action of the kind specified, when spread over so many years, and seen, if seen at all, only in fragmentary portions, and by a few individuals, must have lost nearly all its effect in the performance. And then the action itself left its own bearing undefined. How should any one, who might have seen the prophet walking in his shame, have known to transfer the image to Egypt and Ethiopia? It must have been from an accompanying word, explaining the action, that they were enabled to do so. So that it still was the prophetic word, to which they were mainly to be indebted for the information of their minds; and the rehearsing of the action as done in the visions of God-done in the peculiar sphere of the prophet's spiritual agency-along with the explanation of it, was on every account the mode best fitted for reaching the end; the only mode, we may affirm, actually possible. 2. The other action of the prophet Isaiah referred to by Dr Turner -the last of the cases specified by him-not less imperatively demands the same interpretation. We have again to notice the slurring over the main features of the transaction, as presented by Dr Turner; he speaks of it as simply consisting in the ceremony of giving a symbolical name to a child of the prophet. This, however, was the smallest part of the matter. The existence of the child, much more than his name, was what formed the embodied prophecy; the name merely served to . explain the symbolic meaning of the child himself. And how was this child to come into being? Not properly as a member of the prophet's family; but the prophet was to " go to the prophetess," who was thereafter to conceive, and bring forth the son, that was to bear the symbolic name; and not only to go, but to take with him witnesses of the whole transaction, that there might be no doubt respecting any part of it (chap. viii. 1-3). Can anything be conceived more entirely at variance with the essential character of a true prophet, if understood of what was to be done in real life, or that would more palpably have identified his procedure with the worst practices of self-inflated visionaries? For, the prophetess to whom Isaiah was to go, and with whom he was to have carnal intercourse, can with no propriety be understood to be his own wife; she is represented as one standing apart from him, and with whom his connection was to be quite special, so as to require even a formal attestation. An ideal person, therefore, she must be considered, and the connection one that existed only in the ideal sphere -if the prophet is to be vindicated from the charge of pollution in the very execution of his mission. Indeed, the mode of designating her, clearly indicates as much: the prophetess-what prophetess? We have heard of none before, and we hear of none afterwards in this connection. Such a designation can be understood only if viewed as the form into which God threw His communication to the prophet, and, as such, confined to the higher sphere of his immediate intercourse with Heaven. An assurance was to be given to the people of the approaching certain overthrow of the enemies of God's covenant-the combined powers of Samaria and Damascus. And for that purpose there is given forth an account of an ideal transaction, through which the prophet is spiritually conducted by God, and in which he, the prophet, is described as going to the prophetess, that by the conjunction of a twofold prophetical character in the parentage, there might be a birth in the fullest sense prophetical-a son so strikingly predictive of the coming overthrow, that before he should be able to cry, My father, both Syria and Damascus should have fallen under the stroke of Assyria. Viewed thus, merely as a sensible form, though confined to the ideal sphere, under which God made known His fixed determination to the people, one can easily perceive the propriety of what is recorded; but no otherwise can the history it seems to delineate be vindicated from the gravest charges. It may be added, that in this case, too, as in the preceding, it could not have been the outward reality (even if it had taken place, and had been liable to no moral imputation), on which must mainly have depended the assurance given of the intended result: the chief ground for faith to rest upon still was the word which accompanied and explained the transaction. And for this it was substantially one, whether the word was connected with an action in vision, or an action in ordinary life. 3. The case of Ezekiel, at the Divine bidding removing his furniture in the sight of the people, and going forth with covered face, and only an exile's implements (chap. xii.), is particularly unhappy for the realistic interpretation. Dr Turner seems to have regarded it as one of the most telling examples, as if the act itself spoke its own meaning. But he forgets where the prophet was when the supposed action was performed before his countrymen. Both he and they were already in exile on the banks of the Chaboras, and the impression that would naturally have been produced upon their minds by the sight of such a symbolic action would have been, not that the day of exile, but rather that the day of escape from exile was at hand. The persons whose exile was foreshadowed in the prophecy were the king and people far off in Jerusalem, not those who should have witnessed the transaction had it been outwardly performed. So that for those whom the prophetic action immediately contemplated it must, of necessity, have been not the actual sight of what was done, but only the rehearsal of it, that was to tell upon their minds. And surely, in that case, it mattered little whether the sphere of the transaction might be the ideal or the real world; while for those in the immediate neighbourhood of the prophet, it so far mattered that, if it had outwardly taken place before them, it would have tended to convey a false information. 4. It is needless to dwell upon the two instances (besides the one already considered) connected with the prophetical agency of Jeremiah. They are both of them confined to what respects God's communications to the prophet, and so belong to the higher sphere in which direct communication was held with heaven. One of them may be said to have been beset with impossibilities, if considered as an action in real life. We refer to the bonds and yokes which Jeremiah was commanded in chap. xxvii. to make, and not only put upon his own neck, but also to send to the kings of Edom, of Moab, of the Ammonites, of Tyre, and of Sidon, and to do so by the hand of the messengers who were coming to Zedekiah, as a sign that all those countries were to be brought into subjection to the king of Babylon. Such persons, we may be sure, would neither carry such a symbol to the different kings mentioned, nor the message that was appointed to accompany it. And the prophecy itself was for the people of Jerusalem rather than for those surrounding nations. It only took the form of a message to them, in order, more distinctly, to show the fixedness of God's purpose regarding the issue of the struggle in which Zedekiah was engaged with the king of Babylon. The rehearsing by the prophet of the command he had received, to make the yokes, and send them to the different parties, was what properly constituted the prophecy. And though Jeremiah appears, from what is related in chap. xxviii., to have had yokes actually on his neck, yet this seems rather to have been done for the purpose of calling attention to the prophecy than the necessary condition of its announcement. Nor is anything said in the historical part of the sending of yokes to the surrounding nations. In regard to the other instance, that recorded in chap. xxxii., the whole has the aspect of a continuous stream of communications between God and the prophet; and the prophetical action about the buying of Hanameel's field is most naturally regarded as of a piece with the rest, an action in vision. There are other reasons, also, against its being taken as an actual transaction, for, being a priest, Jeremiah could scarcely have entered into any such transaction for the purchase of land; and if he could, yet, as he had predicted that a desolation was at hand, which was to last for seventy years, the transaction would, in his case, have been a kind of extravagance, since long before the purchase could have been of any avail he must have been numbered with the dead, and all the old landmarks practically abolished. Only as an ideal action in the peculiar region of the prophet's spiritual activity does it admit of a natural and fitting interpretation. Thus, when more nearly considered, the instances appealed to in proof of the symbolic actions having taken place in real life, are found to support the principle of interpretation we have sought to establish. The striving after outward reality in such things, on the part of modern commentators, has chiefly arisen from forgetfulness respecting the fundamental law of prophetic revelation, that it was to be by vision. Had this been sufficiently borne in mind, it would have seemed quite natural (as no doubt it did to those by whom, and to whom, the word of prophecy came), that in accounts of Divine communications, things done in the sphere of the prophet's ecstatic elevation should have been described as real transactions; for to the prophet's own consciousness, and as symbolic representations for the people of the mind and purposes of God, they had all the force and value of realities. APPENDIX I, Page 250. ST PETER'S DISCOURSES IN ACTS II., III. THE view given in the text of Peter's discourses in the Acts puts no strain upon any of the expressions, but takes them all in their natural sense and connection. Strange liberties are resorted to by those who espouse the 2 L 514 Jewish theory of the future, and in part also by some who adopt only the semi-Jewish. The question of the disciples to Jesus on the eve of his ascension, about restoring the kingdom to Israel, is usually made, not only to commit Jesus to the fact of such a restoration, but also to rule by its carnal sense the whole of the subsequent expressions. It is assumed, that Peter's views of the kingdom after the descent of the Spirit, continued the same as they were before; and that, however it might be in other respects, on this subject he gained nothing in depth, spirituality or clearness of discernment. It is usually farther assumed, that in those invitations to press into the kingdom, addressed to men far and near, as many as the Lord might call, he never thought of any but Jews as having a right to the blessings of the kingdom-although the Lord had in the most explicit manner charged the apostles to include the whole world in their ministrations. They were, He said, to be "His witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth :" -a regular gradation, but only in respect to order and time; first Jerusalem, then the country around Judea; next Samaria, the kind of intermediate region between Jew and Gentile; and finally, the most remote and distant territories. Nay, the original charge, as given in Mark, chap. xvi 15, was that they were to "go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature"-precisely, as in the first parable, "the field is the world.” So that if Peter and the apostles still thought only of Jews as entitled to a place in the kingdom, they must have been most strangely inattentive to their Lord's instructions. That they did not open the door at once to the Gentiles, arose simply from their views respecting circumcision and the law; they thought these were still to remain in force, and consequently that the Gentiles must enter the Messiah's kingdom by passing under the Jewish yoke. But this had respect merely to the mode of admission; it did not touch the fact, that the Gentiles had an equal right to enter, but simply that they had to enter as the Jews; both alike must go in by the legal door. And in this very circumstance we have an answer to the statement made by many-among others by Baumgarten-respecting the sense attached by the apostles to the expression "the restoration of the kingdom to Israel," as necessarily meaning both with them and with Christ the revival of Israel's external power and splendour as a nation; because "their honest and childlike minds clung to the what and the how that the prophets had written of." The apostles no doubt did this, they did so in this matter only too long, and in respect to circumcision, as well as the kingdom; but the issue proved in the latter case, that their spirit, however honest and childlike, needed enlightenment, as the style of Peter's future discourses showed that it had also done in respect to the other. The passage in chap. ii. 30-36, seems alone quite conclusive of a change of view respecting the kingdom. In one part, there is a diversity as to the proper reading, and the two best MSS. A, B, omit the words in verse 30, rendered in the common version, "According to the flesh, he would raise up Christ." There are good reasons for supposing that these words were |