ARTICLE II. MINUTE PREDICTION AND MODERN DOUBT. BY THE REV. ANDREW W. ARCHIBALD, D. D., DAVENPORT, IOWA. SOME one has said that while miracles were originally designed to assist in the establishing of Christianity, they are to-day a great obstacle to faith. The same may be said of the prophecies, and is in a sense being said of them even by some biblical scholars. Of course so destructive a critic as Canon Cheyne of Oxford belittles and rejects what he terms "a circumstantial fulfilment" of prophecy. That much more conservative fellow-Oxonian of his, Professor Driver, while rightly emphasizing the fact that "the prophet speaks primarily to his contemporaries," and while admitting that the visions of the seers are "independent of time" and can properly be projected "upon the shifting future," yet cautions against "a too literal interpretation of prophetic imagery," and against the idea of a "detailed and definite description of the circumstances of a distant age,” and affirms with reference to Isaiah's prophecy concerning Tyre, "there is no evidence that it was fulfilled, either at once or subsequently, in accordance with the details of his description," but only "in its main conception," the details being "unessential." A leading Yale professor, a Congregational pastor formerly, who has written a book on "What is the Bible?" speaks disparagingly of those finding “remarkable minute correspondences between old-time prognostications and new-time events," and Dr. Ladd says expressly that the Hebrew prophet was not "an announcer of definite future events," though what he would do with such passages as the beginning of the tenth chapter of First Samuel is not exactly clear. Professor Briggs, of Union Seminary, who has produced a work on "Messianic Prophecy," in the Inaugural Address upon his induction into the chair of Biblical Theology in that Presbyterian school of the prophets, names, as one of the "barriers" to be swept away, "Minute Prediction." Now this is something which must be determined by evidence, for it is a matter of observation as to whether or not prophetic forecasts have become historic facts. In the writer's "The Bible Verified," he thinks he has shown, to the extent of five chapters, how the Word of God has been minutely verified in the cities of Babylon and Tyre and Jerusalem, and in the whole unique history of the peculiar Jews. Not to traverse this ground again, he will in this paper confine himself to what was foretold about Christ, and he will write not as a theologian, but from the standpoint of an average pastor. The late Canon Liddon gave three hundred and thirty-three particulars prophesied about Jesus and fulfilled in his Person. Edersheim, in his "Prophecy and History in Relation to the Messiah," while deprecating (as we all must, with Lieutenant Totten and other such in mind) a "mechanical literalism," yet maintains that "many special predictions can be only Messianically interpreted," and that "unquestionably" there are "definite predictions," and this perhaps will appear in the development of our theme which will be illustrated by Messianic prophecy alone. We might say, with the lamented Delitzsch on this subject, "Whether one takes with reference to Christianity the unitarian or trinitarian, the rationalistic or supernaturalistic standpoint, it is established that Christianity, as contradistinguished from Judaism, is the religion of consummated morality, and that Jesus is the great holy divine man whose appearance halves the world's history." In general it would seem that the minute constitutes the only difference between sagacious human foresight and divinely-given actual foreknowledge. Any one can make a vague prediction, and run a fair chance of having it verified. It is the wonderful minutiae which test the matter of a real inspiration. The famous Delphic oracle once said to the rich Croesus who consulted it, "If Croesus crosses the Halys, and prosecutes a war with Persia, a mighty empire will be overthrown;" and it was even so, but it was his own empire. The oracle had so worded its wisdom, that, whatever the issue, it would not have to recede and retract. There is no such ambiguity to the divine oracles. And now, in a more particular unfolding of our thought, let us first consider the fact of the Messianic expectation in the first century as presumably caused by something definite predicted, and let us next take a comprehensive survey of actual predictions which will be seen to have been such as naturally to have excited hope. . First, as to the fact of the Messianic expectation. Europeans long noted, with a curious interest, articles floated to them over the ocean from unknown shores. A Portugese pilot had seen upon the waves a piece of rudely carved wood. Pine trees, and cane stalks, and other vegetable growths that were unfamiliar to Europe and its neighboring isles made people wonder whence these came. On the coasts of Ireland and Scotland and Norway was thrown by the billows, from time to time, what evidently came from tropical forests. There were even reports of canoes, and of human bodies with strange features, constituting part of the sea's drift from the west. Whence came all these? No one knew; but more and more were led to believe in an undiscovered continent as the source of the mysterious freightage of Old Neptune. Hope and belief in Columbus were thus strengthened, and he sailed away to solve the problem, and in 1492 America was discovered. It was now the the well understood Gulf Stream which, bearing this and that from a far-away country, awoke expectation and faith in Europeans. This mighty ocean current of warm water in the midst of cold, at the behest of the continually blowing trade winds of the tropics, rushes forth from our Gulf of Mexico a river which is two thousand times larger than the Mississippi, and which is sometimes forty and again three hundred miles and more wide. It rolls northeastward along the entire United States coast, though at some distance therefrom, then strikes across the vast Atlantic, through its very heart, toward Europe, and after many a turn, north and south and east, it completes its course of over three thousand miles, to bless with a temperate clime and a luxriant vegetation regions that otherwise would be frozen and barren and desolate. Its heat is said to be sufficient to "melt daily a mass of cast iron as large as Mount Washington," and this it distributes over Western Europe, even Arctic cold being thus modified with salutary effect. Now the Gulf Stream not only carried warmth and fruitfulness across the Atlantic, but it was also the means of starting the course of empire westward by carrying to the Old World evidence of a new continent. We can to-day by actual experiment prove, that articles committed to the Gulf Stream at its source as it dashes past Southern Florida will ultimately be carried to points where expectation of old was born by reason of similar drift that then appeared. Like this ocean current is the stream of Messianic prophecy, flowing down through the past, and widening in its course, and blessing every nation it touches by awakening a great hopefulness. (1) Placing ourselves at a time just prior to the great discovery of the kingdom of the truth, we find that many devout souls were in a state of expectancy. Luke tells us that the aged Simeon was "looking for the consolation of Israel," and was confident "he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord's Christ," and that the saintly Anna was similarly minded, and that there were still others who "were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem." Mark describes the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea, that "councillor of honorable estate," as one who was "looking for the kingdom of God." Matthew informs us of wise men coming from the East with the same pulsing hope. Indeed, the New Testament is confessedly full of what Wordsworth would call intimations of immortality," of a better day to dawn, even as Zacharias prophesied, "the dayspring from on high." So fervent was the Messianic expectation in the first century, Josephus says, "That which chiefly excited the Jews to war was an ambiguous prophecy, which was also found in the sacred books, that at that time some one within their country should arise who would obtain the empire of the whole world," and this Jewish writer has nothing sadder to record than the rise and fall of various false. Christs. (2) Classical writers, also, of the beginning of the Christian era testify to the same expectation. Suetonius, who wrote "The lives of the Cæsars," says, "A firm persuasion had long prevailed through all the East that it was fated for the empire of the world at that time to devolve on some who should go forth from Judea." Tacitus speaks of a similar belief being current, "that the East would renew its strength, and they that should go forth from Judea should be rulers of the world." Though Virgil (40 B. C.) may have written his fourth Eclogue in honor of a son of a iiterary friend, he yet could hardly have used such significant language as is found in this poem, had he not caught the spirit of what have been called "the unconscious prophecies of heathendom." How almost Messianic are these lines, for example, from the Eclogue: 66 'Come, claim thine honors, for the time draws nigh, |