These, then, are the four points, upon which the religion of Israel offers itself. _First_, it is the force of the character and grace of a personal God; _second_, it speaks with a high intellectual confidence, whereof its scorn is here the chief mark; _third_, it is intensely moral, making man's sin its chief concern; and _fourth_, it claims the control of history, and history has justified the claim.
[85] _From to-day on_, Ez. xlviii. 35; but others take it _Also to-day I am He_.
[86] Renan's theory of the "natural monotheism" of the Semites was first published in his _Histoire des Langues Semitiques_ some forty years ago. Nearly every Semitic scholar of repute found some occasion or other to refute it. But with Renan's charming genius for neglecting all facts that disturb an artistic arrangement of his subject, the overwhelming evidence against the natural monotheism of the Semite has been ignored by him, and he repeats his theory unmodified in his _Histoire du Peuple d'Israel_, i., 31, published 1888.
[87] Literally _witnesses_--_i.e._, of the idols.
[88] This word is wanting in the text, which is corrupt here. Some supply the word sharpeneth, imagining that חדד has fallen away from the beginning of the verse, through confusion with the יחד which ends the previous verse; or they bring יחד itself, changing it to חדד. But evidently ברזל חרשׁ begins the verse; _cf._ the parallel עצים רשׁח which begins ver. 13.
[89] Here, again, the text is uncertain. With some critics I have borrowed for this verse the first three words of the following verse.
[91] Chs. xliii. 25; xliv. 21, 22; xlv. 17.
ISAIAH xli. 2, 25; xliv. 28-xlv. 13; xlvi. 11; xlviii. 14, 15.
Cyrus, the Persian, is the only man outside the covenant and people of Israel, who is yet entitled the LORD'S Shepherd, and the LORD'S Messiah or Christ. He is, besides, the only great personality, of whom both the Bible and Greek literature treat at length and with sympathy. Did we know nothing more of him than this, the heathen who received the most sacred titles of Revelation, the one man in history who was the cynosure of both Greece and Judah, could not fail to be of the greatest interest to us. But apart from the way, in which he impressed the Greek imagination and was interpreted by the Hebrew conscience, we have an amount of historical evidence about Cyrus, which, if it dissipates the beautiful legends told of his origin and his end, confirms most of what is written of his character by Herodotus and Xenophon, and all of what is described as his career by the prophet whom we are studying. Whether of his own virtue, or as being the leader of a new race of men at the fortunate moment of their call, Cyrus lifted himself, from the lowest of royal stations, to a conquest and an empire achieved by only two or three others in the history of the world. Originally but the prince of Anshan, or Anzan,[93]--a territory of uncertain size at the head of the Persian Gulf,--he brought under his sway, by policy or war, the large and vigorous nations of the Medes and Persians; he overthrew the Lydian kingdom, and subjugated Asia Minor; he so impressed the beginnings of Greek life, that, with all their own great men, the Greeks never ceased to regard this Persian as the ideal king; he captured Babylon, the throne of the ancient East, and thus effected the transfer of empire from the Semitic to the Aryan stock. He also satisfied the peoples, whom he had beaten, with his rule, and organised his realms with a thoroughness unequalled over so vast an extent till the rise of the Roman Empire.