fulfilment, it is none other than the Lord, who is, therefore, the only true God, to whose glory and majesty every deed of His servant Koresh bears witness. The argumentation is unintelligible, as soon as, assuming that it was Isaiah who wrote down the prophecy, it is not admitted that he, losing sight of the _real_ Present, takes his stand-point in an _ideal_ Present, viz., the time of the appearance of the conqueror from the East, by which it becomes possible to him to draw his arguments from the prophecy in connection with the fulfilment. It is altogether absurd, when it is asserted that the second part is spurious, and was composed at a time when Cyrus was already standing before Babylon. It would indeed have required an immense amount of impudence on the part of the Prophet to bring forward, as an unassailable proof of the omniscience and omnipotence of God, an event which every one saw with his bodily eyes. By such argumentation, he would have exposed himself to general _ridicule_.--In chap. xli. 21-29, the discourse is formally addressed to the Gentiles; but in point of fact, the Prophet here, too, has to do with Judah driven into exile, to whom he was called by God to offer the means to remain stedfast under the temptations from the idolators by whom they were surrounded. Before the eyes, and in the hearing of Israel, the Lord convinces the Gentiles of the nothingness of their cause. They are to prove the divinity of their idols by showing forth the announcements of the Future which proceeded from them. But they are not able to comply with this demand. It is only the Lord, the living God, who can do that. Long before the appearance of the conqueror from the North and East, He caused it to be _foretold_, and comforted His Church with the view of the Future. Hence, He alone is [Pg 184] God, and vanity are all those who are put beside Him. It is said in ver. 22: "Let them bring forth and shew to us what shall happen; the former things, what they be, show and we will consider them and know the latter end of them; or the coming (events make us to hear)." _The former things_ are those which are prior on this territory; hence the former prophecies, as the comparison of the parallel passage, chap. xlii 9, clearly shows. The _end_ of prophecy is its fulfilment. הבאות "the coming, or future," are the events of the more distant Future. As the Prophet demands from the idols and their servants that only which the true God has already performed by His servants, we have here, on the one hand, a reference to the whole cycle of prophecies formerly fulfilled, as _e.g._, that of the overthrow of the kingdoms of Damascus and Ephraim, and the defeat of Asshur,--and, on the other hand, to the prophecy of the conqueror from the East, &c., contained in the second part. The _former_ prophecies, however, are here mentioned altogether incidentally only; the real demand refers, as is shown by the words: "What shall happen," only to the prophecies in