There are still the following Messianic features which are peculiar to Isaiah. A clear Old Testament witness for the divinity of Christ is offered by chap. ix. 5 (6); the birth by a virgin, closely connected with His divinity, is announced in chap. vii. 14; according to chap. viii. 23 (ix. 1.) Galilee, and, in general, the country surrounding the Sea of Gennesareth, being that part of the country which hitherto had chiefly been covered with disgrace, are, in a very special manner, to be honoured by the appearance of the Saviour, who shall come to have mercy upon the miserable, and to seek that which was lost. Isaiah has, further, first taught that, by the redemption, the consequences of the Fall would disappear in the irrational creation also, and that it should return to paradisaic innocence, chap. xi. 6-9. He has first announced to the people of God the glorious truth, that death, as it had not existed in the beginning, should, at the end also, be expelled, chap. xxv. 8; xxvi. 19. The healing powers which by Christ should be imparted to miserable mankind, Isaiah has described in chap xxxv. in words, which by the fulfilment have, in a remarkable manner, been confirmed. Let us endeavour to form, from the single scattered features which occur in the prophecies of Isaiah, a comprehensive view of his prospects into the future. The announcement first uttered by Moses of an impending exile of the people, and desolation of the country, is brought before us by Isaiah in the first six chapters, in the prophecies belonging to the time of Uzziah and Jotham, at which the future had not yet been so clearly laid open before the Prophet as it was at a later period, at the time of Ahaz, and, very especially, in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah. A reference to [Pg 5] the respective announcements of the Pentateuch is found in chap. xxxvii. 26, where, in opposition to the imagination of the King of Asshur, that, by his own power, he had penetrated as a conqueror as far as Judah, Isaiah asks him whether he had not heard that the Lord, long ago and from ancient times, had formed such a resolution regarding His people. These words can be referred only to the threatenings of the Pentateuch, which a short-sighted criticism endeavoured to ascribe to a far later period, without considering that the germ of this knowledge of the future is found in the Decalogue also, the genuineness of which is, at present, almost unanimously conceded: "In order that thy (Israel's) days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."