"Wherewith shall I come before the Lord" (said the prophet Micah), "and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" [Footnote 77] [Footnote 77: Micah vi. 6-8.] {219} Even whilst calling the people of Israel back to the faith of their fathers, the prophets open to them new perspectives: whilst reproaching them with the errors that have led to their decay and servitude, they permit them yet to see the future delivery and regeneration. It is their divine character to live at once in the past and in the future; to confide alike to the ordinances of the Eternal and to his promises: they move forward, but they change not; they believe, they hope; they are faithful to Moses whilst they announce the Messiah. V. Expectation Of The Messiah. Controversy has the mischievous power of the Homeric Jupiter: it collects clouds amidst which the light that we seek for disappears. The Old and the New Testament, the history of the Jews and the history of Jesus Christ, lie before us. Do these two monuments form but one single edifice? That second history, is it comprised and written beforehand in the first? {220} Such is the question which has for the last eighteen centuries occupied and divided the learned. Some affirm that Jesus Christ was foreseen and predicted among the Jews, and that the series of prophecies continued from the very time of Moses until the advent of Christ. Others lay stress upon the hiatus--the want of connection and cohesion--the contradictions to be detected here between the Old and New Testament; and thence they conclude that the text of the Old Testament by no means contains the facts that appear in the New Testament, and that the miraculous history of Jesus Christ was, in the bosom of Israel, neither miraculously foreseen nor predicted. Why was it, and how was it possible, that two assertions so contradictory came to be both adopted and maintained by men most of them as sincere as learned? {221}