Religious Studies, Sketches and PoemsStowe, Harriet Beecher
Religion
Religious Studies, Sketches and Poems
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Religion
As time rolled on, this mingled chant of triumph and of suffering
swelled clearer and plainer. In the grand soul of Isaiah, the
Messiah and his kingdom were ever the outcome of every event that
suggested itself. When the kingdom of Judah was threatened by
foreign invasion, the prophet breaks out with the promise of a
Deliverer:--
"Behold, the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold, a
virgin shall conceive and bring forth a son and shall call his
name Immanuel [God with us]."
Again he bursts forth as if he beheld the triumph as a present
reality:--
"Unto us a child is born
Unto us a son is given.
The government shall be upon his shoulders.
His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor,
Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and of peace there shall be no end,
Upon the throne of David and his kingdom,
To establish it with justice from henceforth and forever.
The zeal of the Lord of Hosts will perform this."
Again, a few chapters further on, he sings:--
"There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse
A Branch shall grow out of his roots.
The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him;
The spirit of wisdom and understanding,
The spirit of counsel and might,
The spirit of knowledge, and fear of the Lord.
With righteousness shall he judge the poor,
And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth."
Then follow vivid pictures of a golden age on earth, beneath his
sway, when all enmities and ferocities even of the inferior animals
shall cease, and universal love and joy pervade the earth.
In the fifty-third of Isaiah we have again the sable thread
of humiliation and sorrow; the Messiah is to be "despised and
rejected of men;" his nation "hide their faces from him;" he "bears
their griefs, and carries their sorrows," is "wounded for their
transgressions," is "brought as a lamb to the slaughter," is "dumb
before his accusers," is "taken from prison to judgment," is "cut
off out of the land of the living," "makes his grave with the wicked
and with the rich in his death," and thence is "raised again to an
endless kingdom."
Thus far the tide of prophecy had rolled; thus distinct and luminous
had grown the conception of a future suffering, victorious Lord and
leader, when the Jewish nation, for its sins and unfaithfulness, was
suffered to go to wreck. The temple was destroyed and the nation
swept into captivity in a foreign land.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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