The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah, Volume 2 (of 2)Smith, George Adam
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah, Volume 2 (of 2)
Smith, George Adam
Bible. Isaiah -- Commentaries
"One God, 'mongst both gods and men He is greatest,
Neither in shape is He like unto mortals, nor thought."[68]
Xenophanes scorns the anthropomorphism of his countrymen, and the
lawless deeds which their poets had attributed to the gods:--
"Mortals think the gods can be born, have their feelings, voice and
form; but, could horses or oxen draw like men, they too would make
their gods after their own image."[69]
"All things did Homer and Hesiod lay on the gods,
Such as with mortals are full of blame and disgrace,
To steal and debauch and outwit one another."[70]
Our prophet, to whose eyes Gentile religiousness was wholly of the
gross Crœsus kind, little suspected that he had an ally, with such
kindred tempers of faith and scorn, among the very peoples to whom he
yearns to convey his truth. But ages after, when Israel and Greece
had both issued into Christianity, the service of Xenophanes to the
common truth was recounted by two Church writers--by Clement of
Alexandria in his _Stromata_, and by Eusebius the historian in his
_Præparatio Evangelica_.
We find, then, that monotheism had reached its most absolute expression
in Israel in the same decade, in which the first efforts towards
the conception of the unity of Being were just starting in Greece.
But there is something more to be stated. In spite of the splendid
progress, which it pursued from such beginnings, Greek philosophy
never reached the height on which, with Second Isaiah, Hebrew prophecy
already rests; and the reason has to do with two points on which we
are now engaged,--the omnipotence and the righteousness of God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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