messenger of God, 'and a glimmering wick quencheth he not; he declareth judgment with truth; far lands wait for his doctrine.'[1] 'A bruised reed shall he not break,' runs the passage in St. Matthew, 'and smoking flax shall he not quench, until he send forth judgment unto victory: in his name shall the Gentiles trust.'[2] The words, until he send forth judgment unto victory, words giving a clear Messianic stamp to the personage described, are neither in the original Hebrew nor in the Greek of the Septuagint. Where did the Gospel-writer find them? If, as is possible, they were in some version then extant, they prove in a striking way the existence and strength of the aspiration which Jesus Christ satisfied by transforming the old popular ideal of the Messiah. But there are in any case signs of the existence of such an aspiration, since a Jewish commentator, contemporary, probably, with the Christian era, but not himself a Christian, assigns to this very prophecy a Messianic intention. And, indeed, the rendering of the final words, in his name shall the Gentiles trust,[3] which is in the Greek of the Septuagint as well as in that of St. Matthew, shows a similar leaning in the Jews of Alexandria some two centuries before Christ.
Signs there are then, without doubt, of others, besides Jesus Christ, trying to identify the Messiah of popular Jewish hope,—the triumphant Root of David, the mystic Son of Man,—with an ideal of meekness, inwardness, patience, and self-denial. And well might reformers try to effect this identification, for the true line of Israel's progress lay through it! But not he who tries makes an epoch, but he who effects;
- ↑ Is., xlii, 3, 4.
- ↑ Matth., xii, 20, 21.
- ↑ These words are imported from an undoubtedly Messianic passage, the famous prediction of the 'rod out of the stem of Jesse' in the eleventh chapter of Isaiah. Compare, in the Septuagint, Is., xi, 10, with Is., xlii, 4.
