ism to fulfil the splendid promises of prophecy, and Jewish apologists taunting Christendom with the like failure on the part of Christianity. Neither has yet fulfilled them, or could yet have fulfilled them. Certainly the restoration by Cyrus, the Second Temple, the Maccabean victories, are hardly more than the shadows of a fulfilment of the magnificent words: 'The sons of them that afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee, and all they that despised thee shall bow themselves down at the soles of thy feet; thy gates shall not be shut day nor night, that men may bring unto thee the treasures of the Gentiles, and that their kings may be brought.'[1] The Christianisation of all the leading nations of the world is, it is said, a much better fulfilment of that promise. Be it so. Yet does Christendom, let us ask, offer more than a shadow of the fulfilment of this: 'Violence shall no more be heard in thy land; the vile person shall no more be called noble, nor the worker of mischief worthy; thy people shall be all righteous; they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest; I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; the Eternal shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended'?[2] Manifestly it does not. Yet the two promises hang together: one of them is not truly fulfilled unless the other is.
The promises were made to righteousness, with all which the idea of righteousness involves. And it involves Christianity. They were made on the immediate prospect of a small triumph for righteousness, the restoration of the Jews after the captivity in Babylon: but they are not satisfied by that triumph. The prevalence of the profession of Christianity is a larger triumph: yet in itself it hardly satisfies them any better. What satisfies them is the prevailing of
