everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shal be ended; the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising, and my salvation shall be forever, and my righteousness shall not be abolished.'[1]
The prophets themselves, speaking when the ruin of their country was impending, or soon after it had happened, had for the most part had in prospect the actual restoration of Jerusalem, the submission of the nations around, and the empire of David and Solomon renewed. But as time went on, and Israel's return from captivity and resettlement of Jerusalem by no means answered his glowing anticipations from them, these anticipations had more and more a construction put upon them which set at defiance the unworthiness and infelicities of the actual present, which filled up what prophecy left in outline, and which embraced the world. The Hebrew Amos, of the eighth century before Christ, promises to his hearers a recovery from their ruin in which they shall possess the remnant of Edom; the Greek or Aramaic Amos of the Christian era, whose words St. James produces in the conference at Jerusalem, promises a recovery for Israel in which the residue of men shall seek the Eternal.[2] This is but a specimen of what went forward on a large scale. The redeemer, whom the unknown prophet of the captivity foretold to Zion,[3] has, a few hundred years later, for the writer whom we call Daniel and for his contemporaries, become the miraculous agent of Israel's new restoration, the heaven-sent executor of the Eternal's judgment, and the bringer-in of the kingdom of righteousness,—the Messiah, in short, of our popular religion. 'One like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days, and there was given him dominion and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and
