Introduction

Thus far I have been applying the test of coincidence without design to the historical Scriptures; I will now do the same by some of the prophetical, founding the argument chiefly on a comparison of these latter writings with those details relating to the period in which the Prophet is said to have lived, given in the concluding chapters of the Books of Kings and Chronicles. It is possible that these coincidences may be thought proportionally fewer in number than those which other parts of Scripture have been found to supply; but it must be remembered, that the Books of the Prophets are not of any great bulk, and that the chapters in the Books of Kings and Chronicles which furnish materials for checking them, are neither long nor many. Moreover, which is the chief consideration, that the language of Prophecy, as might be expected, is commonly framed in terms so general, and often so dark and figurative, that it is easy to overlook a latent allusion to an event of the day which it may really contain, even where some notice of that event does happen also to be left on record in the contemporary history. With regard to such coincidences as we do find, it may be observed,

1. First, that the argument they furnish has a twofold value; since it not only demonstrates the Historian and the Prophet to be veracious—the one, in the narrative of facts, the other, in such allusions to them as blend with passages more strictly prophetical—but that it also serves to determine the date of the Prophet himself—a date which, when once obtained, fixes many other events of which he clearly seems to tell, far in futurity with respect to him, and so ministers to our conviction that it could not be of human knowledge that he spoke. We indeed, on whom the ends of the world are come, may be supposed to stand less in need of such a confirmation of our faith in the Prophets; for since the objects of their prophecy are two: the more immediate events which were coming upon several kingdoms of the world, and especially those of Israel and Judah; and the more distant Advent of the Messiah; the evidence for the genuineness of their claim to the prophetical character arising out of this latter province, where they appear as heralds of the gospel, is strong to us, because we do see the actual circumstances of Jesus Christ and his coming, correspond in so express a manner with the sketch made of them, by Isaiah, for example (as nobody in this instance can dispute), so many hundred years before. But their contemporaries, or the generations who lived next to them (and these were the persons who admitted their writings into the prophetical canon), were cut off from this ground of confidence in their message; they must have rested their belief in them upon the accomplishment of their political prophecies alone, such being the only ones of which they lived to see the completion. Although therefore the mere fact of the Jews having of old agreed to acknowledge them as Prophets, is enough to show that such evidence alone sufficed for them, they being the best judges of what was sufficient; still if we have the means of convincing ourselves that these remarkably exact prophecies (claiming at least so to be), which related to the Assyrian invasions, the captivity, and the like, were certainly delivered long before the events arose, we shall have a further reason, over and above an experience of the fulfilment of those concerning the Messiah, for putting our trust in them, and considering them Prophets indeed.

2. Nor is this all. For, Secondly, it may be observed, that the effect of this evidence from coincidence without design is to show, that the prophet sometimes occupied a considerable range of years in the delivering of his predictions—thus, that the whole Book of Isaiah was not struck off at a heat, was no extempore effusion, but a collection of many distinct predictions (claiming to be such) uttered from time to time, as events, or the heart hot within the prophet, prompted them; that it was in truth, as the title describes it, “the vision which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.” Now this is an important consideration, because it argues that the prophet did not deliver himself of some happy oracle for the once, and earn the reputation of a seer by an accident, but maintained that character through a life—a circumstance which goes very far in itself to exclude the possibility of imposture, nothing being so fatal to fraud of this kind as time.

Having made these preliminary remarks, I shall now address myself to the argument itself.