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THE KING’S BUSINESS
them, Cyrus could not have been mentioned á hundred years before he came into being. That this rejection of prophecy is the a priori reason for postulating a second Isaiah, living after the time of Cyrus, is evident from the weakness of all their other argu ments. . First, there is nothing in the style of Isaiah xl. to lxvi. to separate it from the first part of the book. Tennyson, who is good authority of style, gave it as his opin ion that so far as style is concerned the book bears indisputable marks of the same author. In the words used there is no evidence of a later date for the second half of the book. The second Isaiah is so like the first in its use of words and figures that one is indis tinguishable from the other.- There has never been any other such duplications of personality as the critics suppose to have been the case here. Secondly, the weakness of the argument for a Deutero-Isaiah appears in the later conclusions of the critics that there were ten different Isaiahs in the first part of the book. To be abreast of the times one must now speak, according to these critics, not of the second Isaiah as the author of the last twen ty-six chapters, but of the eleventh Isaiah. In view of that prophetic exaltation of mind which has given us the description of Christ and his work in the 53d of Isaiah, we ought not to find it difficult to accept every thing else in the book on its face value. As someone has humorously remarked, “If the last chapters were not written by the his torical Isaiah, they were written by another man of the same name and prophetic in sight.” What is the use of palming off upon our Sunday School scholars these phantoms of German criticisms as if they were scien tifically ascertained facts?— Pof. G. Fred erick Wright, LL.D. lut tfieg hatte nut all ohetjeh, the gospel. Jffur Eaataa aatth, Curb, »hu hath belietteh uur repart ? ®u then faith runteth bp hearing, anb hearing bg the nwrh uf (Sub.—Sunt, 10 : lB:i r : 3aa. 53:1.
R ev . A rthur G. B aldwin of Fall River, Mass., a Baptist Missionary secretary, re cently said in an address that the war illus trates that Europe is evangelistic territory. It is a region of militarism and has never known evangelism. He also said that in Indian cost of living has risen 25 to 50 p. c., making it difficult for the middle classes to subsist, and that mission work had almost stopped. Rev. A. W. Halsey, D. D., a secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, says that there is nowr no spot under the sun, according to reports, where the Euro pean war has failed to strike a blow at com merce ; no inhabitant of the civilized world, even to the half-savage Indians of Chile and the wandering tribes of Syria, has failed to feel its effects in some degree. The situation in West Africa is critical; Syria is engulfed by utter hopelessness; Persia is in chaotic condition, at least as far as finances are concerned; missionaries in India are shut off from outside financial aid; Chile is in pitiable plight because of the prostration of her industries, and in Guate mala the poor are driven by hunger to the point of confiscating the foodstuffs of the wealthy. Rev. William S. Nelson, a missionary in Syria, writes under date of August 21: “Riding on Monday and Tuesday across three districts, I did not see a single camel, or mule, or horse and only a few weak donkeys and very few men. All were hid ing from the army draft, and there was no talk anywhere except of means to evade the encroachments of the officials. The draft calls for practically all the able-bodied men .’’—Christian Workers’ Magazine. Who Is Deutero-Isaiah?* H e is a myth, spun out of the irresponsi ble brains of German critics, whose funda mental principle is that there is no such thing as actual prophecy. According to •Destructive critics make two or more authorships in the book of Isaiah. Prof. Wright is a scholar if there are any and philosopher and theologian of the first rank.
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