(2) I would like the power to see homesick prodigals when they are still away in the far country. This was the characteristic sight of the Father: "When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him ! " It is the pathos and tragedy of the Church, and of so many of the Lord's disciples, that we see the prodigal only when he knocks at the door and when the long return is over. We know him when he kneels at the penitent bench, or expresses himself in some outward confession. We do not see him before confession springs to his lips, and while a sullen indifference appears still to sit upon his face. I would have the sight which can see the beginnings of the better life, while the outside still seems violently antagonistic.
(3) I would like to have the power of seeing the far-off significance of seemingly insignificant events. I covet the gift of a sanctified imagination, which can look down long highways into distant futurity. For instance, when an apostle like Paul walks into imperial Eome, utterly unheeded and ignored, I would like the power of being able to foresee some of the amazing possibilities of that lonely entrance. When a few women are met together for prayer by the riverside at Philippi, entirely unnoticed in the busy, hurrying life of the great city, I would have the power of tracing in sanctified imagination the far-reaching, healthy currents proceeding from that consecrated circle. When James Gilmour crosses the frontier into Mongolia, and sets his single plough to the upturning of the soil in that mighty land, I would have the eyes that can see coming harvests, vast reaches of waving corn, shining ripe before the face of my Lord. When the New Testa- ment is translated into a new language I would have the power of seeing the tremendous influence of the modest book, the light
' F. de W. Lushington, Sermons to the Young Boys, p. 19.
204 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
it will bring, and the warmth, and the moving air, and the genial liberty.
(4) I would like to see the distant and glorious possibilities which are the purposed inheritance of my children. When 1 look at my boy I want the eyes which can see beyond what he is to what he can be, and I want to live in the inspiration of that splendid prospect. It is altogether needful that I should see my child other than he is if I am to lead him into something better. My imagination must rivet itself upon the contemplation of his splendid possibilities, and I must work upon the immediate while I gaze upon the distant. With the ideal in my eyes I must turn to present training, and the strength and glory of the possibility will get into my moulding fingers and determine the quality of my immediate work. The " far-away " shall lend its influence to the near, and something of the glory of the goal shall shine upon the very beginnings.^
II.
The text is now to be regarded in its application to the Messiah and the Messianic Kingdom.
i. The Beauty of the Son of Man.
Christian thinkers have expressed two different conceptions of the personal presence of Jesus. Some have inferred from such words as those in the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, "He hath no form nor comeliness ; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. . . . Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows : yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted," that the Messiah was weak and sufferino-. stricken with disease ; nay, even, from the expression " smitten of God," that He was a leper. But others again, seeking what they have felt to be a natural association between physical and moral beauty in the Divine life on earth, have pictured Him as fairer than the children of men, full of grace and glory, yea, altogether lovely. Perhaps the two lines of prophetic utterance are not wholly irreconcilable. It is difficult to believe that beauty of
' J. H. Jowett.
ISAIAH 205
soul such as was seen in Him alone should not have expressed itself in physical attractiveness. There is no mention of His suffering from disease. Yet who can think of Him — the Man of Sorrows — the Supreme Sufferer, except as showing in His physical aspect something of the burden of the world's sinfulness ? But it seems, if the Gospels are justly interpreted, that the might — the majesty — of His Divine Nature flashed ever and again through the vesture of His human life. Let us recall only the passage where St. John relates how the soldiers who came to arrest Him in Gethsemane, at His words, "I am he," immediately " went backward and fell to the ground." The evangelist may well have been thinking of that incident or of others like it, of which he had been an eye-witness, when he wrote in the preface of his Gospel : " We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father."
It is surely no light thing that the Christian world in its universal tradition of half a hundred generations, has piously and intimately believed that the second Adam, like the first, bore the outward signature of God's perfect hand. It is not without some deep reason, dwelling in universal belief among those countless things which, if written, should have filled the whole world with Scriptures ; or in the intuitions of the Spirit, or in the instinct of love, or in the self-evident harmonies of God's works ; it is not, I say, without some or all of these reasons, that the world has believed that prophets, psalmists, and seers knew what they spake, and spake what they beheld. It is a pardonable fault to take them in the letter of their words, and a harmless error to go astray with the belief of Christendom. We shall not be dangerously out of the way, if we lovingly and humbly believe that He who is the brightness of His Father's glory, and the express image of His person, did take unto Himself our manhood as His revealed presence for ever, in its most perfect image and likeness ; that where two natures were united, as both were perfect, so both were beautiful. I know not what he may be to whom such a thought is not blessed. ^