At last, in the second century B.C., we come to the Book of Daniel, and what do we find ? A life-and-death struggle going on between loyal Israelites and a wanton heathen persecutor of their religion. Death any day rather than eat the heathen meat, or profane the Sabbath, or sacrifice to idols, or neglect the hours of prayer ! The spirit of martyrs and confessors is abroad, and it is no narrow creed that such men champion. They have their wide outlook, their grasp of principles. They are convinced that no heathen powers can in the end prevail against God, that the truth is bound to triumph and the Kingdom of God to be established. And they were bold enough to fix a date ; in three and a half years deliverance would come and the reign of the holy people of God begin. So in former days the prophets had again and again expected that a great act of salvation was at hand, to be followed at once by the dawn of a glorious day. But no ! it was not to be. The hour was not yet come.
5. And yet Jerusalem did spread out her scattered settlements into the great world. The synagogue was planted in the chief cities of the Koman Empire ; and just in proportion as the Jews were true to the higher elements of their faith they sent forth truths of priceless value and imperishable influence. They were forced out into the great world, and wherever they went they carried their religion with them ; and notwithstanding their hard legalism and exclusive temper the nobility and attraction of that religion manifested itself. The patriotic saintly men scattered through foreign lands thought with tenderness of Jerusalem as the city of their God and the home of their religion, but many of them began to realize that the true Zion is not the soil or the walls of an earthly city but the living truth, the glorious revelation from God. From this point of view, the prophecy received a very real fulfilment. Jerusalem did indeed break its barriers; the life inspired by prophets and regulated by lawgivers overspread the world, and became one of the most important factors in its
ZECHARIAH n. 4, 5 403
religious life. Churches and sects may struggle, as they do to-day, for the soil of the ancient city, fighting with vulgar fanaticism for " the sacred places," but the city of God, " Jerusalem the golden," is otherwhere ; it is found wherever men are fighting for true liberty, personal purity, and social righteousness.
Tj When we try to apply our reason to the whence and the whither of the cosmos, to the analysis of time and change, reason and imagination fail. But if neither is more intelligible than the other, that which looks forward to a consummation appears to correspond more with the other powers of developed manhood. Both feeling and will demand that life as we know it shall have a consummation; both feeling and will demand that human history as we know it shall work toward that consummation. This was the great strength of the Hebrew prophet; God had a purpose in history ; it was a purpose that man could partly under- stand ; it was a purpose that man, if he would, could wholly co- operate with ; it was in the co-operation of man and God that the purpose was to be accomplished. If there be a Divine purpose in history, insight into the meaning and survival value of events is the same thing as foresight into the result of those events. Dr. Edward Caird said that with the Hebrew prophets insight was foresight. But it is not alone of the Hebrew prophet that this is true; the man who can look about him to-day, and see with penetrating eye those elements in the life of his community which have survival value, can, if there be purpose in history, sketch the future. The imagery of his sketch may be crude, as in Jewish prophecy, but just in so far as his insight is true, his vision of future events will symbolize truth. The crudeness of the symbol will not alter the inner certainty that it sets forth.1
6. Out of that rebuilt Jerusalem came the Christian faith. Near the walls of Jerusalem was reared the Christian cross. From the cross of Christ issued a power which is most aptly and beautifully described by the very words of this prophet. How could the Christian religion be better described than by saying that it is a wall of fire round about, and the glory in the midst ? And as that new faith came out of the old, the nations of the earth were gathered to it as Zechariah saw — not gathered to Judaism, but gathered to the transformed Judaism of the cross of Christ.
Our Lord advances far beyond Jerusalem and Gerizim and Hermon and Tyre and Sidon, and makes the measurements of His
1 The Practice of Christianity, 100.
404 THE CITY WITHOUT WALLS
Kingdom as wide as the world : " God is a spirit : and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." He looks beyond the Hebrew races scattered abroad in every nation under heaven, and He says, " Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold : them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice ; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd." And He gives the word of command on Olivet, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature."