FOUR CENTURIES OF SILENCE;

OR,

FROM MALACHI TO CHRIST.

THE

CHAPTER I.

THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS.

HE two volumes which now stand side by side in our Bible, preserve, in their separate titles, the memory of a great gulf of time, dividing the old from the new. Four hundred years is a long period in the history of any nation. They were eventful years in the annals of the Jewish people. Is it possible, we naturally ask, that during all that time no gleams of Truth should have come forth upon the sky? There was once, in the age of the great prophets, a bright glow of spiritual glory spreading along the horizon; faith and hope and love flaming in the souls of lofty-minded men, full of patriotic ardour, and ecstatic visions of the future, breathing the highest strains of poetic rap

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ture, and lifting up the people of God into a prayerful expectation of the coming day.

That wonderful evening sky continued to cheer true hearts through centuries of trouble and change. The captives of Israel and Judah, scattered over Eastern lands, divided from one another, mourning over the desolation of their homes, and bitterly repenting the ages of unfaithfulness which had culminated in so gloomy a destiny of judgment, still, through the long sad years of exile, kept before them the lovely tints of prophetic radiance; they spoke to them of a rising Sun of Righteousness, which should bring with it the day of salvation. The seventy years of Judah's banishment went by. The time of restoration arrived. Band after band of exiles returned to Palestine. For a hundred years the history of the Jewish people was the history of a reawakening nationality. But the sky was not again lighted up with the same brilliancy. The colours seemed to fade. There were prophets still sent to accompany the work of restoration. Zerubbabel had his Zechariah and his Haggai. But the glow of the prophetic inspiration was rather declining than increasing. At last the New Jerusalem seemed to be complete. The energetic measures of the Persian cup-bearer, Nehemiah, filled with zeal for his beloved land, had raised up

the fallen city, and re-established the neglected Temple service. The land had rest; and the people could look away from the sphere of their earthly environment to the heaven of their hopes. Once more, as the faithful reformer (Nehemiah) set his diligent hand to the building up of their civil and religious establishment, there was a new light shooting across the sky, and brightening the horizon with fresh colours of Divine appeal and invitation. It was not so rich and glowing as that which flamed like a fire three hundred years before, but which had since so much faded from the view of the people. But it was still beyond all doubt a heavenly gift. And after that evening of prophecy there followed a night of four hundred years; during which it was only here and there that the sky was faintly illuminated by some star of wise, devout reflection, borrowing its light from the past, but pointing on very distinctly to the future.

We learn much from the study of that remarkable silence of prophecy in Israel. We are able to distinguish all the more clearly the voice of God when it did certainly speak. We call on the Jews themselves to be our witnesses, that in putting the New Testament beside the Old we are not dishonouring the fathers, but giving them their