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THE PROPHETIC STYLE.
In the prophetical style the figurative and the real are wonderfully intermixed, to the utter confusion of the rules of the technical rhetorician; insomuch that, if I err not, Dr. Blair, the father of our Scottish school of taste, (which, however, has less to do with Scotland than with any land, true indigenous Scottish intellect and deep Scottish feeling having ever rejected it as a miserable and unnatural importation from the cold-hearted and infidel school of France,) could find only one complete and faultless metaphor or figure in the Old Testament which is not mixed with the literal: for nothing do they abhor so much as a mixed metaphor. Poor word-slaves! How unsufferable are ye! What puny minds, bound in fetters of feebleness! Ye should imitate God’s word, and not ask God’s word to imitate you. If ye had the same free and rich spirit, ye would have the same free and rich language. But, with your miserable canons of taste and criticism, ye have now, these fifty years, been starving the free and deep spirit of the Scottish people with correct and elegant compositions, as ye term them, which have in them no nourishment of truth, and are as little entitled to the name of sermons as my child’s toy to the name of that real thing which she fancies it to be. Oh, I abhor and nauseate, as much as any Scottish peasant who wears the blue bonnet, these empty, heartless, feckless, foisonless productions of what is called the moderate school of Scotch preaching, at the head of which stands the Rhetorical Professor referred to above. But, to return from a digression which the bitter memory of many blighted parishes of my native land forced me into. I observe again, that it is the use and wont of the prophetic style to intermingle the figurative and the literal: for this reason—that truth is one, and the creation, in all its parts, an expression of that one truth. The similitudes are therefore not accidental resemblances, but real, though diversified expressions of the same truth. The figures of the Scripture, taken from nature, are the Holy Spirit’s expressions of what nature was fashioned and is preserved to body forth, concerning the one purpose of God, which is complete in Christ. For those rhetoricians, who neither know nor believe this, it may be very well to insist that the similitude shall be told out, in order that we may see whether it be a true similitude or not; but for those who understand the deeper secrets of nature, who are nature’s true poets and bards, and have in them somewhat of the holiness of the prophet, inasmuch as they are conversant with the realities and not the mere shadow of things, it will ever be the privilege and the inclination to fall in, more or less, with the method of the Prophets: which is, to pass out of one region of creation into another—the elemental, the vegetable, the animal, the intellectual, the spiritual—by means of that clue of Divine discernment with which the spiritual man is gifted, of whom it is said, that “he judgeth all things, but he himself is judged by no one.”
The instances of this secret and sudden transfiguration from the figurative to the real are numerous in this very prophecy; indeed, just as numerous as the number of figures employed, for there is not one instance to the contrary. In Isaiah 8: 6-8, there is a notable example of the mixed metaphor, at which our critics might find great amusement; where the Assyrian is at once a river overflowing, and a bird with wings. In chapter 10: 16-19, he is a forest, a herd of fat cattle, a fruitful field, with soul and body, whose destruction is like the fainting of a standard-bearer. In chapter 11: 1, Messiah is a branch; in verse 2 he is a man full of the spirit: and so forth, in almost every instance of a regularly formed figure. But if we refer to mere similitudes, then they are heaped up one upon another from all regions of nature. This is the manner of the Prophets, and I take it of uninspired men also, according as they are endued with more and more of the spirit of wisdom and understanding. No objection, therefore, is it, to say of the figurative before us that it passeth likewise into the literal; for the wonder would be that it should not. Now, while we maintain the figurative sense, upon the grounds already set out, we see many indications of the figurative also; as, when it is said, verse 6, “And a little child shall lead them.” This must be understood either as conferring a literal and plain sense upon the wolf, the leopard, the kid, the calf, the young lion, and the fatling, or the whole must be taken as an allegorical painting, which we have already rejected. There would be no propriety in making a child to lead the great and mighty men of the earth; but there is a great beauty in a child leading these various beasts in one band of union and peace; it shows, not only the departure of their mutual instincts of destructiveness and fear one toward another, but likewise the return of their common subordination to man; and presents with all creation yielding its neck, not to the wise tamer, or the strong subduer, or the crafty catcher of the creatures, but to the face and image of upright man, stamped upon the weakness, the artlessness, the helplessness of a child.—There seems to me, again, another indication of the plain and literal sense in the words of the 7th verse: “And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” This could not, without great refinement indeed, suggest itself to one who had only the figurative sense in his mind. That the lion should not devour the ox, is of easy and natural application from the figure to the thing set forth by it; but that the lion should eat straw like the ox, is a refinement which I think will hardly be found in the Prophets. But, taking it literally, it doth declare the law of their being to be changed, which at present is universally, and in all conditions, to feed on flesh; not only that they will not destroy and devour one another, which is the very instinct of many wild animals, and of some appears to be the chief end of their being; but, if flesh be presented to them, they will not use it for food, but reject as much as they now reject straw. The next verse, “And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’s den,” can, I think, admit of interpretation only in the literal sense; for as a figure I cannot tell what it means. It means, one may say, that the simplest of mankind may safely entrust himself with men naturally of the most deep and malignant character. But this, methinks, would have been better expressed by taking two animals; and it hath already been sufficiently expressed by bringing the wolf and the lamb to dwell together. It may be said, moreover, that the figure of general pacification, being once begun, the rich and exuberant spirit of prophecy carries it onward, and finishes with this beautiful climax. I answer, that I find no such playful use or unnecessary expense of words among the Prophets; whom, the more I study, the more I admire, as gaining their end by the most simple, short and exact methods. But being understood literally as it is written, it brings out a most beautiful and appropriate meaning—that the enmity between the serpent’s seed and the woman’s seed should then be at an end; that the serpent should no longer, as the deodand for the horrid crime of which he had been the tool, be doomed as the most deadly enemy of his master, man; but, the redemption being completed, between the child of woman and the serpent there should be harmony; his subtlety should not betray the child, his venom should not hurt the child: he should be delivered from the sore badge of his having been a party to the great calamity of the Fall.—Proph. Exp.
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