THE LATE F. D. MAURICE ON PROPHECY. pro as EDITOR
OF THZ " 8PRCTATOR.1
Sra,—The following extract from a letter of Manrice's which I enclose may interest some of your readers, as illustrating his view of the Messianic prophecies :—
"I should be much more inclined to adopt your interpretation of the 53rd of Isaiah* than that which limits it to some definite mortal, or that which merely makes it a prediction of a Christ to come. An ever-present King and Word of God, hereafter to be manifested fully, then manifesting himself through various persons and in sundry acts- of mercy and judgment, is, it seems to me, the subject of the pro- phecies. They speak of Him who has been, and is, and is to come We dwarf them into messages concerning the future, and so give the future a poor, feeble significance. The Eternal Son of God who was with the Father before all worlds, dwindles into a mere Son of Mary, whom, that we may save our orthodoxy, we prove by a number of texts to be divine. And so the miracles which your father's practical and devout instinct recognises as manifestations of a love which is the same in all ages—just as the Church does in its services for the Sundays after Epiphany—are changed into mere evidences of an exceptional power, put forth then, withdrawn ever since.t Many of the strangest apparent contradictions of the prophecies and miracles which are current amongst us are the consequences of our unhappy, partial, heretical conceptions of them, and are efforts, how.- ever irregular and tortuous, to arrive at a deeper, more reverent, more practical understanding of them. God will bring good out of all our perverse ways of thinking and acting."
Here ends the portion of the letter which I think will be-
generally interesting.—I am, Sir, &c., X.
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