he weavers notice it, and wonder, and
yet are under a strange impulse to weave on without understanding.

Their coming One is to be a king, but there is the distinct consciousness
that there would be for Him terrible experiences through which He must
pass, and to which He would yield on His way to the throne. The very
conception seems to involve a contradiction which puzzles these men who
write them down. Like a lower minor strain running through some great
piece of music are the few indications of what God fore_knew_, though He
did not foreplan, would happen to Jesus. A sharp line must always be drawn
between what God plans and what He knows will happen. The soft sobbing of
what God could see ahead runs as a minor sad cadence through the story of
His plans.

Sometimes these forebodings are _acted out_. In the light of the Gospels
we can easily see very striking likenesses between the experiences in
which keen suffering precedes great victory, of such _national leaders_ as
Joseph and David, and the experiences of Jesus. Here is _God's_ plan of
atonement by blood, involving suffering, but with no such accompaniments
of hatred and cruelty as Jesus went through. Read backward, Jesus'
experience on the cross is seen to bear striking resemblances, in part, to
this old scheme of atonement; yet only in part: the parts concerning His
character and the results; but not the _manner_ of his death, nor the
_spirit_ of the actors.

Then there are the few direct specific passages predicting a stormy trip
for the king before the haven is reached. There is a vividness of detail
in the very language here, that catches us, familiar with after events,
as it could not those who first heard. There is the Twenty-second Psalm,
with its broken sentences, as though blurted out between heart-breaking
sobs; and then the wondrous change, in the latter part, to victory
_through_ this terrible experience. And the scanty but vivid lines in the
Sixty-ninth Psalm. There is that great throbbing fifty-third of Isaiah,
with its beginning back in the close of the fifty-second, and the striking
ahead of its key-note in the fiftieth chapter.

Daniel listens with awe deepening ever more as Gabriel tells him that the
coming Prince is to be "_cut off_." To the returned exiles rebuilding the
temple Zechariah acts out a parable in which Jehovah is priced at thirty
pieces of silver, the cost of a common slave. And a bit later God speaks
of a time when "they sha