to some future situation of
affairs, is presumed to have been oracular. The words of Isaiah were
delivered by him in a prophetic character, with the solemnity belonging
to that character: and what he so delivered was all along understood by
the Jewish reader to refer to something that was to take place after the
time of the author. The public sentiments of the Jews concerning the
design of Isaiah's writings are set forth in the book of
Ecclesiasticus:* "He saw by an excellent spirit what should come to pass
at the last, and he comforted them that mourned in Sion. He showed what
should come to pass for ever, and secret things or ever they came."

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* Chap. xlviii. ver. 24.
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It is also an advantage which this prophecy possesses, that it is
intermixed with no other subject. It is entire, separate, and
uninterruptedly directed to one scene of things.

The application of the prophecy to the evangelic history is plain and
appropriate. Here is no double sense; no figurative language but what is
sufficiently intelligible to every reader of every country. The
obscurities (by which I mean the expressions that require a knowledge of
local diction, and of local allusion) are few, and not of great
importance. Nor have I found that varieties of reading, or a different
construing of the original, produce any material alteration in the sense
of the prophecy. Compare the common translation with that of Bishop
Lowth, and the difference is not considerable. So far as they do differ,
Bishop Lowth's corrections, which are the faithful result of an accurate
examination, bring the description nearer to the New Testament history
than it was before. In the fourth verse of the fifty-third chapter, what
our bible renders "stricken" he translates "judicially stricken:" and in
the eighth verse, the clause "he was taken from prison and from
judgment," the bishop gives "by an oppressive judgment he was taken
off." The next words to these, "who shall declare his generation?" are
much cleared up in their meaning by the bishop's version; "his manner of
life who would declare?" i. e. who would stand forth in his defence? The
former part of the ninth verse, "and he made his grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death," which inverts the circumstances of
Christ's passion, the bishop brings out in an order perfectly agreeable
to the event; "and his grave was appointed with the wicked, but with the
rich man was his tomb."