the
light of the Gentiles,--that He only, without external force, by His
gentleness, meekness, and love, has founded a Kingdom, the boundaries
of which are conterminous with those of the earth. The connection,
also, with the other Messianic announcements, especially those of the
first part, compels us to refer it to Christ.

The reasons against the Messianic interpretation are of little weight.
The assertion that nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus appear as
the Servant of Jehovah (_Hendewerk_), is at once overthrown by Matt.
xii. 18, as well as by the other [Pg 200] passages already quoted, in
which Christ appears as [Greek: pais Theou]. Phil. ii. 7, [Greek:
morphen doulou labon] comes as near the [Hebrew: ebd ihvh], as it was
possible, considering the low notion attached to the Greek [Greek:
doulos]. The passages which treat of the obedience of Christ, such as
Rom, v. 19; Phil. ii. 8; Heb. v. 8; John xvii. 4: [Greek: ton ergon
eteleiosa, ho dedokas moi hina poieso], give only a paraphrase of the
notion of the Servant of the Lord. With perfect soundness _Dr Nitzsch_
has remarked, that it was required by the typical connection of the two
Testaments, that Christ should somehow, according to His [Greek:
hupakoe], [Greek: hupotage], be represented as the perfect
manifestation of the [Hebrew: ebd]--The assertion: "The Messiah is
excluded by the circumstance that the subject is not only to be a
teacher of the Gentiles, who is endowed with the Spirit of God, but is
also to announce deliverance to Israel" (_Gesenius_), rests only on an
erroneous, falsely literal interpretation of ver. 7, which is not a
whit better than if, in ver. 3, we were to think of a natural bruised
reed, a natural wick dimly burning.--The objection that this Servant of
the Lord is not foretold as a future person, but is spoken of as one
present, forgets that we are here on the territory of prophetic vision,
that the prophets had not in vain the name of _seers_, and puts the
_real_, in place of the _ideal_ Present,--a mistake which is here the
less pardonable that the Prophet pre-eminently uses the Future, and, in
this way, himself explains the ideal character of the inserted
Preterites.--In order to refute the assertion, that the doctrine of the
Messiah is foreign to the second part of Isaiah, that (as _Ewald_ held)
in it the former Messianic hopes are connected with the person of a
heathen king, viz., Cyrus (how very little have they who advance suc