ecy, when a new era was opened on the world. The approximate time of the work can be fixed by its allusions to the surrounding circumstances, which are still of the same kind as those which form the scene of the operations of Ezra and Nehemiah. To them he must have stood in the same relation as Isaiah to Hezekiah, or Haggai to Zerubbabel; and, although there is no probability in the tradition which identifies him with Ezra, it is true that he represents the prophetic aspect of the epoch of which the two great Reformers were the scholastic and secular representatives.

2

There is the same close union as then between 1 the office of Priest and Scribe. There is the same demoralization of the Priesthood as then in the questionable associations of the house of the High Priest Eliashib the Eli of those later days the gross and audacious 3 plundering of Hophni and Phineas repeated on the paltry scale of meaner and more niggardly pilfering. There are, as in Ezra's time, the faithless husbands, deserting for some foreign alliance their Jewish wives, who bathe the altar with their tears. There are the wealthy nobles, as in the days of Nehemiah, who grind down the poor by their exactions. Against all these the Prophet raises up his voice in the true spirit of Amos or of Joel. There is also the passionate denunciation of Edom, which runs like a red thread through all the prophetic strains of this epoch, from Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the Second Isaiah, through Obadiah and the Babylonian Psalmist, down to this last and fiercest expression, which goes so far as to enhance

1 Mal. ii. 7.

2 lb. i. 6-12; ii. 8, 9. 8 See Lecture XVIII.

4 Mal. ii. 10-14.

5 Mal. iii. 5.

Mal. i. 2, 3. See Lecture XL.

the Divine love for Jacob by contrasting it with the Divine hatred for Esau. But there are three ideas peculiar, if not in substance yet in form, to Malachi — significantly marking the point from which, as it were, he looks over the silent waste of years that is to follow him, unbroken by any distinct prophetic utterance, yet still responding in various faint echoes to the voice of this last of the long succession of seers that had never ceased since the days of Samuel.

I. We speak first of the chief idea which is inwrought into the very structure of his work The Mesand of his being. The expectation of an senger. Anointed King of the house of David has ceased. Since the death of Zerubbabel, neither in Ezra, nor Nehemiah, nor Malachi, nor in any contemporary books, is there any trace of such a hope. It is another form in which the vision of the future shaped itself, and which was peculiarly characteristic of the time. The prominent figure is now that of the Messenger, the avant courier-to use the Greek word, "the Angel" -to use the Hebrew word, the Malachi, of the Eternal. Such a figure had, doubtless, been used before. In the Patriarchal age, and at times in the Monarchy, there had been heavenly Messengers who brought the Divine Word to the listening nation. Once by the Great Prophet of the Captivity Israel himself is termed the Angel or the Messenger. In Haggai' after the Return that idea had been still further localized. was himself "the Angel of the Eternal." In Zechariah the same expression (was it the aged Haggai of whom he spoke, or the unseen Presence which Haggai represented?) describes the mysterious guide that led

1 Isa. xlii. 19.

* Haggai i. 13.

8 Zech. i. 11, 12; iii. 1; iv. 1.

He

him through the myrtle-groves and through the court of the High Priest's trial. But now the word pervades the whole prophetic Book. The very name of the Prophet is taken from it; whether he bore the title of Malachi as indicating the idea with which the age was full, or whether it was transferred to a Prophet without a name, as, possibly, Abdadonai, "the servant of the "Lord," may have been given to the Great Unnamed of the Captivity,' from the subject of his prophecy. The ideal Priest whom Malachi describes is in like manner the Messenger of the Lord of Hosts.2 The eventful consummation to which he looks is the arrival, not of the Warrior-king or the Invisible Majesty of Heaven, but of the Messenger who should enforce3 the treaty which had been made of old time between God and His people, which had of late been renewed by Nehemiah. This was to be the moment of the unexpected sifting and dividing of the essential from the unessential, the worthless from the valuable. It was to be like the furnace in which the precious metals were cleansed; it was to be like the tank in which the fullers beat and washed out the clothes of the inhabitants of Jerusalem; it was to be like the glorious yet terrible uprising of the Eastern sun which should wither to the very roots the insolence and the injustice of mankind; but, as its rays, extended like the wings of the Egyptian Sun-god, should by its healing and invigorating influences call forth the good from their obscurity, prancing and bounding like the young cattle in the burst of spring, and treading down under their feet

1 See Clem. Alex., Strom., i. 2. See Lecture XLI. Mal. i. 1.

2 Mal. ii. 7.

8 Ibid. iii. 1.

5

Ibid. iii. 2, 3.

5 Mal. iv. 2, 3 (Heb.). See Lecture IV., 100.

the dust and ashes to which the same bright sun had burnt up the tangled thicket of iniquitous dealing. Yet for this day of mingled splendor and gloom, a Prelude, a Preparation was needed; and, in forecasting the forms which it would take, two colossal figures rose out of the past. One was Moses, to whom on Horeb had been given the Law, which now through Ezra had been just revived, expounded, and brought within their reach. The Pentateuch was to live in their remembrance. The memory of their past history, the fulfilment of those ruling principles of "con"duct which are three fourths of human life," was their guide for the perilous future. And for the enforcement of these there was needed yet another spirit of the mighty dead. It was the great1 representative of the whole Prophetic order, now as it were, by the last of his race, evoked from the invisible world. Already there had sprung up round the mysterious figure of Elijah that belief which reached its highest pitch in the Mussulman world, where he is "the Immortal one," who in the greenness of perpetual youth is always appearing to set right the wrong and which in the Jewish nation has expected him to revive in each new crisis of their fate, and to solve all the riddles of their destiny. But for Malachi the chief mission of the returning Elijah was to be that of the Forerunner of the final crisis; who should arrest in their diverging courses the hearts both of the older and the younger generation, and who should enable (if we thus far venture to unfold the thought which is not expressed in

66

1 Mal. iv. 5.

2 See Lecture XXX.

3 Mal. iii. 6. It is the figure implied in the word "turn" which is

perpetuated in the Latin phrase con

3

version, and in the Greek μeтávola. The idea is of a wrench of the mind in another than its ordinary direction.

the Prophecy, but lies deep in the history of that, as of all like ages) the fathers to recognize the new needs and the new powers of the children, and the children to recognize the value of the institutions and traditions which they inherit from the fathers.

Such an insistence on the necessity of patient preparation on the importance of working out the old and homely truths of justice and truthfulness, as the best means of meeting the coming conflict-received its full point and meaning when such a rough Precursor - such an Angel1 of moral reformation-did arise and recall, even in outward garb and form, the ancient Tishbite who had last been seen in the same valley of the Jordan. But the principle of the necessity of a Messenger or Angel in the place or in the anticipation of that which is still to come-of the opening of the way by the Great for the Greatest of the announcement of pure morality, which commends itself to the many, leading toward the spiritual religion, which commends itself chiefly to the few this is the main idea of Malachi's teaching, which shall now be expanded and explained by the corresponding events and ideas of his time.

Divine

1. It branches into two parts. The sense of the Awe of the need of this intermediary dispensation, if it is Name. not directly connected, at any rate coincides, with the awe which shrinks from familiar contact with the Divine name and Presence, with the reverence which fears, the irreverence which avoids, the mention of the Supreme Unseen Cause. In the book which prob

1 Mark i. 2. So completely in the Eastern Church probably from the constant use of the word ayyeλos both for angel and messenger-have the two ideas been combined, that

John the Baptist, in reference to this passage, is, in the traditionary Greek pictures (as at Mount Athos), represented as a winged angel.