STRENGTH OF JUDAH AND THE VENGEANCE OF ASSHUR. A TALE OF THE TIMES OF ISAIAH. BY CHARLES STOKES CAREY. SEELEY, JACKSON, AND HALLIDAY, 54, FLEET STREET, LONDON. MDCCCLXII. PREFACE. In the following pages the author has sought to exhibit the higher forms of Hebrew life and thought that meet us in the Prophecies of Isaiah, by connecting the momentous events of the times of the great Seer with the biography of a fictitious hero, who is represented as attaining under his influence to the lofty and wide conceptions of Truth and Right that distinguish his writings. In pursuing this design the writer has now and then given a definite shape and colouring to certain occurrences recorded in the Scriptures, but has never knowingly distorted the Sacred Narrative. He has, however, occasionally expanded and made prominent its more obscure intimations. For instance, he conceived himself justified by the prediction of Isa. XXX. 30, 31 in introducing a thunder-storm into his account of the destruction of the hosts of Sennacherib. He has sometimes also described historical personages as speaking and acting in the midst of imaginary surroundings, but in nearly every such case if the form is fictitious the substance is not so. The speeches of Shebna, Shallum, and Benaiah in the council of Hezekiah were not uttered by men who bore those names, but they set forth the religious and political views that were actually held by the people and nobles of Judah. Should this mingling of Scriptural fact with fiction give offence to any pious mind, the author would plead that he has but followed illustrious examples. The grandest religious poems in our language, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, as well as the humbler Sacred Dramas of Mrs Hannah More, have never been regarded with disfavour among Christian people, though we have in all these works the combination of Sacred History with the inventions of the imagination. He would appeal also to the practice of the most devoted and efficient ministers of the Gospel, who often feel compelled to take a similar license in order to convey distinct impressions to their hearers. He would shrink from incurring the penalty which attaches to all who add to or take from the Divine Word, and humbly hopes that such guilt cannot rest upon him while he seeks but to point out its treasures and enforce its lessons. In a work of this description unsettled questions. about sacred topography and Biblical criticism have been necessarily ignored. Any wide departure from popular notions would have rather caused confusion than conveyed instruction, and would have been at best the substitution of one conjecture for another. The author in conclusion has but to express his earnest hope that it may please his Divine Master to consecrate this volume to His service, by making it helpful in inducing a fuller sympathy with the faith and courage of the saints and heroes of the Old Testament, and a higher estimation of that better Revelation which is at once our greatest blessing and our most awful responsibility. |