The Living Power of the Jewish Prophets 44
The moral feelings of men have been deepened and strengthened, and also softened, and almost created, by the Jewish prophets. In modern times we hardly like to acknowledge the full force of their words, lest they should prove subversive to society. And so we explain them away or spiritualize them, and convert what is figurative into what is literal, and what is literal into what is figurative. And still, after all our interpretation or misinterpretation, whether due to a false theology or an imperfect knowledge of the original language, the force of the words remains, and a light of heavenly truth and love streams from them even now more than 2,500 years after they were first uttered.
BENJAMIN JOWETT.
One lesson, and only one, history may be said to repeat with distinctness, that the world is built somehow on moral foundations; that in the long run it is well with the good; in the long run it is ill with the wicked. But this is no science; it is no more than the old doctrine taught long ago by the Hebrew prophets.
J. A. FROUDE, 1889.