glorious purposes. To deny this fact is to
deny all prophecy. If God can not foretell future events and the
instruments for their accomplishment, there can be no prophecy, and
God's omniscience is impeached. Isaiah prophesied in the seventh chapter
and fourteenth verse: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and shall call his name Immanuel." Matthew affirms that this prophecy
was fulfilled in the birth of Jesus. (Matt. i. 22, 23.) He also declares
in the same connection that the announcing angel foretold that the name
"Jesus" was to be given to the Messiah at his birth. These
preannouncements must be cast aside if the critic's dictum is accepted.
Shall we discredit Isaiah, the announcing angel, and Matthew on the
ground of the critic's literary acumen?

Further, the student of the Word will remember that when Jeroboam was
bringing disaster upon Israel, God sent his prophet to declare: "Behold
a son shall be born unto the house of David, Josiah by name; and upon
thee (the altar at Bethel) shall he offer the priests of the high places
that burn incense upon thee, and men's bones shall be burnt upon thee."
More than three hundred years after this prophecy was given, according
to Usher's Chronology, Josiah was born and did the precise things that
were predicted concerning him. (See 1 Kings xiii. 2 and 2 Kings xxiii,
15, 16.) The omniscience of the Holy Spirit can predict the name of the
instrument as readily as the event which is to be accomplished.

Again, undoubtedly the prophet must speak out of his own environment. He
can speak only where he is. But who is to decide how many and what
allusions he must make to custom or incident in order to satisfy the
critic, as to his time and place in history?

The tailor who decides that he must have twenty yards of cloth to make a
suit of clothes, when ten yards are sufficient, will shortly be wanting
customers. The critic who has decided how many and what kind of
synchronous events must be furnished by the prophet, in order to secure
his credence as to authorship, will be left without a prophet or a
Bible.

The erection of an arbitrary law, by which to interpret history or
prophecy in the Bible, is contrary to all the treatment which secular
literature receives from these same critics.

From these strained, forced and unphilosophical methods of dealing with
prophecy, we turn to the testimony of the inspired book itself. The book
of Isaiah is distinguished by a phras