nt on to Christ?
I answer both No, and Yes. Of any mere literal prediction of the events of
His life I know none. The many passages that have been made to read like
predictions of His miraculous birth, His sale for thirty pieces of silver,
and so on, refer to personages and experiences in the time of the writers.
Isaiah expressly says this about the Virgin--that is, the young bride--who
was to conceive and bear a son. Before he should be able to distinguish
right from wrong the relief of Jehovah to Israel would appear. The
passages which seem to our eyes, looking through orthodox spectacles, to
have this predictive character, lose it in a more exact translation.

It is doubtless true that the Gospels make many such applications of Old
Testament words, adding to their record of minute incidents--"That it
might be fulfilled which was spoken by ... saying." But the Gospels, as we
now possess them, have been slowly fashioned by the labor of many hands,
working over the tradition which gradually shaped itself out of the
reminiscences of multitudes of men and women. Pious Jews, trained in this
Rabbinical use of their Sacred Scriptures, delighting to make application
of ancient mystic sayings to the life of their adorable Messiah, read into
the Gospel narrative these fulfillments of prediction.

This use of the Old Testament has been pushed to absurdity in learned
books over which I have patiently toiled. "The Gospel of Leviticus," gave
me the Hebrew civic and ecclesiastic legislation mystified into 'sound
evangelical' symbols. "Christ in the Psalms" twisted every heathenish
imprecation of the Hebrew hymns into language which could be put upon the
lips of the dear Lord, and turned the bitterest curses into sweet and
gracious benedictions.

The culmination of this moon-struck exegesis, as far as my knowledge
reaches, is in the ancient and fantastic reading of the tradition of the
escape of the spies from Jericho, which gave a young and eloquent Bishop
of our church a favorite sermon; wherein he showed conclusively that the
scarlet cord by which Rahab let down her visitors over the city wall was a
type of the atoning blood of Christ!

This Chinese puzzle-book of predictions exists nowhere save in the
imagination of its readers.

There was, however, a most real and substantial typifying of Christ
through the Old Testament; but it was natural, organic, ethical and
spiritual; in those books as first in the lives of the people.