XIII.

THE EDUCATION OF THE CLERGY.

'The priest's lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth; for he is the messenger of the Lord of Hosts.'

MAL. II. 7.

HE words of Malachi have in one respect a

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special interest and significance, shared by no other words, not even by those of the greatest of prophets. He was the last of that goodly company. The age of scribes was succeeding to the age of prophets. The work which had gone on for centuries, the Divine work of educating men by special revelations of the Divine will, was for a time suspended, never again to be resumed in the same form and under the same conditions. Sorrowfully and sadly, we may believe, the men of the Great Synagogue, the guiding teachers and doctors of the age that followed him, must have added his prophecy to the number of the sacred books, feeling that the vision had departed, that there was no prophet more, looking forward, as their successors did afterwards in the time of the

Maccabees,1 to the time when a prophet of the Lord should again appear among them as to a day far distant, resting that yearning hope, it may be, on the last words of Malachi himself.

We recognise this character of the prophet in some of the references which we commonly make to the message he delivered. We think of him as standing at the close of one great period, and watching in the distance the dawning of a brighter day. He sees that the work to be done needs the revival of that highest type of the prophet's character, which acts, speaks, lives, as the servant of the Lord, though it leaves no written oracles. Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.' He sees that that work will be but the preparation for a yet greater advent. 'Behold, I will send my messenger who shall prepare the way before me. The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to His temple.'

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We do well to point to these words as to prophecies that have received a true and wonderful fulfilment, to which, it may be, there is yet reserved, in the future of the Divine order, another fulfilment yet more marvellous and mysterious. But the other parts of the prophet's message, to which we commonly give less heed, are not, I

believe, less significant, nor have we exhausted the meaning and interest of his position as the last of the prophets, when we have thought of it only in relation to his Messianic hopes, his visions of the kingdom of the Christ. To be the last of the Prophets, what did that involve, not only for the age in which he lived, but for the man himself? What bearing had it upon the words spoken by him? What ought it to have upon the lessons which those words convey to later generations ?

Much of this, it may be, we can but dimly guess. The inner life of those older prophets lies too far remote from us to be seen clearly; it is too high and deep for us to gauge and fathom. All that we can hope to do is to ascend to it from those lower analogies that lie closer to the range of our experience. The deep and earnest thinker, the large-hearted lover of his country falling upon evil days, witnessing evils that he cannot cure, may perhaps help us to understand it. To feel that he stands alone, that there is no one like-minded, to see all around him meanness and selfishness and intrigue, to look towards inevitable ruin, the world out of joint, and no one as yet born to set it right, to see a whole nation perversely going the wrong way, cowardly when it should be brave, frantic when it should be calm and self-controlled,—that has been the lot of

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some of the greatest men in the world's history. Who does not feel that that life-long martyrdom of theirs claims a special reverence and sympathy? Who does not own that all words of theirs come with a more solemn power, sounding through the length of ages, as with the voice of a trumpet, their notes of warning and rebuke? Like that, but higher in its mission, more awful in its solitude, sharper in its sufferings, must have been the position of him who was the last of the prophets. To him it was given to know more clearly the purposes of God, to see the calling of the people in all its wonderful glory, and therefore to measure the depth of the evil to which in their blindness they had yielded. Hypocrisy, formalism, selfrighteousness, unbelief, all the germs of the sectarianism of the Pharisee and the Sadducee, these were growing up in rank profusion. The Temple was polluted, the sacrifices unclean. Priests and people were alike forgetful of their true calling. The prophet was sent to bear witness against these evils, to speak sharp words, and utter terrible threats. Yet he did so with the feeling that for all immediate results his work would be utterly fruitless. The people were blind and deaf, and met all rebukes with the same obstinate hardness, with the same monotonous questions of selfdeceit and wilful ignorance:-'Wherein have we

despised Thy name? Wherein have we polluted Thine altar? Wherein have we wearied Thee?' Surely, the words of such a man, words which, if his own in one sense, determined by his character and position, were yet, in another sense, not his own, but the message from the Lord of Hosts, the utterance of the Eternal Spirit, ought to win our reverence. Surely they too come across the wide tracks of time, belonging not to the history of the past, but to all ages. If they unfold, as they do, more fully than any historian could trace them, the true causes of the decline and fall of Judaism, if they show how a people called to be the chosen of the Lord, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, might become 'contemptible and base,' even 'cursed with a curse,' we must believe that this was not written for them only, but for us also. It tells us how a Christian Church and a Christian people may, in like manner, lose its calling and election, and fail to do the work to which God has called it. It proclaims to us that just in proportion as either priests or people approximate to the state which the prophet's words bring before us with so terrible a clearness, in that proportion they are in danger of falling under the same curse; all the more in danger in proportion as they think they stand. We shall do well to examine ourselves to see whether the