When I reflect upon the subject of the messenger of the covenant, and
observe the distinction taken in the prophets between the teaching and
suffering Christ,--the Priest, who was to precede, and the triumphant
Messiah, the Judge, who was to follow,--and how Jesus always seems to speak
of the Son of Man in a future sense, and yet always at the same time as
identical with himself; I sometimes think that our Lord himself in his
earthly career was the Messenger; and that the way is _now still preparing_
for the great and visible advent of the Messiah of Glory. I mention this
doubtingly.
* * * * *
What a beautiful sermon or essay might be written on the growth of
prophecy!--from the germ, no bigger than a man's hand, in Genesis, till the
column of cloud gathers size and height and substance, and assumes the
shape of a perfect man; just like the smoke in the Arabian Nights' tale,
which comes up and at last takes a genie's shape.[1]
[Footnote 1:
The passage in Mr. Coleridge's mind was, I suppose, the following:--"He
(the fisherman) set it before him, and while he looked upon it attentively,
there came out a very thick smoke, which obliged him to retire two or three
paces from it. The smoke ascended to the clouds, and extending itself along
the sea, and upon the shore, formed a great mist, which, we may well
imagine, did mightily astonish the fisherman. When the smoke was all out of
the vessel, it reunited itself, and became a solid body, of which there was
formed a genie twice as high as the greatest of giants." _Story of the
Fisherman_. Ninth Night.--ED.]
* * * * *
The logic of ideas is to that of syllogisms as the infinitesimal calculus
to common arithmetic; it proves, but at the same time supersedes.
_January_ 1. 1834.