[1] What words are these! What ideas! What radiances of glory
and hope for the long-afflicted Church! Nations abolishing
war and crimes, to cultivate righteousness and peace!
nations emerging from ignorance and idolatry, to join
themselves to the Church, and to walk in the light of the
Lord! _How marvellous that words like these should proceed
from the Hebrew prophets!_ that men of the most confined
education with regard to the Gentiles should thus lose the
glory of Israel in the overflowing glory of the converted
world! Can we ask for clearer proof that these holy men
were purely the organs of the Holy Ghost, and transported
in spirit to publish the righteousness of God to every
nation and language of the earth?--_Sutcliffe._
I would urge the thoughtful consideration of these verses
(2-9) on any one who is perplexed by the confident
assertion of writers who prefer vague declamation to close
investigation and reasoning, that the Hebrew prophets were
actuated by a bitter hatred of foreigners. He will, I
think, discover (from this and such like study) that they
were possessed by views and hopes of a philanthropy which
even our own times have not been able to extend: they
longed for fellowship with all men, under the only
conditions in which fellowship is possible; they desired an
universal communion of virtue, humanity, and goodness, and
could not be content to have a general license of vice,
brutality, and wickedness instead; and they advocated what
they saw, and what all history has proved, to be the only
way of avoiding the one and securing the other.--_Strachey._
[2] This verse shows that there will come a time when men shall
have found out that they are men and not brutes, and when
they shall settle matters, not by the force of their animal
powers, but by the force of superior intelligence.--_James
Wells._