Again, a few chapters further on, he sings:--
"There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse A Branch shall grow out of his roots. The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him; The spirit of wisdom and understanding, The spirit of counsel and might, The spirit of knowledge, and fear of the Lord. With righteousness shall he judge the poor, And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth."
Then follow vivid pictures of a golden age on earth, beneath his sway, when all enmities and ferocities even of the inferior animals shall cease, and universal love and joy pervade the earth.
In the fifty-third of Isaiah we have again the sable thread of humiliation and sorrow; the Messiah is to be "despised and rejected of men;" his nation "hide their faces from him;" he "bears their griefs, and carries their sorrows," is "wounded for their transgressions," is "brought as a lamb to the slaughter," is "dumb before his accusers," is "taken from prison to judgment," is "cut off out of the land of the living," "makes his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death," and thence is "raised again to an endless kingdom."
Thus far the tide of prophecy had rolled; thus distinct and luminous had grown the conception of a future suffering, victorious Lord and leader, when the Jewish nation, for its sins and unfaithfulness, was suffered to go to wreck. The temple was destroyed and the nation swept into captivity in a foreign land.
But they carried everywhere with them the vision of their future Messiah. In their captivity and sufferings their religious feelings became intense, and, wherever they were, the Jews were always powerful and influential men. Daniel, by his divine skill in spiritual insight, became the chief of the Chaldean magi, and his teachings with regard to the future Messiah may be traced in those passages of the Zendavesta which predict his coming, his universal dominion, and the resurrection of the dead. Everywhere through all nations this scattered seed of the Jews touched the spark of desire and aspiration--the longing for a future Redeemer.
In the prophecies of Daniel we find the predictions of the Messiah assuming the clearness of forewritten history. The successive empires of the world are imaged under the symbol of a human body, with a head of gold, a breast of silver, body and thighs of brass, legs and feet of iron. By these types were indicated the Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Greek and Roman nations, with their successive rule. In prophetic vision, also, a stone was without hands cut out of the mountains, and it smote the feet of the image, so that the whole of it passed away like the chaff of the threshing-floor.