that such an author would have been anonymous.  This dim figure, then, is the last of the mighty line of prophets, and gives strong utterance to the ’hope of Israel’!  One clear voice, coming from we scarcely know whose lips, proclaims for the last time, ‘He comes!  He comes!’ and then all is silence for four hundred years.  Modern critics, indeed, hold that the bulk of the Psalter is of later date; but that contention has much to do before it can be regarded as established.

The first point worthy of notice in this passage, then, is the concentration, in this last prophetic utterance, of that element of forward-looking expectancy which marked all the earlier revelation.  From the beginning, the selectest spirits in Israel had set their faces and pointed their fingers to a great future, which gathered distinctness as the ages rolled, and culminated in the King from David’s line, of whom many psalms sung, and in the suffering Servant of the Lord, who shines out from the pages of the second part of Isaiah’s prophecy.  This Messianic hope runs through all the Old Testament, like a broadening river.  ’They that went before cried, Hosanna!  Blessed is He that cometh.’

That hope gives unity to the Old Testament, whatever criticism may have to teach about the process of its production.  The most important thing about the book is that one purpose informs it all; and the student who misses the truth that ‘the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy’ has a less accurate conception of the meaning and inter-relations of the Old Testament than the unlearned who has accepted that great truth.  We should be willing to learn all that modern scholarship has to teach about the course of revelation.  But we should take care that the new knowledge does not darken the old certainty that the prophets ’testified beforehand of the sufferings of Christ and of the glory that should follow,’ Here, at the very end, stands Malachi, reiterating the assurance which had come down through the centuries.  The prophets, as it were, had lit a beacon which flamed through the darkness.  Hand after hand had flung new fuel on it when it burned low.  It had lighted up many a stormy night of exile and distress.  Now we can dimly see one more, the last of his order, casting his brand on the fire, which leaps up again; and then he too passes into the darkness, but the beacon burns on.

The next point to note is the clear prophecy of a forerunner.  ’My messenger’ is to come, and to ‘prepare the way before Me.’  Isaiah had heard a voice calling, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord,’ and Malachi quotes his words, and ascribes the same office to the ‘messenger.’  In the last verses of his prophecy he calls this messenger ‘Elijah the prophet.’  Here, then, we have a remarkable instance of a historical detail set forth in prophecy.  The coming of the Lord is to be immediately preceded by the appearance of a prophet, whose function is to effect a moral and religious reformation, which shall prepare a path for Him.  This is no vague ideal, but definite announcement of a definite fact, to be realised in a historical personality.  How came this half-anonymous Jew, four hundred years beforehand, to hit upon the fact that the next prophet in Israel would herald the immediate coming of the Lord?  There ought to be but one answer possible.