We have said nothing of the seventh feature, the stone cut out without

hands.  This foreshadows the kingdom of the Lord.  As members of the Body of

Christ with a calling, hope and inheritance, 'far above all', these things

only remotely touch us.  They belong, however, to the Christ we delight to

honour, and, though far removed from the scene of His earthly triumphs, we

can, with full heart, pray: 'Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as

it is in heaven'.

The reader is referred to the article entitled Feet of Clay (p.

219), for fuller exposition of the meaning of the terms.  We draw attention

to the chart on the preceding page.  It will be observed that, following the

rejection of their Messiah by Israel, and their own lo -ammi condition, an

undefined period is entered, the figure emerging again as the time draws near

for the resumption of God's dealings with Israel.  At the right -hand side of

the chart, the image is aligned with the Prophecy of the Seventy Weeks of

Daniel 9, the unrecorded gap corresponding with the indefinite drawing of the

legs of the image.  For a fuller exposition see the article Seventy Weeks9.

We believe we can safely assume that none of our readers will wish for

a lengthy disquisition on the so -called 'assured results of the Higher

Criticism', nor would they feel that the space at our disposal has been used

to profit by filling it with 'arguments' for and against the modernist theory

of two or more 'Isaiah's'.  When we can turn to no less than ten passages in

the New Testament that quote Isaiah by name as the author of the so -called

'former' portion (1 to 39), and eleven passages in the New Testament that

just as emphatically quote him by name as the author of the so -called

'latter' portion (40 to 46), and when we discover also that six different

writers are responsible for these statements, namely the Lord Himself,

Matthew, Luke, John, John the Baptist and Paul, then, for the believer, the

matter is at an end.  These twenty -one references to Isaiah by name are not,

of course, the total number of references to his prophecy.  Isaiah is quoted

eighty -five times in the New Testament from sixty -one separate passages

(some are repeated by more than one writer), and there are only seven books

out of the twenty -seven that form the New Testament canon that are without a

reference to his prophecy.  Twenty -three of these citations are from Isaiah

1 to 39, and 38 from Isaiah 40 to 66.  The unity of the authorship is further

demonstrated by the occurrence of certain words in both portions, which,

according to the so -called critics, are to be found in one portion only.  A

selection of these will be found in The Companion Bible (Appendix No. 79),

but a much more exhaustive list is given in the commentary by T.R. Birks (see

The Berean Expositor, Vol. 30, pp. 42 and 86).

Turning from the question of the authorship of the prophecy to matters

far more helpful, it is important at the outset that we should bear in mind

the two great sections of the book -- namely, chapters 1 to 35 and chapters

40 to 66.

The former portion of Isaiah ends with chapter 35, but this closing

chapter is so woven into the fabric of the latter portion that neither can be

looked upon as complete without the other.