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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI THE SHEPHERD OF ISRAEL (Chap. xi.) Every reader of this book feels that in passing from the eighth to the ninth chapter he is making a distinctly marked transition to a new kind of writing. The first eight chapters are homogeneous. They have a resemblance to one another, and obviously form one whole; but this continuity is broken by the remainder of the book. It is not only that the style changes, nor only that the interpreting angel who has figured so largely in the first part disappears from the second, in which his services are quite as much needed; but the subject and character of the prophecies alter. In the first eight chapters the references to Zechariah's own time are continual, pointed, and obvious ; in the six remaining chapters there is not one allusion which obviously and without hesitation or dubiety can be referred to contemporary circumstances. In the former part of the book the prophet speaks of the half- built temple, of the gradually extending city, of the measurers, the masons, the stones, and the persons who were visible day by day in the streets of Jerusalem, and which he had only to name to call up the real object before the mind's eye. Every one of his allusions could at once be understood by the men who were then resident in Jerusalem; and all his utterances regarded matters which every one was daily speaking about. But no sooner do we read the first verse of the ninth chapter than we experience a sudden loss of this firm foothold among the well-known events of Zechariah's time. We seem to have made a step off terra firma into quaking bog, where we can walk only flounderingly. Up to the ninth chapter we advance in the clearest sunshine. We seestanding out in broad day every person or thing that the prophet has in view. But in chapter ix. we...