Old Testament Prophecies

If the prophecies of the Old Testament are not rightly interpreted of Jesus / our Christ, then there is no prediction whatever contained in it of that / stupendous event -- the rise and establishment of Christianity -- in comparison / with which all the preceding Jewish history is as nothing. With the / exception of the book of Daniel, which the Jews themselves never classed / among the prophecies, and an obscure text of Jeremiah, there is not a / passage in all the Old Testament which favours the notion of a temporal / Messiah. What moral object was there, for which such a Messiah should come? / What could he have been but a sort of virtuous Sesostris or Buonaparte?

I know that some excellent men -- Israelites without guile -- do not, in fact, / expect the advent of any Messiah; but believe, or suggest, that it may / possibly have been God's will and meaning, that the Jews should remain a / quiet light among the nations for the purpose of pointing at the doctrine / of the unity of God. To which I say, that this truth of the essential unity / of God has been preserved, and gloriously preached, by Christianity alone. / The Romans never shut up their temples, nor ceased to worship a hundred or / a thousand gods and goddesses, at the bidding of the Jews; the Persians, / the Hindus, the Chinese, learned nothing of this great truth from the Jews. / But from Christians they did learn it in various degrees, and are still / learning it. The religion of the Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the / light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but / itself.