Professor Lyon's Lecture.

With the cuneiform inscriptions and the prophets Professor Lyon completed yesterday the course of public lectures. He said that the inscriptions interpret or illustrate every branch of Old Testament study, Genesis, the history, the poetry, the religion, and, to a special degree, the prophets. The Hebrew prophet is not, as the popular notion too often makes him, primarily a student of the distant future, whose chief function is predictive. On the contrary he is a reformer, a preacher of righteousness, a man of affairs, concerned with the present, and rarely, if ever, looking to the future except to draw thence new arguments for in fluencing the lives of his contemporaries. The picture of the future is such as is needed by the present. Isaiah and Jeremiah present the gloomy prospect of captivity in Assyria and Babylon, while a later prophet, just before the exile period closes, points in glowing terms the glories of the return to Judea. The prophet was in an important sense, a man of his time, and he always appeared in connection with great national epochs which demanded his presence. As men of their times, occupying a definite place in the history of the world, the prophets are elucidated by every investigation that sheds light on their times. This the inscriptions do more fully than any other line of study. By making the general course of contemporary history in western Asia clear, by furnishing precise chronological data, and by clearing up a multitude of references in the prophets to Babylonian and Assyrian matters, the cuneiform inscriptions are the best friend to the student of the prophets. The so-called "contract tablets," by revealing all phases of the social life at Babylon while the Jews were there in exile in the sixth century B. C., are particularly helpful, because they show the influences under which the Jewish con contemporaries of the prophets were living. These influences, polytheism excepted, were certainly far better than one could have supposed before the reading in recent years of the contract tablets.