Commentary upon the Prophecy of Isaiah

After that Babylon was taken, use and experience §4taught them, that those things which they had learned in times part from the mouth of the Prophets, had not been foretold at random nor in vain. Notwithstanding, there was an other cause why the Lord commanded that the ruin of Babylon and other places with it was foretold: not that the Babylonians had any profit at all by these prophecies, neither yet the other Nations, as though these writings came to them.

After that Babylon was taken, vse and experience §4taught them, that those things which they had learned in times part from the mouth of the Prophets, had not been foretold at random nor in vaine. Notwithstanding, there was an other cause why the Lord commanded that the ruine of Babylon and other places with it was foretold: not that the Babylonians had any profit at all by these prophecies, neither yet the other Nations, as though these writings came to them.

Another cause then was this, God meant by §5this consolation to assuage the sorrow of the faithful, lest they should grow out of heart, as if their estate had bin worse then that of the heathen, ⟨p. 143⟩if they should have seen them escape the hand of God altogether without punishment. For if so be the monarchy of Babylon should have continued safe, the Jews would not only have thought they had served the Lord in vain, and that the covenant which he had contracted with Abraham had been to no purpose, seeing strangers and wicked men were better dealt withal then the elect people of God: but they might also have entered into a worse suspicion, to wit, that God had favoured these cursed thieves, who trod all justice and equity under their feet by their robberies and seditions; truly they §1might by and by have thought either ye God