future events, and his witness is historically sustained, if his teaching does not sustain loyalty to Jehovah, not only is it to be counted of no value, but he himself is to be counted worthy of death. He says:

"If there arise in the midst of thee a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and he give thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or unto that dreamer of dreams: for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Ye shall walk after the LORD your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him. And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken rebellion against the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed thee out of the house of bondage, to draw thee aside out of the way which the LORD thy God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put away the evil from the midst of thee." 1

If the prophet's message is luminous with truth, if it is inspiring, if it presents to the people a grander conception of God than they have before entertained and calls them back to a more righteous life in his service, then, and only then, is the messenger to be accepted. Not by any miraculous

1 Deut. xiii. 1-5.

quality, but by its religious spirit and character, is the teaching of the prophet to be measured. Such is the standard which the prophets themselves recognized as that by which all prophetic writings are to be judged.

It is not difficult to see how the other conception, that the prophet is primarily a foreteller, became prevalent. In the first place, he was in some sense a foreteller. There are two ways in which men are accustomed to decide on their course of action in a time of doubt. He who is charged with the responsibility of decision may endeavor to peer into the future, judge what will be the probable results of the alternative courses, and by the anticipated results determine the wisdom or the righteousness of the courses proposed. I say the righteousness, not merely the wisdom; for he who is accustomed to determine the righteousness of conduct by its results will naturally employ this method in determining the righteousness as well as the wisdom of any prospective course of action. Thus while this method is always the one pursued by the man of expediency it is not only pursued by him; it is also the method of the utilitarian. Such men serve a useful purpose; the immediate results of proposed action ought always to be taken into account, and such counselors compel us to take account of immediate results; they require the community to count the cost, which it always ought to do. But they are never far-sighted, for it is never possible for even the most sagacious mortal to foresee more

than the immediate outcome of any path of life, and this never with certainty. The other course of reaching a conclusion in such a time of doubt starts from a different premise and employs a different process. He who adopts it assumes as his premise that there are certain great principles, both of practical wisdom and of practical righteousness. On the irresistible force and immutable action of these principles he bases his judgment. The only problem is how to apply the principle, the truth of which he assumes, to the circumstances before him. If he is mistaken in his judgment of the principle the mistake is fatal; nothing can prevent inevitable disaster from following the course of action he advises. But if he is correct in his apprehension of the principle, his errors in application can be corrected from time to time as these errors are made manifest. When Thomas Jefferson, long before he or any man could have anticipated the Civil War, said in view of slavery, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,' Thomas Jefferson was a true prophet, not because a miraculous vision of future events was given to him, but because the sense of divine justice and the consciousness of human iniquity made him feel sure that unless the nation rid itself of its iniquity it would suffer the penalty threatened by divine justice. He who is endowed with a keen sensitiveness to moral principles, with intellectual capacity to apply those principles to national life, and with the insight which enables him to understand the

inward and real life of the nation, will be equipped with the foresight which will enable him to see not in detail, but in a large way- what will be the future of the nation.

Thus the Hebrew prophets, because they perceived that God was just, because they perceived the divine principles which rule in the world though the world understands them not, because they understood the relation of the national events in the midst of which they lived to the divine law and the divine Lawgiver, were able to forecast the future. They did this, not generally, if ever, by listening to some message whispered into their ears, as, according to the Mohammedan legend, the dove whispered the message into the ears of Mohammed, but by their knowledge that national well-being follows national righteousness and national death follows national iniquity, and by their further perception that, in a few faithful men willing to suffer for truth and righteousness in an epoch seemingly given over to the corruption of covetousness, there is a salt which will save the corrupt nation, a light which will lead it through its gloom to the day of the Lord. Because the prophet's predictions seemed marvelous to those who do not understand the inexorable operation of divine principles in national history, attention has been diverted from those principles which formed the real subject matter of the prophet's message to those apparently more marvelous predictions which were incidental to it. Hence, too often the students of prophecy have

read the books of the Hebrew prophets, not to see what great fundamental principles they inculcate, what are the laws of national life which they make clear, and which may be justly applied in our time and to our nation, but to see how strangely their predictions correspond with events long posterior to them.

1

This habit of dwelling on the marvelous has been strengthened by the rabbinical habit of reading into the Old Testament books what was not in the mind of their original writers. This rabbinical habit affected to some extent the writers of the New Testament books themselves. Thus, for example, Hosea, pleading with Israel, and setting before it the mercy and love of God, illustrated by the historical fact that God loved Israel when it was weak, feeble, good-for-naught, says, "When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt." It is as if the prophet said, speaking in the name of Jehovah, I knew you while you were still in bondage, and I chose you as the nation to bear the message of religious truth that God is and that he is a just God; for this purpose I chose, not the Phoenician race, mother of literature, not the Egyptian race, at once cradle and grave of civilization, not the Babylonian or Chaldean or Persian race with its wealth of territory and its concentration of power - I called you out of your bondage, a set of weak, willful, worthless slaves. When, centuries after Hosea has uttered 1 Hosea xi. 1.