116 PROPHECY AND PROPHETS
PROPHECY AND PROPHETS
dawns on him, or certitude is reached, or conduct becomes plain, will also feel and say with certainty that it was God who gave him the result he reached. It might be rash to say that the experi- ence of such a devout mind is perfectly analogous to that of the prophetic mind, but the analogy is probably the nearest that can be found.
It may be said, therefore : (1) that the prophet's mind in revelation was not passive, but in a state of activity. Even the ' call ' to prophesy was not addressed to a mind empty or unoccupied with the interests of the nation. The ' call ' came to the three great prophets through a vision (Is 6, Jer 1, Ezk 1 ), but it is recognized that the ' vision ' contains strictly nothing new ; it is a combination of ideas and thought-images already Ij'ing in the mind. Isaiah, for example, had often thought of the Holy One of Israel, the King, previous to his vision ; he had often considered tlie sinfulness of the people, which he himself shared ; and no doubt he had forecast the inevitable fate of the people when J" arose to shake terribly the earth. These thoughts probably occupied his mind at the moment of his caU, for it came to him as he worshipped J" in the temple, and beheld His glory (cf. also Jer 1*"'°). Neither can the com- pulsion of which the prophets speak be regarded as anything physical. Even when Amos says, ' The Lord God speaks, who can but prophesy?' the constraint is only moral. And similarly when Jer. says, ' Thou didst induce (or entice) me, and I was induced ' (20'), he refers to the conflict in his own mind described in 1^"'° ; and even when he speaks of the word of J" being as a fire in his bones, com- pelling him to speak, when, to avoid persecution, he had resolved to be sUent, there is nothing more than such moral constraint as was felt by the apostles in the early days of the Church, or by one now with earnest convictions. Again, the allegation, often made, that the prophets did not understand their own oracles, can hardly be s>ib- stantiated. The passage 1 P l""- says that the prophets ' searched what time or what manner of time the spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto ' ; but first, it speaks of the prophets as a body, and of the spirit common to them all. It does not say that any prophet searched his own prophecies. The apostle probably generalizes the mstance referred to in Dn 9-, where Daniel searches the prophecies of Jeremiah. Further, tlie point to which the search was directed was the time or manner of time, nothing else. And this point, if indicated at all, was indicated so obscurely that it had to be inferred from the other contents of the prophecy (cf. Mt 24*^). (2) The kind of operation of the proplietic mind wlien reaching or perceiving truth was intuition. In the early times of pro- phecy the excitation or comparative ecstasy was common. This elevated condition of the intuitive mind was natural to an Oriental people, and in an early age. It was a thing particularly natural when truth was new ; wlien convictions regarding God, and man's duty in moments of great ])er- sonal responsibility or national trial, were for tlie first time breaking on the liuman mind. But, on the other hand, it is equally natural that as prophecy became more regular and acquired the character of a stable institution, such accom- paniments of revelation in the mind would gr.adu- ally disappear. And the same ell'ect would follow from the gradual accumulation of religious truths. These were no longer altogetlier new. As funda- mental verities they had entered into the conscious- ness of the nation. Wliat was new was only the application of tliem to the particular crisis in the inuividual's life or the nation's liistory, or that further expansion of them needful in order to make them applicable. But this was always new.
No truth uttered by a prophet has attained thi rank of a maxim of reflection or a deduction from prior truths. The prophet never comes before men inferring. His mind operates in another way. The truth reached is always a novelty to him, so that he feels it to be an immediate communication from God. But it is vain to speculate how the Divine mind coalesces witli the human, or to ask at what point the Divine begins to operate. Some have argued that the operation was dynamical, that is, an intensification of the faculties of the mind, enabling it thus to reach higher truth. Others regard the Di\'ine operation as of the nature of suggestion of truth to tlie mind. What is to be held, at all events, is that revelation was not the communication of abstract or general religious ideas to the intellect of the prophet. His whole religious mind was engaged. He entered into the fellowshij) of God, his mind occupied with all his own religious interests and all those of the people of God ; and his mind thus operating, he reached the practical truth relevant to the occasion.
iix. The False Prophets. — Reference has already been made in the historical sketch to the so-called false prophets, but the phenomenon of false prophecy has points of connexion also with the proplietic mind. A hard-and-fast line of de- marcation between true and false prophecy can hardly be drawn. The fact that prophecy was the embodiment of a religious-national spirit accounts for what is called false propliecy. When the spirit that animated the pro])het pursued pre- dominantly national ends, he was a false prophet ; when the ends pursued were religious and ethical the prophet was true, because in the religion of J" the national was transient, and the ethical abiding.