Prophecy. Under this head we propose to treat of certain general aspects of the subject of permanent interest, reserving for the head of Pp.ophet what re- lates more personally to the organs or media of true prophecy, as found in the Bible. In doing so we make free use of the articles in Fairbaim's and Smith's Dic- tionaries.
I. Design of r mphe ci/. — In this respect we would de- fine prophecy as "God's communication to the Church, to be her light and comfort in time of trouble and per- plexity." Vitringa defines it as "a prediction of some contingent circumstance or event in the future received
by immediate or direct revelation." Dr. Pye Smith speaks of it lias a declaration made by a creature under the inspiration and commission of the omniscient God relating to an event or series of events, which have not taken place at the time the prophecy is uttered, and which could not have been certainly foreknown by any science or wisdom of man." Other writers say, " Proph- ecy is nothing but the history of events before they come to pass." Dean Magee dissents from this popular but erroneous view. In a lecture on the uses of prophecy he defines a prophet as " the religious teacher of his age, whose aim is the religious education of those whom he addresses." To have received a call and message direct from God, and to deliver it, is the essence of prophet- ism. The Jewish lawgiver in delivering moral and ceremonial precepts received from God, and our blessed Lord in the Sermon on the Mount, were prophets just as much as when they predicted the future of Israel (M'Caul, Aids to Faith). As a reaction from the gen- eral body of writers on prophecy, who exalt the predic- tive and neglect the moral element of God's communica- tion to man, there have arisen in Germany, and to some extent in our own land, writers who speak exclusively of the moral stream of light flowing through prophecy, and deny altogether its predictive character. Both errors will be avoided by bearing in mind that the word of prophecy was profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction, to the first recipients of the message, as well as for succeeding ages.
The usual view of prophecy as anticipated history virtually excludes from the roll the great Prophet who was its theme and author, Moses his distinguished pro- totype, John the Baptist his eminent forerunner, Elijah, Samuel, under the old covenant, as well as the apostles and prophets under the new. According to this view, prophecy is virtually limited to what the Spirit saith unto the churches in the four hundred years between Hosea and Malachi. and by the beloved John, the writer of the Apocalypse. But if we agree to regard the prophet as the forthteller, possessing the mitnus prce- dicandi— rather than the foreteller, possessing only the munus pi-adicendi—we see at once how the very highest place is assigned to our Lord and to Moses ; how John the Baptist was more than a prophet, as he stood with- in the actual dawn of the day of Christ, and as a relig- ious teacher did really more for the religious training of those whom he addressed than any of the prophets of the old covenant. We see, too, how naturally and clearly the earlier prophets were subordinate to Moses, so that the test of their commission was conformity to the lawgiver; and how appropriately the term is applied to the apostles of our Lord and Saviour, as charged by Christ with the whole ordering and establishing of the Church in its institutions, government, and progress. In fact, students of prophecy perpetually use the word in a non-natural sense. Hence the variety and discord- ancy of their interpretations. Our attention must be rigidly fixed on the natural and proper sense of the terms, if we would gain any satisfactory results.
In all communications from God to man two elements may be traced, the moral and the predictive. Neither element must be pressed or insisted on, so as to depress and exclude the other. Yet the moral element is the fundamental, to which the predictive is always subsid- iary. The moral element occupies the highest place in the communications made by our Lord, by Moses, by the apostles; the predictive element prevails in those who had the more ordinary gifts, as all their announce- ments appealed to the revelations made by Moses and by Christ. The testimony of Jesus as the author, and the testimony borne to Jesus as the theme, is the spirit of prophecy. According to this view prophecy is always didactic; the moral element is fundamental, the predic- tive is entirely subsidiary. All who bore testimony to Jesus before his incarnation were preachers of righteous- ness, and all who testify that Jesus is come in the flesh exercise the prophetical function.
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II. Value of Prophecy as Evidence of the Truth of in,— Davison, in his Discourses on Prophecy, fixes a "Criterion of Prophecy," and in accordance with it he describes " the conditions which would confi r co- gency of evidence on single examples of prophecy" in
Ihe following manner: first, "the known pr ulgation
of the prophecy prior to the event; sc> lly. the clear
and palpable fulfilment of it; lastly, the nature of the event itself— if, when the prediction of il was given, it lay remote from human view, and "as auch as could nol i u by any supposable effort of reason, or be de- on principles of calculation derived from prob- ability and experience" t Disc, viii, 378 >. AppU ing his test, the learned writer finds that the establishment of the Christian religion and the person of its Founder ... i. predicted when neither reason nor experience could have anticipated them ; and that the predictions respect- ing them have been clearly fulfilled in history. Here, then, is an adequate proof of an inspired prescience in the prophets who predicted these things. He applies hi^ test in the prophecies recorded oftbeJewish people, and their actual state, to the prediction of the great apostasy and to the actual Btate of corrupted Christian- ity, and finally ti> the prophecies relating to Nineveh, Babylon, Tyre, Egypt, the (shmaelites, and the lour Empires, and to the events which have befallen them; and in each of these eases be finds proof of the existence of the predictive element in the prophets.