it is, that the prophet spake for God, that he spake according to the mind of God, that he spake by commandment and commission of God, and that his commission was not a mere general preliminary consecration to an office, but a constantly renewed obligation to speak and supply of what to say on every specific occasion. The prophet is one who speaks for God, and being under an impulse to speak which he cannot repress, feels that he is speaking from God, and that what he utters is God's truth. These are statements to which all parties will subscribe, but they will not all use the language in the same sense. All will say "God" and "truth" and "for" and "from," but these words express nothing like the same ideas to them. What ideas such words express to ordinary believers in revelation is well known. But the ideas which a large number of scholars, who regularly use the words, express by them, may be put into such a paraphrase as the following. All truth, they say, is divine, god-like, and given of God. The thoughts of, God are expressed in the world in things, and in the order of things. But man was not made to be a stranger to these eternal thoughts. He was meant to discover them, and appropriate them, and let them rule over him. The heart of man contains in it, folded up like so many germs, deepest spiritual truths; let the fostering warmth of heaven, or of any work of God in providence or in creation, but fall upon them, and the germs will live and open and expand into blessed fruits. The human heart is a lyre well strung, and hung to catch every wind; the most fitful vagrant breeze that blows will bring some heavenly melody out of it. Thus all truth is evolved by the mere expanding of the mind under the ordinary conditions of providence. And the truths thus uttered are divine truths, and they who utter them are prophets. And thus, as the race climbs the ladder of advancement, truth after truth emerges from its deep heart into light and general acceptance. The men in whose souls such truths spring up, who feel themselves seized and arrested by them, and who are hurried on by an unconquerable impulse to proclaim them, these are the prophets of humanity. Such men are not peculiar to one race more than to another; to one faith more than to another. They are found in Greece as well as in Judæa, in India and Arabia alike. They belong to the infancy and youth of the human race, when truth was yet scanty, and when humanity was not yet sure of its relations to Godhead-when it was in the process of realizing itself and its God, and its awfully mysterious relations to him. Now, when all this has been fully lived out and through by some man or family of men, often and in many diverse conditions, when religious and all high truth has passed out of the region of intuition and fiery feeling into that of reflective thought and calm experience and recognition, the prophetic order is no longer wanted, is indeed no longer possible. The prophet, impulsive, inspired, borne along and overmastered by the grasp of some new truth, and | the deep far consequences which its conception opened up before him, has given place to the teacher, calm, and scientific, finely and frigidly ratiocinative and methodical. This is the "natural" theory of prophecy, and it is based on two or three broad principles which it assumes, such as the following: that the development of pure religious truth is as much part of the task of mankind as the development of ethical or physical truth-that all the conditions of this development are given in nature and history-and that as to one branch of the human family was given the development of the ideas of law and order, say the Roman, and to another the development of the ideas of beauty, say the Greek, so to the Jew was committed the great task of worship and religion. And it being in these spheres that truth lays hold of men with the greatest power, and urges them to the declaration of it with an irresistible force, it is on the scene of Jewish history that the prophet is seen to greatest advantage and almost in his ideal perfection. One cannot say easily how near this theory may approach the view commonly held in the churches. Its phraseology is sometimes vague, and when used by some men may contain much, just as in the mouths of others it may contain little. But the two theories can meet on this common ground, that what the prophets uttered was truth. And when results agree methods need be less closely scrutinized. And the way sometimes adopted of repudiating everything which does not come up to a fixed standard, and taking nothing unless we can get all from men, is not wise. Rather, if men will go a mile with us, let us thank them for their good company so far, and not upbraid them because they refuse to go with us twain. Certainly at parting we shall tell them they had better come on. But if they will not, we shall say it is well they have done so much. It is often seen that when one man does not go so far as another, he carries more with him the distance that he goes. The ordinary theory seems to want something needful to satisfy those minds that have recourse to another. What they want, perhaps, is that which goes under the favourite name of solidarity. They feel that all God's manifestations of Himself must be connected, that they must all belong, so to speak, to the same piece. And in like manner that all discoveries of truth by men must have much in common, and that whatever man does, in whatever sphere of his activity, is capable of being scientifically estimated. This is not a controversial paper, and I will only add a sentence or two to show that the theory of prophecy we form involves in it important consequences. All prophecy is one, is of a kind. The first prophet and the last, and every link between them, have one constitution, and speak truth in one way and from one source. There cannot be more in the flower than in the bud. Any prophet had in him the same elements as the prophet of Nazareth. If there was no Spirit of God in the prophet, then there was no Deity in Christ. A prophet, then, according to the meaning and usage of the word, was one who "spake for God." This involved three things: God and man, and one who was the medium of communication between them. This medium was the prophet. He could not be a prophet unless he spake to men; he could not be a prophet unless he spake from God, as his mouth-piece. As Amos says: "The lion roars, who will not fear? the Lord God speaks, who can but prophecy?" Such a definition, a speaker from God, allows a very extended sphere of action to the prophet. Particularly, we cannot restrict prophecy, as it used to be restricted, to prediction. So far as we see, prediction was actually an element in the activity of most of the prophets, even in that of Christ. But it was the least element in the activity of all of them as well as of Him. A few sentences about His own death, and the destruction of Jerusalem, and the end of the world-sentences which, though predictive, involve, too, the deepest truths of Christianity, and have almost nothing of contingency in them-are almost all that He uttered which can be called prediction, although some of His miracles, and many incidents in His life, demonstrate His foreknowledge. And perhaps the same proportion might be found between the predictions of the prophets and their general teaching, as exists between the predictions of our Lord and the whole mass of His teaching. The prophet was essentially a man of the present, determined in his deliverances by the necessities of his own time; and only lifting the veil of the future when it was needful to cheer or to soberise the hearts of his contemporaries by the sight of what was certainly about to come. But the idea of a prophet is, one nearer to God than other men, possessed in that way of His secret, and under pressure to declare it to the world; as Amos says again, "Surely Jehovah doeth nothing but He revealeth His secret unto His servants the prophets;" and "The Lord God speaks, who can but prophecy?" Hence such men as Abraham are called prophets; as it was said to Abimelech, "Restore unto the man his wife, for he is a prophet" (Gen. xx. 7). And in the same way it is said of the patriarchs: "Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm" (Ps. cv.) The prophet is the bearer of God's revelation in the world-the bearer and the utterer, whether he bear it consciously or no, and whether he utter it in words or no. The person charged with God's truth and coming abroad among men, so that such truth gets divulged, is God's prophet to men. Generally, or perhaps always, the prophet will be conscious of being charged with the truth; even the patriarchs must to such an extent have understood their mission. And generally, too, though not always, the way of divulging the truth will be by speech; but sometimes by signs and miracles and judgments. Thus we might exhaust the conditions of prophecy by saying that it required knowledge of truth pertinent to the time and the feeling of pressure to declare it. time. There is no such thing as prophesying or even speaking at large in Scripture. There was an occasion for every scripture. It had a particular application when first uttered. It has also other applications, because though circumstances change, principles remain the same. Prophecy was the speaking of divine truth relevant to the occasion when it was spoken. Now, to go into this question of relevancy in detail, would be to discuss a question far too wide for such a place as this, the question of the connection of prophecy with history in Israel. It is certain that there was such a connection, and that it was intentional, and, as we might say, organic. The nation was put through certain evolutions historically, that prophecy might deduce and apply their lessons. And this also is true, that these historical evolutions were of a kind containing in them much more moral teaching than the processes of ordinary history, though teaching of the same kind. The Jewish history teaches the same lessons as ordinary history, but in a way much more condensed and perspicuous. And prophecy deduces these lessons. Prophecy is the philosophy of history. It is history become conscious and expressing its own meaning. But prophecy is not the expression of the meaning of ordinary, but of Jewish, history. And Jewish history containing two factors-human activity as in ordinary history, and a supernatural divine guidance: prophecy must contain two factors also-human insight, and divine illumination. The question whether prophecy and history are properly two co-ordinate things that fit exactly into one another, but are both independent; or whether prophecy be not rather secondary, the institutions and condition of the people at any time being the primary or mould that gave it its shape, is one no doubt difficult to answer. If prophecy were secondary, then the way the prophets on all occasions reached their prophecies, would be a moral road, that is by reflection and illumination on the nature of the kingdom of God, and on its present circumstances, and thus they would attain to know what events must come about in order to its realizing the end set before it, and thus they would be able with certainty to predict them. Little is known of these things. Perhaps little can be known. But few attempts have been seriously made to know much. Men have been scared away by the idea, that all this region is beyond the management of the mind. But whatever kind of state it was that the minds of the prophets were in, it is a state in which the human mind may be, and any such state ought to be capable of being intelligently estimated. But there is the closest connection between the prophetic truth delivered at any time, and the historical circumstances in which it was delivered. Thus Joel applies the great general lessons of God's providence the locusts and the drought. He has hardly a prediction which is not at the same time an announcement of some necessary truth. He moves amidst broad principles of religion, hardly getting beyond the first Prophecy was the utterance of truth pertinent to the promise in his Messianic predictions: "I will put en mity between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise His heel." A conflict and a victory—the world and the church, and the triumph of the latter and her ultimate felicity after great siftings-all is general, such as suits a time of peace before Israel has come into hostile relations with the great empires about her. But already in Amos this is altered. He threatens the people with the Assyrian power, which shall carry them captive beyond Damascus. The prophets were the bearers of the idea of the constitution in them the consciousness of the constitution resided. Now, this position of theirs being so general, needing men of such diverse types of mind and character, so as to be adapted to enter into whatever crisis the state had reached, and apply to it the principles of the constitution, explains why the prophets formed no caste. They were not, like the priests, a tribe. The functions of the latter were more mechanical. Little talent was needed. A pure personal character sufficed. But the prophetic office required men of intellect and breadth, very often of great personal courage and weight; men of wide sympathies, and skill, and policy, who could be diplomatists, or tribunes, or king-makers, as the exigency of the time required. Hence it was needful that they could be selected from the whole extent of the nation. Wherever a natural character was found adapted to the need of the time, he might be called and commissioned to exercise the prophet's office, whether he was one of the blood-royal like Zephaniah, or a poor herdsman of the south like Amos. It can hardly be questioned that the highest talent in the nation was draughted into the prophetic office, for to do great works God selects worthy instruments, and it is scarcely conceivable that higher genius could have existed among the people at any time than is displayed by Joel, and Micah, and Isaiah. Leaving, then, this particular side of the pertinency of the prophetic oracles, the pursuit of which would take us down through the whole course of the history to inquire how the prophet suited his words to the successive historical relations in which the people stood politically to those without them, and to the successive social conditions which the nation passed through during its life as a people, it is of more consequence to consider the relations in which the prophet stood to those elements in the state that were essential and invariable. What was the place of prophecy among the other permanent institutions in the state? It was a historical institution, and we seek to know what were its functions. Now, prophecy in this sense arose after the constitution had been settled. No doubt, if Abraham, as mediating between God and the world, as bearer of God's revelation, which was at this time almost condensed into the covenant of promise, "In thee and in thy seed shall all families of the earth be blessed”—if Abraham was called a prophet, and truly, for no one ever was the medium of a higher revelation from God than this, so also was Moses. And when the predicting the rise of a prophet in after-times, whom the New Testament recognizes as Christ, he says: A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you like unto me." And the Old Testament knows no such high prophetic position as that of Moses: "There arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face" (Deut. xxxv. 10). But when we now speak of prophecy we restrict the term to that office which arose within the Israelitish constitution. Certainly the office of Moses in ordering the constitution was partly prophetic. He mediated between God and man in the matter of revelation. He laid God's will before men. The great principles of law and morality came by him to the world. He was the prophet less of the Jews than we might say of mankind. But he was more than a prophet. He combined in himself for a time all the powers and functions of the new constitution. And in truth there arose no prophet like unto him, for those who followed chiefly applied his work to their own time. But the prophetic office, as we are now speaking of it, was a machinery for carrying out the constitution. That constitution was supposed to exist. It had fixed laws. The prophets understood them, and explained them, and applied them to the constantly altering circum-giving it flexibility and novelty of application. Ile de stances of the people. They were the bearers of the idea of the theocracy, entrusted with it, commissioned to carry it out till it reached its final intention. But now, as the prophets were the bearers of the idea of the theocracy, the extent of their functions could only be learned by understanding well what this constitution was, and that is not easy. But at least, in it, as everywhere else, men might be considered as individuals, as an ecclesiastical organism, and as a state. These are the three relations in which men stand to God. And the prophet was the medium of God's revelation to the people in these three aspects. This made them always preachers; sometimes ecclesiastical reformers; and on rarer occasions politicians. One sometimes sees a fountain sending out a flood of water which divides into several channels. In the time of winter it becomes congealed, and the channels are covered with ice, beneath which runs the stream. But at the source the spring is still fluid. God's revealed will was condensed and congealed in the institutions of the State, and the prophet was the point at which it was still fluid. For all other ways of knowing God's will seem gradually to have ceased. For a time a kind of mechanical application under the direction of the priesthood was resorted to, called the Urim and Thummim; but this, by-and-by, fell into desuetude. God withdrew, and no longer spoke through it. And gradually the prophet alone rose to be His appointed organ of utterance. And the prophet-the living consciousness of all the institutions of the State —took up the law and made it alive and powerful, scended into the history, and the history became in him articulate, and spake through him its meaning and tendency to the nation. He seized the spirit that lay imprisoned in every office and rite, and stripping off the outer form, displayed it to the eyes of the people. Thus, first of all, in relation to the individual men in the nation, the prophets were moral teachers. They everywhere chastised vice and sensuality, and drunkenness, and the too common oppression of the poor by the powerful, a vice that seems ineradicable from Oriental society. Thus Hosea, one of the sternest moralists that have lived, runs up in unflinching words the catalogue of offences: "In swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery they break out, and blood toucheth blood, therefore shall the land mourn." They everywhere hold up before the people the inevitable consequence of these sins-political dissolution. From the combination of these two dutiesa reprover or guardian of the morals of the people, and an out-looker or watcher for events that shall develop the present crisis, and be the punishment or reward of the people's action the prophets received the name of watchmen or out-lookers (Is. xxi. 11). But this idea was most fully realized in later times, when the State was hastening to dissolution (Ezek. iii. 17). Again, as ecclesiastics, the prophets often denounced the people's carelessness in sacrificing-the perfunctoriness and routine of their ecclesiastical performances; as Isaiah: "Bring no more vain oblation-incense is an abomination unto me." And Amos v. 21: "I hate, I despise your feast-days; I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. Take away from me the noise of thy songs; but let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." Everywhere the prophets seek to recall the people to the real meaning of their ecclesiastical rites, and everywhere they exalt this meaning above the mere ritual. "I will have mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt-offering," says Hosea. And Micah : "Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? He hath showed thee, O man, what is just, and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with thy God?" And thus even in teaching a great difference existed between them and the priests. The latter merely taught the rites to be performed; the prophets drew out the spiritual truths everywhere underlying the ritual. The text of all prophecy is the Book of Deuteronomy. That book is a homily on the constitution. It is the Sinaitic covenant and the redemptive history translated into its principles. And the prophets are never weary appealing to it. Indeed, so singular is the similarity, that many critics maintain that Deuteronomy is a compilation from the prophets; that it is the Mosaic constitution from the view of prophecy of the age of Hezekiah or Manasseh. Finally, the constitution being a State of which God was king, and the prophets being charged with leading it on to its true consummation, they became statesmen. And no land has seen truer patriotism or profounder political wisdom than these prophets displayed; nor has the love of country ever led to greater sacrifices than were borne by Jeremiah and Isaiah and Urijah. And reference need only be made to the history of these men, and to those sharp interviews between Isaiah and Ahaz, between Elijah and Ahab, between Jeremiah and Zedekiah, to show both the wisdom and the influence which they possessed. HARMLESS SUPERSTITIONS: CAN WE INDULGE THEM IN CONSISTENCY WITH FAITH IN GOD? M ANY of our readers must be aware that the minds of their friends, and, perhaps, their own minds, are infested with little beliefs of the nature of superstition. Many people, for example, for some centuries at least, of this country, have disliked to commence any enterprise on a Friday. A particular kind of dream makes them miserable, with apprehensions that it, or the contrary of it, will shortly happen in their waking lives. And so on. Now, no one in this century professes to hold such ideas, and when they are brought forward in society every one laughs at them. But the laughter, in an extraordinarily large number of cases, is insincere. A great many educated people, a great many intelligent people, a great many people of all ranks of life, and of both sexes, believe in these things, and give the best practical proof of their belief by this,-they act upon them. For example: A superstition, connected with the idolatry of the ancient Romans, and indeed with that of a larger part of Europe, forbade marriages in the month of May. It would offend the gods, and therefore they abstained from it. Now the belief has come down to modern times, without any reason for it surviving—or at least the reason now has gone back to a more primitive form of heathenism, and instead of "gods" we are afraid of the "unknown powers." But in a large part of Great Britain such marriages are held to be unlucky. Of course, it is only the uneducated class whom you will get to allege this in so many words; and even they, when taxed with it, will repudiate any real belief in such a fancy-and much more, of course, people of refinement and education. But let the thing be put to the proof by the only possible test-namely, by practice-and what do you find? There are scarcely any marriages performed in Scotland at all during the month of May. At the cost of very great inconvenience to all parties concerned, they are hurried on into the previous days of April, or kept back till the first days of June; and the crowded intimations in the newspapers at both of these times, contrasted with nearly a blank for the whole month between, prove sufficiently what is the state of feeling of the population. And any one who chooses to try may satisfy himself that this is not confined to the uneducated, or to those who confess their belief in the ill-luck of such a marriage. Others do not confess their belief. But they prove their belief by their practice; which is more than can be said in all cases for the beliefs which they do loudly confess, and the proof of which would be of infinite value. The larger one's acquaintance becomes with persons around us, the more astonishing is the number of cases (preponderating, of course, in the female sex) where superstitions of this kind are found to have a firm though secret hold. And at the present day these people are of all kinds. Some of them are absolutely irreligious, and even (apart from these superstitions) completely sceptical. Others are truly and deeply Christian. And every shade between these contributes its proportion to the vast army of people in the nineteenth century, who, whether they believe in God or not, believe in what is lucky and unlucky. Now, we do not find practically that arguments of reason-arguments pointing out the folly and baselessness of such notions-have much weight with such people. Rational training can do a great deal with the young, and if these friends of ours had enjoyed it in childhood, it might have saved them from such fancies. But fancies of all kinds, once established, are difficult to reason with; and superstitious fancies especially. For, as we have said, these superstitions are generally not confessed; and scarcely any human being alleges that he has ground for positively believing in one of them. What they do allege, occasionally, and what they always feel without saying it, is this,-"These things have been believed for centuries. I do not know that they are true; but how can I be sure that they are not? How do I know what unknown influences there are surrounding human lives? The thing has been said to be unlucky, and why should I take the risk of it?" Especially where a great deal is said to be involved, as in many of these cases, life and death, or, in the instance of marriage which we have given, one's whole future happiness here, you find even intelligent and devout people often say to themselves :— "How the future is to turn out I have no security. So far as my own power over it is concerned, it is a game of chance. Why then, at a critical moment, should I provoke unknown and boundless dangers, by doing what others abstain from-by doing what is said at least to be unlucky, and what, for all I know, may turn out to be really so?" Now, to such arguments reason has very little to reply. All it can say is, that the superstitious fancy has no basis to warrant rational belief. But then that is not denied. Nobody says it has any basis. Nobody professes to have a rational belief in it. All that is said is, that it may be true; that we have no security against it; and that in this uncertainty it is not safe to run the risk. It is not reason, but religion, that must make the effective reply. But that reply is very clear from Scripture, and very weighty. All belief in luck is, to the extent in which it exists, disbelief in God. And every particular act in which we either do anything because we think it may be lucky, or omit anything because it may be unlucky, is a sin. It may seem very superfluous to sit down to prove this; but so long as there are really good people who are tyrannized over by such ideas, it is necessary that they have the truth upon this subject constantly brought before them. When a person does a thing because it is lucky, he does not do it, on the one hand, because he thinks it has any natural tendency whatever to produce the good sought, or because he imagines there is any natural connection between the two things as cause and effect. The idea of luck excludes this natural connection. Nor does he do it, on the other hand, as an appeal to God, calling for His interference in some other way than by the ordinary operation of nature. His doing it for luck equally excludes this directly pious appeal. An appeal to luck, therefore, is an appeal to an unknown power-outside nature, certainly, but also apart from God—to do some good thing for us in our future life. Now, nothing is clearer in Scripture than that the whole future life of every one of us, unknown as it is to ourselves, is known to God, and is His care, alike in the greatest and in the smallest parts of it. "Not a sparrow falleth to the ground without your Father." God's providence is a particular providence; and there can be no region of mere luck possible, unless it falls outside the providence of God. All this applies even to those who do not know God or trust Him, and to those to whom His call has not come. But all men under the gospel, and God's children especially, are absolutely called to trust their whole lives, their whole future, to God, and to God alone. Even the sparrow falls according to His law. But “ye are of more value than many sparrows. And the very hairs of your head are all numbered." Now, any belief in luck is a belief in a region of life outside the divine providence, and beyond the divine protection, and for which we cannot claim the divine promise; and every act by which we invoke this unknown power of luck is at once an expression so far of unbelief in God's power, and a refusal to trust Him. Besides, it is the very essence of heathenism. Idolatry, or the worship of images, is not its essence; that is a later and rather a graceful variation. The essence of heathenism is the worship founded on the fear of unknown powers. Luck and Unluck are the two great gods that, under names innumerable, rule all the nations; and their worship is declared in Scripture to be antagonistic to that of God. "Learn not," said the prophet to Israel "learn not the way of the heathen, and be |