the background; he feels himself for the time being the mouthpiece of the Almighty.'[1]
And it was from one of these prophets that our Lord took the words of his first public utterance,[2]
'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, Because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.'
But not all inspiration was supposed to be the work of God, as we shall now see.
In the group of six Psychic Charismata, we arrive then at the last three, which we are calling Supernormal, to distinguish them from Healing, Powers, and Prophecy.
The first of these is the Discerning of Spirits, or 'discriminating between spirits'.[3] Commentators in the past have generally shirked this also, and have interpreted it as meaning 'to discern between distributions of the Holy Spirit'. But this has no meaning, since, if all manifestations came from the Spirit of God, there would be no cause to sift them. S. Paul also says quite distinctly, not the Spirit, but 'spirits' in the plural; and I think that unbiassed scholars to-day would agree with Schmiedel[4] that the apostle meant just what he said. Most people are still at the present day strongly prejudiced
- ↑ The Oracles of God, 1891, pp. 54, 55.
- ↑ Is. 61 1-2; Luke 418-19.
- ↑ διακρίσεις πνευμάτων. Weymouth translates this, unfairly enough, by 'discriminating between prophetic utterances'.
- ↑ Paul W. Schmiedel, Enc. Bib. iv. 4773.
