Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/844

820 P R P H E T only the last waves beating on the shore after the storm which destroyed the old nation, but created in its room a fellowship of spiritual religion, had passed over ; they resemble the old prophets in the same imperfect way in which the restored community of Jerusalem resembled a real nation. It was only in so far as the community of faith still possessed certain external features of nationality that post-exile prophecy was possible at all, and very soon the care of the national or quasi-national aspects of religion passed altogether out of their hands into those of the scribes, of whom Ezekiel was the first father, and whose Torah was not the living word of prophecy but the Penta- teuchal code. From the time of Jeremiah downwards the perennial interest of Old-Testament thought lies in the working out of the problems of personal religion and of the idea of a spiritual fellowship of faith transcending all national limitation ; and these are the motives not only of the lyrics of the Psalter but of the greater theodiceas of Isa. xl.-lxvi. and of the book of Job. The theodicea of the prophets is national ; they see Jehovah s righteousness working itself out with unmistakable clearness in the present, and know that all that He brings upon Israel is manifestly just ; but from the days of Jeremiah 1 the fortunes of Israel as a nation are no longer the one thing which religion has to explain ; the greater question arises of a theory of the divine purpose which shall justify the ways of God with individual men or with His " righteous servant " that is, with the ideal community of true faith as distinct from the natural Israel. The discussion of these problems constitutes a quite distinct type of Old-Testament literature beginning with the book of the Great Unknown, which is now appended to the writings of Isaiah ; but this is an accident of arrangement that ought not to lead us to include among the prophetic writings proper a work so entirely different in origin and scope, and addressed not to an actual nation but to the ideal Israel, whose vocation is no longer political but purely religious. It will be evident even from this rapid sketch, neces sarily confined to a few of the most cardinal points, that Hebrew prophecy is not a thing that can be defined and reduced to a formula, but was a living institution which can only be understood by studying its growth and observing its connexion with the historical movements with which its various manifestations were bound up. Throughout the great age of prophecy the most obvious formal character that distinguished it was that the pro phet did not speak in his own name but in the name of Jehovah. But the claim to speak in the name of God is one which has often been made and made sincerely by others than the prophets of Israel, and which is suscep tible of a great variety of meanings, according to the idea of God and His relation to man which is presupposed. Every early religion seeks to realize such an intercourse with the object of worship as shall be two-sided ; when the worshipper approaches the deity he desires to have an answer assuring him of acceptance and divine aid. The revelation thus looked for may be found in natural omens, in the priestly lot or some similar sacral oracle, or, finally, in the words of a seer who is held to be in closer contact with the deity than common men. Broadly speaking these methods of revelation are found in all ancient religions, but no other religion presents anything precisely analogous to prophecy. It is true that the prophets absorbed the old seers, and that the Israelites, as we see in the case of the asses of Kish, went to their seers on the same kind of occasions as sent heathen nations to seers or diviners. There is sufficient evidence that down to the last age of the Judaean monarchy practices not essentially different from divination were current in all classes of 1 One might say from the days of Habakkuk. society, and were often in the hands of men who claimed to speak as prophets in the name of Jehovah. But the great prophets disallowed this claim, and the distinction which they draw between true prophecy and divination is recognized not only in the prophetical law of Deuteronomy but in earlier parts of the Pentateuch and historical books. " There is no augury in Jacob and no divination in Israel ; in due time it is told to Jacob and to Israel what God doth work " (Num. xxiii. 23). The seer, in the sense in which all antiquity believed in seers, is simply a man who sees what others cannot see, no matter whether the thing seen be of public or of mere private interest ; but the prophet is an organ of Jehovah s kingship over His people he sees and tells so much of the secret purpose of Jehovah as is needful for His people to know. We have already seen how Amos and Hosea put this (supra, p. 817 ), and it does not appear that they were introducing a conception of prophecy formally novel the new thing was their con ception of Jehovah s purpose. And so too with the fol lowing great prophets ; the important thing in their work was not their moral earnestness and not their specific pre dictions of future events, but the clearness of spiritual insight with which they read the spiritual significance of the signs of the time and interpreted the movements of history as proofs of Jehovah s actual moral sovereignty exercised over Israel. So long as the great problems of religion could be envisaged as problems of the relation of Jehovah to Israel as a nation the prophets continued to speak and to bring forth new truths ; but the ultimate result was that it became apparent that the idea of moral government involved the destruction of Israel, and then the function of prophecy was gone because it was essentially national in its objects. But meantime the relation of God to the prophet had acquired an independent significance ; the inner life of Isaiah during the long years when his teaching seemed lost, or of Jeremiah through the whole course of his seemingly fruitless ministry, was rich in experiences of faith triumphing over temptations and trials, of personal converse with God sustaining the soul in the face of difficulties hopeless to the eye of sense, which formed the pattern of a new and higher stage of religion in which the relation of the individual soul to God should be set free from those limitations which had been imposed by the conception that the primary subject of religion is the nation. But the religion of the OKI Testament did not become merely individualistic in becom ing individual, and now the problem was to realize a new conception of the society of faith, the true Israel, the collective servant of Jehovah in a word to form the idea of a spiritual commonwealth and to show how it was pos sible for faith to hold fast, in spite of all seeming contra diction, to the truth that Jehovah had chosen for Himself a spiritual people, every member of which was in truth the object of His saving and unfailing love, and which should ultimately in very deed inherit that glory of which the carnal Israel was unworthy. This is the post-prophetic problem which occupies the more profound of the later Old-Testament books, but first received its true solution in the gospel, when the last shreds of the old nationalism disappeared and the spiritual kingdom found its centre in the person of Christ. Old-Testament prophecy therefore forms only one stage in a larger development, and its true significance and value can only be realized when it is looked at in this light. In this as in all other matters of transcendental truth "wisdom is justified of her children"; the conclusive vindication of the prophets as true messengers of God is that their work forms an integral part in the progress of spiritual religion, and there are many things in their

teaching the profundity and importance of which are