reference to prophetic complications, unknown in the days of Moses, when revelation was attainable through Urim and Thummim.

The Deuteronomist or his interpolator, whether Jeremiah or some other prophet, is strangely ignorant of the purport of the language he attributes to divine. wisdom. True prophecy is attested by its fulfilment. All false prophets shall surely die. No prediction is, therefore, applicable to events extending beyond the lifetime of an inspired prophet, because if he died pending the fulfilment of his prophecies he would necessarily be pronounced an impostor by his contemporaries. Could Omniscience, therefore, devise no more reliable means of attesting revelation than the unsatisfactory course of waiting an undefined period for the dubious results of prophetic prediction, or the premature death of deceptive prophets? Was life endurable under conditions of expectancy, involving joy or sorrow, prosperity or ruin, life or death, as prophets might prove true or false exponents of destiny? Was not the very existence of the nation imperilled by the inevitable vacillation of its rulers, perplexed by the divergent predictions of rival prophets, advocating conflicting views of home and foreign policy, in the name of Jehovah ?

A remarkable instance of this form of prophetic strife is furnished by the contest between Hananiah and Jeremiah, in which the former advocated resistance to Babylon through an Egyptian alliance, and the latter counselled submission to Nebuchadnezzar as the will of Jehovah.1 We regret the absence of Hananiah's version of this great political question, involving the national

1 Jer. xxviii.

existence of the Hebrews; but, as the story reaches us through his rival, we are assured that he died prematurely as a false prophet-a result so analogous to the prophetic test of the Deuteronomist,' that the passage obviously belongs to the age of Jeremiah.

6

If prophecy is inseparable from these embarrassing conditions, could Jehovah have introduced fresh elements of confusion? In Deuteronomy xiii. we find the following remarkable passage, also assignable to the age of Jeremiah: If there arise among you a prophet or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign and the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams, for the Lord your God proveth you to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. And that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he hath spoken to turn you away from the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt.'

6

Again, in Ezekiel xiv. we read: And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the Lord have deceived that prophet; and I will stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel.'

We thus have true prophets dependent for attestation of their divine mission on the, possibly, tardy fulfilment of their predictions; impostors gifted with the power of working miracles that the Chosen Race

1 Deut. xviii.

may be lured to apostasy; and false prophets deceived by Jehovah Himself, and ruthlessly punished for irresponsible complicity in divine deception!

The contents of 1 Kings xxii. removes all doubt as to the practical meaning of these passages of Scripture. We there read of the alliance of Ahab, King of Israel, and Jehoshaphat, King of Judah, with the view of recovering Ramoth-Gilead from the King of Syria. At the suggestion of Jehoshaphat, Ahab consulted four hundred prophets respecting the prospects of the expedition, and received unanimous assurance of the destruction of the Syrians. Jehoshaphat, however, inquired whether there was no other prophet of Jehovah available for consultation. Ahab replied that there yet remained Micaiah, the son of Imlah, whom he hated for his unsatisfactory predictions. This prophet was, however, summoned to the presence of the kings, and contradicted his inspired brethren by forecasting the death of Ahab and the defeat of his army. This startling divergence of prophetic opinion he explained in the following manner: Hear thou, therefore, the word of the Lord. I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the Host of heaven standing by him on the right hand and on the left. And the Lord said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-Gilead? And one said on this manner, and another said on that manner. And there came forth a spirit, and stood before the Lord and said, I will persuade him. And the Lord said unto him, Wherewith? And he said I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And he said, Thou shalt persuade him and prevail also; go forth, and do so. Now, therefore, the

Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets, and the Lord hath spoken evil concerning thee.'

If this dramatic record of divine complicity in fraud and falsehood be true, Orthodoxy can no longer identify the tribal god of the Hebrews with the Supreme Being whom modern Christians worship; if it be false, so monstrous a calumny against the Deity finally discredits the claims of the Hebrew Scriptures to divine inspiration; but whether true or false, the scandal of these divergent prophecies destroys all confidence in Hebrew predictions, and warns us against accepting their imaginary fulfilment as confirmation of their divine origin.

Thus far the relationship of the ancient Hebrews to prophetic divination is clearly defined.

(i) They had true and false prophets.

(ii) True prophets falsely inspired by Jehovah.
(iii) The only means of testing the credibility of
prophecy was to wait its fulfilment or the
death of the prophet.

Is it not obvious that the nation, whose domestic and foreign policy was controlled by so disastrous a superstition, was doomed to destruction as a foregone conclusion?

There remains a yet more important aspect from which to view the prophetic superstition. It is obvious that, if supernatural prediction has any basis in fact, the miracle lies in foreknowledge of future events which would occur in their natural sequence whether predicted or not; and not in the miraculous fulfilment of those events in consequence of their prediction. The actors, also, in the scenes forecast by prophets, must be

unconscious of any design to accommodate their conduct to the prediction, or otherwise the prophecy simply produces its own fulfilment, and loses all claim to the miraculous. But the Hebrew Scriptures clearly show that prophets circumstantially announced impending events, inculcated their fulfilment as a religious duty, and thus evoked that pernicious superstition which prompted the zeal of fanaticism to co-operate with the Deity in blindly executing the decrees of His prophets. How vast and overwhelming an influence this superstition has exercised in the evolution of Christianity will appear at a later stage of our inquiries.

Thus armed with power to influence human thought, shall we blame the prophets if they sometimes adopted pious frauds to accomplish national purposes? The most remarkable instance of fictitious prophecy is, perhaps, furnished by that passage of Scripture in which Cyrus is named, more than a century before his existence, not by Isaiah, but by the 'Great Unknown' of the Captivity, who obviously personated a remote predecessor with the patriotic design of influencing Cyrus to restore the Hebrews to Palestine.1

In the first year of the reign of Cyrus,' says Josephus, God commiserated the captivity and calamity of the Israelites, as he had foretold by Jeremiah the prophet, that, after they had undergone a servitude of seventy years, he would restore them to the land of their fathers, and they should build their temple and enjoy their ancient prosperity. And these things did God grant them, for he stirred up the mind of Cyrus, and made him write this through all Asia: Thus 2 Antiq. xi. 1.

1 Isa. xliv. 28.