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propitiate his offended majesty, and supplicate his royal favor. The Prophet-the "seer," or man of vision, as he was called at first - was the delegate of Jehovah to his people. He was emphatically a man of action and popular address. His sphere of activity was abroad among the people. His influence was one of the determining forces in each critical exigency of the state. In the civil and political life of the nation, as well as in the causes of its religious thought, his position is at once indispensable and unique.

The authority and prestige of such an office were sustained by a numerous, well-recognized body. The class of men called Prophets were reckoned, not by solitary individuals, but by companies, and even by hundreds.* Especially as the ritual establishment acquires coherency and shape, they appear more and more distinctly in the exercise of their peculiar function. Samuel, in his restoring or recasting of the national polity, gathered them in groups, and established schools for their special training. Young men of forward and active genius thronged together in them, to learn the art of minstrelsy, and the use of speech and writing, together with such mechanical or medical skill as the age could furnish. David's faithful companion in exile, and counsellor in the decline of his strength, the prophet Gad, affords (says Ewald) a probable example of the associations of this early culture. It was a noble conception of the last and greatest of the Judges, wonderful for that age, and invaluable in the after-history of the nation. Samuel, more than any other man, is to be regarded as the father of the long line of Hebrew prophets. The office of Moses, indeed, in the reverent view of a late posterity, finally resolved itself into that of a prophet, a conception so strikingly presented in the book of Deuteronomy; but his true work was too complex and peculiar to admit so definite a title. The prophetic mantle had fallen on Miriam and on Deborah, to the enduring glory of Hebrew womanhood; and special messengers, charged with special warnings, appear here and there, on the page of the scanty annals. But under Samuel, Prophecy first became (so to speak) a Hebrew institution and a fixed fact. Not hereditary,

* See 1 Samuel x. 10, xix. 20; 1 Kings xviii. 4, xxii. 5.

like the priesthood, or of man's appointment, as any magistrate's function, it depended essentially on a Divine call, and on the moral aptitude of a man's soul. Institutions could only guide, train, instruct, and put to actual service, the spirit which came by its own laws, free as the unfettered wind. The "Schools of the Prophets," with their music strangely fascinating, their sacred discipline, their gathering and concentrating of the fresh religious zeal there might be in the body of the people, were of Samuel's foundation. And this institution of Prophecy the fountain-head of the world's noblest poetry, and in after-times the bold protest against tyranny, the altar-fire of the nation's faith, the sacred hearth and shrine of a hope that should have its fulfilment in One who should be the world's spiritual Sovereign and the Prince of Peace—is the magnificent legacy bequeathed to humanity through the great Restorer of the Hebrew

state.

These schools thus furnished a rallying-point for both intellect and religious zeal. The sacred traditions and early records of the race must probably have perished, but for this rude germ of a national university. The arts which require most patient and elaborate method in their learning, would scarcely have existed without such aid. The very forms and fragments of written history which have been preserved to us are doubtless in great part what after-compilers borrowed from the "book of Samuel the seer, and the book of Nathan the prophet, and the book of Gad the seer," or from the later chronicles of Iddo and Shemaiah. So that, for whatever made the Hebrews great as a people, or gave their history instruc tion and avail for after-times, they were mainly indebted to that guardianship which Samuel and his successors exercised over the frail and early germs of their mental life.

Those who are at all acquainted with the religious history of the East will be at no loss to account for the profound influence at all times exercised over the popular mind by this body of enthusiastic, earnest, and comparatively well-cultured men. Causes of a powerful and

* 1 Chron. xxix. 29; 2 Chron. ix. 29. The books of Kings and Chronicles may perhaps afford a fair comparison between the mental qualities of the prophets and the priesthood.

headlong fanaticism are familiar events in that history; religious extravagance and frenzy are familiar facts in the mental physiology of Eastern races. The religious terror, that gave its crushing weight to Oriental theocracy, was easily roused by any vision or appeal, whether coming in the course of natural events or in the word of an inspired man. What might not be easily reconciled to a cooler temperament, or a different way of life, becomes natural and familiar when transferred to the soil of the East, where to the wild Arab the lonely desert is popu lous with phantoms, and its drear silence haunted with misleading demon voices. The dry and electric air may have its subtile influence, or the fierce splendors of the sun, or the mysterious affinities of race, affecting the temperament of brain and nerve. What we know is, that facts rare and abnormal in Western climates, or among Western races, are offered daily to the incredulity of Eastern travellers; and, by whatever name we call them, they must greatly affect our judgment of visions and wonders recounted among such a people, — still more, of their popular effect. Very much that a shallow rationalism has rejected from the Old Testament narrative, is reproduced and interpreted in the more generous "scientifics" of the present day.

We deem ourselves justified in suggesting what appears to us a probable exposition, especially of such passages as have most perplexed modern scholarship with accounts of prophetic ecstasy, that frenzy whose contagion seized, for example, the messengers of Saul, and made the king himself lie down in a prophetic raving all day and all night, "naked," or stripped of his royal robes, so that the saying went abroad, "Is Saul also among the prophets?" For the same quality that fits one man to be an enthusiast or seer, will in feebler degree make a multitude susceptible of the most powerful impression from his words. To the Orientals, the Franks have always seemed cold and irreligious. Among themselves, the race of prophets and visionaries, and the answering floods of popular fanaticism, never cease. The sudden triumphs of Islam are to be accounted for by no device of imposture or lunacy; but by laws profoundly written in the

* See De Quincey's remarkable essay on "Modern Superstitions."

human constitution, and working out under the influences of an Eastern clime. A roving Christian preacher at this day will rouse to passionate terror the whole population of a Moslem town by his prognostics of disaster;* and the counterpart of Hagar's vision, or Elijah's comforting voices in the desert, is repeated now in the tales of the Bedouin camp, and the warnings of the hushed march of the caravan. Profoundly susceptible, like all Eastern races, of that whole class of influences which border on the mysterious and supernatural, the Hebrew people offered just the requisite field for the expansion and development of the prophetic gift,— whether we regard it in its essential character as natural or divine. United as it was with a peculiar culture, and that intense and singular pertinacity of character and habit belonging to the race, it could not fail to become the culminating fact of their entire mental history.

The peculiar constitution of the state itself was based upon a conviction that made part of the very life of Hebrew thought, a conviction which must powerfully coöperate with the quality just spoken of, to give energy and effect to the function of prophecy. The "people of Jehovah" were instructed to ascribe to their Divinity both the direct founding of their institutions and every powerful influ ence that affected their destiny. Everything inexplicable and unseen must necessarily be referred to Him,the more certainly, the more nearly it bore upon their own fortunes. Even such fatal events as the great pestilence of David's reign, the revolt of the tribes, and the massacres committed by John, are referred to his express interposition and forethought; and the four hundred prophets who gave Ahab his false hopes of victory were really inspired by "a lying spirit from Jehovah," as declared in Micaiah's eloquent story of his vision.† Of course, a man powerfully in earnest must derive his conviction from the same source. A rapt visionary, a poetical declaimer, a victorious champion, a skilled artificer, a sagacious and confident declarer of the future, a successful practiser of healing, or one who should exercise the now more familiar, yet unaccount

*See Layard's "Babylon and Nineveh," p. 632. +1 Kings xxii. 22.

able, power of finding hidden water-springs, or controlling "mesmerically" the bodily condition of others to hurt or heal, would even more certainly be regarded as deriving his gift from the particular favor of the unseen Sovereign. We have ourselves, among the recent phenomena of the so-called "Spiritualism," seen a diffident woman, of plain education and no practice in public speaking, transformed into one of extraordinary genius for improvisation and religious declamation; and there is no room whatever for a doubt in our mind as to the sincerity of her own conviction in her inspiration from the "superior spheres." How far such obscurer facts of mental physiology may supersede the hypothesis of direct supernatural influences, in explaining the more remarkable narratives of the Hebrew records, or how far those facts require for their own explanation the same hypothesis, we do not argue at present. We only insist, that they should be taken fairly into account, before we superciliously set aside what seems incredible in the accounts of a people so remote and strange to us.

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At any rate, the class of men known as prophets found in the popular feeling and belief an ally by which they would be most powerfully aided, — all the more, because the feeling and conviction were their own. The gift of bodily temperament, or mental genius, of which they were conscious, they were expressly taught to regard asthe commission or favor of Jehovah. A man of profound feeling, like Jeremiah, might shrink, in trembling and tears, from the pressure of the awful burden; but it must be borne, nevertheless, for the commission it implied could never once be doubted, a commission that must crush every scruple, overrule every thought of policy, and still every throb of fear. A barbarian chieftain, like Jephthah, or one of the incorrigible levity of Samson, might be fortified by believing in his own divine legation, though it should not save him from the worst superstition or the grossest vice; while to one of resolute purpose, like Samuel, or of ardent and confident conviction, like Isaiah, the same belief would be the inspiration of the purest moral heroism. However shaded or stained, there is not the smallest reason to doubt that the belief was real. It made part of the temperament of the race, and the creed of the religion. It was shared alike by prophet and VOL. LVI. - 4TH S. VOL. XXI. NO. III.

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