Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/113

 the infant Christ was preserved in the massacre of the innocents (Matt. ii. 13). Christianity, therefore, may be said to owe its very existence to the celestial intimations conveyed in dreams, and Christians cannot consistently embrace any theory which would lead to a denial of their holy and prophetic character. Since, moreover, we have numerous instances in the Bible of such dreams being granted to heathens and idolaters it is plain that the Christian deity does not confine his nocturnal visitations to orthodox believers. If the chief butler, the chief baker, Pharaoh, and Nebuchadnezzar dreamt prophetically, so may any of us at any time according to this teaching. On the other hand, this power may be due to a special out-*pouring of the Holy Spirit, as implied in the prediction of Joel that "your sons and your daughters shall prophecy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions" (Joel ii. 28). So that we may completely endorse the conclusion of the Rev. Principal Barry, who discusses this subject with much solemnity in Smith's "Dictionary of the Bible," "that the Scripture claims the dream, as it does every other action of the human mind, as a medium through which God may speak to man, either directly, that is, as we call it, 'providentially,' or indirectly, in virtue of a general influence upon all his thoughts; but whether there is anything to be said in support of the further inference that "revelation by dreams" may be expected to pass away, is not equally clear. Assuredly no passage can be produced which, even by implication, states that this method of communication was temporary or transient; and considering that it continued in operation from the days of Abraham to those of Jesus, it is hard to see how the Bible can be made to support the notion that it is to cease entirely at any period of human history. On the contrary, the Scriptural writers, both old and new, would practically have agreed with Homer: "The dream also is from Zeus" (Iliad, i. 63). Indeed, the passage in which that deity sends the personified Dream to bear a message to Agamemnon (Ibid., ii. 8-15), differs only in its mythological coloring from the representations in the Bible of dreams in which God comes or appears to the sleeper, or in which he charges an angel to convey to him his purpose or his will. And the discrimination commanded to be exercised