Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/78

68 upon steps more solid even than the buried slabs of Nineveh. There are some splendid and powerful words in one of the books of the New Testament which indicate the true value to be set upon the demonstrable facts of Hebrew prophecy—first, as a support to our faltering, or to our faint, beliefs, and then as a guide to still deeper spiritual insight. I speak of the call which bids us "take heed" to "the more sure word of prophecy, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in our hearts." They point especially to those Messianic visions in which some Jews, speaking to other Jews, yet burst through all the barriers of their intense exclusiveness, and tell them to look to a Deliverer in whom the Gentiles were to trust, and who was to be the Desire of all nations. Other men than those who claim exclusively the name of critic must really be allowed to have some inner consciousness of their own—some power to recognize voices which are full to overflow of intimations from the spiritual world. It is impossible for any open-minded man to follow those lofty strains without recognizing the mystery and the majesty of their import. It is no more possible, when doing so, to listen to the carpings of the verbal critics than it would be to listen to the rasping noises of some petty mechanical operation when the thunders of heaven are pealing overhead. And here I may be permitted to express a very strong opinion that in recent years Christian writers have been far too shy and timid in defending one of the oldest and strongest outworks of Christian theology. I mean the element of true prediction in Hebrew prophecy. It may be true that in a former generation too exclusive attention had been paid to it, and too much stress had been laid upon details. Nay, more, it may be true that the attempted application of prophecy to time still future has been the cause of great delusions amounting almost to religious mania. But the reaction has been excessive and irrational. A great mass of connected facts, and of continuous evidence, remains—which can not be gainsaid. Even if the greater prophets could be brought down to the very latest date which the very latest fancies can assign to them, they depict and predict overthrows and vast revolutions in the East which did not take place for centuries. It is easy to see how and why this reaction has arisen. Besides that mere swing of the pendulum which affects more or less all progress in human thought, a false analysis of physical science has intimidated men into a languid submission to that greatest of all fallacies which is embodied in the very word "supernatural." They tell us they can not believe in what they call the supernatural. But neither need they do so. For my own