How, one after another, the same features are reproduced in the prophetic books. The process is always extremely different from what it would be if the prophet arrived at his insight into spiritual things by the tentative efforts of his own genius. There is something sharp and sudden about it. He can lay his finger, so to speak, on the moment when it came. And it always comes in the form of an overpowering force from without, against which he struggles, but in vain. Listen, for instance, to the opening of the book of Jeremiah. Read through in like manner the first two chapters of the prophecy of Ezekiel.

...

"It is not, however, only at the beginning of his career that the prophet passes through a crisis which is clearly not self-caused. Scattered all through the prophetic writings are expressions which speak of some strong and irresistible impulse coming down upon the prophet, determining his attitude to the events of his time, constraining his utterance, making his words the vehicle of a higher meaning than their own. For instance, this of Isaiah's: 'The Lord spake thus to me with a strong hand,' . . . an emphatic phrase which denotes the overmastering nature of the impulse, ' and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people.' Or passages like this from Ezekiel: 'The hand of the Lord God fell upon him,' 'The hand of the Lord was strong upon me.' The one standing characteristic of the prophet is that he speaks with the authority of Jehovah himself. Hence it is that the prophets one and all preface their addresses so confidently, 'The word of the Lord,' or 'Thus saith the Lord.' They have even the audacity to speak in the first person, as if Jehovah himself were speaking. As in Isaiah: 'Hearken unto me, O Jacob, and Israel my called; I am He, I am the first, I also am the last,' and so on. The personality of the prophet sinks entirely into the background; he feels himself for the time being the mouthpiece of the Almighty."

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From what has been said it will easily be seen that divine inspiration can never mean that the human ceases at any point to operate and becomes passive in the power of some non-ego, but rather that the human rises with all the splendor and pristine glory of its native forces to the highest pinnacle of its own power. Were the Infinite One to speak through any finite being it were of no avail to Him or to us, we should still insist that He speak to us in terms of our own consciousness, in our own language, lest it be like the distant roar of the cannon, mighty and fearful but not as intelligible or translatable as the tiniest voice of the human babe. Were inspiration a literal

speaking of the Infinite One through the mouthpiece of the prophets, then all inspired books are dictated by the same author and should bear the same characteristics of style, rhetoric and language throughout, which needless to say is not the case; to say nothing of the necessity of presenting us with unmistakable ultimate truth and not with a progression or development of truth as we find it. Furthermore, such inspiration should have presented predictions literally true in every detail, which again is not the case with any prophet, of any people, time or clime; neither of Moses nor Buddha, neither of Jeremiah nor of Jesus, neither of Swedenborg nor of Joan of Arc can it be said that all the inspired utterances, predictions and the like are literally true.

Even Delitzsch, the orthodox writer, acknowledges:

"The divine thoughts take their way to the Ego of the prophet through his nature. They clothe themselves in popular human language, even according to the prophet's individual manner of thinking and speaking; and they present themselves in a form manifoldly limited, even according to the existing circumstances and the horizon of contemporary history.”

More in harmony with our own thoughts is Farrar's statement: "Inspiration is neither infallibility, nor verbal diction, nor abnormal miracle, nor-to quote the favorite metaphor of Montanus-the playing of the spirit upon the harp of man's being as upon a passive instrument; it is the inmost harmony of the spirit of man with the spirit of God within the sphere of human limitation." Or as Ralph Waldo Trine puts it, the prophets come into conscious realization of their oneness with the Infinite Life." Inspiration, it must, therefore, be granted, is the highest eloquence of thought, speech or action, a result of the temperament, power, inheritance, energy of genius, under the exhilaration and stimulation of some great enthusiasm and mental excitement, an eloquence so far above what genius himself is ordinarily capable of, that it is easily

believed to be not his own work, thought or action, but the result of some higher power than self. Therefore we shall define inspiration as that state of the human mind in which mental activity, accelerated it may be externally by means of drugs, wine, music, dance and the like, or subjectively by strong emotion and passionate feeling and interest, is so rapid that in this state of mental energy the mind's reaction time is practically nil, and the subject finds at his command all the conscious and unconscious impressions of his mind and occasionally or often the trailing clouds of glorious thoughts from countless generations of soul evolution, all of which rises suddenly in majesty to meet the occasion, and the result whether in art, in sculpture, in music or in religion is so profound and beyond the subject's normal ability as to carry the conviction that some mysterious power, the spirit of God, has wrought the result through him; and in the ultimate analysis this is literally true; for there is no distinction of kind in mind. Human mind and divine mind are one mind. Mind is in essence one. If the genius of the prophet has channeled a larger stream of mind to turn the machinery of his being he has been helped in his work by divine mind, by a larger stream of divine mind than other men find possible to utilize.

CONCLUSION

So long as we shall read one nation's history as sacred and another nation's as profane, so long shall we remain profoundly ignorant of the unfolding of humanity and of humanity's soul, mind, religion. And worse than this, so long as we do this, so long shall we continue to weave our ignorance into the web and woof of life in the patterns of higher and lower, heathen and civilized, prejudice and fear, damned and saved, and the like.

Every creature is divine, and if you will not allow that much, then at least every genius is divine, insofar only, however, as he has more of the divine spirit than others. But Israel, having listened to brooks and babes, having heard the myriad voices of nature that are ever musical and sweet, and interpreted them with his religious seriousness, was called supernatural instead of more divine than others who do not see and hear the manifestations and voices of God. We can comprehend this only by assuming boundary lines to human mind and calling a certain amount of ignorance the standard measure, those nations which have the required ignorance are natural; those nations falling below the standard of ignorance are subnatural, barbarous, heathen; those above the standard are supernatural, divine.

The fact is there is only one universe, and that universe is divine. There is for us only one interpretation of that universe, and that is human and natural.

Flagg so admirably states the point for which I contend that I shall quote his thought in full:1

"So far as we have any good account of their beginnings, all religions and all their great embranchments and graftments have had a like origin, however different their contents. None has been by the god of it given

"Yoga," p. 104.

directly to mankind, but each has come through an immediary prophet, having natural or acquired receptivity for so-called supernatural inflow, and also miraculous, so-called, to exhibit as sanction for his authority to speak for God and control man. Such was Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Moses, Saul of Tarsus, Mohammed, and such was Swedenborg. No devotee of any faith can trace the sources of it further back than to something lying within his own self the revelation he transmits, be it given to him by intellectual illumination, symbolic visions or talking ones, clairaudience, clairvoyance, automatic or direct writing, trance-speaking, or whatever other of the now well-known to have been always common methods by which the hidden word speaks to the manifest one the medium was adapted The mystic already religious, treading the path of contemplation, in search of the source of his being, already believed to be a god, in hope to attain communion with it, comes upon his own very self (but his inward self) as objectified by itself in form of that god of his messenger, and forthwith bows down and worships himself; and then whatever revelation is thus vouchsafed to him he communicates to the world with the zeal that comes through absolute conviction, as the absolute truth all men long for, to meet with more or less acceptance according as time, place and circumstances may suit."

to.

Prophecy, as I have shown in the foregoing pages, is a human and subjective phenomenon of the mind; divine it is, not only in the narrow sense of being superinduced by God, but in the larger and truer sense that all phenomena, and certainly, above all conceivable possibility of doubt, mind phenomena are divine phenomena, are the manifestations of the Infinite One in a literal sense of the word. The subject of prophecy to be intelligible to us must be analyzed as a psychological process, as has been attempted in this thesis, and since this subject, so far as I am aware, has never before been handled entirely from a psychological standpoint, the preceding pages have in most cases dared only to indicate the direction in which a solution of the problem is to be sought and a comprehensive study begun. It cannot be emphasized too often that prophecy is a human process, a mind process, and must be studied from a human point of view as a branch of psychology, just as philosophy, poetry and music are human phenomena and are studied as psychological processes.

The