requirements does not on that account become a prophet; he may be called and receive a message, but unless he be constantly in this receptive condition, that is, as we understand it, unless he be occupied with the subject, aside to see," he will receive no more messages.

3. Prophetic Temperament.

turn

We can readily understand this subject when we think of genius of another order, say, a musician. It is certainly necessary that the musical genius prepare himself by studying technique and expression and all things pertaining to music, but this study alone does not make him a musician; it depends upon the will of God or, as we should say, upon his genius, his temperament. Now, the prophets received the "divine call " not only because they were prepared and educated, but because their minds were preoccupied with the profound mystery of life and were by temperament and genius able to turn those experiences into the living channels of prophetic activity.1 We find these prophets expressly confessing that not only had they heard God's call to prophetic office, but by temperament from the very moment of their birth, nay even before born, were they dedicated to become prophets. This I take to mean nothing else than that they were born geniuses not studied artists, who were moulded into "Prophet-Genius " by Jewish history. Of Jeremiah it is said: "Before I formed thee in the belly I took cognizance of thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations."2 The very psychology of prophetic vision as will be shown later means essentially this, that the soul

1 Schulz: "Old Testament Theology," p. 239. "And probably there were as among the Greeks certain families in which the prophetic faculty was particularly strong."

2 Cf. also Isa. 49: I and 5.

of the prophet was by temperament and experience saturated with the mental elements that combine into the vision.

4. My Own Experience

Emerson in his Essay on History says: on History says: "Every step in his (everybody's) experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible." And further in the same essay he says: "I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day."

For my own part I must confess that I cannot conceive how else we can comprehend the psychology of prophecy unless it be in terms of our own consciousness. Hence the prophet, when speaking of the thoughts and words of God, speaks, and can speak, only in terms of his own consciousness. I find, therefore, in an experience of my own life the beginning of an explanation of the prophetic call; and I mean this not in any figurative sense, but in a strictly literal way.

My mother belongs to a family of great learning and piety. My father, too, had been at school till the day of his marriage, and had been brought up with that respect and reverence for learning with which the Jew, who for centuries had no other fort and comfort than his Talmud, is more imbued perhaps than any other people. From the womb, therefore, I believe, I was dedicated to a student's life. When only five years old my ambition was to become a rabbi, and I stated this ambition to my father while we were both promenading near the river in our little city in Germany. A short time afterwards

I visited my uncle who was then, and is still, teacher in a neighboring city. I saw him walking up and down his room studying some foreign language, evidently Latin. Immediately I was seized with the ambition of walking up and down the room also studying some foreign language; that seemed to me the highest ambition in life. In the course of events, however, we left Germany and came to the United States, and at the age of twelve I was taken from school and devoted myself to a business career in my father's business. For six years I was in that business, occasionally "turning aside to see" longingly, without the slightest hope or idea however that I should ever be called to a student's life. No means and no opportunity presented themselves. One cold winter evening I visited all alone the German theatre. The music made me sad. I felt oppressed, alone and miserable. All the inheritance of my ancestors was suddenly awakened into life, and in a very serious and sincere sense of the word I felt the call to the higher life. I cared not what it was, but something it had to be, something that would unveil the mysteries of the world, prepare me to be a student, a helper and guide among people. That night I walked home several miles in deep snow and was assured, I felt certain, I was determined that I would become a student, though the opportunity and the means for obtaining that end were as vague as are my opportunities at present for becoming King of Prussia. From that moment to this the ambition and the hope has never for a single moment left me that I would be a student, a teacher and a helper among men.

Now, I believe with Emerson that we shall never understand the psychology of the Prophetic Mind, if we believe that the laws of their mind were in any wise different from the laws of our own mind. I am convinced that the psychological experience of the prophets which they de

scribe as the "call" to prophetic activity is not only similar, but identical, in essence and principle to the psychological experience that awakened me into a student's life. What that psychological experience was that we designate by the term Prophetic Call" will now be investigated.

5. Smend and Buttenwieser

What is the psychological experience which the prophet designates as the Call from Jahve to prophetic office? I believe with Smend and Buttenwieser that it is a premonition on the part of the prophet of the downfall of the nation. If we will but think that in ancient Israel some of the gravest sins were punishable by "cutting off that person from the midst of his people," that is, by excommunication, and that such a punishment was evidently worse than death, for it meant the renouncement of nation and kin, of God and custom, it meant that outside of one's nation, one had no right as a human being, we will understand vaguely what the prophets, the national geniuses of Israel, must have felt at the awful thought that Israel was doomed to destruction, the whole people to be cut off from their patrimony. The problem has, however, been reversed by most scholars. It has been thought that the prophet, seeing the many sins of which Israel was guilty, preached the destruction of the nation on the principle that God's rule is justice. This is in every sense, as I believe, an anachronism. To-day every school boy knows that a plant must acclimatize itself or die. He knows, too, that the universe is moral, and man must acclimatize himself to the moral nature of the universe, or the punishment is death. Philosophy of history teaches to-day that any nation that violates the laws of morality is doomed to destruction. No prophet need rise from the grave to tell us that. But that law had to be discovered, and Amos, the Hebrew Prophet, was the

first, as far as we know, to discover that law. The prophets never dreamed of reasoning from the sins to the necessity, the absolute certainty, of Israel's destruction. Israel had sinned before, and God had always forgiven. But now the prophet, Amos, an obscure genius, a herdsman and a gatherer of the sycamore fruit, is seized with the premonition, that evil foreboding of the nation's destruction, and he rises to the situation with the true genius that makes him a prophet. As a true student of history he could probably have seen with the vision of a statesman the approach of Assyria, but that alone could never have awakened him to the certainty of Israel's downfall, could never have made a prophet of him. The premonition does not necessarily make a prophet of one. Others, such as Queen Louise, Scipio, Leibnitz, Maid of Orleans, and many other persons reported as authentic by the Psychic Research Society of England and the United States, had premonitions and they were not prophets. Others before Newton had seen an apple fall to the ground, they were not scientific geniuses; it was the awakening of the soul, by the experience of the apple's fall, that makes us call Newton a scientific genius. And so it was the awakening of the soul of the Hebrew genius into poet, statesman, preacher, teacher, adviser and exhorter, as a result of the premonition, that made prophets of the Hebrew geniuses.

It seems to me that the prophecies of Amos show clearly the truth of this position. When after the awful premonition of Israel's downfall, he looks about for some cause, some reason for this threatened calamity, he finds it naturally enough in the sins of Israel, and his imagination sees as means of this destruction a locust plague (Ch. 7: 1-3), but the Lord repents of this evil, and it is not to be. He then sees a drought that shall devour and dry up, but of this also God repented and it was not to be.