i8 7 o] PROPHECY AND PERSONALITY 107 



did not come purely in dream or vision, called for a 

 conscious effort of inventive thought to elaborate it. The 

 matter from which the new thought is to be elaborated 

 is, as Rothe points out, 1 certain ideas and representa 

 tive notions (&quot;Begriffe&quot; and &quot; Vorstellungen &quot;) already 

 present to the prophet s mind. These, however, may be 

 either natural or embrace images presented in super 

 natural vision for, as we have already seen, a perfectly 

 new image presented in such a vision will at once call 

 for an exercise of personal thought. Upon the matter 

 thus presented the prophet s mind must now act to supply 

 the formal element of the thought which is what is pro 

 perly new. The method must be a teleological reasoning 

 bringing the matter into subordination to the general 

 principle of God s redemptive work. But no mere 

 natural deduction could suffice for this ; and here comes 

 in the feature that distinguishes prophecy from other 

 forms of the supernatural. No mere material super 

 natural modification of the nerves can serve here. The 

 power of producing a new thought depends on man s 

 spiritual nature, and the only means by which this faculty 

 can be raised to correspond with the necessities of prophecy 

 is by a direct action of the Spirit of God on the spirit of 

 man. What this action is we cannot tell ; it lies in a 

 region even the natural features of which have baffled 

 human science. All that we know is that the formal 

 part of thought is that in which the human and therefore 

 the Divine Spirit come into play in that unexplained 

 process by which general and abstract truth is extracted 

 from concrete notions. But this perhaps suffices to show 

 how far this mysterious process can affect the relation of 

 prophecy to history. So far as the resulting truth is 

 abstract and general, it will rise above all the conditions 

 of a special time ; but, so far as a concrete element 

 remains, that concrete element will not be a new one 

 but what was already present. So the relation of pro- 



1 As quoted by Tholuck, Die Propheten, u.s.w., p. 45. 



