i88 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1868- 



What Ewald says on this topic could not be said in 

 the same sense by all members of the critical school ; for 

 it is manifest that Ewald writes as a believer in prophecy. 

 He is persuaded that the prophets really did enjoy a 

 peculiar communion with their God which sharply distin 

 guished them from their fellow-men, and bestowed upon 

 them the power of penetrating into eternal truths hid 

 from their contemporaries. And these eternal truths 

 are not bare abstract generalisations about God. The 

 prophet is essentially a seer. His insight into the purpose 

 of Jahveh takes the form of a spiritual intuition, a clear, 

 ideal picture of past, present, and future history. The 

 natural man stands in the midst of a vast and complicated 

 scene, filled with groups of actors moving to and fro without 

 unity of order and purpose. Of these actors he is himself 

 one, but he understands his own destiny as little as that of 

 others, hurried along as he is by momentary impulses and 

 necessities. But the prophet has gained the key to this 

 complex drama. He has seen the Invisible One who 

 rules all by His irresistible will. He has submitted himself 

 to that will, and now his own path opens up plainly before 

 him. But he sees more than this. He sees one plan in 

 all the movements of history. He does not, indeed, 

 perceive in full detail how the drama must be carried on ; 

 but his hold of the plot is so firm, and his comprehension 

 of the present situation so just, that scene after scene 

 opens before him in visionary outline leading on to the 

 great final issue when the purpose of Jahveh shall be fully 

 accomplished. Thus when Ewald speaks of prophecy 

 as in the main intuition, rather than pure thought, he is 

 not thinking of vision in the sense of ecstatic mental 

 phenomena. The conscious thought of the prophet must 

 take the form of a shifting series of pictures, all developed 

 out of the divinely illumined picture of the present which 



ence of the prophet, which was decisive in forming his career. In Jer. i. 

 he recognises a groundwork of fact freely embellished ; in Ezekiel s 

 vision, hardly even so much as this (Onderzoek, ii. 56, i?3 seq. 262 seq.). 



