i8 7 o] PROPHECY IN CRITICAL SCHOOLS 189 



he is enabled to form by his sympathy with the mind of 

 Jahveh. This seeing, in truth, is not peculiar to the 

 prophet. No man can really understand past or present 

 history unless he has it vividly before him. The real 

 peculiarity lies in the way in which the prophetic image is 

 gained by &quot;an effort of the gazing spirit starting from a 

 definite truth, to represent with more distinctness the 

 conformation of the future, and to break through the veil 

 of the unseen.&quot; l The starting-point in this construction 

 is always the relation of the present to the Divinely- 

 appointed end. And herein lies, according to Ewald, the 

 practical superiority of prophecy over mere moral teach 

 ing ; for in pointing the way in which the difficulties of 

 the present must, according to God s purpose, be resolved, 

 the prophet points out at the same time the principles of 

 action which he and his hearers, in following God s will, 

 are not only bound, but encouraged to make their own. 



To Ewald, then, the reality of prophecy is an historical 

 fact. The prophets really were what they claimed to 

 be privileged ambassadors of God. And the proof that 

 they were so lies not in the supernatural process by which 

 they received the Divine message, not in the fulfilment of 

 individual predictions, but in their work as a whole. 

 That work was true work. It proved itself by its opera 

 tion in history to be what it professed to be, no mere 

 natural efflux of the past history and past development of 

 the people, but a new and living power, the utterance of a 

 new life, which, because it is a new life, can spring only 

 from the infinite source of all life. Just at this point of 

 Ewald s conception there is indeed a certain indistinctness, 

 which makes it difficult to put his position into words 

 without saying either too much or too little. The new 

 life of which Ewald speaks so decidedly has its origin 

 above the sphere of history. But instead of acknowledg 

 ing the limits of his sphere, and admitting that history 

 itself has its beginning in the creative Spirit of God, the 



1 Ewald, Propheten, i. 29. 



