192 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1868- 



plain question of historical fact : Is the prophetical 

 consciousness the highest fruit of a development common 

 to the whole people, and reacting on the nation only as the 

 explicitly stated will always draw out what is only im 

 plicitly present ? Or is the work of the prophets of a 

 higher kind really as well as in expression in advance of 

 their age, and leading it on to higher and new life ? 



The prophets themselves would have accepted this 

 way of stating the question. All that distinguished 

 Israel from other nations it has, according to their view, 

 received at the hand of prophets. &quot; By a prophet,&quot; says 

 Hosea, &quot; Jahveh brought Israel out of Egypt, and by a 

 prophet he was watched over.&quot; l From Kuenen s stand 

 point such a notion is inconceivable. Moses, he expressly 

 says, was not a prophet. In truth, prophecy, as a 

 phenomenon peculiar to the nation of Israel, must, on the 

 negative theory, only appear after the national character 

 had reached a very considerable development. To carry 

 out this view involves a double task. The earliest prophets 

 whose writings we know appear, as we have seen, not only 

 as men who did a remarkable work in their age, but as 

 members of an order to which the people looked for 

 remarkable work. It is necessary, then, for Kuenen not 

 merely to explain the extraordinary career of individual 

 prophets, but to explain the no less singular position of 

 the prophetic order as a whole. These two tasks separate 

 pretty widely, insomuch as he does not recognise that all 

 prophets of the eighth century who really had a right to 

 claim the name were of the type of Hosea or Isaiah. In 

 short, it was not by performances analogous to those of 

 the great spiritual prophets that the prophetic order 

 gained, according to Kuenen, its recognised position. 

 To Ewald all prophecy is spiritual, but to Kuenen the 

 spiritual prophecy of the eighth century is a new develop 

 ment of a religious phenomenon which originally rested 

 on a purely physical basis. That basis he finds not 



1 Hosea xii. 14 (Ev. 13). 



