196 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1868- 



We cannot here criticise in detail the historical assump 

 tions of this ingenious theory ; but it is important to 

 consider what species of religious feeling is consistent with 

 such a kind of prophecy. If we seek a historical parallel 

 for Kuenen s Samuel, we can hardly fail to think of 

 Loyola. The &quot; exercitia &quot; of the Jesuits are the modern 

 counterpart of the disciplined enthusiasm of Kuenen s 

 scheme. Was it, in truth, a religious spirit of this kind 

 that did such marvels in Israel ? The theory, indeed, has 

 not one particle of plausibility without the assumption 

 that we have no records of the earlier prophecy which 

 have not been strongly coloured by the more advanced 

 religious views of a later age. And even if we allow the 

 theorist, on the strength of this assumption, to evacuate 

 whole centuries of Old Testament history of almost all 

 their moral earnestness, the exigencies of the negative 

 school are not half met. Can we evolve the life-work of 

 the newer prophets from the categories of natural religious 

 feeling, physical enthusiasm, national temperament, 

 historical circumstances ? To gain even a show of 

 plausibility for such an attempt, the critic is forced 

 everywhere to look away from the noble spirituality, the 

 lofty comprehensiveness of view, which he cannot deny 

 to the prophets, and seek by a petty pragmatism to bring 

 out into exaggerated prominence the limitations of their 

 natural and religious convictions. Not even in so great 

 a crisis as the fall of Sennacherib, can he afford to look 

 at the grand and instructive side of the history. Every 

 where his eye is directed to discover some inexactness 

 in the fulfilment of a prediction, some natural method by 

 which the fulfilment might have been foreseen or brought 

 about, forgetful how completely the facts forbid us to 

 identify the foresight of a prophet with the calculations of 

 a man of the world, and how often we are able not only 

 to say that certain predictions were made and fulfilled, 

 but in some measure to lay bare the Divine process by 

 which the prophet came to make them. 



