i8 74 ] THE FULFILMENT OF PROPHECY 263 



Germans say, from a single mould. We must therefore 

 regard the prophet alone as the true author of his writings. 

 The operation of the revealing Spirit lies in a higher 

 sphere. Whether the prophet records a vision vouchsafed 

 to him, or, as is oftener the case, works out a line of 

 thought to which he has been enabled to rise by spiritual 

 illumination, every link of the argument must be 

 thoroughly his own. The whole is shaped in his own 

 mind before it is committed to paper. And so he is the 

 real author of the whole, and what exegesis has to do is 

 just to determine what the thoughts were which the 

 prophet was expressing. Nor, again, will it do to say that 

 the prophet had more than one sense in view, a lower 

 sense for his contemporaries or for weaker men, a higher 

 sense for the spiritual or for a future dispensation. This 

 is the essential position of the exploded allegorical exegesis. 

 It stumbles against the plain fact that a single line of 

 thought can have but a single meaning. If two meanings 

 are covered by one expression, they can be so only by 

 virtue of a clever artifice by which two lines of thought 

 in place of receiving their natural twofold expression are 

 forced under a single verbal formula. No one will suppose 

 that the prophets consciously engaged in such a process 

 of cryptography. The parallels would be in Bacon s 

 &quot; Omnia per omina,&quot; or in such verses as &quot; Aio te Aeacida, 

 etc.&quot; The theory of a double sense is always held on the 

 supposition that the two senses are so connected that the 

 one grows in a manner out of the other, that naturally, 

 and not by mere artifice, more lies in the prophet s words 

 than he directly expressed. 



Now if we put this thought in its most general form, 

 we see that it is just an attempt to formulate the fact that 

 the fulfilment in Christ belongs to a higher sphere than the 

 view of the prophets themselves. But the formula of a 

 double sense is inaccurate, in so far as it attempts to reduce 

 to a question of mere exegesis what is really based on the 

 difference of dispensations, and seeks by the hypothesis 



