342 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1874- 



ma tely &quot; for the time when the national life directly 

 accepted the guidance of the prophetic ideas as paramount 

 in all its interests was not the time of Moses or of Samuel, 

 or even of Josiah, but the time of the great leaders of 

 the nation after the Captivity. That at this period some 

 of the prophetic ideas had already lost their freshness 

 and were misunderstood by those who applied them, 

 does not affect the truth of our statement. Rightly or 

 wrongly comprehended, the prophetic teaching furnished 

 from this time onwards the fountain-head from which 

 everything characteristic in the intellectual, moral, 

 spiritual, social life of the people flowed. I must not at 

 present go into details on this topic. The truth and 

 the importance of what I have just said will appear in 

 the course of these lectures. In the meantime I simply 

 ask you to remember that it will be one main part of our 

 business during the Session to attain a proper conception 

 of the part which prophecy played in the history of Israel, 

 and to comprehend how each prophet s actions, teaching 

 and writings stood in a living relation to the historical, 

 circumstances of his own time, and exercised a living 

 influence, first on his own contemporaries and then upon 

 those who came after. In order to do this it will be 

 necessary for us to follow step by step the historical 

 sequence of the prophets, and to interweave with our 

 account of the prophetic diadoche a more or less con 

 tinuous sketch of the main epochs of Hebrew history. 



When I say that our first concern will be to under 

 stand prophecy as a factor in the Old Testament history, 

 you must not imagine that I forget that the interest which 

 must dominate all our studies in this hall is not historical, 

 but theological. To the Christian theologian Old Testa 

 ment prophecy has more than an historical interest. 

 To us the prophets are not merely the leaders of the 

 religious life of Israel and the guides of the nation in all 

 its highest attainments ; they are men who bore on their 

 lips the word of the only true God, a word that endureth 



