is;;] WAS PROPHECY SUPERNATURAL ? 355 



weighed until we rise above the empirical standpoint and 

 look at the details of the question in the light of the ideal 

 design of prophecy as the expression of a personal and 

 confidential fellowship of God with His people. The 

 question of the fulfilment of prophecy is not the first 

 question to be taken up in dealing with prophetic inspira 

 tion, but the last. Instead of forming our ideal of 

 prophecy from the empirical facts, let us remember that 

 the empirical details are only intelligible in the light of the 

 idea of prophecy. 



In fact, this whole argument of Kuenen is closely 

 analogous to the argument which certain men of science 

 lately sought to apply to the subject of prayer. You 

 remember that it was proposed to test the efficacy of 

 prayer by a series of experiments on selected patients in 

 an hospital. The answer to such a proposal is, of course, 

 that the very idea of prayer excludes such experiment. 

 Prayer in the name of Christ is the expression of that 

 fellowship with the Father into which we enter through 

 the redeeming work of Christ. We present our requests 

 to God for temporal as well as spiritual blessings, 

 because we believe that all our interests, of body as well 

 as of soul, are of consequence to God, that He is willing 

 to take account of them, and invites us to seek His help 

 in them. But we have no right to determine the form 

 which His interest and help shall take. It is not because 

 we receive literal answers to detailed petitions that we 

 believe in the efficacy of individual petitions, but because, 

 living in the constant exercise of a prayerful trust in Him, 

 we find our whole lives ordered by His grace, and are 

 enabled to trace His good hand upon us in every crisis of 

 our needs. The most certain answers to prayer are often 

 not those in which God s help comes just in the form in 

 which we asked it, but those in which God answers the 

 spirit of our prayer by denying the letter of it. Such 

 answers cannot be measured and numbered by inductive 

 science. They are addressed to the spiritual nature of 



