of their being charged with miraculous powers.  The prophecies constituted the chief evidence for the supernatural character of the Bible.  Of course, with this theory in the mind of the church, a predictive character would be read into everything capable of bearing it; and the history of the Hebrews, the eloquent orations of their great statesmen, the pious longings of their hymn writers, became mystic anticipations of everything in the heavens above and the earth beneath.

But Hebrew prophecy never was the synonyme for prediction.  It meant forth-telling.  The prophets were “men of the spirit,” whose pure nature mirrored the supreme laws of earth, the moral laws; whose intuitions made application of those laws to the policies of statecraft, and enabled them to divine the issues of the stirring events amid which they lived.  Their glory is that they saw above the brute force of great empires the might of right, and dared to vision its triumph, and that history has verified their moral insight.  But they chiefly spake, as the author of The Revelation declares of his prophecy, “of things which must shortly come to pass” upon the earth.  Their horizon bounded a very nigh future the approach of Syrian, Assyrian, Egyptian invaders the overthrow of Jerusalem, etc.

In these predictions they were often mistaken; nearly as often in error as in the right.  We seldom hear of these unfulfilled prophecies, but they are in your Bibles.  They should teach you, that which the prophets tried so hard to teach their own cotemporaries, that the essential distinction of the true prophet was not that he predicted the future, for this they scornfully left to the false prophets the oracles of the pagan Jews, but that they forthtold the inner mind and will of God, read the ’laws mighty and brazen’ which constitute the essential nature of the Most High and hold the supreme felicity of man.  I believe I know of no one passage of the prophets which can be certainly said to point to any event beyond the near future of the writer.  Only in so far as they spoke of the ideal forces, of ethical victories, did they launch out upon the far future.

But you say, Do not the Old Testament prophets surely point on to Christ?  I answer both No, and Yes.  Of any mere literal prediction of the events of His life I know none.  The many passages that have been made to read like predictions of His miraculous birth, His sale for thirty pieces of silver, and so on, refer to personages and experiences in the time of the writers.  Isaiah expressly says this about the Virgin—­that is, the young bride—­who was to conceive and bear a son.  Before he should be able to distinguish right from wrong the relief of Jehovah to Israel would appear.  The passages which seem to our eyes, looking through orthodox spectacles, to have this predictive character, lose it in a more exact translation.