But in the street, definite forecasting of future events is still the vulgar use of the term.  Dozens of sober historians predicted the present war with a clean-cut story that was carried out with much faithfulness of detail, considering the thousand interests involved.  They have been called prophets in a congratulatory secular tone by the man in the street.  These felicitations come because well-authorized merchants in futures have been put out of countenance from the days of Jonah and Balaam till now.  It is indeed a risky vocation.  Yet there is an undeniable line of successful forecasting by the hardy, to be found in the Scripture and in history.  In direct proportion as these men of fiery speech were free from sheer silliness, their outlook has been considered and debated by the gravest people round them.  The heart of man craves the seer.  Take, for instance, the promise of the restoration of Jerusalem in glory that fills the latter part of the Old Testament.  It moves the Jewish Zionist, the true race-Jew, to this hour.  He is even now endeavoring to fulfil the prophecy.

Consider the words of John the Baptist, “One mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose:  he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.”  A magnificent foreshadowing, being both a spiritual insight and the statement of a great definite event.

The heeded seers of the civilization of this our day have been secular in their outlook.  Perhaps the most striking was Karl Marx, in the middle of the capitalistic system tracing its development from feudalism and pointing out as inevitable, long before they came, such modern institutions as the Steel Trust and the Standard Oil Company.  It remains to be seen whether the Marxian prophecy of the international alliance of workingmen that is obscured by the present conflict in Europe, and other of his forecastings, will be ultimately verified.

There have been secular teachers like Darwin, who, by a scientific reconstruction of the past, have implied an evolutionary future based on the biological outlook.  Deductions from the teachings of Darwin are said to control those who mould the international doings of Germany and Japan.

There have been inventor-seers like Jules Verne.  In Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea he dimly discerned the submarine.  There is a type of social prophet allied to Verne.  Edward Bellamy, in Looking Backward, reduced the world to a matter of pressing the button, turning on the phonograph.  It was a combination of glorified department-store and Coney Island, on a cooperative basis.  A seventeen-year-old boy from the country, making his first visit to the Woolworth building in New York, and riding in the subway when it is not too crowded, might be persuaded by an eloquent city relative that this is Bellamy’s New Jerusalem.