All power is rapidly coming to be based on news—­news about human nature, and about what is soon to be done by people.  This news travels by express in boxes, by newspapers, by telephone, by word of mouth, and by wireless telegraph.  Most of the wireless news is not only wireless, but it is in cipher—­hence prophets, or men who have great sensitiveness; men whose souls and bodies are films for the future, platinum plates for the lights and shadows of events; men who are world-poets, sensitive to the air-waves and the light-waves of truth, to the faintest vibrations from To-morrow, or from the next hundred years hovering just ahead.  As a matter of course, it is already coming to be true that the most practical man to-day is the prophet.  In the older days, men used to look back for wisdom, and the practical man was the man who spoke from experience, and they crucified the prophet.  But to-day, the practical man is the man who can make the best guess on to-morrow.  The cross has gone by; at least, the cross is being pushed farther along.  A prophet in business or politics gets a large salary now; he is a recognized force.  Being a prophet is getting to be almost smug and respectable.

We live so in the future in our modern life, and our rewards are so great for men who can live in the future, that a man who can be a ten-year prophet, or a twenty-five-year prophet, like James J. Hill, is put on a pedestal, or rather is not wasted on a pedestal, and is made President of a railroad.  He swings the country as if it were his hat.  We see great cities tagging Wilbur Wright, and emperors clinging to the skirts of Count Zeppelin.  We only crucify a prophet now if he is a hundred, or two hundred or five hundred years ahead.  Even then, we would not be apt to crucify; we would merely not use him much, except the first twenty-five years of him.

The theory is no longer tenable that prophets must be necessarily crucified.  As a matter of history, most prophets have been crucified by people; but it was not so much because of their prophecy as because their prophecy did not have any first twenty-five years in it.  They were crucified because of a blank place or hiatus, not necessarily in their own minds, but at least in other people’s.  People would have been very glad to have their first twenty-five years’ worth if they could have got it.  It is this first twenty-five years, or joining-on part, which is most important in prophecy, and which has become our specialty in the Western World.  One might say, in a general way, that the idea of having a first twenty-five years’ section in truth for a prophet is a modern, an almost American, invention.  We are temperamentally a country of the future, and think instinctively in futures; and perhaps it is not too much to say (considering all the faults that go with it for which we are criticized) that we have led the way in futures as a specialty, as a national habit of mind; and though with terrific blunders perhaps have been really the first people en masse to put being a prophet on a practical basis—­that is, to supply the first twenty-five years’ section, or the next-thing-to-do section to Truth, to put in a kind of coupling between this world and the next.  This is what America is for, perhaps—­to put in the coupling between this world and the next.