e to guess, as the ancient Greeks
puzzled over the messages of the Delphic shrine, is to revive Paganism in
Christianity. "No prophecy is of any private interpretation." No passage
in the Bible was written, centuries ago, with reference to your private
affairs. All that is there written concerned men and affairs of distant
days. The principles there applied will help you now, if you will take the
trouble to search for them, since principles do not change with the
fashions.

V.

_It is a wrong use of the Bible to go to it, as the heathen went to their
oracles, for divination of the future._

The pagan oracles were the shrines of a Power sought for the forecasting
of events. The inspiration of an oracle was proven by the success of its
predictions. In the same way men have turned to the Bible as a sort of
sacred weather bureau, a book which, if we could only interpret its mystic
utterances, would tell us what things were going to happen upon the earth.
I remember an eloquent Irish divine who came to this country on a great
mission a number of years ago. His first sermon was on Ezekiel's vision by
the Chebar. He said that this was the age of science, and that such a
marvel as science could not have escaped the vision of the prophets. This
mystic creature which the prophet saw, with wheels, whose appearance was
like burning coals of fire, which turned not as it went, and so on,
was--the locomotive! This folly was only more undisguised than the mass of
the lucubrations called Prophetic Studies.

Let any political crisis occur, and some sage will write a book showing
how Daniel had foretold this issue of diplomacy. I have not forgotten the
learned tracts and essays called forth by the fascination Louis Napoleon
exercised upon the imaginations of half-educated people; all proving
beyond a doubt that he was the mystic man of sin, the Anti-Christ in whom
history was to culminate.

America, the restoration of the Jews to Palestine, and the Church of Rome
especially inspire, at present, these crazy conjectures. They ought all to
issue from Bedlam.

This mad and maddening use of what, rightly read, are noble and
instructive books, grows out of a misunderstanding of what were the
functions of Hebrew prophecy.

Prophecy has been taken as a synonyme for prediction. There is not much
verbal difference between foretelling and forthtelling, but there is a
vast difference for the purposes of religion. Taking prophecy as