the
synonyme of foretelling, the essential function of the prophets became
predicting. They were supposed to have been busy in forecasting the things
which should come to pass in the far future. The success of these
long-range predictions was the demonstration 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 poi