ctical 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--t