The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer

The Hebrew Prophecy and Their Source of Prophetic Inspiration.

[Rev. O. B. Frothingham]

The statesman earns his title to that distinction by insight into the causes that control long reaches of events, and the tact to distinguish between apparent and real forces which determine the sequence of events. The more complicated the lines, the more difficult the task of discovering the issues of destiny. Moral cases seem the simplest; hence with these prophecy has been universally associated. The moral intuitions being regarded as divine and infallible, the eye has run its glance along the track they indicated, with an assurance scarcely yet attained even by the scientific adept. This belief explains the grandeur of the ancient prophetic office. All the great prophets have been prophets of the conscience; the old Hebrew prophets were. The popular impression is that these men, who represent prophecy to us and who are the embodiment of prophecy in the eyes of Christendom, were gifted simply with a longer sight than ordinary mortals possess; were furnished by the great I Am with news in advance of their generation, and were enabled by means of certain private and confidential dis- patches from the Regulator of the universe, to tell their countrymen what was to take place a century or two after they should be in their graves. A great mistake this, and a mistake fraught with the gravest consequences, not literary and historical merely, but moral and spiritual. No doubt, some of these men were possessed of uncommon intellectual capacity. No doubt, they were keen observers, patient watchers of events, sagacious men of affairs, and shrewd students of human motives and human conduct— sharp-sighted politicians, wise statesmen; but they were something very much more and higher than all this, or they would not have been what they were. It was their calling "to speak that which belongs to all time, and finds its interpretation in every place; to penetrate to the everlasting realities of things; to disclose not when this or that man will appear, but how and where all men appear and disappear; to make it felt, not in what nook of duration such an incident will happen, but from what all-embracing eternity the images of history emerge and are swallowed up." In one word, they were men who had struck this truth, that human events run in the grooves of moral law; that human history, with all its astonishing phases and complications, its swirling nations, its rising and falling dynasties, its crowned and discrowned kings, its Ninevehs and towering Babylons, its warriors, priests, lawmakers, battle-fields, and armies drowned in blood, was a panorama exhibiting the play of moral forces; a passing show, very bewildering to those who looked at it from the outside, but very simple to those who traced effects to their causes, and at last to one grand cause, the justice of God. They perceived that events were as they were, and could not be otherwise; because He was what He was, and could not be otherwise. And they perceived that events must continue to go on upon the same principle—evil producing its effects and good producing its effects; evil producing different effects according to the degree and kind of its evilness, good producing different effects according to the degree and kind of its goodness. They saw what would be, because they saw what must be. And their sight was longer or shorter, according as their moral conviction was intense or feeble. They did not judge of the future by the past, save as they judged both past and future by the eternal; and they judged the eternal by the soul. The word of the Lord came to them, because it was very near them; it was in their heart. There was no mystery nor marvel in the foreknowledge of such men. They could not help foreknowing, for they could not help forefeeling. They had the key to causes, and of course they could unfold the sequence of effects. They knew what was of course they could define what was to come. Such men are found in every nation, and in every century. They are men who are sure that by the constitution of things, by the organization of the universe, by the nature of the Lord, honesty means success; and truth means triumph; and justice means pleasantness, prosperity and peace, and goodness means greatness and glory.—O. B. Frothingham.