Southern Christian Advocate

THE PROPHETS OF OLD.

How wonderful was the prophetic dispensation! What wondrous men were these prophets of the Most High! We speak of poets; but how they sink when compared to the prophet! All that they possess--susceptibility, selection, numbers. imagery--he possesses too. and that in a depth and compass "above all Greek, above all Roman praise." We speak of the poet's eye; his piercing, ranging view of nature; and of the association between natural objects, and sentiments, and morals. But whither ranges the vision of the prophet? And with what does he connect the multiplied objects which nature throws around? They were indeed seers. They bring the seraphs before the throne, veiling their faces, and bending under the weight of the felicity of adoring love; and thus teach us the depth and glory of the Godhead, and that the highest employment of intellect is to meditate on God, and that the sum of rational bliss is the love of him. In the heavens, beaming with the sun, and glowing with the stars, they see different degrees of glory. In the eclipses which darken them. and the last elemental strife which shall shake them from their orbits, they see the overthrow of thrones. and the extinction of all human splendor. In storms, and earthquakes, and the rush of mighty waters, they see the irresistible sweep of the Divine vengeance, chasing the proudest rebels like the sleep of the wilderness. and hurling down the loftiest marks of human power; while the dawning light, the calm which sits enthroned on earth after the tempest, the buoyant clouds flitting across the vernal sky. and dropping fatness on the earth. the spring bubbling forth in the desert, smiling vales, and laughing fields. displays to them, by images which at once enchant the imagination, and enlarge the heart. the refreshing. cheering blessings of Messiah's free and universal salvation. Christian poets have often well imitated them: and thus has the poet himself been raised above the natural level. But as for the poets of the world, what are all their associations of human passions, and merely human instincts and sentiments, with the imagery of nature, in comparison with these? Theirs was the true inspiration: it opened to them all the mystic ties and chains of sacred association; it gave a hallowed voice to all nature; it erected the whole universe into the system of spiritual types, and made it a pattern of things in the heavens. and of heavenly things in human bosoms: it did more, for it dispersed the obscurity of the future, and, as though invested with the character of omniscience, made the things that were not as though they were.

Rev. R. Watson.